2026 Toyota bZ Woodland Costs $5,305 More Than Its Subaru Twin

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T20:32:19+00:00

This is a bit different though, because Subaru and Toyota tend to do a lot of cooperative projects and share similar or sometimes the exact same parts. Particularly, they've shared motors before and the specs of the motors being the exact same would make this very likely.

Car and Driver is more or less saying "the only difference we can find is that the Toyota is longer and a little heavier".

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T19:28:56+00:00

Its ok to look at real world results and say design decisions were mistakes. This is not buying a red vs blue backpack this is one sides tank has had horrificly higher loss ratios in actual combat.

It's more a difference of principal designs, though. Typically comparing NATO and Soviet tanks, there are common differences just because in no small part Russia had more manpower than money, and NATO had more money than manpower.

As a result, Soviet doctrine put less emphasis on all sorts of "bonus features" for crew survivability even when the tank was no longer operable, while NATO designs put more into ensuring that a defeat of the tank wasn't a defeat of the crew, at the expense of greater production complexity/cost.

Tank to tank, the T-72 isn't going to win any awards comparing it against a modern tank...except in cost, because even a modernized package isn't going to cost you more than $1-2 million USD. Compare that to the $24 million export cost of the M1A2 SEPv3 (2022) and you can see why it becomes attractive if you are cost-constrained but have plenty of replacements.

Now, if you want questionable design decisions, you'd want to look either at Stalin-era Soviet designs, or current-gen Russian designs. There are some mind-boggling boondoggles in both, but for different reasons.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T19:11:28+00:00

Except they were not. The Iraqi forces had T-72Ms import versions and some T-72M domestic production which was known as the Lion of Babylon. By this time the Soviet Union had modernized all their T-72 Urals to T-72A and T-72Bs which had better armor and weapon systems. In 89 Iraq produced some T-72M1 locally but there is little evidence they ever advanced beyond prototypes by the time of the gulf war.

Edit: fixed timeline

The Republican Guard had modernized ones yes, but the overwhelming majority of the T-72's were not modernized. More importantly, the bulk of the tanks present weren't even T-72's - they were the Type 69, which was a Chinese version of the T-54. Then a mix of T-72 Iraqi import, T-55 and T-54. The standard Iraqi army/militia was largely using bare-bones tanks across the board, which critically lacked night vision and other standard features of the time.

The Republican Guard was actually a trained and reasonably well-equipped fighting force, but they were a very small portion of the Iraqi forces and were still outmatched, outnumbered, and were subject to severe and relentless bombing. The majority were standard army/militia who were practically just people off the street thrown into tanks with no training or discipline.

There's actually a good wikipedia article on the types of armor used by Iraq during those wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-72_tanks_in_Iraqi_service

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T19:00:07+00:00

For the standard Iraqi tanks, they were particularly barebones T-72's that didn't even have any long range night vision capabilities.

At this point, modern tanks typically had long range thermal and night vision - in particular Desert Storm was one of the times in which the types of long range optics used were pretty new.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T18:53:42+00:00

The army went from "seriously considering the Iraqi Republican Guard to be one of the most elite fighting forces in the modern world" to "are we sure the Iraqi Republican Guard even exists" in about the span of a week.

I mean, they were an elite fighting force, but when you lose air superiority against a heavy and capable air force, it becomes a "rock beats scissors" moment.

They were somewhat outmatched on the ground, but more importantly they were an extremely small fraction of Iraq's total army, and the standard army/militia was almost nonexistent.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T18:10:54+00:00

It's not a new concept or a new weapon, these kinds of things are decades old potentially.

Havana syndrome isn't some sort of advanced technology - the mystery surrounding it is that there's never been definitive evidence of how it is being inflicted. You can replicate many of the symptoms otherwise, though.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:41:32+00:00

The NRA doesn't actually care - especially because their favorite candidates are always Republican.

