solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3d ago
The way I choose to look at it is that you may never perfectly "fit in" with a given clique of people, but thanks to all the crossed wires you'll probably have something to contribute for a given group. It's probably not possible to actually be unique without being at least a bit weird, but it doesn't have to be crippling. The way I like to put it (having been repeatedly armchair diagnosed as autistic by randos at the bar, something I find irritating) is that there's a difference between being a bit of an autist (guilty as charged) and diagnosable as autistic (I doubt that.).
That said, truly kindred spirits (instead of "tolerable enough") have been hard to come by in my experience. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, was too much of a nerd to fit in with the redneck kids, my family situation could be summed up as "Hillbilly Elegy with the details scrambled and maybe a bit worse." (Something it took me too long to learn: When middle-class Millennials gather and complain about their families, they don’t actually want to hear about traumatic stuff. Dropping a nuke and insta-winning the dysfunctional family olympics makes you a party pooper. Likewise, women who want to hear about your mommy issues more than you want to talk about them usually have bad intentions.), and somewhere along the way the teachers decided that I was “talented and gifted”, I reformed from being “likely to wind up dead or in jail” to “reasonable success story who is gainfully employed and lacks a criminal record”, and “talented and gifted” wound up being my escape at 15.
The one place I really fit in was a residential high school aimed at “gifted” STEM students. Sure, I quickly learned that I don’t care much for math or science, but I was good enough to pass with Bs and history and English teachers need pets as well. The student body weren’t truly brilliant for the most part (nor was I), but they were comfortably above-average (smarter than state-school undergrads, at least) for the most part and many were sufficiently weirder than I was that I passed for normal by the standards of that place. Was it fun? Yes. Does isolating a bunch of weirdos into a boarding school for three years and indulging their proclivities help make them less weird? LMFAO no. Some years later my favorite English teacher told me that I was the smartest person she’d ever taught (confirmed by her kids, who were amused/relieved to discover that I liked drinking beer and bullshitting just like them; on a side note being raised by a teacher of gifted kids with an excessive regard for intelligence has to have been a trip. I hope she never told them that she adopted a Chinese and an Indian because she was afraid that the local pool of white kids up for adoption would turn out to be dumb white trash.). Why? I don’t know. I guess she’d never encountered someone who was literate and also mechanically-inclined.
I guess the way I would describe my life as an excessively-online weirdo is that I find myself living in a world where people rarely get my references (and TBF I barely watch TV or Movies/wasn’t into Star Wars, Star Trek, or Harry Potter so I don’t get theirs either). Read books? Too bad. No one’s ever heard of my favorite novelist (that would be Lionel Shriver); they’re too busy reading 50 Shades of whatever. Favorite band? No one I meet has heard of Dog Fashion Disco or The Dillinger Escape Plan. I could go on but it is what it is, and I at least like football and cars enough to have something less obscure or hoe scaring to talk about.
If you want a pro-tip to level up your social skills in a hurry and have the time to spare, get a side gig working the door or barbacking a night or few at a place where people you want to be around (or at least don’t despise) like to drink. Being an acquired taste (I’m probably guilty of that.) doesn’t preclude making friends, bar patrons are a captive audience, and you’ll be forced to at least LARP as a normal person. Every once in a while you might find someone actually interesting to talk to! You’re right about time being of the essence, though. I’m 34 and the place I live (an SEC college town, and it’s summer so it’s pretty dead right now) probably doesn’t help, but I presently find myself in an episode of “Do Millennials even leave their house anymore?” I go to the bars and pretty much everyone I run into are either undergraduates or old and half of my friend group moved somewhere else after covid (a mix of people getting shaken out of their complacent lives as overpaid service industry types by the shutdowns and the town getting annoyingly expensive to live in as out of state student money gentrifies the place relative to the crappy local white collar job market).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor".
Being the best of a bad bunch isn't good enough (and it isn't as if the EU and commonwealth don't also have tons of immigrants, so we can't blame nativists for their poor performance). Unless I'm missing something, real GDP growth in the US was worse in the 2000s (and far too much of that growth went to the healthcare sector) than it was in the 80s and 90s and has been thoroughly mediocre since. Aside from the post-covid rebound in 2021 the average Millennial has never seen real GDP growth exceed 3% during their working lives.
