I would also kind of respect the project if it was a mechanization of McNally's "It can be opened with a Master Lock".

You can buy a hitch for any vehicle and a brand new 8 foot trailer for < $2k.

For the "I need to sometimes pick up large objects" use case it's hard to beat.

I have 3 vehicles, an old project jeep, an old truck, and a sedan.

Sedan handles 99% of my driving, but can't really tow anything. Truck handles all of my towing stuff, but gets ~14mpg which hurts so I don't drive it.

Jeep is a jeep, it's always being worked on, but when I use it I'm using it to go ride around on dirt paths or for camping. It gets 17-20mpg when I'm driving it but I don't want to drive it often.

If the jeep was a 2000's series jeep I would totally just get a small trailer for the occasional towing things that I do with the pickup and downsize to 2 vehicles. I know I could rent a uhaul from time to time for about what I pay for insuring and titling the truck, but the $100 annual difference is worth it for the convenience of not having to deal with uhaul 4 times a year.

But I said all of that to say, that a hitch isn't a perfect solution for everyone. I would feel very uncomfortable towing an empty 4x6 trailer behind my sedan, not to even mention the occasional couch or dresser or bunch of boxes from helping a friend move.

> I would feel very uncomfortable towing an empty 4x6 trailer behind my sedan, not to even mention the occasional couch or dresser or bunch of boxes from helping a friend move.

Why? 1500 lbs rated tow hook on an average sedan should be no problem at all. And that's more than enough for a 4x6 with a couch and a couple of boxes. Might even get a slightly larger trailer so you don't have to take the couch apart.

I've towed 14' sailboats including all gear behind a Corolla, didn't even feel the trailer was there.

I bought a used "regular" F-150 with an 8-foot bed about the last year that made sense, and when the frame finally rusted out and it could no longer pass inspection, the prices of used trucks was insane, and most of what was available was a lot of luxuries I didn't want to pay for.[0]

So I replaced it with a 5x8 trailer, which anymore gets pulled behind a Chevy Volt. I'd hesitate to load it to the max and take it on the thruway, but for most of my tasks it's actually more convenient than the truck. Loading up a riding lawn mower or a few hundred pounds of scrap metal is way easier with it being closer to the ground, and I'm mostly driving 10-15 miles over back roads so if I'm worried the load is too heavy for the compact car I don't mind taking it a little slow.

Also, it's convenient to load it while it's unhooked, piling in garbage and debris over a week or a weekend and then hooking it up to run to the dump; likewise, just unhooking the trailer full of construction materials and (weather permitting) just unloading it as you build.

I occasionally miss being able to drive it into the woods, but to be honest not being able to parallel park the trailer is a bigger inconvenience than not being able to off-road it.

[0] Since having kids I've come around on the second-row-of-seats/short bed trade-off; not being able to pick up dimensional lumber with kids in tow is way more limiting in my current phase of life than not being able to fit it in the bed with the tailgate up.

I don't know the specifics but the US has some sort of strict requirement on Towing, such that vehicles like hatchbacks and sedans that have ubiquitous 1500lb towing ratings in Europe are not rated to tow at all in the US.

People mostly still do it though, because it's cheap and easy to do.

It's at least as much about being able to stop it as it is being able to pull it. An loaded utility trailer with no trailer brakes on a wet road is going to jacknife in any kind of emergency stop, and the brakes on a Corolla are going to be challenged to do it even on a dry road.

I towed heavily loaded trailers - stuffed with books, tools, furniture, the trailer was loaded to the roof and I couldn't get up steep San Franscisco hills - to and from Alaska, and across the entire United States.

With an Impreza.

That included highways in the Yukon that were more river rock than gravel, backwoods of Montana and Wyoming, you name it.

It was totally fine. Especially in a Subaru, with AWD and a low well centered center of gravity. I'd do it again.

Just because. It's a Malibu, its tow rating is don't. I'm sure I could, but its not worth jeopardizing a $25,000 cars' drive train to potentially save about $600/year in insurance and tags and fuel for the truck.

2001 Wrangler owner, I do some towing (particularly like the flexibility of UBox for borrowing a box on a trailer for a few days to store items at my house or leisurely pack up for storage).

