I covet this. My god, do I covet this...

It's the same god-complex that you see with other professions where your life and the lives of others hang by a thread based on your ability to trust your instincts and make good decisions quickly and without thinking. See: surgeons, paramedics, race car drivers, etc

I don't think it was ever about the oil, I think it was half a vendetta on the part of Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, and half the result of goading from both the wealthy Gulf states (who hated Saddam because he was a bully who invaded Kuwait and destabilized the region) as well as from AIPAC/the Israel lobby (who hated…

Let's ditch that "Licensed and regulated industry with driver safeguards versus any yahoo with a car and a smartphone" BS once and for all.

As long as we're talking about the US, the "Licensed and regulated professional versus unregulated yahoos" argument is at best a pathetic red herring and at worst a bold-faced lie put forth by the cab industry.

If we're talking US brands, I vote for Packard, the closest thing that the US ever had to Bentley, and the only company that was badass enough to license-build the mighty Merlin in WWII.

Fine arts major here, and my feeling is that these "X degree has the worst ROI" are a little misleading and don't do nearly enough to address the fact that its not just what you study, but where you study it that will determine what you can do with a given major.

England is the big one you're missing, with even more giant stadiums per capita than the US has (we're talking Cup-ready pro-level stadiums with the amenities to justify the $500 bleacher seats, not just acres of aluminum benches fit only for drunken freshmen)

The more you read about submarines, the more fascinating they get. Between the exotic propulsion systems, the insane sonar arrays, the gravimetric-assisted inertial navigation systems, and all of their low-observable technologies, they're the closest things in existence to the starship enterprise, and they make the…

It was the same up near my neck of the woods. My family used to go on vacation to Brunswick ME in the summers and I remember vividly how as a little kid I'd see the P-3 subchasers from the Brunswick NAS taking off and landing every 20 minutes or so to go scour the North Atlantic for boomers.

Between this and the Navy's open lust for the Advanced Super Hornet, how long do you reckon it'll be before Boeing throws together a frontal-aspect stealth optimized F-15E with new engines and avionics to dangle in front of the USAF? Think of it as a cheaper, more versatile american take on the Eurofighter Typhoon.

If all cabs were regulated the way London regulates theirs, using driver knowledge and skill as the barrier to entry/licensing, which encourages knowledgeable, professional, competent drivers, then we wouldn't ever really need Uber to begin with.

Imagine, for a second, an alternate universe where instead of wasting all that money on the Model 880, Convair had decided to update the XC-99 with the swept wings and all-jet powerplant from the YB-60. They could have had a jumbo-sized airliner for high-luxury or long-haul routes that could have beaten the 747 and…

That's why we'd be 100% better off with a large, relatively low-cost air force of frontal stealth-optimized F16s, F15s, F-18s, A-10s, AV-8Bs (and, heaven forbid, F-14s) with modernized avionics plus some B-52s and B-1Bs that could do 98% of what we need our aircraft to do for a lot less money and with a lot fewer…

"That's life" is just about the most fitting way you could put it. I've been through more than my fair share of extremely traumatic experiences, and I've dealt with courses, movies, books, etc dredging up some horrifically vivid memories, and it just sucks. But that's life in a nutshell, awful things happen do good…

Combine it with a piece on the TSR-2 and the Avro 730 for a "white paper victims" special!

In a weird twist of fate, today I had a rare sighting of the Boston-area TVR Griffith, which has to be one of only a tiny hand full of late-model TVRs that managed to make it stateside (John Travolta's Tuscan comes to mind). So here it is, in all of its 400+hp, no-traction control, no-ABS, tube-framed ultralight…

Someone in Lexington, MA has a metallic blue late 90s/early 00s TVR Griffith. Thats a rare enough car in the UK, but its totally surreal seeing it stateside.

Interesting fact: Soviet/Russian naval designs have historically made far more extensive use of (relatively simple) automation to keep crew complements down compared to American crew sizes, especially when it comes to submarines. The Soviet/Russian design philosophy essentially prioritized size and systems…

And yet congress cancelled the CG(X)...