Rov_Scam
1mo ago
As someone who grew up middle-class in an exurban area my thoughts were the same as yours... until PA announced it had provisionally implemented Voter ID and suddenly my grandmother was effectively disenfranchised. She hadn't driven in years and let her license expire. She could get a state ID, but that required a birth certificate, and she didn't have that. Getting a copy from Vital Records isn't difficult, but since she didn't have a driver's license we had to go to one of the "other" forms of ID, and then present the newly-acquired birth certificate to the DL center with an entirely different group of required documents that some people might not have (e.g. you need a Social Security card, and if you lost yours then you have to go to SSA to get a replacement which is a whole other process). So yeah, I can understand why this could be disenfranchising for elderly people who don't drive and don't work. There may not be many people like this in rural areas, but go to some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh where the average age is deceased and there are a ton of them who use the bus to get around since it's free if you're over 65. These people aren't at the fringes of society, they're just pensioners who live on Social Security and aren't going to maintain a license to drive a car they don't have and who have no reason to get a photo ID.
The big reason I think voter ID failed nationally was that its proponents made it sound like people without IDs were bums who, as you suggest, are a vanishingly small part of the population and who probably have no interest in voting anyway. If instead they had acknowledged the problem and worked towards rectifying it and maybe kicking in some money for outreach efforts or modernization of the ID system then they may have been more successful. But they instead stuck to the argument that we didn't need to worry about these people. For their part, the left didn't do a good job of defining who these people were in a way that would be understandable to Republicans — the more moderate ones just said such people existed in urban areas and left it at that while the more dedicated proggies trotted out their tried and true sob stories about a homeless woman of color with a glass eye and a wooden leg who was forced to make a living collecting cans behind Wal-Mart, which did little to disabuse conservatives of their preconceptions. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't have a point.
Rov_Scam
23d ago
I don't think China is going to stop selling to the US just because they might integrate the materials into weapons that will be sent to Ukraine. China is pro Russian, but not that pro Russian.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Affirmative Action/DEI has always had a bit of a mushy existence in the context of discrimination law. The origins of the concept are pretty easy to understand — in the 1960s, blacks typically made up a smaller percentage of the semi-skilled and skilled workforce than their total numbers would suggest. It was pretty obvious that even if companies weren't actively discriminating now, there was certainly a time when they were, and it was a given that as a black guy there was only so far you could go. A lot of people on here will point to HBD and blah blah blah but keep in mind that this was a time when the workforce was largely industrial. If you work in a steel mill, you don't get hired based on your skills and education for specific positions; everybody starts in the labor pool and bids on higher-paying jobs as they become available, and most of these jobs don't require much additional skill. There are skilled jobs, but union dynamics require in-house hirings — if you need an electrician, you don't put an ad in the paper and hope that someone from the IBEW applies from the job; you run your own apprentice program for USW guys already working labor and production jobs so that they can learn the necessary skills, and replace them with new hires. The problem was that, in an environment where these promotions are often based on social and interpersonal dynamics, black employees often found themselves relegated to the lower rungs of the ladder.
The idea behind affirmative action was that companies would take a long, hard, look at how they were making these decisions, and put policies in place to ensure that a diligent black employee would, for example, have a chance to get into that electrician apprenticeship rather than be destined to a career of cutting grass and cleaning up. But Title VII still existed, so blatant discrimination was still prohibited. This has been roundly affirmed by the Supreme Court on multiple occasions. And more aggressive forms of affirmative action in general have a lot of under the hood requirements to demonstrate that it's necessary, and these are all things a court may look at in an inevitable lawsuit. So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements. Make sure the black guys in the labor pool are aware of the opportunities and let them know that they have enough seniority to get the promotion if they apply for it. That sort of thing. It's also why DEI isn't just a euphemism; affirmative action is a legal concept that's complicated. DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.
