We've seen this story before - mortal enemies Lockheed and Boeing joined forces to created United Launch Alliance. For a number of years the company did impressive things with Delta IV and Atlas V reliability and put a lot of national asset satellites in space, but they are still stuck in the historical way of doing aerospace engineering - very low risk tolerance, very expensive, very slow. They are aiming to match where SpaceX was 5 years ago as opposed to where SpaceX is going.

It would be surprising to see anything different from merging a bunch of European aerospace companies - the hard part isn't hiring up a bunch of aerospace engineers and funding a project, it's having a focused goal and actually aiming for full reusability on an aggressive schedule. Legacy aerospace companies don't tend to think that way, so this is probably just going to combine 3 slow companies into one bigger, slower company.

Uh, no. Center of gravity isn't related to how high the driver sits.

Ah, I see, you think they should use low-floor buses. Those are a lot more expensive, have higher maintenance costs (especially the kneeling ones), require flatter terrain (buses don't go offroading, but where I live they can't stay on the pavement all the time and also have to contend with deep snow), and give up seating capacity because the wheel wells and rear engine intrude into the seating are. Their only real advantage is accessibility. City bus systems can't predict where disabled people will be, so all buses have to be accessible.

School districts, on the other hand, do know where the disabled kids are so it's much more cost effective to buy and operate less expensive buses for moving the 95% of the kids who can climb stairs and to operate a separate fleet of smaller buses equipped for accessibility to pick up the disabled kids. So, they save the money on buses and spend it instead on teachers and classrooms.

As a taxpayer and a parent and grandparent, I think that's the right choice.

Dude, your confirmation bias is running circles around you.

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.

Reality has no bias. Liberal and conservative and their ilk are all made-up human concepts.

Liberals taking over Wikipedia is not nearly as alarming as the US deep state govt stooges (the "intel community") infiltrating the place. It's not enough the Junited States govt agencies now completely own every news media outlet and spread nothing but pro-Israel neocon propganda 24/7. Now they are trying to infiltrating all of the interwebs.

Somebody who seemed knowledgable came on Tucker Carlson show and said the Wikipedia is crawling with US govt intel stooges. I have no reason to doubt them. Why wouldn't they? Everything they've done in the past 50 years, from blowing JFK's head off to blowing Charlie Kirk's neck off, suggests that they would naturally do this.

P.S. karma is a bitch and it is coming for the psychopathic genocidal motherfuckers in Eeeesrael) and their creators JUSA.

P.P.S. God bless the people of Palestine. May they endure this hardship and win over the evil motherfuckers

Okay... but what does that have to do with the center of gravity? And those sticks are just as important for rear-engine buses as for front-engine buses, though they probably don't have to be quite as long.

In Utah I don't think I've seen one of those for at least 20 years, and they were rare before that.

No, you don't. I'm sure I follow that a lot closer than you do. Any claims that the federal judiciary is already captured are just silly. SCOTUS is an issue, but look at all of the rulings against Trump. Even the appellate opinions that the news calls as in favor of Trump are basically all just staying the district injunctions until the merits are decided, and if you read the opinions, not just the headlines, you'll see they're almost always extremely skeptical on the merits.

Honestly, even SCOTUS isn't quite as captured as a lot of people on both sides think. They also seem to be giving Trump his way on the procedural issues, but almost always come down against him on the merits.

The ~900 federal judges in the system are almost universally apolitical, thoughtful and fair. There are exceptions, and Trump is working to get more of them in there, but the judiciary is very far from captured.

Interesting. What stick are you talking about? I'm talking about the thin plastic tube that hinges out from the front passenger corner and blocks kids from being able to walk in front of the bus. It clearly can't have anything to do with center of gravity or stability; you can bend it with one finger (it springs back).

Also, all the buses where I live (in the US) are rear engine and have flat fronts.

You didn't actually read the method, I think. In order for corruption to "build up around it", the entire (or at least most of) the federal judiciary would have to be corrupted. While that's not impossible, if it happens we'd have much bigger problems than pardons. And the fact that the judiciary isn't already irredeemably corrupt is strong counter-evidence, because the benefits of corrupting the courts are far bigger than the benefits of corrupting the pardon system.

Bong!

No. I only remember when R meant klansman capitalist and D meant not-klansman capitalist.

1) Prosperity theology is the dominant religious belief system in America. If you are successful, it's because God loves you!
2) Lots of people are stupid enough to think he had a lot of money before he got access to the presidency and therefore bribes from all sides, instead of a lot of property which was worth less than the amount of debt he had. Therefore they can believe that he was wealthy, which means God loves him. (See point 1.)
3) They love that he says the kinds of things they say and wants to hurt the people they want to hurt.

About the only consistent through line in conservatism is doing something shitty while yelling very loudly how the other guys are doing it.

The right always puts itself as the party of law and order. They never are, because they are the party of the rich. Law and order cost money and the right prefer tax breaks. Plus the best way to get rich is to cheat.

Sears used to own a bunch of real estate and a trucking fleet. This let them ship things anywhere in the country in a reasonably timely fashion and keep costs low on both ends. They did absolutely, pathetically flub web sales, but it really wasn't too late to fix that. They at least had done the work of getting the product information digitized, even if the web site was otherwise a loss. (It really was terrible, and so were the prices, wtf.)

I don't know that MS has been caught doing data transfers specifically(though they'd have to screw it up or have it leaked at a fairly high level to get caught; 'cloud' is basically always opaque on the back end as far as the customer can see); but there have been a couple of instances recently of service getting cancelled. When Trump got into a snit with the ICC cut their chief prosecutor off(Brad Smith mollified more or less nobody with the claim that they didn't cancel service to the ICC, just to the senior official that the feds were upset with, which is probably technically true in the sense of account GUIDs but not usefully true); and the also kicked Unit 8200 out of their cozy custom Azure environment; though apparently with enough notice that they were able to move the data somewhere else.

It seems likely that random European corporations see themselves as lower profile and less vulnerable than the ICC or Israeli military intelligence; but if anyone doing risk assessment for them hasn't at least considered the fact that basically a belligerent old man would just have to decide that they are 'very unfair' tomorrow; or that someone other than greenland needs to be brought into the homeland, and that would potentially be all it takes for your MS EA to just stop talking to you then they aren't doing their jobs very thoroughly.