It’s weird that he’s so in the numbers but then doesn’t carry through with the battery electric truck calculations. He just dismisses it out of hand.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
My read is most likely some kind of strike on the cartels. There hasn’t seemed to be any significant US military buildup so it’s something they’ll be able to do with a smaller force.
The trapezoid makes me worried about a ground incision there- it extends to the border and would be a cover space for an invasion force. Absolutely bonkers that we are even having this discussion.
The TFR is most likely contingency planning for possible retaliation by cartel drones and the need to keep the airspace clear so they can see (with radar) and shoot down drones and not passenger aircraft.
Other commenters here in this thread as well as many people on reddit and other sites about this news are also saying the same thing. Our minds are not as unique as we think :)
Nuts, definitely. Bonkers to jump to that conclusion? No, especially with this US administration.
Mexico itself is concerned enough about the possibility that it's made statements to make it clear it wouldn't be acceptable. Mexico thinks it's nuts, too, but not bonkers to think the US might do it.
> You can't be a simple mayor without cartel involvement in Mexico.
I don't know what world you're living in, but this is absolutely not the case. Mexico is not a failed state, don't get all your news from places trying to scare you.
It is totally nuts. We will see I guess. If there will be a ground invasion, people will see the convoys moving into position. You can’t really hide that much stuff.
What’s also bonkers is our political whimpiness that allowed this to happen, right? If there is a drone response it’s pretty damning evidence that we are way too dovish in our policy against drug smuggling up until now
I mean the RIRA is a splinter group of the PIRA which had massive funding from overseas, especially from the United States. PIRA was not a small-time group.
I'm assuming that's a typo missing a zero (i.e. should be half a million), not a typo substituting comma for decimal (i.e. five hundred quid). Even with 24 years of inflation, that spend does not suggest a big group to me.
I'm just going to copy my comment on a previous post about this topic:
You think that Trump won't demand something in return for this?
I keep telling everyone I know that AI will be enshitified just like every other internet business. Tell me why the incentives will be different this time around. Putting yourself in hock to an aspiring authoritarian is certainly one way to supercharge that process.
What do you think OpenAI's output about Jan 6 will be one year from now if this goes through?
You think that Trump won't demand something in return for this?
I keep telling everyone I know that AI will be enshitified just like every other internet business. Tell me why the incentives will be different this time around.
Putting yourself in hock to an aspiring authoritarian is certainly one way to supercharge that process.
What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mindless scramble for dopamine that concerns me.
Where my kids went to high school, a smart phone was required. The teacher would encourage kids to put assignments and tests on their calendar. They would use the camera to take a picture of a home work assignment written on a whiteboard. They used the camera for photo and movie projects. They had some twitter-like app for the teacher to broadcast to all students.
I think there might be something to be said for the idea of teaching computer literacy on smartphones. There's often a real gap in comprehension of conceptual computer use in those who grew up in the age of ambient smartphones/socialmedia/etc.
That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).
There are quite a lot of things you can mess around with. Install a custom ROM, a custom recovery or build a custom ROM from scratch. Use emulated players such as winlator for gaming. Use GrapheneOS for maximum privacy and security. Use termux for learning CLI. There are tons and tons of things you could do with that little rectangle screen
I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.
Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
That is an insane assertion, does your house stand on a cloud without plumbing or electricity? Some places require a plan for water and septic on your land before they'll even approve a house.
Realistically, I would not have been able to own my car, which is rapidly depreciating to nothing, without my land on which to park it. Are you suggesting that I should start telling people that my car is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'm quite sure I'll get a lot of funny looks, and probably some angered questions from my financial associates, if I heed your advice, even if it is actually true under some sort of accounting methodology.
You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.
You don't seem to understand how land works in the US. Owning land is more like a license to do certain things in a certain place. Part of that is the license and infrastructure that forms a house. Land is part of the house.
