Oof, it’s worse than I thought. The reference article says they cost about 36 cents each to make... doubtless LA is paying more than that, because, you know, businesses like to make SOME margin on their products.

...so yes, they are too expensive for what they are.

...the amount of anesthetic gas that would be needed to pull off such a feat would be very expensive and hard to acquire.

Very cool piece, Brent! One piece of advice though - you need to proof-read your own work before you post, because nobody at Giz (or anywhere on a Gawker site) is going to proof or edit it for you. I hate to see such good writing marred by a few typos here and there.

Fight the ticket, and get the adjournment, because it wastes the ticketing officer’s time, and the court’s time. The point of modern traffic enforcement isn’t safety - it’s revenue generation. If everybody insisted on a trial, and dragged it out to the limits of the law, the system would stop being a revenue center…

This paragraph could use a tweak to make it clearer:

Unfortunately, ROE>BVR. Being able to engage enemy fighters before they even know you’re around is only worthwhile if you are actually allowed to engage them without visually identifying them first.

I wouldn’t say that it is any big crime in particular - I’d nominate the fact that sportsman racers get their trailers stolen all the time. I’ve spent the last ten years on and off covering doorslammer drag racing, and it seems like at every second event, somebody’s rig got broken into or stolen outright in a hotel…

Sure it is. Try and buy a car without seatbelts or an airbag. Society decided that there is a minimum level of safety that is required, despite a higher, more expensive standard being technically possible. You could be required by law to wear all that stuff, but we’ve decided that despite the fact it would undeniably…

We do that all the time. For example, we could make cars far safer than they are, and require all the occupants to wear a helmet, HANS device, fire suit, 5 point harness, gloves, and boots like you have to in a race car. But we don’t because it would be expensive and inconvenient.

Does riding gear count? I’d nominate the helmet-back-protector-gloves combo worn with a T-shirt that ensures your central nervous system will be intact to transmit 100% of the pain impulses when you are flayed alive by the pavement.

The same way a helicopter picks up or drops off any other sling load. The pilot sets it down gently on the ground and takes tension off the line, then drops the hook. The tank isn’t spewing fire continually - that would be madness. There’s a remote control valve that dumps liquid fuel on command, which is ignited as…

Is the nose wheel supposed to be locked for landing and takeoff, and unlocked for taxiing?

I don’t know why you think this is a sentence fragment. It’s a perfectly cromulent phrase. Here, let me reorder it for you:

Do you really believe that, or are you trolling?

A world free from rolling resistance better be completely level, or shit is all going to end up piled up in the low spots.

How much of a profit margin do they have to have in order to finance as many as six separate “series” of commercials simultaneously, all with multiple “episodes”?

It’s actually a serious concern. Driverless cars could allow precision delivery of pretty nasty payloads with no risk of physical injury to the person sending it, like there would be in a suicide bombing, and no risk of arrest if the car is intercepted before reaching the target or before it detonates, like there…

See, now you just need one of these so that you have your right hand free for sippin’

It’s really cute that you all have developed a convenient shorthand way to belittle anyone who has a different take on a story.