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Guavanaut posted:Why didn't they go with two steered wheels at the front with Ackermann geometry and one fat driven wheel at the back? The Robin geometry seems like the worst way of doing it, you still need a differential and you fall over. It was to do with how the Reliant evolved. They started out being made by Raleigh (of the bicycles) as lightweight urban delivery trucks based around the front end and drivetrain of a motorbike but with a solid twin-wheel rear axle. When Raleigh decided to stop making motorised vehicles, their chief designer bought the rights and founded Reliant (named so he could re-use all the existing parts with 'R' cast into them). After sticking with motorcycle-based engineering for a while Reliant bought the rights to the Austin Seven's drivetrain in the late 30s when Austin stopped making it and so developed its 'one wheel at the front, conventional live axle with a diff at the back' layout. For vans and light cars propelled by an Austin Seven engine it was fine, but once you get into (relatively) heavier, faster stuff like the Regal 3/30 and the Robin it becomes a bit of a liability, although the instability has been greatly overstated in pop culture. But there is a reason why the 'sporty' three wheelers from Morgan etc. all had the single wheel at the back.
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Sep 3, 2021 10:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A lot of those vehicles really bring to mind how the whole definition of 'car' legally has fringes. I have driven Model Ts a couple of times, and the thing that makes them a complete mindfuck is that they have three pedals, a lever that looks like a handbrake and two stalks behind the steering wheel but none of them do what they would do in a modern (post-1920s) car. The 'handbrake' is actually a combined parking brake and (sort of) clutch. Pull it all the way back and it's a parking brake. Put it to the middle and it's as close as a Model T can be to being neutral. To make the thing move you have to push down on the left pedal, which is partly a clutch pedal that works backwards to a normal one and partly a way of engaging first gear. To get into second (top) you have to put the gear/clutch/brake lever all the way forwards, then you come off the left pedal and that engages second gear. The middle pedal is what engages reverse (so long as the lever-thing is in the mid position) and the right pedal is a transmission brake. The stalks behind the wheel are your ignition timing and throttle controls. Given that the Model T was conceived when everything about car design was very much up in the air and it was intended for people who had never driven a car before, it makes a certain amount of sense. It's basically a modern automatic transmission but not automated - it's all epicyclic gears and band brakes. So once you've got it all sussed you never miss a gearchange, you can't grind the gears and you don't have to master biting points or clutch control. As a modern driver it's much more confusing. I found I got the hang of it quite quickly...until something unexpected happens and you revert to muscle memory. Then you end up trying to put it into first and reverse gear simultaneously and the man from Ford Heritage gives you angry looks. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 3, 2021 13:03
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feedmegin posted:I mean not like the Bundesrepublik was in the market for strategic bombers ( and indeed looks like they were banned from producing aircraft postwar to make very sure of that). Mitsubishi also did and do make all sorts of stuff. Yes, a lot of the (in)famous German aircraft makers had odd sidelines in the 1950s because they were explicitly prevented from building military aircraft and the market for civilian aircraft was both extremely limited and dominated (by both market forces and political pressure) by manufacturers from outside Germany. At the same time there was a massive demand for small hyper-economical cars in Germany and aircraft makers are good at making lightweight, aerodynamic machines. So BMW licensed the Isetta and Messerschmitt and Heinkel made their own bubble cars. Messerschmitt and Junkers also made pre-fab buildings (on aircraft principles of construction) to address another acute shortage in post-war Germany. These became very popular in the UK in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, as did homegrown microcars like the Bond and Reliant. My grandmother graduated from a Lambretta scooter to a Heinkel Kabine in about 1956. The sudden popularity of these globular German oddities, putt-putting along at the front of traffic jams, was a major impetus for the creation of the Mini, which was required to offer the same footprint and economy as the German bubble cars but with more practicality and better performance.
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Sep 4, 2021 11:22
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Lobster God posted:https://twitter.com/grantshapps/status/1434814678476197889?s=19 It really is beyond parody - rightly or wrongly the Pacers are widely known as a symbol of the North being denied proper funding and infrastructure and being fobbed off with a load of cheap old poo poo that are woefully inadequate for and wouldn't for a moment be considered for the Home Counties...and the 'Blue Wall' populist Tories' promise to Level Up turns out to be to retire those infamous symbols and repurpose them as other forms of cheap fobbed-off stopgap services that are woefully inadequate. Seriously, if that was proposed as the punchline of a satirical sketch ("Retire the Pacers...and use them as schools!") it would be too on the nose.
