I wonder if they’d be shocked to learn that normal car companies sometimes turn a profit through their financing arms/partnerships instead of simply selling cars. And wait until they discover licensing IP. 

Is it your impression that companies didn’t used to grow with the help of investors until they made a profit?

I guess the Jalopnik Slack channel has an ongoing “How can we move the goalposts for Tesla?” topic.

Clancy suffered from at least 3 problems by that point. First, the Cold War setting was gone and he was struggling to find equivalent geopolitical threats to frame his novels. Second, Jack Ryan had risen so far that he was no longer an analyst getting buffeted by world events, he was in the position of *making* those…

I honestly hung on way too long hoping he would get back on track. The character of Elizabeth Elliot was hard to take, and it seems that every writer in the genre like Dale Brown developed a similar character, who was a shrieking, almost traitorous, unstable harpy that was clearly based on their view of Hillary…

Yeah, he’s the only author I know of that has TWO wish fulfillment characters. Ryan is the guy that Clancy thought he could be, but the guy he really wanted to be was John Clark.

So much this. I watched an interview on NBC over the weekend where a reporter was talking to a restaurant owner who complained that unemployment benefits were the reasons he couldn’t get enough employees.

Uber and Lyft have launched high priced public campaigns

I gave up on the Lyft thing early last year and honestly I couldn’t be happier. It was an alright gig for a while but near the end it was becoming a miserable chore. Lyft has made some big time changes that pretty much cut my paychecks down a third and it was rapidly ceasing to make sense financially. I do wonder how…

3rd Gear: I imagine a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers have moved over to gig economy delivery services instead.

1st: I was “up North” in the hinterlands to visit family this weekend. There’s a new car dealer at the corner I turn at to head toward my mom’s house that normally has 50-75 cars on their lot. Yesterday, they had 11. I give them a ton of credit for trying, but they had them all spaced out like the automotive version…

3rd Gear:

Weren’t these books always just wish-fulfilment for suburban Republican dads? The movies were a victim of the internationalization if popular cinema: when domestic box office was surpassed in importance by the global take, the CIA hero started to look like a niche interest.

Ryan ascending to the presidency was when I was officially done with Tom Clancy. Making Clancy’s fantasy version of himself president was just the last straw after the previous steady quality decline of his authorial output. His takes on the American Indian Movement in Sum, and on Japan in the one where he becomes…

Pretty sure the tech to make the shield died with Howard Stark and the Wakandans are highly unlikely to give away the secret of how to work it.

Can you rewrite this article? Because obviously you get it.

But seriously, *the show itself* is committed to arguing that “Steve’s legacy” is the man himself, not the title, or the shield, or the serum.

Yep, that’s what happened: Sam gave up the shield because he didn’t think he deserved it, the military wasn’t just gonna turn around and offer it right back to him. I could argue that Sam was probably a bit foolish and a lot idealistic to think the military would just let something like that sit in a museum for more…

This. A zillion times this.

“like why the U.S. government happily handed the shield over to a white guy rather than the Black man who deserved it”