Do most people who buy a pickup need a pickup? No. But that doesn’t mean I can evaluate whether any particular person needs one. At least pickups and higher passenger/capacity vehicles have a legitimate utility, unlike, say, sports cars or luxury cars. (But get one of those if you want; I don’t care and that’s not the…

Heh. That’s exactly what my lab would do. I would get him one of those little ferret things with no stuffing and a squeaker in the tail.  It wouldn’t last the night.

Depends on the dog.  It’s not one-size-fits-all.

Preventive Vet has a short checklist to help you select safe toys to try out.

Pissed? I’d call the cops. They just stole your car.

I mean, it looks kinda sweet, and there’s some nice detail work there, but I can’t get past the fact that there’s no belt on that alternator. He’s got a non-functioning alternator sitting there in his shoulder just taking up space performing no discernable function.

...when the lab results came back as hydrogen, oxygen and trace elements of any number of things, they’d claim that the lab was compromised by a secret cabal,...

It’s what I call aggressive stupidity. If something doesn’t do what I expect, it can’t be because of my third-grade understanding of physics. It must be a complicated global conspiracy.

1) Lane assist, especially if it tries to correct for you. I appreciate the idea, but DO NOT take steering control away from me. Ever. For any reason. Either be entirely self-driving or not at all. Had that in a rental Ford Escape once. Had to pull over to turn that nonsense off. And heaven forbid you hit construction…

General tablet advice I give to family/friends who ask:

General tablet advice I give to family/friends who ask:

An episode written by Steven Moffat, so the quote should be attributed to him, no?

Fair point. But ‘cool’ and ‘functional/safe’ are not strongly correlated in vehicles.

Definitely. I’m old and from a relatively rural area. Lots of gravel roads and unpaved driveways around when I started driving. ‘Driving off road’ these days is pretty much what we just called ‘driving.’ Our Driver’s Ed even had a requirement for a certain amount of instructional time driving on gravel roads. In a…

This is clearly in the, “What did they think was gonna happen?” category, to the point where the only reasonable conclusion is that this is exactly what they intended. You cannot convince me anyone thought this would go down any other way.

Good example of the difference between trading and investing. We unfortunately conflate the terms because they both happen to involve stocks, but they are very different things. These guys are trading, not investing.

“Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.” —The Doctor

It irritates me that the English language is being re-written by people who damn near flunked English class.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, ‘literally’ just one more word that can mean its opposite, depending on context (e.g., sanction, seed, dust, cleave).

Your question is a good one, and a common one. I would simply caution against the slippery slope argument that “rules evolve over time” means “there are no rules.” Just because something can become correct doesn’t mean nothing is ever incorrect. Not every typo or malapropism represents an evolution in the language.

Fine, but where do we draw the line?