In the history of bad space ideas, that’s up there with the nuclear rockets.

If a Denali worked out so well for him, why not get another one?

I like the term stupidity multiplier. It’s perfect.

I think in both of those cases the assumption of the driver was that the idiot wasn’t a terminal one, but made a temporary mistake, and will go back to being a normal driver as soon as they realized the error of their ways.

Today I learned that Australians have a tire shortage, and don’t replace their tires when they are bald.

Hello, engineer here (although not automotive). Formulas are nice, FEA is better, but all it does is gets you in the neighborhood. In case of a sheer pin, there is typically a 10x difference between the force its designed to pass, and what it’s designed to fail under. It’s a really big gap.

It’s the case for commodity manufacturers, where your product is virtually the same as your competitors. It’s a different case for areas where differentiation is possible. There manufacturers can charge higher prices for a real or percieved advantage (like say, consumer electronics)

Ah, that might explain the difference. Most people grow cotton here, with cattle feed crop as backup, but the income is coming from cotton.

Apologies, I didn’t think the GTR was meant to bring it profits at its lower, 70k price, on either level. At that time, it was trying to build up the GTR brand (that was relatively unknown to people who didn’t play GT) so that it could be a Halo car for the rest of nissan.

We’d need batteries with much higher energy densities, and also once that don’t catch fire when they overheat. The safety concerns here are considerable.

There is a redundancy problem there. We may be able to schedule things in such a way that sharing is possible if everything goes exactly right. But things frequently don’t, and we are all at the mercy of the weather. A sudden storm means I have to go and tend to my crops, right now. And so do you, then what? Or you…

Even with something as straight forward as a drive shaft, it’s nowhere near that simple. You can figure out how much its going to take a theoretical shaft to fail, then you’ll need a 10-20% fudge factor because your calculaitons are approximations. Then you need to adjust for the dimensional tolerances of the actually…

The point of a halo car isn’t to make money. If it makes money, great, but if it looses that’s ok to. The idea is that for every GTR you sell, you’ll cause people to buy 20 z’s and altimas.

They could write weird EULAs for the buyers to sign like john deer.

I think he used the wrong word. GTR pretty clearly has a wing.

It’s a halo car, so it’s not going to bring in the profits. Maybe it makes sense to take a greater loss to get more of them out there and have a greater halo effect.

It is really hard to design things to fail under some circumstances and not fail under normal use.

I don’t think the first part of it is all that correct. Fundies feel that there is no room for them in the democratic party, and that if liberals had their way, fundies would not be able to be fundies anymore. Trump may not be a fundie, may not believe as a fundie, but will let fundies be fundies if they want to. So…

I asked about that, and the main obstacle I saw was how to determine access rights in a pooled environment (although I didn’t assume the small farms would unite into larger, just that they would split the cost of harvester and take turns using it)

I’m not sure what you find so scary (incidentally, why is everything gaslighting?). If there is proof, then I suppose the idea that a candidate managed to get elected by breaking the law is kind of scary (but not all that surprising. Politicians, breaking laws?). If there is no proof, then what? Trump is going to get…