HelixDab2 @ HelixDab2 @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

What am I supposed to do? "Oh, hey, yeah, so, I just held my cat in my arms as he died. I had to euthanize him because he was had congestive heart failure, and was slowly drowning from pulmonary edema. I miss him so much, and I want to believe that he's in a better place, but he's just dead and gone, and I'm never gonna see him again. All I've got are memories, and they're going to fade with time until one day I realize that I haven't thought about him in years. But yo, how are you doin'? Any big plans for the weekend?"

You get up, and keep doing the shit you have to do, because it needs to get done. Telling people you're really depressed tends to make them feel really awkward, they don't know what to say, and then they gradually start ghosting you. Shit sucks, but you put a happy face on because no one wants to know that you aren't happy.

They're usually not too bad, if you get a working one off eBay. Buying a new loom from the manufacturer? Yeah, that's a few grand.

Here's one source on immigrations, although the numbers are slipping as the cases of illegal and wrongful deportations continue to make headlines. Even with that, Americans are fairly even split. Here's a solid source on transgender policy; while some things that are positive for transgender people have broad support, some things that are unequivocally bad--like preventing minors from accessing gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, bathroom bills, etc.--have net +10 and greater support. (+31 on only allowing people to play sports that correspond to the gender they were assigned to at birth means that it's about a 65/35 split, with 65% in favor of preventing transwomen from participating in womens' sports.)

I'm really tired of voting for better candidates that are in favor of reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, that want religion out of politics, that support genuinely free speech, and then also want to eliminate 2A rights. We're already seeing what 75 years of libs and progressives working to disarm themselves has done, and the result is that ICE agents aren't getting gunned down in the streets when they're kidnapping people, and the fash are free to do whatever the fuck they want with zero fear of consequences.

Most people are for gun control

There's a big problem with that.

Right now, the majority of people in the US are in favor of deporting all undocumented immigrants. Right now, the overwhelming majority of people are opposed to transgender rights (e.g., using bathrooms that correspond to their gender, participating in sports, having access to gender-affirming care, and so on). Going back to the late 80s/early 90s, most people would not have believed that Satanists had the right to free exercise of their religion (and many people still don't today). If you go back 75 years, the majority of the country believed that 'separate but equal' was entirely reasonable; sure, let those negroes have rights, but letting them live in our neighborhoods, go to our schools, get married to our women...? Absolutely not!

This is what is referred to as "the tyranny of the majority".

The whole purpose of the bill of rights is that they are RIGHTS, and not intended to be something that is up for a popular vote. All gun control is intended to prevent people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

At a certain point, it ends up feeling easier to just replace the whole damn wiring harness.

I enjoy working on engines when it's not urgent, and it's fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it's incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there's an electrical fault, and I know that I'm going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.

I agree with the older Dems, but not for their reasons.

No, we should not support the candidates that Hogg supports. Because Hogg is very opposed to 2A rights, and ipso facto any candidate that he supports will also be opposed to 2A rights. And if you think that we're gonna just vote our way out of this, I've got some very, very bad news for you.

Primary the old fucks with young leftists (hopefully ones that actually understand economics and tax policy)? Absolutely! Primary them with ones that ideologically aligned with Hogg? No.

A coworker that got pissed when things didn't work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company--hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss--was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just... Didn't show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a 'bad attitude' because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn't work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

...But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there's a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.

Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.

Right, that's my point though. With my '84 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, I could drop a new engine in (started with a 305, ended with a 400 short block), do a high-flow dual carb intake, get a couple Edelbrock carbs, buy some headers, straight pipes and a glasspack muffler, and get a ton more power. (And also much, much worse fuel economy.) Now you not only need to understand wrenching, you also have to have the software and knowledge to entirely re-map the fuel, since it's all computerized.

And while you are technically correct that you can get tons more power out of a lot of mostly stock engines, that does sharply reduce your engine lifespan. Of course, that's always been the case, but it used to be that you could fairly easily get your block bored and sleeved to have larger pistons ("there's no replacement for displacement"), but generally engines are running with much less material now. Oh, and they're aluminum rather than iron, so often you're going to have to send your block off to a specialist to get the cylinder bores coated for longevity. (I think my Honda CBR600RR had alusil or nikasil plating in the cylinders? I'm not sure now.)

I'm really, really not nostalgic for those days; yeah, hot rods are kind of neat, and it's fun being able to do your own mechanical work, but cars now are so much more efficient, more powerful, and last 3-4x as long as cars from the 60s through early 80s.

...Which, you must admit, is a singularly effective way of dealing with Nazis moving into your neighborhood.

Encapsulation, yeah. That's usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.

I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.

I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was--is--far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.

I understand it as a hobby/passion, even though the old cars are far less efficient, die sooner, and are less safe than now. The only way they were better, IMO, was that they were less complicated, and thus easier to wrench on. It's significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.

I'm still in favor of asbestos. It's an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is... Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they're inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they're known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don't, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.

There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.

The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.

There were two issues. First, tetraethyl lead increased the effective octane level. That, in turn, reduced the probability of pre-ignition, e.g., the fuel-air mixture igniting before the compression cycle was completed. Higher octane allows for higher compression, which is more efficient. The other issue was the valves specifically; the lead provided a 'cushion' between the valves and the valve seats, which minimized valve wear.

The octane issue is easily solved by both better refining or by adding alcohol. It was known that you could add alcohol to gas to improve octane rating even when TEL was first added, but TEL could be patented, and alcohol couldn't. The valve issue has largely been solved by better metallurgy and manufacturing.

The one are where it hasn't been solved is small aircraft. Some small planes still use leaded gas, and it's mostly for the octane boost. TEL can give them a better octane rating than alcohol or better refinement can, which allows them to operate at much high compression. Take that away, and the engines are too underpowered to keep the plane in the air. Over 150,000 small airplanes still use leaded AvGas; thankfully, newer turboprop planes and all jet planes mostly use Jet A or Jet B fuel, which is closer to kerosene.

In theory, I think that you could convert older cars to run on unleaded fuels, but you would need new parts rather than OEM.

Probably not the ideal way to go about it, no.

OTOH, I have serious questions for anyone that could raise a child to be a white supremacist that's trying to start a racial holy war. Or I would, if the suspect hadn't already murdered them.

...Huh.

Right idea, wrong motive, I guess?

Well, yeah, it would be.

We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we're running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I'm not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.

(No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)

Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov't for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)

Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I'm saying this as someone that's at the lower end of middle class; I'm not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I'd also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.