The problem is that Novant Health crossed a line. It may have actually been permissible if it were part of an affirmative action plan, but Novant never made that argument and tried to claim that the firing was entirely unrelated to race. They had to do this, of course, because there was no affirmative action plan, and even if there were, it's doubtful whether such a blatant act would be permissible under those circumstances. So it's really no surprise. The actual law isn't any different than it was in 1987.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I thought the same thing too until I saw that Oregon's overdose rate was among the lowest in the country at time the law was enacted and continues to be relatively low even after the recent spike. West Virginia has the worst rate in the country and it saw a similar doubling over roughly the same period, and that isn't exactly a lax jurisdiction. I wonder how much of the surge is simply due to an unusually low base rate in an area where you'd expect it to be higher.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Ironically, the end result "power users" would be complaining about is likely to be something akin to Linux, where if you want software that isn't included in the approved repository you're condemning yourself to a complicated install process (that's totally easy provided you ignore every online tutorial telling you how complicated it is and instead follow these 23 simple steps [assuming you are using one of three distros]).
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I'd be in favor of changing the law, the question, though, is whether the pro gun people would actually go for it. Say you limited private sales to 3 per year or 5 in any two-year period and required that the seller fill out a Firearm Bill of Sale and keep that and a copy of the buyer's photo ID on file for 5 years so that in the event the weapon was used in a crime they'd be able to demonstrate that it was sold? Or maybe do what Pennsylvania does and require FFL transfers for handguns (but not long guns). Or also require them for long guns with removable magazines. I think part of the reason why the law remains vague is that gun control is such a toxic issue right now that any change of the law is difficult to accomplish. For the gun rights people any clarification short of a total repeal of the FFL requirement is going to be seen as an unreasonable imposition, and for the gun control people anything short of eliminating private sales entirely is going to be seen as a useless half-measure. So there's no political will to do this.
That being said, I don't think the law is as ambiguous as you're making it out to be. In Abramski, there was no question that the defendant purchased the gun for immediate resale, and the evidence in the case didn't even support a defense that Abramski purchased the gun for himself and later decided to sell it. I also don't think Abramski really applies here in any context because the defendant transferred the gun to Alvarez through an FFL; at no point was he invoking the private sale exception. While I don't like the ambiguity myself, I don't know that the Malinowski case is really the best argument for the idea that the ambiguity needs correcting. I don't know the exact evidence, but I'd find it hard to believe that Mr. Malinowski wasn't acquiring these guns specifically for the purpose of reselling them. I mean, it's possible that he happened to inherit a bunch of guns all at once and wanted to get rid of them, or that he was constantly buying guns to try them out and getting rid of ones he didn't like, but absent specific evidence of that, it's safe to assume that someone who sells 150 guns over the course of a couple years is doing so for pecuniary gain.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.
The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."
I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.
I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I used to run a high-adventure program for the Boy Scouts, and whether or not some sourt of "Trial by fire" wilderness experience would be considered abuse would depend on the nature of the experience. There's a big difference between pushing a kid's limits and actively abusing them. If I take a kid mountain biking and he's apprehensive about riding a certain line, I'll encourage him to ride it if I think it's within his ability based on my observation of him. If I don't think he can ride it and that it's going to end in a crash I'll tell him to walk it. If he's clearly freaking out at the prospect of riding it, I'll tell him to walk it. If it's a difficult line I'll probably won't even pressure the kid into riding even if I think he can ride it; I'll just tell everyone they can walk it if they'd like. It gets more difficult when, say, you take the kid on a long bike trip with limited or no opportunity to bail. In that case it's more a question of getting them motivated enough to keep pedaling rather than putting them in a situation that could lead to injury, and making sure they have enough snacks, water, etc. so that an acute event isn't going to happen. I mean, I always have outs in case of emergency, but a kid being tired isn't an emergency unless they're obviously incapable of continuing. Usually I just slow down the pace and take more frequent breaks to keep them moving, even if it ultimately takes longer. When they complain, I just ask what they expect me to do about it, and that usually shuts them up, especially when I tell them that an evac means an ambulance ride and a trip to the hospital that will likely end their time in the program.
