solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
Of the stuff we deal with, our main trouble categories are asphalt, latex (If not washed immediately the stuff dries and has to be scraped out of the trailer by hand), and a particular class of water treatment chemical.
The latter isn't regulated as hazmat, but requires a polymer wash and apparently has a habit of expanding upon touching water, which is troublesome for a lot of plumbing systems. Furthermore, many places either prohibit or limit how much of that product can be washed in a given time frame due to wastewater regulations.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
Allegedly she tried to take our safety guy back to the hotel while shit faced a few months ago, so yeah, probably. If I had to guess the bedroom is pretty dead because she lost all respect for the husband a long time ago.
Personally, I'm not into GILFs, or married women for that matter, and that's before you get into the can of worms of being someone else's drunken mistake when that someone else is the logistics boss for your biggest customer.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3d ago
The way I would describe myself (having been armchair diagnosed with autism by multiple acquaintances, much to my irritation) is that there's a difference between "kind of an autist" (guilty as charged) and "diagnosable as autistic" (The shrink I saw never brought it up, so if that's the case it isn't that obvious, and the guy was otherwise fairly dramatic with his assessments.). Whatever happened to being a bit weird, anyway?
If anything (I've always been something of a motormouth.), after getting a job at a bar I discovered that I am a lot more extroverted than I thought I was. It's still not perfect, runs hot and cold, and I'm not the best at approaching strangers, but I get bored sitting at home alone after awhile.
Mind you, there are other problems like pathological aversion to conflict and/or a screwed up attachment style, but I don't think those are an autism thing, more of a fucked up mommy issues thing (gag!).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3d ago
One Year in the Trucking Office
Well, it’s been 11 months, but the company sent me my one year pin, so close enough I guess. Things are going reasonably well. The job can be a lot (24/7 on call, but luckily most of my drivers aren’t vampires and we don’t do that much weekend work.), but I don’t hate it, I’m not terrible at it, and hopefully I’ll be getting a raise fairly soon, so that’s nice. I was recently interviewed for a promotion, but turned it down because it was completely out of my wheelhouse (an IT job, when I have no real IT experience/qualifications/desire to do it for a living, nor am I interested in moving to Craptown, Mississippi, but I appreciate the opportunity. Apparently my name came up because scuttlebutt around the corporate office is that I’m smart and can be taught things). The good news there is that I discussed it beforehand with the corporate operations guy and he told me that there was no wrong answer: take the corporate gig if you want it but you will be promoted, and soon if you stay in the trucking division. Apparently the VP of trucking is relieved that I chose to stay, and I know that my boss is. The learning curve was steep for a few months when my workload went from nonexistent to running day to day operations more or less overnight, but it’s not a terrible workload as much as it is inconsistent, unpredictable, and frequently frustrating.
This will soon degenerate into a bunch of unfocused observations/musings about the job in the form of bullet points, but I will elaborate on my boss. We met when I was a barback and he was a customer at the bar I worked at, and he’s the one who tipped me off about the job some years later. We work in a small terminal, but have our own offices. He’s kind of lazy, infuriatingly bad with details (I tell him we need insurance cards, and he asks for registration cards, or he forgets to ask me if we can cover something before making a promise.), and occasionally ill tempered (He’s short tempered but gets over it quickly, while I’m more patient but less forgiving.) but pretty easygoing (just show up before 8AM!). We get along and complement each other well, and he has talents worthy of respect. He has a nose for company politics, a talent for self-promotion (and he says great things about me to his bosses!), and is a genuine people person. He’d kill it in sales (and I believe he will be promoted into that at some point), and I believe that really does respect me. I may joke about some some annoying quirks (he *cannot multitask/pay attention to more than one thing at a time, and he likes to have Fox News on all day), but we all have quirks and my read on the situation is that he has coattails worth following. Apparently we’ve cultivated a reputation for doing well among people that matter.
- Dispatching tanker trucks is different than food delivery drivers. It’s not as fast paced, but you have to think in a 3-7 day window and there are a lot more details that can get you. Not all tanks can haul all products/deliver to all places, not all drivers know how to do everything, and certain products can’t be cleaned at the average tank wash. Speaking of tank washes, many of them suck and while most things in trucking work 24/7, tank washes (and repair shops!) do not. Most of them are closed on weekends/holidays.
