I know this isn't an open thread, but do I still need my hifi? I haven't had it hooked up in like three years, all the components save the turntable are from the 80s, and if I can replace it with stuff that sounds as good and are physically smaller, I think I will. Basically big floor speakers and a large receiver that needs to be rebuilt.
That _was_ the plan 35 years ago, I even bought a switch box so I could use them with my T.V. then I decided I like the quietude more than I need the good sound .
Here's the problem with "smaller." The "E" note that is half-way up the top string of a violin has a Frequency of 1320Hz, and a Wavelength circa 10.25 Inches.
Whereas the low open E string of an orchestral double bass has a Frequency of 41.2Hz and a Wavelength of about 27.5 FEET. And, 41.2Hz is also the frequency of the lowest string of an electric bass guitar.
Now, if space is at a premium, you can go to smaller "Satellite" monitors, and one or two active powered subwoofers, some of which are surprisingly small.
I don't sell equipment, but I have been an audio journalist for oh, 40 years. I wrote for TAS in the old days, and for Stereophile for nearly 20 years.
If you don't mind hashing this out in public, what would your target budget be, assuming that you will keep your turntable and therefore you need a phono stage? Also, do you have Roon, and do you have a streaming service such as QOBUZ (my fave).
Thanks. Sometimes I think that miracle of audio is that it works at all.
Case in point: Mendelssohn Violin Concerto: A High E on the violin and a Low E on a double bass--at the same time! The bass wavelength is circa 34 times longer that of the High violin note.
A stereo LP encodes them differently: one with "Constant Amplitude" the other with "Constant Velocity," and each of those in two versions, for Left and Right.
All that happens in ONE LP Groove!!!!
Here's a $1 million room I helped design and build:
When you put it like that it makes sense that vinyl has so much value. A simple solution to a complex problem.
Do crossover points in relation to available speakers make a big difference? I have a base Tiguan with a tweeter and a speaker in all 4 doors. The sound is so clear that the kids can pick out words and sounds in songs. From what I can tell, this is because the bass and treble are split between the speaker and the tweeter in a way that has each speaker playing optimally. Interestingly I drove a higher spec Tiguan with brand name audio and the sound was artificially boosted and did not sound as accurate.
Well, everything makes a difference! Now, how much of that is really as inaudible as Chicken Soup?
I like holding crossover boards down with non-ferrous, non-magnetic screws. I pay for Silicon Bronze boatbuilding screws for my rear panels. I would not expect to hear differences in ABX testing, but on the other hand, perhaps the combination of six different tweaks, each in and of itself inaudible, will together save you 1dB of noise floor extension. Which should be audible.
Car audio: I have to wonder whether most car makers still use traditional, coil-capacitor-resistor analog-parts crossovers in their basic and upsell car stereos any more!
Unlike people who build and sell nice home stereo loudspeakers 12 pairs or 24 pairs at a time, a car company's production module is going to more like 50,000 car sound systems, right?
For that, I assume that, taking the long view, they divide and direct the various part of the music frequency spectrum via large-chip DSP amplification: a Separate for each woofer, midrange, and tweeter, hand-tailored to the acoustics of that model--which is something, car guys take note, that was first done for a next-gen Corvette, IIRC in the early 1980s. GM was so broke that Bose had to lend GM the money for the Non-Recurring Engineering, but of course Bose made out well in due course.
10 years ago it was maybe $500 total of Sansui stuff, my use case it to be able to streaming and vinyl, and I just want big, immersive sound. I was planning on replacing the receiver anyway, cause it need rebuilding, but I could go either way on the speakers.
Not really, but that is merely borne of ignorance. If I could replicate the sound quality in a package that wasn’t 24x18x8, I would happy. I was probably thinking 500-1000 for the receiver, and 500-1500 for the speakers, and those are all used prices cause I’m scotch/irish. Basically I want the same or better sound, or the same as when my stuff was younger/fresher.
I was planning on buying a rebuilt older receiver, like a pioneer or something, but I’m open to suggestions.
If you want to buy used, I do think that old Onkyo all-analog "Receivers" were built like bricks and under-appreciated in their time. I have not heard on in a long time, though.
The Sansui is often worth fixing if you like its vibe. The people who love them, really love them.
I used to have a BT adapter plugged into a Marantz 2230 and it was... fine. But honestly for just streaming in my LR, any of the "all in one" Class-D BT/airplay/wifi mini-receivers I tried also sounded equally fine. FWIW, these were powering an early 90s set of PSB Alpha bookshelfs.
I'd work backwards from your speakers. If you're open to a sat/sub system, you've got a TON of options.
But what's the condition of the woofers and tweeters? If you have to replace any of them, it gets tricky.
John (and I'm sure others) are much more experienced in this realm, but I've always understood that the speakers and room dynamics have much more impact than the electronics (and that's been borne out by my experience too).
FWIW, sometimes the cones (esp paper) just get "tired" long before the surrounds tear. If you're interested in used gear, your price range has a lot of options. I just saw a pair of current generation Revel Concerta towers locally for $900.
Vintage gear can sound just fine. For the room where I assemble electronics, I'm rebuilding a couple of Dynaco Mk IV power amps, to go with my old conrad-johnson preamp that I just had the factory go over. I haven't decided what speakers to use yet.
It's a small business with a very long supply chain. I think the woofer comes from Indonesia. I guess that the cabinets--at that amazingly low price--are Chinese. They assemble the speakers in Virginia.
Without seeing them in person I can' tell for sure, but it looks like the Vera-fi 12" sub might be a good visual match with the BMR Monitor in Gloss Ebony.
Hi, If you are thinking about getting the BMR Monitor, I'd suggest getting them first and then decide if you need a subwoofer, even though Vera-Fi's sub is hard to beat on price.
The reason I say this is that the review pair of BMR Monitors appeared to be new, and I often use torture tones to break in loudspeakers, such as Hot Rodded Pink Noise with an overlay of 32Hz sine wave. The BMR Monitors definitely have output at 32Hz.
Those are so beautiful. I'd totally take a set in Rosewood or Ebony -- except that I'm no audiophile and I just bought the VeraFi Vanguard Scout speakers you reviewed last summer.
did you name your truck jfk becuase you knew it would have a hole blown into the side of it
anyway at least the fix is a better bearing/more oil pressure at idle/some other secret third thing and not a mechanical problem inherent to the design so it could be worse. i dont know what the issue is but now im curious
imagine trying to make your hated opponents look as bad as possible and then show them as young, fit, attractive, well off, and happy lmao
I carefully read the first book that advanced that theory, "Mortal Error," and if the supposition were true, it would explain a lot.
Such as the Secret Service whisking Kennedy's body away, lest independent medical examiners in Texas find out that the fatal shot was fired at ground level, and not from the 6th floor of anywhere.
The Failure Mode therein described is that, for no good reason I could see, the Secret Service equipped one of the agents in the follow-up car with an AR-15 or an M-16.
And this was at a time when the M-16 was not a fully developed weapon. In the early years of our "Flooding the Zone" in Vietnam, many US soldiers were found to have died while trying to unjam their new Wonder Weapons.
But the JFK scenario is obviously not a jamming incident!!!
It's that, once the first shot was fired from behind and high (my theory is the LHO was paid to fire shots way over JFK's head, so the CIA could say that a ComSimp had tried to kill JFK, so now they get to invade Cuba for real) the dumbass agent attempted to execute the maneuver of:
Grabbing the M-16 or AR-15 off the limo floor;
standing up;
raising the gun,
while trying to once and at the same time to turn around
and climb onto the rear seat
and fire a standing shot at a rapidly receding building.
Halfway through that plan, with the rifle at waist level, he squeezed the trigger, perhaps in response to the limo's braking or speeding up, and the tumbling .223 projectile entered the back of JFK's head, right about where there is a whorl or crown in his hair distribution.
The projectile transited internally for three inches or so, and exited over and in front of his right ear, as shown in the Zapruder film.
I have read at least 200 books on this subject, and the "Dunce with an M-16" theory is very tempting.
BUT BUT BUT it is PREDICATED on there having been a shot ALREADY fired from behind and very much above. THAT has to be explained, too.
BTW, if there is a "Clincher" for the "Dunce with an M-16" scenario, it is that in the Vice President's limo, Senator Ralph Yarborough was a passenger, and as they traveled through the area where the Secret Service limo had been, Yarborough distinctly smelled burnt gunpowder in the air. While recounting this, he often would note, "I am a hunter and am familiar with that smell."
But not from the 6th floor of the DSBD did he smell that!!!
So, the rifle was an AR-15, which had been put into service for the first time EVER that morning, when they handed the AR-15 to a young driver who had never been trained for it.
So, yeah the Secret Service has proven itself much more adept about lining up call girls in foreign lands, than actually protecting US Presidents.
Hey Don, why don't you DEFUND THE SECRET SERVICE? Few will notice, and nobody will care!
Despite and still, the "Special Needs Kid with an AR-15" scenario still has our SNK (or, FLK, which is what they said in the 1950s--Funny Lookin' Kid) standing and firing in reaction to a gunshot.
An old friend (RIP) who was a contract employee of Good Housekeeping, er, no that was the CIA, claimed inside knowledge that Dallas was "a False Flag Operation that got hijacked."
BTW John. No self respecting Australian would regard the Herald Sun as a 'source'. Its journalists are not the type to do quality research It's entertaining reading but that's about it.
Hi, Luke. I believe that the Herald Sun was running a feature to support an Australian author who had written about about Dallas, 11/22/63.
Most of the text I linked to seems to be nothing other than direct block quotes from that book. NOT reporting or research by anyone at Herald Sun. Just "Copy" and Paste."
The book is VERY first-person-y, and we are forced to look over his shoulder as each little nugget of "Evidence" comes in.
But it seems to me that it is just a copy-cat of the earlier book "Mortal Error," which is easy to find wherever large quantities of used books are to be found.
The truck was named JFK because we primarily used it to pull Danger Girl's race Miata, Marilyn. Which got that name because it started its race career in Playboy Cup.
i dont think it helps but what might be happening is the oil getting too hot which (depending on actual temp) can ruin the metals in the bearing which are usually quite soft relatively speaking. from there your bearing load capacity would degrade and then it grabs a rod and away it goes
pure speculation on my part but if i had one id want an oil cooler and an oil temp/pressure gauge regardless, also depending on temp a thicker high end oil
Could be my ignorance, and I do not care enough to go down a google rabbit hole, but don't the GM trucks have the oil temps buried in the instrument cluster? My last Ram and my last 2 Ford trucks have temp gauges. The Ram was the lowly 3.6 and it used to spook me traveling in the mountains when vacationing out west. Oil temp would get up to 240-250F on the higher elevation climbs. I haven't taken my F-150 out there yet to tell if that is common on newer trucks. Michigan is too flat to stress it :D
As I've said, Mary Barra and Reuss fucking suck. I am so disappointed in GM nowadays it hurts. From EV's to now the crown jewel of American V8's, it hurts. I'd be willing to force a board vote and bring back Bob Lutz. He wasn't perfect but he was full balls out when it came to automotive. Shit, they can't even get NASCAR right with the rumors Cadillac will replace Chevrolet. Stupid move if that's true.
I don't follow politics super closely, there's a reason for it, but where I'm living on the left coast you'd think Hitler was reincarnated and anyone not aryan was being rounded up for the gas chambers. My wife lost her shit again recently about it citing the failure of this nation to confront racism and nazism. My brain started to bleed so hard from hearing this I asked for a reprieve of about a week before we speak again. The only failure of this nation is to properly educate people on how government works and why in history things happened. Hopefully, my children and their generation will do better in that department.
IMO Lutz was the beginning of the end of "good old GM," priding himself on outsourcing suppliers to China and chasing after panel gaps and getting rid of old internal durability standards.
Try reading “car guys vs bean counters” he spells those things out that I mentioned in explicit detail. Like GM sedans being engineered to cross a 2in (?) tall piece of steel bar at highway speeds without damage to wheels or suspension.
Ah NO. My 81 Phoenix was not what would be called anything remotely close to "durable". Some things on it were well thought out; some things we completely stupid.
I remember a glossy piece in NYT or something about Lutz, sometime around the Cobalt launch. It went on-and-on about how they benchmarked the Mk4 Jetta's "sophistication and materials quality", etc. and how proud they were they beat it on all measures.
Hey now panel gaps were quite the rage in the '90's - ever since Lexus showed a ball bearing dancing around the LS 400 seams.
The old durability standards were ridiculous though - it's the reason why all their cars from the 60's - 80's look like they have a lift kit installed. GM air conditioning did kick ass back in those days though.
I took my $400 '91 Park Avenue down a bunch of gravel roads in Appalachia including some water crossings back in 2021, then chased down a bunch of guys on big bore adventure bikes who thought they were making time on some twisty back roads, I was on some junkyard whitewalls. What a machine!
Great, now I wanna drive the cheapest Nimitz-class hooptie I can find. Just to say my car cost less than that model kit of the Yamato my brother got my for Christmas two years ago.
NASCAR (like most racing series) is a branding exercise so the car will have a Cadillac logo with the same motor under the hood as the Chevy logo’d car.
