Maybe the truck sticks to the ground with its bare steel chassis like sticking your tongue to a flagpole.
Elon shouldn’t have gone right to the triple dog dare.
This is one of my pet peeves. My current truck came with what I’d call summer tires (though they call them all-seasons). I don’t know why they do this- my last truck came with a great set of Goodyear Eagle M+S tires and I ran those same brand/type tires for the whole 12 years I had the truck
And if you’re buying off the lot you get what the factory gives you. It’s really stupid, and now I’m putting so few miles on my truck it will be years before I get to change the tires.
For the majority of trucks that never leave pavement and don’t live in serious snow country, equipping them with noisy inefficient bad-wearing snow or offroad tires just annoys the suburbanites.
When you buy a general-purpose vehicle for a specific purpose, you kinda need to plan to customize it. That may be a towing package, that may be more aggressive tires.
The days when pickup trucks were designed around ranchers and farmers operating in the mud and snow and /or towing a heavy trailer ended ~30 years ago when the CAFE standards were invented but trucks were exempted. At that moment trucks became passenger cars in disguise.
Lotta truck buyers seem to only slowly be coming to recognize what happened. Of course all the contrary tough-guy marketing helps disguise what the manufacturer’s and marketers are really doing. They’re not aimed at construction workers. They’re aimed at cost accountants who want to pretend to be construction workers.
Strangely, I feel seen, though I’m not actually a cost accountant.
—Dr. Drake, urban truck owner.
Not sure whether you mean this, but not all winter tires are studded. Studs are largely outdated and unnecessary, but they are what most people mean when they consider winter tires “noisy”.
Yeah, but even M+S tires that have big tread blocks are a lot noisier than normal passenger car tires.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924977X15000097
You have to be careful of what they are measuring. All of the following questions can be answered, “No”, and a person could still end up as someone that I would view as insane:
- Did the individual suffer physical harm because of this compound?
- Did the individual become dependent on this compound?
- Did the individual engage in criminal behavior because of this compound?
- Did the individual experience anxiety, depression, anger, or other negative emotions because of this compound?
In general, spirituality is not viewed as a negative result - even when it’s a belief that dolphins are part of the cosmic alien government, watching over us. Personally, I’d argue that it’s pushing people towards insanity. It’s “happy and satisfied with life insanity” but insanity none-the-less.
Quotes from the above studies:
psychedelics elicit psychosis-like symptoms acutely yet improve psychological wellbeing in the mid to long term. It is proposed that acute alterations in mood are secondary to a more fundamental modulation in the quality of cognition, and that increased cognitive flexibility subsequent to serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) stimulation promotes emotional lability during intoxication and leaves a residue of ‘loosened cognition’ in the mid to long term that is conducive to improved psychological wellbeing.
Although direct causation cannot be established, these data suggest that regular use of psychedelic drugs could potentially lead to structural changes in brain areas supporting attentional processes, self-referential thought, and internal mentation. These changes could underlie the previously reported personality changes in long-term users and highlight the involvement of the PCC in the effects of psychedelics.
Changes in personality and attitudes are among the most commonly
studied long-term changes related to psychedelic use. In particular,
increased openness to experience has been commonly linked to experience with psychedelics […]
Given the robustness of the affective changes discussed so far, it
should be unsurprising that, long after their sessions, many participants
report their psychedelic experiences as being incredibly personally
meaningful, and sometimes spiritually significant. In a seminal study,
Griffiths et al. (2006) found that two-thirds of participants rated their
psilocybin session as being among the top five most meaningful experiences of their entire lives two months after the experiment; 58%
responded similarly at the 14-month follow-up (Griffiths et al., 2008).
In a subsequent experiment, this research group once again found that
two-thirds of a new sample of participants included the experience as
being among their five most meaningful experiences five months later
(Griffiths et al., 2018). Likewise, Johnson et al. (2017) evaluated the
efficacy of psilocybin treatment for smoking cessation and found that
86% put it in their five most meaningful experiences, and 58% reported
similarly in another study one month after their psilocybin session
(Nicholas et al., 2018). Schmid and Liechti (2018) noted that 71% of
healthy participants administered LSD included the session in their ten
most meaningful events. The fluctuation across studies likely relates to
small sample sizes, but in-general, psychedelic treatment appears to
reliably induce meaningful experiences—experiences which have been
reported to be comparable in importance to events such as childbirth or
losing a parent (Griffiths et al., 2006). In addition to being personally meaningful, in some cases, psychedelic experiences have been described as being spiritually significant and can lead to long-lasting changes in spirituality (Griffiths et al., 2019).