- From someone with a decent (if non-professional) background dealing with cars, the quality of the semi trucks (and trailers!) we deal with is surprisingly poor in comparison. Maybe other manufacturers suck less, but PACCAR (aka. Peterbilt and Kenworth, like Chevy and GMC are both built by GM) is like some bad stereotype of 70s domestic cars. Get a brand new truck? Better get ready to take that piece of shit straight to the shop to get the kinks worked out, and truck dealers aren’t any more fun to deal with than their automotive counterparts. I understand that diesel emissions tech is, shall we say, undercooked at the moment, but the amount of failures I see on trucks from stupid components that rarely break on cars boggles the mind. I just had a ‘24 model have to have the gear selector switch and fuel sending unit replaced because both failed. One of our new ‘26 models had its engine explode at 20K miles. I’m sending another brand new ‘26 to the shop tomorrow because the air compressor is bad. Pretty much all of our trucks leak coolant, usually from the APUs, and getting this actually fixed seems to be impossible. We just received an allotment of brand new trailers and the hydraulic hand pumps have a ~50% failure rate. NEW doubles as an acronym, “Never Ever Worked”.
- Our software is...not great, and in many ways significantly worse than the software I used dispatching for a small Doordash clone. Doing payroll is very time consuming because nothing is automated and every line item on every driver's check has to be added manually. For some reason beyond my comprehension our software does not send the addresses of the shipper and receiver to the driver's ELD, so I have to manually look these up on my phone and text it to them.
- I don’t have a CDL and have never driven anything bigger than a small U-haul, but I haven’t had any issue with that with the drivers. I’m up front about that, tell them that I’ll be honest with them when I screw up, I can’t promise them that they’ll never have a bad week but I’ll do my best to make sure that every week isn’t a bad week, etc. and it seems to work out okay. As one put it, “You haven’t driven a truck, but you have a brain and you listen to us.”.
- As for the drivers themselves, we have a mostly solid crew: a few great ones I couldn’t run the terminal without, more that have flaws but are serviceable, and a few divas (At least the diva who unnecessarily blows up my phone is decent conversation, and he rolls with the punches when plans constantly change.) and stains (I hope that my worst stain is about to leave before safety fires him, and I hope he goes to a doctor and gets a fucking CPAP before he dies at 45, because I do like the guy. I just wish he would get his shit together.). Our new hire worries me. The trainer likes him but he doesn’t strike me as being overly bright or having a sense of urgency. Hopefully he’s just being cautious as a new guy and proves my intuitions wrong.
- Trucking has some of the fattest employees I’ve ever seen, and the offices are far from immune. It’s here that I’ve learned that GLP-1s are not a miracle for everyone. Many are afraid to take them and some have quit them due to finding the side effects intolerable. That said, one of our dispatchers lost over 100lbs and completely turned his life around on them. Our biggest success story (and this is what success often looks like when dealing with morbid obesity, not a perfect ending but a significant, life improving improvement) managed to drop from 470 to 290lbs (The first guy is tall and the second is not, but 290 with controlled diabetes and hypertension is still a lot better than 470 and near death’s door.).
- A lot of our drivers are also older, so between obesity and old age we have a lot of diabetics, sleep apnea, etc. You do not want your blood pressure or A1C to be high enough that the DOT fails your physical, but it happens. One of my more reliable guys is out on FMLA because he just had heart surgery. Mercifully, after some form wrangling he will be paid his short-term disability. Our health insurance is decent, but it’s still United Healthcare and he’s currently freaking out about his insurance saying that his hospital stay for chest pain was “not medically necessary” as I reassure him that they’re shooting from the hip and denying everything, the hospital’s billing department will fight them, and they may or may not have goofed up the initial claims paperwork.
- Trucking is a hard job, and being an owner-operator can be more rewarding but also financial ruin if you’re not mechanically inclined, bad with money, or go into it without enough capital. Seeing an owner-op drown is depressing. Winter sucks, and a lot of our drivers are afraid of snow, problematic given how much of our freight goes up north. In my experience the midwest is much better at dealing with snow than the east coast, but my understanding is that this last winter was unusually bad for them.
- Nobody wants to go to NYC (or Philly, Connecticut, etc.), I don’t want to deadhead someone eight hours east to pick up a load going to New York where it’s hard to get a backhaul, and I really don’t want to send them there with a product that’s difficult to get washed. Naturally, our backhaul department has lots of loads from the Georgia coast heading to the NYC area with a hard to clean product, and to my perpetual frustration the terminal we opened in coastal Georgia has been slow to ramp up, so I’m still being asked to cover loads from there.
