I may have a bit of a rose-colored view of the US, or at least its potential to have its conscience pricked by the notion that tomorrow can be freer than today, but if we don’t care about that anymore, then whatever it was that made America a more palatable hegemon than the USSR or China is gone. The USA is just another transactional actor, and not even a particularly reliable one. At this point, Trump has literally threatened more individual souls with annexation than China has.

Tacoma’s gotten big, and the new Ranger too, but Ford has the (slightly homely) Maverick and Hyundai has the Santa Cruz, which is basically an Aussie-style Ute. The Ridgeline is getting bigger too, but I think its guts are still a unibody SUV/minivan frame that should be pretty easy to live with.

You’re not wrong, but due to many reasons, most of them cultural and political, most of them CAN still do normal truck things, assuming you don’t need a long-bed, don’t mind your very expensive toy losing its value as it gets beat up, and can fix or tolerate various frills failing over time. I am starting to see well-worn work trucks that were almost certainly bought used but would have been considered luxurious when new. There’s at least a modicum of utility there that the chassis and motor can still have a second life as a truck after a few years as a grocery-hauler. There’s also still one dealer near me that stocks row upon row of white Silverados with steel wheels and vinyl interiors.

The Cybertruck is very bad at truck things regardless of how you feel about its resale value, and at this point it’s just a way for assholes with too much money to make their entire car a MAGA bumper sticker.

I mean, I was messing around a bit to make it more fun, but yeah, you start with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and a few Frisians invading and having to come to a sort of mutually intelligible Germanic dialect (to the extent they even did), adding some Celtic place names and lingering Roman verbiage and practices, though I guess they would have been dealing with the latter all along. There will be Scandinavian injections from subsequent raiders, especially in the North and East.

Then 1066 comes and the Normans, speaking Viking French invade and displace English as the language of court and bring in thousands of words that rework the vocabulary extensively, especially for uses that reveal the social divide (e.g. “cow” for the animal, “beef” for the food made from it). English survives but has several centuries with no one in power giving a single shit about how it changes.

Then the scholastic era begins and gives birth the Renaissance, and the printing press makes an appearance, so you’ve got increased literacy in Latin mostly in the early going, and the types of knowledge that are coming in often have no direct cognates in English, so English being English (and not French, LOL), they just say “fuck it, you’re an English word too, now.” Many of them die off or get relegated to narrow fields where the specificity remains valuable, but many stick around to offer polysyllabic nuance to English, especially among the literate class who will necessarily dominate what comes down to us in writing. This is also the gang that decided that if a rule of grammar works in Latin, it should in English, leading to idiocies like “don’t split your infinitives.” Why the fuck not, Clarence or Godfrey or whoever? The infinitive is already two different words, Godfrey, and it is exceedingly easy to carefully split it and preserve or even increase the effectiveness of the communication. Fuck you, Godfrey. 😂

The Great Vowel shift occurs over this period as well, for unknown reasons (some have hypothesized it was simply younger generations wanting to distinguish themselves from elders and newcomers to London), and unfortunately just at the time when people decided the spelling should become more consistent, so while most English words have some reason for being spelled how they are, you often have to do some historical spelunking to figure out what those reasons are, and it’s only marginally helpful to know that rough and through used to rhyme.

Finally, as English becomes a language of colonization and empire, influences come from everywhere, and the general trend of adopting new items and new ideas with something like their original “foreign” term continues at an accelerated pace. Even as the one empire faded, a new English-speaking hegemon was emerging, one who if anything was somehow even less concerned about linguistic purity.

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.

Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.

I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.

With English, it’s even more fun, because it was (1) first lightly Celticized, then (2) lightly Romanized, then (3) significantly Romanized by a close cousin of the Germanicized Romance Language that had been extra Germanicized by Vikings, then (4) Roman-frosted with a bunch of technical jargon, some of which seeped into the upper registers of “regular” speech, and finally (5) liberally dusted with a sprinkle of “Literally Everything Else.”

Oh, and spelling will have stopped being updated sometime between steps 3 and 4, and immediately before most of the vowels changed sounds, because skibidi toilet rizz.

I can’t think of what else it would be. It seems to be a precision piece of kit, but Christ on a cracker that’s a lot for a glorified jig that can only work with stock that could be handled as hand-work by most whose preferences lie in that direction.

PDM is the current buzzword for lower-end CAD. Alibre just added it. OnShape tries to embody it. Solidworks hobbyist options only continue to exist in order to market it. Even the Ondsel startup that hired some FreeCAD devs built their (failed) business model around bolting PDM on.

This looks like it’s taking a more traditional “cloud storage” model and replacing it with something more PDM-like so they can sell to low-end corporate users, and the hobbyists just get rolled in because ain’t nobody maintaining something just for the freeloaders, who can be forced to get used to it anyway and might push for it if they ever get work in the field, simply because they know it.

My guess is it’s not inherently worse than what it’s replacing, but it’s likely complicated and kinda clunky for a random person designing gears and project enclosures.