My feeling is Mamdani is what you get when you tell entire generations that they “need to go to college or you’ll end up digging ditches” only to have them graduate with tons of debt and be told “you should have dug ditches instead of going to college”
Socialism gets traction because facts don't care about your feelings.
Leftist ideas don't work, and usually kill innocent people in the process.
But conservatism has this Social Darwin mindset that discounts luck and chance in the attainment of success, attributing everything to pure Hard Work, Moxy and Gumption AND ignores the human costs of that success, while demanding payment in cash, up front so to speak, for that success with only a promise to pay up later.
"Work hard, pay your dues, follow the rules. But there are no guarantees."
Up until "learn to code" this was mostly true. If you followed the rules, got a solid degree, worked hard, you would end up at least middle class. Now? Lol. What do you even go to college for? Finance? MRS degree? Tough when you're 60% competing for 40%. Guys can go into the trades and make good money but you know what you can't do working in the trades? Dick off for an hour a day commenting on ACF and get paid.
Unpopular opinion here but as a guy who has a lot of friends “in the trades” I can say the trades are grossly overrated and if you don’t believe me you can just ask them
It's an honest and respectable living but It's HARD work. The business partner I bought out grew up/worked on a farm growing up. He became and accountant for a reason.
Why ask them when you can look at numbers? The LOWEST number I've ever seen for improved lifetime earnings of a degree holder is $900k and that was a few years ago, so probably 2020 dollars, and no job requiring a college degree is on the list of 10 most dangerous jobs.
Honestly, the going-to-college benefit is the best argument against student loan forgiveness; it's a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. About the only people I feel sorry for are those with "some college," who have some loans but don't have the increased earning power of a degree.
It's also worth noting that this is exactly the problem with Boomer self improvement advice in ALL of its forms.
"Go to college" is advice that usually works on an individual basis. Followed by the whole society, you get the Masters Degree Barista.
Time and again I find myself discussing society-wide problems with people who say, "they should just work harder, or lift weights, or looksmaxx, or learn Python," and so on. Most of that will work for ONE person. It doesn't fix a broader issue.
Yes and no. The 4yr/4 wall college is a specific thing and higher learning should be beyond that. And the yields from the big rise of college grads from GI Bill/WW2 is nearly immeasurable.
But we’re failing kids much too early. No one here wants to do what EU and much of Asia do, but they slot kids much earlier into diff tracks, and support them (more or less) appropriately. Here in the US, it’s set up like College or Nowhere, even though college doesn’t ensure much these days.
PS: But I also agree and have had this discussion with many over the years.
Me: "Our enemies, as a group, are acting against us in a coordinated fashion. Shouldn't we organize to defend ourselves?"
Response: "Just focus on yourself as an individual!"
Me: "I am, as I have all my life. But I also think we should coordinate to protect our interests: Tell me what war was won by a single individual."
Response: "Focus on your wife and kids!"
Me: "I am single; the closest I got was covering for my coworker Ramesh while he took a month off for his arranged marriage."
Response: "Just keep working on yourself and ignore the billions of dollars of lobbying, and the coordinated actions of industry and multiple governments against you."
Vaughn Gittin Jr got exactly what he wanted out of Ford in his RTR. The real question is, will anyone buy these things? And yeah... if you want the V8, VG sells one in the form of the RTR Spec5 which is actually a pretty nice stang for half the GTD cost... but it's still a mustang over 100k bucks.
Stellantis-
Let's hope that Stellantis has figured out this "New Coke" experiment should be over and done with. Everything good they are bringing out right now is the very stuff we told them two years not to ditch. I expect it to be met with excellent sales numbers compared to before.
Mumdani-
I'm drinking a whole lot of copium today on this. We're told that he'll win and NYC will fail and it'll prove that this thing doesn't work. But, will it? We continue to pump kids through higher education institutions at a high rate who come out and LOVE the Mumdanis of the world. When they can't find a job, they move places they can. Guess what? That's closer to us.
What I'm really over most is this GOP civil war crap. It's a much wider and bigger tent these days. That means you'll have people you don't like underneath it. If the fighting doesn't stop, there will be zero coalition once Trump is gone. The idiots don't realize that he was an incredibly uniting figure for the totality of the base despite how divisive we've been told he is. The talent bench is deep... but if they start fighting, no one will win.
To change history you either have to stack wins or stack bodies. I fear for the second and frankly I don't think our society has the stomach for it despite electing text message wise guys.