Of course, thanks to the fact that federal spending has grown far faster than the economy during the last 25 years, VA-7 is doing better than most.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
12d ago
FWIW, as a 2/3 Trump voter (albeit in a red state, so I knew my vote didn't matter and just thought it would be funny if he won the popular vote) I'm generally bored with the Epstein stuff and wouldn't be surprised if he was in it or if he was covering for others in his circle.
I mean, he's more Ross Perot and Bill Clinton than he is Pat Buchanan (so the immigration restrictionists should be expect to be betrayed), even if he was clever enough to ape the latter for politics' sake.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
20d ago
Yeah, I forgot about Fetterman. My Fox News watching boss (a normie not-online Gen X Trump voter with, yes, a goatee) mentioned offhand that he kind of likes the guy since he had his stroke.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
21d ago
Human Bio-diversity is a thing.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
Thanks to social sorting by occupation/income/class/education I'm not sure that HBD is that obvious to your average layman. The kind of black person that hangs out in lefty college educated millennial circles is not the sort that drives an Altima with a fake paper tag. If anything, your average college educated white millennial might be more likely to know/be related to some embarrassingly white trash types than they would the average ghetto-dweller. Pro football players are supermajority black, but high school football players and more broadly football fans more closely reflect the demographics of the sort of places that are into it.
To give a Trump-coded example I work for a trucking company in the deep south whose employees are almost entirely black and white, and of the pre Ellis Island variety at that. Your HBD guy would argue that our black employees are in fact an above-average sample of the black population of AL/MS/GA while the whites we have mostly aren't (More accurately, there's an age gap. Our white employees are mostly older/from a time where college education wasn't that common and trucking was more widely considered a good job. Our average office guy was a trucker for a decade or few before they switched to the office.) but IRL it looks like a place where "90s colorblindness" (aka. the normie Trump voter position) is accurate. The black and white men (and it's all men) I work with are largely the same: high school educated/some college at most, very Southern/rural-coded, married or divorced with children (Educated incels would rage at the fact that fatass truckers can get laid and they can't.), of average intelligence, and somewhere between fat and fat as hell for the most part. The drivers (and frankly a lot of the office guys; I was hired into the office with no trucking experience based in part on the expectation that as a college educated white guy I'd have superior computer skills) might not be the brightest guys, but we pay well above-average for trucking so we get the kind who are experienced and by and large have their shit together (especially the owner/operators).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
21d ago
The mustache/goatee combo might be slightly right-coded because it’s popular with certain types of boomers and early Xers, but even that’s a weak indicator.
In my experience goatees are incredibly Trump-coded, but that's mostly because they seem to be almost universal among (mostly) high-school educated Gen Xers and the sort of Millennials (almost always blue collar) that wear them. On that note the only politician I can think of off the top of my head with a goatee is Chip Roy.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
21d ago
I think beards have become somewhat obesity/soy coded at this point thanks to too many out of shape guys using them to cover up a poor/mediocre jawline. On that note it works for JD Vance and very much does not for Ted Cruz (and it probably wouldn't even if Ted Cruz could grow one; he just needs to embrace his inner Gen Xer and stick with a goatee. See Chip Roy.).
There is a generational bit to it though. I've gone with a beard and just a moustache (the latter briefly because I thought it was hilarious how much I looked like a carbon-copy of my maternal grandfather) and the female millennial bartender was very much pro beard (and is dating a bearded lefty soylennial) while the zoomer barbacks (most of whom can't grow either) complemented the moustache.
As a Southerner who lives in Dixie Alley it was hard not to be brought back to 4/27/11 by the news coverage.
It's different when it's your family and your town where they're spray-painting X's on houses. I was in Tuscaloosa that evening, a student delivering pizza, and the level of destruction in the impacted areas (20% of the city, but more like 50% of my store's delivery area) and suffering inflicted upon victims was beyond description. Funny enough I'd spent much of the day worried about my family in north Alabama because they'd been hit earlier.
As you say, life is fragile, fate is capricious, and weather awareness only goes so far. To their credit the meteorologists got it right that day and managed to convey "This is going to be bad." in a way that penetrated typical Southern skepticism about storm warnings. Still, when you're talking about EF-4s and EF-5s there comes a point that not much short of a bunker is going to save you.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22d ago
As someone who was in Tuscaloosa when we were hit earlier that year I chalk the local nonchalance up to a few things. Aside from the over-prevalence of false alarms it's hard to really comprehend what "this happens" means unless it happens to you. I shrugged it off as a joke even as I was dodging an EF-4 in my car delivering pizzas until I was rummaging around bombed out parts of town with my friend whose survival had suddenly been in doubt looking for his friends because communications were pretty much totally gone. I learned something about myself that week: It's easy enough for me to be personally brave or at least unconcerned with my safety enough to do something stupid like volunteer to take a delivery knowing full and well that there was a tornado on the ground. Holding it together in the face of people who'd lost something to everything and who'd only been guilty of being less fortunate than I was in the space of a few minutes was not so easy. The sense of suffering and apocalypse was overwhelming and not something I hope to witness again.