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Sep 6, 2021 23:04
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 I always enjoy the way the Telegraph's paywall puts a font fade and ellipsis at the end of the teaser, because it's always at about the point my attention drifts away and it emphasises how it's just another unhinged reactionary rant like the ones from your uncle who spends too much time on Facebook that you try and tune out at family gatherings.
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Sep 9, 2021 12:22
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Also, I know it's the modern Torygraph and all, but the mood whiplash is incredible. 18 months ago the GE result meant that the stalwart yeomen of Britain had decisively, overwhelmingly, finally rejected all forms of left-wing politics and thought forever and we were going to be a sceptred isle of free enterprise, property rights and common sense for ever more. Now there's been a 1.25% tax rise and suddenly we've become a Soviet republic and the NHS is destroying capitalism...[I can barely type that with a straight face, although it's yet another entry in the "right-wingers making reality sound much more awesome than it actually is" list]
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Sep 9, 2021 12:47
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Dead Goon posted:Pounds, pence and shillings sure, but then there are guineas and what the gently caress are they for? The pound (£) was made up of 20 shillings and represented a fixed and real weight of silver - literally a pound of silver was divided into 240 parts. Each part was the weight of a penny, and twelve pennies was a shilling. The guinea came along several centuries later and was a gold coin weighing a quarter of an ounce. It was introduced to restore a 'real' value to the pound (£) since a pound (lb) of silver was no longer deemed worth 20 shillings. So the new golden guinea was worth £1 (or 20 shillings). But this immediately ran into problems as the values of gold and silver diverged and went up and down at different rates, meaning that the guinea was worth a varying number of shillings. Finally, in the 1800s, the value of the guinea was fixed...but at the time the value of the guinea in silver was 21 shillings. So 20 shillings made up £1 and the guinea was worth one shilling more. Being Britain, there was of course a class element to all of this. Expensive stuff was sold in guineas, moderately expensive stuff was sold in pounds and everyday stuff was sold in shillings and pence. So the aristocracy paid for land, furniture, horses, livestock and medical bills in guineas. The middle classes received their salaries, paid their mortgages, settled their tradesmens' bills and made their investments in pounds and the working class received their weekly wage, paid their rent and bought their food in shillings.
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Sep 16, 2021 21:19
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Skull Servant posted:Isn't the target for the Lib Dems less the old Tory who is socially regressive and more the One Nation "Economically conservative but culturally liberal" conservative voter? Therefore, attempting to go for those metropolitan Conservative seats that mostly believe that the flag waving bring back pounds and ounces is gauche? That's not One Nation Conservatism, that's just modern neoliberal conservatism, even if both Cameron and Johnson called themselves One Nation-ers. I don't think actual ONC in the Macmillan, pre-Thatcher 'wet' sense actually exists as a meaningful constituency in either the Conservative party or the country any more. The modern equivalents will be very happy with Johnson's strongly patriotic, culturally chauvinistic, big-spending, railway-nationalising, infrastructure-building, levelling-up, prime-the-industrial-pump, Global Britain platform, so long as they don't spot the difference between rhetoric and reality. ONC was always a hair's breadth away from "hmmm...what if we did the bits of socialism that we like but only for our people in our nation. Socialism on a national scale; a national socialism, if you will...  " The "economically conservative, culturally liberal" lot (if they exist - wasn't there some big study a couple of years ago that found that while a lot of people say that they fit that description, but when given policy options a large majority of them turned out to also be pretty conservative socially as well?) will already be LibDem orange-bookers or the right of the Labour Party I'd have thought?
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Sep 19, 2021 20:56
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forkboy84 posted:This seems unfair to Dacia. Very unfair. Modern Dacias are excellent - basic but entirely modern cars of a sensible size and weight, built on proven Renault platforms, with all the modern safety and emissions gear left on but a lot of the electronic frippery taken off. They're well-made where it counts, even if the dashboards look low-rent and the door card plastics aren't soft-touch. A much more sustainable form of car than a high-performance £100k electric saloon with computer hardware that bricks itself after a few years because it runs out of re-writable space and can't boot up anymore. The rest of your post was spot on, too.