The key is that the adversity be time-limited, controlled, and intended to develop skills and build confidence. Telling kids who are old enough that they'll be cooking dinner one night a week so they can learn the skills necessary to be adults is a lot different than just not feeding the kids. Making sure your kids get early exposure to outdoor adventure in the hopes that it will maintain fitness and social relationships while building a lifetime hobby is different than putting the kid in situations he's clearly uncomfortable with (and that come with high risk of injury) and regularly subjecting them to death marches in the woods. Some kids are just whiners who want to stay inside and play video games all day and not do anything that's going to make them mildly short of breath, and I never had any problem trying to toughen those kids up over their complaints. But it's important that you know where the line is, and that you make sure you never get anywhere near it. If you're moving to the Alaskan wilderness because you like the outdoors and want your kids to learn self-sufficiency, I don't think that's too much of a problem, as long as you understand the limits I outlined above. I certainly wouldn't put it anywhere near the level of the kind of stuff that's on the ACE quiz.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Yep, and I agree that it's one of the best documentary series ever made. The only quibble I have is that it gives the Pacific war rather short shrift; in 26 episodes, one of which is dedicated entirely to the Dutch resistance, only 2 deal with the Pacific War exclusively (possibly 3, there may be one on Burma, I can't remember). This may be an artifact of it being a British series, but it prevents the series from being definitive.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
This isn't new, though, and has nothing to do with AI. I remember an Aphex Twin interview from about 20 years ago where he admitted that when he was behind his laptop at live shows he was just playing solitaire.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
There are more of these holidays that get limited governmental recognition than you can shake a stick at. Some congressmen proposes that March 22 is National Inland Waterway Workers Safety Awareness Day and it passes unanimously by joint resolution and nobody pays attention to it except a few trade organizations that want do distribute safety leaflets.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
For the past 25 years or so, Christians have, among the irreligious, had a connotation of being the kind of bible-thumping holy rollers who promote conservative politics. Even among a lot of actual Christians (Catholics in particular), the idea of subscribing to some explicitly Christian conceptions (like advertising yourself as a Christian bathroom remodeling company, Christian Rock, etc.) usually brands someone not as a regular guy that happens to attend a Methodist church, or whatever, but a megachurch-attending wackaloon. I think the idea of these ads isn't to convey some complex theological thought but to reassure the masses that faith in Jesus doesn't necessarily put you in this bucket. For all the complaints among conservatives that mainstream Protestants and liberal Catholics have gone off the woke deep end, this is only apparent to people who are already immersed in Christian culture; it certainly isn't represented in the media, except for maybe a few minutes at the end of the news if the story involves the Pope. It's certainly a ham-fisted, dumb, and probably vain attempt, but I don't think it's necessary to read too much into it. You may complain about how certain facets of the ads are on spurious theological ground, but as a Catholic I could argue that most of the Christian churches in this country are operating on spurious theological ground (and they'd say the same about me, of course).
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
You're basically buying into the whole Cancel Culture idea here. Someone made a series of youthful indiscretions and now you're demanding that they be permanently barred from polite society as a consequence. Would you feel the same about someone who made racist tweets at the same age?