In regards to the civil war crap, the politicians themselves aren't the ones that are mildly terrifying, it's the weasel voters who continue to vote for them that are the issue. My oldest son, against all advice (to be honest, there wasn't much else available for $250,000 in regards to housing, he's outside Pensacola, and got an acre and a half plus a rather new house in a somewhat-decent neighborhood) he moved to Florida, and he's noting that he's surrounded by Trump people, flags waving everywhere, but the type of people who are waving those flags are stuck in a fascinating, sociopathic mindset that Trump is going to re-usher in some sort of golden era of 1980's $5 an hour, and record prices for anything that they might be selling.
This is what's on one side of the civil war in question, greasy Boomer-types who for whatever idiotic reason desperately want the guy in office, but also vehemently disagree with everything he (supposedly) claims to hold dear, in effect, ending the get-rich-at-everyone-else's-expense financial party that the Boomers have been running for decades. At the same time, on the other side of the Boomer aisle, you've got hardcore Democrats who are pissed off that Trump is wanting to end the party, at least while they're still alive and are able to blow through whatever remains of their money so their supposedly-evil kids won't get a dime.
Kind of not really giving a shit about blue or red states these days, they're both corrupt disasters in completely different ways, at this point, might as well stay in Oregon and continue to take my punishment for merely existing, in addition to continue to hope and pray that the Earth Killer asteroid does finally wipe out Homo Sapien sometime during my existence so I can finally breathe that existential sigh of relief.
BTW, I should mention that I'm actually a happy guy to be around in person.
Regarding pessimism, I realized something yesterday: I actually have a form of plot armor, in the real world no less!
I'll never have to worry about being killed in a terrorist bombing, plane crash or mass shooting. I'm invulnerable to any kind of mass-casualty incident.
How, you ask? Simple.
When some jihadi blows up a skyscraper, or some airliner lawn-darts into a blue-collar neighborhood, how are the victims inevitably described?
As fun-loving, popular, full of life, outgoing, everybody loved them.
None of them were ever angry loners or sullen misanthropes or depressive introverts or socially awkward shut-ins or anybody else American culture wants to pretend don't exist.
My God, you might have something there. Just imagine the incredible drop in American casualties and deaths in both the European and Pacific/Asian theaters of World War II had we instead sent a couple of million pessimistic assholes over to fight in all those battles, Holy Christ, all of our memorials from that war would only be highlighting, lest we forget, all the casualties our doom-and-gloom boys suffered in the form of paper cuts, shaving nicks, sunburns, and the odd occasional boot-caused blister...
Wait...did we just solve the whole "war" thing?
The only pisser here is that because it's in Jack's Substack, he gets 90% of all the proceeds from our having saved the world from any future war-related deaths or casualties, that parasitic jerk.
JACK? LOOK AWAY, THIS DOESN'T CONCERN YOU MONETARILY.
Me personally, I'd double my efforts and see if you might be able to revive the old Jerry Lewis telethon show, but pessimist your way into curing cancer through live TV/livestream.
Just think: You'll be able to generate an assload of money for curing cancer, but you won't have to spend a dime on research, you've already cured it in the most depressing way imaginable.
I'm gonna wander through the halls of my wife's memory care facility in an hour or two, just to see how many miracles of healing in eradicating dementia I can create with my advanced theorizing of doom and gloom during the last couple of hours of dayshift.
Since I wasn't, ahem, around when they were new in that era I'll cast my vote off of what I did see when I was, and that was K-cars, despite being in the NE rust belt. The GM products were very few and far between. Pretty sure there were a few early Ks in my high school parking lot, surely pulled out of grandmas garage and put into teen transport duty, in the early 00s.
That would support Jack's assessment that the drivetrains were much more reliable. Since neither of these are particularly desirable cars, why not go with whichever models are more likely to work?
Chrysler made a better economy car, while GM made a better product. Basic K-Cars to me just seemed more pleasant than base Citation’s. That said a loaded X-Car was far more pleasant than any K-Car short of the fancy stretched ones. And if we’re talking stretch models, there is no world where I would take a LeBaron or a 600 over a Cutlass Ciera or a Century.
I'm recalling a 1984 Celebrity with a 2.8 V6 I was given by a neighbor of my Grandma's. It only had 36K or so on the thing, they never drove it.
I ended up replacing:
The engine. The 2.8's were absolute hot garbage.
Power steering pump...twice
The carburetor, and that was after a few rebuilds, the baseplate was garbage/worn out already
The electric power valve on top of the carb...exactly seven times, I ended up converting the car to an X-11 non-computer-controlled carb and HEI distributor, it actually ran better afterward
Shocks and struts
Brakes, five times, couldn't keep pads on it, only garbage replacements available
six or seven door handles on the driver's door...both sides...
three or four batteries
Two HEI modules for the distributor conversion further up
Five alignments, through three different shops. Want to see sloppy engineering? Watch an expert align one of these cars, you have to screw around with shifting the subframe around to make it straight.