The 2 door model unfortunately has a pretty weak tow rating of 1 ton, and I'm fairly certain I have gone well over that a few times. IIRC the four door models a few years later took that up to 5000 lbs because of the extra length.

I would also note that, even if the title is accurate, and (say) 90% of applications are from social media influencers, it doesn't even make a claim about how many are granted. It could be that countless influencers are applying... and being rejected.

Hell, he could have been told that he wasn't promoted because of his sex/race/whatever by his direct superior who supported Adams' promotion but was overruled by his higher ups/the committee.

"Older white guy boss tells younger white guy Adams that he doesn't have a future because the company is only promoting <slurs> and <slurs>." is something I would totally believe happened. Source: if you're a white guy, other white guys tell you all sorts of things you'd think they'd keep to themselves.

Or, as how it usually happens, the guy who told him "You aren't getting promoted because you are white" was just wrong himself

I don't know why people always seem to forget that essential default. People say things that aren't true all the time.

Oh yeah, I meant that to be implicit in what I was saying.

I have zero problem believing that his boss or whoever told him that, or that said person was just talking out their ass.

People's words and explanations have greater significance when the observed reality supports it.

I am sure it wasn't only the words that convinced Scott Adams, but the observed reality of who is being promoted and who is not.

>I am sure it wasn't only the words that convinced Scott Adams, but the observed reality of who is being promoted and who is not.

Humans regularly misinterpret reality. It's why as a species we couldn't figure out jack shit until we started removing ourselves as arbiter of truth.

We are terrible at evaluating information and making conclusions.

My dad is pissed at a company for passing him over because "They only hire gay people in management" and not because.... he doesn't have an MBA and the people they hired do. Or that he doesn't know how to do anything more than low level management in general. Or that he is bad at big picture planning.

Nope, definitely the gays and this woke DEI.

My brother spent most of his life livid at "affirmative action" and seemingly blaming it for his limitations. Rather than blaming the fact that he did drugs instead of leveraging his intelligence to do well in school, dropped out of community college for no reason, and has never even applied to a real institution of higher learning or attempted to educate himself.

Some people just suck at recognizing their faults and make up boogeymen to blame.

Imagine your dad not understanding that he was not promoted despite witnessing that people with MBA were promoted, that people without MBA were not promoted, as well as BEING DIRECTLY TOLD that this is the reason.

You are in this exact situation regarding Scott Adams' experience. Sure, what you say is theoretically possible, but very unlikely. I suggest we use Occam's razor.

I don't think Adams represents a particularly uncommon archetype in the engineering world.

I'm an engineer and I don't exactly know a lot of engineers who think you can manifest alternative realities into existence with the power of quantum physics, on account of most of us having passed a physics class or two

He always seemed like the archetypal "Californian creative who fried his brain with psychedelics and new age woo-woo in the 70s" type

I am pro-nuclear power, but I miss the days when companies would, you know, return their profits to investors, so those investors could then invest in other companies doing different things, instead of all corporations tending towards generic everything-investment vehicles.

This is partly due to tax policy. Investors don't want this. Distributing dividends is less efficient capital distribution because those capital gains are immediately taxed rather than be deferred into a higher share price with no tax drag.

This is why every tech company does buybacks(other than meta which started a dividend when Mark got sick of high interest rates on his debt, they still mainly do buybacks though)

The creators of metric weren't above buggering it to fit human scale needs.

Take the length/weight relationship.

Definitionally, it'd be way more elegant for the unit of mass to be based on the unit of length directly, a cubic meter of something, but having your base unit of mass be a ton wasn't going to fly.

So they instead tried for 1/100th of the meter and landed on the gram, but it turns out they misjudged and now your standard unit of weight is the prefixed kilogram instead, because everyone used kilograms instead.

Which is to say, if you didn't get a pretty good paper size out of the definition used for A0, someone would have found a different definition which did produce a pretty good paper size, and then declare it was the only natural one.

I don't think anybody loses sleep over the kilogram issue because, well, it's metric after all. A kilogram is exactly 1000 grams, so the gram is just as perfectly well defined. Nothing would really change if they were to promote the gram to be the standard unit of mass (not weight!) someday.