Your argument is totally disingenuous and pedantic, you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath the footing and make this argument. In your car analogy, a house without a deed is like a car without a title, you don't own it in any useful sense.
> you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath
If the agreement includes the land, septic system, etc., then sure, absolutely. Likewise, I could also sell my car with the driveway it is currently sitting on, given a willing buyer, and it would equally be fraud if I ripped up the driveway. Lawyers can draft up all kinds of different agreements as far as your imagination, and another willing party, can take you.
But it is not unheard of to sell a house alone. Granted, houses are becoming massive – with the average home today being twice the size of the average home in the 1950s – which makes them harder to load onto a trailer, let alone fit down the road, and thus seeing less and less of it, but it was somewhat common in the past to move a house (and I don't mean a mobile home) from one property to another. They are clearly distinct things.
But, most importantly, the context of discussion explicitly removed land from the equation. It was posed under a theoretical assumption that there were no land constraints. To keep talking about the land in that context doesn't make any sense.
Moving the shell of a house in my county is illegal without waste treatment, which is part of the house permit that forms the legal entity of a house. And I live in about the most deregulated county in the lower 49.
You could theoretically buy a shell of a house in a vacuum but it would be condemned the second it drops off a trailer. It's not useful in a vacuum, no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
> no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
Nobody is talking about housing prices, so... They are pointlessly squabbling over whether or not a house and land are the same thing, when it is obvious that they are not.
>>I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction
>Nobody is talking about housing prices
Actually we were?
Nobody but you thought land and a house is the same thing. House prices include the land they are on. Unless you are living on the space station or sea steading, the land and infrastructure is part of housing prices.
I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
We were earlier talking about the cost to build a house. I suppose that is close enough to satisfy your historical observation, but we also moved on from that a long time ago.
> House prices include the land they are on.
It was recognized that we are in different jurisdictions, so maybe things are different where you are, but around here you effectively need to own the land[1] before building the house. How, exactly, can the price include something that doesn't even exist at the time of the land purchase?
Perhaps you are suggesting that once the house is standing and all the bills are paid one might sum it all up and say that is what it cost to get them into a house? Perhaps, but the prices (e.g. the price of the land and the price of the contractor) will still have been observed independently.
> I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
I have no idea how you think someone could take offence to a comment on the internet. It is an emotionless venue.
[1] It is not entirely unheard of to build a house on someone else's (e.g. a family member) land, but in that case it is even clearer that the price of the house is not included in the price of the land.
This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.
Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.
It doesn't matter if you build skyscrapers for over a century if you don't build enough of them. The only places in the country where rent is actually going down is where housing is actually being built in any significant numbers. Austin builds more homes in a week than San Fransisco does in an entire year.
Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.
Hear me out. Elon wants ultimate control over people’s lives and choices. Why he would want this is a psychological question about which we can only speculate. This is a change from (at least in appearance) his previous libertarian leanings. Whatever the case, this is the plan:
1) Acquire god mode access to government systems and citizens information (contacting, grants, spending, taxes, SSI benefits, you name it).
2) Add features to the Treasury Department’s software to allow him to, with extremely high granularity, control what payments go out. Friends can be rewarded, enemies punished. At first it will take the form of government entities he doesn’t like (USAID, for example). Next will be government opposition in our federal system, mostly blue cities and states with whom he disagrees. Next will be large private entities with whom he disagrees or are business competitors. Finally, individuals opposing him or the government will be personally targeted (for example, by not paying SSI benefits or paying out tax returns, perhaps extended to family members of the opposition, etc). These individual sanctions could extend to large geographic area he dislikes (all of coastal California, for example). He’s putting in place the tools to accomplish this right now as we speak.
3) Fire all bureaucratic opposition elements who might prevent this. Dress it up as a government efficiency measure if you like.
4) Eventually they will pressure large (and maybe small, too) private financial institutions to take part in this scheme (they may have already succeeded, see Citibank and NYC federal funding for migrants).