- As much as I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with freight brokering, our backhaul department, aka. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, are frequently incompetent and a pain in the ass (but a necessary evil, because they aren’t going to be fired and it’s worth eating some of their shit when they hook my guys up with nice runs). Speaking of backhauls, most of the freight out of my terminal runs on dedicated trailers, so while the rates are good the lack of backhaul opportunities really hurts how much money I can make those guys, and the longer runs can soak up a full workweek. Some of our other terminals’ dispatching is a train wreck, but some of them are well run or at least reasonably put together, and it’s nice to have relationships with those guys to keep my trucks rolling. I’m personally more comfortable having to think, beg, and push because we’re busy than I am telling guys that I don’t have work for them, because I don’t want my guys to be broke.
- The logistics manager for my biggest local customer is fun to talk to and reasonably forgiving of my screw ups, but can be remarkably inept at, uh, logistics (No, lady, my driver can’t drive 200 miles to pick up a trailer and then 950 miles to a shipper in the same day.) and taking her out for dinner and drinks (on the company dime!) has a habit of turning into a therapy session about her husband and the fact that she needs her hair pulled in bed.
- Something I’ve learned is that my biggest personal pet peeve is making a mistake out of ignorance. My biggest pet peeve from drivers is being late/barely making it because they started late (If I tell you to pick up the trailer at 11, that doesn’t mean 12:30!), and that goes double if they don’t tell me that they’re going to be late and I find out the hard way. I hate not feeling like I can trust someone to do what they say they’re going to.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
Yes, mid 30s, and I go out to the bar between 1-3 nights a week (usually closer to three, but it depends). How much? Too much, especially for my wallet (I, uh, spent over $6K on bar tabs last year...), and a doctor would likely be horrified if I made an actual count and told them, but hey, who needs to do that? This is actually an improvement, and I rarely drink alone these days, just keep some light beer in the fridge to finish off the night if I get bored and go home early. I've been working on the same 15 pack of Natty Light in my fridge for the last month.
I was a pretty ridiculous drink at home alcoholic in my early-mid 20s, such that I’m probably lucky to have survived and definitely lucky not to have wound up in jail. I didn’t do much day drinking but did peak at about a fifth of vodka a night worth of whatever cheap beer (Steel Reserve and Natty Ice were my go-tos.) I was going for that night. I don’t recommend it, even if it was an effective weight loss plan. There’s nothing attractive about self-pity, getting blacked out every night is an extremely inefficient method of working through your problems at best, and that therapist who fired me and wanted me to go to inpatient rehab had a point (even if I don’t think that rehab was the correct answer).
From there I spent the better part of a decade being an overpaid (SEC college town) service industry townie who hung out with other townie service industry/musician types. It was a much more fun way to spend one’s time, if not exactly more productive. I had a life pretty much perfectly catered to it: Work 11AM-10/11PM, hit the bars until they close at 2, rinse and repeat and before you know it you’re over 30 wondering where the time went. Covid, rent increases, and the delivery company I worked for dying ended that fun, though I tossed in a few years of playing the alcoholic bartender game for good measure before concluding that bartending was a dead end. There’s a difference between being passionate and knowledgeable about drinking and passionate and knowledgeable about drinks, and I was a mediocre bartender at best who’d aged out of liking most craft beer.
The last few years and especially the last year have put a major crimp in my barfly lifestyle, namely due to most of my friends from that era either moving out of town or aging out of that lifestyle, along with now working a job that requires showing up early in the morning and actually being productive. Losing that employee discount along with the old crew that was good for at least one or two drinks not rang in per night also hurts. With that, my favorite bar has transformed itself from a hangout for disgruntled adjuncts/professors and dilettantes into a nursing home that occasionally hosts children (aka. undergraduates), or maybe happy hour was always like that and I just never knew (Spoiler: It was always like that, which is why I hated working happy hour, though it remains my contention that our night shift is a shadow of what it used to be). I get bored and want to go to the bar and talk (I envy people who enjoy watching TV.), but then I show up to happy hour and am more often than not the only person aside from the bartender under the age of 55. I haven’t hit every happy hour in town but this seems to be the case in every one I’ve tried so far. Lately, I’ve found myself going out less and/or having two rounds and going home more often because the expected value of entertainment/conversation just isn’t there like it used to be.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
For now, the latter. Black voters punch above their demographic weight thanks to being the largest and oldest minority in most swing states and black politicians/party officials perform similarly thanks to gerontocracy bias within the Democratic Party. Joe Biden in particular ran a very "on or east of the Mississippi" campaign that emphasized the black vote.
