Imagine if we'd used all that excessive force to defend the borders of this nation. You have to admire a ruling party that never tires of killing women and children from the sky overseas but the minute some 17 year and 364 day old MS-13 soldier can't get free healthcare the day after he walks across the border they're all like "fuck having borders and laws and sheeit."
The Navy is supposed to be the only permanent branch of the US military, under the Constitution. The militia serves as the army during defensive wars and the Coast Guard polices the coastlines, mainly for smugglers & pirates.
That CAN'T possibly cost more than a hundred billion a year.
Oo, scorched earth on the southern border. I don't need to be convinced, I feel it in my bones that this is the right move. Let's scorch the northern border too, and then run oil pipelines across what's left.
Pretty sure we were always going to get involved in Afghanistan after guys they were harboring killed 3,000 of our people in one day. You don’t get to be a real country and ignore something like that.
"You don’t get to be a real country and ignore something like that."
We did the equivalent of getting bullied at work and kicking the neighbor's dog when we got home. The proper response would have been to turn Saudi Arabia into a sea of glass. It was the equivalent of "dope on the table" from The Wire.
"We got Bin Laden!" Great. By those standards, we should have gone from World War II the minute Yamamoto's plane splashed.
I still think that Charlie Wilson's War had a point. What you should've done was taking a page from the British playbook, be in charge, build some schools and hospitals and then pick some friendly, least-terrible warlord and let him rule while supporting/controlling him in the backgroud.
Democracy is not a crab, not everything will evolve into it.
The people involved didn't know shit about the region. Afghanistan had a ruling royal family. Everyone liked them. If our moron leaders had just stuck the last survivor back in charge, waved, and told everyone to 'play nice' the problem would have been out of our hair and we'd have been DONE.
But some hard core lefty in State and the government decided that wasn't good enough.
Why do we even HAVE a state department? They are useless. And mostly overrun by pedos.
I don't know if State has ever done anything right but certainly not since before WWI. They are directly responsible for the first and second Indochina wars and all the fallout from them, including the Drug War.
I have a few friends who've had to deal with 'state' on several occasions and the first word out of their mouths is always: You can't trust them.
Followed by: If you ever rely on them, count on them, or trust them, you will end up dead.
Rule #1 of overseas travel: State will NEVER do ANYTHING to help you. Their advice will most likely get you killed and/or raped. Always have your own plans (and bribe money) to get out of the country if everything goes sideways. NEVER do what the embassy tells you. Cause they're morons who only care about themselves.
Hell, the stories about what they did in Iraq alone are beyond the pale.
my dad told little me that the state dept. was the biggest enemy of the american people in '48. i was so shocked i remember where i was standing in our house at that moment...i thought our government LOVED us!
Secretary of State George Shultz would ask newly appointed ambassadors to show him that they new where their country was on the globe in his office. Most would point to their assigned location. When Mike Mansfield was appointed amb to Japan, he pointed right to the U.S. of A. "That's my country," he said. Every time after that, Shultz would tell new ambassadors, "Never forget you're over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You're there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you're representing the best country in the world.' "
From my perspective, the Department of State rarely executes the wishes of either the chief executive or the American people. Additionally State has been the locus of Israel-haters in D.C. since before Israel existed.
I have had that policy for a long time which is tough for me because I'm a natural busybody (thanks mom) but I keep my mouth shut. I recently had a friend ask for advice and I have learned, don't give it then either. Just agree with whatever they're doing, it's all they really want no matter how stupid what they're doing is and no matter how much they insist they want your advice!
I'm reminded of a tale that emerged from interrogating one of the Taliban types. He looked at his interrogator's watch and said "You have the watch. But we have the time."
It's like the people involved have never fought a war before. They haven't even played Sid Meier's Civilization! When I go to war in Civ IV I raze cities to the fuckin' ground. I don't want any losers who miss Huayna Capac raising a stink in any of my conquered territory. They get scorched earth and then I send in the settlers. THAT is how we should have handled the aftermath of 911. Any population celebrating the deaths of our people (even if they were NYC lizard people) should have been bombed from afar. I would say like Dresden, but we wouldn't even have to fly over them. We can just lob missiles from The Gulf. But I'm a monster and hearts and minds innocent civilians blah blah blah.
There are a lot of what ifs, but basically it all boils down to they should have let Delta and the Rangers smoke bin Laden in December of 2001 and just left them to their own devices. It's really like a different world.
I'd rather watch old episodes of "Motorweek" because unlike Cammisa, watching John Davis never made me feel like I was getting played somehow.
That's my main objection to YouTube Voice: It makes the speaker sound like he's running a game of three-card monty, trying to suck you in and scam you.
I used to laugh-cringe at those little blurbs at the beginning of Jalopnik and TTAC and others (“Lamberari paid for my first class flight, hotel room, piece of mahi and haricots verts that I didn’t know were fancy green beans, AND the wifi with which I watched tranny porn before submitting this press release/strike story on their Fasterossa”). I assumed that press trip fluffing was ubiquitous and universal and therefore it didn’t matter which resort and first class flight each particular automaker treated you to. None was going to sway your opinion over another.
What I never pondered was how much they’d hate the automaker who didn’t do it.
I do recall some stories about a secret auto journalist Facebook group where the Abby Bassetts of the world bitched about stuff like “I only got the Omni when only the Ritz would do” or “I had to go down to the uhaul to move, nobody brought me a loaner box van!” stuff like that. So maybe it does matter, but the Jalop crowd is probably less likely to complain; the Embassy Suites I stay at for work is far nicer than anywhere they live.
Speaking of noted zero-talent mattress A-Bass: her newest thing is apparently trying to bilk her fellow zero-talents out of $5 a month for a newsletter with SIX-FIGURE OPPORTUNITIES!
The blurbs, snarky or otherwise, are a federal requirement, and for good reason.
The argument that "they all bribe us so nobody's bribing us" has no legs in the real world. As Alonzo says in Training Day, there's levels to this shit. A lot of the Lieberman-class scumbags take active offense when they don't get the perks like extra travel days and drive-home cars. Not everybody provides them.
I’m sure you are right. I just found them tedious and tiresome and they came across as especially Jalopnik signaling their virtue, which I hate, and I find their virtue strongly lacking.
At the end of the day, no one I respect is going to tell me a C280 is better than a 325i because Mercedes put them up at the Four Seasons and BMW only gave them a room at the Marriott.
More to the point, I found it stunning the mental gymnastics most journalists go through to say “All EVs Good Except Tesla Bad” and I have to attribute that at least in part to Tesla refusing to suck any 3” journalist dick.
You must be new here, as in post-flying-vagina. TTAC did not used to run the disclaimers because TTAC dint used to play that shit. I don't know if that was the beginning of the end, but it was definitely the end of the beginning.
The lifestyle stuff can be incredibly seductive even when you (1) pay your own way with the brand and (2) own one of their marquee products.
I have probably been to ~15 or so sports car races as a paying Porsche VIP (Le Mans, Daytona, Sebring, Petit Le Mans, Rennsport Reunion) over the years.
I declined the opportunity to drive a then brand new 911 992 Carrera (not even on sale yet) around the Circuit de la Sarthe on the Saturday morning of Le Mans in 2019. Two laps, minder in the passenger seat (lead / follow conditions), soft limit of 150 MPH on the Mulsanne straight. $12K up front.
I got one of those VIP Le Mans invites in 2002. I had just purchased a new Carrera 4S for $88k which was quite a chunk of change for 2002. A group of us on Porsche Pete’s Boxster board also ponied up some cash for Kevin Buckler to take is TRG team to Le Mans. Porsche offered factory drivers if he could get the car over there. It was very early crowd funding. Kevin had won his class at Daytona. So I got the VIP invite to attend in the Porsche box, tour the track, plus a helicopter tour of the track amongst other things. I think it was $4400 all in per person to attend. I didn’t go as my children were still young and we couldn’t make it work that week with school. I do have a 2002 Daytona poster of The Racer’s Groups class winner signed by all the drivers. We also got to hang out in the paddock with them at the ALMS race at mid-Ohio. So yeah, the lifestyle stuff can be fun.
I went with Porsche in 2018. Porsche now has a permanent building in the style of the PEC in Atlanta or LA (or various places around the world) immediately next to the track at the Ford Chicane. There is something to be said for having a place to sit down, eat a meal, charge a phone, take a cat nap, etc. while in a foreign country during a 24 hour race.
-Porsche France VIP Reception Thursday night - $600
-Porsche AG VIP Hospitality Saturday & Sunday - $3,000
-“Luxury” Shipping Container “Glamping” (my “neighbors” arrived from the UK in a 918) - $2,400
-Roundtrip Airfare (ORD-CDG-ORD) - $1,300
-Helicopter Ride During Race - $140 (shockingly cheap)
-TGV, One Night in Paris, etc. - ~$500
So about $8,000 all-in to attend Le Mans and do it “right”. It was well worth it.
as the first honda dealer in oklahoma karen and i were invited to watch the phoenix gp--remember that one?--in the honda hospitality suite. karen wouldn't go to any scca races with me after that
Porsche Pete’s Boxster Board. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. I posted there occasionally as a HS kid 25+ years ago. Why, I have no idea, I had no business doing so. At least I didn’t pull a DeMuro and pretend I had one.
It was a reasonable, open place. I was driving a 2000 Boxster S at the time. I traded it for the C4S in 2002 when the 996 version came out. I met some good guys in the Columbus area at the time. We would meet monthly to have dinner. The wife of one of the guys christened us the Boxster Boys and it stuck for some reason.
The Romans actually had the ability to build rudimentary automobiles two thousand years ago and just didn't know it.
I'll bet that buried in our civilization right now are the knowledge & materials necessary to make a warp engine, but our intellectual horsepower goes into computers and law instead of aerospace.
Everybody teaches from the same books and papers. You might actually get the author of a book or seminal paper from an Ivy, but frequently they are not the best teachers.
Don’t single Perdue out on that. I have an engineering degree from a state university and a depressing number of my classmates didn’t know which end of a screwdriver was the business end.
I was going to give you crap over Perdue (chickens) vs Purdue (engineering), but instead will observe: how does a young man graduate from engineering school and not know how to use basic hand tools? Did he not have a father? That's truly sad.
He knew what a screwdriver was, and he knew right right lefty loosely, but didn't understand different sized heads needed different size drivers, or how to use pressure so as to not strip them. He is a smart kid and caught on, but we were all a bit perplexed that he got as far as he did without learning that.
I worked with ME auto engineers who did not know how to swap out a flat tire for the spare. Others were flummoxed by wiper blades. I somehow was able to give up being bothered by it, but still am slightly saddened...
I don’t feel so bad now. I can’t figure out for the life of me how to remove a wiper blade from a Honda or other vehicle that uses the hook-style attachments. I even managed to snap the end of the driver’s wiper arm off my last car while struggling with the thing! So now I just let the dealer change blades, and I’ll take care of the refills.
If there were any justice in the world, we'd release the existing prison populations back into society and replace it with our "elites". Let those who "earned" their way to the hoosegow take care of those who were "selected" for a while.
