This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
I think you got it quite wrong. It was never about pure performance. It was always about the rush of the wins during the journey.
Do you know which is the most condescending, obnoxious thing in modern cars - the check engine light. It is the equivalent of the ban on twitter of old and Facebook - with you break our guidelines without telling you what is wrong. Not only it doesn't refuse to tell you the error - with 2 screens in my car there is not a single place, submenu or whatever where I can read the code, let alone the description of the error. You the user are unworthy of even knowing what is wrong with your property.
There is this meme/observation - in the 60s the car manuals included how to adjust the valves, Today the warning is to not drink from the washing fluid.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI - this is ad for Chevrolet from 1937 that gives the best explanation how differential works. This is a culture that creates petrolheads.
In days of old it was basic expectation of masculinity to know how a car works in detail, to be able to repair it (or at least keep it moving until you get to repairman) and maintain it. Nowadays there are guys that brag with their inability to change a flat tire (true story).
We don't live in a culture that can generate interest in cars. Or PCs for that matter. While the PC is still quite open it is too monoculturish (or oligoculturish) to actually generate deep interest in custom builds. The society tries its best to discourage the tinkerer, the inventor. Except in the confines of the big corporations. We don't want people to actually interfere with our plans for planned obsolescence I guess.
My washing machine has 12 programs. And there is absolutely nowhere info to be found about what time they take, the rpm and difference between them. Let alone regulate it or change it. My customer steam oven has all kinds of awesome fancy programs and yet not a simple way to create my custom one.
Nowadays we live in the opposite culture - knowing is discouraged. The car works by magic, the iphone works by magic, the washing machine too.
Huh? Put in an obdii reader and check the code. Tells you exactly what's wrong.
Which is a third-party prosumer item that not everyone has.
That's the point. You shouldn't need a third-party item to understand where the fuck-up is. Even if it's a hidden option in the background, cars come natively with enough computers that you should be able to pull up an error-code read-out without spending additional money.
Instead, we get new cars and trucks with 18 different cameras built in so the software can construct a to-down view when backing up and then wonder why everything is so expensive nowadays.
Grousing about a $100 tool for a car that cost thousands doesn't really make sense. Not everyone has a wrench set either. The obdii scanner pinpoints the issues much better than a few gauges on the dash ever could - it's a huge step up from how things used to be.
Cpi for new cars was flat from the late 90s until covid, so new cars actually got cheaper in real terms. Before that, prices followed general inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01
Also, nobody can force you to buy a new car (it's against the law!).
It makes perfect sense. I'm already paying thousands for said car - why does it not include the necessary software already?
If I wanted to get a new car to replace the one I have(I don't), I couldn't even go with the latest make and model as they literally don't release them in America any more.
Nor am I skeptical that I could purchase one with similar performance and at a similar price. The MRSP for the model I own has gone up, not down. That's not normal.
Hopefully I won't have to find out any time soon.
Cars don't come with wrench sets either. What contempt for the user!
You indeed should not be skeptical, because until covid as I said car prices were getting cheaper in real terms for twenty years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think either of us is wrong, a journey needs a destination to have meaning. Performance might be more MacGuffin than goal, but you need a MacGuffin to animate the characters to pursue the actions that create the plot. Without a goal, your journey becomes a walkabout, that of a Flaneur, and few people share that temperament.
The speed might not ultimately have been the fun part, but achieving and pursuing the speed was the motivating force behind the whole culture.
I was viewing mostly your paragraph about how fast modern cars are at factory defaults hurts the hobby. It doesn't in my opinion. Sorry if I wasn't clear. The same way a sharpener takes a cheap knife for fun - he knows it won't beat the Shigefusa or Sakai Yusuke - the high come from the improvement of the original car. It is the relative not the absolute performance of the car that moves the tinkerers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn’t the engine light strictly more information than you’d have had in an older vehicle?
All your same diagnostics still work. You can go pop the hood and observe, shit, I’m out of blinker fluid. Time to walk to the nearest phone booth and call for a tow.
I bet it’s easier to hack new washer cycles, too. Back in my day you only had one knob and one button.
No. While the ecu has a lot more information it is hidden. In the old soviet lada and moskvich you had a oil pressure gauge. The design was a lot more in your face.
The check engine light is like your wife being angry with you. What is wrong - if you don't know, no need to tell you. But something is wrong. Give me the fucking error code in plain sight. It was the same with windows when they changed the BSOD to smiley. Why ?
I doubt it. Manufacturers go to great deal to obscure the raw parameters - like RPM, duration and so on. Why?
