It seems a bit sexist to think that men shouldn’t swear around women or vice versa. I’m considerably older than Drew, and I guarantee you that among the engineers and scientists I know and have worked with, the women swear just as much as the men. You should hear my sister talk about her overentitled medical students.

Less like brainwashing and more like bought.

It looks like a giant Nash Metropolitan.

This is similar to an anecdote about “urban mercenary” Repairman Jack’s early days in F. Paul Wilson’s series of novels. As a teen he helped an elderly man whose streetside landscaping was repeatedly being mowed down by damn kids driving crazy to install some steel bollards embedded in concrete within the…

Production costs for one-hour TV episodes (50 min) in the late ‘60s seem to have run between the low $100,000s to low $200,000s, so that cost for a short film that doesn’t use known actors but also doesn’t have series economy of scale doesn’t seem completely outrageous. I remember a teacher being scandalized about the…

The Google Home app, and before that the Cast app, can cast anything on the screen in another app to a Chromecast, including Prime Video. There’s an additional step, but that makes more sense to the engineer in me than building redundant code into every single app that someone may want to cast to a larger screen.

We used Iomega Bernoulli Boxes, which used PET film discs inside a hard plastic cartridge with a metal shutter that opened when inserted into the drive and used the Bernoulli Effect to draw the disc toward, but not touch, the read/write head. In ‘85 they were still 8" cartridges and drives in 5, 10, and 20MB…

I know in some states an employee on sick leave can’t be dismissed if they have a disability insurance policy through the employer (it was optional from mine), until the patient’s doctor determines if a claim on that insurance will become necessary or not.

There’s no obvious activity indicator, but a list is returned after waiting several minutes.

I’d actually forgotten that the Aztek had a tent option. I remember when it was introduced as an option for the Chevy Nova hatch in the early 1970s; I wonder what the first example was.

Drums without power assist would make it a lot more exciting to stop as well.

The wheels have ten spokes, but the pattern isn’t the same. Mazdaspeed wheels had 5 concave spokes, and 5 convex spokes that sat slightly behind at the hub. The 6 wheels are more similar to the 20-inchers on some past CX-9s, possibly a newer design from the same supplier.

How American of you to ignore the existence of southern hemisphere.

There seem to be a lot of owner complaints in both Australia and the US, with Nissan settling class-action lawsuits and whatever the equivalent is Down Under. As with the Getrag dual-dry-clutch DSG used by Ford and FiatChrysler, it is difficult for an observer to separate what may be actual faults from dissatisfaction…

And putting a hot burger on top does melt it, as American icon Big Mac and various other restaurant burgers demonstrates. The point is that the cheese should be recognizeable, and not an envelopment of liquified then refrozen grease.

There’s an AWD Mazda3 in other markets so the necessary pieces could be put together, but US buyers seem to prefer lifted and high-roofed, and Mazda USA already has an excess of low-volume models.

Well, all the major tire manufacturers. Regardless of drive wheels.

They are bigger than I want, but I could be seduced by the chance of having a 5-door saloon again, especially since the 5-door is one of the few automobiles to offer a deep jewel green paint, strangely not available on the wagon. But the “attractively” priced 1SV lacks some significant standard equipment compared that…

Didn’t Toyota emails leak last year about their ambition to reduce wages at their US plants from average for the auto industry to average for manufacturing in the local area? Which I believe was from low 20s/hr to low teens, excluding benefits statutory and otherwise.

They have been trying with some success to curb abuses like employers clawing back the wages they do pay by overcharging employees for meals and dormitories. Naturally, this made the American Chamber of Commerce in China, an industry group for US companies that do business there, make noises that if labor costs grew…