It’s more ridiculous in F1 where I understand that the future Cadillac entry will be powered by a Ferrari powerplant.
Don’t worry too hard. She’s still in the shallow end of the pool. I got called a Nazi by someone wearing a shirt saying “imagine being afraid of drag queens and books”. Is it still a hate crime if you want to crack someone in the face because of their morals and attitude and not their sexuality? Making adult choices as a responsible human sucks some days. Children deserve so much better…they would NEVER openly choose that as an option.
Re: Never Let Me Go - Alex Garland (who wrote the screen adaptation) must have had similar thoughts.
Reading between the lines, his reaction to the "gentility" of that world seems to have influenced his (better, darker, more insightful... and definitely sexier) Ex Machina.
I had a friend who listened to the Rogan conversation about sex robots and showed some interest in the topic. I think, but don't know, that sex robots would be incredibly dull ... unless, as in Ex Machina, they had a real brain ... and (here's the improbable part) they were interested in what little I had to offer.
... so you're saying there's a chance ... of either sentient / sapient sex robot interest and / or death? I like my chances!
Blame CAFE for all of it: standards intentionally impossible to meet to purposely force EVs down our throats. We are stuck with a generation of compromised vehicles over this.
There are a THOUSAND other places to make those fuel economy numbers instead of sacrificing powertrain durability, but upper management makes bad calls.
How many VPs and higher get promoted from powertrain development? Anyone? Last guy (or girl) anyone here remember?
Your link goes nowhere, but I'll respond anyway. The entire industry has been doing triage since 2012. They're rushing programs every year. When are they supposed to spend five years testing a new transmission or engine design before shipping it? There are no shortcuts. Accelerated engine development programs fail to reveal problems that occur in low intensity use. They also fail to reveal the impacts of heat cycles, since engines must either be tested continuously or heat cycled, there is no data that relates to engines that are actually used strenuously and heat cycled. Idiot authoritarian bureaucrats can't order physics to act as they wish, and I am really sick of the idiots who let them try.
I didn't mean to post a link... that was subcrap interpreting it as such.
You're not telling me anything I DON'T know...
But my point remains that this is a CHOICE... they're choosing to cut corners and let go of people who know what they're doing at critical points of a program and saying ' if the sim said it was fine its okay to ship'.
Somewhere there is a Chief engineer or a Vice president of Powertrain or some such moron whose job it is to stop the MBA madness raining down from above.. these people are - DIPSHITS.
There are few people who hate MBA madness as much as I do, but this is authoritarian bullshit ruining the world we live in instead of profit-maximizing halfwits ruining the world that we live in.
No company, except maybe Toyota, has an infinite amount of money/engineering to throw at every test scenario imaginable. And even then, you only qualify the known-unknowns. You have no idea what unknown-unknowns there are in your new design; you can only make your best guess.
So yes, you do have to choose where you are going to get the most "bang for your buck" in your test/qualification regime.
These MBA dipshits as you call them, would be happy to spend another billion dollars verifying and EGR valve; but the money is needed elsewhere.
I owned 4. One bought new and the other 3 were hand me downs. I used to park in some sketchy Chicago neighborhoods and even the criminals didn’t want to steal or break into them. They were also sled dogs in the snow.
That’s how we get 3500 pound SUVs with 1.5 liter engines paired with transmissions that shift way to early and make the poor thing completely miserable to drive.
When I had my C6, my engine builder said GM was forced to switch bearing material on all of the 6.2s to meet EPA guidelines. Not for fuel economy but because the bearings contained lead.
He was certain it would cause issues down the road. Here we are...
Personally, I want the people of ten thousand years hence to write stories about the Ancient Americans that sound like a high-tech Lord of the Rings, they're that awesome.
Green Berets, Prince and Yosemite Sam have to protect a couple of midgets on a quest to save the world by driving the Foghat tour bus into Lake Erie or something, I don't know.
"Green Berets, Prince and Yosemite Sam have to protect a couple of midgets on a quest to save the world by driving the Foghat tour bus into Lake Erie or something" - can we ask an AI bot to generate a preview video of this now? sounds freaking hilarious + epic!
I've always said that Woke/Leftism is a new religion, just like communism became one before it. It's fun to see the rebellion you describe happening with those a bit younger than me, as it always has.
My former college professor always has had an interesting take on this, and is active on twitter. His public op-eds are always great reads and thought provoking, for those who want to check it out: https://x.com/darelmass
As for the GM motors, I mentioned it last week, but hearing of the exploding 6.2s (and how wimpy the 5.3 felt compared to the diesel and Ford 3.5) was the final checkbox that sealed the deal on buying an Expedition 2 years ago.
STILL waiting on the cancellation or rollback of CAFE so we can finally replace my wife’s American Land Cruiser (5.4 Expedition) with a nice 7.3 powered Navigator.
No doubt the 3.5 makes good power and has great tune potential but speaking personally I’d prefer longevity and lower power to the complexity of a modern small displacement turbo motor.
I’ve heard there is some tricks to keep them running reliably IE some sort of oil filter screen for the turbo oil lines that should be changed with regularity that owners and dealers are apparently ignorant of.
Cam phaser issues would bother me way more than the turbos. Most things I seem to read about are arguments between oil weight and change cycles. “We” started designing for super light cold weights and it would seem some clearances demand the lighter weight with smaller passenges as other items need a heavier weight to live.
If you stepped back to 80s /90s turbo mannerisms
of letting cars get up to temp before real use and cooling down just the same (albeit more of a coking issue), I’d wager the vehicles would get much further without a failure.
A contributing complication is the oil change intervals. The general public sees "10,000 mile oil change" oils and do not read the asterisk beside that claim. They see the "synthetic long life!" oils and think that means the oil is actually synthetic (which it isn't) and that the long life claims apply to their driving...which it doesn't.
The oil they're buying most of the time is not bad, but it still has dinosaur guts in it. It's called "synthetic" thanks to Castrol's marketing bullshit being green-lit by dumbass courts. Their typical stop-and-go driving involving short trips here and there are not the conditions that actually allow going 10,000 miles plus between oil changes. They don't read the fine print that says those numbers apply to mostly highway style driving that hotshot truck drivers and maybe long commuters are doing.
Then they fill up the tank with whatever the cheapest gas they can possibly find happens to be because, well, it's cheap. Who doesn't want cheap gas?
They don't understand that gas is the mortal enemy of motor oil, motor oil that's been in the engine longer than it should. Motor oil that's not being brought up to sufficient temperature to get rid of the water that condenses into it from short trips hither and yon. Motor oil that doesn't maintain its advertised viscosity toward the latter end of those extended OCI's. Motor oil that doesn't have the additive package to cope with the crap being left behind by the shitty gas they're buying, especially not at a 10,000 mile OCI.
The oil is better than ever, but the engines are pickier than ever and more maintenance intensive than ever IF you want it to work well in the long term. Which is why the manufacturers keep introducing newer oil standards to try and cope with the demands of the strained technology they're putting out in a hopeless effort to keep up with hairshirt environmentalist bullshit.
Very valid points. IIRC GM rolled back the OCI on the 3.6's (we had one at one point hence my vague recollection) on account of them notoriously stretching timing chains.
My good buddy also has an F-150 powerboost and the computer did not prompt him to do his first oil change until 12k miles. NO WAY I would let mine go that long.
I’m still a 3k mile stickler. My fun cars get punished and my daily drivers see a ton of use. 90% when a manufacturer has issues with chain tensioners etc the recommendation is always to change the oil sooner. As you said they break down so badly. Especially anything with E-85 or used as a flex fuel vehicle.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire going the modern Ford truck route (IMO). Honestly, there's just nowhere to turn for a long term "buy and hold" type of vehicle anymore.
Interesting point. On one hand my knee jerk is a last-gen 4Runner or Land Cruiser should last you basically forever. On the other, having just watched some release videos on the new 4Runner, as much as I don’t want a 4cyl hybrid, I can’t argue with the fact that Toyota has made NYC Priuses like cockroaches, and also lasting forever. I’d probably lean towards the last gen, but I wouldn’t fault someone who rolled the dice on a Toyota hybrid.
I wanted an LC200 but couldn’t justify a CPO one for $90k (or even an LX560 for $70), given that a new expedition was around $60. The Sequoias just felt old and slow having driven the two my buddy owns. Just not worth the price and the GX460 was just way too small inside, even if it had the dimensions of my old Land Rover Discovery 2
I’m going to hold it, and have had little trouble so far but it will also become a 3rd vehicle pretty soon and is just here to road trip and tow.
Most folks I know have had better luck with Ford vs GM lately and parts are cheap so I’m not too worried.
Cheap parts? How does $2500ish for a taillight strike you? I’m referencing that viral episode of a cracked taillight lens on an F150 immobilizing the truck because the CAN line the radar module was on was corrupted or something.
I come from a family who ran a Land Rover, a B5.5 1.8T Passat, and multiple Volvos to 150k+ and we've got two very good mechanics we're close with. Parts and any fixes on the Ford are cheap :)
That sounds like a real mess, but the type of thing that happens to a lot of these modern computer driven cars.
That’s exactly it though. It may be a ford but it’s a *modern* Ford. It might make a B5 VAG product look like a 90s Corolla in terms of longevity/servicability.
Thank your lucky stars. I drove the brother-in-law's LC200 for a few months and I detested it's steering. Wondered around like it had dementia. The Landcruiser felt like a vast bleak desert inside and I was coming from a Mitsubishi Outlander. I also drove a hilux for work and apart from the 3 cup holders I was convinced that Toyota's ergonomic design was done by someone that had never been in a car.
Let's just say the interior I the LC200 is a MASSIVE step up from the Sequoia.. Even then, I couldn't bring myself to pay what they go for. Outside looks great, size is perfect for me, and it's easy to pull the 3rd row that I'd rarely use.
I would very much hunt down a prior gen with the port injected 4.0 and old serviceable 5spd aisin. Toyotas newest truck launches have been shitshows. And as far as their hybrids go, the actual hybrid stuff seems to be sorted but for example the Atkinson cycle 1.8s in the 3rd gen Priii have been dropping like flies in middle age. I think my brother has done three head gaskets on them just this year and he’s just a small one man shop. The hybrids also have some stupid pricey specific ABS controllers that can basically total out one of these cars. Toyota had their “golden age” but we’re now past it.
I’m not young but I’ve been saying gay and retard and faggot with greater frequency, and mentally daring someone to say something. And now I have the perfect response if they do: “I don’t really care, Margret.” Haven’t gotten to the N word yet, but it may be coming. Hard to say.
it's an IDOL. bow down to it or be destroyed! and the minute somebody on tv gets bleeped for the f-word i know he's a lib. conservatives hardly ever say it on tv.
1) because I’m sick of all the pussies that said we can’t and 2) I’m sick of this idea that “words are violence”. Words are not violence. I’ve been called a fag, and I’ve been punched in the face. I’ll let you guess which one hurts more.
I’m also tired of this “offense inflation.” Retarded replaced idiot which replaced moron which replaced… because words were too mean. Cut the euphemistic shit.
I also see the absurdity in the idea that some words are so toxic or radioactive that we must strike them from society as a whole. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, you didn’t call someone the N-word, but no one freaked out if you said it in a song lyric or read it aloud in Huck Finn or godforbid had an academic conversation about it. These days just uttering it in any context is grounds for professional and social homicide. It’s just such a fucking ridiculous concept that making a sound that other people find offensive in any context can only be explained by the fact that the people taking offense are retarded faggots.
A group of people who trolled peoples old tweets then called their employers and got them fired from their jobs, wrote articles in major "newspapers" to make sure those people would never work again, got their feelings hurt.
I got suspended from twitter a few weeks ago for responding to someone asking for weight loss advice "Fasting has worked great for me" Twitter tagged this as violent speech and upon a careful review of my appeal that took all of 12 seconds determined I needed a time out for a week. I got suspended again yesterday for responding to a post about the Paul brothers boxing each other that they should punch their father instead of each other. more "violent speech" All day yesterday people were posting "We are going to kill all of you" But I responded to an important person earlier in the day and they didn't like what I said so I had to go and they needed an excuse to see me gone. Whatever, it's tax season and I shouldn't be on twitter anyways (or here, but let's save that for another day) but it's preposterous. They change the rules on the fly, don't tell you what any of those rules are, and accuse us of harassment for not going along with their new retarded narrative.
Then they wouldn't let me cancel my premium subscription because I was suspended and my account features were limited. I imagine in my business if I charged somebody for a service and then said "Sorry, I can't do your taxes because you violated my terms of service but I'm keeping the retainer!" would get me into some legal trouble.
I have no disdain for your average lefty but we should throw communists out of helicopters. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
I actually think the political spectrum is a circle. Most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between an extreme fascist and an extreme communist.
Any epithet, sneer, derogation, sarcasm, abuse, invective, slur, ever invented by the human power of language has legitimate use in the right context; 99% of the individual instances of use are lazy, tiresome, performative, irritable, repetitive, dreary, asinine or impotent. In conversation as in writing, it is almost always better to replace them.
That God Himself has a Name susceptible of abuse means that it indeed possible for words to violate -- even violate at a the level seriousness that imperils the violator's immortal soul.
