I suspect Austin is a bit like Seattle, where every new resident wants to be the last person to move there.

The problem is hyperloop has the same right-of-way problems as HSR, but unlike HSR it’s unproven technology with no installed base.

From what I can tell, most US truckers don’t care that much about vaccines. They just want more places to park so they can sleep.

That takes me back to the days when Boeing Surplus was still open. You could equip a home shop pretty inexpensively there. I still have a Fluke 77 I got for $20. They had a whole Gaylord box full of them and I just went through it until I found one that powered on.

This has been a business model for light aircraft for years. Most “experimental” registered airplanes are actually owner-built kits, sometimes with factory assistance.

I suspect they’re including the hourly cost of the hazmat team that did the cleanup, plus a substantial institutional markup.

Yup, I’m familiar with countersteering. That’s what I mean by torque mattering — it’s not how far you push the bars, it’s how hard you’re pushing the grip on the inside of the turn. The actual movement is surprisingly minimal (which is why twist throttles work great on motorcycles but are awkward on ATVs.) It’s an…

That yoke looks like something I would have drawn as part of my dream car interior, when I was too young to have actually driven a car.

Some very early cars used tillers. A wheel provides such a good combination of precision and a large range of motion, though, and allows for different wrist positions during long drives.

I went to college there. Several years later I compared notes with a guy I knew in Finland and realized all my Finnish vocabulary was about 150 years out of date. ;)

And in the rally world that hill you just flew off the crest of is a “yump.” ;)

Finnish is a fascinating language. Part of the reason for so many noun cases is they don’t have prepositions. So there’s a separate case for, say, an object that’s on top of another object.

I’m told that Finnish doesn’t really have the concept of taboo profane words that English does.

In spite of the lack of impact (I once saw it compared to a car running over a soda can) this can be extremely traumatic psychologically for engineers. Sometimes it’s career-ending.

Yeah, but for the rest of his life every time he fills out a job/rental application or background check he has to check “yes” next to “have you ever been arrested?”

I never had trouble understanding Finnglish either. The thing is Finns usually hit their consonants pretty hard, so the fact that they don’t hit every vowel or intonation like a native speaker is not that distracting to me.

I always got a kick out of his tendency to start sentences with “OK, yes.”
Interviewer: “Are you getting too old for this?”
Gronholm: “OK, yes...no.”

I find it pretty funny that rally cars are far closer to stock than “stock” cars, these days.

The Supreme Court just agreed to take a case contending that Harvard’s acceptance standards benefit Black applicants at the expense of Asian Americans. It’s widely assumed the conservative majority will use this to kill all race-based acceptance policies.