They’re all shared, d00d.

I think Tom gave good advice. Breaking even on the loan seems like a crappy pill to swallow, but perhaps the least bad option if renegotiating the loan doesn’t work out. I can’t imagine that would make the payment all that more palatable.

The military has upgraded their BCGs lately. I got the old ones when I went through OCS - the same type my grandfather wore just because they were free for him as a retiree. By the time I separated, the new ones had come in and I got one last pair as a parting gift - they look pretty normal. Wearing them right now at…

Made the switch from Catholic school to public as I started 7th grade. It exposed me to a much wider swath of society. My friends ceased to be exclusively white, affluent Catholics. I don’t know what biases I might have developed by age 12, but that switch probably helped lay a lot of them to rest.

November 2006: Berlin. Left the Hauptbahnhof feeling perfectly well on a six-hour train ride to Amsterdam. Arrived with full-blown, worst-case-in-my-life flu. After a couple days, um, medicating and doing something resembling sleep in a listing boatel, we departed for warmer climes in Naples so I could recuperate,…

I hate to complain, but videogame sites are getting to be universally pretty lax on this: What system/s is this game for? It looks like a computer/console game, but you seem to indicate it might be a physical pinball game without explicitly saying so. I’m an old guy and I can’t intrinsically understand anymore... :(
But…

As I started to look for a TDI replacement, I got curious about the market share of VW and the Subaru I eventually settled on. I found it astounding that VW and Subaru both have only a 3.1% market share. VWs seem like they make up 10% of the cars here in SoCal. There must be wide swaths of the country that just don’t…

I’d argue it’s vitally important the military retains officers who have extreme reservations about following unlawful orders. More important that they have the will to refuse to follow those orders. If I were still serving now, I can only imagine the cognitive dissonance I’d be suffering from. I don’t envy them.

I served as a naval officer during Obama’s presidency, and I’m very glad I’m not in a position to serve under Trump. Most of the time, service in the military doesn’t entail making decisions or using judgment much different from what would be expected of you at any job. It just includes the implicit possibility of…

I really dislike the truism that you need to remain where you are at least a year after starting. The job may be bad objectively, you may be a bad fit for it. Whatever the case, look elsewhere. There’s no actual penalty for moving on after a short period - if another employer wants you, then that’s justification…

I find complaints about fuel economy regulations puzzling, frankly. I can understand that having the government force automakers to increase minimums would be cause for heartburn, but it’s over the course of decades.

David Tracy’s suggestion of the Ridgeline is really spot-on. Those seats that fold all the way up to leave an unecumbered floor would be as good as it gets for a big-ass dog like that.

Auto industry and EPA are inextricably linked. And Jalopnik are part of the automotive press.

Now I know at least something of the fate of my TDI SportWagen after it leaves my ownership - a forlorn part of the San Bernadino airport. It’s a stupid analogy, but it’s a little like Alderaan blowing up in Star Wars. Cars are expected to die capriciously, one at a time, but here they are all lined up to be destroyed…

A couple years ago some massive thunderstorms hit LaGuardia just as we’re the next plane to take off on the way back home to San Diego on a direct flight. We wait it out a while, but have to de-plane, as we’ve hit a FAA maximum amount of time waiting on the plane. An hour or so later, we re-plane, but then have to…

I was glad to see that McRaven brought the offending members to admiral’s mast, which is hard to imagine. Usually it would be the CO who would issue non-judicial punishment. But also astounding that the members were let back in after a time-out.

Agreed. It’s really astounding on automobile sites how commentary is so predictably anti-automatic/CVT: “Ugh, the new Ferrari has an automatic - Not gonna buy it!” Manual gears are a chore. And no matter how good people think they are at driving, they will allow themselves to be distracted while driving, manual…

I often use mine to make boiled peanuts. It cuts out a rather large chunk of time on a task that usually takes 6 hours or so - down to about 3 or 4 hours. Also negates the need to add water continuously, as it would on the stovetop.

The typical reaction on Jalopnik seems to be to call these sort of safety features new-fangled junk that gives carte blanche to people to be distracted while driving.

It’s about maximizing our infrastructure. It’ll free people to live further away from city centers without facing ever-longer commute times. Self-driving cars, operating in sync with each other, will eventually be able to move along smoothly at maximum speed, without braking and changing lanes all willy-nilly, which…