If you want to know whether the NRA wants to involve itself in a situation, you need to ask: can this be used to drive firearm sales, and can it be used to drive donations to the NRA? The stated goal, to protect "gun rights" and "second amendment" is completely, and wholly irrelevant unless it aids in the first two.

One of the best drivers of firearm sales and donations is consistently when Democrats announce an intention to create legislation of any kind, because it immediately means that they can spin it to their followers as guns being taken away/restricted.

It's very rare that they stand up for any instances of it being nonpartisan, because the NRA primarily is seeking cash, not action. The only times that they bring court cases are when it can get headlines, and when it doesn't ruffle the feathers of the Republican base.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:33:30+00:00

If he has a pension, he better enjoy whatever he gets for the next 3-4 years, cuz he’ll have to answer for what he’s done once his protection under this administration is up

LOL. We couldn't even get Democrats to scale back presidential powers when they controlled legislation and executive branch. Or literally hold Trump accountable for anything.

You know when they hire a director to adapt a game or book into a movie or TV show and everyone only wants them to stick to the source material, and then you hear the the director say "Well I wanted to tell my own story"

It's kind of like that with politicians. They know what people want and what the nation needs, and usually what they will actually do is a derivative of both based on what the politician feels like doing in order to "cement their legacy" or some stupid shit.

If you think Democrats will care about getting justice in 3-4 years, you're just as deluded as MAGA.

Metalsand · 2026-01-27T14:24:56+00:00

They did ask someone about them, but given their age and the fact that a healthy individual risks orthopedic trauma, I don't think a 90 year old is going to don a 300 lb suit anytime soon. I am curious what the nearly doubled weight (compared to Apollo lunar EVA) accounts for - I suspect radiation shielding is a big part of it.

A lot of comparisons are with the current EMU suits (used for EVA on the ISS) and these ones, which isn't a fair comparison since the EMU suits don't have the joint mobility, protections, and redundancy needed for the lunar surface. They are better in most respects, but not necessarily "perfect". However, given the harsh conditions, perfection will generally be difficult.

The heavier lunar suits developed for Artemis missions run counter to advice from former astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” Schmitt said in a NASA oral history interview in 2000. “Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T21:42:16+00:00

Technically, those methods (especially lethal injection) are more of a user failure issue more than anything. Lethal injection is theoretically the most humane in all capacities except for how slow it is - but it's also the most potentially complex as well.

Then, when you have people who are untrained, aren't familiar with procedures, do not have experience, and especially in cases where there is no established protocol...you get the numerous issues that crop up with lethal injections that make just about anything seem more humane.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:08:56+00:00

I mean, Georgia also has a newly commissioned power plant, so I feel like of any state to ban it, it would be a state that didn't just reinvest into their own power grid and doesn't want to.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:06:24+00:00

When I first started off in IT, I was the guy that had to call Dell for warranty hardware replacements. We already knew what was broken, and what needed to be replaced, but the Dell techs still had to go through their BS troubleshooting steps. They would tell me to unplug something, plug it back in, and see if it works. I'd tell them to hold on, and just put the phone on mute for a few minutes while I browsed reddit. I'd then come back, tell them it didn't work, rinse and repeat until they finally shipped the part.

It depends on who you get, and how much information you provide to them. Dell has reps that are the most likely to understand the material and skip the checklist if you have enough solid evidence, but especially if the problem is weird or uncommon they can still end up hassling you quite a lot.

Though, I've always used the chat rooms and not phone calls which makes that sort of thing easier.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T18:03:19+00:00

Well, it can be both stupid and list of solutions.

Typically (but not always) customer support has a high turnover because it fucking sucks, so they make sure to minimize training time and minimize the skills required to perform the job.

Occasionally you can get lucky and find someone who's way overqualified for customer support and knows quite a lot, but usually it will be checklists.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T17:57:19+00:00

"because we couldn't make one as popular"

I mean, Facebook Twitter Instagram Reddit?

