swalling

The existence doesn't annoy me. It's the sanctimonious tone that this should be the norm, when it's clearly not even remotely built for the reality of how families actually live, despite their marketing.

The actual solution to this short trips problem is better mass transit and cycling infrastructure, with cars reserved for highway travel and other long trips or cargo hauling. Good pre-car suburban neighborhoods existed on a network of walking and electric streetcars. That is the future of urban design, not cars designed for Oompa Loompas.

You are weird. I am a born-and-raised PNW resident and a very small proportion of the population can tolerate having to wear a rain suit to bike home from work or go to the grocery store for 6-8 months of the year.

Try telling a family who needs to haul multiple children, dogs, and gear for even short trips to the park for soccer practice that they should use a tiny city car instead of a van or SUV. You buy vehicles for the life and city you have, not some aspirational version that exists in a fantasy of urban design.

You're supposed to buy a second car just for long trips? Even if you live in a dense city, America is inescapably huge and requires highway travel unless you never want to leave your neighborhood. We don't have a functioning passenger rail network like China etc.

Even if this were remotely feasible, which it's not, this kind of tiny car is a total death trap for your family when everyone else is driving large vehicles. I would love to see a crash test video of this against an F-150.

Finally, let's say you do live in a city and you are already a two car household. Try telling your wife that she has to buy this ugly toy-sized car that she looks ridiculous in while you get to drive a Tesla or Rivian. Like it or not, cars are lifestyle status symbols where the aesthetics matter.

It doesn't take comprehensive statistical analysis to conclude that a brand new car that comes with an electronic immobilizer, alarm system, and remote GPS-based location monitoring is less likely to be stolen than your 1999 Honda Accord, 2001 Subaru Forester, or 2020 Kia Soul that comes with none of those features. The advice to buy a used car to avoid theft is demonstrably stupid.

Used cars are actually much more likely to be stolen, especially if lack modern features like chip keys, immobilizers, and GPS tracking services. In US cities, the most stolen cars are all 15-20+ year old models. If you buy a new Toyota for instance, you don’t need an AirTag because it comes with location tracking services built in.

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/most-stolen-cars/

https://wblk.com/most-stolen-vehicles-ny/

That still doesn’t prove that accounting audits should prevent a bank run. The more likely culprit here is what the FDIC called out in its report, namely a failure of oversight and a loosened regulatory regime.

KPMG audits more US banks than any other firm. This article is like saying that all dead people drank water before their demise.

This is very common among endurance athletes. It's extremely difficult to consistently recover from a >1,000-2,000 calorie deficit every time you do a weekly long run or ride. Glycogen reabsorption is optimally effective for only a relatively brief time period post-exercise and there are upper limits on your rate of glycogen resynthesis.

It's not just a longterm effect of VO2max improvements, which is a physiological metric that is quite slow to improve and realistically has upper limits based on your age and sex. It's also that aerobic exercise acutely improves brain function. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256523/#:~:tex...

Indian drivers honk incessantly. It’s widely believed that driving there without honking frequently is unsafe, because concepts like lanes and signaling are… loosely followed, to put it mildly. Honking in North America or Europe either means an emergency or someone is pissed off. Honking in India means hello I am here.

The issue is not purebred dogs. It’s breeding purely for conformation (how the dog looks) rather than for health, longevity, and performance.

A good counterpoint to the idea that most purebred dogs have health issues are gundog breeds that are still judged based on hunting and retrieving field trials, or other dogs with real jobs like police/military dogs, herding dogs, etc.

Athletic breeds with real jobs typically have much longer life spans. Even AKC Border Collies and German Shorthaired Pointers have average lifespans of 12-15 years, with it not unusual to see dogs that are 16-18 years old and still healthy. My own dog is a GSP, and I not only met his father and mother but also his grandmother, who was perfectly healthy.

German Shepherds were epically screwed up as a breed in the 20th century by intentionally breeding heavier dogs with unhealthy body structures that looked aesthetically pleasing. This is a big part of why Belgian Shepherds (Malinois) replaced GSDs and Dobermanns as military and police dogs in many countries. The extreme form of this aesthetics problem is the French Bulldog, which is an abomination that shouldn’t exist according to the laws of nature, because it typically can’t reproduce without caesarians and/or artificial insemination.

The Silicon Valley version of this is the SF2G (San Francisco to Google) bike route. https://sf2g.com/

Instead of riding miserable Caltrain or driving the 101, biking 40 miles with friends is an absolute pleasure, even if you have to start pre-dawn to get in the office on time.

Potatoes produce the highest level of satiety compared to other carbs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267283/ Combined with fats via frying or baking, and it's not a joke that they would make you feel the most full compared to a similar amount of rice or refined wheat bread/pasta.

A slightly healthier but equally delicious replacement for fries are oven-roasted or grilled duck fat potatoes with the skin on.

Gotcha. I think I never dug into it because normal people generally don’t want to write in Markdown. The effort in doing that and manually managing cloud sync isn’t worth it. Apple needs to build it with WYSIWYG and have it work out of the box with iCloud.

Say it with me now: immigration. Who do you think most landscapers, house painters, and roofers employ already?

It’s true that the organizational model of the file system and desktop metaphor should be usable for this.

There’s another huge gap though: documents in your local machine don’t have easy to use hypertext. Apple Notes app is very nice, but neither it nor TextEdit nor Pages can do what a Notion document can do. The OS needs a HyperCard to make it adopt Web-native tools for thinking.

There may also be municipalities that will die because they cannot sustain the financial burden of doing so or which are just simply located in totally unrealistic places for their current use.

