I have yet to hear a real argument for lifting a truck whilst keeping the straight axle. The very, verrry marginal clearance gains for approach/departure angle while off-roading can usually be better achieved with a bumper delete instead, which doesn’t ruin the driving performance or increase your chance of rollovers. And instead of thousands spent upfront and extra maintenance cost later, removing parts is free.

Now, put some double wishbones and universal joints, that’s an immediately justifiable capability to pursue. But these mall crawlers with the magic pop-out steps are for emotionally stunted manchildren who are transparently buying into someone else’s idea of what a man is.

Of course, we need to make the asocial and undesirable ‘work-shy’ elements of society contribute their fair share to the fatherland’s struggle, the great leader has spoken! /s

The concentration camps didn’t begin as a policy of industrialized state murder, but grew out deliberate policy decisions that viewed people as problems that needed ‘correcting’ or eliminating, instead of viewing people as individuals. And we are seeing the same here today:

• Red triangles marked “political prisoners… [which] in Auschwitz were, above all, Poles.

• Green triangles marked “criminal”, imprisoned as a direct consequence of committing a forbidden act, or after release from prison in cases where the criminal police regarded the sentence imposed by the court as too lenient.

• Black triangles marked “asocial” prisoners, imprisoned in theory for vagrancy or prostitution, but in fact for a wide range of other deeds or behaviors, loosely and arbitrarily interpreted by the police. The Roma in the Birkenau “Gypsy camp” were classified as asocial.

• Purple triangles marked prisoners imprisoned for belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, regarded as enemies of the state because of their pacifistic beliefs.

• Pink triangles marked homosexual prisoners, in practice exclusively German, who were imprisoned on the basis of §175 of the German criminal code.

And not just as a refresher/competency test! It should also be a chance to educate on updates like legislation that get passed, safety information and tips as research improves, and new traffic controls like double diamonds or roundabouts that weren’t in use when people learned to drive in their youth.

But at a minimum you should have to re-validate that you are a competent and safe driver every decade or so, agreed.

There’s a key difference between using a tool to crunch a known mathematical equation (because you cannot just say “find X” to the calculator) and having to punch in the right inputs - ergo requiring understanding - and simply asking the teacher for the answer.

Treat AI like the hermit oracle/shaman/divinator of yesteryear, and you’ll get the same results - idiots who don’t know how to think for themselves, and blindly accept what they are told.

Your Brain on ChatGPT

…LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use… LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Outsourcing thinking from your brain to an AI literally makes you dumber, less confident in the output, and teaches you nothing.

Call me a Luddite or a hater, but if you’re one of the people who uses AI as a shortcut to actual thought or learning, I will judge you and disregard your output and opinions. Form your own basis of understanding and knowledge instead of a teaspoon deep summary that is frequently incorrect.

X to doubt. The UK threw out due process a long time ago, wave the ‘terrorism’ tag and egregiously Orwellian policies become law:

• Legalized warrantless arrest and imprisonment of suspects without trial or warrant for 28 days
• Permits freezing of a suspects assets without trial
• Allows unlimited imprisonment of foreigners suspected of terrorism without trial
• Military police permitted to operate on UK soil openly, even for non terrorism reasons
• TPIM orders without trial that permits electronic tagging, travel bans, limited house arrest, curfews and constant monitoring.

And all that’s before we even talk about the recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act nonsense.

Oooooh I like the spoken sound of ‘concubi’ but strictly aren’t concubines more so a pseudo-partner/marriage than a smash-and-pass like the incubus and succubus?

This is the line that even at my most cynical, I never thought Trump would go for/be allied to cross - fuck with the money directly. Ruin the bag for the capital class. Tariffs were bad long term but presented an opportunity for huge wealth transfer during that manufactured chaos’s period of ‘creative destruction’:

“He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske

But then again, this loon is who he put forward in his first term, sooo yeah.

…what if we can do even better tho?

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day

I equally enjoy the 1 and 2 star reviews where they will openly state “product is great, no issues” but then immediately throw all that away because the version they bought doesn’t fit their grandpappy’s 1963 Barracuda, or “that table of six let their kids run around the restaurant, 1/10”.

The bipolar reaction of the average consumer is maddening, no nuance.

Proper scran, that

If you’re a business that’s serious about a supporting an actual charity like childhood cancer or homelessness, I’m expecting at or near 100% of profits to be donated.

Virtue signaling while pocketing essentially all of the proceeds is a super scumbag move. And that’s before the badge worship angle…

It’s okay, we’ve all been gotten by this too. It’s easy to look at an older piece of technology that has survived, and ascribe that to ‘things used to be better’ while ignoring the materials advances or better engineering that doesn’t require massive buttresses to stop building falling over, or why using MIM instead of forging is better for 95% of use cases, or how wastefully overbuilt things were in the past because they didn’t know how to build efficiently.

There is a flipside of planned obsolescence and value engineering something to death where the wrong material/spec is decided for profit reasons… but that is not a new phenomenon