So…which of those raw parameters was available in the good ol’ washer? From where I’m standing, if you desperately wanted to tune your washer, too bad. Today there’s at least a chance that the OEM left an open port somewhere in the machine. It has strictly more features than its predecessor, even if it doesn’t include all the ones you want.
The loss of an oil gauge is a shame. And a surprise—my car still has one! Why do you think they took it out? My guess would be cost-saving, or maybe wanting a cleaner visual presentation. Arguing that it was a corporate plan to discourage amateur maintenance…well, I find that less likely. There are plenty of better ways to make working on your car less appealing; just ask BMW.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve often thought that the lack of such maker cultures both in STEM and in the arts hurts the ability of the next generation of people to get excited about making things themselves. Everything is left to the professional, to the pro STEM guy to make an app for that, or for the artist to create the kind of content people want. I think some of the trouble comes from the laws. If someone does something stupid with their device settings and either breaks the device or injures themselves, the company might be liable for that. In the case of the arts, most mainstream characters and concepts are copyrighted to long past the lifetime of anyone who grew up when the concept was new.
More options
Context Copy link
An increasing number of new cars don't even come with a spare tire, without which the skill is not necessarily useful. On the other hand, modern tires are far more reliable than our grandparents', and run-flat tires aren't that bad, from what I hear.
And it's not like most folks can change the tire on the rim at home anyway: that's a specialized skill these days involving some specific large power tools and esoteric knowledge of installing TPMS sensors correctly. And used tires have specific proper disposal requirements too.
I'm not sure I disagree with your take completely, but it's also interesting to see the grind of reliability engineering and the division of specialized labor make observable progress within my own lifetime.
Maybe not a full size spare, but compact spares are standard on 2023/2024 Camrys, Corollas, Accords (the one big exception of the four being hybrid models only have flat repair kits) and Civics (the 4 most popular not-SUV, not-truck cars of 2023).
More options
Context Copy link
It's not that it is skill, it is the equipment for the rimjob (pun intended), but lifting a car, unscrewing 4-5 bolts, changing, putting bolts again, running till you get to the closest shop is useful. And it requires less than 60 seconds of learning.
From my experience modern cars are reliable until they aren't and they make sure that in that situation you are completely helpless.
I do my own oil changes and brake work, but I refuse to change flats on the road. Not because I don't know how to do it, but because the scissor jacks cars come with are absolute garbage and rather than dick around with one of these in the rain on the side of a busy road I'd rather just call someone to do it for me for free. At home I have a floor jack so it's not an issue, but if I didn't have a garage and instead, say, had to work on my car while it was parked on the street, I'd probably take it somewhere.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Unsure if you are talking about the manufacturers of PCs or the enthusiast.
All the same, I do miss the days when the various manufacturers had more interoperability. Now you pick and AMD or Intel processor, and they must use a small range of AMD or Intel motherboard chipsets. It's all very homogenized.
I think the peak of enthusiast computer building was probably Socket 7. You had chipsets from Intel, ALi, SiS or VIA. You could use CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix and a few other also rans. You could do all sorts of goofy stuff with clock multipliers and the front side bus. I'm still running a Pentium 233 MMX at 2.5 x 100 instead of 3.5 x 66.
You still had a plethora of motherboard chipset manufacturers for a while even after that. Nvidia got in the game for a hot minute. I'm not sure who hung on longest? Maybe VIA? I see they kept plugging along with Intel until the P4 era, and then AMD until AM2.
None the less it's all pretty boring now. You pick AMD or Intel, then throw the whole damned thing away in 3 or 4 years for a new socket. And often not because new hardware has really gotten all that better, but because Windows has gotten so shit it's slowed your PC to a crawl.
More options
Context Copy link
Not to excuse the atrocious incapacity of your screens, but your car should also have an OBD2 port, right? For $20 you can plug in a handheld reader (or bluetooth dongle to use your phone as the reader) and see what internal code triggered the light.
And this is what I do. But once again - it shows the attitude towards the driver and the owner.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just
a black boxmagic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my localmechanicmagician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
More options
Context Copy link
It went something like this - I had flat tire (due to stupidity on my part), the girl I was in the car with posted some kind of story on the social media. Some fuckboy wrote something among the lines her - hey hun, do you know how to change a tire. Her answer was - no, you? . His answer was - no I have guys for that.
For the other part - it was the damned iphone. Because android was open for learning and still is. But apple are actively hostile towards viewing their device as something different than magic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link