Do you live somewhere that has hard freezes in the winter? I always noticed that in MI, but now that I live in CA they mostly seem flush. I’m assuming the utility vaults don’t get heaved up by frost but the pavement surface does.

Anybody remember Eagle Computer and Dennis Barnhart? He made millions in a stock IPO, bought a Ferrari to celebrate, then immediately crashed it and died.
There’s a danger in having so much money that you can buy more car than you know how to drive. Or more airplane than you know how to fly, a perennial problem for…

A lot of the entry level mega-carriers (those common names like Swift, etc.) pay drivers really poorly. Their main purpose is to train drivers who then move on to greener pastures, but in recent years they’ve taken to using various strategies to try to trap them under a mountain of debt such that they can’t leave.

Halliburton isn’t just a defense contractor. They’re also an oilfield company — which was their original business, in fact. They still do a lot of that work, and they’ve bought up and consolidated a lot of the smaller oilfield servicers in Texas.

Eventually we’ll see sheds made out of the pieces, like with the old N1 rocket shrouds.

Usually,  yeah. Sometimes there are really elaborate definitions of what constitutes an act of war, too. My renter’s insurance policy has a clause that any detonation of a nuclear weapon, even if accidental, is an act of war.

Partly that’s down to different engineering philosophies. They’ll take a working design and iteratively improve it over and over again. In the US instead of iterating on something that already works we tend to tear up the blueprints and start from scratch for each new vehicle. Contractors make more money that way,…

Eh, during the heyday of the USSR Aeroflot’s safety record wasn’t that bad. You have to remember that beside their major intercity routes they also did what we’d call bush flying in the US, flying people to remote parts of Siberia and places like that, so that drove up their accident rate compared to major Western…

Not to mention Vancouver drivers, who consider stop signs and red lights to be mere suggestions.

In BC it’s a little more complicated — there’s only one car insurance company and it’s an arm of the government.

Yeah, Police Interceptors were never that fast from 0 to 60. Most were geared for top speed — in most of the Crown Vic versions, about 130 mph, a limitation imposed by driveshaft vibrations. Most of the police-specific modifications were actually aimed at making sure the car stayed cool and kept its battery charged…

That is of course true, and I doubt he’s ever really cared about anything but money. It’s just funny to see him take the mask off after presenting himself in the past as some sort of savior of mankind.

It’s interesting how he got quieter about any personal political stances that aren’t in sync with the GOP ever since he moved to Texas and became beholden to Gov. Abbott.

This reminds me that my college roommate had a Jeep Wagoneer with a broken gas gauge, so we stopped every 100 miles to top it off. The main problem was this made it depressingly easy to calculate the fuel economy, which was in the single digits.

This takes me back to when I worked for a company that moved into an older suburban industrial site that had had a number of different manufacturing operations in it over the years. We had *everything*. 208, 480, 600...all of it unreliable. On a good week we didn’t lose any phases.

I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a complex less than 30 years old. New complexes are all “luxury apartments” that are out of reach for most people.

I had a friend who worked as an after hours security guard, and it was the same deal. Observe and report. He was mostly there to deter people with his presence. His employer didn’t want him doing anything that could get them sued, either by the perp or by his own next of kin if it went badly.

I just flashed back to when I told my aunt, who lived in Rollingstone, MN, that I was moving to St. Paul. She responded with a deadly-serious “I’ll pray for you.”

I used to do oil changes this way on my ‘81 Mercedes 300TD. The engine was actually designed for it — it had an unusually large-bore dipstick tube that went clear to the bottom of the pan. The one time I checked I was unable to get any more oil out of it with the drain plug after using the extractor.

Is there a Batmobile that hasn’t looked dorky in person? I’ve seen the “Batman Returns” one and it looks really chintzy and fake up close. Movie cars are kinda built with the idea that you won’t get to look too closely.