I will regret making this my social media alias

If you're having a bad day, just remember that it's going to be winter soon and imagine what will happen to all the Cybertrucks ❤️

Salt-rusted unprotected steel panels... Meltwater getting into poorly constructed and poorly isolated electronics... Stuck in snowdrifts that a real truck would have been able to deal with... Oh, those are indeed happy images. Yes indeed...

It's winter in the US is anything happening to all the cybertrucks

No snow here yet. Lots of Cybertrucks in my area, so I’ll keep an eye out.

Keep us updated I am so curious to see how they handle Normal Weather

There should be Cybertruck Winter, like Fat Bear Week. Where we see which cybertrucks fall first and which ones make it to the end in usable condition.

Dispatch from the far northern hemisphere and have witnessed a Cybertruck in the winter wilds.

We're early enough into the snow season in that the damage isn't obvious. My guess is that exposure to road salts are really going to destroy these ambulatory dumpsters, but we won't start to see that until spring. Road salt is difficult to impossible to get off in a regular car wash, and we know that Cybertruck can't handle even that.

On the one I saw, any metallic shine that the Cybertruck had was completely lost in a combination of cold winter temps, light street grunge, and lower ambient sunlight. It was the same color as my friend's early 2000s silver pickup truck. One of the big draws, imo, is that stainless steel panelling and to see it turn into the same shade of grey as one of the most popular truck colors twenty years ago would be disappointing to me. It's not special anymore.

Local Cybertruck enthusiasts who are salty dogs at winter driving have started vinyl wrapping their automotive basket cases. The trend seems to be to go from the door windows down, which gives them a beach cooler vibe that is similarly underwhelming.

They’re already having issues! The head lights are sunken in for some reason. This means there is a shelf to hold snow in front of the lights and block them.

Now, every car has to have the snow cleared off the headlights before you drive, but this is way worse. That shelf collects snow as you drive. People have to pull over and clear the snow off mid-drive because they lose their headlights.

Akalabeth: World of Doom (California Pacific, 1980)

computer game graphics are so realistic these days

so, Akalabeth: World of Doom is a 1979 game for the Apple II. It's one of the first Computer Role Playing Games of all time, predating even Wizardy and Might and Magic. It launched the career of its creator, Richard Garriott, who went on to make the Ultima series. He was only 18 when he made it, in his bedroom.

It's often called Ultima 0, since it's a sort of simple dry-run for what Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness would be.

So yeah! I joke, but this game is actually very important in video game history. This was one of the first RPGs, made by a teenager who put disks in ziplocs with art by his mom, and then went on to sell 30,000 copies.

sometimes 45 years of video game genre history starts with "YOU ARE BEING ATTACKED BY A SKELETON"

a neat little trick for tamping down inflation is not to place sanctions on major energy exporters as part of a needlessly prolonged proxy war you have spent the better part of two decades goading them into ^_^

Well, the alternative is to surrender 300 Million people to his tender mercies.

There's already a million plus civilians in mass graves in Ukraine, mostly from the more Russian (literally, they did quite a bit of settlement back in the day) half. Couple hundred thousand kidnapped kids too.

They're back to the old WW1 doctrine and it sucks.

I think my summary for the 21st century thus far is that we realised the global financial system didn't work in 2008 but simply refused to accept it, largely because the people put in charge of the global financial system were those who most benefited from it, so we simply denied the failure and staggered on regardless, at enormous cost to the popular legitimacy of every government on earth as it became clear that they no longer served the interests of the people they purported to represent.

is that true though? arguably after 2008 we sorta figured out the magic sauce to make the markets work better, like the post assumes that there existed a financial system that did work, but we had a decade of stagflation in the 70s and black monday in the 80s

the optimistic reading of this is that 2008 could have been the last great recession we have, we had a massive economic shock in 2020 and managed to apply the lessons of 2008 (read: print a bunch of money and risk a bit of inflation) and basically managed to stop a honest-to-goodness recession in its tracks! the fundamental tools we used in 2008 (stimulus, QE, cut interest rates) are sound, we just needed more dakka then

the fact that voters prefer unemployment to inflation is an unsolved problem

but the 2008 crisis should never have happened in the first place! and we didn't fix the underlying causes so much as just commit to eating the cost of future crises

The 2008 crisis was the inevitable logic of:

No housing -> rent inflation -> lower wages until rent can't go up too much.

You raise interest rates and reduce credit until millions of people lose their jobs instead of eating uh... 4% rent inflation and a mild built-in 5-10% drop in housing prices that was already in process in late 2006.

I'm gonna be honest. I would simply not bet against Elon Musk. It's fine not to like him! He can be unlikable. But I don't think there's an interpretation of base reality that's like.

'Elon Musk is bad at getting things done, accomplishing his goals, etc. The guy's a loser.'

It makes you look really stupid when you say things like this. On account of how obviously wrong you are.

Reminds me of:

They say that Elon Musk is around Trump constantly now. I think he's going to be disappointed. Although I think Trump aiming his vibe at a lower IQ and less educated band than Barack Obama did is deliberate, I think Trump's convention speech revealed that he's not a transcendent ideological innovator.

But the "finding" tweet... yeah.

Democrats need to be shaken out of this culture that is simultaneously hubristic and so hostile to agency that it cannot even conceive it.

I think this type of guy thinks "smart" is "socially smart, approved by ny tribe," as in, "what kind of idiot would do something that gets social disapproval from the tribe?" rather than "ability to rapidly process information" or "high transforming power."

I mean, I do not actually like JD Vance and he will use his smarts in ways that I wish people would not be using their smarts.

And of the 5 people involved in the Presidential race in 2024, he's visibly and obviously the smartest one up there from the second he opens his mouth right? And if you don't give him credit for that (and the very real limits of that as well), um.

My brother recently bought a house in the rural outskirts of his city, and apparently it's a real fixer-upper, but that's always been the kind of thing he loves doing. So he has a truck now (to haul stuff for all the repairs he's doing on the house). He's already fond of flannel. He bakes his own bread.

And now a cat has turned up, so he has a cat.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, it's dawning on me that my own brother is, in fact, Hallmark Christmas Movie Small Town Man.

If he shows up to Christmas dinner with a bewildered hedge fund manager who got stranded in his town and fell in love with him over an ice sculpture carving competition or some shit, I'm gonna have to stage an intervention.

god forbid men do anything

Unemployment over inflation:

Inflation over unemployment:

How does the 1970s fit into this model?

Deliberate picking of unemployment over inflation by the Fed damaged the party in question in 1978, 1982, 1992, and also Bush got destroyed twice.

Oh and because it was supply side they got the inflation anyways.

Picking inflation over unemployment in 1994 gave us Clinton.

There's some other stuff going on (Bush was a god after 9/11) and with the exception of 2008, the Fed doesn't destroy the party.

But yes, well.