It looks to be in pretty good nick, though it’s obviously been kept outside from the engine hardware. The fact that it’s been bored out means that you should be asking a number of questions about the kit used, whether the engine was balanced before reassembly, and check for obvious leaks at the headgaskets. It’ll…

AM works in areas that higher-frequency transmitters won’t: mountainous and rural regions are the most obvious. Think about how far a single AM frequency goes compared to FM.

“Let’s fuck up the ability to do this work whilst saying we ‘should’ provide enough funding to do a better job without actually following through on it” is certainly a strategy.

According to NASA, space telescopes cost 1000x more per kg than ground-based telescopes. Not only do you have to design and build something in a clean room that is radiation hardened, but you also have to send it up, and you can’t easily maintain it if something goes wrong (see all the gyroscope problems that Hubble…

The FA20 is such a complex block since you have to be able to crack the two case halves apart in order to get at the crankshaft that it’s always going to be costlier.

Well, it’s just correlation for one city, but DC’s driving fatalities have increased 86% in the last decade. There’s a lot at play here -- it’s a very complicated parameter space with size of vehicles, phone usage, etc -- but AEB and adaptive cruise control have become increasingly common in the intervening years.

They’re goofy looking, but honestly pretty endearing, and being purpose-built whilst also increasing safety and comfort is a huge win. 

I was pulled over in my WRX doing 78 in a 70 on cruise control because the state trooper “was pacing me going 96 in a 55". They’ll lie to your face, regardless of what you were doing. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I sold that car not long after.

I love my 2001 911 as a road tripper when I’m travelling with my partner: it’s comfortable, quick, and so much fun.

I recently went on a 1700-mile tour on my old Airhead BMW and it was honestly my favourite solo road trip I’ve ever done. You can only load it up with so much stuff, so you have to be judicious, but you can carry a surprising amount. I got smiles and waves everywhere I went, and with a 5-gallon tank making >40 mpg I…

As much as Amica’s constantly-increasing rates hurt, I maintain their coverage on my 911 because I know that they’ll take care of me and even replace it with a like vehicle if anything terrible happens to it.

I can speak from personal experience: the Subaru WRX. By god I got so much more LE attention driving that car than I have in any other vehicle I have ever owned.

Presidentsman just doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way.

The classic maxim comes back: hard cases make bad law.

This is a FANTASTIC idea, and I honestly mean it.

Bradley is right: take your budget and use it over the next few years to repair the mechanical parts on your already-fantastic car. Better the devil you know.

Motocompo.

I’m a physicist supporting the US government and the number of times I’ve nearly flipped my laptop or keyboard because someone naively proposed “just using machine learning/neural networks/generative AI” to solve a VERY complex problem is CERTAINLY in the double digits. The thing that pisses me off the most about…

It takes more energy and is slower the longer you own it as the chain gets longer and longer...

Fun follow on to all this: I was just on the Maine/New Hampshire border for a motorcycle rally and decided that I had to go up Mt. Washington (I never had before) and thought about this the whole time. Now my old-ass air-cooled bike overheated a bit on the way up because the person in front of me couldn’t bear to go…