The bed is only 4.5' long. The 5.5' short bed available on an F150 Lightning is too short for me, the ICE F150 with a 6.5' bed at least lets you have flat sheet goods with the tail gate down.
I think that the median US voter likely did not want this.
With two candidates and a variety of issues, you are very likely going to have to compromise on something. You can support Trump's immigration policy, DOGE efforts, and more; without thinking that the US should help Putin restore the Soviet Union.
Personally, I could not bring myself to vote for either of the presidential candidates. I only voted on the down ballot races.
Trump has no moral compass; and the only thing that matters is his ego.
Harris had domestic policy that I almost universally disagree with.
I did vote in the primary, but it didn't matter at that point because the only other option was Haley. I would have been enthusiastic about any other Republican primary candidate.
> I think that the median US voter likely did not want this.
I can't speak to the level of public support for Ukraine, though it seems most Trump supporters don't really care about Ukraine and want the US to stop spending money on foreign wars. Despite anecdotes about Trump voters being upset by executive branch cuts, polling suggests ~95% of Trump voters are ok with or actively pleased with his gutting of the government.
The median US voter does want this.
> Personally, I could not bring myself to vote for either of the presidential candidates.
Then you voted for Trump, in that case. If you can vote, and don't, then that's tacit approval of what voters choose.
There was a Roomba equivalent company out there, which would have wheels that drive the motor around, but they never shipped. Maslow moves itself by pulling on belts on fixed anchor points.
The Shaper Origin has you move the machine, and it makes corrections using machine vision to track its position. It will give you more accuracy than a Maslow; but at a much greater cost and more attention.
A jig saw does not make as clean cuts as a router, and you need to have the workpiece suspend so the blade can go through the work. With a router, you can just have a spoilboard underneath.
>The Shaper Origin has you move the machine, and it makes corrections using machine vision to track its position. It will give you more accuracy than a Maslow; but at a much greater cost and more attention.
I really don't understand the market for the shaper. Even the youtubers that get paid to shill them don't seem to have a compelling reason to be using them.
I've not bought an origin, but think it definitely has a niche. You can do almost everything you can do with a Shaper Origin with a regular router, but you'll need a template or jig to do it.
For example:
- It can do dovetails, etc. instead of purchasing a Leigh jig and using a standard router.
- You can do hinge mortises for various hardware.
- Cutouts in hardwood floors for various registers, without having to make a template for just that thing.
When you get into curves instead of just straight lines it can be easier to work with the Shaper than a template/jig. You can also use the Shaper to build a template that a standard bearing guided bit will follow.
You can do all of that with another tool, but the Shaper origin does it with less setup. The trade-off is if you have the setup then a regular router is probably going to be much faster to batch things out.
Broadly the same market as the Festool Domino. The Domino doesn't do anything that you can't do with a dowel jig or a biscuit jointer, it's just does one thing quickly, accurately and well. The Shaper Origin isn't a replacement for a full-sheet CNC router with an ATC, but it is an excellent alternative to a plunge router and a stack of custom templates. Nobody needs one, but for someone who does high-end custom cabinetry and joinery, the Origin should give a good ROI.
Being able to cut complex shapes on site for art builds, where a designer knows Illustrator but nothing about tool paths, has paid for my Shaper Origin several times over already.
I don't actually care about battery backup for my house. I have an $800 generator for that which is not tied to my truck being parked in front of the house.
I do want my pickup truck to be a good pickup truck, and the impression I get is that the Lightning is really an F150 and does a good job at that.
I ordered my ICE F150 in late 2022 (delivered in 2023), so don't plan to buy a new truck for another 7-9 years.
When I was ordering, the Lightnings were just not available. Even if they were, however, you can only get the Lightning in the crew cab short bed configuration with a 145" wheel base.
I wanted a 6.5' bed, so the Lightning doesn't offer that. For a classic F150, you can get 2 wheel base options with 3 different cab/bed combinations.
The frunk with lockable storage is actually a really attractive feature though in terms of carrying tools or other things you want secure and out of the weather.
My snowblower is 283lbs with a 10hp engine. It takes about 30-45 minutes to do my 3000sf driveway for a normal snow. Adding the weight and expense of batteries is something I'm not at all interested in.
Not all manufacturers have big batteries for power tools, but the ones that do like the MX fuel that is used to run concrete tools have prices that are >$500.
You can't just recharge the battery overnight like you can in your car if it run out; you need to have the machine running to get out of the house - and filling it up with gas is just a couple minutes charging is going to take much longer.
Even the smaller machine that I had before was 8hp (but had wheels instead of tracks) and weighed 150lbs.
One thing that I would object to is this characterization from the article:
>There are people who take insulin pumps (which provide insulin in very small very frequent doses and are ~permanently injected into your body, but are otherwise dumb as a brick) and combine them with continuous glucose monitors, and make the glucose measurements inform and control the pump. This is called “closed loop” or “artificial pancreas”, and getting one officially is very hard or impossible: not FDA approved yet / you need to be part of an university study to get one / … It’s one of those things that “will be here in 5 years”, they say every year for the past 30 years.
