The repair was the frame (the hitch took quite a bit with it), but no, the impressive part was gluing a pair of 2" cylinders, tying a rope to either end, and picking the truck up with it.

Zach at Jerry Rig Everything snapped the hitch and nearby frame off his cybertruck with an excavator (for science!), and Tesla repaired it for him and let him film the repair. They have a really impressive adhesive that lets them replace partial panels. (One neat engineering speck in the sea of Tesla awfulness.)

It might not be that the truck is truly unrepairable, but it’s a relatively expensive repair, and insurance weighed the immediate cost plus future liability (the repair will always be blamed for future problems even if it’s not really the culprit) and decided totaling was the best decision for their business model.

doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer

I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.

There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.

What a heartless attitude to value their aesthetic preferences over the safety of your pets. (Adorable pets as we can tell from the cat tax!) And good on you and your neighbor to go through all that research, and inquiries, and installation work (not to mention navigating the negative social interactions with that board) to provide your cats with the best environment. I can understand how with all that investment in the current setup why the neighbor would get attached to it.

They could have avoided all this by just doing their own research and offering some safe alternative to cat safety, working with you guys, instead of going power hungry and heartless. Thanks for sharing your successful ‘compliance’!