Ms. (lower case) hochschild and her ilk are far more dangerous than any drug addled serial burglar can ever dream to be. I'm a nobody because I've always felt accomplishment means more than selection and openly disdain those who ascend because of the latter. I'm a hell of a lot happier being a nobody. I just hope that I'm high enough in the nobody hierarchy to survive when shit lets loose. I'll be a Khrushchev to Jack's Lenin. I still think I'd send Tiko to go count trees though...
There are a lot of very violent people in prisons. A lot of murderers too. Wouldn't be so quick about releasing the guys in the SuperMax or any of the other hard timers.
I totally get it. Plenty of evil going on around there. I'm just disgusted that a far more sinister level of evil is practiced by our "superiors" and we're just expected to lap it up. Death by a thousand cuts. They deserve a nice big taste of what they're doing to destroy the world and country.
I've been around actual releasees of the first kind and they tend to enjoy Pittsburgh-style filets with a dash of V8 sports racer. The latter folks you mention should be put down like dogs.
AFAIK my dad quit 1 thing in his entire life: an admissions panel at the ivy-league school he attended/taught at/was a 'noteworthy official' for. Proximate cause was that 2 students with the usual quals (5.1 GPA, editor of this, captain of that-- before your pronouns and orientation were qualifications) came down to 'pick ONE' time.
The girl had worked on a fishing trawler for a couple summers and isnt that something. So she was about to be selected. But then another panelist realized the trawler was her uncle's, which made it somehow less marvelous, and so they picked the boy.
"I don't know what that is, but it's not a process".
"What would the privilege of a Harvard admission be if you could automatically get in with a certain SAT score or list of achievements? At that point, it’s Texas Tech."
Perhaps I'm naive, but I believe there was a time (the decade or so following Sputnik) when you could get into Harvard and the other Ivies with simply a high GPA and 1500+ on the SAT.
Perhaps at Harvard alone but I was including the other Ivies. The one kid in my class that got into Harvard had close to a 4.0 and got 1500 on the SAT. A very smart nerd, one of the five smartest kids out of over 600 in my opinion but other than being exceptionally bright there wasn't much exceptional about him. Back then you didn't need essays or extracurriculars. My best friend got early admitted into Columbia and he had about a 3.8 and ~1300. If I had applied I would have gotten in. I didn't apply to any of the Ivies because my parents weren't going to spend the money to send me to a private out of state school and I figured Michigan was their equal academically.
It was different then. Nobody got over a four point because honors classes (the term AP hadn't caught on so much back then) didn't get 5 for an A. There were very few perfect SAT scores. I'm not even sure anyone in my high school got a 1600. I scored less than 1400 on the PSAT and that made me a National Merit Finalist.
We didn't have to walk uphill both ways to get to school but the American educational system in the '60s and early '70s was fairly rigorous and mostly merit based at least when it came to getting into good schools.
when my late nephew graduated from a private california highschool--chatsworth?--in '62 his english courses were more than i'd done to get my m.a. at tulsa u. in '59
Maybe there was. When my father was the smartest math student his teacher in orange Texas ever had, she suggested he go to MIT. He had no idea what that was. He chose University of Houston over Texas A&M, because “University” sounded more prestigious to him.
I wonder if college prestige and Ivy League valuation is a relatively newer phenomenon.
I think the obsession with where you went to college and the prestige of the Ivy League was therefore probably lower. The average kid from anywhere outside of the northeast might not have even known anything about them.
The literature of the Twenties and Thirties was dominated by NYC based publishers, and writers who likely affirmed those publishers biases.
Harvard has always been a prestigious school but it seems to me that the elite schools on the coasts (The Ivies, Stanford, MIT, CalTech) are given more prestige than elite schools in the country's interior like Chicago, Duke, and Northwestern. Hell, even with elite public universities, Berkeley, on the west coast, has more prestige than Michigan, which is at least its academic equal.
If I was looking to hire an engineer, I'd go with Georgia Tech, Illinois Champaign-Urbana, or Cooper-Union graduates first. From the Ivies? Maybe Princeton. I'd bet that the average engineering student at Michigan Tech is more capable than one with a degree from Harvard or Yale.
It literally only matters to east coast nit wits and politicians. Nobody from the midwest gives a shit if you went to Harvard. If anything, it is a negative signal to live in Des Moines or a Suburb of Chicago with a Harvard degree.
A number of my undergraduate classmates went on to Harvard. None of them are particularly impressive, aside from their egos. One of my fraternity brothers went to MIT, he’s a solid dude.
Not everything is about money and prestige. My cousin was raised in California and loves it there (other than the politics and homeless). He's spent his entire adult life living near Detroit because he loves his wife and she wanted to be near her parents.
True that. My East Coast wife had no idea how little we all cared. Here it's U of M and some dumb hick state schools. For engineering go to Purdue like my kid did. if you want an Ivy we have Wash U in St. Louis, U of and even Northwestern in Chicago.
I'd probably throw Notre Dame in there. At least in Chicago. Purdue is funny for a college. They'll let anyone into the engineering department and let them wash out. At least they did 20 years ago.
Purdue won't stop a kid from taking engineering classes once he's enrolled. They will definitely flunk them out if they can't hack it. I'll say that my son's ME degree opened a ton of doors. Perdue is considered a top 10 engineering program across the country, and it's not because the school is selective-- it's not particularly, but the engineering part is highly selective on it's own.
Dumb hick state school checking in. Coursework was more difficult than my peers from more prestigious schools. 30% of students dropped the program after the first year. It doesn't mean shit on a resume, but in the real world it put me far ahead of the competition.
Friend of my father's got recruited by Northwestern. He didn't know what that was, but he knew that Northeastern sucked so he went to West Point instead, just in time to go to Vietnam.
I have slept with two women who got perfect ACT scores. One went to THE ohio state university for her DVM, the other went to Georgetown I think. I am a dumbass who didn't get a perfect score but height > intelligence.
If they were genuinely smart, they would have taken the SAT. My dad was an alum so I have to say that Michigan State's veterinary school is better than OSUs. In reality they're probably about equal. I wonder when feminists will say vet schools have gender equality now that about 80% of graduating vets are women.
ACT is standard here. Everyone I went to high school with the the ACT. The smartest guy I've ever know took the ACT. Maybe he took the SAT too but I know his ACT score. Going to Vet school is stupid. It's all the cost, difficulty and expense of becoming a doctor to graduate making 80k per year. Men are smart not to do it.
The thing about being a vet is to own the practice if possible. My daughter-in-law got her DVM from Oklahoma State and is now working on acquiring 25% of her current practice. She was invited, or should I say selected, by the founder. It wasn’t offered to any of the other vets in the practice. The practice is growing because people will spend insane amounts of money to keep their dog alive. Cats, not so much.
Her standard line when it’s time to put a dog down is, “You can have a dog, just not this dog.”
That's kind of the thing about everything if possible. Buying in is nice, I imagine the cost of starting one from scratch is astronomical these days. The 2nd way to make money as a Vet is emergency services. I have a DVM Client who makes north of a quarter of a million a year as a W-2 who travels around the country as a travelling ER doctor for dogs.
When I was in high school, if you were applying to an elite school you did not take the ACT. A lot of top tier schools simply did not accept ACT scores. True or not, the ACT was regarded as a test for B students going to directional state universities.
In small town west MI we weren't given a choice, it was ACT or nothing. My guidance counselor thought U of M was about the best anyone from my school could aspire, or ND if you were really lucky. I was actively discouraged from applying to an Ivy despite the stats for it.
I graduated 20 years ago from a decent private school in Boston. (Not Harvard or MIT). Back then it was GPA and SAT score. I had ZERO extra curriculars: a fair GPA (IIRC 3.5+) and a fair SAT (again IIRC, near 1200) - that was also enough for a scholarship.
Today, I worry for my kids. The "selection" is insane. State schools have a 7% acceptance rate for non-minorities w/simply "decent" academics.
The schools are also just not worth it for the most part, educationally, ideologically, and even in terms of ROI. Even STEM is corrupted by CRT/DEI. My younger daughter is unhappy with her job and is thinking of going back to school to get a masters, perhaps in history. I'm going to encourage her to first decide what she wants to do and then see if she really needs a paper credential to do it before taking on another $30,000 in student debt. She only recently paid off her debt from her BA.
It's not just your daughter. Women LOVE credentials. I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't want to go back to school for some stupid ass degree she doesn't need. You couldn't pay me to go back to college. I got my masters degree so I could sit for the CPA and I was done.
That's great, but of course I was referring to the fact that college degrees cost 10,000% of what they should and graduates can't find jobs that will let them pay off the loan in less than 30 years.
I am hoping the college bubble bursts by the time my girls are old enough and I'm putting half of my money where my mouth is by splitting between a 529 and a regular investment account
Same here. I'm able to set aside about $20k per year in investments. We've had a 529 for the kids for a few years now, but it really hasn't performed. I wouldn't bother much with it, aside from the state tax credit and then the tax break when you use it.
I'm leaning towards paying my house off instead. Been running a bunch of amortization charts and if I put $20k per year (extra) against the mortgage I'll have the house paid off in 7 years and will have saved over $100k in interest (even with my piddly 3% mortgage rate).
Sure, if I had the full $140k now (instead of over 7 years) I'd put it in the market, but I don't and I don't think I can "grow" it more than that same $100k in interested saved over the next 7 years (granted I'm counting 15 years worth of interest saved as well). Plus, it'll be nice to no longer have a mortgage, but at that point I'm 3 years from my oldest starting college and will then be putting my income likely to his education.
I'm half thinking out loud in case someone smarter than me on here has some suggestions.
At 3%, unless you think you are in danger of spending the money, you are much better putting it in VMRXX until rates get reasonable. I refinanced at 2.5% and auto invested the mortgage "savings" every month. If I can't beat 2.5% over thirty years, we have bigger problems. Backing into your mortgage with some assumptions, you'd make an extra 60-65k in interest in treasuries at current rates which is probably 40-50k after tax dollars.
If you give me your pmt and remaining years, I'll give you an exact number
I was off a bit in my quick calc. If you pay an extra 1,666.66 per month (20k per year), I have you paying off your mortgage in March of 2033. If instead, you invest that in VMRXX and the interest rate stays at 5%, you will have 234.6k in an investment account and you will owe 211k on your house. You could write a check that day and be 24.5k ahead. Less after taxes and less than my quick calculation but it's also not nothing. If you wait until march 2024 to pay it off and still invest, you'd be 29k ahead, if you wait 2 years, you'd be 35k ahead 3 years 41k ahead.
It's already here. I oversee several departments and hire a lot of people. I can't think of the last time I placed any importance the school someone went to, and in some cases whether they even had a degree. I want to know what they've done.
The quality of degreed students varies so wildly that it's not even a marker for me.
I get that it's necessary for certain professions, but it's no real indicator of capability. Turns out character is most important. I have a 2nd year engineering student intern out performing veterans with the same degree that he will eventually finish.
I graduated with a masters from the Royal College of Art. Other slightly more notable alumni: Sir Ridley Scott, Zandra Rhodes, David Hockney, Alan Rickman, Tracey Emin, and err James Dyson and Thomas Heatherwick. You get the idea. Little did I ever expect in a million years would I get to attend. Little did I realise at the time these days the RCA will accept anyone who can fog a mirror: it's just that these days because of the fees, location and reputation most of those people are very middle class/well off indeed. I was living at home with Mother Dearest in her social housing.
