A Jeep CJ-5 to show how a 4x4 works at its most basic level.

Yes, always. My parents had a different method of parenting: show me how, then never do it again themselves. You know how to wash dishes? Then washing dishes is your job now.

I enjoyed this the first (or tenth) time it came around, when it was called Antiheroes, and produced by Cracked.

How well do they seal up, i.e. against insects? Basically every place I sleep in a tent, the air is 90 percent mosquitoes, 10 percent air.

Taking humans out of Earth orbit is currently non-optimal, and will remain so for some time, if not for all time. Our advances in robotics and telecommunications are coming faster than our advances in human life support, as well they should. Let’s spend another several decades focusing on sending machines before we…

Where’s the project? ;) This is substantially nicer than my daily-driver Jeep. Like, really, substantially nicer.

Looking at their current costs, I anticipate the new products will be way, way outside my price range. $300+ for tents, $350+ for bivvies, $200++ for sleeping bags...this stuff is marketed to someone who definitely isn’t me. Guess I’ll keep living with my 7 pound tent for a while yet.

Awesome, as expected.

The monolith found, made of a single, large block, required a cutting, extraction, transportation and installation, which undoubtedly reveals important technical skills and great engineering. The belief that our ancestors lacked the knowledge, skill and technology to exploit marine resources or make sea crossings,…

As an emotional response, I totally get that, and there’s nothing abnormal about the reaction.

As a rule, cars stay pretty rigid even with the doors off; if you shove your fingers between the door and frame while you’re cornering, you can feel whatever flex the car has to offer. My Cherokees bend like crazy, but not enough to ever really compress onto the door itself, and doorless hasn’t broken any of them…

Well, we probably both are, but not necessarily because of this issue. ;)

Yeah, you might never be able to. That said, I sleep on my side a lot, and once I got past the initial period of a couple of months, I found positions where I could make it work for me. However, after 10 years, there’s been some wear to my shoulders, but hell, at my age, being able to raise your arms above your head…

As someone who lives every day with a 20-year-old lifted SUV squeaking, rattling, and periodically grinding down the road, and as someone whose child drives a smooth, quiet, perfectly-behaved Audi quattro, I think about this dilemma all the time. I spent an afternoon behind the wheel of the Audi, and very very badly…

There is an option people don’t typically consider: don’t use a pad at all. I know, I know, that sounds terrible! After all, you sleep on a big thick pad at home, shouldn’t you have one in the wilderness? Well, maybe not. I gave up sleeping pads over a decade ago, and even though I sleep indoors most of the time now,…

My worldview is that humans are intrinsically more valuable than animals...

An excellent point: even the pursuit of objective morality over subjective morality is based on a subjective valuation of “objective” being better than, or more preferable to, “subjective” valuation. And that’s why the first question we need to ask ourselves is “what system of valuation should we use, and why?”

I find direct comparisons of Canada and the US - with their broadly similar histories - often produce historically-significant lessons, though often at long remove. The US’s greater population boom, for example, has led to pressures Canada hasn’t had to deal with; the long, long choice of slavery, and of racism…

His is a completely understandable view, and akin to the views I hear from hunters and farmers about deer, bears, even raccoons. Non-human animals do harm to humans, just as humans do harm to these non-human animals. If we want to serve both, we must seek compromise, and compromises of this sort are entirely possible.…

On what system of valuation? An objective one that’s built into the universe, or a subjective one that we invented? Should we use our subjective valuations as guides for our own actions, or should we seek objective valuations and act according to them?