Ford serves two markets, the Americas, and everybody else, with an approx. 2/3rd vs. 1/3rd split respectively.

Sure they sell some small amount of F150s and similar oversized cars/trucks outside of the Americas, but its measured in 1000s.

European market is mostly much smaller cars. Ford has had the best selling car in the UK on and off with its Puma, a small SUV that is a mild hybrid.

Outside of the Americas they are starting to move forward with EVs, and will even have their own Renault produced R5 clone with the new Fiesta, but its too little too late as its not due to 28.

I used to do an hour of power lifting in the morning, then after work, two hours of BJJ/Kickboxing/conditioning five days a week.

I didn’t start doing that, I built up to it over twelve hard months with heavy focus on base fitness and flexibility.

Needed a complete change in diet and mentality to do so. My diet was totally focused on training for the longest time, stupid mix/maxing such as eating lentils over rice due to lower sugar content and higher protein content.

It was also a massive help that I WfH and have a weights cage at home so that saved an enormous amount of time that I could reinvest in training.

I cannot train that hard now as I am too old to recover from that much training but I did so for more than a decade. Now I just focus on lifting every other day with stretching/yoga in between.

When my kids were kids it really depended on if they needed anything big. One year we would get them a macbook because they needed a new laptop for school but then it would last nearly five years so I wouldn’t have to buy another one for ages. Same for things like phones or consoles or. I always spent more on these big purchases as they normally last longer.

Now they adults I spend a few hundred for birthdays and Christmas. I like to get something they will actually use, will last, and is memorable. The best gifts show that you actually pay attention to their current hobbies or are something they would want but would rare splash for. Example would be for my sons birthday i got him a GBA SP style emulator and loaded it up with pokemon roms, official and fan, as I knew he had a few months off studying for his professional qualification.

Yeah I do not think he ever publish another one, we might get something like the Silmarillion when he dies put together by his estate, if he doesn’t have it all destroyed as part of his will.

Folio is the reason I downsized my bookcases, stop me spending so much money. I got rid of half my books, books I had no intention of ever reading again even the rare ones.

Yeah i am reluctant now unless I know the artist has finished the series. Wish I spent the extra for the folio versions of GoT series as those are at least complete and far nice

If I remember correctly they were doing an illustrated version of the book each year and then the series got delayed because they fell out with the orginal illustrator.

So it would make sense that this one would be shit, because even if its not AI errors like this are basic shit to get right, because I believe the dispute was over money.

I would rather live on the streets than put up with that, I could not cope with it as I get woke up by people in the same house being quiet let alone noisy cunts like that.

Typically I get about six. Had a long weekend had did nine and half each day for three days straight, which never happens, then last night I got four hours and undid all that goodness.

I would like between seven and eight hours on the regular, just not going to happen unless I retire and live on my own as I am a very light sleeper.

I would stay near (ish) to Kyoto and just go one day, the National Museum in Kyoto is really good and you can see the rest of what you want to see quite quickly. It is about as commercialized as you can get for a town in Japan, its approaching Disney levels of parody.

Staying further away lowers the cost and as long as its on one of the direct train lines into Kyoto it doesnt take long to get there. There is a lot to do in daily travelable distance in the region that is a better use of your time.

I would love to know how many owners actually ran out of fuel or near as damn did doing long high speed runs

That includes corners, which can be as low as 50kph, which will lower the average significantly over lap… Straight line they are approaching 340kph on the longest straights, but have hit nearly 380kph in recent history.

They would be a lot faster if they were allowed to tweak the gear ratios for each circuit rather than them being fixed for multiple circuits, and they didn’t have a fuel flow limit per lap. A twenty year old car nearly hit 400kph in non race spec.

People are fed up with being broke and not able to afford the same things that they or their parents could afford even 20 years ago. Populists do not have to offer policies they can or event intend to implement so they can promise any old shit to the gullible who want change. Wrap that in a reassuring racist package: immigration is out of control, send back the small boats, etc. so that it doesn’t smell like communism (not that communism cant be racist) that people confuse even moderate socialist policies for due to decades of western propaganda.

Couple this with the Overton window being moved ever towards the right due to left and center left parties being captured by neoliberals who seek funding and patronage from the Rich, plus decades of the press putting pressure on any left wing policies by enforcing a double standard of left wing policies required to fully document how they will work and be funded, while right wing fantasy policies are waved through without any scrutiny from the majority of press.

Then the right deliberately break any essential service, under fund it and spend it elsewhere, making it time consuming and expensive to fix, leading them to point at their opponents being ineffective, and the press refuse to hold the right to account over this.

