I don't get this attitude. Everyone criticizes auto companies for not making a small truck anymore, and then Ford comes out with the Maverick and then you say it doesn't have enough towing capacity. It can tow 4000 lbs. That covers a whole lot of use cases. It also has a payload capacity of 1500 lbs which is quite respectable for a small truck. As for FWD vs. RWD, who cares? How does that affect your ability to move things around?
Really the only thing I think you can ding it for is the small bed. It used to be that trucks this size would have a regular cab or an extended cab with the two tiny side facing seats, and they would have a longer bed. With the tailgate down you can still move sheet goods with a Maverick though.
I get your point, but those tow numbers are notoriously optimistic. Most people I bet would not be comfortable towing 4000 lbs with a Maverick, and it would struggle on grades or in heat. You can even feel that kind of weight with a full-size truck. Above 5000 lbs in most places you need independent trailer brakes.
The real issue that limits the Maverick for a wider audience is the rear is too small to comfortably fit kids, especially in car seats. Adding 4 in of leg room to the rear and making the whole truck 4 in longer would've made in a great homeowner family option without sacrificing much agility.
Most people don't need to tow 4000 lbs period. If I had a Maverick and needed to tow 4000 lbs I would absolutely do it though. I've towed more than that in an older Tacoma that's not that different from the Maverick. Would I do it at 75mph? Probably not. Would I be towing 4000 lbs going 65 up an 8% grade in the heat at high altitude in Arizona? Again probably not, but the idea that a small truck needs to be able to do everything is just against the concept of a small truck. If you must have the ability to do that, get something bigger.
I agree that the Maverick's bed is small and the back seat is small. IMO they would have been better off making a regular cab or an "access cab" thing with two doors and fold-down seats, and used the extra length to add to the bed. Those are great if you're single or don't have kids, and you just need to carry passengers very occasionally. If you're regularly hauling kids around you definitely want the next step up. A lot of tradesmen essentially never even use the passenger seat though, and the back seat is just lost bed space unless you're using it for locked storage.
People want smaller, not weaker, trucks. The 1985 Ford ranger compact truck could tow over 3000 lbs base, and over 5000 with upgrades.
The Maverick only tows 2000 base, the 4000 is an upgrade package and only for trailers with their own brakes.
RWD is pretty functionally important for a vehicle to maintain control while towing significant weight, as all the weight sits on the back of the frame, and that's where you want the engine power to go.
The Maverick is not a working truck, which was my original point. In terms of what matters, it is worse in every way than a 40 year old design.
You need to have AWD for the Maverick to have the 4000 lbs rating. It's going to be sending power to the rear wheels when you're towing.
You can't really compare the tow ratings with a 1985 Ranger. Back then the ratings were not standardized and were generally inflated for marketing purposes. Today tow ratings are standardized by SAE J2807. The Maverick has way more power than the old Ranger and weighs about 600 lbs more, plus it has trailer sway control. You're going to have a much easier time towing 4000 lbs in the Maverick than the Ranger.
Edit: The Maverick also has 300 lbs more payload capacity than the 1984 Ranger. The fact is, not everyone needs a giant heavy truck. I see loads of tradesmen driving Mavericks.
The '22 ranger tows up to 7500, payload 1500. Sure, bed is only 5-6 feet, but is 4x4, and interior feels good, and is about as bougie as the big F gets. Had it down to 12L/100km, a full tank gave me a 700km range at that point. Fits my family of 5 when it needs to. I would buy one again e-z.
Grabbed it in '25 with factory warranty still on it for about the price of a new maverick.
The electric backpack leaf blower isn’t that much more expensive than the gas ones. If you’re using it in a business, the extra cost really isn’t significant amortized over thousands of uses.
If you’re poor and using it on your own property, a corded electric is like $50 and works fine. The cord is a little bit of a hassle, but you don’t have to worry about mixing gas and oil, fuel stabilizer etc etc. electric has gotten to the point of being good enough, and it’s not reasonable to make so much noise in a residential area when there are good alternatives.
They should. Unfortunately a lot of incentives are not aligned. Due to the profit cap as a percentage of premiums, generally higher medical spending increases health insurance profits rather than reducing them. It's the same thing with PG&E -- the only way for them to make more money is to increase costs. It's exactly the opposite of a normally functioning market, and you see the same result in both cases.
There are more powerful forces than the profit caps, namely that the big insurers now actually also own the doctors.
And capped or not, the pay-vider structure allows intra-company eliminations to bury arbitrary amounts of money as "not profit" even though it effectively is.
And even if that weren't true, the expected coverage term for a US patient is ~4 years due to it being tied to employment, so there is quite literally zero incentive to address any health issue that won't materialize as cost in the next few years (obesity being one such type of health problem).
