Yeah, the triple-pane windows are getting popular here in the US. Also, on the nicer windows, the spaces are filled with an inert gas, not vacuum. I haven't heard of 4-pane windows though.
Industry "representatives", who are uniformly young, attractive people of the doctors' preferred gender, whose job includes accompanying them to nightclubs after an industry-funded dinner function, and getting quite embarrassingly physically intimate with them.
WTF? Why didn't someone tell me about this before I majored in engineering instead of medicine???
What pharma (or medical device) companies *don't* have is a way to enforce compliance: they can't censure a doctor who receives a free holiday from them and then doesn't prescribe their products.
That's what I figured. What you're talking about isn't a kickback, or even a bribe, it's just advertising of a sort. A kickback is something that happens *after* you do something to make money for someone else (they "kick back" a portion to you), and a bribe is a payment specifically for a certain service or favor. What you're describing is no different than a salesman taking you out to lunch, hoping you'll get your company to buy products from his company (this happened to me when I was fresh out of college). If you don't deliver, then he might not bother taking you to lunch any more, but that's it.
Yeah, but these are city streets we're talking about, not a long highway. What if they just turned onto the road and started tailgating you recently, and then you come up to the light?
They don't! I guess if there's a real problem they find a driveway to pull into. But there's absolutely no provision to pull off on these roads; lots of rural roads are like that. If you do pull off and you don't have a Hummer or the like, you're likely to roll your car over because there's a big ditch there.
You have the right to walk on public property all you want.
You don't have the right to drive. You never have. That's why you need a license. Not everyone can get a license, and if you're a danger your license can be revoked.
If you stop in the middle of one of these roads, you're going to cause a wreck. The roads are windy and people go around the corners pretty fast. You can't just stop in the middle of a road with a 55mph speed limit.
They is grammatically incorrect according to Harbrace et al, but these days it seems to be the norm because the English language is sadly lacking in gender-neutral plural pronouns.
However, "xe" and "xem" isn't the answer. How the fuck do you even pronounce those??? If it's with a sorta-"sh" sound it'll just sound like the feminine pronouns, and if it's with a "z" sound it'll sound like you're speaking with a bad German accent.
With some things (like flying cars), maybe. With other things (like space stations and moon bases), no.
The future depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey was almost completely plausible (even in 2001, much less 2015), except for the bit about HAL being self-aware and all that. Videophones, rotating space stations with gravity, and a Moon base could all have been done by 2001 if there had been the will and the budget for it. We even had videoconferencing by then, but thanks to poor regulation there was no standardization of it, the way we had for landline phones, so it was just either on the internet using proprietary software or using some crappy proprietary videophones that could only talk to each other. Basically, somewhere around the early/mid 70s, we as a society lost the will to put forth the effort and money needed to make these things (namely the space-related projects) happen, the way we did with the Apollo missions. You can argue all you want about how useful those projects would have been, but from a technical perspective they were completely doable.
Flying cars, on the other hand, aren't that easy. There's a real problem with feasibility because they'd use so much energy (meaning they'd cost too much to operate for most people), plus most people can barely handle operating a car in 2D, and certainly wouldn't be able to handle flying. The amount of training pilots have to go through is far higher than for drivers, plus lots of aspiring pilots (esp. helicopter pilots) wash out and never finish their license because they simply don't have the talent necessary.
The problem here is that "pulling over" is frequently not an option. Where do you pull over? Many roads do not have any shoulders on them. The rural roads near where I live are windy, narrow and have no shoulders at all, and traffic moves pretty fast on them. They also have a lot of wrecks; I came up on one last week, the road was completely blocked with a dozen fire trucks and cop cars, and I had to turn around and find another route around the mess. I guess if you could program the car to pull into some random house's driveway, that might work.
The main problem with this idea is: how do people get around if they're not proficient enough to get a driver's license under a new regime where drivers have to be as skilled as pilots? We don't have public transit in this country which is actually feasible for much of the population. A lot of people don't even live anywhere near public transit routes. So what are you going to do, take away their livelihood and make them move at their own expense? The results would be catastrophic with all the people going bankrupt; it'd make the 2008 meltdown look like peanuts. It would be a complete economic collapse.
