Ford's new hybrid Maverick: A 40 MPG pickup for $20,000.

[Tahoe_Hybrid]

Originally Posted by Xist

After I posted I realized that everybody knows that Jalopnik is the world's best news outlet, so I should have gone there first!

Did they redesign the Chevy trail blazer???
Looks like a 2009 trailblazer front end https://www.classic.com/veh/2009-che...01437-3n2ReBn/

[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

Gone are the days when someone wouldn't be pointed out as a public threat for folding the rear seat of a station-wagon, turning it into some sort of mobile playground for the kids. Nowadays, even if the dog is unrestrained, the driver is at risk of getting fined...

Blame wokeness. Back in the day, a head on accident between 2 cars @60 mph killed a horrendous percentage of passengers until finally someone said "enough" and mandated that cars become safer. Ralph Nader comes to mind but there were others.

I recall also that the mood was: I am a safe driver, it won't happen to me. That safe driver expired, too.

[freebeard]

I recall also that the mood was: I am a safe driver, it won't happen to me.

When I was in high school, we expected to expire from car crashes or knuclear annihilation. Turns out to be cancer and heart attacks, although all my graduating class are still extant, one horizontal.

[Piotrsko]

Cool. Many of my male classmates came back home in boxes, but the college ones are alive and well. 10 years makes a huge difference.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Blame wokeness. Back in the day, a head on accident between 2 cars @60 mph killed a horrendous percentage of passengers until finally someone said "enough" and mandated that cars become safer. Ralph Nader comes to mind but there were others.

I recall also that the mood was: I am a safe driver, it won't happen to me. That safe driver expired, too.

Not going so political, but sometimes trying to make "safer" cars which become out of reach for families on a tighter budget is not enough to decrese the death toll. Some people who can't afford a supposedly safer, newer car, will die either in an older rust bucket or a motorcycle. And it's hard to deny that some drivers now seem to believe they're roughly invulnerable while driving an oversized SUV with all the bells and whistles in the most reckless manner conceivable...

[redpoint5]

It's a tired point of fact that as technology and wealth advances with time, that we look back on civilizations as being backwards and comprised of fools. We'll be the future's fools when they view our level of risk taking and behavior as barbaric and idiotic.

I may even live to see the day when eating animal meat will be seen as a savage practice by a cruel people, who lazily did not develop cheap and nutritious lab grown meat-like products delivered by electrically powered autonomous drones.

Where's my crowbar? I need to pre-emptively tear down modern statues and art to make way for the coming perfect society. Lets make a blank slate for their genius.

[Piotrsko]

I need to point out that one man's utopia is another's hades.

[freebeard]

One man's Ecotopia is another man's Eutopia?

https://www.ecotopia.org › about
About | Ecotopia
Ecotopia is an interesting concept, first formulated by Ernest Callenbach in his two works: Ecotopia, and Ecotopia Emerging. Utopia means "no-where", a fancifully imagined ideal reality, as in Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia. Ecotopia is not nowhere, the 'u' is supplanted by 'eco', from the Greek, oikos, the word for household or home.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

It's a tired point of fact that as technology and wealth advances with time, that we look back on civilizations as being backwards and comprised of fools. We'll be the future's fools when they view our level of risk taking and behavior as barbaric and idiotic.

I have no kids (at least not as far as I know), but whenever I talk to kids and teens about "the past" it seems like the historical distancing is greater than when I had their age and listened to older people telling me how their times were different.

I may even live to see the day when eating animal meat will be seen as a savage practice by a cruel people, who lazily did not develop cheap and nutritious lab grown meat-like products delivered by electrically powered autonomous drones.

Ain't it somewhat already done by radical vegans, yet the plant-based stuff they endorse is not lab-grown?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

Ain't it somewhat already done by radical vegans, yet the plant-based stuff they endorse is not lab-grown?

I'm just making a prediction of how our cultural moral values will shift as technology allows for new ways to do things.

People like to think they live in a state of perfect moral enlightenment brought about merely by being genius thinkers. The reality is that if we suffered a catastrophe that wiped out all technology, we'd be hunting people, enslaving them, women would revert to more traditional roles, transgenderism wouldn't be a thing...

There wasn't some recent genetic evolution that endowed us with superior moral virtue. We develop tools that increase our productivity such that slave labor no longer makes sense. Those tools allow women to delay childrearing and participate in the workforce... eventually technology will grow high quality meat in a lab and it will cost much less than feeding corn to animals and taking them to slaughter.

Those who live in the world in which affordable lab grown and delicious meat is available will look at us like savages, not giving any thought to the fact that if they somehow lost that technology they would be looking for animals to eat.