> And capped or not, the pay-vider structure allows intra-company eliminations to bury arbitrary amounts of money as "not profit" even though it effectively is.
Source? There are 7 large publicly listed health insurers with public financials, all underperforming SP500 for more than a decade. There are myriad other non profits such as Kaiser/Cambia/Premera/Providence/various BCBS/etc, all with public financials as well.
Where is all this fraud going? And it’s happening across hundreds of executive offices across the country? And getting past 50 state insurance regulators that have to approve prices for insurance?
That would be remarkable levels of corruption and collusion.
It's not "fraudulent" per se, nor does it require corruption or collusion beyond what people already openly accept when they accept the existence of payviders (which they shouldn't! Or at least not for-profit payviders).
Payvider: An entity that is both a payer (insurer) and a provider (medical practice). Most payviders also have vertically integrated PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers), pharmacies, and labs, all of which participate in the same scheme.
A few of the examples you listed are NOT payviders, they're just payers, and therefore do not have these levers available to them.
Vertically integrated companies evade profit caps on their insurance division by shifting money to their unregulated provider, PBM, or labs divisions. It's pretty simple: the insurance arm overpays its own subsidiary doctors and clinics and records these internal transfers as mandatory "medical care" which is recorded as loss on the insurance side. The parent company then pockets the excess money as unrestricted profit on the provider/PBM/lab side, effectively bypassing the legal limit on how much insurance revenue they can keep and completely destroying the incentive to manage costs through their insurance division, at least when those costs originate from their own providers, which given that e.g. UHG is now the largest employer of doctors in the US, is increasingly often!
Is it fraudulent, corrupt, or collusive for a health insurer to employ doctors who deliver care? Not per se, but it gives insurers the ability to more or less arbitrarily convert premium dollars into profit while still getting people to defend them with claims like "they've been underperforming the SP500 for more than a decade."
Here are a few sources about different constituent behaviors, though you'd have to do a decent amount of reading to stitch together the full picture of how this works:
> Vertically integrated companies evade profit caps on their insurance division by shifting money to their unregulated provider, PBM, or labs divisions. It's pretty simple: the insurance arm overpays its own subsidiary doctors and clinics and records these internal transfers as mandatory "medical care" which is recorded as loss on the insurance side. The parent company then pockets the excess money as unrestricted profit on the provider/PBM/lab side, effectively bypassing the legal limit on how much insurance revenue they can keep and completely destroying the incentive to manage costs through their insurance division, at least when those costs originate from their own providers, which given that e.g. UHG is now the largest employer of doctors in the US, is increasingly often!
Yes, UNH does better than the other managed care organizations because their healthcare business has higher margins than their insurance business. But it’s certainly not arbitrary, and it’s apparently not enough to make their shares worth buying.
More importantly, UNH competed against other insurers. They don’t get to “arbitrarily” pay their doctors (as if any business wants to overpay their employees). If they pay too much, then they will have to charge higher premiums. Premiums which also have to be approved by state regulators. And it’s a fact that UNH’s premiums are comparable to everyone else’s premiums. Why else would people buy from them?
>Is it fraudulent, corrupt, or collusive for a health insurer to employ doctors who deliver care? Not per se, but it gives insurers the ability to more or less arbitrarily convert premium dollars into profit while still getting people to defend them with claims like "they've been underperforming the SP500 for more than a decade."
The silly claim is stating managed care organizations are booking outsize profits, yet they don’t show up in 10-Ks or even shateholders’ pockets.
Underperformance relative to SP500 is a factual claim. 2% to 3% profit margin (objectively a tiny profit margin is a factual claim for 6 different businesses. UNH is at 5% to 7%, which is decent, but pathetic compared to tech/pharmaceutical/finance/real estate/oil companies.
Hopefully you can see why this all sounds like unfounded conspiracy theories. Just the fact that it’s better to own SP500 than a health insurer stock should be enough to conclude there are no “unrestricted” arbitrary profits being taken. They are very much restricted, and their shareholders know.
> Yes, UNH does better than the other managed care organizations because their healthcare business has higher margins than their insurance business. But it’s certainly not arbitrary, and it’s apparently not enough to make their shares worth buying.
> The silly claim is stating managed care organizations are booking outsize profits,
Is this claim in the room with us now?
My claim is that the pay-vider structure enables these businesses to produce way, way, way more money than their regulatory "profit cap" leads people to believe. They can remove what would be profit from their insurance arm (where profit is capped anyway, so it keeps them under the cap) and dump it into their healthcare arm (proven by above-market self-reimbursement rates) to fund network expansion, which then further strengthens the insurance arm's market position (alleviating their need to "compete against other insurers" [ lol ])
Your claim is actually concordant with mine, which is that this profit doesn't show up as margin and doesn't show up as excellent stock performance. Correct! That's what it means to hide profit in order to stay below profit cap!