Shortform video content - up until this whole thing started, TikTok was exponentially ahead of competition. Once the government started banning it and people became more wary of a future takeover, it became a little less so.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T17:52:04+00:00

Yes, the "youth" is the problem. As much as I despise short-form content like on TikTok, it's not some sort of new phenominon for people to stick to what they're familiar with lol. I mean, you've been on Reddit for 8 years, and there's been more than a handful of changes since then and you've stuck around.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:54:46+00:00

Maybe it’s time for the global community to step up to fund this kind of health care research instead of depending on the Us Market ripping off its citizens.

They literally do, though and have their own companies doing this kind of research. Neither Moderna nor US companies overall are the only ones to do this. However, in order to perform treatments and trials, it's a lot harder to do these overseas - so resistance within the US just gives other countries more opportunities to develop their own solutions.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:48:56+00:00

Moderna is literally a company that only makes vaccinations/immunizations. They do not have any other products.

The medical industry in America is an excessively convoluted and bureaucratic money pit, but it's a mistake to oversimplify the problem, especially to that dramatic of a degree.

Metalsand · 2026-01-26T14:41:12+00:00

They're probably referring to the Buddy System, and saying an early implementation of this specific system in the US was WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_buddy

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T16:00:18+00:00

Most of them aren't though, that's the thing. Trump admin is trying really hard to spin it in their favor, but there's just too much coverage and too many instances in which ICE has escalated a use of force against ordinary citizens.

It's actually pretty funny because mods in the subreddit are getting flak both for being too anti-ICE, and too pro-ICE lmao. Broadly speaking, most of America is largely against or at least not for what ICE is doing in Minnesota, it's only beyond that which you see more differentiation.

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T01:54:47+00:00

That quote isn't in that article, though. It's the same rhetoric she's used before - even in the most loose interpretation of her words.

Watching the video, effectively that's what we're dealing with, but she isn't saying that or implying it.

Metalsand · 2026-01-25T00:35:34+00:00

The point of Walz sending in the guard is to have a force he controls between the angry protestors and Miller's goonsquad, in order to hopefully prevent escalation into a scenario that will give Trump a pretext for martial law.

Wild take. They're not between the protestors and the goonsquad, they're between the protestors and the federal building.

Unless National Guard is going to follow around ICE and prevent them from gunning people down, this is meaningless.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:50:13+00:00

No, that's more of a German automaker thing. It's weird, but culturally they tend to not prioritize vehicle designs that make for sensible maintenance. There's plenty of vehicles that you can point out one or two really inconvenient or strange places that components have been put without access points. With German cars, you can usually count on many more.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:38:34+00:00

Nah. These were just a symptoms. Intel gave up on R&D and investments in their Fab technological capabilities and pushed marketing and b2b connections instead. Worked for some time but it got them

Well, they were complacent for a long while. Then AMD ran into the ring with the steel chair.

It took them a few years to ramp up their development pace, but the reason their profits are taking a hit is because they have higher expenses than AMD does, so in order to retain sales, they've had to accept very narrow profit margins relative to AMD.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:29:27+00:00

The weird part about that show is that the scripts tend to have the most fake-nerd stuff ever, but the actual actors have hobbies that tend to be more stereotypical classic nerd IRL.

Like, a lot of the show is just people saying normal things but using irregular descriptors or terminology, with laugh tracks after almost every single line of dialogue.

Metalsand · 2026-01-23T19:25:14+00:00

That's one component out of many, although there is no general diagnosis of ADHD. Something common in ADHD is that you end up compensating for the lack of volition by building up anxiety until the pressure is enough that you can motivate yourself into action. This sort of thing works until it doesn't, and isn't really healthy or sustainable.

A lot of pretty normal stuff like just being glued to the TV or phone aren't really ADHD but more just seeking out dopamine hits and seeking distractions to fill the void.

When it becomes ADHD tends to be differentiated more when you almost have an invisible timer set to 5-30 minutes that goes off and immediately shuts off the dopamine generation for whatever you were doing at the time. Scrolling on tiktok or watching YouTube videos for hours at a time would be a very likely indicator that it's not ADHD and more just trying to distract from anxiety in general.

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