What we really need is some kind of policies which encourage people to move into denser (sub/)urban areas, along with development and buildout of the SkyTran personal rapid transit system so people can get around faster and not need these overly complicated self-driving cars. Automated pods on elevated rails simply don't have to deal with all the complexity that cars on ground-based roads do, and the control software would be orders of magnitude more efficient. Government policies making urban living cheaper and more affordable would be a huge help too. It always seems like it's always one extreme or another: either it's ultra-dirt-cheap to live in the city (like $500 houses) but the violence is worse than Somalia, or it's ridiculously expensive but very safe. And I think this is mostly unique to America; from what I read, European cities aren't like this: most people live in cities and the cost-of-living is relatively reasonable.
The law about challenging speeding ticket could even be altered to require that a defendant provide a copy of the "black box" data (or the digital camera footage). Then my dad's technique wouldn't work any longer. Or, the police could just do a standard data transfer at the time when the car gets pulled over.
I seriously question whether police departments and local municipalities will even allow self-driving cars on roads. They threaten to completely ruin their source of funding: tickets. Why would someone in a self-driving car get pulled over for speeding? As Google's cars have shown, self-driving cars obey the traffic laws to a fault. There's have to be a way for the driver to force the system to disobey the laws and make the car drive faster.
Once we have self-driving cars that never break the law, what will municipalities do for both revenue, and harassing non-white drivers? These black boxes will reveal that the driver wasn't even controlling the car when pulled over, much less committing any infraction, despite what the cop swears he saw when he decided to pull over a black driver and shoot him.
So how is all this actually going to work? As we've seen over and over, the ones who have real power at the local level are the police and their buddies in local government; not even the Federal government can overrule them, or else we would have seen some measures to reel in this police abuse that's become so blatant.
What's he going to say 5-10 years down the road when he's sick of the crappy work environment, being laid off multiple times because the corporation changed their mind about something, the lack of pay raises without job-hopping, etc? Is he going to resent you?
Your house isn't complete until the lawn is a perfect monoculture, you have a security system with a monthly fee, double pane windows, water filters, Ronco Turnip Twaddlers and a chic set of stainless steel cookware with copper bottoms now that teflon is bad, a king sized water bed, a 72 inch flat screen TV and a surround sound system, etc.
WTF is wrong with double-pane windows? They're an absolutely huge improvement over old windows in insulating your house. Do you like paying higher utility bills or something?
And what's wrong with stainless steel cookware with copper layers? It conducts heat better (meaning better and more even cooking), and it's easy to clean since you can take steel wool or even oven cleaner to it if you really need to. You can even get a nice set for a mere $100 these days.
And what's wrong with water filters? Tap water in many places tastes like shit.
Water bed? I haven't seen one of those in ages. Who the fuck still has a water bed? Those things went out with the 80s.
Clotheslines project such a negative, impoverished image that they are severely discouraged, and everyone must use a power hungry clothes dryer instead.
Clotheslines are nearly useless in places where the humidity is high.
Turn the heat setting down on your dryer to save energy and help your clothes last longer.
Red light cameras can increase safety
No, they don't. They don't look to see if the person maybe ran the light because some asshole was tailgating them and they were sure they'd be rear-ended if they slammed on the brakes to stop for the light in time.
The rest of your assessment mostly spot-on, except the bit about doctors. I think that may be a problem with some doctors, but most doctors don't have any way of profiting from prescribing drugs; they give you a piece of paper and you take it to Walgreens, who profits from selling it to you. Walgreens isn't giving them a kickback. The insurance company (who pays the doctor) sure isn't giving them a kickback, because the insurance company would prefer they didn't prescribe you anything, because that just costs them more money. And I have a hard time believing the pharma companies have some way to kickback to the doctors.
You use a nice cheap air bypass valve to control air without diddling the throttle.
Right, and how much does that cost, in both parts cost and assembly time and extra complexity? You don't need this valve when you have throttle-by-wire; less assembly time, less labor cost, and greater overall reliability.
Also, this doesn't sound right at all. Air bypass valves are used so that the engine can idle when your foot is off the throttle. That's why they're called the "idle air bypass solenoid". They increase air to the engine. When you shift gears, you need less air to the engine; you have to back off the throttle. Throttle-by-wire eliminates all that extra complexity by having the ECU control it directly. You also get better shifts because the ECU can better handle rev-matching.
I don't know what leads you to imagine that a high-end potentiometer and a high-end servomotor would be cheaper than a bit of glorified bicycle cable, but you are way off your nut.
