DBDr
6mo ago
I've simply excepted the dao of construction. I can turn my head a look at a stack of 2*4's right now.
DBDr
6mo ago
I worked in the field for quite a while, but even before that I was simply extremely poor. The choice was learn how to plumb or have no water, because the landlord wasn't gonna do shit.
This applies to you too! Use your common sense here, but most things aren't that bad if you fuck them up. (excepting gas, electric, and non ground floor plumbing, those can be bad. be careful). Worse comes to worst, you have to do the call of shame and have someone clean up your mistake.
There is such a thing as best practices, you can usually get good specific advice on youtube and reddit, and be mindful of common safety failures. Eg, read the warning labels on everything, climbing on roofs is taking your life into your own hands, never trust an angle grinder (or any tool that spins faster than you can pedal a bike), etc.
DBDr
6mo ago
Man, don't ask chat GPT. Doesn't know dick about shit. Try getting it to say anything deeper than buzzfeed for your area of expertise for a laugh.
Speaking of not knowing dick, mobile homes are a closed book to me. I assume you are in a community of such; if they have a managment office they'll probably know. Failing that, probably normal house shit needs done in addition to mobile home shit.
EG, check your roof, check your door sweeps and insulation, change the anode in your water heater if it's gone, clean the filters in your range hood and furnace, flush your water heater, etc.
DBDr
6mo ago
Dude is pure crackpipe. Could be smart, could just talk real gud; but is unable to support anything he says when pressed.
Certainly found his content niche.
DBDr
6mo ago
You can't. They don't exist. They are like unicorns. You can do 100 jobs with a contractor, and that won't stop them from fucking you on the 101st. Ask me how I know!
For real though: don't trust reviews, and try to either get a personal friend who is a contractor to do it or have the personal friend contractor find you one that he knows to not be a total shit.
For Real For Real: Become your own contractor. Hire tradespeople directly, let them know before they quote you will get the materials they recommend yourself and keep any spares, only pay the full amount on completion, and stand over their shoulders the whole fucking time they are working.
For the REALEST: do what I did and become and omnitradsman, capable of doing everything except sparky shit on your own to a semi-expert level and then suffer eternaly.
DBDr
6mo ago
Yo, 5 year plan the board game would be fucking incredible. Secret Hitler like; but everyone knows who Stalin is and he has to hit certain (real) production numbers or he gets killed, some random number of players want him killed, some random number are loyal, with stated production being the only real signal Stalin gets and real production getting totaled at the end.
Could be fun if someone good designed it.
DBDr
6mo ago
I want to bitch about the blue collar middle class here for a second: Contractors are all liars and thieves, or thieves and liars.
Was doing some maintenance on one of our properties, in this case a leaking water line near a wall from god knows when; but was on the plans and part of the original construction. Fuckers ran that shit 100 feet through a slab and instead of spending an extra 50 bucks on fittings and labor to put a t to a hose bib for hose bib and draining purposes; they did four pipe bends to bring the whole fucking thing into the air, ran it into the wall, then back into the fucking slab. Turned a 30 min. solder job into a 8 hour hell march (admittedly because I didn't restock on slip to street couplings and wide radius 90s. Oh well) because I can't just tell the resident "lol i cut the water pipe no water till the grainger truck arives lol".
This a couple days after I went to replace a failing range hood to find it was venting through dryer vent (NOT TO CODE BIG FIRE HAZARD HOURS) and the dryer vent was venting into a cavity in the ceiling, and was actually not even connected to the range hood that had never had the plug removed so it wasn't venting at all.
I go to fix this, and find that the complete shitbags that did previous owners kitchen remodel installed a 3 layers of drywall and a 2*4 below the galvanized vent pipe that goes to the roof. These motherfuckers turned a 30 min. job into me having to cut a 2 foot access hole into the fucking kitchen ceiling because they also ran a ton of vents to a gas heater 100% blocking the crawl space; all in service of scamming their customer out of thousand(s) of dollar(s) and maybe burning their house down.
All this to say: Never trust a contractor. Never trust a tradesman older than 36 but younger than 68. I've never worked with one in that range that didn't try to cut corners or steal from their customers on the quote end.
DBDr
6mo ago
This is a rational response to someone the highly evolved social calculus computer in your skull has snap judged to be either dangerous, your enemy, or stupid.
Ie, What if the moon was made of cheese? <- Fuck you/lol dumbass/ death threats
DBDr
6mo ago
Why not just kill Epstein and take his shit, in that case? Less morally repugnant.
DBDr
6mo ago
You have a straw consequentialist there. They should consider the second order effects of normalizing old guys having sex with consenting children for a lot of money; that being parents suddenly finding a previously untapped (wahey!) reservoir of them for old guys to fuck for lots of money.
DBDr
6mo ago
Now this I tentatively disagree with. Do you think that only what you choose for yourself should be essential to your identity?
Yup. Anything else is loser shit in my mind. It's laying the cornerstone of your personality on being tall or having the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. I allow that in society as it is, your identity will be based off of stuff that has the same value as those examples; things that have nothing to do with your choices or history or efforts and everything to do with the genetic lottery. In an imagined perfect world people going around being all "I am a ciltrosoaparian" will be rightly ridiculed as FOOLS and JESTERS.
Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.
I believe this is true the second people also treat couples that don't have children, the infertile, anyone who remains married to a woman past menopause, people that use birth control, and priests with the same level of scrutiny and antipathy as they do gay people (or the opposite, from some parts of the population.)
As the view I outlined does not exist outside the most terminally online spaces and never extends out of them into real life where it might get you made fun of, I empirically deduce the issue with homosexuality must come from something else.
DBDr
6mo ago
An argument for literacy through Wojac symbology
DBDr
6mo ago
This but unironically.
If a low iq dude with a fucked up spine wants a middle class lifestyle and gets told "sucks to suck", why shouldn't that attitude extended to all of human existence? This is capitalist realism land, my dudes.
If you don't have something you want, by the dictates of the efficient market it can only be because you don't deserve to have it.
DBDr
6mo ago
Yes, yes, and within reason.
This is very easily googleable or verifiable by either going there or asking anyone from those places.
That last one is iffy though; I was told (in Oslo, at least) that if you want a big house for any amount of money you are gonna have to be willing to move outside the metro area.
DBDr
6mo ago
As a gender abolitionist, I agree. I think attraction, sex, and gender being part of identity is fucking stupid; anything that you don't choose for yourself as part of your identity likewise.
That said, society at large down to the legal system doesn't agree.
Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.
DBDr
6mo ago
Why though? Why not attraction as identity, instead of race as identity or job as identity or cult as identity or gender as identity?
They are all equally valid and equally worthless way to construct yourself; I don't see why we should say "This cultural hallucination is good but this one is bad" without reference to either outcomes or principles. Those can be argued, at least.
DBDr
6mo ago
Useful to who? Useful in what way?
How do you reckon with the fact that the only reason the earthworm does anything is to fulfill it's impulses, and it leverages it's billion year evolutionary history and nonstick skin to do so with minimal friction?
DBDr
6mo ago
I beleive deeply to my heart in road karma. You are buildign up bad road karma where you shell forever be trapped in the wheel of road samsara (the interstate) or even be road naraka (a roundabout where you are stuck on the inside lane and nobody lets you out for all of eternity)
where as I am VIRTUOUS and GOOD and will reach road nirvana (a working public transit system that takes me to the woods somehow shut up fuck you FUCK)
This is the true and I refuse to think about it.
DBDr
6mo ago
They do have the right to vote: They can rock up to their polling place, place their vote, and then loose because their policies are unpopular (or win on merits, but given the polls on that particular issue it sure seems unlikely).
The right to compete doesn't mean the right to win.
DBDr
6mo ago
Also, not to put too fine a point on it: Israel is huhWight.
Even if most Israelis aren't white racially, it is a white post colonial European state culturally. Ingroup loyalty puts it's finger on the balance, so if you aren't sure what's going on/ don't care that much, the default position is to support team most-like-you.
's why absent any knowledge about the region, most Americans and Europeans feel better about Singapore than eg New Guinee: Even if Singapore isn't western, it's close enough for horseshoes and international diplomacy.
DBDr
6mo ago
Yes, because the majority of people in the country want abortion enshrined as a right. The fact that the system as it is enforces minority rule is not a dunk on progressives; it's a condemnation of the system.
DBDr
6mo ago
Again: Do they? When you read accounts of EG Shiloh from pre about 2006 you'd think Johnny Reb had carried the day and not gotten driven from the field. When you look at nice books full of nice graphs from those days, you might notice the casualty numbers are somewhere between "enthusiastic" and Plutarch, with the union loosing something like 2 times as much as they actually did; by folding in a certain amount of loses to disease and desertion into battlefield casualties while at the same time only counting Confederates that were shot dead on the field. This leads to ridiculous figures (again, to pick shiloh) where the union looses twice as many men on the line in a battle where the confederates attacked, lost, and retreated.
DBDr
6mo ago
Eh. Modern historiography that is less triumphal and heroic puts almost all the blame for southern success on early northern incompetence and sheer bad luck with who went where.
Eg, Lee could have been replaced by any number of Dudes in the south, as long as the Cav turned coat whichever guy the pick still gets his early licks until the north relearns how to do horsey shit.
Actually, Lee probably lost the war for the south even faster than it would have gone otherwise by trying to repeat his early Dramatic Battle successes well after the North got some real killers in charge that stopped walking into bad situations.
Honestly, if a contractor charges you 10* market rate but does a good job, I would just consider that capitalism at work. Yes, it is probably morally wrong and pretty scammy; but what isn't?
The problem (as you noticed) is that price is decoupled from quality.
Re. consequences: No, not really. You should only use licenced and bonded contractors and get everything in writing; specially for important shit. (If you get a guy from the HD parking lot to lay some carpet, the worst that happens is you need to relay the carpet. Less so in the case of eg. roof maintenance.)
If you get everything in writing (Dates and Rates+ specified materials at specified prices, etc) and they fuck you on one of them, you can usually recover something in small claims court or get them to redo the work because they know you can get them in court.
If you don't have it in writing? hahahaha get fucked kid.
The real issue is that lots of shitty contracting only becomes apparent 3 years later when the boomer fuck who had the license is dead or cirrhotic or fucking coolie boys in Malaysia
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