In the end it didn't help me a great deal, apart from providing me with the qualification I was expected to have in my chosen field (car design). It became apparent to me quite quickly that my face didn't fit/didn't have the right background/too old/to weird looking/too smartass to ease my way smoothly to success. Peers who I graduated with who didn't have half my talent have all fallen ass backwards into success, whereas thanks to COVID/Brexit I found myself out on my ass.
What was I trying to say? Oh yes. I'm qualified to write a takedown of the Cybertruck and what it represents, and I'll probably do it soon!
Is it a distinctly British thing to use the phrase “middle class” to refer to privileged, upper income people?
Chris Harris and his buddies on his podcast make self deprecating jokes about being middle aged, “middle class” men. The other hosts are Edward Lovett (Dick Lovett heir), Chris Cooper (consultant and gentleman driver), Manish Pandey (surgeon, Senna screenwriter, filmmaker), and Neil Clifford (long-time CEO of Kurt Geiger who owns an F40, a Bristol Fighter, etc.)
“Middle class” has a different connotation to me, as an American - someone of (almost) any income level who works for a living and has any anxiety about maintaining class standing; people who are particularly proud of having gone to XYZ school are almost certainly middle class, even if that school was Harvard.
Middle class does not necessarily mean middle income, in my view.
As Luke mentioned - classes in the UK don’t have direct analogues to North American class structures. The classes are largely based on status/taste and divorced from financial means (mostly).
They joke and are self-deprecating but they are all, to a man extremely privileged. They’re middle class in the sense they’re not upper class because they’re not nobility. I might be middle class in my champagne socialist tastes, but I have the burden of having to work for a living.
Harris is perhaps the least privileged among that august grouping, although I have intuited that the vast majority of enduring UK automotive media personalities come from privileged backgrounds (although they perhaps downplay it in public) - Andrew Frankel, his TI partner Dan Prosser; Henry Catchpole; Jethro; Metcalfe obviously; and so on.
Whereas in America, the bulk of the written content from legacy outlets comes from class warriors, and the YouTube content comes from brainless fortunate sons.
I don't think you're fair to the Tesla critics, especially the FSD criticisms. I'm certainly no Tesla or Musk hater – I think that he lately shows similar symptoms to 1920s-and-later Henry Ford (micromanaging shit he doesn't know enough about, God complex, fawning to dictators), but I still think SpaceX might be the most important company there ever was and admire Tesla for many, many things, especially turning the EVs into a useable customer product.
However, Cybertruck is still stupid because it could've been much better without the idiotic exoskeleton, which is almost certainly a product of aforementioned Elon's hubris and thinking he knows more than his engineers and designers.
And I honestly believe that the FSD is worthy of criminal prosecution. So, of course, was the Pinto and many other shit traditional carmakers did.
FSD, though, is different in that it is not a fault that someone was lazy/cheap to get fixed. It's systemically bad and IT WILL GET WORSE OVER TIME.
Now, the FSD seldom kills anyone, because it is so bad that not many people will really "let it drive". It makes mistakes often enough that it reminds anyone sane that it's actually a Level 2 driving assist and not anything even remotely close to autonomous driving.
However, Tesla will likely keep marketing it as autonomous (or almost-there autonomous) system in the future and will keep making the features preventing people from treating it as an autonomous driving too weak, because they have this narrative of "we have basically full autonomy, it's almost there, the regulators are just slowing us down, so we put these features there, but you know how to go around them, no? Wink, wink.
At the same time, the system WILL improve, statistically – but that will only make people less attentive when driving it (and they are still driving it, not the car itself). People are not wired to watch boring processes where a mistake occurs once in a long while.
And THAT is the moment FSD will become deadly.
When it makes one bad mistake in 10 miles, it'll keep you attentive and you will probably fix that mistake. One mistake in 1,000 miles? Or even 10,000? That will probably kill you.
Also, I would be willing to bet money that no current Tesla product will ever have Level 5 autonomy, because of hardware, which will result in very fun class-action lawsuits when the owners realize that they shelled $10 or 15k or whatever this shit costs and then Tesla will finally release something close to real autonomy, but it will work only on the next-gen hardware.
I once wrote an article comparing Elon to Henry Ford and André Citroën. They were geniuses either in engineering or marketing, and they took the automotive world where it has never been before.
Both also became so persuaded that they are infallible geniuses that they almost destroyed their companies and had to be ousted. That's what I expect will happen to Musk in 5 to 10 years time – his stainless trucks and hypercars with rockets and other idiocies will divert too much resources at Tesla from actually making profitable cars that they will have trouble competing either with legacy carmakers or the Chinese (or likely both, depending on where in the world) and he will eventually be replaced by someone who will turn the company into a normal automaker.
I dunno. What chaps my ass about the whole Full Self Driving thing is how many autistic morons will scream “It’s called Full Self Driving but it isn’t Full Self Driving!!!1!!1!” So if we called it “Kinda almost self driving” you’d be OK with it? So literally the problem is one word in the name? I’m somewhere between “yeah, words matter” and “gold jacket green jacket who gives a shit?”
The problem is 1) the name 2) the presentation by Tesla (like the fake video of Tesla driving itself that was realeased in 2017 or so) and 3) the fact that the safeguards against inattentive driving are purposefully weak, so it makes people think it can actually drive itself safely even when it can not.
I'm pretty sure that systems from GM, Ford, BMW, Mercededes or others are able to do similar things as FSD, but they don't, because it's not safe.
Tesla fanatics keep saying that the systems of other companies are stupid, because they're geofenced or work only under certain conditions – but that's the point. They only work in conditions where they've been proved reliable.
Tesla is trying to let FSD work everywhere, all the time, but it has no mechanism that will fix things when FSD doesn't know what to do, or worse, it thinks it knows, but doesn't. Because the problem with AIs is just that – they don't know when they don't know.
The difference is that GPT or DeepL will not, usually, kill you. Unless you use it to translate the in-car communication, as unnamed company from Bavaria did, resulting in Czech BMWs telling you something to the effect of "please keep your hands off the steering wheel" while the English original was kind of exactly the opposite.
But even that won't kill you directly, nor will Midjourney's man with six fingers. The FSD will kill you, because it has no way of finding out it doesn't know what to do and therefore will do something – most likely something idiotic.
"The difference is that GPT or DeepL will not, usually, kill you. Unless you use it to translate the in-car communication, as unnamed company from Bavaria did, resulting in Czech BMWs telling you something to the effect of "please keep your hands off the steering wheel" while the English original was kind of exactly the opposite."
Lol, wait till they use it to figure out your dosage on your IV. "They're not stupid enough to try that are they?" We have planes falling out of the sky, of course they're stupid enough to try it.
It sounds like the other guys are programming for bounded variables while Tesla is attempting to program for near infinite variables which is, shall we say, problematic.
I should add when I make that statement the full autonomous nerds say, “Duh, machine learning.”
What if we just said it's "Enhancing the user experience of driving" like every software company that makes every single update worse. Whatever these "engineers" are getting paid it's too much because you could literally take outlook 2002 and hire a monkey for minimum wage to change nothing and you'd end up ahead. OOh, progress, I can venmo someone money! Wow, I could never give someone money before via check or ach or god forbid cash. I'm in a salty mood today.
I always thought that the reason that I have to update the Crapital One app (at ** almost 500 MB, the biggest one on my iPhone) the day after I had to download a prior version was because one of their useless Indian coders forgot to put a comment in the code! 🙄
Yes. And I find it quite amusing how many right wing people are suddenly becoming Tesla fans just because Elon seems to be righty enough.
Of course, equally amusing are lefties for whom Elon was a god and Tesla the best car in the universe and now they are ready to buy something Chinese instead, because they don't like Musk't political views.
I don’t care about Musk’s politics, but I do care that he’s (more or less) a free speech absolutist and shined a bright light at the bugs under the rock at Twitter. There are plenty of people whom I respect who believe in leftist things that I don’t, but also don’t believe in the censorship and other bullshit going on. Someone who makes a nuanced argument for more gun control or higher taxes or more government regulation I can respect and disagree with; I don’t consider them an “enemy” until they’re advocating for mass censorship and memory holing, etc. That Musk is at least appearing to try and do away with most of the censorship and other bullshit is enough to make him somewhat of a hero in my opinion, not matter what his other beliefs are.
I'm as righty as you can get, and Tesla is still dubious. I like SpaceX, because it alternates between spectacular explosions and a spectacular launch rate. I also appreciate his taking over twitter/X and having a light(er) hand.
"We are 2-3 decades on from that and a lot more basic stuff is standard engineering practice."
It was standard engineering practice when the Pinto was engineered, and sold, and the infamous "lawsuit recall calculation" was made. What about the GM ignition switch? That's a lot closer to now.
My personal and professional opinion is that GM should have been walked off the plank for the ignition switch as an entity, which it was, but with accounting shenanigans.
Tesla sucks. There's not a single car they make I would by but the reasons the Autojournalists suck every other electric car makers dick and not tesla, which still makes the best electric car, has nothing to do with Tesla.
I can't disagree with a single thing you've said -- FSD is a disgrace. Is it worse than the Explorer tire fiasco? It's not nearly as deadly. Are we judging intent, execution, legislative chicanery?
"Also, I would be willing to bet money that no current Tesla product will ever have Level 5 autonomy,"
This is a sound bet, because no vehicle will EVER have Level 5 autonomy in a mixed-use environment with human-driven vehicles. It is computationally impossible. Any system that could do it would be better put to use ruling the globe, because that's an easier problem from a comp-sci perspective.
As for Explorer comparison – it's not YET nearly as deadly. Wait for some next FSD that will make one deadly mistake per 10,000 miles and we'll see.
On the other hand, I believe that Elon believes he's making the world better. He most likely isn't defrauding people, he honestly believes that he's saving humanity and that FSD is a way to reduce road deaths and therefore should be pushed on the road ASAP, no matter how many lives it costs short-term.
As for L5 autonomy ever existing – I absolutely agree. What Level 5 needs is AGI and then it's a question whether it will let us have cars. Hopefully we will create an AGI that will treat us like we treat cats.
Until then, I don't really believe we will go further than very low-speed robotaxis for downtown areas (at 20 mph you can solve basically anything by slamming the brakes) and some L4 autonomy on the highways – a few steps further from what GM, Mercedes and BMW already have.
Fun part is, the FSD will still be L2 at this point.
If it happens to one person, it's bullshit, if it happens to 100, there is a design flaw. You don't see an esteemed brand like my Audi having unintended acceleration issues*
* I shouldn't have to say this is a joke but I'm going to anyways.
To this day I do not understand what mechanism caused the deaths in the Explorer "fiasco". Were blow outs and tread delamination not a thing previously? How do you get from tire failure to roll over on a public road in the ballpark of legal speeds for the conditions?
As I recall -- and I apologize for being too lazy to research properly -- the issue was that the Firestone tires had a specific operating pressure -- let's say 35.
To get the ride qualities Ford wanted out of these relatively heavy/large wheel and tire combos that were foisted on the second-generation Explorer, Ford lowered the operating pressure to 28, without Firestone's active consent.
Starting at 28 meant that a lot of them got down to the low twenties real quick. At which point the belts were SERIOUSLY deforming every go-round, which led to intense heat buildup and consequent delamination.
