A lord/servant relationship is still a relationship.

I don’t want a relationship with my tools.

If my PC starts running slow I’ll tear the fucker item and start replacing shit. If the OS displeases me I’ll start disabling parts. If software starts interrupting me when I’m not actively using it I change its permissions so it can only do what I tell it.

I’m not gonna give my butler a lobotomy to make him more obedient, swap the Footmen’s hands out for serving platters, or kneecap the scullery maid so she can’t leave the kitchen.

If my phone dies, it gets scrapped and I replace it without shedding a tear. I can’t say the same for a loyal Valet.

If you have reason to believe someone is in mortal danger, your response shouldn’t be to mail a letter giving them 30 days to respond.

You send police to the scene where they secure the potential suspect and make sure there’s nothing going on.

It’s actually 5.75% annually.

6.25% would compund to 27.4% over 4 years.

The whole reason he tried to keep weapons from Ukraine was because he was given instructions by Putin to make Russia’s planned invasion easier.

Trump being Trump, he tried to extort some political favors or of Zelenskyy first, but clearing a path for Putin was always the goal.

Lifetime vs annual.

You have a 100% chance of your life ending in death. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen this year.

Stop using vehicle footprint for trucks on CAFE standards.

Starting in 2012 truck fuel economy standards changed to being based on vehicle footprint, which essentially outlawed small trucks and encouraged manufacturers to keep making them bigger and bigger.

It’s why the Ranger, Dakota, and S10 were all suddenly discontinued. The Ranger eventually came back, but is now bigger than the F150 was before.

It’s hit cargo vans too. Between 2021 and 2023, all small cargo vans (Transit Connect, Promaster City, and NV200) were discontinued as they got passed by stricter fuel economy standards that penalized them for not having a larger footprint.

Younger than the Dynatac.

Younger than the Dynatac.

Corporate Average Fuel Economy. It’s the US Federal Regulation that establishes required fuel economy standards for vehicle fleets in the US. For instance, by 2026 the average fuel economy for a vehicle fleet, based on number of vehicles sold, must be 49 miles per gallon.

For manufacturers that sell a lot of trucks, that’s a problem. The #1 selling vehicle in the US for 50+ years has been the Ford F-150. So they split consumer vehicles into 2 major categories: passenger vehicles and light trucks, which had less-strict standards and an adjusted mpg-rating. After all, a truck designed for low-end torque for hauling gear and pulling trailers isn’t gonna be able to compete with a Civic for fuel economy.

To game the system, the manufacturers started pushing vehicles they could classify as light trucks. The classification was supposed to be reserved for cargo vehicles, vehicles rated for 12 or more passengers, or off-road vehicles. So the manufacturers started making everything “off-road.” Remember how the minivan disappeared and suddenly all the manufacturers had SUVs instead? Light Truck classification is the reason.

The final straw was the Chrysler PT Cruiser being classified as a light truck.

So in 2008 the feds announced that, starting in 2012, more weight would be given to a vehicle’s footprint in calculating an adjusted mpg to discourage the manufacturers simply raising a car a few inches and calling it an off-road vehicle to game the numbers. But the unintended consequence was a system where they just have to make trucks a little bigger every few years to stay ahead of the increasingly-strict mileage standards.

It’s about to get worse, too. Starting soon, manufacturers won’t be able to use the improved mileage of Hybrids to improve their CAFE numbers (it’ll only use traditional ICE for calculations), so I expect a lot of hybrids and plug-in hybrid models to be discontinued, including the Maverick.

The Maverick is the cheapest truck on the market AND it comes standard with a hybrid. That’s not because Ford is generous.

It exists almost exclusively to sell enough fuel-efficient vehicles to improve the CAFE numbers for the rest of the truck fleet to avoid fines, and when the hybrid engine no longer gives Ford a bonus in the numbers I doubt they’ll keep making it, or at least not as cheaply with the hybrid engine as the standard.

Screenshot from Ford showing it’s relative size to other trucks on the market. It’s significantly smaller, and making it any smaller would get it killed by CAFE. This is the rare case where regulation really, truly is the enemy of progress.

The automakers fucked around classifying everything as trucks to get around CAFE, and the well-meaning regulation designed to fix that loophole accidentally outlawed small cargo-haulers and encouraged automakers to just keep making things bigger instead of improving efficiency.