Replaced the driver's seat some five or six times, absolutely flimsy garbage
Two headliners
I did end up getting rid of the terrible 13" wheels and swapped a set of X-11 wheels onto the thing (I got an X-11 for parts, no title, belonged to some ancient guy and he died, couldn't get the title, got the car for $100, had to scrap it)
Traded the thing in with only 52K on it, was weary of replacing parts.
In other news, the only K-ish car I ever owned (I did own a couple of Chrysler T&C minivans) was an '88 Dodge Dynasty with the 2.5 in it, drastically more reliable than any similar-year Chevrolet, other than replacing the problematic reverse-apply pin (common problem with the A670 3-speed auto, the replacement is far stronger), I got it with a tick over a hundred thou on the car, sold it with 260,000, and I last saw the car with the guy I sold it to, it had 365K on it and still had the original (noisy as hell, but it was loud when I got it) 2.5 and transmission.
Yeah, I wish I could rack it up to simply being an idiot with a wrench, but I've encountered similar reliability hijinks-related hilarity with other mid-1980's GM products. I don't call this era of GM "The Interior Rainforest" for nuttin...
I was reading this thinking, "wow, five seats, he must have put a gazillion miles on this thing...FIFTYTWOTHOUSAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT'S IT??????" And that's 52k minus 36k. OMG.
I wish I could say that I weighed 800 pounds, but it was more like 280, I'm from northeastern Europe troll stock, my sons are freaking scrawny but are pushing 240-270. We're all kinda built like Shrek.
It was getting ridiculous, it was either the seat back, the springs, the tilt mechanism, and two sets of seat tracks broke out of the seats.
I would have bought another car, but this and odd time, waaaay before the internet, and my boomer dad did me zero favors when he obliterated my credit report with his borrowing of my SSN for loans that he never paid back.
Later on, after I opened my shop, people were just dropping off fairly nice freebies fairly regularly and I didn't have to buy a car for a long time after that.
No matter how much you weigh, it doesn't justify that. Imagine what those seats would do in an accident. And your dad was a jerk.
This reminds me of my wife's Cruze. It was a solid car for the most part but I gave up replacing the exterior trunk release button after it failed three times. It's just not protected at all from water so the electric switch stops working. It was annoying because there is no interior button and the key fob would only pop the trunk if the car was off. So, picking up someone from the airport? You had to turn off the car, pull the key out of ignition, press the release, then restart the car.
And the sad thing is, with all that work, it was still a Celebrity. There is no "...but when it ran!" redemption in this story. It's the girlfriend who was as ugly as she was crazy.
I thought there was a Click and Clack joke about the Omni having a heated rear window so your hands wouldn’t freeze when you pushed it. But Google AI is telling me it was about the Yugo. (Shrug)
My dad had the Aries version of THAT EXACT CAR. I never saw another dark blue Aries K coupe besides his. Saw a lot of light blue Reliant coupes, though.
That's what I think of the Northeast. Went on a work trip to Boston. At dinner, a middle-age woman working at this contractor brought up how it's a shame there will never be another national election. She was dead serious. Although, if she really thought that, why hasn't she fled the country?
Begpardon for thickness, but she said this as a left-winger believing in Trump 2028 (lol), or a right-winger believing in the demographic implication that future elections will not offer american-americans and american-american to vote for?
I can say that's pretty much not true. Look at Austin. Look at Houston, and now look at Dallas.
They're coming here because Taxes are lower. Then of course they immediately start in on how 'we need to raise taxes and spend more money'. I'm actually considering selling my house and moving because the Californians that moved into my rural area have raised taxes so many times in the last 7 years that I'm paying a fortune in property taxes.
Yeah. When we decided to flee Chicago it came down to the hill country of Texas or middle Tennessee outside of Nashville. The deciding factor was property taxes. Tennessee wins hands down….excluding Nashville which will have two major increases in a couple of years.
Cali psychopaths have absolutely destroyed the housing markets in practically all 48 continental states, and have introduced their most-profitable-of-all mental illness into many a locale.
Yeah, that's the problem with sociopaths/psychopaths who do this shit, nothing is ever their fault, but they also don't hang around to face the consequences of their actions. Currently dealing with this crap in Central Oregon, where out-of-towners even run practically all city and county government, and they're running it into the ground.
It's actually getting to be difficult to find anyone...and I mean anyone...who was actually born in this state that's still in the area.
