Thank you for the correction on that. I had always heard it was for the NY Times, until I looked it up on wikipedia.

I would counter though that even with the Times of London being considered a "centre-right" newspaper in the UK, it is still a "far left" paper compared to anything Trump associates himself with.

That Times New Roman is of course named for one of their least favorite newspapers.

Or maybe we should, so we can watch some heads explode and witness the next round of glorious infighting.

That's an understatement. I know I've been predicting the fall of this conservablog for years now but seriously how will we know if there's even someone left to turn out the lights? Some front page articles generate discussions now that are barely longer than ones I've had with my dog.

Some conservatives who are rich beyond measure are spending a trivial portion of their wealth to offer to help kids at some time in the future. On top of that, it comes with so many strings attached that few will be able to cash this in. But they are good friends with our Dear Leader, so of course they deserve front page accolades here for doing this. The main stream media is also drinking this up and plastering news of this - with a beaming photo of the happy couple - on the front page of nearly every news site around.

The GOP would give thanks to drudgedot for helping to spread the word, if only the GOP cared about drudgedot. I'm sure the conservative supermajority here though is happy to see it.

I can't load a news feed anywhere and not see another article celebrating their "gift". Of course the devil is in the details and the details show us this gift won't make much difference to many people.

Even if you ignore the political aims here, $250 is not a lot of money. Being as it is $250 for kids born between 2025 and 2028 - but not available to them until they turn 18 - it likely won't even buy them a weekend's worth of groceries by the time they can access it. Yet it is supposed to help them buy a house? I don't see how that is going to move the needle.

It certainly bought them an avalanche of positive media coverage though. Not bad considering how small a portion of their overall wealth they're spending. One can't help but wonder if they are trying to cover something up, either for themselves or for a friend.

Don't pilots usually train and certify on just one type of aircraft? In other words, Airbus pilots don't fly Boeing, etc. If all the MD11 planes end up permanently mothballed by the two main operators of them (FedEx and UPS), what happens to the pilots who are trained to fly them? Will they have an opportunity to train on another aircraft type, or will they end up without a job? Are there other planes sufficiently similar to the MD11 that their training won't be too lengthy? Wikipedia mentions it last flew for passenger service in 2008, but doesn't mention it having been developed into anything else.

Of course it doesn't seem like this is a great time to be a pilot, given the ATC issues we're facing in this country - but that's a different issue.

That makes two dictionaries that chose two words for the 2025 word of the year. I will say I like this one better than the choice from Merriam-Webster.

You made a rather huge leap there, and I'm not sure why you committed to doing so.

I've never heard of this van. I work in several metropolitan areas on a regular basis and I've never seen one anywhere. I fully acknowledge they exist, but I've never seen one. I could well be unique in having never seen one, but if they aren't in any of the markets where I frequently drive then there are likely a lot of other people who have never seen them in the wild either.

The point I was after is that there are a lot of people who love to dunk on the automotive industry - particularly the American Big Three - any time they can. The Big Three are far from blameless. However, ripping to shreds a discontinued vehicle that you've never seen isn't exactly a fair thing to do.

I'd like to hear if even one person in this discussion had ever heard of it before this was posted here. I follow quite a bit of automotive news myself and had never heard of this van before now. Granted it is a commercial vehicle that would have been difficult to obtain as a regular consumer here (similar to the larger current model Ford econoline (not transitconnect) vans) but I had never heard of this at all. I've seen news on the new USPS delivery vehicles, the new NYC taxis, but never on this.

It's awfully difficult - at least in real space - to claim to be an expert on something you never heard of. I'm sure that won't stop people here but nonetheless it is worth pondering why we had never heard anything of this vehicle. If regular consumers hadn't heard of it, how many potential commercial customers hadn't either? Plenty of commercial customers exist in this country who would do well with an electric van, if only they knew this one existed.

Are you sure you're talking about China there? That sounds like the MAGA party to-do list, especially if you add on corporate extortion and mandatory bribes to the leader of said one party state.

I'm fine with sending Musk to Mars. He can take DOGE and the rest of MAGA with him. Few of them are smart enough to realize there is no return trip, even if the trip there is a success. Musk and Trump can spend the trip trying to convince each other who is the most important person in the history of the universe while those of us here on earth rebuild from the destruction they left behind here.

Making things even worse we now see MAGA flexing another muscle here to exert force on America; they are getting people all over the country fired for daring to express a non-MAGA-endorsed opinion of the matter. Yesterday ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely for stating a few days ago that we didn't know the politics of the shooter. How dare he suggest that the shooter might not be the left-wing devil that MAGA insists him to be!

There are endless counts of other people across the country who are losing their jobs for daring to say something disparaging on social media about Kirk after his death as well. MAGA is very openly celebrating these firings.

We should also consider the non-zero chance that he was shot by someone not for being too far to the right but rather for not being far enough to the right. Remember there are a lot of MAGA folks who are tripping over each other to see who can be the most extreme; years ago the GOP passed a point where they would have thrown out Reagan for being too far left and now the MAGA party is even further yet to the right.

Turbines are great at power density. They are not especially efficient compared to ICE.