My S10 outranges a Slate by over 50%, refuels from empty to full in less than five minutes, seats 4, has a 6 foot bed, tows up to 7600 pounds…a Slate is a massive step back in a lot of ways.

…There. Now everybody knows.

The maximum weight for a tractor-trailer rig in the United States is 80,000 pounds, 40 short tons or 36.36 metric tons.

A tractor-trailer rig is surprisingly streamlined. The cab is shaped and sized for the front of the trailer to ride closely in its wake, often with fairings that reach as close to the trailer as practicable. Sure it’s a brick, but it’s ONE brick:

A pickup truck towing a trailer isn’t anywhere near that slick, even with a gooseneck trailer, the trailer is often taller and wider than the cab. It’s a brick, attached to another, larger brick being pulled through the turbulent disturbed air from the first brick:

In terms of torque, EVs have a significant advantage. Electric motors produce a lot more torque at low to zero RPM than internal combustion engines do. Limited slip differentials or all-wheel drive are solved problems.

The additional energy required to accelerate the additional weight up to speed isn’t that much of a problem as an EV will get that back with regenerative braking. Well, some of it. Most trailers have brakes of their own that do help with braking distance but are there mostly to keep the hitch under tension to prevent jackknifing. An ICEV figures on losing all of that energy to friction braking, a BEV plans on recovering some of it. An electric pickup carrying 1000 pounds in the bed will be more efficient than one pulling a 1000 pound trailer, in most cases.

An electric pickup isn’t a no-brainer for the US market. It’s a big-brainer.

Most EVs are shaped like running shoes for aerodynamics. Pickup trucks are big air smacking slabs. Larger pickup trucks advertise towing capacity as a major feature, EVs are bad at towing, again because of aerodynamics. The additional batteries and such required to make an EV pickup work are large, heavy and expensive. I think the technology needs to cook a bit before we get there.

Now on the compact pickup truck front…those are basically extinct. The Slate is almost a good attempt, the problem is it’s almost the anti-cybertruck. The Cybertruck is what you get when a billionaire nazi notices how thoroughly the drugs have emptied his scrotum. It’s the costume a truly awful male wears to cosplay as a man. The Slate is almost the equal and opposite, it’s what r/fuckcars thinks of when they start a sentence with “Can’t you just make do with…” A 20 year old S10 kicks the Slate’s ass in every way because the Slate is designed mostly to play dress-up like a barbie doll. They’re taking pre-orders but they won’t show you where the tie down points in the bed are.

No, it’s best would have been to crush more rich people.

They guarantee parts availability for 10 years. 2012 was 14 calendar years, 47 human years ago.

I mean, it’s an x86 pc. You can run Windows on it.

So there’s been a massive spike in demand for a product, that demand isn’t forecast to let up for the foreseeable future, and yet it’s outright impossible to get in on the action.

RAM is Lostech.

Okay Valve. Can YOU make memory?

Stock Dire Wolf had 4 ER Large lasers IIRC Along with sundry other lasers, an LRM10 and I think some AC10S? It’s been a hot minute.

Nothing he added was pointful. All of the CGI retouches of the original trilogy were pointless CGI effects for the sake of having pointless CGI effects. At one point in the Mos Eisley sequence a huge pack animal walks through the frame, obscuring almost all of it. Why? Because it was some computer generated shit to throw in!

Autopilot: Engaged.

Autopilot: dIsAbLeD.

There wasn’t an Awesome in the game, it’s set during the Wolf/Falcon refusal war so it’s all Clan mechs. Nothing’s stopping you from from loading like five of them on a Dire Wolf though.

I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?

but are they really making this about Culture Wars, or are you?

They’re the ones spending hundreds of millions of dollars to depict The Patriarchy oppressing Belle, not me.

Here’s a video by Lindsay Ellis analyzing the remake of Beauty and the Beast, including a fairly large section criticizing the added feminist talking points and their effect on the overall story.

Then there’s Snow White and the whole scandal with the dwarfs. See, they initially planned to use live action little people to play the dwarfs, but Peter Dinklage of all people went on a podcast talking about how typecasting little people in that role and calling them ‘dwarfs’ was offensive. So Disney erased the word ‘dwarf’ from the movie, canned the actors and replaced them with awful CGI. Because that’s the bleeding heart liberal method to avoid offending marginalized groups: Erase them.

Unhealthily watching = scrolling shorts for too long.

The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”

There’s another aviation term, “The Pilot Flying.” The Pilot In Command bears the authority and responsibility. The Pilot Flying is doing the work of steering. If present, a Pilot Not Flying might help with checklists, system monitoring, navigation, radio communication, handling secondary controls like flaps and landing gear, but the Pilot Flying is in immediate control of the aircraft.

The PIC is very often not the pilot flying. I used to be a flight instructor, when teaching students who aren’t yet qualified to command, I acted as Pilot In Command, but the student was the Pilot Flying as much as possible.

Autopilots have been a thing for most of aviation history. It doesn’t count as a crewman. It’s a piece of equipment like any radio or gauge. It is a tool at the PICs disposal. It is the PIC’s job - sometimes delegated to the Pilot Flying - to monitor the autopilot and take over if it begins doing something wrong.

That’s the concept that is missing with self-driving or driverless cars. Tesla drivers will sit in the driver’s seat and abdicate command of the vehicle to the autopilot, or worse, cars are operating as taxis with passengers in the back seat and no one in the front seat, or with no onboard controls at all. Fully autonomously, or remotely operated by Southeast Asians who…totally have a valid American driver’s license. Definitely.

Corporations love it. “Legally, the driver is responsible for the vehicle. Our car has no driver, so legally no one is responsible for the vehicle. Responsibility averted.”

Up to this point, remaking classic Disney animated classics in live action has been done for the purposes of imposing a 21st century Gender Studies major’s sensibilities on them. Because you see, there’s a problem with 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. Sure, it was the third highest-grossing movie that year, it was the first animated film to gross over $100 million, it was the first animated film to win a Golden Globe for best animated picture and the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for best picture…but you see, Belle wasn’t enough of a feminist polymath and the Beast wasn’t enough of a hateful incel, so it had to be redone from scratch.

Imposing 21st century Bachelor of Gender Studies sensibilities onto 20th century retellings of 16th century fairy tales has been the point. That’s why Mulan is effortlessly perfect and Snow White is half-hispanic, because women can’t learn to embrace their strengths or…be ethnically European. But Moana already had 21st century cynicism in it. Quoth Maui: “If you wear a dress, and you have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess!” What about Moana - or any movie made since Lilo & Stitch - does the rainbow hair crowd have to fix?

So you end up with a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake that isn’t as colorful or stylized and thus an objectively inferior visual treat?

Can I have some of the Disney corporate cocaine? I’ve never had cocaine before and their behavior makes theirs sound great. Can I try it? I promise I’ll make a Sleeping Beauty movie where Prince Charming is convicted of rape and Sleeping Beauty is played by Whoopi Goldberg.

How many millions of dollars in profit were made by Jack Black saying the words “Chicken jockey?”

Money can be made with movies. Just…not by Disney.

You know, I bet you could hate yourself and others on Truth Social just as much as you do here, so why don’t you head back there where you can give everything you own to some prosperity gospel scammer or gold smartphone bullshit or whatever else you “too straight to fuck women” assholes do.