I am annoyed by it. We should be using gravs instead. Then there would not be this special unique unit with prefix as base unit.

I was actually unfamiliar with the history of the grave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_(unit)

There's also the concept of a story stick.

When working on a project where you need a bunch of things to be the same, you take a stick and mark on it at various points the dimensions you're using -- when working on a house, it might be things like the heights of outlet boxes and switches, the width and height of rough opening for doors, the height of window sills, etc etc.

Then, you just use the stick as the reference, using the marking for outlets to position all of the outlets instead of measuring the height of the floor in inches or millimeters or cubits or whatever each time. It's kind of like a measuring jig.

("Measure once, cut twice" is a superior methodology which has been unfairly maligned for generations.)

This works fantastic for building furniture as well, where the absolute dimension doesn’t matter as much as all of the pieces having matching dimensions. A cabinet with drawers, for example. The story stick captures the spacing between the drawers, the width of the drawer, the slightly smaller height of the drawer face, etc.

It feels really imprecise the first time you set the fence on a table saw based on a marking on a stick instead of a precise specific value but the results are hard to argue with.

With carpentry in particular, it is extremely powerful to make multiple cuts at the same time -- set a fence once and then cut everything that needs to match at the same time, or stack multiple pieces together, or cut a board to length before ripping it into several pieces that need identical lengths.

Sure, check your measurements to be sure they're correct, but the more times you can cut based on the same measurement, the less measurement error can creep in.

Was going to mention that too. 100% agree. If I mess up and end up needing to make matching cuts later on, I'll often set the fence using one of the existing pieces too instead of trying to re-measure. The story stick works great but lining up the teeth on the blade with the cut edge of an existing piece works fabulously well.

A similar strategy I've used when I've known that there was going to be cuts that I couldn't sequence like that is to cut "as built" story sticks with scrap dimensional lumber and write what they are right on the board.

It's an interesting tiny trade-off.

Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.

Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.

Many, many people want to double or halve documents.

Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.

I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).

I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.

Sorry, I should have specified "and have it look perfect".

People do that all the time with US letter paper, print two to a sheet, you just end up with slightly wonky margins and usually everything being more like 40-45% the size it would be doubling up A4 paper. That use case isn't really hindered.

You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.

Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.

Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.

That's not a difference between ANSI and ISO paper sizes.

ANSI A (US letter) is a half sheet of ANSI B (ledger/tabloid) is a half sheet of C is a half sheet of D is a half sheet of E. When producing the paper, there is no waste of material or time, its the same process just starting with a slightly differently sized starting sheet (hypothetically; I am assuming that paper production has advanced beyond shaking screens of the largest handleable size by hand).

The difference is that ANSI A, C and E have aspect ratios of 17/22 (0.77) and ANSI B & D have aspect ratios of 11/17 (0.65), while all ISO sizes have aspect ratios of 1/sqrt(2) (0.71).

The waste comes in when scaling between adjacent sizes.

Going from A4 to A3, you can enlarge a document to 141% of the original size, and the margins will match.

Going from US letter to tabloid (ANSI A to B), the width of the paper is 129% larger and the height is 154% larger, so you can only enlarge your document to 129% the original size, and you have larger vertical margins, which is waste.

(But if you double it, from A to C, the problem goes away, because the aspect ratio is the same; so you can produce posters of multiple sizes, just not on every ANSI paper size at once.)

Oh, you're talking about books, not sheets? My reply is probably all wrong, sorry.

So, regarding books, why do you think the methods of printing books varies based on the size of the printing sheets?

Regardless of the size of your printing sheet, you choose a page size that's based on dividing your printing sheet in half N number of times, typeset your document to that page size (which you can't even skip for ISO paper sizes, because you pick your font size independent of the paper sizes), print 2^N pages per printing sheet in a particular pattern, fold and/or cut the sheet up, and bind.

There's no difference in waste or time regardless of your paper size choices, unless you do something silly or artistic, like choosing to print a square book or some shape not derived from halving your paper size.

I also have think that's a substantial reason behind the RTO push: some people found their lives empty without the office social environment, even after two years, and enough of them had the power to change it.