This $8,000 Suzuki From India Received A 5-Star Crash Test Rating
The model tested is called the Suzuki Dzire. Starting at the equivalent of $8,000, buyers can get a 1.2-liter 80 horsepower engine or go the CNG route and make do with just 69 hp 75 pounds-feet of torque. Despite the cheap price and lower power, the Dzire aced Global NCAP crash tests, receiving five stars for adult impact safety and four stars for child impact safety.
The rest of the world drives small, inexpensive cars. The US has seven-year mortgages on freight train pickup trucks never used for any work.
The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It’s Going to Build Nukes
The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them.
Simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons? The booms are already pretty big, don’t you think? Why not use the computer to figure out why I always hit every red light on the way to the supermarket? That would be useful.
How people spent their time in the 1930’s
In 1937, primarily young, working women, a typical week consisted of a strict allotment of responsibilities and enjoyment. They spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure. This pleasure time was parsed among automobile rides, movies, social activities, and a small smattering of reading or passive activities like listening to music.
The modern analysis is faulty. They entirely discount that people used to enjoy taking care of their homes and families, and cooking and eating. The idea that many hours of each day should be spent staring at Netflix and Instagram for “pleasure” is a category error.
More than half of U.S. adults could be candidates for Ozempic
More than half of all American adults, almost 137 million people, could be candidates for the blockbuster GLP-1 drug semaglutide, a new analysis finds. Sold as Ozempic for treating diabetes and Wegovy to spur weight loss, the medication could be indicated for those two purposes or to help prevent heart disease, explained a team led by Dr. Dhruv Kazi, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Americans are now paying 13.8 billion dollars for drugs that are simply bulimia in a tube. Use your finger instead, and you’ll have more dough for donuts.
Half of Young Norwegians Say Online Piracy Is an Acceptable Way to Save Money
A new survey from Norway reveals that 50% of young people under 30 believe that pirating content is an acceptable way to save money. The survey, conducted by Ipsos, highlights that the high cost of streaming services is a key driver behind this attitude. Links between piracy and organized crime or malware, appear to be of less concern.
Half say it’s acceptable, the other half are lying.
Another student at Cathedral came to the same conclusion last school year, in Grade 9. She says that, during group projects, classmates failed to pull their weight because they spent all their time on their phones. She gets distracted as well, and at 15 years old experiences phone-induced eye and back pain from constant hunching and neck-craning. Most days she uses Instagram for at least four hours and TikTok for another two, plus a little time on Snapchat. That’s still less than most of her friends. “The way I see people using their phones in school, on the bus, when they go out, it’s alarming,” she says. “People don’t communicate.”
Yes, but how people spent their time in the 1930s made for a miserable hellscape.
Koehler emailed us out of the blue over the weekend with an irresistible opening line: “I think you might like to see me doing static burnouts in my Caddy.” She elaborated further by saying she has eight grandkids and while she’s relatively new to the car hobby, she’s “hooked” after winning a few burnout contests. What’s more, she asked us for a hand: “I am looking for more contests. If you know of any, please let me know. I can do rolling burnouts but prefer the standing still ones. I think the radical, moving ones might be too hard on my old Caddy.
A ’57 Caddy prolly weighs close to 5,000 pounds. You can burn rubber down to the rims just trying to get it to move.
The scary sound of Aztec skull whistles
Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles
Interestingly, “Aztec Skull Whistles” is the name of my Bad Company tribute band. But I digress.
For context I work production in local news. Recently there’s been developments in AI driven systems that can do 100% of the production side of things which is, direct, audio operate, and graphic operate -all of those jobs are all now gone in one swoop. This has apparently been developed by the company Q ai….
…There are people I work with in their 50’s, single, no college education, no family, and no other place to land a job once this kicks in. I have no idea what’s going to happen to them. This is it guys. This is what our future with AI looks like. This isn’t creating any new jobs this is knocking out entire industry level jobs without replacing them.
I guess AI tools can now decide who is Hitler without any human intervention needed.
An intact 80-million-year-old fossil is the ‘Rosetta Stone’ that promises to decipher bird evolution
In the evolutionary history of birds, there is a 70-million-year gap filled with questions. During this time, all the modern bird groups we know today emerged, but science has yet to fully explain how the transition from the ancient, more dinosaur-like birds to modern birds occurred. Now, an analysis of a fossil with an unprecedented degree of preservation — belonging to a previously unknown bird species that lived in what is now Brazil 80 million years ago — could help illuminate how this process occurred. The discovery is being hailed as a “Rosetta Stone” for the study of bird evolution, as it may unlock many of the mysteries surrounding their evolution.
They probably went extinct while flying around looking for a car to poop on.
3 Responses
“The US has seven-year mortgages on freight train pickup trucks never used for any work.”
And, as a bonus, said monstrous trucks are too tall to fit in most garages, so their owners (the mooks with the loans, not the bank) leave them parked in the driveway. So their redistributionist neighborhood youth can make free with their tires, fancy chrome rims, and any contents of the truck. Contents like guns, laptop computers, cameras, cash, etc. Happens. Every. Night. Hereabouts.
Perhaps “The most interesting thing about me” isn’t a motto to live by.
You said, “…freight train pickup trucks never used for any work.” Funny that the last thing I did with the truck this week was pick up a half-yard of crushed limestone from the landscaper’s supply and bring it over to the house, and then unload it (with a shovel) into my wheelbarrow and fill the low spots in the garden path. We won’t mention the trips into the NF to cut dead/downed trees, cut to wood-stove length, and haul back over bad Forest Service logging roads to set for a few months before splitting. Or the furniture delivery charges we’ve avoided. Or…but you get the point. I guess I don’t like being dissed for owning a truck and then being told I’m not utilizing it correctly.
But mostly (since I’m retired) it’s used when I toss the kayak in the back and drag it over some fairly bad dirt roads to a remote reservoir to go fishing. Awfully nice at my age (and back back) not to have to try to hoist those kayaks up onto a roof rack; just put the paddles and life perverters in the front of them, put the tails of the kayaks into the corner of the truck bed, and attach a strap from the cargo loop onto the noses. Takes me longer to get a frozen half-gallon milk jug of water out of the freezer and into the cooler to keep the trout cool on the way home than it does to put the ‘yaks into the truck and secure ’em. Of course, the fishing poles, landing net, and tackle are always in the back of the truck since you never know when you’re going to stumble on a good spot.
Mike Anderson:
One of the nice things about living here in Tiny Town™ in NW Wyoming is that the criminals know that stealing stuff out of trucks is a losing proposition…their lives, sometimes. And yeah, mine’s parked just off the driveway, since the garage contains my wife’s cars (summer is a 27-year-old convertible, winter is a Subie), my bike (my 3rd black GoldWing, hence the ‘net moniker), a snowblower, lawnmower (sometimes used within a few days of each other), cut-off saw, table saw and stand, wheelbarrow, and all of the other stuff you need to maintain a house and yard.
Yup, it’s a “snout-house” but since the garage is on the northwest corner of the house it acts like a huge windbreak, and insulates the house-part from the north and west winds of winter.
Nice to hear from someone who actually makes good use of one of those behemoths. I can’t say the same for the thousands of truckheads with a shiny new pickup parked in the driveway of a 2000 sq ft tract house, one with shabby landscaping and NO FIREPLACE. Horses for courses; I suspect you take better care of yours than most of my “trucker” neighbors do.