Then, once the tire blew, the situation was possibly compounded by the vehicles, being 90s SUVS, perhaps not being the best handling things around, then once a rollover did occur, the roof crush or rollover standards at the time for said vehicles perhaps not being the most robust, enhanced the severity of the situation. In addition, given that the failures were tire-related, there seemed to be a lack of notice for a time that this was happening in the field, the end result of that being the TREAD act of 2000 being passed.
We had a 95 Explorer 2 door with Goodyears which did not have the same problems. If I remember correctly, it was 26psi on ours. Drove it at those pressures precisely once (steering felt really squishy and dead) and kept them in the low to mid thirties ever after. Then it felt twitchy. Never did feel comfortable driving it very fast.
There were two very different wheel/tire packages on those: 15" wheels with narrow tires and fender-flare trucks like the Bauer and 2 door expedition with 16".
The '95 and newer trucks didn't have the issues like the first-gen did because they used a different front suspension. The problem was with the first-gen Explorers that used the Twin-Traction Beam (TTB) front end with 2 big swing arms.
speaking to Elon's hubris: I've heard, from people who worked at Tesla at the time, that the reason the Model S could seat 7 is because Elon had five kids at the time the car was being designed and the reason he developed the Supercharger / NACS standard is because he hated how the SAE J1772 plug looked.
I believe both cases. At the same time, a lot of this approach made Tesla what it is. All that geeky shit with SF-based names for stuff and features and everything basically LOOKING like in sci-fi, that works on the target audience.
But I also think that Tesla is way past the point where it starts to be a hindrance. Case in point – steering wheel buttons instead of stalks. If you sell to geeks who basically hate cars, hate everything traditional and want to live in a sci-fi world, it's a great idea.
However, for Tesla to really succeed and realize the expectations already baked in their stock price, they need to be able to sell a Model 3 to a guy who, until that point, always bought Camrys or Škoda Octavias. And they hate that stuff.
He should've bought Stellantis instead of Twitter and sell Teslas with traditional looks and controls rebadged as Chryslers and Peugeots.
"However, for Tesla to really succeed and realize the expectations already baked in their stock price, they need to be able to sell a Model 3 to a guy who, until that point, always bought Camrys or Škoda Octavias. And they hate that stuff."
Sir, I believe you're a bit short of vision here, which is admittedly rare for you.
People will adapt in the long run to whatever the automakers give them. You might as well say, AS MANY DID, that the Honda Accord wouldn't go mass market because it had lighting and wiper controls on steering wheel stalks instead of the dashboard... and let's not forget the fact that as recently as 1970 the vast majority of cars sold in America, automatic AND manual, used column shift.
I see your point, but turn signals are still different. You use them all the time and it's annoying to have them elsewhere. Headlights? I've seen them everywhere from a button to a knob to steering wheel stalk and no one really gives a shit.
Also, if Tesla stayed vastly ahead of others in other respects (range, efficiency, price), then people would probably adapt. But will I buy a Model 3 which annoys me on several levels, or will I add 10-15% to its price and have the BMW i4?
To make it worse for Tesla, if they keep their typical timeline (at least two years behind schedule), they might find themselves overtaken to the "Golf territory" by VW, Škoda, Cupra, Renault, possibly also Kia/Hyundai. And then this is just a final nail in the coffin.
"Also, if Tesla stayed vastly ahead of others in other respects (range, efficiency, price), then people would probably adapt. But will I buy a Model 3 which annoys me on several levels, or will I add 10-15% to its price and have the BMW i4?"
Most people will ask themselves the question: Which car confers more prestige?
In that respect, BMW has shot themselves in the foot Stateside. If the Glorious EV Transition had happened in 1993 instead of 2023, BMW would have had a 24k-gold brand image with which to sell EVs. But they're spent decades embarrassing themselves.
It's not as bad here, people still consider BMWs worth the money. Also, the Tesla is a very prestigious brand to some, but very un-prestigious to others. Most people are either thinking Tesla is light years ahead of anything else, or they think it's a unreliable piece of shit with unusable ergonomics, or they just don't give a crap, don't like cars in general and buy them the same way you or I buy refrigerators. In which case the Model Y makes a lot of sense.
Still, even for people who don't love beemers that much, the i4 is vastly superior in UX and in the fact that it works exactly like the 330d you had before.
Similar is true for the Enyaq, which, unlike the VW IDs, seems to also be built by people who have experience building cars. Not that its platform is especially good (and the software was terrible until recently), but it just feels... car-like.
I knew a guy who went to William & Mary at the same time as one of the Kennedy's. Who never attended a single class - just sat outside when the weather was nice surrounded by all of the better looking girls there. All of whom obviously wanted to be a 'missus Kennedy' and many of whom I'm sure were given auditions.
Then of course after he graduated (I don't recall if he got honors or not) he went to law skool (rinse and repeat) and got a job in NYC that requires him to have passed the bar (I don't know if he ever did - for some reason they made him take the test which last I heard he'd failed like 26 times? Might be off a bit there).
I forget if this is the same kennedy who death spiraled into the Long Island Sound one night because the gods of physics and flying in the weather don't look the other way just because of your last name. But it is funny (well it's sad to be honest) how many people will give unearned accolades to someone just because of their last name. Even if they're a lazy shiftless bum. Guess money CAN buy everything...
Human beings naturally love aristocracy, hierarchy, and celebrity. The natural consequence of a biology built around needing to be acutely conscious of where you fit in the 200-person tribe at all times lest you die from having the wrong impression.
I wasn't sure if the plane crash was that (weather, and wasn't it also nighttime and he was not instrument rated), or something more sinster. I have heard told that he'd figured out who had murdered his father and uncle and was ready to publish. He had a magazine that could do it too - George!
But of course that is too ridiculous to take seriously. That would make him the first... wait the second... ok the third of his family brought to heel by force
He wasn't rated for the flight he was trying to do. So what happened to him is what happens 99 percent of the time - death spiral and dead.
I don't recall if he even HAD his pilot's license, but he wasn't qualified to fly in the weather. He got the leans, stopped trusting his instruments, and that, was that. If you can't trust your instruments over ALL else - you should never fly instruments. If you don't know how to cross-check so you can tell if one is bad - you should never fly instruments. If you are easily susceptible to vertigo, you probably shouldn't fly on instruments.
ESPECIALLY not over the water at night. That's like the deadliest thing there is.
Jews no longer getting special treatment in the US != Jews being bullied. I categorically disagree.
They're just being shoved in the same category as everyone else the machine comes after, and they don't like it.
I'm starting to get mildly irritated by 'check out the instawhore/substandard of "insert dipshit name here" being sent to you and the obvious breakdown of why people who can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag needs analysis. Who is this clown anyways, and WHY did I have to see that trucking picture at the top of the post? /jk
"Jews no longer getting special treatment in the US != Jews being bullied. I categorically disagree. They're just being shoved in the same category as everyone else the machine comes after, and they don't like it."
There's no sane way to disagree with you here -- but Harvard is clearly bullying Jews right now. Just because they ALSO bully Badwhites to the best of their ability doesn't mean that's not so. The US Government was perfectly capable of killing pregnant mothers in Idaho at the same time as they were undermining South American governments; so, too, can Harvard shit on Jews and whites simultaneously.
"I'm starting to get mildly irritated by 'check out the instawhore/substandard of "insert dipshit name here" being sent to you and the obvious breakdown of why people who can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag needs analysis."
This is a drum that I beat about as often, and indelicately, as Ringo Starr would, and I feel your pain -- but the fact that you long-ago internalized all the facts of the matter is more a statement of your discernment than anything else; plenty of people still need to hear the message a bit more before they get it.
You're a favorite commenter of mine, being willing to regularly upbraid me and force a bit of thoughtfulness on my part -- so if you want to suggest a topic for next Wednesday, I shall do your bidding, if I'm able.
Oh as much as I appreciate the offer, two things make it nearly impossible. I don't read as much or as widely as you or many other commenters and contributors here (looking at Sherman), and second, I don't know of a way to get in touch with you, since I don't have any social media contacts.
I'll keep the offer on hold for a while though. I don't have any topics off the top of my head.
The reason Jews are important in this context is because they have enough of a history of victimization and semi-protected status that they could push back and make a huge stink about the two-tiered level of “justice” based on intersectionality and victimhood ranking and all the other modern bullshit.
I’m a straight middle aged upper middle class white male. No one gives a shit when I point out the corruption, hypocrisy, and general anti-Americanism it is to rank BLM and trans folks and whatever other flavor of the month is more of a victim than I am. “You’ve had your turn, get over it whitey.” “You’re a racist/biggot/homophobe/transphobe/Islamaphobe etc etc etc.”
But Jews have enough of a victim score that it makes the ‘elites’ sit up and notice. Jews already have an “ism” they can throw around, anti-semitism. So we can have the battle of the “isms”. Plus there are enough prominent Jews who have the resources and megaphone to call the bullshit out.
So I am more than happy to sit here and watch them loudly, angrily, question why “death to all Jews” is not hate speech and grounds for cancelling when “death to all trans” or “death to all blacks” or “death to all fatties (I might be able to claim this protection…)” is. And I think we’re all better for it. We’ve been trying to use Asians for this purpose for years, but no one seems to care. But using Jews works, for whatever reason.
Death to all fatties takes you and me off the table, but it also eliminates much of autowriting and it leaves the Brownell/Korendyke real-estate empire entirely the property of the probate court, so there's an argument to made for it!
Nobody gives a crap about the Asians, as they're not as powerful or represented as Jews and don't embed themselves into the machine the way the Jews do either.
Nuked CoD off the drive last summer during that Nickmercs controversy. It was a lockdown thing for me anyway, met a lot of people in lobbies, got into a few discords, got out of all but one. I took half a look at the new version that must be made for cocaine addicts, it is so twitchy that I get a headache just watching someone stream it.
Mr. Beast got famous with a video where he gave $10k to homeless people. He's not the subject of his videos... the other people are. This is why you see wannabe famous streamers uploading videos with titles like "giving out 5000 burgers to homeless people". I see these recommendations because I couldn't figure out the YT algorithm like I did with Instagram. When I open IG's "Explore" page, every other video is a gruesome death in some Chinese sweatshop or road accident where people go flying. Like the good old times when maddox.xmission.com was one of the most trafficked site on the internet. (God, that guy fell down hard.)
I got a chuckle though. I had no idea what a 'tanker' Corvette was but a short google later I found this:
"...is simply a larger fuel tank option (RPO N03) to give the C2 Corvette more range for endurance racing. The option gave the Corvette a massive 36.5-gallon (that's over 138 liters) tank (...) The Corvette shown here was bought new at Capital Chevrolet in Nashville, TN, by racer Anatoly "Toly" Arutunoff and was then exported to Germany and put into service as a race car by Arutunoff, who was one of only a handful of privateer Grand Prix entrants, and once finished fourth against the factory teams"
I don't consume ANY gaming content other than the games, so this NICKMERCS thing is new to me, and disappointing. You have to shake your head at the fact that the makers of a game that transparently socializes young men into the idea of killing random Arabs and Russians in generic Arabic/Slavic cities draw the line at... not wanting kids to get fucked.
Mr. Beast is to Jason Cammisa or DeMuro as Muddy Waters is to Joe Bonnamassa; one is a generational talent and the others simply fill space. Yes, YouTube is a fundamentally stupid field of art but he's the master nonetheless.