How do you have the car back off the throttle when it changes gears then? How much does that mechanism add in cost? And how much is the labor of a factory worker worth? Remember also there's a huge amount of robotic automation in building cars. Routing a throttle cable isn't something you can get a robot to do easily.
It costs *less* to have throttle-by-wire. It's simpler and easier to install at the factory, that's the biggest reason for it. It has some other benefits too, like being able to momentarily reduce throttle when the transmission shifts gears; with a cable-driven throttle you need a mechanical linkage to do that, but with TbW you just do it in software. But probably the biggest benefit is you don't have to have some factory worker contorting himself to install a cable through the firewall after the engine has been installed. The engine goes in and plugs into its harnesses, the pedals go in on the other side and the gas pedal plugs into a harness, and you're done. The brake pedal still has to penetrate the firewall since we don't do brake-by-wire yet (not fully at least, a lot of cars do automatic braking in addition to your manual braking), but that's not that hard, you just install the master cylinder/booster on one side, then install the pedals on the other and connect the linkage.
Well the other thing you have to remember is that Mercedes (BMW might not apply here) is not a luxury car company. We Americans think it is, but it is not. It's a company just like Toyota: they have a full range of cars from econocars to luxury cars, just like Toyota has cars ranging from the Yaris up to high-end Lexuses (which, everywhere outside of America, are not Lexuses, they're just Toyotas). We just don't know about this because Mercedes doesn't sell their lower-end cars in America.
For top reliability, I'd pick a Japanese car brand anyway (but not Mitsu), but if it's a choice between a Mercedes and a similar-priced GM car (whether it's a Chevy or a Cadillac), I'd definitely go for the Mercedes. I've never heard of Mercedes murdering people with faulty ignition switches and then covering it up for a decade.
I would pick a Ford over either in terms of reliability, cost of ownership, and value.
I wouldn't. I even thought about looking at Fords recently because I was in the market for a new car, and I came across a deluge of reviews complaining about how unreliable the automatic (DSG) transmission was in the Focus and how they'd never buy another Ford again because the way Ford handled it was miserable. Add in the horrifically bad MyFordTouch systems (and on the GM side, the whole ignition-switch fiasco and cover-up) and that cured me of the desire of giving the American companies another chance. Maybe in another 20 years I'll look at them again (Tesla excepted).
Probably has something to do with complete lack of industrial policy
I'm not sure what you mean here by "industrial policy". America actually does have some shipyards, but they're antiquated things that only produce either overpriced military vessels, or some small private yachts. But they can't compete against the foreign shipyards in anything else. Heck, they even suck at military stuff, leading the US Navy to go to Australia's Austal to build the Littoral Combat ships (though they had to do the production at an American shipyard). Newport News Shipbuilding (maker of aircraft carriers) even tried to get into commercial tanker work back in the 90s and failed miserably.
Honestly, America is very very lucky that it's still pretty good at software, and everyplace else seems to suck at that for some reason, because it's keeping our economy afloat. The only other thing we're any good at making these days is food (mainly thanks to our land size and climates), and that's not something to base a world-leading economy on.
Exactly. What kind of moron would pick a Chevy over a BMW or Mercedes? It's obvious which society is better at producing quality products, and it isn't the USA.
It's not just cars either; where do all the nicest ships come from? Multi-billion-dollar cruise ships are made in northern European countries, not the US. The US actually has no industrial ability to produce a ship like the Norwegian Epic, yet Europe cranks those things out left and right. That's pretty sad. Or, if you want tankers and cargo ships, those things are all made in Korea (which incidentally also makes some nice cars, a lot better than Fords and Chevys). After years of crap though, America finally is making some really nice, and innovative cars.... except they're made by an upstart who the auto dealerships and the state governments are all trying to shut down, because somehow it's "unfair" to sell your products directly to consumers instead of going through a legislated middleman who adds cost and only gives customers horrifically bad service and unethical sales tactics in exchange for higher prices. Yet the politicians who push these laws claim they're the "business friendly" party who's interested in a "free market".
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Yeah, the triple-pane windows are getting popular here in the US. Also, on the nicer windows, the spaces are filled with an inert gas, not vacuum. I haven't heard of 4-pane windows though.
Industry "representatives", who are uniformly young, attractive people of the doctors' preferred gender, whose job includes accompanying them to nightclubs after an industry-funded dinner function, and getting quite embarrassingly physically intimate with them.