Mamdani can cause a lot of pain. Ignoring criminals & refusing to prosecute them, making the budget deficit even worse, driving business and the productive out of NYC are just a few almost guaranteed to happen.
5000lb sedans are not interesting to me no matter how much HP they have, unless it is a Bentley or Rolls.
Not sure about the generation of K cars you mention, I was very young, but we had a 1987 Plymouth Aries K I do remember and it was a POS. Constantly in the shop and eventually lemoned.
As much as watching an IRL Escape from NY sounds entertaining to me, unfortunately without walls and razorwire it will be a C+ reproduction at best. I predict a flight out of those that see what is coming, followed but a later wave of believers who realize now THEY are the rich, followed by misery/riots/etc. But who knows. The biggest lesson is this: heterogenous societies create homogenous societies, every single time.
I think the kids are alright though… they know that socialism is only ever a few million murders away from working, and I don’t think they are going to go along with the plan.
"39.6% increase in temperature reduction" made my head spin. Why not just say 40%? If they must write increase, why not increased heat removal? Increased reduction sounds stupid. Now I'm wondering if they took a percent of a number in Fahrenheit haha.
I assume they did it because the way normal people see it would equate to "17% temperature reduction instead of 13%" or something like that. They're sacrificing a comprehensible stat in the service of an impressive-sounding one.
Let’s try this again. Re: both political parties shipping manufacturing to China. Here’s a link to a great article: https://substack.com/@drewholden360/note/c-166235845?r=48qsss&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Everyone should read this. Thank you.
My feeling is Mamdani is what you get when you tell entire generations that they “need to go to college or you’ll end up digging ditches” only to have them graduate with tons of debt and be told “you should have dug ditches instead of going to college”
"Okay, we stayed off your lawn, now what happens?"
Oh, and by the way we let in a bunch of ditch diggers willing to work for low hourly cash payments under the table.
"dont be so greedy and be glad you have a job"
Socialism gets traction because facts don't care about your feelings.
Leftist ideas don't work, and usually kill innocent people in the process.
But conservatism has this Social Darwin mindset that discounts luck and chance in the attainment of success, attributing everything to pure Hard Work, Moxy and Gumption AND ignores the human costs of that success, while demanding payment in cash, up front so to speak, for that success with only a promise to pay up later.
"Work hard, pay your dues, follow the rules. But there are no guarantees."
Up until "learn to code" this was mostly true. If you followed the rules, got a solid degree, worked hard, you would end up at least middle class. Now? Lol. What do you even go to college for? Finance? MRS degree? Tough when you're 60% competing for 40%. Guys can go into the trades and make good money but you know what you can't do working in the trades? Dick off for an hour a day commenting on ACF and get paid.
Unpopular opinion here but as a guy who has a lot of friends “in the trades” I can say the trades are grossly overrated and if you don’t believe me you can just ask them
It's an honest and respectable living but It's HARD work. The business partner I bought out grew up/worked on a farm growing up. He became and accountant for a reason.
Why ask them when you can look at numbers? The LOWEST number I've ever seen for improved lifetime earnings of a degree holder is $900k and that was a few years ago, so probably 2020 dollars, and no job requiring a college degree is on the list of 10 most dangerous jobs.
Honestly, the going-to-college benefit is the best argument against student loan forgiveness; it's a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. About the only people I feel sorry for are those with "some college," who have some loans but don't have the increased earning power of a degree.
The 100% true and correct perspective
Blue collar work destroys the body.
Many people in it (in any capacity other than managing owner sitting behind a desk) want to move to a different part, or out of it entirely
Three hours, actually!
It's also worth noting that this is exactly the problem with Boomer self improvement advice in ALL of its forms.
"Go to college" is advice that usually works on an individual basis. Followed by the whole society, you get the Masters Degree Barista.
Time and again I find myself discussing society-wide problems with people who say, "they should just work harder, or lift weights, or looksmaxx, or learn Python," and so on. Most of that will work for ONE person. It doesn't fix a broader issue.
Even then, guys DO IT, to be told "NOBODY OWES YOU A JOB / WIFE / FAMILY / APARTMENT / MEAL!!1!!!1!"
Consider the Sherman Batsignal swtiched ON
Half the people in college when I was in college didn't belong in college. I suspect, but do not know, gen x had a similar experience.
MOST people shouldn't go to college. It does nothing for them. High school graduates built 95% of the useful world.
Yes and no. The 4yr/4 wall college is a specific thing and higher learning should be beyond that. And the yields from the big rise of college grads from GI Bill/WW2 is nearly immeasurable.