For the future, I am less certain. For one, what is "white"? Is it a (broadly speaking) married, high school educated, male Gen Xer who owns a car dealership (along with the self-styled "independent" mechanic who works for him), or is it an unmarried, college educated, female Gen Xer with a white collar job working for a large corporation, government, or a non-profit? The first group might outnumber the second, but if the latter is better educated, richer, and exercises a near-monopoly on the votes of educated immigrants the first group is in serious trouble.
If we just simplify things by remembering that the GOP wins the white vote outright in most places, we're left with everyone else. The GOP hasn't been competitive with educated, legal immigrants (not just Asians, but, as a shorthand, Asians) since Bill Clinton was in office, but they tend to cluster in already blue cities in already blue states, so they're not a major electoral force. Legal, educated immigration remains a major boon to the Democrats in terms of House seats, human capital, and powering the economy of blue-leaning America, however. The GOP couldn't offer black politicians and voters the sort of representation they have within the Democratic Party even if they wanted to, and educated black Americans aren't conservative by and large, so moving the needle there is difficult. The GOP/Conservative Inc. have long been desperate to diversify, but have found few takers, hence the massive disparity in minority candidate quality the two parties have to represent them. Democrats have some dummies in their minority caucus, but broadly speaking they don't have to resort to the likes of Larry Elder/Herman Cain/Ben Carson or worse (Herschel Walker/Mark Robinson) because they have better options. Things haven't looked much better for the GOP in terms of finding high quality Asian or Hispanic candidates either. Maybe they're just unlucky that Marco Rubio was/is more comparable to Cory Booker in terms of charisma than Barack Obama.
This leads us to the problem of Milton Friedman's idea that immigration is best if it's illegal. Was Trump being competitive with Hispanic voters in 2024 a realignment or a mirage? Even in the best case scenario in which the GOP keeps Floridian Cubans in their column and in which Hispanic voters start to look a lot like "independent" whites, they're left with the problem that the same education polarization that pushes them away from the Democrats makes them less reliable partisans and less valuable in terms of building competent institutions. In their worst case scenario in which 2024 looks like an '04 style mirage aggravated by the Harris campaign being poor at Hispanic outreach they're...screwed for now. Can the Texas GOP win the Hispanic vote with a candidate slate that's as white if not whiter than an SEC frat house?
Racial politics within the Democratic Party could look interesting. Jim Clyburn isn't going to live forever and if SCOTUS were to curtail the Voting Rights Act the Congressional Black Caucus would face some attrition. There's also the old white problem. Are Gen X whites going to stay loyal to the GOP as they age out of their prime taxpaying years and into their prime healthcare spending years, especially if the GOP tries to revert back to some variety of fiscal hawkishness? It's entirely possible that oldmaxxing is the easiest electoral strategy for the Democrats in the near future, especially if they can promise most of the Dream Hoarders that they'll tax someone richer than them to pay for it (see: the SALT deduction), in which case any racial argument gets kicked down the road.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
8d ago
The short answer is that the upper/educated class and state got a lot bigger and more secular.
One could add a longer answer involving economics (Societies as a whole became vastly richer, and we had a whole new class of jobs in which women were competitive in doing, increasing the opportunity cost of keeping women out of the workforce.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
Mathematically someone has to balance the books here.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
You wouldn't pay Mom's rent anyway
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system.
You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
17d ago
FWIW, I also played a ton of videogames growing up. I lived in the middle of nowhere and "other kids to play with" weren't a thing that existed. I enjoyed the PS2 era, grew up on Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and Max Payne. My username is a reference to Ace Combat: The Belkan War.
Unlike you, I mostly played single player. LAN parties were a thing in boarding school such that I briefly became competent (but not good!) at Counter Strike: Source and had built a modest gaming PC, but I didn't get into the likes of WOW and wasn't very good at RTS games. Around 18 I mostly lost interest. PS3 games were slow to appear and Madden in particular was godawful after the switch. I never got into multiplayer online aside from Battlefield 3. That, and GTA 4 and the DLCs were the highlight of my time with the PS3.