I've had a Medtronic CGM and pump for 6 years now (680G, now 780G). It is an FDA approved system with feedback from the CGM to the pump. The only thing I needed to get insurance approval was a blood test showing that I was T1 and not T2.
The auto mode has been greatly improved in the 780G pump vs. the 680G pump. I only need to stick my finger a couple times a week, and my control has improved. Without the pump and MDI it was quite a bit higher. It's nowhere near as good as an actual pancreas, but it is definitely not vaporware by any stretch of the imagination.
The Medtronic support is (mostly good), and I have a pretty high degree of confidence that it will keep me alive. I do have Kwikpens as backup in case of malfunctions - which do happen. The biggest things for me are as simple as ripping your infusion set out while away from home, or the thing has an intractable Bluetooth communications problem or other kind of hardware error.
The author is pretty much 100% right about "vibes" though, even with a pump.
My wife is T1D and she is really scared about the idea of moving to a closed loop system with a pump, but her endo is constantly pushing her towards it even though she is keeping her A1C at like ~6% with her Dexcom CGM.
The concern is the the G7 CGM seems to have times where it is so wildly off with readings that a closed loop system could kill her. This weekend the CGM was saying she was all the sudden at 40, but she was at about 115. I am scared to think what would happen in the night if the closed loop system thought it needed to raise her blood sugar... Logically I know it wouldnt raise it to a point that would cause medical harm, it would still put it higher than would be ideal for her health.
Maybe there are differences between the different brands, but the G7 from Dexcom's big selling point was "no more calibrations" and the FDA approval for that tagline, and we've been seeing a need to calibrate more than the G6, which is disappointing. Granted... sample size of n=1 so...
I don't find the Medtronic solution to be that off. But the closed loop solution can't raise your blood sugar, it can only lower it. It only has insulin which it can dial back or increase. The real danger would be if it detected you very high and then tried to rapidly decrease it.
The FDA approved systems do have safeties in there that alarm persistent highs or on any lows. They also won't provide more basal than a multiple of the pre-configured setting you have.
The biggest thing for me was the 780G alarms less than 680G when there is nothing that I actually want to do to change it. Waking up all the damn time is no fun.
Ahh you are right, I had the situation reversed in my head. It would be the false high reading that would be the issue.
That is good to know there are some safeguards in place to prevent an over-correction.
And I agree about the constant wake-ups. The Dexcom system will sometimes not stop alerting when it detects a low, even if she has taken glucose tabs and knows it will be taken care of. If she doesnt interact with the notification it continues to alarm every 15 minutes or so. There is a recompiled APK for the dexcom apps that changes some of the notification behaviors but she hasnt needed to use that recently.
Hey, thank you for the correction! I am not keeping up to date with how are the closed loops progressing, and from quite a few of comments here it seems like the future is already here :) Maybe just not evenly distributed - I just need to wait for it to get from US to CZ. I'm glad closed loops are already helping people around the world!
I recently worked for a company called Tandem Diabetes which has multiple closed loop, FDA-regulated systems going back 9 years:
"In July 2014, Tandem announced that it had submitted a PMA for the t:slim G4 insulin pump, which integrated t:slim Pump technology with the Dexcom G4 Platinum CGM System. This device was approved by the FDA in September 2015."
We were still working on international support when I left last year. As you can imagine, there are quite a few regulatory hurdles esp. regarding patient data portability and access.
You might not actually care about any particular brand or model. When I bought a new car in September 2023 (probably one of the worst times to do it), I was pretty much content with any AWD sedan or small SUV new or used that was not too old or too high mileage and had Carplay. I would have liked a power driver seat, but ended up compromising on that. Even reminding yourself of the list of features you want at each point.
There is a lot to think of with a car transaction that goes beyond mechnical function. The basic four boxes of finance or leasing/trade-in/price/"extras" are a lot to keep in your head all at once when you only rarely buy a car. I ended up going to about 6 or 7 dealerships to get what I wanted at a good enough price taking into consideration the trade value on my truck and what they had in stock.
I have a Sawstop for my main cabinet saw in my shop at home, but also a regular job site saw for working elsewhere.
The table saw is a great tool, and the safety feature makes sense. Especially for the cabinet saw where the incremental price for a comparable too is not so much - but there are plenty of other power tools that will hurt you just as badly. A router or jointer won't amputate a finger, it will just turn it to hamburger.
No matter the tool, you need to respect it and learn the safety rules.
As an American, American soldiers are not fighting. The Ukrainians are not asking them to either. We are paying taxes, and those taxes are being used to send weapons to Ukraine. I'm pro-Ukraine as long as they collectively want to fight themselves - whether that means we send them advanced weapon systems or provide training and support for an insurgency.