People were understandably more obedient toward the weather people for some years after (and to the meteorologists' credit they got it right on 4/27/11) but over time I guess you're going to be a worry-wart or not. Maybe my take isn't the healthiest, but it's this: If it's an EF-3 or less you're unlikely to get hit in the first place and probably will survive even if your house gets trashed. If it's an EF-4/5 after having seen brick apartment buildings and schools flattened I feel like there's not much point in worrying because unless you've got a bunker to climb into whether or not you survive is more a question of fate than weather awareness.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22d ago
Heh, it's been kind of entertaining watching Shriver wander from The Guardian to The Spectator over the last decade, her boomer 2nd wave feminist liberalism (and I don't mean that as an insult) not sufficiently hip for the contemporary left and she too stubborn to get with the times.
I suppose what makes her fun to read is her uncompromisingly brutal honesty (Critics would just call her uncompromisingly brutal, but hey, some people have a taste for bitter.) combined with a scalpel-like vocabulary. It doesn't matter if the story is especially great (some are; some aren't) when the telling is that fun to read. That several of her novels draw from personal disquiet only add to the charm. I only later learned that So Much for That (an over-the-top takedown of American healthcare) was actually based on a close friend's death from mesothelioma.
To be frank she reminds me so much of my favorite English teacher from high school (a unique, highly intelligent, and, yes, profoundly bitter person; we were kindred spirits in that regard) that I sent her my copy of We Need to Talk About Kevin after reading it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23d ago
Mania by Lionel Shriver. Her novels are fun in a way that's hard to describe.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
24d ago
We can expect it when it comes to the social justice issue that Americans are beaten over the head with more or less continuously. Being allegedly so "out of the loop" that you don't understand what "black American" is typically understood to mean should be an automatic disqualifier for college admission.
Torturing definitions for "face value" to pursue personal gain is undesirable behavior, as is the widespread acceptance of this in elite institutions because they'd rather dole out patronage to like-minded individuals even if it makes a mockery of the patronage's alleged purpose. Yes, "African-American" is an arbitrary definition if one is sufficiently pedantic, but a naturalized citizen born in Africa and a black American from Alabama are obviously not the same thing. Eric Adams is a son of black Americans from Alabama. Ask a high-school educated adult from Mississippi which one is "African American". That's the intuitive interpretation.
IMO the census definition should be made more specific to include ADOS and ADOS alone, but "Obama, not Mamdani or Musk" is close enough.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
24d ago
I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk. If the majority of your ancestors weren't enslaved Americans, you're not "African-American" and thus not entitled to any of the affirmative action schemes intended to benefit that group. You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
26d ago
Broadly, it's bad fiscal policy in a way that fiscal policy has been bad in an escalating fashion for the last 10-25 years (Any self-described Republican fiscal hawks need to account for Hastert before we get to Ryan/McCarthy/Johnson.).
What I find interesting in the argument over Medicaid cuts is the fact that Medicaid spending somehow increased by 40% in the last five years? How?! I could see 25% given inflation, and a temporary covid bump makes sense, but we've allegedly had a strong working-class labor market for years.
Is a healthcare system that's rapidly approaching 20% of GDP even reformable?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
27d ago
Wash it? Pretty much never. It's a light color that doesn't show dirt much, the paint job is roasted, and there's a bit of body damage so washing it doesn't really make it look much better. I keep the interior reasonably clean, though, and my tools are organized in the trunk.
I find anything to do with cleaning cars to be a chore, but worth it when I have a car where the effort actually pays off.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
30d 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
1mo ago
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.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo 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
1mo ago
In my experience (southeastern US) it depends on the trade. Plumbers and HVAC guys tend to run in vans while construction guys tend to run pickups.
During my brief membership in the white pickup mafia (I was a service/install technician for draft beer systems.) I drove a quad cab Chevy Colorado with a bed cover. Most of what I did could be accomplished with a van, but I occasionally hauled large refrigeration units (glycol chillers) that wouldn't easily fit in one. It was also nice to carry dirty/smelly equipment in the bed instead of the cab.