I've occasionally had games reel me back in, but rarely. Far Cry 4 and 5 were fun but I wasn't impressed with Far Cry 6. Metro 2033 and and Ace Combat 7 were fun, but didn't keep me reeled in long term. My PS4 mostly collects dust these days and if anything I wish it could play the old PS2 games so I could give B7R another go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
17d ago
In lieu of something actually interesting (We're nearing "Three months on a bootleg Chinese GLP" and "10 months in a trucking office"; the latter has potential.), I present an update on [my bum elbow].
A month later, and four doctor's visits (one urgent care, orthopedist No. 1, CT scan, and orthopedist No. 2) later my HSA is soon to be some hundreds of dollars poorer (On that note, why does every practice seem to have its own app, and how do I even find what I owe after the insurance discount to pay it? Is someone going to mail/email me a bill at some point? I'm used to just paying urgent cares cash up front like a pleb.), my elbow thoroughly scanned and X-rayed, and the answer is about what I thought it was, something along the lines of "not great, not terrible".
"Wow, that's an ugly elbow. Can you move that thing?", the nurse for ortho No. 1 remarked upon seeing the X-ray with a tone of bemusement that I found charming. The urgent care doc had supplied a decadron shot and prescribed some variety of steroid shots for the road as expected, but referred me to his buddy at the local ortho clinic to try and get to the bottom of my elbow seemingly going on strike at random. Both ortho appointments were remarkably short and the questions remarkably repetitive, be they from the screening nurse or the doctors themselves. One wonders if anyone takes notes given how many times I had to answer "Why are you here?". "function normally limited but not intrusively bothersome, flare ups ranging from annoying to seriously intrusive and crippling, flare ups have become more frequent and severe with age". Ortho No.1 was more gung-ho about arthroscopic surgery. Ortho No. 2, apparently the "elbow guy" (Why didn't I get the elbow guy the first time?), was more conservative, advocating a "wait and watch" approach.
The verdict: Yup, the joint has lots of arthritis, the cartilage is gone, and there are some bone fragments floating around that might be catching and causing range of motion issues. Some nerve damage/muscle atrophy is visible on the left hand. That said: if it doesn't get much worse doing nothing might be the correct answer here. The bad news is that we're unlikely to achieve serious improvement with surgery (No lifting weights for you!). The good news is that it probably won't get much worse or at least won't get worse quickly and if the situation does degrade we can probably get you back to "not great, not terrible" with a scalpel.
Here's hoping this has just been an anomalously bad spring, things will stabilize, and I'll have forgotten about this by the time its solidly summer. I do know that traveling up north for Easter, driving through a big storm, and then smack into a major cold front was most likely the faux pas that provoked the latest flare up.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
27d ago
287, performed oddly well in cultural knowledge and most poorly in literary knowledge (The latter isn't surprising.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The US already had those cards given its ability to sanction or blockade pretty much any oil exporter at will and/or blockade China. The only reason that Chinese purchases dominated Venezuelan and Iranian exports in the first place is that they were pretty much the only ones who would buy from them thanks to US sanctions, and as much as the sanction discount was easy money for the Chinese it isn't that important. China also buys lots of oil (much more than from Iran and Venezuela combined) from Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, along with Iraq. Are we going to sanction all of them as well?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I did a long time ago (The initial injury and surgical repair occurred a bit over 20 years ago when I was in middle school.). Since then, that arm was weaker but functioned well enough in my high school/college years, and what has transpired since has been a gradual loss of function/escalation of symptoms on "bad" days, easy enough to ignore until it becomes impossible to ignore.
I actually learned something at the doctor today. I'd been told when the surgery happened that I'd had a plate and two screws put in but he had it X-rayed today and apparently this isn't the case. The only other thing I'd been told was in my 20s, at a chiropractor being X-rayed for a different issue (car wreck). That guy was like "Your back is fine, but who did the hatchet job on your arm!?"
Who knows...what I do know now is that the doctor who saw me today wants to refer me to an orthopedist so that we can figure out what is going on with the joint.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This is more yelling into the void than anything useful, but I managed to combine bad luck and bull-headed foolishness to reap myself a lot of pain.
