Somewhere in the 60s and up until the early 70s everything did standardize on DST, but people didn't like their kids walking to school in the dark.

It came nowhere close to that long, being imposed in January 1974 because of the oil crisis, and being retracted less than a year later when people had had time to see how stupid it was and how dangerous it was for school children in the winter.

Are you suggesting that Senator Cotton is a clock sucker?

So they're giving pregnant monkeys Tylenol?

Nobody has the wherewithal or the balls to go up against him so he can basically rule by Fiat.

Would you be happier if he ruled by Volvo?

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.

Birds with toothless beaks diverged from that diet to a seeds and insects based one...

Oh, really? I'm sure that the eagles, hawks, owls and other birds of prey would have something to say about that.

A few months ago I had a poster complain that I'd removed the beginning and end of a sentence of his I quoted and replaced the missing parts with three dots. Apparently he didn't know what an ellipsis is.

The primary goal of political campaigns is to turn out supporters because most elections are decided by who turns out.

Don't you mean that all elections are decided by those who turn out? Unless you're suggesting that there's ballot box stuffing and other fraudulent methods of affecting the outcome of an election going on it's rather hard to see how those who don't turn out and vote can have the slightest effect on the outcome.

Long before I worked, briefly, at JPL, MOPS, the Maneuver Operations Programming System was written for an IBM 360, in assembler. When they moved up to a Univac, it was re-written in whatever version of FORTRAN was current and worked very well. In fact, I'd bet money that that package is still running there because, like the old COBOL programs, It Just Worked. I know this because I had the privilege of working with the late Dan Alderson, the last member of the team that migrated the package still at JPL when I was there.

In the almost three years that we worked together, I only saw him presented with a bug in the package once, and it turned out to be a user error. The user was trying to calculate the perturbations on Voyager I caused by 11 of the Jovian satellites, either to calculate their masses, or at least the maximum possible, causing the program to crash. It didn't take long for Dan to find the problem: the data for the satellites was kept in an array, and being written in FORTRAN, the array was designed for a max of ten objects. He suggested that the user edit a copy of the source to enlarge everything and use that instead of the regular program.

I take it that you've never had to deal with code from back in the Bad Old Days when self-modifying code was the norm. For a classic example, take a look at the story of Mel, the real Programmer, either from Wikipedia or FOLDOC because the explanatory text is different in each.

Yes, COBOL is wordy, but were you ever told why? It's so that the language is self-documenting and the bean counters can follow what's going on well enough to be able to spot any attempts at embezzlement.

So far this is only affecting fools who pay up for such ridiculous features. The real problem comes when you have to pay to not have the thing you purchased controlled from afar.

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.