Back in 2014 I had a job driving Over The Road Test Vehicles.

After putting 25,000 miles on a car I would drive it to Montgomery AL to the Hyundai plant where they would disassemble the vehicle and inspect it. Then they would just recycle it.

When flying into or out of Montgomery Regional Airport you can't miss the plant because they have Hyundai in big letters on the roof. Visible on Google Earth too.

In their showroom they have actual cutaway engines you can look at. Those damn things don't look like any engine I recognize. Amazing.

This video shows what the cars looks like when testing. We only drove them to get the required amount of miles on the vehicle for the manufacture. No test tracks or courses like the video shows.



That was a fun job for me. Got to drive the 2015 Corvette Stingray from Florida to Las Vegas and back to Florida again before they were ever hit the showroom floor.

The Dodge Viper and Dodge Challenger with the Hellcat engine were also nice treat.

Only if you ignore the acidification, heating, and other degradation of the oceans (which contain 99% of the living space and as much as 80% of all life on the planet)...and history. The massive habitat losses there are almost completely unrelated to farming feed crops and dwarf the recent losses on land.


Today creating space for farming is the major single cause for the intentional destruction of terrestrial habitats, but not historically.


Wiki-
Habitat destruction caused by humans includes land conversion from forests, etc. to arable land, urban sprawl, infrastructure development, and other anthropogenic changes to the characteristics of land. Habitat degradation, fragmentation, and pollution are aspects of habitat destruction caused by humans that do not necessarily involve over destruction of habitat, yet result in habitat collapse. Desertification, deforestation, and coral reef degradation are specific types of habitat destruction for those areas (deserts, forests, coral reefs).

...but what do you care? GET YOUWA AZZ TO VEGA!

Um....earth dollars are fine to fund your trip off earth....you'll have to get your own Vega spending money.
Extinctions today are 99% from habitat destruction, not the bush meat trade.

Eat some protein, your brain isn't working

'corporations bought, branded it, and started selling it at ludicrously inflated prices'

'From the ORIGINAL creators of Fallout'

'try not to break it'

Throwing shade at how badly Bethesda has messed up fallout since New Vegas.

“You know you didn’t have to shoot either one right?”

Roasting Bethesda quests, especially in Fallout 4

It was tongue in cheek of course, but they clearly were aiming at people dissatisfied with Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.

New Vegas was riddled with bugs on release, what are you talking about?

Just Google "New Vegas Bugs" and you'll find gems like this...

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/fallout-new-vegas-is-buggy-as-hell-but-wheres-the-outrage/

and helpful guides like...

https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/fallout-new-vegas-bugs-glitches-how-to-fix-work-around-them.197148984/

You are right, I copied and pasted the title from YouTube as is. No intent other then the comedy aspect was in my mind at the time I posted this one.

But I have lived in the states enough to know this is a tender subject. Every time I go to Vegas I visit the gun ranges that offer full Auto Micro Tavor. Outside of those trips it's just air rifles.

Pretty good video. Specific things:

Too many prostitutes: Most of the non-Thai people that complain about this went to the wrong places in Thailand. Pattaya was a tiny fishing village before the Vietnam war. Then, soldiers started getting shipped into the country for R&R. The Thai government didn't really know what to do with them, so they sorta passed the buck and decided to send them to Pattaya to relax. Bunch of stressed out dudes there, nothing to do, high demand for alternate activities ... the market answered.

Fast forward to today, and Pattaya knows exactly what put it on the map. I hate that place -- it is like what would happen if you took the worst/sleaziest elements of Vegas and Tijuana, and then built a "city" around it. Shittiest beach in Thailand, chock full of sleaze, disgusting. However, it is one of the most major tourist destinations. Gee, why could that be? Is it in spite of the nature of the place, or because of it? No false advertising here, you know what you're getting when you book a trip there. And if that is your thing, more power to ya.

Now, I don't want to act like prostitution exists in Pattaya and Soi Cowboy / Patpong in Bangkok, and is absent elsewhere. Far from it. Every town, down on to tiny ones, likely has a red-light district and brothels. The ones you hear about are sex tourism pits like those major ones, but the trade is alive and well pretty much everywhere -- and mostly caters to local Thais.