ACF members appear throughout history; we will eventually find that Napoleon was an early subscriber.
I wouldn't let me kids watch it because I figured they could learn how to be smartasses all on their own. Also, I got tired of "Idiot Husband/Dad" jokes somewhere between The Honeymooners reruns and The Flintstones first season. At least Dinosaurs' take on it was self-aware.
Their tribute to Jam Handy films, A World Without Zinc, makes me wonder what a Jam Handy promotional film about Tesla would be like.
YouTube Premium is well worth the $10 or so it costs a month.
One side benefit that I didn’t realize until after I’d been paying for it for a while is that I do not see political ads. I also don’t have cable / watch TV.
I originally bought it because it enabled you to download YT videos to view offline. It is and was fantastic for flying with small children, among other things.
PCs and Adblockers. Youtube had somehow gotten around the Adblockers for a bit but after a couple of days, the ads went silent.
I give directly to Youtubers sometimes if they have the heart with the dollar sign symbol. I wouldn't mind the ads, except when they insert them in the middle of a vid....Tesla....o.
The problem with Afghanistan was that we tried to pick a president when we should have just picked a warlord and called it a day.
The graveyard of empires, indeed.
Maybe we can go back in ten years with a more diverse military and finally win!
Could find a lot of common ground between our kiddie diddler rainbow coalition and their bacha-bazi-enthusiasts
How about we use that time machine to go back and just NOT get involved in Afghanistan?
Those people don't want to be Americans. Why force it on them?
Imagine if we'd used all that excessive force to defend the borders of this nation. You have to admire a ruling party that never tires of killing women and children from the sky overseas but the minute some 17 year and 364 day old MS-13 soldier can't get free healthcare the day after he walks across the border they're all like "fuck having borders and laws and sheeit."
But but, the MS-13 guy is a CHILD!
The Navy is supposed to be the only permanent branch of the US military, under the Constitution. The militia serves as the army during defensive wars and the Coast Guard polices the coastlines, mainly for smugglers & pirates.
That CAN'T possibly cost more than a hundred billion a year.
Oo, scorched earth on the southern border. I don't need to be convinced, I feel it in my bones that this is the right move. Let's scorch the northern border too, and then run oil pipelines across what's left.
Pretty sure we were always going to get involved in Afghanistan after guys they were harboring killed 3,000 of our people in one day. You don’t get to be a real country and ignore something like that.
Then if we had to do it, we shouldn't have half-assed it.
Hearts & Minds pales in comparison to The Apocalypse as far as strategies go.
"You don’t get to be a real country and ignore something like that."
We did the equivalent of getting bullied at work and kicking the neighbor's dog when we got home. The proper response would have been to turn Saudi Arabia into a sea of glass. It was the equivalent of "dope on the table" from The Wire.
"We got Bin Laden!" Great. By those standards, we should have gone from World War II the minute Yamamoto's plane splashed.
Bin Laden wasn't even in that country.
Are we sure the Afghans had anything to do with that?
We were told they did.
Spoiler. OBL disclaimed involvement. http://911review.com/articles/usamah/khilafah.html
When we got him he was in PAKISTAN where had been for several years. But we never declared war on Pakistan because reasons.
wait... isn't it Russia's turn next? Or is it Britain's? We all just sort or rotate through there.
China, and they will somehow make it work out well for themselves.
I still think that Charlie Wilson's War had a point. What you should've done was taking a page from the British playbook, be in charge, build some schools and hospitals and then pick some friendly, least-terrible warlord and let him rule while supporting/controlling him in the backgroud.
Democracy is not a crab, not everything will evolve into it.
The people involved didn't know shit about the region. Afghanistan had a ruling royal family. Everyone liked them. If our moron leaders had just stuck the last survivor back in charge, waved, and told everyone to 'play nice' the problem would have been out of our hair and we'd have been DONE.
But some hard core lefty in State and the government decided that wasn't good enough.
Why do we even HAVE a state department? They are useless. And mostly overrun by pedos.
As fas as I'm concerned, the whole point of diplomats is to clean up after the generals and admirals who get shit done.
I don't know if State has ever done anything right but certainly not since before WWI. They are directly responsible for the first and second Indochina wars and all the fallout from them, including the Drug War.
I have a few friends who've had to deal with 'state' on several occasions and the first word out of their mouths is always: You can't trust them.
Followed by: If you ever rely on them, count on them, or trust them, you will end up dead.
Rule #1 of overseas travel: State will NEVER do ANYTHING to help you. Their advice will most likely get you killed and/or raped. Always have your own plans (and bribe money) to get out of the country if everything goes sideways. NEVER do what the embassy tells you. Cause they're morons who only care about themselves.
Hell, the stories about what they did in Iraq alone are beyond the pale.
Unless you’re a black lesbian basketball or soccer player who hates America.
I don't think it was State who saved her ass. I think it was Biden.
By the way, isn't she trans? I keep forgetting.
my dad told little me that the state dept. was the biggest enemy of the american people in '48. i was so shocked i remember where i was standing in our house at that moment...i thought our government LOVED us!
My kids' teachers try to tell them that lie. I'm doing my best to make sure they don't buy into it.
Secretary of State George Shultz would ask newly appointed ambassadors to show him that they new where their country was on the globe in his office. Most would point to their assigned location. When Mike Mansfield was appointed amb to Japan, he pointed right to the U.S. of A. "That's my country," he said. Every time after that, Shultz would tell new ambassadors, "Never forget you're over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You're there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you're representing the best country in the world.' "
From my perspective, the Department of State rarely executes the wishes of either the chief executive or the American people. Additionally State has been the locus of Israel-haters in D.C. since before Israel existed.
Everyone involved in trying to 'build a country' or 'bring democracy' there was a moron.
You do NOT nation build without killing off 100 percent of the native population.
Everyone who pushed that Nation Building thing needs to be stood up against a brick wall.
"You can't want it more than they do."
Words to live by.
Barely seen footage on the ground of Afghanistan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG0mm4-7TgU
“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.”
Which is why I stopped giving advice to friends, especially when its unsolicited.
I have had that policy for a long time which is tough for me because I'm a natural busybody (thanks mom) but I keep my mouth shut. I recently had a friend ask for advice and I have learned, don't give it then either. Just agree with whatever they're doing, it's all they really want no matter how stupid what they're doing is and no matter how much they insist they want your advice!
America's largely unprecendented-in-world-history military capability is Steamrolling Your Whole Goddamn Catbox Of A Country Flat.
NOT Making You Squee Over Democracy And Human Rights.
What's the last war we've won? Desert storm? Did we win that? Korea? no. Vietnam? No. Afghanistan? No. Ukraine? No.
We won all of 'em but Vietnam. Then some idiot decided he wanted to have fries with that and those fries were never delivered.
If you're up 3-1 and you forfeit, you still lost
World War II. The last war those treasonous ingrates in the media let us win.
Nope.
1812.
I'm reminded of a tale that emerged from interrogating one of the Taliban types. He looked at his interrogator's watch and said "You have the watch. But we have the time."
And he wasn't wrong.
DAMN
It's like the people involved have never fought a war before. They haven't even played Sid Meier's Civilization! When I go to war in Civ IV I raze cities to the fuckin' ground. I don't want any losers who miss Huayna Capac raising a stink in any of my conquered territory. They get scorched earth and then I send in the settlers. THAT is how we should have handled the aftermath of 911. Any population celebrating the deaths of our people (even if they were NYC lizard people) should have been bombed from afar. I would say like Dresden, but we wouldn't even have to fly over them. We can just lob missiles from The Gulf. But I'm a monster and hearts and minds innocent civilians blah blah blah.
Hearts and minds are what should have been splattered over the walls.
Well said.
We should have turned the entire Middle East into glass and let God sort it out. Then go back in for the oil!
or we could have just saved the money and the lives and not done anything aside from killing those responsible and calling it a day
There are a lot of what ifs, but basically it all boils down to they should have let Delta and the Rangers smoke bin Laden in December of 2001 and just left them to their own devices. It's really like a different world.
Or not have bases in the Middle East to start with or foster future enemies because of what the Soviets were doing.
"Nation Building".
...is like trying to rehabilitate criminals. If they don't really want to change, you're wasting your time trying to force them.
I can't think about warlords without recalling the SNL sketch where Phil Hartman is Bill Clinton at McDonalds eating everybody's food.
"Your McNugget, is relief from Great Britain to Somalia...intercepted by warlords! This guy's Fillet 'o Fish sandwich, aide from Italy...warlords!"
I'd rather watch old episodes of "Motorweek" because unlike Cammisa, watching John Davis never made me feel like I was getting played somehow.
That's my main objection to YouTube Voice: It makes the speaker sound like he's running a game of three-card monty, trying to suck you in and scam you.
Well, that's only because he IS.
LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!
“Don’t forget to RING THAT BELL! 🔔 “
I used to laugh-cringe at those little blurbs at the beginning of Jalopnik and TTAC and others (“Lamberari paid for my first class flight, hotel room, piece of mahi and haricots verts that I didn’t know were fancy green beans, AND the wifi with which I watched tranny porn before submitting this press release/strike story on their Fasterossa”). I assumed that press trip fluffing was ubiquitous and universal and therefore it didn’t matter which resort and first class flight each particular automaker treated you to. None was going to sway your opinion over another.
What I never pondered was how much they’d hate the automaker who didn’t do it.
Lamberari reviews matter not a whit. It's like the articles in Playboy.
Now Camcord, F150 and Miata reviews.....
And remember, no matter how much a Lamberari costs, it's ALWAYS a bargain!
I do recall some stories about a secret auto journalist Facebook group where the Abby Bassetts of the world bitched about stuff like “I only got the Omni when only the Ritz would do” or “I had to go down to the uhaul to move, nobody brought me a loaner box van!” stuff like that. So maybe it does matter, but the Jalop crowd is probably less likely to complain; the Embassy Suites I stay at for work is far nicer than anywhere they live.
Speaking of noted zero-talent mattress A-Bass: her newest thing is apparently trying to bilk her fellow zero-talents out of $5 a month for a newsletter with SIX-FIGURE OPPORTUNITIES!
The blurbs, snarky or otherwise, are a federal requirement, and for good reason.
The argument that "they all bribe us so nobody's bribing us" has no legs in the real world. As Alonzo says in Training Day, there's levels to this shit. A lot of the Lieberman-class scumbags take active offense when they don't get the perks like extra travel days and drive-home cars. Not everybody provides them.
I’m sure you are right. I just found them tedious and tiresome and they came across as especially Jalopnik signaling their virtue, which I hate, and I find their virtue strongly lacking.
At the end of the day, no one I respect is going to tell me a C280 is better than a 325i because Mercedes put them up at the Four Seasons and BMW only gave them a room at the Marriott.
More to the point, I found it stunning the mental gymnastics most journalists go through to say “All EVs Good Except Tesla Bad” and I have to attribute that at least in part to Tesla refusing to suck any 3” journalist dick.
I'm sure it's partially lack of dick sucking but Elon ruined their favorite toy. It is 90% that.
I thought BMW would have brib..LODGED THEM..at a Ritz-Carlton.
You must be new here, as in post-flying-vagina. TTAC did not used to run the disclaimers because TTAC dint used to play that shit. I don't know if that was the beginning of the end, but it was definitely the end of the beginning.