But we’re failing kids much too early. No one here wants to do what EU and much of Asia do, but they slot kids much earlier into diff tracks, and support them (more or less) appropriately. Here in the US, it’s set up like College or Nowhere, even though college doesn’t ensure much these days.
PS: But I also agree and have had this discussion with many over the years.
Me: "Our enemies, as a group, are acting against us in a coordinated fashion. Shouldn't we organize to defend ourselves?"
Response: "Just focus on yourself as an individual!"
Me: "I am, as I have all my life. But I also think we should coordinate to protect our interests: Tell me what war was won by a single individual."
Response: "Focus on your wife and kids!"
Me: "I am single; the closest I got was covering for my coworker Ramesh while he took a month off for his arranged marriage."
Response: "Just keep working on yourself and ignore the billions of dollars of lobbying, and the coordinated actions of industry and multiple governments against you."
believe in the power of the indomitable human spirit vs insipid globohomo bullshit
dont blackpill
'Me: "I am single; the closest I got was covering for my coworker Ramesh while he took a month off for his arranged marriage."'
Oh, this hurts.
The bait and switch pulled on millennials and student loans is infuriating and I don't even have student loans.
neither do i
just a heap of wasted time
I believe the correct diagnosis regarding student loans is, "got sold a bill of goods."
I have nothing useful to add this week other than three jokes (out of many) that I have written:
"Intelligence is an inventory conundrum: Most everyone thinks that they have loads of it in stock, but the empty shelves say otherwise."
"I would love to write a song called, "The Schizophrenic Perfectionist", but I'm paranoid that I wouldn't get it right."
"I want to be a sarcastic Lady of the Lake that gives King Arthur a magic, talking, smart-ass, insult-spewing sword named...Excaliburn."
There, all done.
"I want to be a sarcastic Lady of the Lake that gives King Arthur a magic, talking, smart-ass, insult-spewing sword named...Excaliburn."
this would have done numbers as a webcomic on tumblr in 2014
Yeah, I'm always rolling in waaaay too late to make any money off of an idea.
Ford-
Vaughn Gittin Jr got exactly what he wanted out of Ford in his RTR. The real question is, will anyone buy these things? And yeah... if you want the V8, VG sells one in the form of the RTR Spec5 which is actually a pretty nice stang for half the GTD cost... but it's still a mustang over 100k bucks.
Stellantis-
Let's hope that Stellantis has figured out this "New Coke" experiment should be over and done with. Everything good they are bringing out right now is the very stuff we told them two years not to ditch. I expect it to be met with excellent sales numbers compared to before.
Mumdani-
I'm drinking a whole lot of copium today on this. We're told that he'll win and NYC will fail and it'll prove that this thing doesn't work. But, will it? We continue to pump kids through higher education institutions at a high rate who come out and LOVE the Mumdanis of the world. When they can't find a job, they move places they can. Guess what? That's closer to us.
What I'm really over most is this GOP civil war crap. It's a much wider and bigger tent these days. That means you'll have people you don't like underneath it. If the fighting doesn't stop, there will be zero coalition once Trump is gone. The idiots don't realize that he was an incredibly uniting figure for the totality of the base despite how divisive we've been told he is. The talent bench is deep... but if they start fighting, no one will win.
To change history you either have to stack wins or stack bodies. I fear for the second and frankly I don't think our society has the stomach for it despite electing text message wise guys.
In regards to the civil war crap, the politicians themselves aren't the ones that are mildly terrifying, it's the weasel voters who continue to vote for them that are the issue. My oldest son, against all advice (to be honest, there wasn't much else available for $250,000 in regards to housing, he's outside Pensacola, and got an acre and a half plus a rather new house in a somewhat-decent neighborhood) he moved to Florida, and he's noting that he's surrounded by Trump people, flags waving everywhere, but the type of people who are waving those flags are stuck in a fascinating, sociopathic mindset that Trump is going to re-usher in some sort of golden era of 1980's $5 an hour, and record prices for anything that they might be selling.
This is what's on one side of the civil war in question, greasy Boomer-types who for whatever idiotic reason desperately want the guy in office, but also vehemently disagree with everything he (supposedly) claims to hold dear, in effect, ending the get-rich-at-everyone-else's-expense financial party that the Boomers have been running for decades. At the same time, on the other side of the Boomer aisle, you've got hardcore Democrats who are pissed off that Trump is wanting to end the party, at least while they're still alive and are able to blow through whatever remains of their money so their supposedly-evil kids won't get a dime.