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I agree that most sex scenes don't add anything to the movie and tend to be boring, unless you're watching an actual Erotic Thriller like Fatal Attraction. This is most obvious in anything that was made for HBO, where a lot of shows seemingly felt the need to show nudity just to remind you that you couldn't get this stuff on regular TV (Boardwalk Empire being a good example). I watched A Few Good Men the other night and never got the impression that the movie would have been better if we saw Demi Moore's tits. I feel the same way about gratuitous swearing. The best regular TV drama of all time is the original Law & Order (and by regular TV I mean a show that was on an actual TV channel weekly from September to May each year and put out 20–25 episodes a season), and that show had little profanity and no sex. The economics of the film industry are partly to blame; movies tend to get pigeonholed based on their MPAA rating, and the easiest way to bump things up to an R is to add gratuitous profanity and nudity.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Well, based on my fuckwit days of recreationally chest boxing my friends in college, the reach advantage is very real among people who don't know what they're doing. The shorter guy would almost inevitably find himself backing up to the point he was against the wall and we had to restart the fight. And we're only talking a reach advantage of 4 inches here. 28 inches and there's no way the knife guy's even getting near him.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I used to work for the local Boy Scout council and found myself advising my old troop on how to deal with the situation through my contacts after the scoutmaster was given answers he didn't like from the District Executive (no real surprise there). The exact problem was that the daughter of one of the more active adult leaders and her friend wanted to join, and while there was a girls' troop relatively close, the leader basically said "I'll be damned if I drive to two meetings and manage two sets of events, etc." So we ended up chartering a troop with two girls that I ended up being the assistant scoutmaster of under the scenario of "We'll call your bluff." It basically operates as a patrol within the larger troop because as long as we keep the paperwork separate, the Council isn't going to pry too deeply into our affairs.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
A Season in Time by Todd Denault, the story of the 1992–93 NHL season. It's pretty much an object lesson on why Americans can't stand Canadian sportswriters. It starts off with a preface where the author boldly proclaims that this was the greatest season in NHL history, and also lets it drop that this happened to be his senior year of high school and that he stopped following hockey as closely when he got to college. Okay, so there's some emotional attachment to the subject selection, but that's not too big a deal. That season did have a number of compelling storylines—Gretzky coming back from injury to make his only cup finals appearance with the Kings, Mario Lemieux's battle with cancer that saw him miss a month of the season and still win the scoring race, Teemu Selanne absolutely destroying Mike Bossy's rookie goal scoring record, the inaugural seasons of the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators, and several others. It also happened to be the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup.
Unfortunately, if you knew nothing about the season when you started reading this you'd incorrectly assume that this team was the Toronto Maple Leafs, because Denault spends the first five chapters talking about them. They were a storied franchise in hockey's most important city that had been god awful for over a decade, and in 1993 they put together an unlikely playoff run. But they got eliminated in the Conference finals. Denault can't even talk about other teams without bringing the Leafs into the discussion; the Pittsburgh Penguins were an absolute juggernaut that year and were expected to cruise to a third straight championship before getting upset in the second round of the playoffs. That and Lemieux's story make the PEnguins a compelling team to talk about this season. But we have to hear about them in terms of how this was the team the Maple Leafs aspired to be, blah, blah, blah. We have an entire chapter about GM Cliff Fletcher's time with Calgary in the '80s. We have a chapter about coach Pat Burns's career as a police officer before entering coaching. If he wanted to write a book about the 92–93 Leafs, why not just do it?
The book is about as extensively researched as one can expect it to be, provided you don't expect the author to leave Toronto. When discussing media reaction to the events of the season, the quotes are almost exclusively from Toronto newspapers or The Hockey News. There's something disconcerting about discussing media reaction without bothering to see what people in the cities where the teams actually played were saying. After all, these are the guys who are covering one team full-time all season. He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams. It's almost as if he lives in a solipsistic dreamland where the only real team is the Toronto Maple Leafs and all other teams exists solely to give them competition; they don't have their own struggles or fanbases or media. It's like they're all the Washington Generals going up against the Harlem Globetrotters, except the Globetrotters suck.
I could forgive all that, though, if the book were at least engaging. And it is, provided the author is giving background information and speaking in broad strokes. Unfortunately, most of the book is descriptions of games that mean little if you aren't actually watching them. It suffers from the same problem as war histories that try to provide overly detailed descriptions of actual battles. It doesn't matter how good the prose is if you don't have a lighted map to show you the troop movements. This isn't too much of a problem until we get to the playoffs, at which point it's nothing but this, over and over again. Even the interstitial bits between games aren't compelling since all he does is quote players and coaches giving meaningless quotes to the media like "We need to play better" after a loss. I get that there's not much to go with here, but Denault doesn't give his audience any credit and quotes this stuff as if it were genuinely insightful.