Long story short, due to an old football injury that may or may not have had a "hatchet job" of a repair that I foolishly didn't fix in my 20s while under my father's health insurance (and until very recently lacked the sort of health insurance/savings to fix it since) my left elbow in normal times suffers from what I believe to be an entrapped ulnar nerve, a limited range of motion, weakness in the arm and hand, etc. Ordinarily it doesn't hurt that much, just makes for a weak arm that isn't very useful such that I can't do pushups, accomplish much lifting weights, or use regular dental floss. It's annoying but harmless and easy to sweep under the rug and ignore most of the time, especially when we're probably talking about needing a fairly serious surgical repair that until recently would've put me out of work for at least six weeks (Now I have an office job and would just be a slower typist.).
However, every once in awhile (and these seem to get worse with age, currently in my mid 30s) my elbow will suffer from a sufficiently severe arthritis flareup as to be crippled, and today has been one of those days. At best, we're talking about somewhere between 0-10 degrees range of motion in my elbow, constant throbbing pain that I'd rate around a 3 or 4 out of 10, and an instant jolt of pain if I move or twist the joint wrong. I'm pretty sure the cause of pain here is the swelling pushing the entrapped ulnar nerve into something solid, like someone with a screwdriver poking in at one's funny bone.
Anyway, duty called and a dear friend of mine needed an emergency car repair, stat, a brake caliper and rotor replacement (existing caliper was hyperextended and leaking fluid and the rotor was trashed). It was too late to get it to a shop, the friend needed it for a work trip tomorrow, blah blah blah. I knew it was going to suck but didn't see much good in saying "sorry man, good luck!" and going home to sit and feel sorry for myself so I worked through the pain, got the job done (I strongly advised said friend to run by a shop and have them check the torque on the caliper brackets, but am otherwise confident in my work and am reasonably confident that the bolts are tight enough, just not as sure as I'd like to be from working in the dark with limited space.), and the brakes work now.
Right/nice thing to do, but holy fuck that was the wrong move in the elbow department. We're now firmly in "joint is paralyzed" territory and that constant pain is now a more consistent four. I needed help putting my jacket on as I left. This sucks, and unless things dramatically improve tomorrow I'm probably going to wind up spending a few hours and a couple hundred bucks at an urgent care getting loaded up with enough steroids to fix this (This was likely the outcome anyway.). Ah well, such is life, and I have money in an HSA to pay for this now! Take better care of yourself than I have.
Oh yeah, happy coincidence: When this happens my elbow freezes at such an angle that my left hand falls in the right place on a keyboard and it's only slightly painful to type.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yeah, he's definitely not a film guy, but he's fun for a casual shitposter.
On that note this season's Raiders were arguably the worst team they've trotted out since '06, so I didn't spend much time watching. That season ending tank bowl against the Giants was pretty funny, though.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This isn't artful. It's impotent thuggery. ICE isn't in the business of prosecuting fraud and no Somalis or white liberals will be punished by their presence. Their bakers remain and will remain thriving, and that is what offends me.
Fact is, Trump is a tough talking liar who lacks conviction and echoes the last person to give him advice. Most of his coterie are corrupt and/or incompetent. He would've been a respectable mayor of NYC but is out of his element as President and the rest of the GOP are mostly worse. Voting is cheap and Hillary/Kamala losing was fun but giving these people an iota of support or emotional energy is a waste of time.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This is a punitive expedition and I could not support it more
So what happens when it turns out that the Somalis are overwhelmingly citizens and/or legal immigrants, thanks in large part to George H.W. Bush and the Republicans who held Congress throughout the 90s, and then a bunch of churches juiced up with money thanks to George W. Bush? For the record if there's going to be punishment I think that it needs to start there.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
But to win, maybe you have to bring the fight to middle class and upper middle class liberals in blue states. Maybe white progressive Democrats in Minnesota have to fear ICE. Maybe that’s what it takes.
I'm sympathetic to that take, but until Republicans so much as sniff toward taking on the business lobby I will assume that they are not serious about immigration restriction and remain the anarcho-capitalist liberals that were Reagan through Romney concerning immigration.
Remember: Business owners are the original open-borders lobby, always have been and always will be. Fealty to capital is not governance but failure to govern and an invitation to be defeated by anyone who values things other than money. One would think that the GOP would've learned from the last century but they did not and will not.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Congress and the Judiciary are overwhelmingly pre-2020 and Twitter is not real life. No Republican politician, let alone Democrat, would dare utter the words "Black people destroyed urbanism in America". Steve King was castrated by the House GOP for less.
