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قبل 17 يومًاdiscuss

Yup. My parents bought a Jeep Cherokee back in the day as the family car rather than something like a Ford Taurus just so they could drive on the beach. That probably only happened a few days a year, but they were beloved outings and made the Jeep worthwhile to them. You could say that it would make more sense to drive a more economical car for most of the year and only rent a Jeep for the beach excursions, but how realistic is that? Most rental car places won’t guarantee much in terms of what sort of vehicle you’ll get. And most forbid offroad driving. It makes sense to a lot of people to buy vehicles for the 1% case if that 1% case is something they really value.

قبل 29 يومًاdiscuss

If you’re an American, I highly, highly recommend the book American Ramble by Neil King, Jr. The one-sentence summary is “a guy walks from Washington to New York” but he connects with history (and the present) at a walking pace along the way, experiencing much more than the typical Washington->NYC traveler.

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

I dunno, New Zealand getting a big chunk of Antarctica is a pretty big percentage gain too.

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian)

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

> "nova" is not a Spanish word

Nova is Spainish for nova.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

Hotel branding might be worse. Marriott has 30+ brands, each supposedly with its own identity but I can’t really see how having that many makes sense. Should I stay at the Fairfield or the AC or the Four Points or the Aloft or the Moxy or the CitizenM … how about just the Marriott?

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

I feel like I’ve seen essentially this same comment every time a Lego thread comes up but there doesn’t seem to be unanimous agreement on which brick toys are better. Sure, some people have good experiences with brand X but others will say they’ve had bad luck with the construction. Someone else will talk up Brand Y and someone else will point out how terrible the instructions are. Are there any brands that actually do consistently deliver a Lego-quality experience without the Lego price?

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.

I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

If the ice cream cone won't lick itself, who will?

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

I’m an American living in a state with no roadworthyness inspections so I don’t have any first hand experience with this. But in previous threads, people have mentioned that the typical thing to do is, at the vehicle service (oil change or whatever) prior to the inspection, you mention “hey, my car needs to get the roadworthyness inspection soon, can you look it over for that while it’s in the shop?”. And if something is wrong, it’ll be brought to your attention and fixed before the official inspection. Then you show up for the official inspection and oftentimes, it goes smoothly. The pro-Tesla theory is that BEVs require less service so people don’t catch these things prior to official inspection.

Seems like if that’s true of BEVs generally one could find similar trends with Nissan Leafs, etc.

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

I’ve never been there but whenever I read something about it I get the vibe that they’re an HOA with a military.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.

https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/three-batter-minimum

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

I think it’s about momentum. The perception is that the US is in some ways getting worse and Mexico is getting better.

Who is better off, the software engineer who lost her $250k job and had to settle for a new job that pays $150k, or the teacher who found a new job and got a raise from $50k to $70k? The software engineer might be better off while simultaneously less happy about their situation.

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

My understanding is that the Lucid Air Pure is more efficient than Tesla’s offerings, but yes, Teslas have tended to be more efficient than compliance BEVs and a lot of other efforts from legacy automakers.

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

> Ford makes plenty of sedans

Does it? Since they stopped building the Mondeo in Europe they don’t sell any sedans there or in most places I’m aware of. The only Ford sedan I’m aware of in production anywhere is the Chinese-market Ford Mondeo built in a joint venture with Changan.

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

I worked at a three-letter agency when the prefix “cyber-” became widely used, and widely disliked. I remember someone there distributed a similar browser extension that changed every instance of “cyber” to “computery”.