This was a planned process and it took time for a reason. They did this slowly but surely. That's the only way to do it without blowing your budget many times over. I hope you recall that big software rewrites almost universally fail. This is a big infrastructure rewrite, it'd fail too if it were done in a "let's just rip it all at once" fashion. It's the same reason you need to be wary of many a company that grows too fast - usually it's internals can't keep up, and it'll eventually fail. Many companies failed just for not artificially limiting their growth. Southwest Airlines is a shining example that sometimes just artificially clipping your growth at 8% annually is a good thing to do :)

It's amusing that you speak about it with such conviction yet it's all a fantasy, no less. Man, where did you get this "insight" from? Lest anyone be confused about it: fuck no .

100,000 descendants alive today? It's not about how many have lived over the years, it's about them alive today.

I meant descendants, you oversensitive clod ;)

The major contributors to "waste" when flooring it, that I know of, are (in no particular order):

1. Engine friction,
2. Rich mixture,
3. Torque converter losses,
4. Drivetrain friction.

Torque converter losses eventually go up with applied torque, even though they may be "funky" at lower torques. Engine friction is an issue at high RPMs, but you get better efficiency at high RPMs as well, so it really depends on a particular engine. Rich mixture is a factor as well, especially if you're not using premium gasoline. Drivetrain friction on gear pairs simply goes up with torque, so if everything else were constant, you'd want to minimize the torque, but of course everything else is quite complex so this has an effect, except when it doesn't ;)

What I've noticed is that using regular gas I get worse mileage with jackrabbit starts, compared to premium gas. It's easy for me to test, since 99% of my driving is on the same road every workday. We do groceries and errands in my wife's car. For freeway driving that I do very occasionally, and is mostly on cruise control, there's no benefit to premium gasoline, other than slightly quieter engine operation (the difference is measurable, but is really meh otherwise). In my city driving, it's actually cheaper for me to use premium gas.

So, if you're using regular gasoline, you probably shouldn't be flooring it, but on my particular car there seems to be no big difference in gas consumption between aggressive starts and less-aggressive ones if I use premium gas. The biggest impact to me, it seems, is from slight "hypermiling" - letting off the accelerator way ahead of stopped traffic, coasting longer. When I do that, jackrabbit starts on premium gas seem not to matter at all.

LOL, Genghis Khan has way more up his sleeve than you give him credit for. Show me a U.S. president that had about a thousand 1st-generation descendants. 800 years later - today - Genghis has about 15 million descendants. This is based on hard science genetic testing, not historic record, by the way. An average male person living 800 years ago has a bit above 500 descendants living today.

We may not be able to identify his tomb, but sure as heck we can identify his ancestors! It so happens that this guy had about half a thousand children that have descendants that survive today. Rape and pillage he did, allrighty. There's more than ten million of those descendants alive today, by the way. Genetics for the win, I say.

So, obviously if one of them dies in a random accident, you've lost your investment, right? That's why one can't use a word investment here. It simply doesn't work, unless you're literally putting a dollar value on human life, happiness and whatnot. Not every cool thing you do is an investment, nor can it be thought of as being one, even if it costs you real money.

Going back to your dad: to support his position, one'd need to support a zero-sum stance where one says "either I support your low-risk lifestyle in college, or I get to pay some other kid, or maybe even myself". I think that's going full-retard.

I have 10 ton jackstands, and for the life of me I wouldn't know how they could be unreliable. When the car is up on four of those jackstands, there's no reasonable way to tip the jackstands by merely interacting with the car. I've had two people try to push the car in various directions as hard as they could - nothing happened. It wouldn't budge, heck it seemed as if it was comparably glued to the ground. When the car is supported by the suspension, there's a lot of "give" and you can get it moving a bit. On the jackstands it's quite different.

Sure, if you have crappy jackstands then it may not be quite safe.

That's not investment unless he'd expect you to support him financially after you graduate.

That's how a properly executed paragliding flare looks like, I'm afraid. Paragliding is like flying, and certification exams use a lot of terms that would apply in flying a sailplane or a helicopter, although the distances and altitudes involved are of course scaled differently.

For any given car, under certain conditions (pavement type, presence of water on the pavement, head and sidewind speed, fuel octane rating, intake air temperature), there's one speed that gives you maximum gas mileage. This speed is not infinitesimally close to 0 mph. On a clear Californian day with little wind and about 75F IAT, such speed is roughly 48mph on my car. Go any slower, and you are in fact wasting fuel. It's especially bad under 30mph. So, on my car if you were to accelerate to 56mph over 10 miles you'd burn more fuel than simply accelerating to 56mph and covering those 10 miles at 56mph. So, um, you're the idiot.

Oh, so insurance companies short petroleum stocks? Well, thanks for the inside info, then.

On older laptops - those that reasonably work well only with XP, I not only install Chrome as the best performing browser, but I also advise people to use it to view PDFs. Note that viewing a PDFs is very different than filling it out etc. A viewer needs to be simple and well performing, and in my experience, even on 10+ year old hardware, Chrome shines there. So, for one, I do welcome this change.

What the fuck is wrong with rapid acceleration?! People repeat this stupid mantra over and over like it was a law of nature or something.