The lifestyle stuff can be incredibly seductive even when you (1) pay your own way with the brand and (2) own one of their marquee products.
I have probably been to ~15 or so sports car races as a paying Porsche VIP (Le Mans, Daytona, Sebring, Petit Le Mans, Rennsport Reunion) over the years.
I declined the opportunity to drive a then brand new 911 992 Carrera (not even on sale yet) around the Circuit de la Sarthe on the Saturday morning of Le Mans in 2019. Two laps, minder in the passenger seat (lead / follow conditions), soft limit of 150 MPH on the Mulsanne straight. $12K up front.
Basem Wasef and co get that for free.
I got one of those VIP Le Mans invites in 2002. I had just purchased a new Carrera 4S for $88k which was quite a chunk of change for 2002. A group of us on Porsche Pete’s Boxster board also ponied up some cash for Kevin Buckler to take is TRG team to Le Mans. Porsche offered factory drivers if he could get the car over there. It was very early crowd funding. Kevin had won his class at Daytona. So I got the VIP invite to attend in the Porsche box, tour the track, plus a helicopter tour of the track amongst other things. I think it was $4400 all in per person to attend. I didn’t go as my children were still young and we couldn’t make it work that week with school. I do have a 2002 Daytona poster of The Racer’s Groups class winner signed by all the drivers. We also got to hang out in the paddock with them at the ALMS race at mid-Ohio. So yeah, the lifestyle stuff can be fun.
I went with Porsche in 2018. Porsche now has a permanent building in the style of the PEC in Atlanta or LA (or various places around the world) immediately next to the track at the Ford Chicane. There is something to be said for having a place to sit down, eat a meal, charge a phone, take a cat nap, etc. while in a foreign country during a 24 hour race.
-Porsche France VIP Reception Thursday night - $600
-Porsche AG VIP Hospitality Saturday & Sunday - $3,000
-“Luxury” Shipping Container “Glamping” (my “neighbors” arrived from the UK in a 918) - $2,400
-Roundtrip Airfare (ORD-CDG-ORD) - $1,300
-Helicopter Ride During Race - $140 (shockingly cheap)
-TGV, One Night in Paris, etc. - ~$500
So about $8,000 all-in to attend Le Mans and do it “right”. It was well worth it.
as the first honda dealer in oklahoma karen and i were invited to watch the phoenix gp--remember that one?--in the honda hospitality suite. karen wouldn't go to any scca races with me after that
It was certainly appreciated to have access to Porsche’s hospitality at Le Mans!
Espresso, Red Bull, Evian, Badoit, Pellegrino on demand at all hours. Also, Cristal for those who didn’t plan to stay up all night.
Excellent food - lobster omelettes for breakfast; ox tartare, steak frites, coq au vin, etc.
I have a picture of myself with Wolfgang Porsche that Oliver Blume took.
"Excellent food - lobster omelettes for breakfast; ox tartare, steak frites, coq au vin, etc."
there has to be some way i can sneak in
Porsche Pete’s Boxster Board. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time. I posted there occasionally as a HS kid 25+ years ago. Why, I have no idea, I had no business doing so. At least I didn’t pull a DeMuro and pretend I had one.
It was a reasonable, open place. I was driving a 2000 Boxster S at the time. I traded it for the C4S in 2002 when the 996 version came out. I met some good guys in the Columbus area at the time. We would meet monthly to have dinner. The wife of one of the guys christened us the Boxster Boys and it stuck for some reason.
MIT literally gives away its courses: https://ocw.mit.edu/about/
Stuff like this puts the lie to the idea that schools like Harvard and MIT provide "elite" education.
It's all about getting into that big club George Carlin spoke of, the one you ain't in.
You mean like Congress?.....
Partly, yes.
George C said CON-gress is the opposite of PRO-gress. He was correct.
Indeed he was!
Ha..never heard that one.
Maybe I'm delusional, but my bet is an MIT math or engineering major is still and "elite" education.
Maybe...
Trolling (fishing, not internet) for random undiscovered geniuses on tractors/machine shops in flyover was probably what got us to the moon.
Triumph of the squares indeed
The Romans actually had the ability to build rudimentary automobiles two thousand years ago and just didn't know it.
I'll bet that buried in our civilization right now are the knowledge & materials necessary to make a warp engine, but our intellectual horsepower goes into computers and law instead of aerospace.
Why didn't the Egyptians build an airplane? It should have been easier than building the pyramids to the level of precision displayed.
Humanity is the strangest thing sometimes.
Why were the Best & Brightest all alchemists a thousand years ago? Why are our geniuses wasting THEIR lives on AI?
Brilliant analogy, and I wish I'd thought of it: AI is alchemy.
And just as scientifically valid...
Financial engineering is alchemy.
They are also making boner pills.
Oh, and hair growth drugs.
Because the pyramids still stand? It gave their culture immortality.
Well, ten thousand years from now I'm sure our successors will find a DVD of the movie "Hidden Figures" or something, to mark what we did.
All hail the overweight black women, the true creators of progress
Or that Museum of the Ancient World, featuring historical figures like Jake & Elwood Blues and Luke Skywalker.
Stuff gets lost in translation, can't find the reciepts, etc. You know.
I was thinking about "Hidden Figures" when I read your Boeing post.
Then sadly this morning I caught Musk's post on how Boeing tied climate change and DEI goals to executive comp (as opposed to safety).
We could've gone to mars but we got SAAS instead. For only 25.99 a month, you can have the most overpriced pdf software out there!
Thanks for reminding me. Now I feel better.
Everybody teaches from the same books and papers. You might actually get the author of a book or seminal paper from an Ivy, but frequently they are not the best teachers.
Yes, and it is a public service. However, getting credit for the courses is still expensive.
I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like giving away MIT courses makes it more elite.
But I am a person who hired a Perdue (not a bad engineering school!) grad and had to teach him how to use a screwdriver.
Don’t single Perdue out on that. I have an engineering degree from a state university and a depressing number of my classmates didn’t know which end of a screwdriver was the business end.
I was going to give you crap over Perdue (chickens) vs Purdue (engineering), but instead will observe: how does a young man graduate from engineering school and not know how to use basic hand tools? Did he not have a father? That's truly sad.
He knew what a screwdriver was, and he knew right right lefty loosely, but didn't understand different sized heads needed different size drivers, or how to use pressure so as to not strip them. He is a smart kid and caught on, but we were all a bit perplexed that he got as far as he did without learning that.
I worked with ME auto engineers who did not know how to swap out a flat tire for the spare. Others were flummoxed by wiper blades. I somehow was able to give up being bothered by it, but still am slightly saddened...
I don’t feel so bad now. I can’t figure out for the life of me how to remove a wiper blade from a Honda or other vehicle that uses the hook-style attachments. I even managed to snap the end of the driver’s wiper arm off my last car while struggling with the thing! So now I just let the dealer change blades, and I’ll take care of the refills.
"All subscribers welcome to read and comment"
You're just trying to draw them out, aren't you.
.... off the bus so they're easier to point and laugh at before the headshot in his chicken suit.
At which point, if the coast is clear, you perform a Fortnite dance.
I do a particularly atrocious version of the mcgriddie (that is what that vikings receiver calls his dance, right?).
I have a dance I call the Schwamel's Jumbo Shrimp.
It's a caricature of a black woman weaving her Altima through traffic at 90 miles an hour while enjoying her music way too much.
If there were any justice in the world, we'd release the existing prison populations back into society and replace it with our "elites". Let those who "earned" their way to the hoosegow take care of those who were "selected" for a while.
Ms. (lower case) hochschild and her ilk are far more dangerous than any drug addled serial burglar can ever dream to be. I'm a nobody because I've always felt accomplishment means more than selection and openly disdain those who ascend because of the latter. I'm a hell of a lot happier being a nobody. I just hope that I'm high enough in the nobody hierarchy to survive when shit lets loose. I'll be a Khrushchev to Jack's Lenin. I still think I'd send Tiko to go count trees though...
"we'd release the existing prison populations back into society"
They're one step ahead of you on that one bub
There are a lot of very violent people in prisons. A lot of murderers too. Wouldn't be so quick about releasing the guys in the SuperMax or any of the other hard timers.
I totally get it. Plenty of evil going on around there. I'm just disgusted that a far more sinister level of evil is practiced by our "superiors" and we're just expected to lap it up. Death by a thousand cuts. They deserve a nice big taste of what they're doing to destroy the world and country.
"Wouldn't be so quick about releasing the guys in the SuperMax or any of the other hard timers."
Yeah, but sometimes you release a genuine cap-peelin' killer and all he does is play rhythm guitar with his son.
I've been around actual releasees and they fall into two categories (but then doesn't everyone?)
Don't start none, won't be none (I'm fine with these folks).
Likes killing & raping & robbing and will never stop doing it (these folks belong in the ground)
I've been around actual releasees of the first kind and they tend to enjoy Pittsburgh-style filets with a dash of V8 sports racer. The latter folks you mention should be put down like dogs.
Can't trust a man without taste buds!
Won't get any argument from me!
“‘It was the best of times, it was the BLURST OF TIMES!?!’ You stupid monkey!”
Now, on to actually read today’s post.
Burns was right to be upset; mathematically that should have come AFTER the correct line, as 'blurst' is a longer string than 'worst'.
"This is the largest television in the free world."
"Ay! Un gato malodoro!"
I feel more and more like Grandpa Simpson every day.
I feel more and more like Hank Hill's dad in King of the Hill... except for a real war, it was the great meme war of 2016.
Ah posted fiddy memes!
Wonder who selects the selectors?? "Ignore that man behind the curtain"
AFAIK my dad quit 1 thing in his entire life: an admissions panel at the ivy-league school he attended/taught at/was a 'noteworthy official' for. Proximate cause was that 2 students with the usual quals (5.1 GPA, editor of this, captain of that-- before your pronouns and orientation were qualifications) came down to 'pick ONE' time.
The girl had worked on a fishing trawler for a couple summers and isnt that something. So she was about to be selected. But then another panelist realized the trawler was her uncle's, which made it somehow less marvelous, and so they picked the boy.
"I don't know what that is, but it's not a process".
"What would the privilege of a Harvard admission be if you could automatically get in with a certain SAT score or list of achievements? At that point, it’s Texas Tech."
Perhaps I'm naive, but I believe there was a time (the decade or so following Sputnik) when you could get into Harvard and the other Ivies with simply a high GPA and 1500+ on the SAT.
I doubt that very much. There was never enough room for that.
Perhaps at Harvard alone but I was including the other Ivies. The one kid in my class that got into Harvard had close to a 4.0 and got 1500 on the SAT. A very smart nerd, one of the five smartest kids out of over 600 in my opinion but other than being exceptionally bright there wasn't much exceptional about him. Back then you didn't need essays or extracurriculars. My best friend got early admitted into Columbia and he had about a 3.8 and ~1300. If I had applied I would have gotten in. I didn't apply to any of the Ivies because my parents weren't going to spend the money to send me to a private out of state school and I figured Michigan was their equal academically.
It was different then. Nobody got over a four point because honors classes (the term AP hadn't caught on so much back then) didn't get 5 for an A. There were very few perfect SAT scores. I'm not even sure anyone in my high school got a 1600. I scored less than 1400 on the PSAT and that made me a National Merit Finalist.
