It has achieved the same level of awareness as the average emacs user.

Sailing ships are considerably slower than engine driven ships, especially given they usually have to sail way the hell out of their way to chase prevailing winds.

Modern cargo vessels have to be able to do things like pass under bridges over harbor mouths that large rigging couldn’t easily do, and most require fairly clear access to the decks for cargo loading/unloading, particularly intermodal shipping containers.

You do see a strange kind of “sail” called a Flettner rotor being used on occasion, which is a fairly easy system to bolt onto a modern cargo ship, it can be raised and lowered without much of a problem, and it can improve fuel efficiency by harnessing wind.

I’m a woodworker. I have a small hobby shop on the back of my property, looks like a garden shed from the outside, I produce 8 or 10 barrels of sawdust a year. That’s probably enough to heat my house through the winter. It all goes to the dump. Here’s why:

There’s nobody who wants to work with me. There are places that make fuel pellets at industrial scale in my area, they want nothing to do with a guy bringing them 2 or 3 rubbermaid trash cans full of sawdust a few times a year, they want regularly scheduled semi truck delivery. There are farmers that have more modest sized hammer mills and extruders necessary for the job, but they don’t want to take the time to run a tool for some guy. I could buy the tools myself, for several times what it cost to heat my house with gas for a year.

So who produces sawdust or other fine wood chips at industrial scale? Sawmills, but they often use their own sawdust to make particle board. Furniture factories maybe? The few remaining that don’t mostly use particle board?

Edit to add: There is a source of kinda free wood matter: Branches. The structural or furniture lumber industries don’t use limb wood; it’s too unstable. Trunks grow roughly parallel to gravity, branches grow more or less perpendicular, so they have a tendency to warp when milled, plus they’re smaller and just not worth trying to saw into boards. So they tend to get ground up for wood chips or paper pulp or whatever would be convenient to the business.

Stirrup jeans are a thing.

Don’t think cuttin’ knife, think spreadin’ knife.

Reminds me of a script I wrote for an episode of Popular Crime Procedural about a decade ago.

“What have we got?”

“Some hiker in the cold open noticed a dead body congruent with your trademark brand of vaguely autistic gimmicky ‘talent’, Tha Chief.”

It turns out that Federal Agent With Speaking Role is Mr. Diddit. The raid on his own house was a clever bit of misdirection.

Someday I’ll be rich enough to make a tailor make that for me, a black tie fishing getup, with cargo pants and a waistcoat with pockets from shoulder to waist.

The flaps shall be secured with your finest of velcros, my good man, mmmm? hawhehawhehaw. Now I shall be off to the haberdashery for a bucket hat to match.

I use a table saw and seldom do I start that machine without wondering in the back of my mind if these are my last moments with ten fingers.

Huh, sure enough. Isn’t that amazing.

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Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitress.

Wait I’m confused, does it require perfectly straight lumber or will it take boards from Home Depot?

Because that kit would cost around what a new Civic would cost, and you’re going to get a 16 year old car made worse.

EV components don’t really swap into the spots that ICE components do. An engine is relatively large, a motor is relatively small. A gas tank is relatively small, a battery is relatively large. Most ICEs designed from the ground up use a “skateboard”-like chassis with the battery taking up basically all the volume below the floor. The motor can be tucked away somewhere, and then the body built on top. You don’t need the volume in the nose for the engine so you get a frunk. a 15 year old ICE car didn’t portion out the room for the batteries, so you’ve got some of the area under the trunk occupied by the gas tank. That’s about the volume that the batteries in a golf cart take up.

Anyone who’s capable of designing and manufacturing that kit might as well go into production of new cars.

That’s an interesting question. I don’t know how that’s done, and conveniently the captions all videos have to have nowadays are in the way of what I need to see. I don’t know how he stays on course.

The closest to that I can think of is the Tesla Roadster. Which IIRC was basically an electric Lotus Elise, rather than a Mazda Miata. I wonder how popular electric Miatas would actually be, without a manual transmission.