The little truck isn’t legal to build and sell in the US. Truck sizes have exploded since 2012 because that’s when the CAFE standards changed to be based on vehicle footprint instead of vehicle classification.

Suddenly small trucks were required to have the same fuel economy as a hybrid sedan. So small trucks are out and instead of making them more fuel efficient they just make them bigger every refresh to keep up with increasing fuel economy standards.

That’s also why think the Dakota, Ranger, and S10 all suddenly disappeared at that time. The Ranger came back, but it’s larger than the F150 used to be.

It’s also why small cargo vans just stopped being a thing. Ib the last 3 years the Transit Connect, ProMaster City, and NV200 were all discontinued because they couldn’t keep that size and meet CAFE standards.

Of course, none of this applies to the Cybertruck. Fuck that thing.

The Ford Maverick. It’s a 4-seater small truck with a short bed and a standard hybrid engine that starts at $24,000.

Because cruise ships are the only thing not on the mainland. Certainly no cargo ships, research vessels, island nations, or anything else.

When I use Uber Eats, I’m not really buying food. I’m buying stress relief.

I frequently have to get up at 4am and don’t get home until 8-9pm on days where I go to my main job then teach night classes at the University. I’m busy that entire time and simply don’t have the time at home to make a lunch or time at work for a lunch break.

Yeah, I could meal-prep on the weekend, but the last thing I want to do with my precious time I’m not working, traveling to work, or sleeping is prep for the work week.

It would be half-true if we hadn’t gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)

For a long time, they used the letter “Y” instead of “th”.

That’s how we have weird relationships with old English words like “You/Thou,” and “The/Ye.”

I mean - they’re just being more honest about it than EA and Activision.

Suburban streets are literally designed around firetrucks. We make them design around allowing firetrucks to reach all houses without having to back out of the neighborhood. That’s why cul-de-sacs exist 90% of the time. They’re firetruck turnarounds.

The developers don’t*why to do this. They want 16ft roads with people folding their mirrors to pass each other so they can cram in more 1500 square foot houses they sell for a million dollars.

They also want zero green space, but we require impervious cover. Specifically, we limit IC to 25% because we’re in a recharge area for an aquifer. We also require water quality treatment of that 25%.

That’s generally what’s under a lot of the roads here. They do rooftop rainwater collection and storm drains that are piped to underground storage that discharges slowly to a retention pond through a jellyfish filtration system.

We allow the grass to treat water naturally where we can and put the storage under the pavement.

If you buy a new couch, how do you get it to your door? A truck.

If someone has a great attack, what do you call for? An ambulance.

99% of the road infrastructure requirements we have with developers aren’t about minimum parking or sprawl, but about having minimum leave sizes and turning radius for fire trucks.

Even if personal vehicles weren’t a thing, we’d still need most of the road infrastructure we have to move goods and services and provide access for emergency vehicles. Adding parking spaces over subgrade detention where the weight of a building can’t be located anyway doesn’t significantly spread things out.

The chief generators of traffic here are the high cost of land in cities, the dangerous heat levels (people who aren’t in shape, children, and the elderly can be killed by a 15-minute walk in the summer), and the insane focus on in-person office work.

I had to come into the office a few times during the lockdown, and my commute was reduced by an hour each way. Most of the people working from home during that time should still be working from home today. It would solve the traffic and real estate issues by giving people the freedom to live where they want.

Saying “cars bad” and thinking that’s a solution screams of living in a fantasy world. Get a degree in planning them go work in an area where we have these problems and you’ll quickly learn that it can’t be solved by city planning.

We don’t spend decades working on these problems and then increase the lane count because we’re lazy. We do it because it’s the only thing we can do that alleviates any issues.

Land is more expensive in city. That’s reality whether or not cars exist. When the city removed parking requirements housing and real estate costs continued to rise at the same or greater rates, except now landlords could charge an additional $400 a month for a parking spot as well since it became a luxury instead of a right for their renters.

The reality is when you live somewhere as spaced out as the US, owning a car is a requirement unless you want to essentially return to a feudalist system where people have to stay within a few miles of their homes for their entire lives while giving all their money to the landlord.

The opposite is true in my case. The long drive is what keeps my life affordable. Rent in town would be quadruple the cost for 40% of the living space. The long drive decreases my cost per square foot by an order of magnitude.

And the zoning in town has zero parking requirements. I know all about it because I work in the development department.

I essentially get paid $30 an hour for my commute with the savings and have a much bigger house.