Anyway it's clear that I'm talking to a "stocks guy" who lacks the curiosity to actually understand how a business works beyond the 10-K (where all this stuff is discussed, by the way, you can find it euphemistically referred to as "network optimization").
Like I said, you'd have to do some reading well beyond the 10-Ks and the price chart lmao.
>Your claim is actually concordant with mine, which is that this profit doesn't show up as margin and doesn't show up as excellent stock performance. Correct! That's what it means to hide profit in order to stay below profit cap!
This definition of “hide profit” seems to be no different than “invest in the business”.
> which then further strengthens the insurance arm's market position (alleviating their need to "compete against other insurers" [ lol ])
Why is this “lol”? It is true that vertical integration results in efficiencies, and that can lead to lower premiums (not that it will absent sufficient competition). Kaiser has been doing it to much acclaim for almost 100 years.
I hadn't thought about the 4 year aspect. That is a great insight. I am against the current US healthcare system in general but I wonder if decoupling healthcare from employment (slightly) could help. Maybe employers should be required to pay for coverage that an employee selects? (clearly a lot of hand waiving of the exact mechanism here but..) This would incentivize healthcare plans to actually compete for someone to sign up with them and to give them an incentive to keep that person healthy since they would likely stick around longer with them.
You shouldn't constantly be hovering over your kids. Still, you don't want them to get in serious trouble. As a parent, you can curate the options they have without knowing exactly what they are doing. You can fill bookshelves with appropriate books, and if you see them reading on the couch, you don't need to know exactly what they're reading. Some people also are able to control where they live, what schools their kids go to, what friends you invite over to your house, etc.
One day your kid might have the friend over that you suspect might be trouble. You check in a little more often. Online is harder. You see them with the device, and without controls, what's going on could be almost anything.
I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its way.
If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.
It could probably be vaguely useful in the kitchen/dining room/mudroom if I had pets/kids. As it is, a broom vac takes just a few minutes. Maybe if I had more day to day mess, I'd feel differently.
I think that the difficulty is that Chinese companies both don't respect IP, but also move much faster than U.S. companies in the consumer electronics space. Part of the speed advantage is being physically close, linguistically close, and culturally close to the factories that are actually making the products, but there are other advantages as well.
Honestly I think it's more that he was backed into a corner. The Teslas from ~9 years ago when they first started selling "full self driving" as an option, had some OK cameras and, by modern standards, a very crappy radar.
The radar they had really couldn't detect stationary objects. It relied on the doppler effect to look for moving objects. That would work most of the time, but sometimes there would be a stationary object in the road, and then the computer vision system would have to make a decision, and unfortunately in unusual situations like a firetruck parked at an angle to block off a crash site, the Tesla would plow into the firetruck.
Given that the radar couldn't really ever be reliable enough to create a self driving vehicle, after he hired Karpathy, Elon became convinced that the only way to meet the promise was to just ignore the radar and get the computer vision up to enough reliability to do FSD. By Tesla's own admission now, the hardware on those 2016+ vehicles is not adequate to do the job.
All of that is to say that IMO Elon's primary reason for his opinions about Lidar are simply because those older cars didn't have one, and he had promised to deliver FSD on that hardware, and therefore it couldn't be necessary, or he'd go broke paying out lawsuits. We will see what happens with the lawsuits.
This is headed for a severe backlash. Social media has broken a lot of trust, but the way AI is being deployed is taking that ball and running way further.
If someone who you thought was untrustworthy offered to sit in on your sensitive board meeting and take notes for free, would you think that was a good deal and let them do it? What about your doctor's appointment?
I really think the breaking point is close and you're going to see people figure out how to be the digital Amish and run what they need locally and live without the benefits of the rest.
> you're going to see people figure out how to be the digital Amish and run what they need locally and live without the benefits of the rest.
I've been a large proponent of what LLMs and the transformative nature of them, but for a lot of people running these companies, it's clear that it isn't about the technology and instead about control. I've even lost some trust in my Apple products throughout this as it feels more like a matter of time that they bend to this more than they have, especially with the shakeup.
I think it's OK if people want to use these systems - but if they don't, we'll let the market speak for itself. For now, I'm out.
Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection.
If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.
I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards.
That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?
Really the only thing I think you can ding it for is the small bed. It used to be that trucks this size would have a regular cab or an extended cab with the two tiny side facing seats, and they would have a longer bed. With the tailgate down you can still move sheet goods with a Maverick though.
reply