I've honestly never been to such an establishment or sought those services (in 11 years of being here), but I don't care that they are available. The most significant negative is that they are NOT well-regulated like, say, what I've heard about Amsterdam. Prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand. So the de-facto situation is that brothels have to pay protection money to police in order to avoid getting shut down or "inspected", etc.

Corruption is a major problem -- much worse than prostitution, in my opinion.


Too many ladyboys: It is certainly true that there are more trans people per capita here than pretty much anywhere else that I know of. It took me a while, being a country kid from Kansas, but I see that in pretty much the same light as the German narrator in the video at this point. Acceptance is good. You do you, man.

As a stereotype on the flip side of the coin, I think the ladyboys tend to be great in custom interaction kinds of jobs. Cashiers at 7-11, waitpeople at restaurants, etc. Polite, attentive, helpful. And often the most willing to attempt to use English. A lot of the best students that I've taught English to have been ladyboy leaning.


Freedom: I'm with @Mordhaus here. When your personal liberty is mainly due to the apathy / incompetence of the governing authority, and they may choose to get off their asses and revoke that at any time ... perhaps it isn't something to brag about. Very basic stuff like dissenting speech and protesting is met with being carted off for little re-education chats, etc. Pretty scary shit, actually.


Basically I tend to think that just like anywhere on Earth, there's a lot of good here and plenty of bad too. There's plenty of legitimate gripes with cultural elements and stuff in Thailand, but the most common ones (that the video pretty accurately listed) are pretty insignificant in my opinion.

It feels like that time I was playing Fallout New Vegas and I found that Vault filled with nothing but guys named Gary.

Your video, Intel's drone light show off 250 drones flying in Las Vegas., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I went to the pinball museum in Vegas and they talk about the history of some of the machines; I think I remember that in the early days some of them were used for gambling and they got banned; then the games became skill games, but there were still a few that from all appearances were skill games, but if you landed in the right spot the owner would pay you out illegally

Even the non-firearm homicide rate in the US is 5 times that of Japan. Japanese gun control can't take credit for all that. Personality is more than 50% heritable, and by extension, so is violent behavior. (Case in point: the vegas killer's father was on the FBI most wanted list). Personalitywise, Japanese tend to be relatively meek and inhibited. Even if every one of them owned a gun, their murder rate would probably still be a fraction of the US murder rate.

Banning 3rd party mods that increase rate of fire actually seems to be getting bipartisan support in congress, with their NRA overlords publicly giving the green light.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lasvegas-shooting/nra-backs-bump-stocks-regulations-after-las-vegas-massacre-idUSKBN1CA0X6

I'm guessing since gun manufacturers, represented by the NRA, aren't in the bump stock business, they don't really want to suffer from the bad press caused by a related but separate industry.

I just hope congress has the balls to also ban the resale of existing rapid fire mods, not just the sale of new ones.

Only what they mentioned in the news.
20 ish guns.
2 ar15s, 1 with a bump stock.
1 ak pattern rifle (47 claimed, but the news is clueless. Could be a 74, could be an odd variant), possibly with a bump stock.
Then a bunch of other guns, not described.

Yes, full auto varies. I erred on the higher rate side.
A more realistic rate would be 12hz auto, 6hz bump, and 3hz semi.

Only other non-NFA non-bump rapid fire mechanism that I know of is a binary trigger (fires on pull, and on release). Effectively doubles your semi fire rate.

In any case, he only needed 1 gun and spare magazines.
I assume he brought everything not because it was necessary, but because he was planning to die and he had the stuff, so why not use it one last time (not like he'll get another chance).

To be fair, so far, mass shooters have stuck around for the long haul. Escape hasn't been an issue. But sure, in the future it could be.

True, you don't have to be 100% squeaky clean, but the vegas guy so far does look like he was.

As an aside, our felony code is incredibly expansive. People get disqualified from gun ownership over things that most normal people wouldn't even think would be illegal.

There's a stat that some lawyer published : a person typically commits 3 [obscure] felonies per day just going about normal daily activities. You can basically put anyone in jail if you choose to monitor them.

IMO, felonies should be divided into major and minor, with anything non violent being minor, and not disqualifying of gun ownership or right to vote.

Eg. I don't care if someone is running a pot farm. It isn't bothering anyone, it shouldn't even be a crime. But if it's gonna be a felony, at least it should be some lesser felony than it is now.

-scheherazade