We didn't have to walk uphill both ways to get to school but the American educational system in the '60s and early '70s was fairly rigorous and mostly merit based at least when it came to getting into good schools.
when my late nephew graduated from a private california highschool--chatsworth?--in '62 his english courses were more than i'd done to get my m.a. at tulsa u. in '59
Maybe there was. When my father was the smartest math student his teacher in orange Texas ever had, she suggested he go to MIT. He had no idea what that was. He chose University of Houston over Texas A&M, because “University” sounded more prestigious to him.
I wonder if college prestige and Ivy League valuation is a relatively newer phenomenon.
"I wonder if college prestige and Ivy League valuation is a relatively newer phenomenon."
The reverse is true. When five percent of students went to college, ANY degree made you white-collar and an Ivy League degree made you rich.
I think the obsession with where you went to college and the prestige of the Ivy League was therefore probably lower. The average kid from anywhere outside of the northeast might not have even known anything about them.
The literature of the Twenties and onward doesn't suggest that.
The literature of the Twenties and Thirties was dominated by NYC based publishers, and writers who likely affirmed those publishers biases.
Harvard has always been a prestigious school but it seems to me that the elite schools on the coasts (The Ivies, Stanford, MIT, CalTech) are given more prestige than elite schools in the country's interior like Chicago, Duke, and Northwestern. Hell, even with elite public universities, Berkeley, on the west coast, has more prestige than Michigan, which is at least its academic equal.
If I was looking to hire an engineer, I'd go with Georgia Tech, Illinois Champaign-Urbana, or Cooper-Union graduates first. From the Ivies? Maybe Princeton. I'd bet that the average engineering student at Michigan Tech is more capable than one with a degree from Harvard or Yale.
It literally only matters to east coast nit wits and politicians. Nobody from the midwest gives a shit if you went to Harvard. If anything, it is a negative signal to live in Des Moines or a Suburb of Chicago with a Harvard degree.
A number of my undergraduate classmates went on to Harvard. None of them are particularly impressive, aside from their egos. One of my fraternity brothers went to MIT, he’s a solid dude.
Why would you live in Des Moines or Elgin or Scumberg or Joilet if you went to Harvard? ;)
+1 for Joilet
Exactly
Not everything is about money and prestige. My cousin was raised in California and loves it there (other than the politics and homeless). He's spent his entire adult life living near Detroit because he loves his wife and she wanted to be near her parents.
True that. My East Coast wife had no idea how little we all cared. Here it's U of M and some dumb hick state schools. For engineering go to Purdue like my kid did. if you want an Ivy we have Wash U in St. Louis, U of and even Northwestern in Chicago.
I'd probably throw Notre Dame in there. At least in Chicago. Purdue is funny for a college. They'll let anyone into the engineering department and let them wash out. At least they did 20 years ago.
Purdue won't stop a kid from taking engineering classes once he's enrolled. They will definitely flunk them out if they can't hack it. I'll say that my son's ME degree opened a ton of doors. Perdue is considered a top 10 engineering program across the country, and it's not because the school is selective-- it's not particularly, but the engineering part is highly selective on it's own.
Dumb hick state school checking in. Coursework was more difficult than my peers from more prestigious schools. 30% of students dropped the program after the first year. It doesn't mean shit on a resume, but in the real world it put me far ahead of the competition.
Friend of my father's got recruited by Northwestern. He didn't know what that was, but he knew that Northeastern sucked so he went to West Point instead, just in time to go to Vietnam.
I have slept with two women who got perfect ACT scores. One went to THE ohio state university for her DVM, the other went to Georgetown I think. I am a dumbass who didn't get a perfect score but height > intelligence.
If they were genuinely smart, they would have taken the SAT. My dad was an alum so I have to say that Michigan State's veterinary school is better than OSUs. In reality they're probably about equal. I wonder when feminists will say vet schools have gender equality now that about 80% of graduating vets are women.
ACT is standard here. Everyone I went to high school with the the ACT. The smartest guy I've ever know took the ACT. Maybe he took the SAT too but I know his ACT score. Going to Vet school is stupid. It's all the cost, difficulty and expense of becoming a doctor to graduate making 80k per year. Men are smart not to do it.
The thing about being a vet is to own the practice if possible. My daughter-in-law got her DVM from Oklahoma State and is now working on acquiring 25% of her current practice. She was invited, or should I say selected, by the founder. It wasn’t offered to any of the other vets in the practice. The practice is growing because people will spend insane amounts of money to keep their dog alive. Cats, not so much.
Her standard line when it’s time to put a dog down is, “You can have a dog, just not this dog.”
That's kind of the thing about everything if possible. Buying in is nice, I imagine the cost of starting one from scratch is astronomical these days. The 2nd way to make money as a Vet is emergency services. I have a DVM Client who makes north of a quarter of a million a year as a W-2 who travels around the country as a travelling ER doctor for dogs.
You wonder if private equity is going to start taking them over like optometrists, etc.
I can't speak to much on this aside from the fact that we were pushed into the ACT as it was supposedly the standard (their words, not mine).
When I was in high school, if you were applying to an elite school you did not take the ACT. A lot of top tier schools simply did not accept ACT scores. True or not, the ACT was regarded as a test for B students going to directional state universities.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: forget STEM, we need gender equality among sanitation workers, commercial fisherpersons, and roughnecks.
we have gender equality and trans representation at the grocery checkout isn't that enough
In small town west MI we weren't given a choice, it was ACT or nothing. My guidance counselor thought U of M was about the best anyone from my school could aspire, or ND if you were really lucky. I was actively discouraged from applying to an Ivy despite the stats for it.
I also made a perfect score on the ACT. I remember thinking it was a supremely easy test. I made a 34 as a sophomore and then a 36 as a junior.
But you can’t sleep with me.
Nobody wants that. Bryce is the one who is into Zaftig
That hurts.
absurd flex
Sherman is younger than me so it ummmmmmm obviously got easier.
im canadian se we never dealt with the sat or act
kinda want to give it a go so i can base my self worth around a few numbers
I only made a 1590 on the SAT.
I graduated 20 years ago from a decent private school in Boston. (Not Harvard or MIT). Back then it was GPA and SAT score. I had ZERO extra curriculars: a fair GPA (IIRC 3.5+) and a fair SAT (again IIRC, near 1200) - that was also enough for a scholarship.
Today, I worry for my kids. The "selection" is insane. State schools have a 7% acceptance rate for non-minorities w/simply "decent" academics.
The schools are also just not worth it for the most part, educationally, ideologically, and even in terms of ROI. Even STEM is corrupted by CRT/DEI. My younger daughter is unhappy with her job and is thinking of going back to school to get a masters, perhaps in history. I'm going to encourage her to first decide what she wants to do and then see if she really needs a paper credential to do it before taking on another $30,000 in student debt. She only recently paid off her debt from her BA.
It's not just your daughter. Women LOVE credentials. I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't want to go back to school for some stupid ass degree she doesn't need. You couldn't pay me to go back to college. I got my masters degree so I could sit for the CPA and I was done.
Your daughter actually paid off a BA?
Bullshit. Nobody can pay off a bachelor's degree these days.
She's very fiscally responsible. She also went to Wayne State, which is relatively affordable.
That's great, but of course I was referring to the fact that college degrees cost 10,000% of what they should and graduates can't find jobs that will let them pay off the loan in less than 30 years.
I am hoping the college bubble bursts by the time my girls are old enough and I'm putting half of my money where my mouth is by splitting between a 529 and a regular investment account
The reckoning is coming, it’s simply a matter of timing.
Most private schools are dead men walking. Endowment per undergrad is probably the best heuristic to gauge survival.
Same here. I'm able to set aside about $20k per year in investments. We've had a 529 for the kids for a few years now, but it really hasn't performed. I wouldn't bother much with it, aside from the state tax credit and then the tax break when you use it.
I'm leaning towards paying my house off instead. Been running a bunch of amortization charts and if I put $20k per year (extra) against the mortgage I'll have the house paid off in 7 years and will have saved over $100k in interest (even with my piddly 3% mortgage rate).
Sure, if I had the full $140k now (instead of over 7 years) I'd put it in the market, but I don't and I don't think I can "grow" it more than that same $100k in interested saved over the next 7 years (granted I'm counting 15 years worth of interest saved as well). Plus, it'll be nice to no longer have a mortgage, but at that point I'm 3 years from my oldest starting college and will then be putting my income likely to his education.
I'm half thinking out loud in case someone smarter than me on here has some suggestions.
At 3%, unless you think you are in danger of spending the money, you are much better putting it in VMRXX until rates get reasonable. I refinanced at 2.5% and auto invested the mortgage "savings" every month. If I can't beat 2.5% over thirty years, we have bigger problems. Backing into your mortgage with some assumptions, you'd make an extra 60-65k in interest in treasuries at current rates which is probably 40-50k after tax dollars.
If you give me your pmt and remaining years, I'll give you an exact number
Thanks! I ran some quick numbers; I'm likely missing something, but below was my thought process. (I pulled an older statement I had lying around.)
12/2050 Maturity Date
2.875 Interest Rate
$290k Outstanding balance (as of July 2023)
$1,246 Monthly payment (ex taxes & insurance)
According to random internet calcs... if I put $20k down (annually) I'll save roughly $90k in interest and have the house paid in about 7 years.
If I take the same $20k per year over 7 years, it looks like I can turn a $140k investment into $160k, assuming a 5% annual return.
I figured saving 90k was better than making 20k-30k, but I'm better with computers than I am with investments. So, what do ya think?
I was off a bit in my quick calc. If you pay an extra 1,666.66 per month (20k per year), I have you paying off your mortgage in March of 2033. If instead, you invest that in VMRXX and the interest rate stays at 5%, you will have 234.6k in an investment account and you will owe 211k on your house. You could write a check that day and be 24.5k ahead. Less after taxes and less than my quick calculation but it's also not nothing. If you wait until march 2024 to pay it off and still invest, you'd be 29k ahead, if you wait 2 years, you'd be 35k ahead 3 years 41k ahead.
It's already here. I oversee several departments and hire a lot of people. I can't think of the last time I placed any importance the school someone went to, and in some cases whether they even had a degree. I want to know what they've done.
My boomer parents cant conceive of a world where my daughters wont go to college. I dream of it.
The quality of degreed students varies so wildly that it's not even a marker for me.
I get that it's necessary for certain professions, but it's no real indicator of capability. Turns out character is most important. I have a 2nd year engineering student intern out performing veterans with the same degree that he will eventually finish.
So, BC or BU?
I graduated with a masters from the Royal College of Art. Other slightly more notable alumni: Sir Ridley Scott, Zandra Rhodes, David Hockney, Alan Rickman, Tracey Emin, and err James Dyson and Thomas Heatherwick. You get the idea. Little did I ever expect in a million years would I get to attend. Little did I realise at the time these days the RCA will accept anyone who can fog a mirror: it's just that these days because of the fees, location and reputation most of those people are very middle class/well off indeed. I was living at home with Mother Dearest in her social housing.