Kind of not really giving a shit about blue or red states these days, they're both corrupt disasters in completely different ways, at this point, might as well stay in Oregon and continue to take my punishment for merely existing, in addition to continue to hope and pray that the Earth Killer asteroid does finally wipe out Homo Sapien sometime during my existence so I can finally breathe that existential sigh of relief.
BTW, I should mention that I'm actually a happy guy to be around in person.
Regarding pessimism, I realized something yesterday: I actually have a form of plot armor, in the real world no less!
I'll never have to worry about being killed in a terrorist bombing, plane crash or mass shooting. I'm invulnerable to any kind of mass-casualty incident.
How, you ask? Simple.
When some jihadi blows up a skyscraper, or some airliner lawn-darts into a blue-collar neighborhood, how are the victims inevitably described?
As fun-loving, popular, full of life, outgoing, everybody loved them.
None of them were ever angry loners or sullen misanthropes or depressive introverts or socially awkward shut-ins or anybody else American culture wants to pretend don't exist.
I'm indestructible!
damn
incredible insight
I know, right?
My God, you might have something there. Just imagine the incredible drop in American casualties and deaths in both the European and Pacific/Asian theaters of World War II had we instead sent a couple of million pessimistic assholes over to fight in all those battles, Holy Christ, all of our memorials from that war would only be highlighting, lest we forget, all the casualties our doom-and-gloom boys suffered in the form of paper cuts, shaving nicks, sunburns, and the odd occasional boot-caused blister...
Wait...did we just solve the whole "war" thing?
The only pisser here is that because it's in Jack's Substack, he gets 90% of all the proceeds from our having saved the world from any future war-related deaths or casualties, that parasitic jerk.
I could be a superhero.
My very presence is keeping everyone in my office alive.
How do I monetize this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V09fnmAUDVQ
JACK? LOOK AWAY, THIS DOESN'T CONCERN YOU MONETARILY.
Me personally, I'd double my efforts and see if you might be able to revive the old Jerry Lewis telethon show, but pessimist your way into curing cancer through live TV/livestream.
Just think: You'll be able to generate an assload of money for curing cancer, but you won't have to spend a dime on research, you've already cured it in the most depressing way imaginable.
I'm gonna wander through the halls of my wife's memory care facility in an hour or two, just to see how many miracles of healing in eradicating dementia I can create with my advanced theorizing of doom and gloom during the last couple of hours of dayshift.
My God! Are we actually...closet Goths?
My God, that's brilliant!
Life sucks, but it'll go on cancer-free!
the real horseshoe theory is that its attached to the hoof of a horse that has been kicking you in the dick for the last few decades
Yeah, one might think that you might at least shift position slightly sometime after decade #2 in order to have the horse kick you somewhere else.
...unless one is into that sort of thing...
Since I wasn't, ahem, around when they were new in that era I'll cast my vote off of what I did see when I was, and that was K-cars, despite being in the NE rust belt. The GM products were very few and far between. Pretty sure there were a few early Ks in my high school parking lot, surely pulled out of grandmas garage and put into teen transport duty, in the early 00s.
That would support Jack's assessment that the drivetrains were much more reliable. Since neither of these are particularly desirable cars, why not go with whichever models are more likely to work?
“Maverick Lobo suspension…”
I first read that as “Lesbo” and wondered.
A successor to the Sierra Ghia Sapphic.
The perfect vehicle to join your Honda Cervix and Vulva (the safe Swedish lux brand) in the garage!
Chrysler made a better economy car, while GM made a better product. Basic K-Cars to me just seemed more pleasant than base Citation’s. That said a loaded X-Car was far more pleasant than any K-Car short of the fancy stretched ones. And if we’re talking stretch models, there is no world where I would take a LeBaron or a 600 over a Cutlass Ciera or a Century.
I'm recalling a 1984 Celebrity with a 2.8 V6 I was given by a neighbor of my Grandma's. It only had 36K or so on the thing, they never drove it.
I ended up replacing:
The engine. The 2.8's were absolute hot garbage.
Power steering pump...twice
The carburetor, and that was after a few rebuilds, the baseplate was garbage/worn out already
The electric power valve on top of the carb...exactly seven times, I ended up converting the car to an X-11 non-computer-controlled carb and HEI distributor, it actually ran better afterward
Shocks and struts
Brakes, five times, couldn't keep pads on it, only garbage replacements available
six or seven door handles on the driver's door...both sides...
three or four batteries
Two HEI modules for the distributor conversion further up
Five alignments, through three different shops. Want to see sloppy engineering? Watch an expert align one of these cars, you have to screw around with shifting the subframe around to make it straight.