WTF? Why didn't someone tell me about this before I majored in engineering instead of medicine???
What pharma (or medical device) companies *don't* have is a way to enforce compliance: they can't censure a doctor who receives a free holiday from them and then doesn't prescribe their products.
That's what I figured. What you're talking about isn't a kickback, or even a bribe, it's just advertising of a sort. A kickback is something that happens *after* you do something to make money for someone else (they "kick back" a portion to you), and a bribe is a payment specifically for a certain service or favor. What you're describing is no different than a salesman taking you out to lunch, hoping you'll get your company to buy products from his company (this happened to me when I was fresh out of college). If you don't deliver, then he might not bother taking you to lunch any more, but that's it.
Yeah, but these are city streets we're talking about, not a long highway. What if they just turned onto the road and started tailgating you recently, and then you come up to the light?
They don't! I guess if there's a real problem they find a driveway to pull into. But there's absolutely no provision to pull off on these roads; lots of rural roads are like that. If you do pull off and you don't have a Hummer or the like, you're likely to roll your car over because there's a big ditch there.
Agreed, it should go to something completely unrelated, in a different district or even state.
You have the right to walk on public property all you want.
You don't have the right to drive. You never have. That's why you need a license. Not everyone can get a license, and if you're a danger your license can be revoked.
If you want to call it "moving"; it's vibrating and its movement is probably completely imperceptible to the human eye.
Microchips have moving parts too... the electrons are moving around on them.
If you stop in the middle of one of these roads, you're going to cause a wreck. The roads are windy and people go around the corners pretty fast. You can't just stop in the middle of a road with a 55mph speed limit.
They is grammatically incorrect according to Harbrace et al, but these days it seems to be the norm because the English language is sadly lacking in gender-neutral plural pronouns.
However, "xe" and "xem" isn't the answer. How the fuck do you even pronounce those??? If it's with a sorta-"sh" sound it'll just sound like the feminine pronouns, and if it's with a "z" sound it'll sound like you're speaking with a bad German accent.
With some things (like flying cars), maybe. With other things (like space stations and moon bases), no.
The future depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey was almost completely plausible (even in 2001, much less 2015), except for the bit about HAL being self-aware and all that. Videophones, rotating space stations with gravity, and a Moon base could all have been done by 2001 if there had been the will and the budget for it. We even had videoconferencing by then, but thanks to poor regulation there was no standardization of it, the way we had for landline phones, so it was just either on the internet using proprietary software or using some crappy proprietary videophones that could only talk to each other. Basically, somewhere around the early/mid 70s, we as a society lost the will to put forth the effort and money needed to make these things (namely the space-related projects) happen, the way we did with the Apollo missions. You can argue all you want about how useful those projects would have been, but from a technical perspective they were completely doable.
Flying cars, on the other hand, aren't that easy. There's a real problem with feasibility because they'd use so much energy (meaning they'd cost too much to operate for most people), plus most people can barely handle operating a car in 2D, and certainly wouldn't be able to handle flying. The amount of training pilots have to go through is far higher than for drivers, plus lots of aspiring pilots (esp. helicopter pilots) wash out and never finish their license because they simply don't have the talent necessary.
The problem here is that "pulling over" is frequently not an option. Where do you pull over? Many roads do not have any shoulders on them. The rural roads near where I live are windy, narrow and have no shoulders at all, and traffic moves pretty fast on them. They also have a lot of wrecks; I came up on one last week, the road was completely blocked with a dozen fire trucks and cop cars, and I had to turn around and find another route around the mess. I guess if you could program the car to pull into some random house's driveway, that might work.
The main problem with this idea is: how do people get around if they're not proficient enough to get a driver's license under a new regime where drivers have to be as skilled as pilots? We don't have public transit in this country which is actually feasible for much of the population. A lot of people don't even live anywhere near public transit routes. So what are you going to do, take away their livelihood and make them move at their own expense? The results would be catastrophic with all the people going bankrupt; it'd make the 2008 meltdown look like peanuts. It would be a complete economic collapse.
