You made a rather huge leap there, and I'm not sure why you committed to doing so.

I've never heard of this van. I work in several metropolitan areas on a regular basis and I've never seen one anywhere. I fully acknowledge they exist, but I've never seen one. I could well be unique in having never seen one, but if they aren't in any of the markets where I frequently drive then there are likely a lot of other people who have never seen them in the wild either.

The point I was after is that there are a lot of people who love to dunk on the automotive industry - particularly the American Big Three - any time they can. The Big Three are far from blameless. However, ripping to shreds a discontinued vehicle that you've never seen isn't exactly a fair thing to do.

You may be surprised to learn that people who use Hindi as their native language also speak English. So yes, scam callers who speak English also speak Hindi...at least a hell of a lot of them do.

I'd like to hear if even one person in this discussion had ever heard of it before this was posted here. I follow quite a bit of automotive news myself and had never heard of this van before now. Granted it is a commercial vehicle that would have been difficult to obtain as a regular consumer here (similar to the larger current model Ford econoline (not transitconnect) vans) but I had never heard of this at all. I've seen news on the new USPS delivery vehicles, the new NYC taxis, but never on this.

It's awfully difficult - at least in real space - to claim to be an expert on something you never heard of. I'm sure that won't stop people here but nonetheless it is worth pondering why we had never heard anything of this vehicle. If regular consumers hadn't heard of it, how many potential commercial customers hadn't either? Plenty of commercial customers exist in this country who would do well with an electric van, if only they knew this one existed.

Are you sure you're talking about China there? That sounds like the MAGA party to-do list, especially if you add on corporate extortion and mandatory bribes to the leader of said one party state.

"Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population...and 82.7% of scam call centre employees.".

Fixed that for ya! :)

If a person got sevely sick or died after believing lies that seems less important than if the wrong song played in the background of the youtube video?

Whenever you put your data under somebody else's control, then pay them to look after it, you're one mistake away from losing it all, and the mistake doesn't even have to be yours. So you forget to update your credit card info with Company X, or a "time to renew" email gets caught in the spam filter, or PayPal decides it doesn't like your politics and suspends your account. Guess what: you just lost your data.

Basically, if you don't have all those family photos and business records and other stuff it would kill you to lose under your own direct control, you're asking for trouble. Sure, back it up elsewhere, but never count on somebody else to care about your stuff as much as you do.

I'm fine with sending Musk to Mars. He can take DOGE and the rest of MAGA with him. Few of them are smart enough to realize there is no return trip, even if the trip there is a success. Musk and Trump can spend the trip trying to convince each other who is the most important person in the history of the universe while those of us here on earth rebuild from the destruction they left behind here.

About 20 years ago Lee Smolin published "The Trouble with Physics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics) and Peter Woit published "Not even Wrong" where they described the core problem with String theory as people attached to the community to the general public of interest (i guess mostly scientists).

Since then, things have shifted a little bit, and the mindset is
changing. That does not mean that everything is peacy already - people who got their professorships 20 years ago may be heads of chairs right now.

I also am fully convinced (as a former experimental physicist who has nothing to do with particle physics) that sometimes it is necessary to follow and explore theories which do not result in immediate predictions. You only will know later if it did not work, and in the current interpretation on youtube there is a lot of hindsight.

ROFL! Thanks for that!

From TFA: "It is a legal gray area with no clear path."

Translation: "When you do it, it's piracy. When we do it, it's research."

"Based on earlier predictions, the F-35C may not do the same for some years".

Given the F-35's "trailer queen" reputation, it would have been nice if at least US ships could chuck it at an enemy like a big, expensive metal rock.

There is a real, for-true Lord Sugar in England. He's got the Donald Trump role in their version of The Apprentice.

Making things even worse we now see MAGA flexing another muscle here to exert force on America; they are getting people all over the country fired for daring to express a non-MAGA-endorsed opinion of the matter. Yesterday ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely for stating a few days ago that we didn't know the politics of the shooter. How dare he suggest that the shooter might not be the left-wing devil that MAGA insists him to be!

There are endless counts of other people across the country who are losing their jobs for daring to say something disparaging on social media about Kirk after his death as well. MAGA is very openly celebrating these firings.