I've certainly read much worse things, but I'm pissed off that the book started off engaging enough but slowed to a crawl when the playoffs just became game after game after game. So I'm waaay too far into this to stop reading (over 300 pages) but I've still got a hundred to go and I can only read it in short sittings. It's frustrating. I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Part of the problem, though, is that the NYT only continues to exist because it continues to employ over 2000 journalists covering everything from politics in Belarus to a DIY column that runs articles like "All You Need to Know about Fixings and Fastenings". No, each individual article probably doesn't drive sales enough on its own to justify the cost spent on it, but I'm buying the NYT because I expect to get All the News Fit to Print. I went through a similar divorce with my own local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When I first started subscribing in college it covered all the national stories, local news, sports, etc. to the extent you'd expect from the major newspaper in a mid-size city. They were always accused of having a liberal bias, which led to the establishment of the Tribune Review in 1993 following the demise of the Pittsburgh Press (which was on-par with if not better than the PG). I wasn't a fan of the Trib, not because of the conservative views (which were limited to the editorial page), but because it was clearly a bush-league paper. It had existed in Greensburg for years prior, and, while the Pittsburgh edition got better over the years, it still always felt like a small town paper a little over its skis, relying more on being the conservative choice than having better coverage.
But as time went on, the PG became less and less worth reading. They dumped the DC bureau, and most of the national coverage was wire stories from the AP and bigger newspapers. More of the op-eds were nationally syndicated columnists (and not ones like George Will whom you include because they're big names with national followings). The sports department stopped sending reporters to out of town events that didn't involve local teams. It started to read more like the Trib, but I kept subscribing anyway because it was at least something that came to my door that I could read every morning and get a good idea what was going on in the world. Then they limited print editions to a few times a week and that was the last straw. My dad still gets the pdf edition but it isn't the same; I can't browse a pdf like I can a broadsheet. I probably didn't read half the stories when I got it, but I liked being able to browse it. Most people jumped ship before I did. To use a trendy term, it became enshittified, even if it still did a decent job of providing information about the big stories.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
You're pretty much in the same situation as me, then, and no, I don't think cutting it out or switching to decaf will change much. I usually drink one cup around 10 am, unless I'm unusually tired, in which case I'll start earlier and possibly have a cup in the afternoon. I also have dinner at my parents' house every Sunday and my mum and I have coffee with dessert. I don't think it affects my sleep in any way. I don't drink coffee at home on the weekends and only order it at restaurants if it's a sit-down place. I used to drink quite a bit of tea when I worked from home (usually about 2 cups a day, almost always in the afternoon) and the effects on sleep were similar. Honestly, having to get up and go into an office as opposed to working from home where I wasn't going to sleep past the start time no matter what made a much bigger difference in my sleep schedule than whatever effect a little bit of caffeine is having on me.
