I’m honestly surprised the Merc is that cheap? Would have figured all the mint 50's & 60's SL’s were deep into 6 figures and only changing hands through auction houses.

Alright, the Fiesta is the correct recommendation, but we need to have an honest to goodness talk about what Andy found. Early 2010's FCA products make it to 140k miles? And are changing hands for 5 figures?

Honestly didn’t even know it was on sale yet.

And heck, I think it has more to do with the fact that the Cybertruck had 5 years worth of order backlog they can blow through, whereas Rivian is just selling their vehicles in the relatively conventional way.

This is giving me PTSD for the arguments on the internet re: Baltimore, where I couldn’t tell who was acting in bad faith:

China backing its industry with low-to-zero interest loans from its central bank is definitely meaningfully different than the US taxing what China produces as a result. Both nations subsidize their industries to an extent, but in this specific instance, one policy is a response to the other; not mutually assured…

I think the problem is that if the Chinese state is going to back its own industry in a way the US won’t, you’ve got to do *something* to handcuff them. The playing field is always going to be tilted towards the state supported industry, regardless of if its providing affordable products to the consumer. The Chinese…

The shame is that there is a valid point here that OP isn’t making. Neither the US or China is close to a shining beacon on a hill for a free and fair market, the latter is just a lot further from it than the former. Making the two coexist in a global economy has a lot of weird results for everyone. 

I think I’d just condense this down to say we are watching a real life prisoner’s dilemma play out: How do you maintain a free market economy* when there is a world super power that is going to not even pretend to do the same? You have to play at their level *to an extent*, because even if it’s doomed to fail in the…

Dear god yes. When travelling with kids, all of your carry-ons are dedicated to child-management. Snacks, lysol wipes, backup clothing, a crowbar.

Fun fact: Opening and closing the hole was the original intended purpose of the Jewish Space Lazer. Now it’s just shooting us with 5G to give us Covid.

Not only that, but industrialized nations trend towards 2.1 adding heads per household once they develop anyway. That education/contraceptives and rising childcare costs (even when adjusted for inflation) prevent humans from rearing as much offspring as possible make us a genuine oddity in the animal kingdom.

I vaguely remember a Peter Dinklage quote from GOT that was “whenever somebody says this, you should just ignore the part before the ‘but’. Everything before that doesn’t matter.”

There’s like a million details to Conrail I am regretfully burdened with (and the big RR’s in general). The shortest synopsis is that the two biggest railroads in the Northeast were failing, merged in an attempt to save themselves, and the result was worse than what preceded it. The whole thing was bankrupt less than…

I’m guessing there isn’t a way to do it. Rear-facing seats in 90's station wagons were fine because they usually integrated the mounting into the monocoque, and kept them inside the crash structure. Just bolting seats to the top of the ladder chassis produces way more undesirable results.

I could live with a bailout if it was a combo of what the feds did with GM and Chrysler in ‘08: The company gets taken off the market, and the government gets an ownership stake until they confident there’s a good management structure in place. It’s not perfect, but its better than whatever the hell has been going on…

I imagine this is like the Chicago Flood of the 90's where they had started the traditional bidding process to fix a known problem, but once it escalated, they just called the best guy for the job and told them to fix it. Not quite as straightforward with building a new bridge, but same principle is probably there. (I’…

I think about the blob thing all the time. A car from 2014 does not feel nearly as old *today* as a car from 1994 did in 2004. Although I that’s probably equal parts about muted styling changes, quality improvements, and there not being anything novel left to do with interiors (although i hate that Tesla has convinced…

Huh, I thought by CEO it implied somebody above the both of them, not actually Horner. That makes more sense.

That makes sense, I guess they are just realizing now that the used BEV market is behaving like a market in the most literal way: The thing is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Which isn’t as much as they were expecting, so they want to get whatever they can before it gets any worse.