Not many people in the US are riding a motorcycle because it’s practical. They’re all fashion accessories to some extent.

Some tech companies and luxury gated communities are offering this as a perk now.

Miyazaki absolutely loves machines, I think. Whenever there’s a car or an airplane in one of his movies, it’s almost always a specific car or plane. I was looking at his storyboard notes for “Porco Rosso” and noting that even when the plane is one invented for the film, he calls out a specific *engine* for it to have.

Automatically? No. But the kinds of people who aspire to management tend to be people who see themselves as superior to the average worker, and badly run companies tend to have policies that encourage an adversarial relationship.

In the short-term maybe. In the long term yo-yoing between working massive overtime and being laid off is not a recipe for a sustainable career.

They should, but that’s not usually the way it works in a company like that. Usually individual trades unionize, not the whole place (although not always.)

I work at a university and there are at least three different unions on campus representing different trades, in addition to some jobs that aren’t unionized at all. It’s really common.

It was the auto industry’s stated belief, based on tests involving bare vehicle frames with no crumple zones, that accidents over 30 mph were simply not survivable on a routine basis. That’s the attitude Ralph Nader was pushing back on with “Unsafe at any Speed.” People remember it as a takedown of the Corvair, but it…

Luxury!

That looks like something you would find rusting next to a road in one of the Fallout games.

When you say “huge updates,” by updates you mean “grille”, right?

I saw someone suggest once that maybe he had declared he’d design it, had opened up Blender and tugged on vertices until he got frustrated, then slammed the result down on someone’s desk and said “THERE! THAT’S THE NEW TRUCK!”
Tesla’s designs have always had a slightly amateurish feel to them but this one is far and…

I remember a sci-fi writer once suggesting that if you could vibrate the windshield fast enough, the water wouldn’t form droplets and would form a clear, undistorted layer instead. ;)

I think as long as the truck is moving the slipstream should work with the wipers to keep it pretty clear. Stationary might be another issue, and I wouldn’t want to have to clear snow and ice off it in the winter.

Yeah, exactly. It’s overcomplicated in exactly the sort of way that should appeal to Elon, and I imagine the patents have expired by now.

It was on the fringe of a parking lot for a Home Depot or something like that, I think; the whole parking lot wasn’t just for those three stores, but it was funnier to frame the photo as if it were. ;)

Also it’s the biggest city for a long way in any direction, so it’s probably something of a regional shopping center.

These types of speed humps are fun on a motorbike. Just lift off the saddle a little and you’ll cruise right over them, especially if it’s a dual-sport bike.

Hands up: Who has driven through a drive-thru in reverse so the person in the passenger seat could make a transaction?

I feel like the best of bad options here is to open a cowl gap of an inch or two between the windshield and frunk lid, use one or two gigantic wipers, and park them underneath it so you don’t see them most of the time. This was a common trick on luxury cars in the 80s, to avoid having “ugly” wipers visible all the…