A Plymouth Voyager. Being rather tall, being able to sit upright comfortably is important, rather than trying to lay in something smaller and less safe for my legs/head.

Animal blood is bad for the clear coat, so tying it down to the outside is bad for the vehicle and gets the animal dirty... a tarp in the back works far better.

What, in your unsupported opinion, makes the F150 Lightning "a piece of garbage"?

That was never my opinion, nor have I used the word "garbage" to describe it.

The claim earlier was "It is an excellent vehicle, all around great", some here disagreed, as did I, based on my experience at a Ford dealership. My only shared criticism here was the limited range in winter... how does that translate to me calling it "a piece of garbage"?

I have experienced zero issues over 50,000 miles. It is not a piece of garbage, it may be the best vehicle I've ever owned. I'm not saying its for you or for everyone, certainly not garbage. I wouldn't use it for towing anything very far.

You keep using the same word, over and over again here which only the OP used, once... either you grossly misread what I said here, or you are accidentally revealing your true feelings about the vehicle and expressing regret.

Given the market reaction to the Lightning, and Ford ending production... maybe not everyone is as happy with them as you are? I used to drive a Pontiac Aztek, and loved it (second best hunting vehicle I've owned), and was very sad when it finally died and had to be sold for scrap. I was a minority in that, and I recognize that, and that's ok.

Hmm, mine has a range over 300 miles, real actual miles.

In what climate?

My v8 2019 F150 doesn't flinch at doing 600 miles on a single tankful, in winter.

I bought mine used with 1100 miles, 20% off sticker.

And? You still probably ended up paying 2-4x what I did for mine.

You talked to a dealer that doesn't want to sell EVs,

In your unsupported opinion.

Why wouldn't a dealer want to sell to someone wanting to buy?

in place where most people don't like EVs.

Plenty of Tesla's in Sioux Falls, which includes at least 3 Cybertrucks... again, you keep giving opinions which don't help, or considering that the views you believe others have may have some basis in reality.

Are you surprised you got a low opinion?

No, I listen to what the opinions are of the dealer and consider it along with what else I know, without seeking to influence what they say.

Seriously, drive one.

What am I going to get from the driving experience? What untold amazement will I have that changes my mind and will compel me to go get one?

It is an excellent vehicle, all around great.

And owning and driving one is enough to convince someone of that?

I'll admit, I've never owned or driven one, though last year when shopping for a new pickup I saw one parked on a Ford dealership I was looking at. It was new so out of my price range, so I got chatting with the salesman (and didn't say my limits) about if it was any good. Turns out it was being driven by the manager, who mostly hated it. Max range he said, in winter was 100-150 miles. Maybe for city driving that's ok, but in South Dakota , a drive down to Sioux Falls for a Costco or Target run is going to give quite a bit of range anxiety.

That's 'all around great'?

Again, this was what I was getting from a Ford dealership!

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That's what I just said.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".