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Sep 20, 2021 18:59
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The party members famously non-voters themselves. It's a continuation of the view that was spun up when Corbyn was leader that the Labour membership aren't 'normal' or 'real' people. The fact that they literally are part of the voting electorate (and, in that period especially, a statistically significant chunk of it) doesn't seem to count. The PLP listen to the real electorate (i.e. the non-left wing bit) so they have got their finger on the pulse. Ipso facto. Just like how anyone talking about minority rights, environmentalism, foreign policy, humanitarian crises, land reform etc. is immediately a member of the 'metropolitan elite', while if you have Genuine Concerns about immigration, don't care about 'the genders' and just want your taxes to be as low possible, you're speaking for the real hard-working backbone of the Great British Public and your voice and views must be heard. The post-2016 populism where anyone with an accent centred north of the M4 who says anything vaguely reactionary or regressive is immediately treated as a sage prophet dispensing folksy truth ('common sense'/'real issues') is one of the most infuriating facets of modern politics. Failed Imagineer posted:Can't wait for Ken Loach to make a devastating social realist drama about Tory MPs struggling to refinance their third home I saw someone griping about the Beeb on facebook once, which went along the lines of: "They're always pushing a left-wing message. Every time I tune into Radio 4's Afternoon Play it's about some poor family on a council estate who get their benefits cut. When are they going to tell a story about a middle class family whose living standards are being squeezed by the high tax burden?" Can you imagine it? A gritty [stoneware farmhouse] kitchen sink drama about how Dad's corporate gains tax has gone up again so they'll have to give up Ocado deliveries and are forced to choose between going to Val d'Isere in the spring and Polzeath in the autumn...
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Sep 21, 2021 14:23
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Guavanaut posted:The government should be run like a business. Didn't this conversation literally happen on Newsnight or something? Sometime in mid 2019 I want to say. Some Ivory Tower Elite Neo-Marxist suggested that it would make much more financial sense for the state to take out a low-interest loan (effectively from itself, too) and buy up all the houses which are currently owned by landlords but rent is paid/subsidised by housing benefits - the interest on the loan would be less than what is paid out in benefits and the state would have appreciating assets on its account. It was also pointed out that if this was a business the accountants would be screaming that it was crazy to pay this much for external services when borrowing was so cheap and it could be brought in-house. The bow-tie wearing representative of the Institute for Common Sense or whatever's only answer was "no, not like that... somethingsomething free market, blah blah landlords provide an essential service by providing houses to those who can't afford mortgages"
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Sep 23, 2021 12:39
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Bobby Deluxe posted:The interesting thing about the ambulance drivers leaving to become HGV drivers is that it reflects this weird "I think this job is more important than yours" mentality. Like I remember working in head office for a lighting company before 2008, and it was 14k a year, and the staff were absolutely horrified when they found out the bin men were on 16k. Despite the fact that we were sat in a comfy office pushing numbers around various databases and they're out physically labouring in any weather. Precisely. Remember when Corbyn supported the striking McDonald's workers wanting £15/hour in 2019? His twitter was full of people saying "but I've worked at my job for 30 years and I don't get paid that much, and now some kid flipping burgers wants to get paid more than me it's a disgrace!!" and "More Labour Lunacy - that means the workers will be on more than their managers!" and "This makes no sense - what's to stop me quitting my [high stress job] and going to work for the same money at Maccy-D's then?" and "I didn't go to uni and work hard to get promotions to only get paid two quid more per hour than a kid at McDonalds!" Just a complete inability to see the situation in the round, or through any other lense than some Just World everyone-is-already-being-paid-exactly-what-they're-worth bullshit. I absolutely agree with you on being happy to do 'easy' min-wage jobs if they were actually 'min effort/stress' too. I've found that the most stressful, physically taxing, emotionally draining jobs I've had were the ones which I did for minimum wage and now I get paid a frankly ludicrous amount of money to sit on my computer at home and do piss-easy work with no-one on my back. My partner and I were talking about this the other day when we were walking round our local area and noted how there is absolutely no shortage of 'work that needs doing' - there are BINS to empty, verges to mow, flower-beds to mow, litter to pick up, fences to mend, graffiti to clean, streetlamps to repair, trees and hedges to trim, gutters to sweep, road surfaces to repair, bus shelters to re-glaze and so on. It's just that, in the case of all that council-managed stuff there's no money and resources to do so and in general that work isn't deemed valuable enough by the Glorious Efficiency of the Free Market to pay enough for people to actually live decently while they do it.
