solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Stop smoking weed. It's not that I'm a big stoner or have ever been, but I dabbled in weed vapes a bit because they're by far the cheapest way to get intoxicated and it's just a waste of time. Aside from being high being kind of fun I can't think of any real positive. I tend to wind up staying up too late/sleeping poorly and get nothing done around the house/at all. I also really need to get a better job soon and pissing hot on a drug test isn't a restriction I can afford right now.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
I'm not necessarily in favor of such a policy (because said policy would open Pandora's box in terms of parties trying to engineer the franchise in their favor), and it would be more complicated than the status quo, but pretty much every parent files a state and local tax return in which they claim their children as dependents, so presumably it would be as easy as "anyone who claims a dependent child gets to vote".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
26d ago
I have recommended that. The middle sister went and allegedly got the same initial reaction from her therapist that I got from mine (something along the lines of "How are you still alive?"). The little sister is more private and thus I have no idea.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Depends on the job, I guess, and I haven't taken the test in awhile. I usually get ISTP, but if I'm emotionally dysregulated (therapy-speak for "excessively stuck in my feelings, usually with a connotation of despair and self-pity but on rare occasions excitement?!) I'll score ISFP, and while I haven't taken those tests in 5-10 years I would consider myself a lot more extroverted than I did then (but probably not enough to earn an E over I).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7mo ago
Much to my chagrin as a Raider fan, Harbaugh really does seem to be doing an admirable job of turning the Chargers around. It's infuriating that all three of our division rivals (even the Broncos are much improved) have had the good fortune and sense to hire known quantity, "can't go wrong" coaches and should be set for the next decade while we're going to have to undergo a total rebuild.
On the bright side, seeing the Charger turnaround at least leads me to believe that Tom Telesco can drastically improve the talent level on the Raider roster, assuming he can get us an at least decent quarterback. The Chargers have always had a talented, if underachieving roster while the Raider roster has been chronically talent-poor such that it's hard to tell where the roster problems end and coaching problems begin. The two feed each other given that only risky young coaches or known mediocre retreads will touch our current roster. Unfortunately nothing about his Chargers tenure or what we're doing this year leads me to believe that he can find the right coaching staff. We wasted Carr's prime years on a rebuild that never produced even an average defense and I'm afraid that we're going to run Maxx Crosby into the ground before we get an offense worthy of his effort.
As much as I don't want to blame Mark Davis for everything (IMO JDR and Gruden were probably the best coaches available in those given years, even though he overpaid for Gruden by giving him GM powers.), hiring Josh McDaniels (He really must have a silver tongue.) was so monumentally stupid that I'm at a loss for words, especially after we had a front row seat to his wrecking of the Broncos.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
Eh, the lack of success of dissident Russian liberals in their own country suggests that that ordinary Russians don't buy them. That said, one of my dear Russian-American (The mix of vestigial Russian accent plus taught in law school Southern accent is hilarious.) friends who I have an incredible amount of respect for (He's both genuinely smarter than me and vastly more driven.) used to be an uncritically turbo-America neocon who mocked me for my cynicism (I was an unironic Paultard in those days. Ah, high school.) and now is a pro-Trumper so disillusioned (and ruined in his Slavic friend group over the Z question, being unable to hide his great Russian chauvinism) that he moved to China.
I'd spend a lot of money for the privilege of a night talking with Artem in a bar (tough shit for me; he doesn't drink).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
That's because dispatching (at least for the food delivery company) is like playing an RTS that isn't fun. On that note I do find it amusing and maybe a little bit disturbing that there are food delivery simulation games.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
I'm kind of there right now. I had a successful gig in food delivery (owner's crony/right hand man at a small company) for a long time before the market got oversaturated/our customers got broken by post-covid inflation and the company I worked for had the bottom fall out and blundered into the draft beer industry, which is also facing rough times (or, at least, my company is; I'm apparently the top grossing service technician in the company for this month right now and that's insane because I'm A. straight out of half-assed training and barely/not competent at my job and B. have been so slow that I haven't hit 40 hours in three consecutive weeks).
