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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The overwhelming majority of automatic transmissions made in the last 85 years have had torque converters, not automatically operated clutches (referring to the primary connection between motor and driveline, not torque converter lockup clutches or transmission clutch packs). Cars that use the automatic equivalent of a manual clutch pedal have really only been practically produced in the last 15 years in the form of dual wet clutch automatics.


  • Assuming you’re referring to the US, the SUV explosion was spurred on by the cheap gas in the early 2000’s. Remember the Hummer? Like the H1 with the tank hatch on top? Those were only made until 2006, and the Hummer brand stopped making new vehicles in 2010. The Ford Excursion, the largest SUV ever made, was only made from 2000-2005. Absolutely, the proportion of large vehicles on the road has continued to grow massively, but they were still everywhere prior to 2010. Something else, like smartphones or statistical reporting practices, is more likely to be the cause of the 2010 uptick in this graph.



  • Texas doesn’t require registration in a party to vote in primaries, so the vast majority of Texans don’t bother to affiliate, and so the proportions of affiliated voters isn’t really very meaningful. More than anything, Texas is a non-voting state. It has some of the lowest voter turnout in the country, which absolutely benefits and is encouraged by the conservatives currently in power. Those who do vote tend to vote straight ticket either based on habit, perceived identity, and social pressures, or out of zealous rage over minimizing taxes at any cost.

    While there is tons of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other ugly political tactics at play, you can’t discount the immeasurable ignorance of the voters. Yes, there are millions of democrats and progressives in the four main metro areas, but between the Bible thumpers, the suburban NIMBYS, the rednecks, and the flocking tech bros that make up the rest of the population, Texas is definitely still an actual red state.




  • 40 years ago.

    It’s so easy to lose sight among all the gish-galloping nonsense around these topics just how long the problem has been almost fully understood and very clearly articulated. It’s absolutely devastating to think about how catastrophically the world has failed to meet the challenge he describes here in the intervening decades.


  • My guess is that it used to have certain words printed in red text for emphasis, but the red dyes didn’t hold up and now those words are gone. If you look between “a camel” and “without” you can see the faint shadow of the lettering.

    My Wheel of Fortune guess is “a camel can live without a drink for 3 days. Who wants to be a camel?” You know, barroom humor.


  • Exactly. You can’t possibly submit over 100 applications per week while also using any kind of reasonable discretion about wether the job is something you actually want to do, that you can actually do competently, somewhere that you can reasonably do it. You’re just an application shotgun at that point and you’re wasting the time of everyone involved.


  • To further clarify on the point you were making in the post, he didn’t just mean he was going in spirit. He fully intended to go, but he was prevented from going by people who knew when to tell him “no.” He even physically grabbed his driver and the steering wheel of the car in a tantrum insisting that he be taken to the Capitol instead of the White House.

    Everyone should have watched the January 6th Commission hearings, but now it’s like they basically never even happened.





  • You know, it’s actually a lot more complicated than I thought originally. It is a satire account, and it isn’t a “real” place, but apparently a lot of the photos originate from a truck stop in Tennessee. There’s a whole internet saga around finding the actual location. Most of the photos they post are digitally manipulated in some way, including alleged AI face superimposition, but they play the satire so straight that it’s impossible to know to what extent. You may be right that it’s not whole-cloth AI generated, but it also isn’t a photo of a kid with a tub full of orange soda.