I says this as someone who's pretty critical of coffee culture generally; it's the only addiction that's not only socially acceptable to have, but socially acceptable to almost brag about having. There was a commercial a few years back where a guy repeatedly warned everyone not to talk to him until he had his coffee. If you say you can't function in the morning without coffee people will act understanding, if not sympathetic. Say the same thing about booze and people will start giving you pamphlets. I get that there's a difference in the relative risk levels, but an addiction is an addiction, and caffeine addiction is probably the easiest to treat (it can be done over a long weekend). I think the dividing line is whether you're doing it for the taste or for the psychotropic effect. If you're doing it for the effect then you'd be sucking down Folgers at home every day and wouldn't have a moment at work without a cup in front of you.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Of course we shouldn't, but expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous. I also shouldn't have to lock my car, or remove valuables from plain sight, or any number of other things that I do because they are unfortunately necessary. The question here is one of remedy, the implication being that receiving justice is so involved that it's often not worth it for relatively minor inconveniences. Which can be true, since this isn't one of those cases. It's a shame that she has to call the property management company to get somebody to do something about it, but it's a phone call. The initial concern wasn't that the thing was happening but that it was too minor for the police to get involved.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I was partially being facetious, but I don't think that size is the main problem. 90 hp is going to be a tough sell, considering that there aren't many cars on the American market anymore that get less than 100. Even a base model Corolla gets nearly twice the HP. Rear wheel drive is basically a nonstarter. The only people I know who have 2wd trucks are contractors. I know people who have been looking for used small trucks for a long time, and when I worked for the Boy Scouts we'd occasionally have a work truck we were getting rid of. I remember one was available, it needed a flywheel but they'd have let it go for $200. Everyone lost interest when I told them it was 2wd, because there's nothing fun about a 2wd Ranger. And while I have no real basis for this, I'd be willing to bet that the interior is chintzy as hell. I don't think it's that people don't want smaller trucks, it's that they don't want that specific small truck.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
That truck is never going to be sold in the US because, outside of you and possibly a few other people, no one is going to buy it. As much as you and other people may complain about the lack of a small, basic truck with a five speed transmission, and 2-wheel drive, there isn't much of a market for one. Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras. Few people actually need a truck, and those who are buying ones they don't need want big penis trucks with huge engines and high towing capacity and 4-wheel drive and and interior like a Cadillac, not some 90 hp puttmobile. They'd sell about as well as those old VW Rabbit trucks that had their fans but didn't exactly take the country by storm.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
$5,000? That's ridiculous. When I had my own law practice I'd hire appraisers occasionally and my guy charged $400 and he actually went inside the place.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Ike Turner's situation is unique, though. He had been out of the public spotlight for 20 years when the movie What's Love Got to Do With It came out, which portrayed him as a serial abuser. He then responded in possibly the worst way possible: He went on TV and called the movie a hack job while answering questions in such a manner as to suggest that every horrible allegation in the movie was completely true. If he'd have just kept his mouth shut it would have been forgotten about completely, but he had such an erratic personality that he became fodder for comedians and sketch comedy shows. Ike Turner impressions became a thing. It didn't help that he trashed Tina's solo career as well and held himself up as one of the true greats of rock and roll, which is technically true, but he's not exactly on the level of Little Richard or Chuck Berry. He finally offered a half-assed apology on Roseanne Barr's forgotten daytime talk show in 1999 (he only apologized under serious pressure from Roseanne), and after that point the music establishment basically forgave him and allowed him to join in on all-star specials and the like.
Yes. Almost compulsively. I like being able to have my music organized the way I like it, and to be able to listen to it on my own terms. If I have financial hardship in the future I don't have to give up music entirely because I can't justify the cost of a subscription to a streaming service. While that isn't likely to happen, I generally don't trust the subscription model as a practical matter (though I admit this has nothing to do with why I don't use a streaming service). We kind of take it for granted that these services have a fairly representative collection of the entire musical corpus, in the way video streaming doesn't, but that's being held together by rights agreements that may or may not hold in the future. As we've seen with video streaming, the motivations of the streaming services and the content producers aren't necessarily symbiotic — Netflix and Amazon want to produce their own original content, while NBC and Disney want to run their own platforms. This hasn't happened in the music industry yet, but Spotify's exclusive contract with Rogan might portend the future. What happens when Taylor Swift signs an exclusive contract with Apple Music or whoever? What happens when Universal music decides to stop licensing their catalog and make it exclusively available on their own service? What happens when half of an artists discography is on one service and half of it on another, because different rights holders own different albums? Since you don't own the music, you only own the right to listen to whatever the platform has available during the month you've paid for in the subscription. If your favorite bands bolt, then you're out of luck for the future. This has the potential to be even more annoying than with video because even if you're willing to pay for multiple services, you won't be able to make playlists as easily. I'm not saying any of this will happen, but given how cheap hard drive space is I'd be wary of dumping my entire collection I already have just to have the privilege to pay for it, and be at the mercy of whoever is hosting it.
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