The Catholic teaching on that, so far as I understand it, comes down to a final resolution of impenitence; in other words, willful refusal to repent of known mortal sins, even unto the end. I believe Orthodox teaching approaches it from the other side: something like the idea that all the souls in hell actively sought to be there.
The ugliest thing about political correctness is the blatant but unspoken assertion that you're not allowed to dislike anybody, no matter what reasons you may have.
Guaranteed that if your ancestors didn’t dislike people and actively stereotype and profile other groups you wouldn’t be here today. It’s called survival and it’s genetically ingrained in us.
The worst lefty re-brand was minor attracted person. Thankfully, Florida congress woman Anna Paulina Luna is introducing a bill for either the death penalty or life imprisonment for convicted pedos.
Why? There is not a reason. A rational person shouldn't need to use those words, nor want to use them. I see words like that as coming from a bad place (and advocating hate) and stay away from them...but that's me.
Also me...true freedom comes from having the "ability" to do something wrong and choosing not to do it. It's something not advocated by our society: self-control. Banning something simply makes someone want to do it, for the reasons that Jack explained.
I have long worked to moderate my speech in that regard. It's not necessary for an adult to be continually swearing, let alone using slurs. The modern habit for young people to preface every single major word in a sentence with "fucking" simply makes them look weak and stupid IMO.
That being said, creating societal prohibitions against certain words invests them with massive and near-permanent power that no slur or random stupidity should possess.
There is a time and place for swearing, but most people don’t know how to effectively swear. Megyn Kelly is an effective swearer. She doesn’t do it often, but when she does she means it and she’s effective.
I guess Millennials are young to you. It's a habit of our generation I am having a hard time breaking. Maybe Gen Z does it too but I don't interact much with Gen Z
It's worth adding that the minced-oath opens wide fields for comic flair -- far in excess of the usual dull and bloodless stuff. Put real feeling, in mixed company, into a "sweet surly sunshine!" or "son of bee-sting!" and you'll make a favorable impression on good people.
Around my kids I’ve turned goddammit into God…bless America. And fuck into fudgecicle. But they’ve heard me use every name in the book behind the wheel. What can I say.
I can understand the desire to remove power from words, but what I struggle with is the desire to intentionally make people around you uncomfortable.
You aren’t inspiring people by calling everyone/everything a “retard” or a “faggot”, but you ARE deservedly gonna have people not want to be around you. And, if that is your goal, your end game with the limited time you have here, it rings pathetic. Be a better man. Be a better neighbor. Have some sense of shame, at least.
"you ARE deservedly gonna have people not want to be around you"
glad you brought that up as in some cases that is exactly the desired outcome. sometimes i like to float out these lines to gauge the reaction of people around me to see what makes them tick and if they pass then i can keep ratcheting up the content until im at a level i like. from that i can figure out how real i can be with them becuase if you can handle slurs and racial jokes theres a good chance we will get along well
note: this doesnt specifically apply to racial stuff
In short, it helps keeps the nutters away. Some of them don't make it as obvious as having dangerhair/dangerglasses or wearing a mask all the time. Probably how you'd treat someone in a red MAGA hat.
But what you aren’t considering is how the Perpetually Offended are happy to try and make ME uncomfortable. In this ever tightening bounds of what’s considered “acceptable language” they are trying to assert control over me by dictating what I’m allowed to say to express myself. It’s all control. Make a word “bad” and then “punish” the people who use it. It’s a moving target and it’s entirely designed to put me back on my heels, tiptoeing around others’ feelings for fear of my livelihood and social standing. When I fight back and use language unacceptable to those people unflinchingly and unashamedly, what I do is disarm their ability to lord over me. It’s basically a “you have no power here” to them, and until their power is removed, they will continued to try and use it against who they consider their inferiors.
And to be clear, I'm not in favor of the Deep Tumblr aspect of using the most ridiculously curated speech ever either. That's insane as well.
Just pointing out that it's easy not to be a dick, and people generally get a long a lot easier in life when they are kind and considerate to those around them.
It really comes down to why the slur is causing offense. When someone uses the word retard I really don't care if it's directed at me. However I have a cousin who is mentally disabled, and using him as the basis of an insult is what pisses me off. I manage to find ways to express myself without needing to use the word and struggle to understand why others can't do the same - unless we're talking about motor timing I guess.
Likely if you know any mentally challenged people you're less likely to use retard as a slur, if you know any gay people you are less likely to use fagot as a slur, etc.
The swearing in general has just become a cliched way for the least authentic people to come across as authentic - boss bitches and the like.
You are free to use those words, and always have been. Others are equally free to decide what they think of you for using those words, and to say whatever they want about it. And many of them are going to decide it says something very bad about you and say so with vehemence.
I don't see the reward as worth the cost; not even close. If I'm going to make people that mad it's going to be for something that has actual benefit I care about.
Right… the various replies are pretty much what I expected tbh.
What is the reward even? Callously and intentionally making people uncomfortable? Good luck in life with that outlook imo.
Takes very little effort to try to be a decent person. I have no idea why you’d set out every day trying to be anything other than that, but it DOES take more effort to be an unrepentant asshole with bad vibes. And, that’s the exactly what throwing around slurs in every day conversation like a verbal tic gets you.
As a kid from the 90s, I think you wildly overestimate how hard I have to try to use the words fav and retard. They roll right off the tongue, because we used them all the time back then when no one gave a shit and cried about how it “offended them.”
People have decided that adjectives used to accurately describe something are now hurtful. They were never slurs to begin with. I think maybe that’s what I’d fight against. Every year I get to say less words. Comedy and movies have gone down the toilet because heaven forbid SOMEONE gets offended or you need to now defend yourself against the minuscule but outspoken “anti-culture”.
You know what guides it? Money. Nobody actually gives a shit. They don’t want to lose sales etc from social repercussion of virtue signalers and SJWs.
When I was in grade 1, my teachers taught us 'sticks and stones will break by bones but words will never hurt me' with the idea of creating some resilience. By contrast my grade 1 kid says 'sticks and stones will break my bones and words will sometimes hurt me'. Yes it's good to think about other people's feelings but you can't expect other people to think about yours. How you take something is up to you.
You know, I asked someone a question similar to yours once and you know what his response was?
"Because FUCK YOU, that's why."
It wasn't the most eloquent statement of philosophy I've ever heard, but I presumed from the statement that he objected to an expectation of others that his speech should be controlled primarily by the ephemeral feelings of others, especially as the boundaries of what is "offensive" changes literally minute by minute and always in yet a new way to exercise control over others without any notable moral authority to do so.
Speaking personally, I've worked around some very vehement language enforcers for some time. They're very passionate about not using language that could be hurtful to others...
At least until they get mad. At which point they seem to have absolutely zero hesitation to call people all manner of things that are hurtful, including using the very language they don't want you using.
Often, though, it's just slurs that they approve of. If you call someone a "retard" they'd lose their shit. But when they call someone a "fascist" it's not a slur and just accurate.
The gentleman who said "Because FUCK YOU, that's why." noted that most of the people he encountered complaining about the language of others simply wanted to control the speech of people they didn't like while carving out massive exceptions for them to use whatever vitriolic language they could muster against the targets of their censorship.
It's difficult to take the "you shouldn't use hurtful language" thing seriously when you've encountered people who insist that their urge for censorship comes from a place of kindness literally say to your face that they hope your children are raped to death because you had the unmitigated temerity to disagree with them.
So while I may not have expressed my feelings in quite the way that gentleman did, I have had enough experience with the phenomenon to see his perspective.
I'm reminded of the video not that long ago where a young woman bent down into a stroller and started screaming some fashionably leftist rhetoric at a child...an act so incredibly unhinged that another person on her side literally pushed her back and said "That's a baby!", as in "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I suspect the gentleman who said "Because FUCK YOU, that's why." suspected that a significant chunk of forbidding the use of "hurtful" language was coming from precisely that kind of loopy bitch and he seemed to reject the entire enterprise.
The way around it is to own it and wear it with pride like the niggers do.
"Waspy? Of course I am and I'd be a lazy slob if I didn't take advantage of it."
And no one will ever be able to make me feel shame for being an Anglo Saxon. We've been emigrants and immigrants all over the world. We won't fight like the French and the Celts but we'll defend what we believe in until the last breath.
I just remind them that we invented everything. It’s directionally true.
Here’s another one. I read this once and I don’t know if it’s true but I like it because it triggers people: Nothing of consequence to humanity has ever been invented by anyone living within 500 miles of the Equator.
You get a small band across central Africa, Indonesia and Northern South America. For that area, population weights and available landmass are far more limiting for original inventions than ethnic origins.
One could claim that the "Best and/or Worst" invention of humanity, H. Sapiens itself, came out of that band, but I'm not up to date on development of modern humans from South/Central Africa.
That statement I read of is one of those things that at first glance sounds true, then when you do a self check, you can’t think of anything off the top of your head, which then gives you unwarranted confirmation bias.
You did scholarly thinking to analyze and most likely give the reason why it’s a suspect statement based on available landmass. That being said, I’m a bit vexed that I can’t even think of one invention from the equatorial region, which of course means nothing. It just proves that I have unknown unknowns.
I read "When We Were Orphans" and decided Ishiguro wasn't for me. It read like a PSA to avoid "literature" and anything that wins a prestigious award. Is all his work that tedious to get through?
I have not believed in prestigious prizes for literature since Dan Neil went on the Smoking Tire Podcast. Having won a Pullitzer prize, I believed he must be the American Jeremy Clarkson and i strove to find an example of his writing that was not paywalled to no avail, so when Matt Farah had him on the podcast I was very excited. Imagine my disappointment as the podcast went on and i discovered: he had only a cursory knowledge of cars, he was incapable of expressing an original idea, he was so vacuous that Matt and Zach had to lead him through the podcast and winning the Pulitzer was basically a self selection process.
Awards for, oh, at least the last two or three decades have been more political statements than anything else. Maybe 13 years ago when I was a little more serious about looking for an agent and a publisher I looked at a scifi book that had won a prestigious (in that field) award to see how my own stuff stacked up and the novel was unbearable. Every line was soaked in sneering pretension. It killed any interest I ever had in whatever was winning awards (as well as my desire to get published). In Ishiguro's defense at least he was just tedious. I've never read anything by Dan Neil but what you've said (as well as other things written here at Avoidable Contact) have done him no favors.
I do not understand the adult desire to win awards for non physical activities. Seriously, they are reveling in the fact that they wrote better, they acted better, or they cooked better than someone. To me that’s crazy. And unknowable.
But I realize why they do it. USA Olympic skier Bill Johnson, who won the gold medal in 1984 for downhill skiing had the best and most honest response. He was asked what winning the gold medal meant to him, and he said “Millions”.
My bet is the 6.2s are nuking because of the following...GM recommends but does not require high test, so most owners don't spend the upcharge but still cane their trucks regularly which creates knock, timing is pulled but the fueling is slow to respond so you get a momentary rich condition...GM spec'd 20w oil because someone thinks consumers give a shit about the fuel economy their $50k+ 5k+lb V8 vehicle gets so they shrank the bearing clearances down to basically nothing which leaves no room for error...They also switched to direct injection to eek a few more trivial improvements in efficiency, which introduces fuel dilution which drops that already low viscosity down to almost water and as a final act of trying to make an orange an apple, they added stop start so the engine goes through more low oil pressure rotations than it should...next thing you know you have a window where one shouldn't be.
Regarding the 2.7 TURBOMAXXXXXXX, it is crazy to me that the dumbest half ton truck engine idea is actually proving to be the most reliable, closely followed by the now seemingly sorted but still overly complex babymax diesel. Signed, a Gen V 5.3 owner who shorts the recommended oil change interval and crosses his fingers every night hoping to catch a lifter failing before it nukes the rotating assembly in his air hauler.
The leftist method in a nutshell is to spend billions to clear up 99% of a problem, then spend billions and billions more to try to fix the remaining 1%, but fixing that 1% always remains elusive. Their regulation playbook has its roots in the never ending Marxist class struggle.
All auto regulation, CAFE and emissions and safety is based on this. That’s why all of these regulations need to be eliminated. The consumer is smart enough choose a vehicle that meets their needs without government safety ism limiting their choices.
Correct. Before gas mileage or safety was a thing, car manufacturers touted gas mileage and safety as a marketing tool. The same will happen again if we eliminate all of the regulations.
But in the freedom of choice arena, a manufacturer could also release a 500 cubic inch luxury car that gets 8 mpg for those that want it. That would be glorious!
I just read the other day that there’s 19 different versions of Oreos.
Could we please free up auto manufacturers so that they could sell 19 different types of cars?
Remember that the GM J cars, last sold in 1994, offered a 2 door hatchback, 2 door notchback, 2 door convertible, 4 door sedan, and a 4 door wagon. And it was an affordable economy car for the masses!
Sure, but all those statements minus the stop/start were true about the L86 as well - which as far as I'm aware is not subject to the issue. 125k on mine and *knock on wood* still going strong.
The L86s had bearing failures just not as wide spread as the L87. My rant was pointed at the GM 6.2 but in reality it is general disdain for the implementation of these "technologies" wholesale across all product lines. Someone in the comments here made mention of a forced change in bearing material due to new regulations on lead, which would be exasperated by what I said above.