He’s putting in place the tools for total control by controlling access to money and resources. I don’t exactly know what he plans to do with them but I don’t want to find out given constant interaction with racists and neo nazis on his site.
It's pretty obvious isn't it? Trump stacked the Supreme Court the first time round which turned out to be the best thing he ever did.
Now they'll control payments to defund opponents as well as sacking anyone who doesn't support them to gain total loyalty. In fact, the way they're doing this is clever: Sack and then make former colleagues compete to be rehired. That way they'll feel extra grateful to have a job and will toe the line in future.
I expect they'll use this data for leverage against opponents in future. They probably haven't decided how yet, which is why they're in hoover mode. Loot the systems quick while they still can.
But it's ok. Half the US thinks there's nothing to worry about. Good luck getting fair elections ever again.
The plans were laid down with "Red Map" in 2010, and reinforced in 2020: this is control of the GOP "at the base" via gerrymandering and primary control. It means that the individual representatives no longer control their own districts since a central authority (Trump) can easily out primary the individual representatives if they don't toe-the-line. One of the non-obvious impacts of the 2010 gerrymander we learned was that the populace actually votes roughly in line at the state-level as they do at the district level; this means you can use the district-level gerrymander to control Senate-level seats. This has bought the GOP a ~+3-+8 bias in the Senate.
> this means you can use the district-level gerrymander to control Senate-level seats. This has bought the GOP a ~+3-+8 bias in the Senate.
What?? No, you cannot gerrymander States (and therefore Senate seats). You can only gerrymander districts smaller than States. States with one House seat can't gerrymander that House seat either. State legislature seats can be gerrymandered. U.S. House seats in States with more than one House seat can also be gerrymandered. (EDIT: Well, I suppose if Oregon counties are allowed to move into Idaho then that would be a gerrymandering of States, but this is a very very rare event.)
The GOP might have a bias in the Senate, but that would be due to small-population States having more oomph in the Senate than large-population States. Though in 2024 the Electoral College was neutral in terms of partisan bias, which implies at most a small bias in the Senate for one or the other party.
As for gerrymandering of U.S. House districts, that has been going on since the very beginning, and even since before, since Colonial legislatures did it, and the English parliament did it before that. In fact, part of the reason for the Democrats' 62 year dominance of the U.S. House from 1933 to 1995 was gerrymandering.
But as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explained in one of her decisions, gerrymandering is self-limiting because the party in power (in the legislature) can only optimize for seat safety (thus reducing their majority in their House delegation) or for number of seats (thus rendering some if not many of those seats not-very-safe). Since that decision we've had numerous wave elections in the House, including numerous changes in party in control of the House: 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2018. Arguably in today's day and age gerrymandering doesn't count for all that much compared to the heyday of the Democratic party between 1933 and 1995.
I think what is worse is people literally driven insane by the psyops that bad been running for last few years.
Documentation found of US agencies funding psyops to basically crush critical thinking skills and scream what their handlers want them to scream.
"Hate the smoke detector, not the fire!"
For this situation, that these agencies and their psyops have put you in, you have my greatest sympathy.
It’s a bit like the old saying about the banks: “If you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it’s the banks problem”. If everyone in class is using LLMs to cheat, it’s really the university/instructors problem and it may be easier to bury their heads in the sand then to change their teaching methods and lesson plans. You can’t fail them all…
Inertia. They were cheating a lot when I was a TA, but using whatsapp groups and other online resources. Nothing changed then, and it probably won't change much now.
Eh, they make precision stuff like this all the time. If they wanted to make a bunch they would first standardize the sizing then create production tooling for the grinding setups. Those gears would come out basically perfect every time.
The bigger problem is the output link is supported by the gear meshes. This means whatever load you put on it is directly supported by the small mesh contact patches. A more traditional system can have roller or ball bearing or bushing support.
Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.
Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.
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