The most “normal car that happens to be electric” I can think of is the Slate. With the exception of the powertrain and complete lack of a radio, the controls and mechanisms look like they’re from 20 years ago. The more I look at it though the more I think that car is DOA.

A good one made of straight grained ash or something are fairly expensive, so they end up being made of low grade poplar or fir or something that’s a lot easier to crack and split.

Wood also has to be finished or it’ll degrade, and most of the coating chemicals that are cost effective and work worth a damn have been banned.

I think there’s also a problem with the kinds of EVs everyone tried to sell.

Tesla has seen legitimate success in making EVs a desirable luxury item. The Prius became something of a fashion statement among kale chip eating Californians in the 2000s because of its alleged economy, but it was still an economy car. It wasn’t that nice or luxurious. Tesla made cars people wanted to drive and be seen driving, with an all-electric powertrain.

Pretty much everyone tried to copy that business model, making excessively fast luxury sport sedanover blobs with price tags that make car shoppers start muttering the word “depreciation.”

Meanwhile, EVs tend to be the breeding ground for shit features everybody hates, like touch screen HVAC controls. Nobody wants to make a normal car that happens to be electric, which is what a lot of the buying public wants, but can’t find.

I ripped my DVD collection a couple years ago, and I watched that change over time happen.

The earlier DVDs in my collection came in bespoke packaging designed specifically for the film, they had properly interactive menus complete with easter eggs, commentary tracks, alternate angles, remember when DVD player remotes had an “Angle” button? DVD was a prestige format, it was actually as cool as LaserDisc was supposed to be.

There was the early mass market phase when older movies, or lower budget current releases were put out on double sided discs that had widescreen on one side and “fullscreen” 4:3 on the other, in those half plastic half cardboard cases, remember those? Higher end stuff would be released in what I think of as the standard plastic DVD case. How much plastic was wasted selling them in packaging other than CD jewel cases?

Later on, you got the cases that had the recycling logo cut out of them, the discs got cheaper, features started disappearing, because it was now the budget option. “It’s just on DVD.” DVDs were cheap to make, everybody had a player for them, Blu-Ray now had the prestige releases. The Direct To Bargain Bin releases weren’t exactly the high point of the format but there’s still fun to be had there.

DVD still staggers on, they’re not dead the way VHS is, but it didn’t make it as long. DVDs could do things VHS couldn’t, like TV shows. The advent of binge watching happened on DVD; complete TV series on VHS wasn’t feasible but it works great on DVD. On the other hand, because VHS was the only widely adopted vdieo format for most of its run, you can find weird stuff on VHS that never got pressed onto DVD.

I could argue that VHS was a superior format to both Beta and Laserdisc because it offered a better blend of features.

Laserdisc offered cinemaphile farkles like perfect pause and frame by frame, additional audio tracks etc. but a movie required at least three sides of a disc, and thus two discs with at least two changes. Laserdisc was read-only and thus useless for timeshifting and camcorders. The tape-based formats were slightly worse in quality but could hold an entire movie in one go.

VHS was superior for timeshift and camcorder use than Beta because of the longer run time. There was a mini cassette for miniature VHS camcorders which could be played back on a standard deck with an adapter, Beta never got there AFAIK and insetad Sony went to Hi 8, which never really took off as a home video format the way it frankly should have. VHS was better than Beta at movie distribution because a longer film could fit on an SP VHS cassette, often with room to spare for some commercials at the beginning which helped subsidize the cost.

VHS was at least capable of everything.

DVD didn’t fully kill VHS; It unceremoniously killed LaserDisc and shouldered VHS aside a little. Through most of the 2000s VHS was still going strong, DVD-RAM is surprisingly old but wasn’t adopted that widely. Hard drive based DVRs and smart phone based video recording finally did VHS in.

I’ve been gaming on Linux for over ten years now: It has gotten to the point where the only major hurdle is kernel-level anti-cheat. Which does work in Linux, but the developer has to enable it to work in Linux, and most don’t. This is only a factor in competitive multiplayer games. I’m not into those so basically I haven’t noticed, I want to run a game, it runs.