What we really need is some kind of policies which encourage people to move into denser (sub/)urban areas, along with development and buildout of the SkyTran personal rapid transit system so people can get around faster and not need these overly complicated self-driving cars. Automated pods on elevated rails simply don't have to deal with all the complexity that cars on ground-based roads do, and the control software would be orders of magnitude more efficient. Government policies making urban living cheaper and more affordable would be a huge help too. It always seems like it's always one extreme or another: either it's ultra-dirt-cheap to live in the city (like $500 houses) but the violence is worse than Somalia, or it's ridiculously expensive but very safe. And I think this is mostly unique to America; from what I read, European cities aren't like this: most people live in cities and the cost-of-living is relatively reasonable.
The law about challenging speeding ticket could even be altered to require that a defendant provide a copy of the "black box" data (or the digital camera footage). Then my dad's technique wouldn't work any longer. Or, the police could just do a standard data transfer at the time when the car gets pulled over.
I seriously question whether police departments and local municipalities will even allow self-driving cars on roads. They threaten to completely ruin their source of funding: tickets. Why would someone in a self-driving car get pulled over for speeding? As Google's cars have shown, self-driving cars obey the traffic laws to a fault. There's have to be a way for the driver to force the system to disobey the laws and make the car drive faster.
Once we have self-driving cars that never break the law, what will municipalities do for both revenue, and harassing non-white drivers? These black boxes will reveal that the driver wasn't even controlling the car when pulled over, much less committing any infraction, despite what the cop swears he saw when he decided to pull over a black driver and shoot him.
So how is all this actually going to work? As we've seen over and over, the ones who have real power at the local level are the police and their buddies in local government; not even the Federal government can overrule them, or else we would have seen some measures to reel in this police abuse that's become so blatant.
This watch is nothing more than a miniature Rube Goldberg machine.
A functional, reliable watch is dirt cheap and has no moving parts.
What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
I don't know, but my cats aren't even as smart as dolphins, but I like talking to them anyway. Sometimes they do seem to understand too.
Modulating neutrinos would be tough since they're only affected by gravity and the weak subatomic force.
Besides, any really advanced civilization would be using subspace for communications.....
What's he going to say 5-10 years down the road when he's sick of the crappy work environment, being laid off multiple times because the corporation changed their mind about something, the lack of pay raises without job-hopping, etc? Is he going to resent you?
Your house isn't complete until the lawn is a perfect monoculture, you have a security system with a monthly fee, double pane windows, water filters, Ronco Turnip Twaddlers and a chic set of stainless steel cookware with copper bottoms now that teflon is bad, a king sized water bed, a 72 inch flat screen TV and a surround sound system, etc.
WTF is wrong with double-pane windows? They're an absolutely huge improvement over old windows in insulating your house. Do you like paying higher utility bills or something?
And what's wrong with stainless steel cookware with copper layers? It conducts heat better (meaning better and more even cooking), and it's easy to clean since you can take steel wool or even oven cleaner to it if you really need to. You can even get a nice set for a mere $100 these days.
And what's wrong with water filters? Tap water in many places tastes like shit.
Water bed? I haven't seen one of those in ages. Who the fuck still has a water bed? Those things went out with the 80s.
Clotheslines project such a negative, impoverished image that they are severely discouraged, and everyone must use a power hungry clothes dryer instead.
Clotheslines are nearly useless in places where the humidity is high.
Turn the heat setting down on your dryer to save energy and help your clothes last longer.
Red light cameras can increase safety
No, they don't. They don't look to see if the person maybe ran the light because some asshole was tailgating them and they were sure they'd be rear-ended if they slammed on the brakes to stop for the light in time.
The rest of your assessment mostly spot-on, except the bit about doctors. I think that may be a problem with some doctors, but most doctors don't have any way of profiting from prescribing drugs; they give you a piece of paper and you take it to Walgreens, who profits from selling it to you. Walgreens isn't giving them a kickback. The insurance company (who pays the doctor) sure isn't giving them a kickback, because the insurance company would prefer they didn't prescribe you anything, because that just costs them more money. And I have a hard time believing the pharma companies have some way to kickback to the doctors.
You use a nice cheap air bypass valve to control air without diddling the throttle.
Right, and how much does that cost, in both parts cost and assembly time and extra complexity? You don't need this valve when you have throttle-by-wire; less assembly time, less labor cost, and greater overall reliability.
Also, this doesn't sound right at all. Air bypass valves are used so that the engine can idle when your foot is off the throttle. That's why they're called the "idle air bypass solenoid". They increase air to the engine. When you shift gears, you need less air to the engine; you have to back off the throttle. Throttle-by-wire eliminates all that extra complexity by having the ECU control it directly. You also get better shifts because the ECU can better handle rev-matching.