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Sep 24, 2021 14:31
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Starmer finds a consensus - that his ideas are terrible
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Sep 24, 2021 19:34
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learnincurve posted:Do people not know we refused to sign the Schengen Agreement in the 1980s and people on mainland Europe have the right to travel anywhere without passports or ID? This was also why our freedom of movement was a lot free-er than the EU's actual rules on Freedom of Movement - by the rules, you don't have a right to remain if you're looking for a job, and host nations can require migrant workers to register with authorities etc. and don't have a right to claim benefits until they've been in their new country for three months. The UK's refusal to be part of Schengen and any accompanying ID scheme meant we had a relative free-for-all because we had no effective way of tracking who was here from the EU, what they were doing and how long they'd been here. To be clear, I generally think that that's a good thing, and I certainly wouldn't have trusted Major's Conservatives or New Labour with a forriner-tracking ID scheme. But so many of the things they would later rail against in the Brexit arguments were caused directly by their own decisions driven by their own refusal to even consider engaging with the EU and its processes.
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Sep 25, 2021 23:05
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Private Speech posted:Stuff about EU Free Movement requirements Thanks  . Unsurprisingly I'm no expert on EU regs. I just remember it being laid out somewhere how the Tories' bleating about how "It's uncontrollable!" and "we just don't know who's here!" were all just reaping the consequences of past decisions.Guavanaut posted:
I'd forgotten about the ST
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Sep 26, 2021 12:03
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Everything about Brexit just proves the old maxim about how bad generals think about tactics, good generals think about strategy, and great generals think about logistics. I mean the almost perfect contrast between "YOU CAN HAVE A CROWN ON YOUR PINT GLASS AGAIN" and the lack of CO2 production meaning beer production was threatened would be hackish and lazy if you wrote it as fiction. This government is like a real-life experiment where they get that group of old guys setting the world to rights round a table in the pub (or say "just get together and SORT IT OUT" on QT) to run the country - Just deport all the illegals, get Nish Kumar off the telly, put gunboats in the Channel, put the crowns back on the pints and make it legal to sell stuff in pounds again - Bosh! Job done! How hard can it be?" "What do you mean there's more to running a country than that?"
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Sep 26, 2021 12:45
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:
Ah yes, the bad sort of capitalism which is ruining the good sort of capitalism that we intended to happen...
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Sep 26, 2021 13:03
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kingturnip posted:Yeah, I'm feeling pumped after Streeting and McGinn's speech. It's been said before, but it's such obvious projection. They really can't understand the notion of joining a left-wing party because you a) believe in left-wing politics and b) believe that said politics would be good for society as a whole. Having principles that you don't want to abandon for mere electoral success is 'navel-gazing' and campaigning for policies that fit your principles, even if they're not obviously and immediately popular, is 'self-indulgent'. If you joined the party because of Jeremy Corbyn that must be because he has hypnotised you with his jam-powered psychic beacon to join his cult of personality, not because he embodied and espoused things you agreed with. You can also tell that so much of the PLP and the party higher-ups are actively annoyed that their membership (and post-2019, a large part of what remains of their voter base) is made up of young, diverse, internationalist, urban-dwelling progressives. Every now and then you can tell that it really sticks in their craw having to even acknowledge that reality, and they want them all to gently caress off and stop making things so difficult for them.
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Sep 26, 2021 16:08
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CGI Stardust posted:for the love of god don't tell Redmond this or he'll try and revoke any and all regulations that stop vans being filled with flammable liquid This was my first thought - not that they didn't appreciate the difference, but that they did know the difference and were going to tear up all the rules and regs so you could drive a lorry on a moped license or something. You can see it now - Help Drive Britain Forward. Like when they let enthusiasts have a go at driving trains during the General Strike.
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Sep 27, 2021 18:23
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This sort of "ordinary working people rejected looney left Labour" thing really winds me up. It's always helpful to have figures to deploy to these sorts of people:  Even in 2019 (let alone 2017), the plurality of voters who are in work (taking out the retired and the unemployed, although the unemployed also mostly voted Lab) voted Labour. The only ones that didn't were those on household incomes above £100k. It was the overwhelming desire of people 50+ and retired to vote Conservative, and the geographical loving that FPTP generates, that delivered Johnson's majority.
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Sep 30, 2021 15:10
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