Auto stop start, low viscosity oils, and direct injection in and of themselves don't necessary guarantee failures they just reduced the margin for error.
I was actually planning to pull some old data logs from my speed3 when I get home to see if I'm remembering correctly that it would richen the mix a fair bit upon detection of knock obviously a different platform but direct injected. I'll be interested in what you find.
I checked a few different logs files from two different GM PCMs and I didn’t notice the fueling get richer during knock retard. Makes sense to do so. I did, however, see in a number of logs showing knock just prior to entry to Power Enrichment. I saw that I had pulled timing from the spark tables in response, but it was lean prior to the knock, so the lean condition may have caused the knock. Good refresher on the basics-get fueling right first!
I'm willing to bet it's a materials issue. To my knowledge these engines do not have significant oil dilution issues. Modern engines are in a constant state of advancing and retarding timing and I have never seen oil dilution attributed to it. I've tested and driven many powertrains on 87 that required high octane fuel and never found an issue in that regard. This includes the Hellcat.
I'd be interested to see the delta in power generated between a Hellcat engine on 93 vs one on 87 with a fully stock computer and tune. The adjustability the OEMs are building into the stock ECUs is impressive.
I'm not sure about ascribing intent for revising the L86. You're merely speculating, but regardless the execution failure lies at the feet of the 'executives'.
Sometimes what is meant to be a nothingburger of an update gets blown up for unrelated coincident reasons. The truth may never come to light.
As for the victorian standard vs the modern standard I think I'm split down the middle and probably leaning towards the classic way, but subjectively on a case by case basis. Thanks for the spoilers cause that prevents me from wasting my non-existent free time on it.
Yours and my feelings on youtube are nearly identical. As much as it is bothersome for a lot of reasons, there is so much on it that is valuable, that you can't do away with it.
if I may make a suggestion, the MIT lecture on presenting should be prerequisite for any hire with PowerPoint access. I may have exclaimed out loud Yes! to points such as "don't start with a joke" and "don't read your slide" among all the others.
I sold my '06 Suburban last year with its 315k mile never-opened 5.3L absolutely purring. It did have the very beginnings of a rear main seal leak and I had done the oil pan gasket a few years into ownership around 300k miles. Occasionally you'd see a small puff of blue smoke on start up, but it never used oil between changes. No cylinder shutoff to wipe out lifters and cams or oil consumption. It also still had all its original greaseable balljoints and steering linkage (as far as I could tell based on condition of the dust seals) and everything was still tight. If I ever need another fullsize SUV or truck it will be another one of these GMT800 trucks. The absolute peak in terms of overall durability/servicability and modern-enough comfort and performance IMO. GM does *not* build them like this anymore.
Aesthetically yes, and thicker frames and better sheet metal galvanization that take longer to rot. But the 800s drive notably better in terms of ride/handling/braking/power/mpg
We got an 02 Escalade a few years back for towing (car on an open alum trailer). It's not a looker, but I've grown to really like it - solid and reliable.
05 rich is the way to enjoy nice things these days because our dollar goes 40% as far as it did in 05. If I made my salary 20 years ago... I'd be 1995 rich!
A friend of mine (guy who drifts the slammed white S197) just got a crazy deal on a set of bronze 18 or 20in TEs with decent A/T tires for his leveled '24 5.0 F150. It looks awesome.
Or: GM is doing what they must in order meet corporate fleet economy standards. The amount they pay in warranty claims for failed lifters on DoD equipped V8’s pales in comparison to the fines from da guv’mint. Their #1 customer, sadly, is THE MAN.
I object (I object!) to your characterization of 5.3’s failing between 100-200k as incomplete; the culprit is often the O-ring on the oil pickup tube that fails, leading to the low oil pressure that eventually starves the bearings.
I do enjoy seeing glimmers of rebellion among young people to the retarded gayeness (settle down, it’s spelled with an e on purpose) of the world since roughly 2014?
What we need is a young “influencer” around 24 with a husband and baby on her hip making vids about monogamy to get the Commies upset.
there were some people that created an filter that would take pics of women in revealing clothing with lots of tattoos and show what they would look like in more modest clothes and makeup holding a child
My father was a huge fan of Chuck Mangione and regularly played Feels So Good, An Evening of Magic, and Children of Sanchez. The video brought back some memories, so thank you for that.
I dunno that a band could be any tighter, or a guitarist any more chill while doing the jazz equivalent of shredding. The fact he looks like a Bible salesman makes it so much better. I'd pay cash money to see him walk into Chicago Music Exchange dressed like that, ask to try a guitar, then pull off that solo and leave without saying a word.
I’d never heard Geissman aside from radio play 45 years ago, and just looked at the Wikipedia article. It says that in 1976 he played with Tony Rizzi’s Guitar Band and on an album by the same in company with Pete Christlieb, so around the time of the Deacon Blues solo. This is going to be a deep dive, isn’t it?
I know this isn't an open thread, but do I still need my hifi? I haven't had it hooked up in like three years, all the components save the turntable are from the 80s, and if I can replace it with stuff that sounds as good and are physically smaller, I think I will. Basically big floor speakers and a large receiver that needs to be rebuilt.
It IS an open thread!
I'll pin this.
I still have my still working 1978 stereo system. Bookshelf Ohm speakers still sound awesome!
I have a nice pair of Advent speakers that I never use, what a shame .
-Nate
Hook them up!!
That _was_ the plan 35 years ago, I even bought a switch box so I could use them with my T.V. then I decided I like the quietude more than I need the good sound .
-Nate
Here's the problem with "smaller." The "E" note that is half-way up the top string of a violin has a Frequency of 1320Hz, and a Wavelength circa 10.25 Inches.
Whereas the low open E string of an orchestral double bass has a Frequency of 41.2Hz and a Wavelength of about 27.5 FEET. And, 41.2Hz is also the frequency of the lowest string of an electric bass guitar.
Now, if space is at a premium, you can go to smaller "Satellite" monitors, and one or two active powered subwoofers, some of which are surprisingly small.
I don't sell equipment, but I have been an audio journalist for oh, 40 years. I wrote for TAS in the old days, and for Stereophile for nearly 20 years.
If you don't mind hashing this out in public, what would your target budget be, assuming that you will keep your turntable and therefore you need a phono stage? Also, do you have Roon, and do you have a streaming service such as QOBUZ (my fave).
This is the kind of answer I like to a hifi question!!
Thanks. Sometimes I think that miracle of audio is that it works at all.
Case in point: Mendelssohn Violin Concerto: A High E on the violin and a Low E on a double bass--at the same time! The bass wavelength is circa 34 times longer that of the High violin note.
A stereo LP encodes them differently: one with "Constant Amplitude" the other with "Constant Velocity," and each of those in two versions, for Left and Right.
All that happens in ONE LP Groove!!!!
Here's a $1 million room I helped design and build:
https://futureaudiophile.com/university-of-the-south-brings-a-million-dollar-audiophile-experience-to-its-students-and-you-too/
When you put it like that it makes sense that vinyl has so much value. A simple solution to a complex problem.
Do crossover points in relation to available speakers make a big difference? I have a base Tiguan with a tweeter and a speaker in all 4 doors. The sound is so clear that the kids can pick out words and sounds in songs. From what I can tell, this is because the bass and treble are split between the speaker and the tweeter in a way that has each speaker playing optimally. Interestingly I drove a higher spec Tiguan with brand name audio and the sound was artificially boosted and did not sound as accurate.
Well, everything makes a difference! Now, how much of that is really as inaudible as Chicken Soup?
I like holding crossover boards down with non-ferrous, non-magnetic screws. I pay for Silicon Bronze boatbuilding screws for my rear panels. I would not expect to hear differences in ABX testing, but on the other hand, perhaps the combination of six different tweaks, each in and of itself inaudible, will together save you 1dB of noise floor extension. Which should be audible.
Car audio: I have to wonder whether most car makers still use traditional, coil-capacitor-resistor analog-parts crossovers in their basic and upsell car stereos any more!
Unlike people who build and sell nice home stereo loudspeakers 12 pairs or 24 pairs at a time, a car company's production module is going to more like 50,000 car sound systems, right?
For that, I assume that, taking the long view, they divide and direct the various part of the music frequency spectrum via large-chip DSP amplification: a Separate for each woofer, midrange, and tweeter, hand-tailored to the acoustics of that model--which is something, car guys take note, that was first done for a next-gen Corvette, IIRC in the early 1980s. GM was so broke that Bose had to lend GM the money for the Non-Recurring Engineering, but of course Bose made out well in due course.
"they divide and direct the various part of the music frequency spectrum via large-chip DSP amplification"
For nicer systems, perhaps. Many base systems with "separates" just use an in-line bass filter (ooof...).
What's the equipment specifically and your use case?
Some stuff is worth it, but (having gone through a similar scenario) it often isn't.
10 years ago it was maybe $500 total of Sansui stuff, my use case it to be able to streaming and vinyl, and I just want big, immersive sound. I was planning on replacing the receiver anyway, cause it need rebuilding, but I could go either way on the speakers.
Do you have a price target for the replacement for the receiver?
Not really, but that is merely borne of ignorance. If I could replicate the sound quality in a package that wasn’t 24x18x8, I would happy. I was probably thinking 500-1000 for the receiver, and 500-1500 for the speakers, and those are all used prices cause I’m scotch/irish. Basically I want the same or better sound, or the same as when my stuff was younger/fresher.
I was planning on buying a rebuilt older receiver, like a pioneer or something, but I’m open to suggestions.
Here are some options in "Just Add Speakers" one-box solutions.
This Denon has a phono stage: https://www.musicdirect.com/receiver/denon-ceol-n12dab-all-in-one-system/ and Music Direct has more options, but you have to read carefully and make sure they have everything you want, esp. the phono stage.
I have not watched more than a couple of minutes, but this YT guy seems legit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of8okbuuoq0
If you want to buy used, I do think that old Onkyo all-analog "Receivers" were built like bricks and under-appreciated in their time. I have not heard on in a long time, though.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/116459116028?
You would then need a modern digital Streamer to handle streaming music. Etc., a separate DAC and perhaps a CD transport.
Best of luck,
john
Thank you so much!!
Re: the streaming, I am a mediocrity accepting looser and therefore I use Spotify.
The Denon looks like exactly the thing for me, I'll try and come back to it when it's time to upgrade.
The Sansui is often worth fixing if you like its vibe. The people who love them, really love them.
I used to have a BT adapter plugged into a Marantz 2230 and it was... fine. But honestly for just streaming in my LR, any of the "all in one" Class-D BT/airplay/wifi mini-receivers I tried also sounded equally fine. FWIW, these were powering an early 90s set of PSB Alpha bookshelfs.
I'd work backwards from your speakers. If you're open to a sat/sub system, you've got a TON of options.
You’d do speakers and then the receiver? I had big floor speakers, I’m okay w the size. Probably 14x14x30”
But what's the condition of the woofers and tweeters? If you have to replace any of them, it gets tricky.
John (and I'm sure others) are much more experienced in this realm, but I've always understood that the speakers and room dynamics have much more impact than the electronics (and that's been borne out by my experience too).
I haven’t looked at them in years. When I’ve worn them out before (different speakers, not these) the surrounds tore.
FWIW, sometimes the cones (esp paper) just get "tired" long before the surrounds tear. If you're interested in used gear, your price range has a lot of options. I just saw a pair of current generation Revel Concerta towers locally for $900.
Do you recommend a satellite/subwoofer system over the big floor speakers? Or is same/same, just packaging?
I wimped out on following Jacks recommendation for Bowers and Wilkins Bluetooth earbuds, and cheaped out with a pair of technics AZ-80s.
It blows my hifi out of the water, fwiw.
Vintage gear can sound just fine. For the room where I assemble electronics, I'm rebuilding a couple of Dynaco Mk IV power amps, to go with my old conrad-johnson preamp that I just had the factory go over. I haven't decided what speakers to use yet.
If you can stretch as far as circa $2000 a pair, and you can wait a bit, I am halfway through writing a review of these loudspeakers.
I have designed loudspeakers for a famous company and I got paid for it (under a NDA, of course!), so that makes me a professional.
These must be a labor of love, because they look, feel, and sound like $4000 the pair speakers.
https://philharmonicaudio.com/products/bmr-monitor?variant=44443827831028
I'd save money and buy the rectangular satin walnut version.
Completely sold out already!
It's a small business with a very long supply chain. I think the woofer comes from Indonesia. I guess that the cabinets--at that amazingly low price--are Chinese. They assemble the speakers in Virginia.
They expect new cabinets in a week or two.
Even wrapped in those hamstrings, if they made a bad product they would still be sitting on unsold stock, right?
It's exciting to see them back. IIRC, they were on hiatus for a while, right?
In 2020, Philharmonic Audio was re-launched as “Version 2.0” with the addition of Supply Chain expert Ken Lin.
I've been impressed with designer Dennis Murphy for decades.
Without seeing them in person I can' tell for sure, but it looks like the Vera-fi 12" sub might be a good visual match with the BMR Monitor in Gloss Ebony.
Hi, If you are thinking about getting the BMR Monitor, I'd suggest getting them first and then decide if you need a subwoofer, even though Vera-Fi's sub is hard to beat on price.