I'm not a truck guy, but I was honestly impressed with that Colorado (aside from. It was faster than it needed to be (300HP V6), nice for a base-trim vehicle (power windows/locks, excellent AC and stereo), and got decent fuel economy (21 MPG mixed and 24-27 MPG highway) while being easy enough to park (Backup camera is a lifesaver here.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
It blows me away that despite a close connection to Russia, and increasingly China, they had such terrible IADS.
I would be careful not to overrate these connections. China and Russia have traditionally been rule followers when it comes to arms exports to Iran, which is to say that they complied with sanctions. China hasn't sold Iran any major systems and Russia only sold Iran four batteries of S-300s. Likewise, there's been much talk of Su-35 fighters being purchased, but no evidence of their deployment.
For comparison, Ukraine is a bit over a third of the size of Iran and reportedly had 100 S-300 batteries at the start of hostilities in 2022, enough to absorb the initial Russian strike and stay in the fight long enough for western-supplied systems like the Patriot to start picking up the slack.
Likewise, while we know that Iran supplied Russia with Shaheed drones (which Russia now produces and develops as the "Geranium"), for all the talk of Iran supplying Russia with short-range ballistic missiles, I've yet to see any evidence of them actually being deployed (i.e. actually having been shot at Ukraine or having been blown up by Ukrainians), unlike certain North Korean artillery pieces (e.g. the Koksan 170mm SPG).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Slightly, but not totally. The teen pregnancy issue during the W era was actually most strongly a southwestern Hispanic phenomenon, with states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico having higher teen pregnancy rates than deep southern states. Nevada used to have a higher teen pregnancy rate than Alabama!
Broadly, those same heavily Hispanic States have seen the largest drops in teen fertility. Deep southern states also fell, but less so, more like a 50% drop, while the northeastern and midwestern states dropped something like 60%.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Mike Johnson was going after gamers because he's too spineless to admit that elderly dementia patients are what's actually eating up Medicaid's budget. Arguments about single mothers or NEET gamers are a distraction from the fact that the welfare state mostly exists to subsidize the old and that nobody really wants to talk about cutting old people welfare.
As for the social conservatives, I think the goalposts have moved past abortion (which was mostly made obsolete by Plan B being made available OTC) once many of the dare I say Catholics among them realized to their horror that devotion to the awfully Protestant and capitalist sounding "success sequence" doesn't so much lead to abortions as a lack of fertility itself. See also: The Conservative Case for Teen Pregnancy.
The relatively secular far right may differ with the relatively Catholic social conservatives (though Mike Johnson is an Evangelical, which itself makes for a fun divide among both the secular and religious conservatives on the Israel Question) on the Single Mother Question, but nowhere near as bitterly as they differ over the Immigration Question (The secular far right see social conservatives and especially Catholic social conservatives as being unreliable on the Immigration Question, in alliance with the capitalists who are otherwise happy to crush social conservatives' fruitful multiplication with careerism and contraceptives.).
My situation is marginally different, but I find myself in a similar boat. After a decade post-graduation of slumming it at an overpaid service industry gig (owner's crony/top driver at a locally-owned doordash clone) because I was too lazy to job hunt followed by a year of going broke in a low-paying blue collar job I was fortunate enough to luck into an office job at a trucking company (thanks to having gotten to know my current boss at my side job as a bartender) that's simultaneously the highest-paying and easiest job I've ever had.
I feel like I'm in some kind of twilight zone where I get paid lower-middle class money to do nothing. I maybe do five solid hours of work a week in the office and my boss is happy with me, and his boss with him. It's a small satellite terminal and I feel like there's enough work for maybe 1.25 people, so I got hired to do some background stuff that my boss finds unpleasant and be his buddy. I was warned by the upper managers who hired me that the slow learning pace would be frustrating and it is, not because I'm struggling to grasp what I'm doing but because I'm asked to do so little and feel like I'm going to get fired because I barely do anything. But hey, my boss is scrolling on his phone/watching TV/shopping online almost as much as I'm scrolling Twitter or reading a novel on my phone, so we're even? I get texts from him about how I've been a blessing in his life. The most important thing I accomplished this week was fixing my boss's refrigerator at his house (I got lucky, the problem wound up being a $10 temperature controller, and it took me about an hour to replace.).
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