As we’re stuck at home, the idea of “hey, let’s just sit on the couch and listen to a podcast” has come up frequently. But then every. single. podcast. is about covid. Even the sports ones!

You the taxpayer may not want that complexity, but the procurement officer looking for his kids to get scholarships and the sales exec looking for a sweet bonus aren’t looking out for your best interests.

The team will make a pitch saying “look at this secret sauce technology we made, we are confident we’ll be at the front of the grid next year and your logo will be all over our car”. You’ll judge whether you believe them and invest or not.

This is basically a roller coaster - build a rollercoaster track embedded in the runway, the plane hooks onto the truck, and have the truck haul the plane.

There’s quite large (10-15%) false negative rates with the standard stick-in-nose test. Just make sure the tester doesn’t push it all the way in when swabbing your star driver.

What I’m hoping for is that the increased racing quality leads to greater sporting income, which then leads to a gradual cost-cap increase over time, but spread over the whole field, so you eventually get back to the same levels of R&D spending.

The 2022 aero ruleset is largely about improving the car’s ability to follow and pass each other, so that should be helped.  DRS will remain, but hopefully will be less necessary.

There’s lots of ways to generate downforce that are effective and low-drag, but also not so safe. Vacuum cars or poorly-designed ground effects can have the tendency to very suddenly lose suction and you go from 5G of grip to 1G of grip mid-corner. Then you fly into the barriers and die.

It remains a engineering competition: You have to be a better engineer to win when you have cost constraints. It’s far easier for a RB/Merc/Ferrari engineer to defeat 7 other teams because they simply have more money, more testing resources, etc.

Don’t know about the “there’s no reason for it” - being able to go directly to a city center or even the building I want to go to rather than a huge airport 45 minutes from the center would be very useful. Less sprawl, less travel time, more convenient.

So as a few-hours-later follow-up, it’s worth giving Trump credit: at least for now, it sounds like the stimulus has changed and might end up being direct cash transfers.

It’s ok! The Trump admin is apparently about to pass $850B of tax cuts as their stimulus. Lost your job and thus aren’t affect by payroll taxes? Then you’re a poor, and being poor is a moral failing so you don’t deserve any relief. Try not to cough on your betters on your way to the gutter.

My guess is even simulator training would be tough. Pilot comes in, spends 2 expensive hours in the simulator with version 0.99 of the training program and flight software, but then the FAA says “oops, we missed this one task you gotta learn” or Boeing says “oops, we changed the way this button works” and you have to…

Basically all of the more modern jets are designed for a lower cruising speed to lower fuel burn. The 747 was not (or at least, not to the same degree).

It’s telling that they have a bank of lithium batteries for sunless/cloudless days.

They can’t train pilots on a training program that hasn’t been certified.

If it’s an end-of-season test, I imagine they’ll just grab a spare chassis (even Williams probably has at least one spare) that they won’t need anymore given the season is over. They’ll have the 2021 cars in heavy development at that point anyway, so they’d probably have a couple big-wheel suspension prototypes to…

Yep - replace the marginal garbage truck first where it makes the most sense, and then as the tech gets better replace the longer-haul ones that go to the dump fully-loaded.

The engine in a hybrid can be optimized for steady-state output, since the battery can fill holes where sudden acceleration or low-RPM grunt is needed, which leads to better overall efficiency. A pure ICE needs an engine tune that can handle starts, stops, steady-state, sudden accelerations, which might hurt its…

An EV, even charged by coal, still emits less CO2 per mile than an ICE. It’s not much less, but it’s still better. And when that coal plant is converted to burn natural gas (as most coal plants eventually will), then every EV in the county instantly becomes better.