The reason I say this is that the review pair of BMR Monitors appeared to be new, and I often use torture tones to break in loudspeakers, such as Hot Rodded Pink Noise with an overlay of 32Hz sine wave. The BMR Monitors definitely have output at 32Hz.
Those are so beautiful. I'd totally take a set in Rosewood or Ebony -- except that I'm no audiophile and I just bought the VeraFi Vanguard Scout speakers you reviewed last summer.
did you name your truck jfk becuase you knew it would have a hole blown into the side of it
anyway at least the fix is a better bearing/more oil pressure at idle/some other secret third thing and not a mechanical problem inherent to the design so it could be worse. i dont know what the issue is but now im curious
imagine trying to make your hated opponents look as bad as possible and then show them as young, fit, attractive, well off, and happy lmao
Too soon!
Dammit, Mr. President, what's in those classified CIA files already?!
i thought they were already out
didnt one of the secret service guys riding shotgun in the car shoot him
I carefully read the first book that advanced that theory, "Mortal Error," and if the supposition were true, it would explain a lot.
Such as the Secret Service whisking Kennedy's body away, lest independent medical examiners in Texas find out that the fatal shot was fired at ground level, and not from the 6th floor of anywhere.
The Failure Mode therein described is that, for no good reason I could see, the Secret Service equipped one of the agents in the follow-up car with an AR-15 or an M-16.
And this was at a time when the M-16 was not a fully developed weapon. In the early years of our "Flooding the Zone" in Vietnam, many US soldiers were found to have died while trying to unjam their new Wonder Weapons.
But the JFK scenario is obviously not a jamming incident!!!
It's that, once the first shot was fired from behind and high (my theory is the LHO was paid to fire shots way over JFK's head, so the CIA could say that a ComSimp had tried to kill JFK, so now they get to invade Cuba for real) the dumbass agent attempted to execute the maneuver of:
Grabbing the M-16 or AR-15 off the limo floor;
standing up;
raising the gun,
while trying to once and at the same time to turn around
and climb onto the rear seat
and fire a standing shot at a rapidly receding building.
Halfway through that plan, with the rifle at waist level, he squeezed the trigger, perhaps in response to the limo's braking or speeding up, and the tumbling .223 projectile entered the back of JFK's head, right about where there is a whorl or crown in his hair distribution.
The projectile transited internally for three inches or so, and exited over and in front of his right ear, as shown in the Zapruder film.
I have read at least 200 books on this subject, and the "Dunce with an M-16" theory is very tempting.
BUT BUT BUT it is PREDICATED on there having been a shot ALREADY fired from behind and very much above. THAT has to be explained, too.
BTW, if there is a "Clincher" for the "Dunce with an M-16" scenario, it is that in the Vice President's limo, Senator Ralph Yarborough was a passenger, and as they traveled through the area where the Secret Service limo had been, Yarborough distinctly smelled burnt gunpowder in the air. While recounting this, he often would note, "I am a hunter and am familiar with that smell."
But not from the 6th floor of the DSBD did he smell that!!!
Eternal Rest Grant them all, O Lord.
john
Thanks for the Likes. I just refreshed my recollection: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/jfk-the-smoking-gun-reveals-shocking-new-details-about-who-was-responsible-for-gunning-down-jfk/news-story/6c8a3ba473172faca7d91717683cf95f
So, the rifle was an AR-15, which had been put into service for the first time EVER that morning, when they handed the AR-15 to a young driver who had never been trained for it.
So, yeah the Secret Service has proven itself much more adept about lining up call girls in foreign lands, than actually protecting US Presidents.
Hey Don, why don't you DEFUND THE SECRET SERVICE? Few will notice, and nobody will care!
Despite and still, the "Special Needs Kid with an AR-15" scenario still has our SNK (or, FLK, which is what they said in the 1950s--Funny Lookin' Kid) standing and firing in reaction to a gunshot.
An old friend (RIP) who was a contract employee of Good Housekeeping, er, no that was the CIA, claimed inside knowledge that Dallas was "a False Flag Operation that got hijacked."
BTW John. No self respecting Australian would regard the Herald Sun as a 'source'. Its journalists are not the type to do quality research It's entertaining reading but that's about it.
Hi, Luke. I believe that the Herald Sun was running a feature to support an Australian author who had written about about Dallas, 11/22/63.
Most of the text I linked to seems to be nothing other than direct block quotes from that book. NOT reporting or research by anyone at Herald Sun. Just "Copy" and Paste."
The book is VERY first-person-y, and we are forced to look over his shoulder as each little nugget of "Evidence" comes in.
But it seems to me that it is just a copy-cat of the earlier book "Mortal Error," which is easy to find wherever large quantities of used books are to be found.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/276409792112
yeah, they are out, but with significant parts redacted, to protect er "sources" (or maybe the guilty parties).
This should blow everybody's mind!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt
THAT's the guy my CIA Contractor friend said was Oswald's handler.
The question is, was de Mohrenschildt handling Oswald for the CIA, the ONI (Office Naval Intelligence), or the KGB?
BTW, de Mohrenschildt is pronounced duh MORN-shield(t).
"Child" has nothing to do with it; Schildt is German for Heraldic Shield/Coat of Arms.
After Investigators from the Congressional Committee phoned de Mohrenschildt to set a time for them to interview him, he blew his brains out.
I thought I knew a lot about Dallas 1963.
I had never known that, as a child, Jacqueline Bouvier knew de Mohrenschildt, and called him "Uncle George."
Cold chills down my spine.
The truck was named JFK because we primarily used it to pull Danger Girl's race Miata, Marilyn. Which got that name because it started its race career in Playboy Cup.
Debbie Harry and Dale Bozzio (Missing Persons) also started that way.
Ninja edit: As Playboy Bunnies, not getting railed by JFK.
Debbie Harry...
I'm sorry what were you saying
Speak for yourself.
okay fair but what about when she was in her 20s
Nope. Didn't do it for me.
Does Bark still have the sunglasses Debbie Harry gave him?
I think he sleeps in them
You still see her Downtown with some frequency.
She carries herself like it's 1978 and pulls it off.
yeah that makes more sense
clever
Tremendous.
Could the problem not partly be 0w 20 oil to help mpg?
i dont think it helps but what might be happening is the oil getting too hot which (depending on actual temp) can ruin the metals in the bearing which are usually quite soft relatively speaking. from there your bearing load capacity would degrade and then it grabs a rod and away it goes
pure speculation on my part but if i had one id want an oil cooler and an oil temp/pressure gauge regardless, also depending on temp a thicker high end oil
Could be my ignorance, and I do not care enough to go down a google rabbit hole, but don't the GM trucks have the oil temps buried in the instrument cluster? My last Ram and my last 2 Ford trucks have temp gauges. The Ram was the lowly 3.6 and it used to spook me traveling in the mountains when vacationing out west. Oil temp would get up to 240-250F on the higher elevation climbs. I haven't taken my F-150 out there yet to tell if that is common on newer trucks. Michigan is too flat to stress it :D
As I've said, Mary Barra and Reuss fucking suck. I am so disappointed in GM nowadays it hurts. From EV's to now the crown jewel of American V8's, it hurts. I'd be willing to force a board vote and bring back Bob Lutz. He wasn't perfect but he was full balls out when it came to automotive. Shit, they can't even get NASCAR right with the rumors Cadillac will replace Chevrolet. Stupid move if that's true.
I don't follow politics super closely, there's a reason for it, but where I'm living on the left coast you'd think Hitler was reincarnated and anyone not aryan was being rounded up for the gas chambers. My wife lost her shit again recently about it citing the failure of this nation to confront racism and nazism. My brain started to bleed so hard from hearing this I asked for a reprieve of about a week before we speak again. The only failure of this nation is to properly educate people on how government works and why in history things happened. Hopefully, my children and their generation will do better in that department.
IMO Lutz was the beginning of the end of "good old GM," priding himself on outsourcing suppliers to China and chasing after panel gaps and getting rid of old internal durability standards.
Lutz worked at GM since the 1970s?
Try reading “car guys vs bean counters” he spells those things out that I mentioned in explicit detail. Like GM sedans being engineered to cross a 2in (?) tall piece of steel bar at highway speeds without damage to wheels or suspension.
I get that.
Pre Lutz the GM cars were durable and thought out, but not appealing.
Post Lutz the cars have curb appeal, but break and feel just as cheap as the durable ones.
Ah NO. My 81 Phoenix was not what would be called anything remotely close to "durable". Some things on it were well thought out; some things we completely stupid.
But like 1980s GM sedans were actively driving people to the competition as it was.
I remember a glossy piece in NYT or something about Lutz, sometime around the Cobalt launch. It went on-and-on about how they benchmarked the Mk4 Jetta's "sophistication and materials quality", etc. and how proud they were they beat it on all measures.
Jack has an article on GM beating the competition on all measures!
Shame about the Kmart styling.
Like I said he wasn't perfect but better then what we got now
A few weeks/months? back I posted some ideas on how to fix GM.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy
Hey now panel gaps were quite the rage in the '90's - ever since Lexus showed a ball bearing dancing around the LS 400 seams.
The old durability standards were ridiculous though - it's the reason why all their cars from the 60's - 80's look like they have a lift kit installed. GM air conditioning did kick ass back in those days though.
I took my $400 '91 Park Avenue down a bunch of gravel roads in Appalachia including some water crossings back in 2021, then chased down a bunch of guys on big bore adventure bikes who thought they were making time on some twisty back roads, I was on some junkyard whitewalls. What a machine!
Great, now I wanna drive the cheapest Nimitz-class hooptie I can find. Just to say my car cost less than that model kit of the Yamato my brother got my for Christmas two years ago.
Look, sometimes you NEED to use your B-Body Impala to haul Cousin Merle out of the backyard mug bog.
NASCAR (like most racing series) is a branding exercise so the car will have a Cadillac logo with the same motor under the hood as the Chevy logo’d car.
It’s more ridiculous in F1 where I understand that the future Cadillac entry will be powered by a Ferrari powerplant.
Don’t worry too hard. She’s still in the shallow end of the pool. I got called a Nazi by someone wearing a shirt saying “imagine being afraid of drag queens and books”. Is it still a hate crime if you want to crack someone in the face because of their morals and attitude and not their sexuality? Making adult choices as a responsible human sucks some days. Children deserve so much better…they would NEVER openly choose that as an option.
Hopefully it gets better for you.
Counterpoint, GM has always sucked and Mary & Mark are just part of the continuing suck
Re: Never Let Me Go - Alex Garland (who wrote the screen adaptation) must have had similar thoughts.
Reading between the lines, his reaction to the "gentility" of that world seems to have influenced his (better, darker, more insightful... and definitely sexier) Ex Machina.
Ex Machina was brilliant. I need to get one of those girls.
idk... didn't work out that great... what if they get it in for the cats?
I dont let real women get away with much so I also feel I could control the robots.
I had a friend who listened to the Rogan conversation about sex robots and showed some interest in the topic. I think, but don't know, that sex robots would be incredibly dull ... unless, as in Ex Machina, they had a real brain ... and (here's the improbable part) they were interested in what little I had to offer.
... so you're saying there's a chance ... of either sentient / sapient sex robot interest and / or death? I like my chances!
Agreed, Ex Machina was brilliant.
https://delicioustacos.com/2018/03/31/2052/
Especially when the dancing starts.
Get down
Saturday night
Saturday night
"I need to get one of those girls."
....until!
Sonoya Mizuno nuff sed
She's no Maggie Cheung but she can get it every day and twice on race day
This book sounds a lot like the Scarlett movie The Island. At least in that one they ran away.
Ex Machina is an outstanding piece of work. It’s one of those movies that I can watch over and over without getting tired of it.
And prescient in its own way without being heavy handed
Blame CAFE for all of it: standards intentionally impossible to meet to purposely force EVs down our throats. We are stuck with a generation of compromised vehicles over this.
and their justification for making them more efficient is just "becuase we said so"
There are a THOUSAND other places to make those fuel economy numbers instead of sacrificing powertrain durability, but upper management makes bad calls.
How many VPs and higher get promoted from powertrain development? Anyone? Last guy (or girl) anyone here remember?
The CAFE schedule requires that whatever they use to meet the standards won't be adequately tested before being dumped onto the buying public.
That's a little misleading - they're choosing to not spend the testing dollars.
Love it hate the CAFE rules, the roadmap is public for years before they kick in.
Being shitty engineers is a more apt description.
Your link goes nowhere, but I'll respond anyway. The entire industry has been doing triage since 2012. They're rushing programs every year. When are they supposed to spend five years testing a new transmission or engine design before shipping it? There are no shortcuts. Accelerated engine development programs fail to reveal problems that occur in low intensity use. They also fail to reveal the impacts of heat cycles, since engines must either be tested continuously or heat cycled, there is no data that relates to engines that are actually used strenuously and heat cycled. Idiot authoritarian bureaucrats can't order physics to act as they wish, and I am really sick of the idiots who let them try.
I didn't mean to post a link... that was subcrap interpreting it as such.
You're not telling me anything I DON'T know...
