Ahh, yes... German cars. If every decent car company does something with 6 parts, the Germans will find a way to make it require 27 parts. All of which are horribly expensive and require specialized tools to install. Or they'll put the timing system at the back of the engine so that a routine service item becomes an engine-out procedure. Garbage cars driven by people who don't know any better.

The space station leak reminds me of an old trick for a leaky cooling system in a car: put pepper into the radiator.

The little flecks of ground pepper get washed around the cooling system and eventually block tiny cracks in the radiator or other places. Putting a raw egg into a *cold* radiator will do the same thing; when the engine gets warm it cooks and blocks the leak. Both of these tricks have saved me on the road, they do work. But they are temporary and you need to thoroughly flush the cooling system after the repair.

I wonder if the Space Station has had the same sort of thing happen - airborne dust blocking a leak?

How so? Once you discover something about physics, or e.g. a rocket design that works, physics won't actively change its behavior to thwart you and make your rocket stop working.

Although there is an element of that in medicine, since we are often combating other living organisms that can evolve to survive.

Security is more unsolvable than rocket science, because it's adversarial.

Not interested in using but I'm curious how this will turn out. At present, vaping nicotine is judged almost as bad/evil as smoking - but is it? Also people are much less critical of smoking marijuana than tobacco, which I assume there is some rationale for but seems odd. However, both of these things do make sense if the the biggest problem of smoking really is the drug nicotine.

Or, maybe because Palestinians keep on attacking Israelis (and everyone else) in the name of their Pedophile Prophet - peace be upon the illiterate 7th-century caravan robber and warlord - so Israelis rightly have no interest in incorporating them into civil society.

...because the Palestinians were digging the water pipes out of the ground and turning them into makeshift rockets...

...electricity and desalinated water which were both being provided by Israel because the Palestinians are more concerned with appeasing their Pedophile Prophet than with getting their shit together and building power plants and desalination plants...

Gaza is unlivable because of the Gazans. Somalia is unlivable because of the Somalis. All of the Muslim world is unlivable because Islam is an evil ideology. The Jewish people (People of Judea) were established in Israel 6,000 years ago and laid the groundwork for the establishment of Western Civilization, approximately 4,500 years before a self-important warlord and pedophile declared himself to be the messenger of something called allah.

And what is allah? God is supposed to be omniscient. So He tells us to call Him yud-hey-vav-hey... but then after meeting the Pedophile Prophet, He changes His mind and wants to be called allah? An omniscient being didn't know in advance what He wants to be called and changes His mind about His own name? This is NOT the God of the Jewish and Christian people.

You're free to believe whatever you want. But when what you believe promotes death for the sake of forcing your beliefs on others, it's time for your ideology to take a long and hard look in the mirror.

This is what Israel is fighting. How to beat your wife - according to Palestinian TV.

There are two kinds of people in the world: there are those who you can negotiate with, and there are those who fly airplanes into buildings. You cannot negotiate with this. You cannot make peace with this. The only thing they understand is being completely and utterly obliterated, and then playing the victim.

I wouldn't wipe my ass with the Palestinian flag. Doing so would be disrespectful to my feces.

Assuming the bus' main problem is the lane, and not the intersections (which I think may well be the case).

Spectacularly?

Footage posted by TikTok user @brahmsstan and obtained by Storyful shows several Waymo vehicles stalled at an intersection in the Mission District neighborhood.

While the Waymo Driver is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.

I dunno man. Even a single traffic signal going out will cause a backup in that intersection even with no self-driving cars, because a 4-way stopsign follows round-robin rules, and the throughput of that is simply much less than a timed traffic signal (which is why they were invented).

I'm not saying Waymo did as well as human drivers would have, but it's kind of hard to tell. Nothing obviously bad happened like the cars losing communications with HQ and going crazy or bricking in the roadway.

OK, but the gas tax was also a tax, and you can raise exactly the same complaints with how it was sometimes spent

https://reason.org/policy-brie...

I also don't think renting out privately-owned cars will take off anytime soon. For now, the self-driving cars that actually work require expensive commercial-grade sensor packages (unlike camera-only Tesla FSD) and secondly they still need a human overseer for every N cars out on the road, which implies you have a pool of trained and available people on staff.

Installing these must be seriously complicated, touching or controlling all the main operations of the plane.

Well it's not like the predictive power of a physical exam is all that great. So you might be looking at a big impact on your lifestyle or career based on a false or small increase in risk (you tell yourself).

I know in military aviation there are games people play to avoid getting kicked off the flight line.

or to the point, the King Air 200's certification does not require a copilot. Pilot incapacitated, you're hosed. I guess it makes sense this technology would start near the upper end of single-pilot aircraft.

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.

How costs build up is really staggering. I'm getting into the business of importing 3d filament. In Iceland, it currently sells for like $35/kg minimum. The actual value of the plastic is like $1. The factory's total cost, all costs included, is like $1,50. If it's not name brand, e.g. they're not dumping money on marketing, they sell it for $3 for the cheapest stuff. Sea freight adds another dollar or two. Taxes here add 24%. But you're still at like $5/kg. The rest is all middlemen, warehousing, air freight for secondary legs from intermediary hubs, and all the markup and taxes on those things.

With me importing direct from the factory, sea freight only, I can get rid of most of those costs. Warehousing is the biggest unavoidable cost. If I want to maintain an average inventory of like 700kg, it adds something like $5/kg to the cost. Scanning in goods and dispatching user orders (not counting shipping) together adds like $2,50. And then add 24% tax (minus the taxes on the imported goods). There's still good margin, but it's amazing how quickly costs inflate.