I loathe my job and can't afford to live on what I'm making, but I have enjoyed working on glycol refrigeration units (They're the closest thing to working on cars in this job, and that's the vocational area I have past experience/strength in.) so I'm thinking that I should look into working on refrigerators.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7mo ago
2004 was a rough time to be a liberal. Dubya won an election that was close, but not that close, and massively improved his numbers with Hispanic voters compared to 2000. The GOP won its fifth straight House election (and actually had a capable Speaker) and a 55 seat Senate majority. If you were a doomer, Bill Clinton was looking like he papered over a losing platform with sheer charisma and the blue dog Democrats were not quite dead but dying fast. Unless you were paying attention to Illinois politics, you'd probably not heard of Barack Obama.
For fun, here's a bit of what passed for terminally online leftism back during the W era. For bonus points, here's his predicting that Hillary would lose back in '05, and his take on the Borderers long before Scott Alexander.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.
Eh, Plan B became OTC for 17 and over in 2006 and for all ages in 2014. Last I checked, a course on Plan B is $20 at your local Walmart. I'd say that counts as "recent" and "fantastically effective".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around!
Right. He spends much of the book complaining about his mother being a dysfunctional addict (and life being made much harder than it had to be by bad financial decisions rather than real poverty), but apparently she sobered up (Maybe the book was a wake-up call?) and they reconciled. He brought her to the RNC and bragged to the crowd that she's nearing 10 years sober, suggesting that she should celebrate her 10 year anniversary at the White House.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1d ago
It doesn't, but it (in theory, at least) absolves the driver from being responsible for checking the order for accuracy (Many restaurants find drivers checking the orders to be annoying, and that's before the driver starts asking for all the sauces/dips that get left out.) while having the happy side effect of keeping their grubby little hands away from the fries.
Like no-contact deliveries, it was a covid-ism that stuck around.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3d ago
Full disclosure: I'm a Youtube/15 years of pizza delivery certified parking lot mechanic, but I suck at detailing (too cheap to buy the right tools, too lazy to really follow through and push for better than 7/10 results). The best I can do is "not dirty", which works for my purposes but isn't "detailed".
My first impulse is to say "just get a quarterly detail" but if you're happy with the results that you're getting for the time/money you're putting in I would say to keep going. There's nothing wrong with valuing cleanliness and while I'm cool with "not dirty" a freshly detailed car feels good in a way that's hard to put into words.
I guess the real question I'd ask is "Do you enjoy doing the work?". I kind of dislike working on cars these days but I still get that rush of accomplishment when a job goes well and I either saved myself a bunch of money or I was able to do a solid for a friend for basically free.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23d ago
If you consider health insurance companies to be outsourced tax collectors and insurance premiums to be a payroll tax in all but name that's mostly imposed on the middle and upper-middle class, I wonder how different the tax burdens really are.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yeah, if there's a next time (Uh, I don't know how many more "next times" can be done before the oil in there turns into 100% sludge.) they're getting invoiced for it. As it happened, I just didn't want to go on a 10 hour round trip drive mostly through the middle of nowhere knowing full and well that the engine was 1.5 quarts low, and I had a jug sitting at the house.
Want to know the punchline? That 10 hour round-trip was for nothing because the parts they sent me with didn't fit.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.
Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
For me, the frustrating part is that I could be a lot better at this, but the training was just so limited that there's far too much that I don't know or don't know enough about to speak with confidence on. Post training, the problem has been similar to the problem I had during training: most of our calls are fairly unsophisticated stuff and our call volume has been low, so it's hard to learn and retain knowledge. TBH, while my supervisor is prone to excessively exuberant positivity, it appears that our standards are just low (in keeping with the pay).