This has reduced any coupling between those left of the far right and the general population in terms of policies meeting the requirement. You can start to see why they are gaining ground.

Its the running costs of these that are insane, and the CO2 that it produces.

All will be rated by gallons per hour for the engines, the big boats can consume 500 gallons per hour. Now assume the owner wants to move the boat just 100 nm, or about 3 hours of travel at the most efficient speed (allowing for departure and arrival). Thats about 1500 gallons for one of the big boats. Assume £6 per gallon, thats £9k, to do 60 nm. Assuming an average of 40 mpg in a car, you could do 60000 miles for the same amount of fuel, or the same annual consumption as seven average UK drivers vs. 60 nm in a big boat. A 60 nm trip is something you do to get to a lunch stop before going on somewhere else for the evening. It can take multiple days of continuous travel to work across the Med, mean while the owner flies somewhere else while the boat is moved, then flies back.

Then there is the electric production on these. Sure, solar has helped a ton, but a lot of the really big boats don’t have a ton of solar as it takes flat surface space that has other shit on it. So they use a generator, a big one. Whole boat will have aircon and copious amounts of inverters to give the guests mains electric, electric toys, tons of lighting, and navigation equipment. The fuel for this is on top of the fuel burned to move the boat.

Then there is the staff on the boat, big boats can have a dozen or more staff on board, all of whom had to fly to get to the boat, and have their own food, washing, and daily energy needs.

Its not uncommon for a rich owner to request the boat moved to a particular location, stocked up with food and booze that is flown in from multiple locations. Then the owner and their guests fly in, and sometimes not, so all that effort and energy is wasted.

Final kicker is that really big boats have a second chase boat, full of even more staff and often similar size to the main boat in consumption. Bezos has two helicopter pads on his chase boat as he cannot have one on his main boat because he wanted sails on it, which don’t actually work properly, they have never used more than one at once.

And I think that at some point enough people will have had enough that they take on production of that themselves via open source projects.

Sure, some will always be driven by cost, thats never going to change, but self sustainability will become more desirable as main stream brands, not just temu tat, drops in quality.

All of which is true but it doesn’t matter if the product is crippled by the designer. Whole point of my model is that you are the designer so its only shit if you are.

Open source devices will become more mainstream as a push back by consumers against enshitifcation, privacy invasion, disposable products, ever rising subscription costs.

Not just things like phones and laptops but things like mice, keyboards, headphones, even tvs and kitchen appliances. I know some of these are possible now, I use a ploppy trackball and qmk based keyboards but a wider spread of these across the home and more than just hobbyists like myself.

Large chunks will be 3D printed, moving the large component parts of manufacting to the local area. Plus things will be endlessly fixable and upgradable.

I agree, also term limits for all of them.

However its egregious for them to be raising the mandatory retirement age for everybody else while leaving their volentary retirement age where it is, and with a particularly fat pension, its about £4k a month for only twenty years of service.

None of which is tied to raising the retirement age for the younger groups, this does fuck all to fix the actual problem.

None of which is tied to medical or elder care for the Danes, this is also mostly funded by taxation, again mostly paid by the young.

The actual solution is to start means testing Ponzi scheme state pension funds with a tapered reduction based on private pension income. However that will never every happen to this particular group as they are the largest single group, and this will be a single issue voting matter for them as they are in the middle of retiring.

Social care should be self funded by the government forcing sell off, of assets like the home, for those that can for this generation.

This does nothing for the current problem, which is the single largest group of people, Boomers, needing their State Pension paid, as Denmark is paid for out of general taxation, and these changes do not apply to this group, as it only applies to some of Gen X and younger. This is the same group PAYING for the boomers retirement, so they being asked to pay more than ever before and getting fucked over with the higher retirement age.

So this rise for Denmark does not kick in on people born before 1970, so it does not count for baby boomers or the oldest and usually wealthiest sub set of Gen X. Oh, also Danish politicians can still retire at 60 right?

This is fairly typical with these age rises, applies to everybody BUT the largest group who have caused all the problem by being the largest group and who often haven’t paid their fair share in a lot of schemes as a lot of state pension schemes are a Ponzi scheme rather than an actual investment fund, including the Danes as its paid directly out of taxation.

This means all the poor fucks who will now retire later will still be paying for that largest ever group to retire at an earlier age.

What is particularly insidious with this type of change is that the private pension age has also been raised for people in the UK. This means even if you can afford to you cant take it as early as you once could. Absolutely done because they will be means testing the UK state pension at some point.