The House of Saud isn’t too concerned with the cash that they gave Musk for Twitter. They not only got plenty of user info about Saudi dissidents, they bought a great deal of influence over Musk. I expect that Dubai is making a similar investment, and won’t care that little to nothing ever gets built. It’s all about…

I once read about Tulipmania, and how it kept expanding until suddenly one day, an auction for the latest bulb failed to reach expectations. Almost overnight, the irrational market got rational. I keep hoping for that event with TSLA.

The president thinks it’s not right that high-flyers in the U.S. still drive around in luxury cars from Mercedes and BMW, while bigwigs across the pond wouldn’t be seen dead in the kind of top-tier American pickups that sell in great numbers here.

Space exploration seemed the coolest thing when I thought that humans would doing the exploring, but now that it’s clear sending meatbags off-planet is insanely difficult and expensive it isn’t nearly as cool. Unmanned exploration still makes a lot of sense, but very few people get excited about that.

The real test of that will be to see what they do about any signage or written history of the base. Let’s see if the private or the general is featured. I know what my bet would be.

The switch from “Don’t be evil” reminded me ever so much of Animal Farm.

Nothing whatsoever to gain from defying the executive order

Go ‘way, I’m ‘bating.

It damned near happened that way. The original northern border of the Indiana Territory was aligned with the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan, but it got moved 10 miles north to allow IN to have a lake port.

There’s a pretty good assessment of the situation over at Gizmodo:

You clearly always headed west once you hit I-80/94. It’s going east that things really get bad when the lake effect snow dump kicks in. I’ve lived in MI and IL, travelling back and forth countless times, and some of the worst conditions I’ve driven in happened there. It’s also where the worst multi-vehicle pileups…

Driving home from college in a 65 VW bug on I-80 during a snowstorm. It’s bad enough that VWs had no effective defrosters and I had to drive with an ice scraper in hand to keep the window clear, but it’s also snowing heavily. Only the right lane has enough traffic in it to keep any pavement visible, and that lane is…

While not referencing Ford or Model Ts, I recently had a tour guide in Savannah say that Spanish moss was used for mattress stuffing until they figured out it was harboring biting insects. Now I’m not sure it that had any truth to it.

You’re overlooking the third, and most important to car makers, issue: If they don’t provide and control the screen, they lose the opportunity to gather your info for sale, and to push ads into your face to sell you shit post-purchase. They aren’t going to give up those revenue opportunities unless forced to do so.

I keep hearing the Mussolini-era expression that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs” tossed around, ignoring the fact that humans aren’t as replaceable as eggs.  

“Assisting” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

get the government off the backs of everyday Americans

Or, you have 2 vehicles, like many households, and one of them is ICE while the other is EV. You use the EV for everyday trips, even trips over 150 miles round trip, and you use the ICE for the multi-day 200+ mile trips.

Honda and/or Toyota could do really well to build a two door sub-compact CUV off their small car platforms. Make it look like a 5/8 scale Wrangler, make it PHEV only with the battery pack underneath to keep the center of gravity low (to avoid tipping issues), bonus points it they can have easily removable roof panels…

I expect that the price bump for faster flight times will weed out any flyers not willing to also sign up for Clear, which expedites the security business.