I’m skeptical of his following statement:
[t]here exists a Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (CCCC) with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control (GCC). Within GCC is the Solar System Control Unit (SSCU), within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO).
I doubt that Lilly considered himself crazy, either. And if - as most studies do - you simply measure whether he’s happy with life and not suffering any negative physical effects then, sure, he ended up a happy guy who was “in-tune with the universe”.
In general, though, I’d say that if you’re not insane then I’d cease any continued usage of LSD or other compounds in that realm. Be happy that you never left the sane zone. Why poke the bear?
Reality is stressful and hard, but it’s reality. Leaving it is just death, regardless of whether you’re buried six feet deep or still upright and mobile.
This:
Not this:
Knobby winter tires with big gaps between “aggressive” lateral treads are noisier than summer tires. On trucks with big wide tires the incremental noise is significant.
Yeah, studs are a whole 'nuther level of noisy beyond that. As you say.
But anyone who’s ever driven alongside a pickup truck with big winter or off-road tires knows how much noisier they are than more conventional tires on more conventional vehicles.
But where I am we do see serious snow. Not right in the urban core (Boston inside the inner belt gets a lot less snow due to the ocean, but millions of “Bostonians” live in suburbs where 12 inches of snow in one fall is completely common.
And I am a suburban/urban truck owner who absolutely uses his truck for trucky things. Hauling firewood, construction materials, demo waste, gravel/mulch, etc.
I don’t think it would be too much to ask if when buying a truck you had the option to exchange your zero mile tires of one type for another.
You can have Sam too
Most domestic trucks have many tire options if you configure it on the mfgr’s website. Not so much on the lot. But you can definitely get different rims and tires including A/T HD tires. Ram build and price
And racist!
Of course I know that, but I think most vehicles are sold off the lot these days. Certainly, if you’re like me and you’re cheap that’s true. I wait for some inventory reduction incentive to buy a new truck
For sure it would be nice if dealers could swap any factory tire option onto a new off-the-lot vehicle sale. I agree I haven’t ever heard of any store willing to do it.
Given that off-the-lot sales are the bulk of sales these days it’s past time for the whole manufacturer - dealer system to update how they handle a lot of these sorts of things. There is a demand for it.
Identifying a currently inchoate demand due to total lack of supply is one of the hardest things for incumbent businesses to do.
I’m not sure how bluesky links show up, but Musk says Xitter will transition to being a video platform.
Without zooming in to thee the text of that post I’d say that’s a hell of a transformation to turn the guy on the left into the woman in the middle and then turn her into the guy on the right.
Sometimes the headlines write themselves.
I’ve purchased two new cars in my life. Both times I bought a car on the lot that I test drove beforehand.
Matt Levine at paywalled Bloomberg quotes WSJ article:
Spiro’s non-denial [1] comes from this Wall Street Journal story about how Elon Musk “has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” as well as using ketamine recreationally, that “his drug use is ongoing, especially his consumption of ketamine,” that people close to him “are concerned it could cause a health crisis,” and that “illegal drug use would likely be a violation of federal policies…”
[1] Right? Like if you email Elon Musk to say “we hear you use ketamine, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” and his lawyer writes back to say he is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test” — that’s just legalese for “lol yeah so many drugs,” right? Perhaps I am misinterpreting? Anyway “Spiro, who said he represents Tesla, added in response to detailed questions that ‘there are other false facts’ in this article but didn’t detail them.”
In 2019 one Tesla board member resigned due to concerns about Musk’s volatile behavior and suspicions of drug use. Tesla board members have reached out Kimbal Musk with their concerns in the past. Board members are often sued for securities fraud, one aspect of which is not disclosing pertinent details to shareholders. So they generally disavow knowledge of Musk’s drug use.
At Tesla, Denholm, the current board chair, James Murdoch and other directors sometimes gathered around Kimbal Musk informally during board breaks or after meetings to ask how Elon Musk was doing or if he was getting enough sleep, people familiar with the conversations said. While the directors wouldn’t specifically ask about substance abuse, the people said they understood the questions to be about Elon Musk’s perceived drug use.
Levine:
I wish that was a risk factor in the annual report. “We depend on the services of Elon Musk, our CEO and Technoking, and we are worried that he isn’t getting enough sleep, if you know what we mean. If he keeps staying up too late, that may impact our business and financial results.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-08/elon-musk-isn-t-getting-enough-sleep
Elmo is the self-appointed king of “the fucking rules don’t apply to me.” All of them, of which drug rules are only a small part.