But my point remains that this is a CHOICE... they're choosing to cut corners and let go of people who know what they're doing at critical points of a program and saying ' if the sim said it was fine its okay to ship'.
Somewhere there is a Chief engineer or a Vice president of Powertrain or some such moron whose job it is to stop the MBA madness raining down from above.. these people are - DIPSHITS.
There are few people who hate MBA madness as much as I do, but this is authoritarian bullshit ruining the world we live in instead of profit-maximizing halfwits ruining the world that we live in.
Respectfully disagree.
No company, except maybe Toyota, has an infinite amount of money/engineering to throw at every test scenario imaginable. And even then, you only qualify the known-unknowns. You have no idea what unknown-unknowns there are in your new design; you can only make your best guess.
So yes, you do have to choose where you are going to get the most "bang for your buck" in your test/qualification regime.
These MBA dipshits as you call them, would be happy to spend another billion dollars verifying and EGR valve; but the money is needed elsewhere.
GM DID spend years and years testing these engines.
Doesn't matter if your durability tests aren't realistic
We're saying the same thing... The design of the experiment (or test) in this case is key to getting useful results.
Who designed these tests and decided the sign off criteria? I'm not on the regulatory agencies' side, but this is ENTIRELY GM's own doing.
GM has used their engine durability processes for decades, I think going back to the 80s.
It's heavy on WOT and high load operation and low on realistic heat cycling
Here's how you fix fuel economy in vehicles: 30-gallon tanks and Drill Baby Drill.
mandatory tanker corvettes
You are on today sir
thank you
sometimes the shit i throw at the wall actually sticks
Often!
I’ll never stop saying this. CAFE killed a lot of people. I say this as a former Chevy Citation owner.
Yep, and I owned a Phoenix.
I owned 4. One bought new and the other 3 were hand me downs. I used to park in some sketchy Chicago neighborhoods and even the criminals didn’t want to steal or break into them. They were also sled dogs in the snow.
CAFE was a fucking stupid idea from the start and has only gotten worse. Just kill it and raise the gas tax or something.
how about just kill it and not raise the gas tax at all
we can have both
That’s how we get 3500 pound SUVs with 1.5 liter engines paired with transmissions that shift way to early and make the poor thing completely miserable to drive.
When I had my C6, my engine builder said GM was forced to switch bearing material on all of the 6.2s to meet EPA guidelines. Not for fuel economy but because the bearings contained lead.
He was certain it would cause issues down the road. Here we are...
Lead that would only end up in the already toxic soup of dirty motor oil. I suppose a handful of garages may still burn it for heat.
Memo to all environmentalists: We are all going to die. Utopia does not exist.
There are only two choices.
1. We enjoy the ride
2. We don’t enjoy the ride
Choose wisely
Personally, I want the people of ten thousand years hence to write stories about the Ancient Americans that sound like a high-tech Lord of the Rings, they're that awesome.
Green Berets, Prince and Yosemite Sam have to protect a couple of midgets on a quest to save the world by driving the Foghat tour bus into Lake Erie or something, I don't know.
Doesn't have to be a documentary.
"Green Berets, Prince and Yosemite Sam have to protect a couple of midgets on a quest to save the world by driving the Foghat tour bus into Lake Erie or something" - can we ask an AI bot to generate a preview video of this now? sounds freaking hilarious + epic!
And Yosemite Sam can basically be Blain from "Predator," minigun and all!
had chatgpt render me a few lines of "foghorn leghorn calling for close air support in ramadi"
would recommend
"This'll be, I say this'll be, danger close!"
I've always said that Woke/Leftism is a new religion, just like communism became one before it. It's fun to see the rebellion you describe happening with those a bit younger than me, as it always has.
My former college professor always has had an interesting take on this, and is active on twitter. His public op-eds are always great reads and thought provoking, for those who want to check it out: https://x.com/darelmass
As for the GM motors, I mentioned it last week, but hearing of the exploding 6.2s (and how wimpy the 5.3 felt compared to the diesel and Ford 3.5) was the final checkbox that sealed the deal on buying an Expedition 2 years ago.
STILL waiting on the cancellation or rollback of CAFE so we can finally replace my wife’s American Land Cruiser (5.4 Expedition) with a nice 7.3 powered Navigator.
My 3.5 has been great for 30k so far, and it makes my father in law giddy to drive compared to his old 5.4
No doubt the 3.5 makes good power and has great tune potential but speaking personally I’d prefer longevity and lower power to the complexity of a modern small displacement turbo motor.
I’ve heard there is some tricks to keep them running reliably IE some sort of oil filter screen for the turbo oil lines that should be changed with regularity that owners and dealers are apparently ignorant of.
Cam phaser issues would bother me way more than the turbos. Most things I seem to read about are arguments between oil weight and change cycles. “We” started designing for super light cold weights and it would seem some clearances demand the lighter weight with smaller passenges as other items need a heavier weight to live.
If you stepped back to 80s /90s turbo mannerisms
of letting cars get up to temp before real use and cooling down just the same (albeit more of a coking issue), I’d wager the vehicles would get much further without a failure.
A contributing complication is the oil change intervals. The general public sees "10,000 mile oil change" oils and do not read the asterisk beside that claim. They see the "synthetic long life!" oils and think that means the oil is actually synthetic (which it isn't) and that the long life claims apply to their driving...which it doesn't.
The oil they're buying most of the time is not bad, but it still has dinosaur guts in it. It's called "synthetic" thanks to Castrol's marketing bullshit being green-lit by dumbass courts. Their typical stop-and-go driving involving short trips here and there are not the conditions that actually allow going 10,000 miles plus between oil changes. They don't read the fine print that says those numbers apply to mostly highway style driving that hotshot truck drivers and maybe long commuters are doing.
Then they fill up the tank with whatever the cheapest gas they can possibly find happens to be because, well, it's cheap. Who doesn't want cheap gas?
They don't understand that gas is the mortal enemy of motor oil, motor oil that's been in the engine longer than it should. Motor oil that's not being brought up to sufficient temperature to get rid of the water that condenses into it from short trips hither and yon. Motor oil that doesn't maintain its advertised viscosity toward the latter end of those extended OCI's. Motor oil that doesn't have the additive package to cope with the crap being left behind by the shitty gas they're buying, especially not at a 10,000 mile OCI.
The oil is better than ever, but the engines are pickier than ever and more maintenance intensive than ever IF you want it to work well in the long term. Which is why the manufacturers keep introducing newer oil standards to try and cope with the demands of the strained technology they're putting out in a hopeless effort to keep up with hairshirt environmentalist bullshit.
Very valid points. IIRC GM rolled back the OCI on the 3.6's (we had one at one point hence my vague recollection) on account of them notoriously stretching timing chains.
My good buddy also has an F-150 powerboost and the computer did not prompt him to do his first oil change until 12k miles. NO WAY I would let mine go that long.
I’m still a 3k mile stickler. My fun cars get punished and my daily drivers see a ton of use. 90% when a manufacturer has issues with chain tensioners etc the recommendation is always to change the oil sooner. As you said they break down so badly. Especially anything with E-85 or used as a flex fuel vehicle.
Don't hold your breath on this
Out of the frying pan and into the fire going the modern Ford truck route (IMO). Honestly, there's just nowhere to turn for a long term "buy and hold" type of vehicle anymore.
Interesting point. On one hand my knee jerk is a last-gen 4Runner or Land Cruiser should last you basically forever. On the other, having just watched some release videos on the new 4Runner, as much as I don’t want a 4cyl hybrid, I can’t argue with the fact that Toyota has made NYC Priuses like cockroaches, and also lasting forever. I’d probably lean towards the last gen, but I wouldn’t fault someone who rolled the dice on a Toyota hybrid.
I wanted an LC200 but couldn’t justify a CPO one for $90k (or even an LX560 for $70), given that a new expedition was around $60. The Sequoias just felt old and slow having driven the two my buddy owns. Just not worth the price and the GX460 was just way too small inside, even if it had the dimensions of my old Land Rover Discovery 2
I’m going to hold it, and have had little trouble so far but it will also become a 3rd vehicle pretty soon and is just here to road trip and tow.
Most folks I know have had better luck with Ford vs GM lately and parts are cheap so I’m not too worried.
Cheap parts? How does $2500ish for a taillight strike you? I’m referencing that viral episode of a cracked taillight lens on an F150 immobilizing the truck because the CAN line the radar module was on was corrupted or something.
I come from a family who ran a Land Rover, a B5.5 1.8T Passat, and multiple Volvos to 150k+ and we've got two very good mechanics we're close with. Parts and any fixes on the Ford are cheap :)
That sounds like a real mess, but the type of thing that happens to a lot of these modern computer driven cars.
That’s exactly it though. It may be a ford but it’s a *modern* Ford. It might make a B5 VAG product look like a 90s Corolla in terms of longevity/servicability.
Thank your lucky stars. I drove the brother-in-law's LC200 for a few months and I detested it's steering. Wondered around like it had dementia. The Landcruiser felt like a vast bleak desert inside and I was coming from a Mitsubishi Outlander. I also drove a hilux for work and apart from the 3 cup holders I was convinced that Toyota's ergonomic design was done by someone that had never been in a car.
Let's just say the interior I the LC200 is a MASSIVE step up from the Sequoia.. Even then, I couldn't bring myself to pay what they go for. Outside looks great, size is perfect for me, and it's easy to pull the 3rd row that I'd rarely use.
Ergonomics has never been their strong suit.
Oh wow!
I would very much hunt down a prior gen with the port injected 4.0 and old serviceable 5spd aisin. Toyotas newest truck launches have been shitshows. And as far as their hybrids go, the actual hybrid stuff seems to be sorted but for example the Atkinson cycle 1.8s in the 3rd gen Priii have been dropping like flies in middle age. I think my brother has done three head gaskets on them just this year and he’s just a small one man shop. The hybrids also have some stupid pricey specific ABS controllers that can basically total out one of these cars. Toyota had their “golden age” but we’re now past it.
I’m not young but I’ve been saying gay and retard and faggot with greater frequency, and mentally daring someone to say something. And now I have the perfect response if they do: “I don’t really care, Margret.” Haven’t gotten to the N word yet, but it may be coming. Hard to say.
always got it in the chamber ready to rip at a moments notice
“You don't call N-words the N-word. It's bad taste. You call your friends the N-word when they're acting N-wordy.”
"its a codeword that when said aloud makes them act like one"
my car friends used to say 'dbo40' because that was the m-b code for black paint
outstanding
When I was last in Europe a certain segment of the population was referred to as “the Ottomans”.
Guess my prevailing question here is… why? Why do you want to say those words that do offend people?
What is the rationale for basically DEMANDING that people be nice about you saying words that are knowingly hurtful to others in basic conversation?
It seems incredibly immature to me, honestly, but I’m happy to hear if there’s an actual, good reason for it instead of “just because”
in my opinion, it's a way to challenge (or use) the power that a word has. We (as a society) gave these words that power, and why?
It can be done immaturely, or knowingly. Either way, it's definitely provocative, which may be good or bad. Makes life more interesting, at any rate.
it's an IDOL. bow down to it or be destroyed! and the minute somebody on tv gets bleeped for the f-word i know he's a lib. conservatives hardly ever say it on tv.
and who are they to restrict my speech because it offends them? why cant they just ignore it?
Upsetting the schoolmarms is its own reward
Paybacks a bitch
What goes around comes around
Take your pick.
The rationale is to challenge “safetyism”-the retarded idea that people should be safe from words
Precisely.
1) because I’m sick of all the pussies that said we can’t and 2) I’m sick of this idea that “words are violence”. Words are not violence. I’ve been called a fag, and I’ve been punched in the face. I’ll let you guess which one hurts more.
I’m also tired of this “offense inflation.” Retarded replaced idiot which replaced moron which replaced… because words were too mean. Cut the euphemistic shit.
I also see the absurdity in the idea that some words are so toxic or radioactive that we must strike them from society as a whole. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, you didn’t call someone the N-word, but no one freaked out if you said it in a song lyric or read it aloud in Huck Finn or godforbid had an academic conversation about it. These days just uttering it in any context is grounds for professional and social homicide. It’s just such a fucking ridiculous concept that making a sound that other people find offensive in any context can only be explained by the fact that the people taking offense are retarded faggots.
A group of people who trolled peoples old tweets then called their employers and got them fired from their jobs, wrote articles in major "newspapers" to make sure those people would never work again, got their feelings hurt.
I got suspended from twitter a few weeks ago for responding to someone asking for weight loss advice "Fasting has worked great for me" Twitter tagged this as violent speech and upon a careful review of my appeal that took all of 12 seconds determined I needed a time out for a week. I got suspended again yesterday for responding to a post about the Paul brothers boxing each other that they should punch their father instead of each other. more "violent speech" All day yesterday people were posting "We are going to kill all of you" But I responded to an important person earlier in the day and they didn't like what I said so I had to go and they needed an excuse to see me gone. Whatever, it's tax season and I shouldn't be on twitter anyways (or here, but let's save that for another day) but it's preposterous. They change the rules on the fly, don't tell you what any of those rules are, and accuse us of harassment for not going along with their new retarded narrative.
