It’s $400, there’s no choice of carrier, the battery won’t hold a charge, and the reception isn’t very-

More Slates than Silverados will be powered by coal.

It’s got a lot of elements that evoke other trucks and 4x4s.

A lot of the face evokes Toyota Landcruisers. The shape of the hood is very Land Rover. The thick B pillar reminds me of a Nissan Hardbody. The Slate graphic on the tailgate reminds me of old Toyota pickups. The fastback roof reminds me a lot of the later model 2-door Chevy Blazers.

You know what? You’ve led me to the diagnosis of my own EV range anxiety: Unpredictable performance.

In a gas powered car, you pretty much can think in miles. They put the “24 city, 29 highway” numbers on the sticker in the window, and that’s pretty close to what you’ll get out of it. Maybe loading it until it squats on the suspension or pulling a trailer or driving like a maniac will decrease the economy. But, if you do those kinds of things, you can fill the tank, note the mileage, drive like that awhile, fill the tank again, note the fuel consumed and the mileage performed and you’ve got a figure you can pretty much rely on no matter the weather. The limiting factor is almost always the driver. Drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank, drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank…

I happen to be a flight instructor. There’s a whole chapter in flight school about cross country flight planning and predicting aircraft performance. Wind is such a factor that you really can’t rate a plane in miles of range, but in hours of endurance. So to plan a flight, you look up the route of flight on an aeronautical chart, the weather forecast, read performance charts and tables out of the plane’s Pilot’s Operating Handbook, crunch a whole bunch of numbers and you’ll know fairly precisely how long you’ll be aloft and how much fuel you’ll burn.

With an EV…they spit out a range in miles that the vehicle will do in unspecified ideal conditions, tell you that heat, cold, using the heater, using the air conditioner, carrying weight, wind and age will reduce the range, and then they’ll get impatient with you if you try to work out what the vehicle will actually do and they’ll mail you anthrax if the answer you arrive at is “not enough.”

That’s a false dichotomy.

I’ve been driving an S10 for decades. Yeah, it’s a little bit 20th century, it makes 18mpg out of a large, slow, primitive V6. It’s great for small truck missions, it’s reasonable for long hauls, and I can expect to go THIS far on THIS much gas.

Aerodynamics. The Bolt is a slick little running shoe. The Slate is a slab.

I’ve no more fucks to give.

My fuck fuse has just blown.

I’ve looked around for my fucks all day but they’ve up and fucked off home.

I’ve no more fucks to give.

My fuck rations are depleted.

I’ve rallied my fuck army, but it’s been fucking defeated.

In the aviation world, we have this concept called Pilot In Command. The buck stops with the PIC, they are solely responsible for and the final authority as to the operation of the aircraft. Something goes wrong, it’s on the pilot. This is borrowed from the maritime industry.

Meanwhile, we’ve got driverless cars on the road right now with no clear legal authority over them.

Almost everything is wired in the least efficient way possible in the human brain. Everything crosses through the middle.

When the fascists are taking over? Every man, woman and child.

I have an old Roku 3 that is, basically, a Raspberry Pi. Like, if you could swap out the OS it could do Raspberry Pi like things.

I think on the Slate, the only part of the frame that is exposed as outer body are the A pillars. Everything else is a panel that bolts on.

My understanding is the Slate is kind of body-around-frame.

Not exactly a ladder chassis but I don’t know if you can call it a unibody.

If I got the history right, it was kind of the wacky gotcha concept of the show early on, but famously humorless Alex Trebek took over and the show got weirdly prestigious and that rule stayed in place and kind of devolved into a verbal tic. _whatis The answer?

Repraps were controlled with Arduino Megas for a very long time. Up until the MK4 series, Prusa’s Rambo or Einsy boards still ran on the ATMEGA2560 microcontroller.

All of this work is done.

In both cases, borrowing the words of stand-up drunkard Ron White, “It’s not that the wind is blowing; it’s what the wind is blowing.”

The house itself should be well waterproofed, the problems come from broken windows, punctured roof due to falling trees, or in a tornado, just being pushed over.

I’m an above average candidate for the Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court scenario. My hand isn’t a chainsaw and my boomstick is a pump action Ithaca not a double-barrel Remington, but also I could make a radio more or less from scratch. You can make a point contact diode out of rusty iron and graphite.

I own a Prusa, a MK4S. They could stand to get their shit together a bit. I’m currently running two firmware versions behind because the last two years worth has been fucktrash.

I’d like to see them pair a bluetooth headset to a phone.