For instance, the small towns bordering Tulare Lake and other historical flood zones. Or the absurd golf courses and mega-farms in the middle of the desert sucking the Colorado River dry.

Turns out that outside the HN startup bubble there are a lot of perfectly nice women who don’t have white collar careers who still want husbands. Electricians and plumbers generally marry women like elementary school teachers, nurses, house cleaners, and administrative assistants.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/

This is total nonsense. By your 60s, a smart person who has been in the trades since their early 20s should own an independent business or at the very least manage a team of people / apprentices who can do the heavy lifting. This is no different than the fact that most software engineers still working in their 60s are almost all either managers, senior architects, or independent consultants with a solid client base.

My appliance repair guy works every day with his father who is in his early 70s, and the younger guy does all the hard physical labor of lifting and dragging dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. and you can tell the old guy would rather be working every day with his son than sitting on the couch twiddling his thumbs. The other version story is my uncle who built a local landscaping company. He did backbreaking work every day sunrise to sunset when he was young, and then by middle age he was hiring crews to do the labor. In his 60s he is fully retired with money for a second vacation home in Mexico and lots of toys.

If a link is paywalled and/or the content is not able to be crawled/archived for a reader mode, a browser that warned me before I wasted time opening a tab whose content is totally inaccessible would be appreciated. Contextual lock icons on links or a hover state with a preview.

If paywall status was exposed via a standardized API to the browser, it could further make it more seamless to buy a subscription iOS-style that I know I can cancel easily later. Looking at you, NYT and other new sites.

Your conclusion may have been correct about your dog, but extending that to all dogs is pretty large and ridiculous leap. Dogs view their people as family members (which is what a pack is), and many other people’s dogs get to have a healthy group of dog friends as well. You sound like a person who just failed to keep a happy dog and developed a rationalization that all dog ownership is morally wrong.

Dog domestication is generally thought to be an example of commensalism, and potentially mutualism. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2021.6623... In other words, it only happened in the first place because a group of wolves benefited from association with people. Pleistocene hunter-gatherers did not have the physical ability to force a grown wolf to be captive if it did not want to be.

Say that to dogs, who have co-evolved with humans over thousands of years to a level that not only do they look completely different from wolves, but they can happily digest food that a wolf cannot.

Dogs like to be with people. Even free-roaming street dogs will usually live in close proximity to people. A well-cared for household dog or cat is one of the most happy, pampered beings who ever lived, often cared for at a level akin to human children.

Absolutist anti-pet thinking is how PETA ends up euthanizing 97% of the pets it receives at its shelter.

It's not just rural Americans. Japanese 4WD vans, SUVs, and trucks are super hot among Portland hipsters looking for city-friendly vehicles for cargo or road tripping. There are some importers here locally that this is all they do now, like https://www.javan-imports.com/ The other highly desirable vehicle among this crowd are the J60 series Land Cruisers from the 80s, for fashion reasons more than functional ones though.

There is a big difference between one digital camera per household and one in the pocket of every person at all times.

Yes, it democratized access and made everyone a photographer, which also had the effect of nuking the bottom tiers of paid professional photography / stock photos, and turned them into something people do mainly for intrinsic motivations (i.e. as a hobby or as a social activity).

The same might potentially happen with writing, where if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem, advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing work will be eliminated.

It’s possible that because these writing-specific jobs were already low value / largely eliminated by the Internet at large, that won’t happen. But it could happen to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general purpose.

Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty possible that generative models do to writing what smartphones did to photography.

Unless it massively changes between now and launch (which is possible) Tesla is only going to outperform traditional trucks on one functional vector, which is speed and acceleration, but they don't outperform other EVs on that front. The Ford F-150 Lightning, Hummer EV, and Rivian's truck are all among the most powerful EVs you can buy. On other functional vectors like reliability and towing capacity they either don't really matter or Tesla won't win.

Rivian's truck in particular has solidly beaten them to market with a highly functional vehicle that has a ton of incredible design details and has some of the highest driver satisfaction ratings of any new car models on the market. They have already captured a significant chunk of the market in luxury SUV and truck EVs, also partially due to the fact that a lot of rich liberals don't want to be associated with Elon Musk in any way now, and Tesla has moved downmarket pretty hard.

Separately, a big part of the reason Ford massively outsells Dodge or other brands is because Ford is particularly loved by fleet buyers. Expect them to continue to do so with the Lightning.

So that leaves the Cybertruck to pin its whole hopes on style/appearance, selling to the same type of bros that might buy a Ford Raptor or higher end Tacoma/Tundra model at similar price points. Not exactly a move poised to win the EV truck market overall, given how polarizing the design is.

We have all seen one, it’s called YouTube.

Jay Leno hit the nail on the head “this doesn’t look anything like a pickup truck” which is exactly what the problem was with the Aztek. Crossovers are a huge market but the totally ridiculous body style was a flop.

If Tesla priced this more like a Raptor, in order to market it as a futuristic status car, it might work. That’s not what they’re doing. Rivian is eating their lunch here and will continue to do so.

The current product is not even remotely one that can compete in the market. It has to be redesigned, or they’re going to end up shipping the Pontiac Aztek of EV trucks.

The article itself cherry-picked France and Mississippi to compare income levels, which is why I continued the example. The additional data points are interesting and valuable, though speaking of cherry picking, Azerbaijan somewhat dubiously qualifies as a European country (neither it nor Moldova are part of the EU or Schengen, for instance).

Anyway, the fact that the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU continues to help make my point, which is that high US income does not compensate for the poorer quality of life.