It was almost certainly for manufacturing/cost reasons.

Not having it be hydraulic probably saves $2k per unit.

I don’t think VW ever called it a frunk. I would believe you if you insist they did it can provide any evidence. Tesla want the first to put storage up there, but they did coin “frunk”.

Tesla was the first to say it and they didn’t trademark it. It works so everyone else adopted the term.

Ford figured out how to do it for the Lightning.

That’s basically what I use mine for. I work in environmental engineering and am very often on construction sites. So I use it to store my PPE bag.

I have a MMachE. Honestly the Frunk is not as useful as I imagined it would be (at least Ford’s implementation of the Frunk." You have to open it just like you would the hood of your ICE car, which is fine for an ICE car hood, but not very convenient for storage access. As a result, I really don’t use it that much.

Vampires is great way to describe them. Out of the debt they use to buy the company, they pay themselves huge “management fees”. So they are taking on crazy debt to buy a company, paying themselves millions, and leaving the bank a rotten corpse to clean up.

I really don’t understand who keeps giving these people money?

Yeah. It was taking a company that is only barely financially solvent because it was grown very conservatively and had no debt, and flooding that company with debt. I mean it’s not Nobel prize economics stuff here.

Who keeps giving these VC guys money? Unless the goal is specifically to close the company the business plan made no sense.

Scouting America is a nearly completely volunteer organization. Their technology is generally about 20 years behind because it’s all pieced together by volunteers that “kinda done something like this for my company once”.

I’ve always thought it was a funny history quirk that the Holy Roman Empire actually lasted longer in time than the Roman Empire.

I love how certain words evolve very very slowly.

The competency factor is something that online commentors greatly undervalue. The US, for all it’s faults in many places, is extremely competent. It’s an institutional world history anomaly. No one comes close.

And that’s the source of the “Greatness” of America that the billionaire-bro class just doesn’t understand and is actively poisoning. They think they are going to own “American Greatness”, but they don’t understand, can’t understand, that they are actively poisoning the institutions that made them rich. They are turning America into Russia (that is literally their expressed goal), but when they do there went be another America left to keep the world order in place.

To circle back to the Su-57, I don’t believe any of it’s advertised capabilities are real. Which is why everyone that was going to order them (India) has greatly pulled back their orders.

And I promise you, the F-35 is definitely not bullshit. But if the programs and institutions that support it aren’t diligently maintained, then in 20 years every plane will be worthless.

I personally don’t believe Putin believes Russia has a single viable nuke remaining in it’s arsenal.

My primary evidence for this suspicion is that for all Putin’s consistent nuclear sabre rattling, he’s never done the one thing that would really rattle the sabre: conduct a nuclear weapons test. If he had a nuke to test he would have tested it just to scare off the West.

The text of the matter is that building a nuclear bomb really isn’t that difficult. A reasonably well funded university physics department anywhere in the world could probably build one. Having a nuclear weapons program is another matter. That’s orders of magnitude more difficult and more expensive. Honestly, I would be really surprised if the USA had half of the viable nuclear weapons it claims. Much less Russia.

They couldn’t maintain a viable tire rotation program with all the grift and corruption. They definitely don’t have a viable stealth fighter her program.

… Because they don’t want Ukraine to bomb them all.

Why is this headline a question?

Software design is cheap in the same way flat pack furniture from Amazon is cheap.

You pay for what you pay for.