Then they wouldn't let me cancel my premium subscription because I was suspended and my account features were limited. I imagine in my business if I charged somebody for a service and then said "Sorry, I can't do your taxes because you violated my terms of service but I'm keeping the retainer!" would get me into some legal trouble.
I have no disdain for your average lefty but we should throw communists out of helicopters. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
just yet another reason to never be on X, FB, Insta, etc.
I quit all of them in 2016 but I'm charlie brown and elon musk held that football in front of me. Technically I have an insta but I never use it
I'm confused. I thought Elon was a fascist?
I actually think the political spectrum is a circle. Most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between an extreme fascist and an extreme communist.
oh hes on the spectrum alright
granted so am i but still
Any epithet, sneer, derogation, sarcasm, abuse, invective, slur, ever invented by the human power of language has legitimate use in the right context; 99% of the individual instances of use are lazy, tiresome, performative, irritable, repetitive, dreary, asinine or impotent. In conversation as in writing, it is almost always better to replace them.
That God Himself has a Name susceptible of abuse means that it indeed possible for words to violate -- even violate at a the level seriousness that imperils the violator's immortal soul.
I was raised to believe that the only unpardonable sin was
"blasphemy against the Holy Spirit"
and to this day, I'm still not sure if I've ever accidentally done it.
The Catholic teaching on that, so far as I understand it, comes down to a final resolution of impenitence; in other words, willful refusal to repent of known mortal sins, even unto the end. I believe Orthodox teaching approaches it from the other side: something like the idea that all the souls in hell actively sought to be there.
I was taught the only unforgivable sive was rejecting Jesus Christ.
But yeah, I hate to say it but I'm not exactly SUFFERING in sin.
I thought the only unforgivable sin was buying retail.
Because I have a RIGHT to offend people.
I have a RIGHT to hate people.
I have the RIGHT to free speech.
I don't care if people like me or like what I say.
I am polite because I CHOOSE to be polite - not for any other reason than that.
The ugliest thing about political correctness is the blatant but unspoken assertion that you're not allowed to dislike anybody, no matter what reasons you may have.
It's intellectual slavery.
The other ugly thing is that everybody is lying.
I'd rather know if I'm being a dickhead.
Guaranteed that if your ancestors didn’t dislike people and actively stereotype and profile other groups you wouldn’t be here today. It’s called survival and it’s genetically ingrained in us.
George Carlin needs to be raised from the dead and given the biggest loudspeaker/bullhorn possible.
a bullhorn pointed at him so everyone can call him a lefty retard
Correct
+1
shell shock
operational exhaustion
post-traumatic stress disorder
thanks for the truth, George...
Hookers became sex workers.
The dump became the landfill.
Problems became issues.
unhoused people, youths, teens, KEEV. It's all so tiresome.
THE GULF OF AMERICA!!! Mount McKinley! Fighting back.
The worst lefty re-brand was minor attracted person. Thankfully, Florida congress woman Anna Paulina Luna is introducing a bill for either the death penalty or life imprisonment for convicted pedos.
It's Kee-EVV!!!
Cold War kid here.
no, no, no, "problems" are "opportunities"
Except in management, where problems are called challenges.
And average is called competitive.
"I'm glad I live in a world where there are no Problems, only Challenges, Issues and Opportunities."
- Scott Adams
I’m not convinced he wouldn’t just be another John Stewart lefty mouthpiece tbh.
always was
Why? There is not a reason. A rational person shouldn't need to use those words, nor want to use them. I see words like that as coming from a bad place (and advocating hate) and stay away from them...but that's me.
Also me...true freedom comes from having the "ability" to do something wrong and choosing not to do it. It's something not advocated by our society: self-control. Banning something simply makes someone want to do it, for the reasons that Jack explained.
read was paul said about sin: kinda 'discovering it's a sin made me wanna do it.'
exactly!
I have long worked to moderate my speech in that regard. It's not necessary for an adult to be continually swearing, let alone using slurs. The modern habit for young people to preface every single major word in a sentence with "fucking" simply makes them look weak and stupid IMO.
That being said, creating societal prohibitions against certain words invests them with massive and near-permanent power that no slur or random stupidity should possess.
There is a time and place for swearing, but most people don’t know how to effectively swear. Megyn Kelly is an effective swearer. She doesn’t do it often, but when she does she means it and she’s effective.
I guess Millennials are young to you. It's a habit of our generation I am having a hard time breaking. Maybe Gen Z does it too but I don't interact much with Gen Z
I sure fuckin do!
It's worth adding that the minced-oath opens wide fields for comic flair -- far in excess of the usual dull and bloodless stuff. Put real feeling, in mixed company, into a "sweet surly sunshine!" or "son of bee-sting!" and you'll make a favorable impression on good people.
Most of the cruelest and most memorable things I've ever said to people, at least from feedback received after the fact, were obscenity free.
Around my kids I’ve turned goddammit into God…bless America. And fuck into fudgecicle. But they’ve heard me use every name in the book behind the wheel. What can I say.
Dagnabit, consarn it and great leapin' horny toads!
Godfrey Daniel!
Heck, darn, and shoot!
godfrey daniel! .....w.c. fields
I can understand the desire to remove power from words, but what I struggle with is the desire to intentionally make people around you uncomfortable.
You aren’t inspiring people by calling everyone/everything a “retard” or a “faggot”, but you ARE deservedly gonna have people not want to be around you. And, if that is your goal, your end game with the limited time you have here, it rings pathetic. Be a better man. Be a better neighbor. Have some sense of shame, at least.
"you ARE deservedly gonna have people not want to be around you"
glad you brought that up as in some cases that is exactly the desired outcome. sometimes i like to float out these lines to gauge the reaction of people around me to see what makes them tick and if they pass then i can keep ratcheting up the content until im at a level i like. from that i can figure out how real i can be with them becuase if you can handle slurs and racial jokes theres a good chance we will get along well
note: this doesnt specifically apply to racial stuff
What drives you to *want* to be a guy acting like a terminally online edgelord though?
Feel like there’s better ways to befriend quality people than seeing who says the most slurs and dead baby jokes.
Dunno. I guess I just struggle with the psychology of it all here.
a. its funny
b. i can find likeminded people
c. i dont want to hang around people who would get easily offended by my opinions
while i like getting along with people i dont want to perpetually walk on eggshells hoping i dont say the wrong thing
In short, it helps keeps the nutters away. Some of them don't make it as obvious as having dangerhair/dangerglasses or wearing a mask all the time. Probably how you'd treat someone in a red MAGA hat.
But what you aren’t considering is how the Perpetually Offended are happy to try and make ME uncomfortable. In this ever tightening bounds of what’s considered “acceptable language” they are trying to assert control over me by dictating what I’m allowed to say to express myself. It’s all control. Make a word “bad” and then “punish” the people who use it. It’s a moving target and it’s entirely designed to put me back on my heels, tiptoeing around others’ feelings for fear of my livelihood and social standing. When I fight back and use language unacceptable to those people unflinchingly and unashamedly, what I do is disarm their ability to lord over me. It’s basically a “you have no power here” to them, and until their power is removed, they will continued to try and use it against who they consider their inferiors.
yeah thats a much better justification than what i said
Exactly
Amen
I guess?
And to be clear, I'm not in favor of the Deep Tumblr aspect of using the most ridiculously curated speech ever either. That's insane as well.
Just pointing out that it's easy not to be a dick, and people generally get a long a lot easier in life when they are kind and considerate to those around them.
It really comes down to why the slur is causing offense. When someone uses the word retard I really don't care if it's directed at me. However I have a cousin who is mentally disabled, and using him as the basis of an insult is what pisses me off. I manage to find ways to express myself without needing to use the word and struggle to understand why others can't do the same - unless we're talking about motor timing I guess.
Likely if you know any mentally challenged people you're less likely to use retard as a slur, if you know any gay people you are less likely to use fagot as a slur, etc.
The swearing in general has just become a cliched way for the least authentic people to come across as authentic - boss bitches and the like.
There's an appropriate Lenny Bruce routine about slurs that I could mention, but that already got me canceled once before.
You are free to use those words, and always have been. Others are equally free to decide what they think of you for using those words, and to say whatever they want about it. And many of them are going to decide it says something very bad about you and say so with vehemence.
I don't see the reward as worth the cost; not even close. If I'm going to make people that mad it's going to be for something that has actual benefit I care about.
Right… the various replies are pretty much what I expected tbh.
What is the reward even? Callously and intentionally making people uncomfortable? Good luck in life with that outlook imo.
Takes very little effort to try to be a decent person. I have no idea why you’d set out every day trying to be anything other than that, but it DOES take more effort to be an unrepentant asshole with bad vibes. And, that’s the exactly what throwing around slurs in every day conversation like a verbal tic gets you.
As a kid from the 90s, I think you wildly overestimate how hard I have to try to use the words fav and retard. They roll right off the tongue, because we used them all the time back then when no one gave a shit and cried about how it “offended them.”
People have decided that adjectives used to accurately describe something are now hurtful. They were never slurs to begin with. I think maybe that’s what I’d fight against. Every year I get to say less words. Comedy and movies have gone down the toilet because heaven forbid SOMEONE gets offended or you need to now defend yourself against the minuscule but outspoken “anti-culture”.
You know what guides it? Money. Nobody actually gives a shit. They don’t want to lose sales etc from social repercussion of virtue signalers and SJWs.
When I was in grade 1, my teachers taught us 'sticks and stones will break by bones but words will never hurt me' with the idea of creating some resilience. By contrast my grade 1 kid says 'sticks and stones will break my bones and words will sometimes hurt me'. Yes it's good to think about other people's feelings but you can't expect other people to think about yours. How you take something is up to you.
You know, I asked someone a question similar to yours once and you know what his response was?
"Because FUCK YOU, that's why."
It wasn't the most eloquent statement of philosophy I've ever heard, but I presumed from the statement that he objected to an expectation of others that his speech should be controlled primarily by the ephemeral feelings of others, especially as the boundaries of what is "offensive" changes literally minute by minute and always in yet a new way to exercise control over others without any notable moral authority to do so.
Speaking personally, I've worked around some very vehement language enforcers for some time. They're very passionate about not using language that could be hurtful to others...
At least until they get mad. At which point they seem to have absolutely zero hesitation to call people all manner of things that are hurtful, including using the very language they don't want you using.
Often, though, it's just slurs that they approve of. If you call someone a "retard" they'd lose their shit. But when they call someone a "fascist" it's not a slur and just accurate.
The gentleman who said "Because FUCK YOU, that's why." noted that most of the people he encountered complaining about the language of others simply wanted to control the speech of people they didn't like while carving out massive exceptions for them to use whatever vitriolic language they could muster against the targets of their censorship.
It's difficult to take the "you shouldn't use hurtful language" thing seriously when you've encountered people who insist that their urge for censorship comes from a place of kindness literally say to your face that they hope your children are raped to death because you had the unmitigated temerity to disagree with them.
So while I may not have expressed my feelings in quite the way that gentleman did, I have had enough experience with the phenomenon to see his perspective.
I'm reminded of the video not that long ago where a young woman bent down into a stroller and started screaming some fashionably leftist rhetoric at a child...an act so incredibly unhinged that another person on her side literally pushed her back and said "That's a baby!", as in "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I suspect the gentleman who said "Because FUCK YOU, that's why." suspected that a significant chunk of forbidding the use of "hurtful" language was coming from precisely that kind of loopy bitch and he seemed to reject the entire enterprise.
"Because FUCK YOU, that's why."
why didnt i think of that
Genghis Khan is no longer Mongolian.
Now we say he was Special Needs or Amazing.
😂
hes differently chinese
Technically Chinese are differently Mongolian. Just don't use Deepseek to fact check me!
Isn't it funny though how you can call white people any racial slur in the world, and it's legal?
that is funny isnt it
almost as funny as the things people come up with to justify it
The way around it is to own it and wear it with pride like the niggers do.
"Waspy? Of course I am and I'd be a lazy slob if I didn't take advantage of it."
And no one will ever be able to make me feel shame for being an Anglo Saxon. We've been emigrants and immigrants all over the world. We won't fight like the French and the Celts but we'll defend what we believe in until the last breath.
I just remind them that we invented everything. It’s directionally true.
Here’s another one. I read this once and I don’t know if it’s true but I like it because it triggers people: Nothing of consequence to humanity has ever been invented by anyone living within 500 miles of the Equator.
I've never heard that one before. But I can believe it.
This just took me down a rabbit hole.
Zooming out on Google Maps shows a rather small amount of land in the spherical segment 500 miles from the equator.
https://www.google.com/maps/@2.9670208,11.453354,3.5z?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDEyOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
You get a small band across central Africa, Indonesia and Northern South America. For that area, population weights and available landmass are far more limiting for original inventions than ethnic origins.
One could claim that the "Best and/or Worst" invention of humanity, H. Sapiens itself, came out of that band, but I'm not up to date on development of modern humans from South/Central Africa.
Sorry to send you down the rabbit hole :)
That statement I read of is one of those things that at first glance sounds true, then when you do a self check, you can’t think of anything off the top of your head, which then gives you unwarranted confirmation bias.
