So do the ramifications of an emergency evacuation in which you’re required to leave your carry-ons behind. I suppose you could stuff everything in a cargo vest you wear on your person, just to be safe...

I’m not saying it’s not inconvenient, I’m just saying I think people vastly overestimate how often it happens. Maybe because it was such a popular sitcom joke in the 90s.

What I’ve heard from actual fat people is “I try to buy a second seat, but the airline decides it’s a no-show and shoves a standby passenger into it. Then I’m the bad guy somehow.”

I find that’s pretty rare -- most seats just don’t recline that much anymore -- but hooking the bag handle with my foot usually works out well.

Just make sure the ground crew puts a tail stand in place if you’re gonna board from the rear. ;)

Oh man, once you get into the airlines and accessibility you’re opening a whole can of worms. They’re exempt from the ACA. Disability advocates have been asking for years for the airlines and FAA to get together and certify wheelchair restraints.

Yeah, for short trips I’ll often take a small carry on and then my regular suitcase, then gate-check the suitcase so I don’t have to mess with carrying it on the flight and through any layovers. It’s a great hack for avoiding having to pay baggage fees, since they *always* end up making the “the overhead bins are…

I feel like the myth of lost luggage greatly exceeds the reality, at least these days where there’s computer tracking. In 20 years of flying I’ve seen it *once* and it was because they swapped my bag tag with another person’s at the counter. (If I’d paid slightly more attention I’d have caught it.) We had the ‘lost’…

For most people being fat isn’t controllable either, other than with surgery. It turns out that evolution trained our bodies to relentlessly conserve body mass in any way possible. There was a study done on “Biggest Loser” contestants that found that their metabolisms were permanently reduced by the starvation diets…

I call BS. I’m 6'0" and I routinely stow a decent-sized laptop bag under my seat. It’s easier to get to in flight that way.

Parkas should go in the coat closet, duh. :)

This reminds me that in the USSR, the planes were designed so passengers boarded on the lower deck, stowed their own bag, then climbed up to the upper deck and took a seat.
Given that many of the airports Aeroflot flew into were extremely remote and sometimes completely unstaffed, it made a lot of sense.

I mean, at least Burning Man is *supposed* to be on fire and if you don’t like it you can leave. ;)

Urban warfare is hell. Which actually leads me to what might be the best answer: The worst possible vehicle to drive into a city is a Russian tank.

Good choice. This is the kind of thing you buy if you hate cities and want to advertise to city people that you’re not one of them, in a self-immolating sort of way.

Anything with a manual transmission is awful in cities. I gave up on having a stick-shift after moving to Seattle and realizing how much it sucked to clutch-bump a car for an hour every morning in stop-and-go traffic.

I have wireless charging for my cell phone and that sucker gets hot. I can only imagine how much power wireless charging for an EV would waste.

I feel like if it’s going to cost me the equivalent of a full-sized car to register, insure, and park, it had better have the capabilities of a full-sized car. I can only afford so many different vehicles. I have too many already, frankly.

The best part would be watching the cable jump when the switch was thrown, as the magnetic field kicked in.

The rear bogies on a semi trailer are attached by some pins and gravity; a lot of times they’re on a track so they can be adjusted fore and aft after pulling the pins. They aren’t really made to take fore-and-aft forces other than whatever braking effort the trailer’s drum brakes can scrounge up.