During a call earlier this week I noticed a massive nitrogen leak on something someone else had done (I suspected us due to the fact that the gas lines were the same brand we use.), due to the fact that every crimp connection on a splitter was loose (fitting was too small for the size of gas line used, clamps can only do so much). I mentioned it to my supervisor and she laughed; apparently we installed that setup last year. I don't know if it was our install team (wouldn't be the first time) or the previous service tech (also wouldn't be the first time) that did it, nor am I immune to making mistakes, but come on, at least make sure your crimp connections are tight. Oh, and to add insult to injury the same supervisor forgot to add a gas regulator to the quote on the job I did. I should've caught that (and called my boss and was like "I feel like I'm missing something here."), but for some dumb reason I assumed that the pressure straight out of the non-adjustable blend box would be okay to run cold brew coffee since it isn't carbonated. Our parts inventory is a total shitshow so our other guy who could've done it today didn't have a regulator, nor did we have one in our storage unit, but I have two in my truck (but was on a call 200 miles away from where he was), so I get to drive 5 hours round trip to deliver him a regulator tomorrow and run one call, with another call possible/probable depending on customer approval.
The drive time can wear on you (I was a delivery driver for 14 years and loved it, but driving on the interstate is mind-numbingly boring.). If I'm lucky my calls are an hour away. My shortest drive this week has been two hours to the first call, 90 minutes home from the second call. Three days with 5 hour round-trip drives. I drove six hours round trip today to sell a restaurant manager a $30 coupler and tell her that her line was foaming because that product was either improperly handled, defective from the brewery, or had a bad keg seal (My guess is one of the first two because the seal looked fine, but I'm certain it was a bad keg. If you swap products to different tap lines and the problem follows the keg, it's the keg.). We charged her nearly $500 in labor for drive time (not so much because of pure distance, but because it was to a part of the state that we don't normally do much business in). I get that we quoted her that much in hopes that she'd call someone else, and it's not my fault that the restaurant manager didn't think to swap the kegs before assuming that her system was broken, but man it's hard not to feel like a bit of an asshole when presenting that invoice for 30 minutes of work.
Apparently I have a call lined up next week that's a 9-10 hour round trip drive for a 1-2 hour job.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.
The only way that America will get either of those things will be in the name of of bailing out the Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Disability prevalence is geographically concentrated, but largely in dying to dead rural areas where the working-age adult population skews old and uneducated and non-physically demanding jobs are scarce, but rents are cheap enough that it's viable to eke out a living on federal benefits, places like Hale County, Alabama, also profiled here by NPR.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
I'm a big fan of the Car Scanner app. Combined with a $20 Amazon OBDII reader the free with ads version is highly useful for the shadetree mechanic on a budget.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6mo ago
I would add (while still oversimplifying; Japanese history is not my strong suit) that there was a strong internal rivalry between the army (who wanted to fight the USSR) and the navy (who wanted to fight the US/UK). The army faction sort of got their wish in 1938-9 but blew it by being defeated by the Soviets (General Zhukov won his first big victory there.) and were in turn discredited in favor of the naval faction.
This scene depicting that battle is hilariously inaccurate in some ways (No, the Japanese weren't using Kamikaze trucks; they had tanks, planes, and artillery of their own.), but the moral of "Oh fuck, the Soviets have more tanks." was true. Unfortunately for Japan, America had just as much overmatch in ship and airplane production as the Soviets did in tank production.
In my experience paper towels work best for windows. If you want to be fancy or have window tint that doesn't mix with ammonia get the glass cleaner that comes in a can. It smells nice!
Wheels are tedious but not that hard.
I used too many words to just say "YouTube certified mechanic" instead of "ASE certified mechanic" (aka a real mechanic). I'm not a real mechanic, but I was a delivery driver for a long time and between keeping my own car on the road and working on cars for coworkers or friends (At the delivery company I used to work at I was the unofficial company mechanic.) I've learned a few things along the way. You can find a video showing how to do most jobs (and lots on auto detailing) on common cars on YouTube, and it's a quick way to preview a job and decide whether I want to do it or farm it out to a shop.
For example, changing a CV axle on an 8th generation Honda Civic (2006-2011) is fairly easy so long as you have an impact wrench (A battery powered impact wrench is the best tool I've ever bought.), a pry bar, and a big enough hammer. Changing the starter on those same cars if it's the Si model with the bigger engine is NOT a fun job (ditto for an AC compressor; an alternator swap isn't hard though), so I would pay a shop to do that unless I absolutely had to save the money on labor.
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