I absolutely vote for "go more socialized". We pay SO MUCH for care here we wind up rationing it. You don't realize this until you get a diagnosis and plan for remediation in a more sensible country then come back here and are told by your doctor "Well... let's wait and see. No, we won't do any sort of tests on that, yet... Let's see if it gets worse." Which I literally have seen. And that's with good insurance. Because we fetishize our tests like they have cost and scarcity, when they are CHEAP in other countries. They do not have intrinsic value, they only have cost based on some pretty absurd profit layers. (Absurd in markup, and absurd in number of layers.)

I think your points on Obama are good. I'd like a more clear explanation of what the senate would be without the 17th.

(I didn't like Obama, because I'm a screaming liberal and he was pretty darn conservative, turned wars into something run by lawyers and did a lot of killing of people with neither a real declaration of war nor due process which included them -- you can make all the practical arguments you like, but the evolution of that is Trump murdering people in the Gulf of Mexico with impunity. Biden was much better. I suspect Michelle Obama would have been a much better president than her husband. It's fantastic that we had someone brown as president, and embarrassing that we haven't had a woman.)

If the idea is that the party in power in the state should pick via a smoke-filled room the two senators... that doesn't seem to represent the interest of the state, either. The senate has two roles. It's the house of lords for the US -- intended to advise. The do NOT run as "I'm a smart guy and an elder statesman" which is clearly part of your point.
But the other role is just to get votes for the constitution 200 years ago. We wanted Rhode Island's vote, for example. The were worried about being dominated by Massachusetts, for example, because of the population size. The senate no longer is needed in that capacity, because small states are in enough numbers to work together, and that was not really fair in the first place.

It would be better to give all states 10 reps in the house plus more based on population than to make a whole house where every state gets the same weight.

The idea that states as governments need representation at all exists because before the civil war we were not a country -- we were a collection of tiny countries "The United States in America" -- after the war we became "The United States of America" (not official phrases, but look in document searches before and after the war). We don't have to protect fiefdoms. I am worried that repealing the 17th is aimed at strengthening fiefdoms.

I asked Gemini to do the following:

"Get the number of F150s on the road. Estimate the change to drag coefficient a sloped hood would make -- Try one which is 6 inches shorter at the front than at the windshield, and estimate the savings of gas per mile that would cause. Multiply that out by the estimated number of trucks and estimated number of miles per year the trucks drive to get a gas savings for just F150s with the lower front on the hood."

According to its calculations, which it lays out in detail (doesn't make them RIGHT) the gas savings would be 306 MILLION gallons of gas a year.

Here's a more reasonable one, limiting ourselves to MODERN F150's:
"Get the number of model year 2024, 2025, and 2026 F150s sold in the US. Estimate the change to drag coefficient a sloped hood would make -- Try one which is 6 inches shorter at the front than at the windshield, and estimate the savings of gas per mile that would cause. Multiply that out by the estimated number of trucks and estimated number of miles per year the trucks drive to get a gas savings for just F150s with the lower front on the hood. "

Darn, changing this in 2024 would have only save 36 MILLION gallons of gas per year today.

If you generalize that across all pickup trucks sold in the past 3 years, we'd be saving (again, this is just Gemini, not real science) we'd be saving 216 million gallons a year.

If we included SUVs in that, the number would increase, but the pickup truck is (per vehicle) the better effect -- doing it for all SUVs (and there are a LOT more SUVs than pickup trucks) would only save a little more than doing the pickup trucks.

The US burns 136 billion gallons of gas a year, so it's a small percentage, but still a big number. Note that your truck would be able to go roughly 25 miles further on the highway with that 6 inch drop in front, with exactly the same gas tank size.

YES!!!!!! OMG YES!

Thank you for that!

When you build a vehicle for a purpose, you build with intention and you design. When you build a wankmobile it's just a Homer.

It's really hard to find a modern "car" as you're describing now. Almost all EVs are "crossovers". The dang VW ID 4 has a huge hood. They have the ID 3 with a lot less hood, but decided not to sell it in the US. It takes real work to find something with a sensible hood position.

"I'd like a new rule. If you drive truck and the hood is taller than your shoulders you should require a CDL." -- I LOVE this. Absolutely LOVE IT. ...but would instead say if you drive anything with a hood which blocks more than 6 feet in front from vision, you need a CDL.

Dude, not that many years from now the touchscreens will be even bigger, and you'll rarely if ever touch the steering wheel.

Yes, the tech is taking longer than expected, but it's already much safer than humans (not based on the Tesla hype, but on a study in "Nature Communications") and will continue to improve. At SOME POINT (5 years? 10 years) when someone hits someone driving his/herself and is sued, the defendant will call it negligence, because he/she didn't use the autonomous driving. That will result in treble damages, and all suits after that will do the same thing. And overnight insurance will skyrocket on cars without it. Driving yourself will be over except for the rich, and that will end quickly too, when a few go to jail for negligent homicide for driving themselves.

I can see better backing out of a spot than driving out of it. The camera is RIGHT THE on the back, at the first inch of movement, but going forward, I need to push out several feet to get my eyes in the same position. If I can't see the toddler walking in front of the car below the hood line, that's one squished kid. If I were backing up, sensors and camera would prevent it.

What's true for 2005 trucks and cars is just no longer true -- we are better off backing out than driving out.

That's kinda stupid, and caused by unnecessarily long and high hoods.

It's irrelevant, if controlled for in the study. It's just the entrenched "I want my penis extension, dammit" folks throwing sand up.

It's worth studying of course, but it has no bearing on the clear need to legislate hood slope.

That's a reasonable take on it I suppose, until you factor in all the lobbying to keep congress from noticing that "work vehicles" were being advertised as family cars. The industry lobbyists represent the conspiracy in this case, and they were hired to do it, involving the companies in the conspiracy. So the Smidge204 is spot on with "conspired".

3. ICE are TWENTY TIMES (yes, really) more prone to burning than EVs are.

Every EV fire gets reported, whereas we think ICE fires are just normal and never report them, but if you count the fires and multiply out by car types on the road, EVs are massively less likely to burn. Add to that each model year, EVs get less likely to burn as battery design, manufacturing techniques, and chemistry improve.

Everything you're saying is true, but sloping hoods can be done in parallel, resulting in both less pedestrian deaths AND less pollution-related deaths, because sloped hoods increase gas mileage and thus reduce pollution.

With respect to the tall hoods, this is simply wrong. You don't need height, you need predictable bending, crumpling, and movement of force outward. We do that very nicely on cars with small length fronts, and cars with sloped hoods. The Tesla crash results are very good, and the hoods are not long or tall.

These big hoods both kill people AND make the cars less efficient and harder to park. Sloped hoods makes both pedestrians and drivers happy.

The only people bothered by it are marketers who are selling a phallic enhancement concept.

well once they crossed 2 billion the signed integer representation made losses into profits

they don't have to make a profit on the investment. The investment is defensive. The goal is not to be outside the moat.