I don't know what leads you to imagine that a high-end potentiometer and a high-end servomotor would be cheaper than a bit of glorified bicycle cable, but you are way off your nut.
How do you have the car back off the throttle when it changes gears then? How much does that mechanism add in cost? And how much is the labor of a factory worker worth? Remember also there's a huge amount of robotic automation in building cars. Routing a throttle cable isn't something you can get a robot to do easily.
Citation needed.
It costs *less* to have throttle-by-wire. It's simpler and easier to install at the factory, that's the biggest reason for it. It has some other benefits too, like being able to momentarily reduce throttle when the transmission shifts gears; with a cable-driven throttle you need a mechanical linkage to do that, but with TbW you just do it in software. But probably the biggest benefit is you don't have to have some factory worker contorting himself to install a cable through the firewall after the engine has been installed. The engine goes in and plugs into its harnesses, the pedals go in on the other side and the gas pedal plugs into a harness, and you're done. The brake pedal still has to penetrate the firewall since we don't do brake-by-wire yet (not fully at least, a lot of cars do automatic braking in addition to your manual braking), but that's not that hard, you just install the master cylinder/booster on one side, then install the pedals on the other and connect the linkage.
Well the other thing you have to remember is that Mercedes (BMW might not apply here) is not a luxury car company. We Americans think it is, but it is not. It's a company just like Toyota: they have a full range of cars from econocars to luxury cars, just like Toyota has cars ranging from the Yaris up to high-end Lexuses (which, everywhere outside of America, are not Lexuses, they're just Toyotas). We just don't know about this because Mercedes doesn't sell their lower-end cars in America.
For top reliability, I'd pick a Japanese car brand anyway (but not Mitsu), but if it's a choice between a Mercedes and a similar-priced GM car (whether it's a Chevy or a Cadillac), I'd definitely go for the Mercedes. I've never heard of Mercedes murdering people with faulty ignition switches and then covering it up for a decade.
I would pick a Ford over either in terms of reliability, cost of ownership, and value.
I wouldn't. I even thought about looking at Fords recently because I was in the market for a new car, and I came across a deluge of reviews complaining about how unreliable the automatic (DSG) transmission was in the Focus and how they'd never buy another Ford again because the way Ford handled it was miserable. Add in the horrifically bad MyFordTouch systems (and on the GM side, the whole ignition-switch fiasco and cover-up) and that cured me of the desire of giving the American companies another chance. Maybe in another 20 years I'll look at them again (Tesla excepted).
Probably has something to do with complete lack of industrial policy
I'm not sure what you mean here by "industrial policy". America actually does have some shipyards, but they're antiquated things that only produce either overpriced military vessels, or some small private yachts. But they can't compete against the foreign shipyards in anything else. Heck, they even suck at military stuff, leading the US Navy to go to Australia's Austal to build the Littoral Combat ships (though they had to do the production at an American shipyard). Newport News Shipbuilding (maker of aircraft carriers) even tried to get into commercial tanker work back in the 90s and failed miserably.
Honestly, America is very very lucky that it's still pretty good at software, and everyplace else seems to suck at that for some reason, because it's keeping our economy afloat. The only other thing we're any good at making these days is food (mainly thanks to our land size and climates), and that's not something to base a world-leading economy on.
Seriously, are Americans REALLY this fucking stupid in general?
As an American myself, I assure you the answer to that is "yes".
Exactly. What kind of moron would pick a Chevy over a BMW or Mercedes? It's obvious which society is better at producing quality products, and it isn't the USA.
It's not just cars either; where do all the nicest ships come from? Multi-billion-dollar cruise ships are made in northern European countries, not the US. The US actually has no industrial ability to produce a ship like the Norwegian Epic, yet Europe cranks those things out left and right. That's pretty sad. Or, if you want tankers and cargo ships, those things are all made in Korea (which incidentally also makes some nice cars, a lot better than Fords and Chevys). After years of crap though, America finally is making some really nice, and innovative cars.... except they're made by an upstart who the auto dealerships and the state governments are all trying to shut down, because somehow it's "unfair" to sell your products directly to consumers instead of going through a legislated middleman who adds cost and only gives customers horrifically bad service and unethical sales tactics in exchange for higher prices. Yet the politicians who push these laws claim they're the "business friendly" party who's interested in a "free market".