You did scholarly thinking to analyze and most likely give the reason why it’s a suspect statement based on available landmass. That being said, I’m a bit vexed that I can’t even think of one invention from the equatorial region, which of course means nothing. It just proves that I have unknown unknowns.
Great job!
Such a kind and well-reasoned reply to what could be interpreted as a "WELL ACTSHUALLLY!!?!?!!"
I come here for the free thinking and intellectual honesty!
(but I am a bit miffed that I didn’t come up with your premise LOL)
ive also heard that a very small area in europe containing bits of england, germany, and france contributed the majority of scientific advancement
I wouldn’t argue against that. Plus lots of inventors of the biggest inventions seem to be rather eccentric, which makes sense.
I read "When We Were Orphans" and decided Ishiguro wasn't for me. It read like a PSA to avoid "literature" and anything that wins a prestigious award. Is all his work that tedious to get through?
Remains Of The Day is not bad.
A true ringing endorsement if I've ever seen one!
That's all I can give it.
I have not believed in prestigious prizes for literature since Dan Neil went on the Smoking Tire Podcast. Having won a Pullitzer prize, I believed he must be the American Jeremy Clarkson and i strove to find an example of his writing that was not paywalled to no avail, so when Matt Farah had him on the podcast I was very excited. Imagine my disappointment as the podcast went on and i discovered: he had only a cursory knowledge of cars, he was incapable of expressing an original idea, he was so vacuous that Matt and Zach had to lead him through the podcast and winning the Pulitzer was basically a self selection process.
Never again did i trust the Pulitzer prize.
Awards for, oh, at least the last two or three decades have been more political statements than anything else. Maybe 13 years ago when I was a little more serious about looking for an agent and a publisher I looked at a scifi book that had won a prestigious (in that field) award to see how my own stuff stacked up and the novel was unbearable. Every line was soaked in sneering pretension. It killed any interest I ever had in whatever was winning awards (as well as my desire to get published). In Ishiguro's defense at least he was just tedious. I've never read anything by Dan Neil but what you've said (as well as other things written here at Avoidable Contact) have done him no favors.
I do not understand the adult desire to win awards for non physical activities. Seriously, they are reveling in the fact that they wrote better, they acted better, or they cooked better than someone. To me that’s crazy. And unknowable.
But I realize why they do it. USA Olympic skier Bill Johnson, who won the gold medal in 1984 for downhill skiing had the best and most honest response. He was asked what winning the gold medal meant to him, and he said “Millions”.
My bet is the 6.2s are nuking because of the following...GM recommends but does not require high test, so most owners don't spend the upcharge but still cane their trucks regularly which creates knock, timing is pulled but the fueling is slow to respond so you get a momentary rich condition...GM spec'd 20w oil because someone thinks consumers give a shit about the fuel economy their $50k+ 5k+lb V8 vehicle gets so they shrank the bearing clearances down to basically nothing which leaves no room for error...They also switched to direct injection to eek a few more trivial improvements in efficiency, which introduces fuel dilution which drops that already low viscosity down to almost water and as a final act of trying to make an orange an apple, they added stop start so the engine goes through more low oil pressure rotations than it should...next thing you know you have a window where one shouldn't be.
Regarding the 2.7 TURBOMAXXXXXXX, it is crazy to me that the dumbest half ton truck engine idea is actually proving to be the most reliable, closely followed by the now seemingly sorted but still overly complex babymax diesel. Signed, a Gen V 5.3 owner who shorts the recommended oil change interval and crosses his fingers every night hoping to catch a lifter failing before it nukes the rotating assembly in his air hauler.
whats worse is that gm isnt even alone in doing all that
very unfortunate that all that headroom is vanishing in search of tiny efficiency increases
The leftist method in a nutshell is to spend billions to clear up 99% of a problem, then spend billions and billions more to try to fix the remaining 1%, but fixing that 1% always remains elusive. Their regulation playbook has its roots in the never ending Marxist class struggle.
All auto regulation, CAFE and emissions and safety is based on this. That’s why all of these regulations need to be eliminated. The consumer is smart enough choose a vehicle that meets their needs without government safety ism limiting their choices.
ive said similar things in the past
eliminating cafe wont create a buyer who is content with getting 8mpg in anything after decades of having relatively fuel efficient vehicles
Correct. Before gas mileage or safety was a thing, car manufacturers touted gas mileage and safety as a marketing tool. The same will happen again if we eliminate all of the regulations.
But in the freedom of choice arena, a manufacturer could also release a 500 cubic inch luxury car that gets 8 mpg for those that want it. That would be glorious!
imagine that
being able to choose what kind of car you want to live with
I just read the other day that there’s 19 different versions of Oreos.
Could we please free up auto manufacturers so that they could sell 19 different types of cars?
Remember that the GM J cars, last sold in 1994, offered a 2 door hatchback, 2 door notchback, 2 door convertible, 4 door sedan, and a 4 door wagon. And it was an affordable economy car for the masses!
Also, how about cars with 19 paint color options?
Sure, but all those statements minus the stop/start were true about the L86 as well - which as far as I'm aware is not subject to the issue. 125k on mine and *knock on wood* still going strong.
Back then the 6.2 was the one to get because
0. It didn't blow up
1. It was bitchin'
The L86s had bearing failures just not as wide spread as the L87. My rant was pointed at the GM 6.2 but in reality it is general disdain for the implementation of these "technologies" wholesale across all product lines. Someone in the comments here made mention of a forced change in bearing material due to new regulations on lead, which would be exasperated by what I said above.
Auto stop start, low viscosity oils, and direct injection in and of themselves don't necessary guarantee failures they just reduced the margin for error.
Let’s not forget GM’s displacement on demand system.
I kind of like that one like an addict likes drugs, you know they are bad but you do it anyways.
There’s always a price to pay.
I wonder if any one has tracked starter replacement rates on cars with start/stop?
I will have to replace the a/s/s button before I replace a starter because shutting it off is the first thing I do when I get in.
I've seen stop/start kill batteries far more quickly than starters after "gen 1" of s/s
Playing chicken with bearing clearances. How fucking German of them.
To suggest that knock retard leads to a temporary rich condition sufficient to dilute oil enough to decrease bearing life strains the imagination.
Never delved into it, so I should open up some logs in HP tuners and see what fuel trims do during knock retard
I was actually planning to pull some old data logs from my speed3 when I get home to see if I'm remembering correctly that it would richen the mix a fair bit upon detection of knock obviously a different platform but direct injected. I'll be interested in what you find.
"In response to a signal from the knock sensor, the PCM will retard the spark and richen the mixture to cool the cylinder head."
https://fuelpumpu.com/blog-how-fuel-trim-is-affected-by-engine-sensors/
I checked a few different logs files from two different GM PCMs and I didn’t notice the fueling get richer during knock retard. Makes sense to do so. I did, however, see in a number of logs showing knock just prior to entry to Power Enrichment. I saw that I had pulled timing from the spark tables in response, but it was lean prior to the knock, so the lean condition may have caused the knock. Good refresher on the basics-get fueling right first!
I agree it is always best practice to blow them up with timing advance, it is more fun than just getting the fueling tables wrong!
I looked for the logs I have, but they must be on a hard drive in the attic and I didn't have enough curiosity to go open that literal Pandora's box.
I'm willing to bet it's a materials issue. To my knowledge these engines do not have significant oil dilution issues. Modern engines are in a constant state of advancing and retarding timing and I have never seen oil dilution attributed to it. I've tested and driven many powertrains on 87 that required high octane fuel and never found an issue in that regard. This includes the Hellcat.
I'd be interested to see the delta in power generated between a Hellcat engine on 93 vs one on 87 with a fully stock computer and tune. The adjustability the OEMs are building into the stock ECUs is impressive.
“… Mangione and his gang put on a masterclass here. It’s delightful, and it inspires me to put down my keyboard…”
Careful there, someone might misquote you!
I STAND BY IT
You were right, that was super tight. One of the best live performances I've seen. Nobody plays the flugelhorn these days!
That reminded me of the time I had 2 vodkas and listened to Aja straight through on the hifi. So good!
Great long play album!
Look up NY jazz trumpeter Joe Magnarelli, he’s great.
Relation to Magneti?
I'm not sure about ascribing intent for revising the L86. You're merely speculating, but regardless the execution failure lies at the feet of the 'executives'.
Sometimes what is meant to be a nothingburger of an update gets blown up for unrelated coincident reasons. The truth may never come to light.
As for the victorian standard vs the modern standard I think I'm split down the middle and probably leaning towards the classic way, but subjectively on a case by case basis. Thanks for the spoilers cause that prevents me from wasting my non-existent free time on it.
Yours and my feelings on youtube are nearly identical. As much as it is bothersome for a lot of reasons, there is so much on it that is valuable, that you can't do away with it.
youtube is incredible
with the stroke of a key someone like me can self educate on something only taught at some universities
love it for that
I really like the long form interviews. Travel videos can be great, too.
if I may make a suggestion, the MIT lecture on presenting should be prerequisite for any hire with PowerPoint access. I may have exclaimed out loud Yes! to points such as "don't start with a joke" and "don't read your slide" among all the others.
noted
looks like ive got homework tonight
"the menagerie of deranged luggage-stealing creatures"
fun to be reminded of THAT melodrama, nearly lost in the annals of time ...
I sold my '06 Suburban last year with its 315k mile never-opened 5.3L absolutely purring. It did have the very beginnings of a rear main seal leak and I had done the oil pan gasket a few years into ownership around 300k miles. Occasionally you'd see a small puff of blue smoke on start up, but it never used oil between changes. No cylinder shutoff to wipe out lifters and cams or oil consumption. It also still had all its original greaseable balljoints and steering linkage (as far as I could tell based on condition of the dust seals) and everything was still tight. If I ever need another fullsize SUV or truck it will be another one of these GMT800 trucks. The absolute peak in terms of overall durability/servicability and modern-enough comfort and performance IMO. GM does *not* build them like this anymore.
GMT800 is peak GM truck.
gmt400 is even more peak
I agree from a durability standpoint but the interiors of the 800s are much better to live with.
Aesthetically yes, and thicker frames and better sheet metal galvanization that take longer to rot. But the 800s drive notably better in terms of ride/handling/braking/power/mpg
Don't care. I can't say no to a nice rectangular face, and I actually think the early 400 seats are more comfortable.
I don't blame you! If the "right" GMT400 came up I would absolutely pick one over an 800.
Bigm Blomk manual extended cab long bed 2500 in teal pls
We got an 02 Escalade a few years back for towing (car on an open alum trailer). It's not a looker, but I've grown to really like it - solid and reliable.
i love that generation of escalade
i think i was chatting with wyatt about how awesome it would be to have one to pimp out and live 2005 rich
05 rich is the way to enjoy nice things these days because our dollar goes 40% as far as it did in 05. If I made my salary 20 years ago... I'd be 1995 rich!
too real
https://www.rayswheels.co.jp/en/products/brand/detail/66
imagine a set of these in triple chrome on an escalade though
would go crazy hard
LIKE A ROCK
A friend of mine (guy who drifts the slammed white S197) just got a crazy deal on a set of bronze 18 or 20in TEs with decent A/T tires for his leveled '24 5.0 F150. It looks awesome.
Or: GM is doing what they must in order meet corporate fleet economy standards. The amount they pay in warranty claims for failed lifters on DoD equipped V8’s pales in comparison to the fines from da guv’mint. Their #1 customer, sadly, is THE MAN.
I object (I object!) to your characterization of 5.3’s failing between 100-200k as incomplete; the culprit is often the O-ring on the oil pickup tube that fails, leading to the low oil pressure that eventually starves the bearings.
I do enjoy seeing glimmers of rebellion among young people to the retarded gayeness (settle down, it’s spelled with an e on purpose) of the world since roughly 2014?
What we need is a young “influencer” around 24 with a husband and baby on her hip making vids about monogamy to get the Commies upset.
"gayeness"
marvin gaye?
there were some people that created an filter that would take pics of women in revealing clothing with lots of tattoos and show what they would look like in more modest clothes and makeup holding a child
they hated it and it was hilarious
Marvin Gaye should've done a concert series with George Strait.
He was born Marvin Gay, ironically. Added the "E"
so he transitioned is what youre saying
Nicely played...
So we should call him “Gay maj7th”? If my parlous grasp of basic theory holds
SIR
My father was a huge fan of Chuck Mangione and regularly played Feels So Good, An Evening of Magic, and Children of Sanchez. The video brought back some memories, so thank you for that.
I dunno that a band could be any tighter, or a guitarist any more chill while doing the jazz equivalent of shredding. The fact he looks like a Bible salesman makes it so much better. I'd pay cash money to see him walk into Chicago Music Exchange dressed like that, ask to try a guitar, then pull off that solo and leave without saying a word.
And, as usual, pay with an IOU.
Go on, git!
Breaks my heart, a boy that young goin' bad.
I’d never heard Geissman aside from radio play 45 years ago, and just looked at the Wikipedia article. It says that in 1976 he played with Tony Rizzi’s Guitar Band and on an album by the same in company with Pete Christlieb, so around the time of the Deacon Blues solo. This is going to be a deep dive, isn’t it?
But a rewarding one!
All that and author/designer of a book about Mad Magazine. Grant Geissman is the amazingly cool older cousin I never had.