Replaced the driver's seat some five or six times, absolutely flimsy garbage
Two headliners
I did end up getting rid of the terrible 13" wheels and swapped a set of X-11 wheels onto the thing (I got an X-11 for parts, no title, belonged to some ancient guy and he died, couldn't get the title, got the car for $100, had to scrap it)
Traded the thing in with only 52K on it, was weary of replacing parts.
In other news, the only K-ish car I ever owned (I did own a couple of Chrysler T&C minivans) was an '88 Dodge Dynasty with the 2.5 in it, drastically more reliable than any similar-year Chevrolet, other than replacing the problematic reverse-apply pin (common problem with the A670 3-speed auto, the replacement is far stronger), I got it with a tick over a hundred thou on the car, sold it with 260,000, and I last saw the car with the guy I sold it to, it had 365K on it and still had the original (noisy as hell, but it was loud when I got it) 2.5 and transmission.
The Celebrity of Theseus!
wow. what an incredible disaster. i didnt think cars could ever consume that many parts that fast
Yeah, I wish I could rack it up to simply being an idiot with a wrench, but I've encountered similar reliability hijinks-related hilarity with other mid-1980's GM products. I don't call this era of GM "The Interior Rainforest" for nuttin...
you have no idea how bad quality was in the '80's.
the finest in '80's GM quality. thus a lot of Hondas and Toyotas were purchased.
I traded in my x-car on an Accord LXi
I was reading this thinking, "wow, five seats, he must have put a gazillion miles on this thing...FIFTYTWOTHOUSAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT'S IT??????" And that's 52k minus 36k. OMG.
I wish I could say that I weighed 800 pounds, but it was more like 280, I'm from northeastern Europe troll stock, my sons are freaking scrawny but are pushing 240-270. We're all kinda built like Shrek.
It was getting ridiculous, it was either the seat back, the springs, the tilt mechanism, and two sets of seat tracks broke out of the seats.
I would have bought another car, but this and odd time, waaaay before the internet, and my boomer dad did me zero favors when he obliterated my credit report with his borrowing of my SSN for loans that he never paid back.
Later on, after I opened my shop, people were just dropping off fairly nice freebies fairly regularly and I didn't have to buy a car for a long time after that.
scrawny at 270?
are they 9 feet tall
No matter how much you weigh, it doesn't justify that. Imagine what those seats would do in an accident. And your dad was a jerk.
This reminds me of my wife's Cruze. It was a solid car for the most part but I gave up replacing the exterior trunk release button after it failed three times. It's just not protected at all from water so the electric switch stops working. It was annoying because there is no interior button and the key fob would only pop the trunk if the car was off. So, picking up someone from the airport? You had to turn off the car, pull the key out of ignition, press the release, then restart the car.
And the sad thing is, with all that work, it was still a Celebrity. There is no "...but when it ran!" redemption in this story. It's the girlfriend who was as ugly as she was crazy.
I think they got a little less bad over time.
K-car. As the joke goes, 'It was a reliant automobile'.
And they were. Sure they weren't pretty - but the were cheap and they worked. Also they weren't ugly.
They were boxes. But they worked.
Usually.
Sometimes.
I thought there was a Click and Clack joke about the Omni having a heated rear window so your hands wouldn’t freeze when you pushed it. But Google AI is telling me it was about the Yugo. (Shrug)
I'm pretty sure most Yugos did not have a heated rear window. Just adding to the irony!
if i had a million dollars and all that
Certified Canadian Content!
My dad had the Aries version of THAT EXACT CAR. I never saw another dark blue Aries K coupe besides his. Saw a lot of light blue Reliant coupes, though.
The biggest problem with Mamdani winning?
Lot's of New Yorkers are, according to the news, fleeing to TEXAS.
Listen assholes, you ruined NY, you need to stay there and enjoy it. We don't need your voting patterns and problem causing in Texas.
Folks fleeing other states have actually enforced Texan conservatism. Often the transplants are more conservative than the natives.
Often.
But not often enough. Look what they did to Colorado amd Virginia.
Frickin’ Puget Sound region of western Washington!
I'd love to live in the Pacific Northwest for the scenery and weather.
But politically and culturally, it's a radioactive postapocalyptic desert.
That's what I think of the Northeast. Went on a work trip to Boston. At dinner, a middle-age woman working at this contractor brought up how it's a shame there will never be another national election. She was dead serious. Although, if she really thought that, why hasn't she fled the country?
Begpardon for thickness, but she said this as a left-winger believing in Trump 2028 (lol), or a right-winger believing in the demographic implication that future elections will not offer american-americans and american-american to vote for?
Wasn’t all this called Californication?