Illegal immigrants (and, really, most first-gen legal immigrants) have almost nothing to do with woke. Those people are mostly Made in the USA Americans like Kimberle Crenshaw with a helping of highly educated second-generation children of legal immigrants.
The GOP does have some genuine restrictionists (motivated by, if nothing else, being able to read exit polls), but the party as a whole is squishier than their rhetoric and quick to sell out to whatever lobbyist shows up. The old school labor types who used to act as a brake within the Democratic Party are all but extinct.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
The libertarian idea echoed by Republicans that business owners are too special a class to fill out paperwork or obey laws is what is "primarily responsible" for widespread illegal immigration. Business owners are the original open borders constituency.
Yes, filling out paperwork has a cost. Paying competitive wages that command American adults and/or building one's facilities in a place that people actually live instead of staffing one's factory with migrant children in a rural nowhere county with less than 10K working-age residents is indeed more expensive.
Failing to govern also has costs. Republican politicians have spent the last 20 or so years either lying about being opposed to illegal immigration or being too spineless to actually enforce immigration laws if it meant irritating the Chamber of Commerce. Lying/failure to deliver has expensive consequences like incompetent populists winning primaries and becoming the face of your party. CPB/ICE's budget increase for the sake of deportations exceeds the budget for the entire Department of Labor.
If the right can't tell the Chamber of Commerce types (who, last I checked, are entirely incapable of mobilizing voters, let alone street protests) to take one for the team or try their luck with the Mamdanis of the world they don't stand a chance in Hell of accomplishing any goal that faces any organized opposition.
At this point the Republicans might as well give up and go back to the Reagan/H.W. Bush position of open borders.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
You write the regulation such that "Compliant Employer" is vicariously liable for any violations by the subcontractor, as is done to varying extents by OSHA and the NLRB.
For an example: busting Hyundai for using child labor. You would want to make the fines larger, but the principle applies. The factory and the temp agency are both fined for the labor law violation.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
It should be remembered that George Wallace was more of a showman than a committed segregationist, the stand at the schoolhouse door was an engineered photo op, and that most of the Southern Democrats were to the left of their voters on segregation. Wallace himself campaigned hard on segregation mostly because he lost the '58 primary while endorsed by the NAACP to a guy endorsed by the Klan (who lived long enough to endorse Barack Obama; Southern politics can be funny like that).
Immigration is another one of those issues where the vast majority of politicians from any party are to the left of their electorate. Steven Miller might be serious about mass deportations, but the Congressional GOP is not and has spent the last 20 years desperate to enact IRCA: Part Two. Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible. Even Trump spent most of his political career calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi before aping his platform.
Probably an adversely selected sample given Aella's audience, and going by my past talent for ruining millennial "complain about your family" sessions by talking about actual bad stuff I'm among the "adversely selected", but as a millennial with Gen X parents, uh... The two of them were married four times (Mom twice, Dad thrice) and of those four, my father's third marriage is the only one that I would call successful (and even then, I have no idea why my second stepmom puts up with my father's shit). Of the six aunts and uncles on both sides, none are married to their original spouses, save for one who is merely separated (They'll likely never divorce, just live in separate trailers in the same park; they had dinner together during Easter.).
My parents' marriage and divorce were insane disasters that only could've gotten worse if my father had given up and walked away, someone actually got murdered, or mom had been clever enough to accuse him of "abusing" my sister and I in court instead of just painting him as an irresponsible alcoholic and lecturing us about her victimhood in their episodes of domestic violence (Yeah, she lost some fights, but she won some too, and after their divorce mom kept having problems with domestic violence while dad did not. She hit my sister and I, not him.). They split for good when I was six and their post-divorce war dragged on for 15 years after that.
I didn't date in college/my early 20s because I was terrified of winding up with someone like my mother. Turns out that while I have a talent for being taken advantage of I have a fairly well-developed set of defenses against that strain of crazy. Relationships/friendships with Borderlines should be avoided for any litany of reasons, but even most of those I've run into (not many, really; women really aren't all like that) haven't been that bad. Oddly enough, or not, the ones who've been diagnosed and told me up front (very rare, but I've known a couple) are among the more manageable. Crazy/dramatic for sure, but maybe worth it and the silent treatment/cold shoulder works with them if you're patient enough.
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