That's the story of Mulder banging the kid from the nanny
I thought that Virginia's problem was being basically a DC suburb?
NoVA is, yeah. But the rest has the same problem as upstate New York, downstate Illinois and inland California.
Same problem as every state with a large city in it--witness Pennsyltucky between Pittsburgh and Philly.
The solution is to live in a place without large cities, like, uh, North Dakota?
I think I'll pass. Though I would liked to have seen Montana....
By some accounts Bozeman and Missoula are blue bug hives and the state is lousy with CA refugees.
My solution is to politically separate large cities from their states and reactivate the polis model.
Blueberries in the red watermelon soup.
Yeah, claiming CO has become borderline embarrassing.
I can say that's pretty much not true. Look at Austin. Look at Houston, and now look at Dallas.
They're coming here because Taxes are lower. Then of course they immediately start in on how 'we need to raise taxes and spend more money'. I'm actually considering selling my house and moving because the Californians that moved into my rural area have raised taxes so many times in the last 7 years that I'm paying a fortune in property taxes.
Yeah. When we decided to flee Chicago it came down to the hill country of Texas or middle Tennessee outside of Nashville. The deciding factor was property taxes. Tennessee wins hands down….excluding Nashville which will have two major increases in a couple of years.
In small microcosms, perhaps.
Cali psychopaths have absolutely destroyed the housing markets in practically all 48 continental states, and have introduced their most-profitable-of-all mental illness into many a locale.
the rightwing guys in leftwing hellholes are at times wildly more radical than regular republicans
It’s like the old saying, the most ardent Zionist you meet is the newly-converted one
Yeah, that's the problem with sociopaths/psychopaths who do this shit, nothing is ever their fault, but they also don't hang around to face the consequences of their actions. Currently dealing with this crap in Central Oregon, where out-of-towners even run practically all city and county government, and they're running it into the ground.
It's actually getting to be difficult to find anyone...and I mean anyone...who was actually born in this state that's still in the area.
Shades of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"?
“where out-of-towners even run practically all city and county government, and they're running it into the ground.”
I’m hearing this complaint about Gianforte in MT even though he’s lived there for 30 yrs. You can take guy out of Silicon Valley, but not vice versa.
The proper response to Democrat voters is to wall them up inside their urban paradises and let them prey on each other.
He’s up for realtor of the year in any state south of the Mason Dixon is what I’m hearing.
Like how Barack Obama was Gun Salesman of the Year for eight consecutive years.
Mamdani can cause a lot of pain. Ignoring criminals & refusing to prosecute them, making the budget deficit even worse, driving business and the productive out of NYC are just a few almost guaranteed to happen.
5000lb sedans are not interesting to me no matter how much HP they have, unless it is a Bentley or Rolls.
Not sure about the generation of K cars you mention, I was very young, but we had a 1987 Plymouth Aries K I do remember and it was a POS. Constantly in the shop and eventually lemoned.
“Ignoring criminals & refusing to prosecute them, making the budget deficit even worse, driving business and the productive out of NYC…”
So he’s a blue state status quo mayor is what you’re saying.
Well yes, but in this case it could be a real life Gotham situation straight out of
Hollywood. When it is some place like Cincinnati it is just dirty & trashy.
Getting Batman would be pretty cool
He’s keeping Tisch as NYPD comish, so let’s see.
Link to a great story
As much as watching an IRL Escape from NY sounds entertaining to me, unfortunately without walls and razorwire it will be a C+ reproduction at best. I predict a flight out of those that see what is coming, followed but a later wave of believers who realize now THEY are the rich, followed by misery/riots/etc. But who knows. The biggest lesson is this: heterogenous societies create homogenous societies, every single time.
I think the kids are alright though… they know that socialism is only ever a few million murders away from working, and I don’t think they are going to go along with the plan.
The interesting dynamic will be Mamdani's interactions with Governor Hochul, who is up for re-election next year.
Either way, the morons in the NY State GOP will probably eff it up.
"39.6% increase in temperature reduction" made my head spin. Why not just say 40%? If they must write increase, why not increased heat removal? Increased reduction sounds stupid. Now I'm wondering if they took a percent of a number in Fahrenheit haha.
I assume they did it because the way normal people see it would equate to "17% temperature reduction instead of 13%" or something like that. They're sacrificing a comprehensible stat in the service of an impressive-sounding one.
So much for indebt educated people.
The k car save Chrysler, who also brought you the Viper…
The maverick only makes sense at near 25k for the hybrid version on steelies.
Does that Maverick actually exist? I've seen them on steelies and the list is north of $30k.