In the end it didn't help me a great deal, apart from providing me with the qualification I was expected to have in my chosen field (car design). It became apparent to me quite quickly that my face didn't fit/didn't have the right background/too old/to weird looking/too smartass to ease my way smoothly to success. Peers who I graduated with who didn't have half my talent have all fallen ass backwards into success, whereas thanks to COVID/Brexit I found myself out on my ass.
What was I trying to say? Oh yes. I'm qualified to write a takedown of the Cybertruck and what it represents, and I'll probably do it soon!
Next step: Sitting on a beach earning 20 percent.
Earning 20 percent... The fucking 80s
THEN FOOKIN DO IT ALREADY
LET IT BE DONE :)
Adrian,
Is it a distinctly British thing to use the phrase “middle class” to refer to privileged, upper income people?
Chris Harris and his buddies on his podcast make self deprecating jokes about being middle aged, “middle class” men. The other hosts are Edward Lovett (Dick Lovett heir), Chris Cooper (consultant and gentleman driver), Manish Pandey (surgeon, Senna screenwriter, filmmaker), and Neil Clifford (long-time CEO of Kurt Geiger who owns an F40, a Bristol Fighter, etc.)
“Middle class” has a different connotation to me, as an American - someone of (almost) any income level who works for a living and has any anxiety about maintaining class standing; people who are particularly proud of having gone to XYZ school are almost certainly middle class, even if that school was Harvard.
Middle class does not necessarily mean middle income, in my view.
In the UK, Upper Class are the selected, middle class have achieved and everyone else is working class.
As Luke mentioned - classes in the UK don’t have direct analogues to North American class structures. The classes are largely based on status/taste and divorced from financial means (mostly).
They joke and are self-deprecating but they are all, to a man extremely privileged. They’re middle class in the sense they’re not upper class because they’re not nobility. I might be middle class in my champagne socialist tastes, but I have the burden of having to work for a living.
Understood.
Harris is perhaps the least privileged among that august grouping, although I have intuited that the vast majority of enduring UK automotive media personalities come from privileged backgrounds (although they perhaps downplay it in public) - Andrew Frankel, his TI partner Dan Prosser; Henry Catchpole; Jethro; Metcalfe obviously; and so on.
Whereas in America, the bulk of the written content from legacy outlets comes from class warriors, and the YouTube content comes from brainless fortunate sons.
I don't think you're fair to the Tesla critics, especially the FSD criticisms. I'm certainly no Tesla or Musk hater – I think that he lately shows similar symptoms to 1920s-and-later Henry Ford (micromanaging shit he doesn't know enough about, God complex, fawning to dictators), but I still think SpaceX might be the most important company there ever was and admire Tesla for many, many things, especially turning the EVs into a useable customer product.
However, Cybertruck is still stupid because it could've been much better without the idiotic exoskeleton, which is almost certainly a product of aforementioned Elon's hubris and thinking he knows more than his engineers and designers.
And I honestly believe that the FSD is worthy of criminal prosecution. So, of course, was the Pinto and many other shit traditional carmakers did.
FSD, though, is different in that it is not a fault that someone was lazy/cheap to get fixed. It's systemically bad and IT WILL GET WORSE OVER TIME.
Now, the FSD seldom kills anyone, because it is so bad that not many people will really "let it drive". It makes mistakes often enough that it reminds anyone sane that it's actually a Level 2 driving assist and not anything even remotely close to autonomous driving.
However, Tesla will likely keep marketing it as autonomous (or almost-there autonomous) system in the future and will keep making the features preventing people from treating it as an autonomous driving too weak, because they have this narrative of "we have basically full autonomy, it's almost there, the regulators are just slowing us down, so we put these features there, but you know how to go around them, no? Wink, wink.
At the same time, the system WILL improve, statistically – but that will only make people less attentive when driving it (and they are still driving it, not the car itself). People are not wired to watch boring processes where a mistake occurs once in a long while.
And THAT is the moment FSD will become deadly.
When it makes one bad mistake in 10 miles, it'll keep you attentive and you will probably fix that mistake. One mistake in 1,000 miles? Or even 10,000? That will probably kill you.
Also, I would be willing to bet money that no current Tesla product will ever have Level 5 autonomy, because of hardware, which will result in very fun class-action lawsuits when the owners realize that they shelled $10 or 15k or whatever this shit costs and then Tesla will finally release something close to real autonomy, but it will work only on the next-gen hardware.
I once wrote an article comparing Elon to Henry Ford and André Citroën. They were geniuses either in engineering or marketing, and they took the automotive world where it has never been before.
Both also became so persuaded that they are infallible geniuses that they almost destroyed their companies and had to be ousted. That's what I expect will happen to Musk in 5 to 10 years time – his stainless trucks and hypercars with rockets and other idiocies will divert too much resources at Tesla from actually making profitable cars that they will have trouble competing either with legacy carmakers or the Chinese (or likely both, depending on where in the world) and he will eventually be replaced by someone who will turn the company into a normal automaker.
I dunno. What chaps my ass about the whole Full Self Driving thing is how many autistic morons will scream “It’s called Full Self Driving but it isn’t Full Self Driving!!!1!!1!” So if we called it “Kinda almost self driving” you’d be OK with it? So literally the problem is one word in the name? I’m somewhere between “yeah, words matter” and “gold jacket green jacket who gives a shit?”
The problem is 1) the name 2) the presentation by Tesla (like the fake video of Tesla driving itself that was realeased in 2017 or so) and 3) the fact that the safeguards against inattentive driving are purposefully weak, so it makes people think it can actually drive itself safely even when it can not.
I'm pretty sure that systems from GM, Ford, BMW, Mercededes or others are able to do similar things as FSD, but they don't, because it's not safe.
Tesla fanatics keep saying that the systems of other companies are stupid, because they're geofenced or work only under certain conditions – but that's the point. They only work in conditions where they've been proved reliable.
Tesla is trying to let FSD work everywhere, all the time, but it has no mechanism that will fix things when FSD doesn't know what to do, or worse, it thinks it knows, but doesn't. Because the problem with AIs is just that – they don't know when they don't know.
The difference is that GPT or DeepL will not, usually, kill you. Unless you use it to translate the in-car communication, as unnamed company from Bavaria did, resulting in Czech BMWs telling you something to the effect of "please keep your hands off the steering wheel" while the English original was kind of exactly the opposite.
But even that won't kill you directly, nor will Midjourney's man with six fingers. The FSD will kill you, because it has no way of finding out it doesn't know what to do and therefore will do something – most likely something idiotic.
"The difference is that GPT or DeepL will not, usually, kill you. Unless you use it to translate the in-car communication, as unnamed company from Bavaria did, resulting in Czech BMWs telling you something to the effect of "please keep your hands off the steering wheel" while the English original was kind of exactly the opposite."
This is the best thing I've read today.
Lol, wait till they use it to figure out your dosage on your IV. "They're not stupid enough to try that are they?" We have planes falling out of the sky, of course they're stupid enough to try it.
It sounds like the other guys are programming for bounded variables while Tesla is attempting to program for near infinite variables which is, shall we say, problematic.
I should add when I make that statement the full autonomous nerds say, “Duh, machine learning.”
Not to be that guy but wasn't it always machine learning?
What if we just said it's "Enhancing the user experience of driving" like every software company that makes every single update worse. Whatever these "engineers" are getting paid it's too much because you could literally take outlook 2002 and hire a monkey for minimum wage to change nothing and you'd end up ahead. OOh, progress, I can venmo someone money! Wow, I could never give someone money before via check or ach or god forbid cash. I'm in a salty mood today.
Software must be continually improved until it is completely unusable.
The MO for constant updates to phone apps!
I always thought that the reason that I have to update the Crapital One app (at ** almost 500 MB, the biggest one on my iPhone) the day after I had to download a prior version was because one of their useless Indian coders forgot to put a comment in the code! 🙄
Every bug they fix creates two more!
I agree that Jack is conveniently glossing over the FSD BS because Elon's personal failings are now on the 'correct' side of the fence.
The actions of Tesla as a company are also on a wildly different scale to diff bolts that would puncture the fuel tank in a rear collision.
We are 2-3 decades on from that and a lot more basic stuff is standard engineering practice.
Anyone 'disrupting' to sell hype is just a con man.
Yes. And I find it quite amusing how many right wing people are suddenly becoming Tesla fans just because Elon seems to be righty enough.
Of course, equally amusing are lefties for whom Elon was a god and Tesla the best car in the universe and now they are ready to buy something Chinese instead, because they don't like Musk't political views.
You either die with incoherent opinions or live to see yourself become an NPC.
10/10
Although, NPCs self contradict constantly. They just aren't aware of it
See above: I was an Elon defender when he was as left as they got.
I don’t care about Musk’s politics, but I do care that he’s (more or less) a free speech absolutist and shined a bright light at the bugs under the rock at Twitter. There are plenty of people whom I respect who believe in leftist things that I don’t, but also don’t believe in the censorship and other bullshit going on. Someone who makes a nuanced argument for more gun control or higher taxes or more government regulation I can respect and disagree with; I don’t consider them an “enemy” until they’re advocating for mass censorship and memory holing, etc. That Musk is at least appearing to try and do away with most of the censorship and other bullshit is enough to make him somewhat of a hero in my opinion, not matter what his other beliefs are.
From what I see, his actions are more of "giving lefties their own medicine" – he's certainly not above banning people who he doesn't like.
Perhaps if we would’ve fought fire with fire, things would’ve been different.
I'm as righty as you can get, and Tesla is still dubious. I like SpaceX, because it alternates between spectacular explosions and a spectacular launch rate. I also appreciate his taking over twitter/X and having a light(er) hand.
"I agree that Jack is conveniently glossing over the FSD BS because Elon's personal failings are now on the 'correct' side of the fence."
This time I have the receipts:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a29944/leave-tesla-alone/
"We are 2-3 decades on from that and a lot more basic stuff is standard engineering practice."
It was standard engineering practice when the Pinto was engineered, and sold, and the infamous "lawsuit recall calculation" was made. What about the GM ignition switch? That's a lot closer to now.
My personal and professional opinion is that GM should have been walked off the plank for the ignition switch as an entity, which it was, but with accounting shenanigans.
Tesla sucks. There's not a single car they make I would by but the reasons the Autojournalists suck every other electric car makers dick and not tesla, which still makes the best electric car, has nothing to do with Tesla.
I can't disagree with a single thing you've said -- FSD is a disgrace. Is it worse than the Explorer tire fiasco? It's not nearly as deadly. Are we judging intent, execution, legislative chicanery?
"Also, I would be willing to bet money that no current Tesla product will ever have Level 5 autonomy,"
This is a sound bet, because no vehicle will EVER have Level 5 autonomy in a mixed-use environment with human-driven vehicles. It is computationally impossible. Any system that could do it would be better put to use ruling the globe, because that's an easier problem from a comp-sci perspective.
As for Explorer comparison – it's not YET nearly as deadly. Wait for some next FSD that will make one deadly mistake per 10,000 miles and we'll see.
On the other hand, I believe that Elon believes he's making the world better. He most likely isn't defrauding people, he honestly believes that he's saving humanity and that FSD is a way to reduce road deaths and therefore should be pushed on the road ASAP, no matter how many lives it costs short-term.
As for L5 autonomy ever existing – I absolutely agree. What Level 5 needs is AGI and then it's a question whether it will let us have cars. Hopefully we will create an AGI that will treat us like we treat cats.
Until then, I don't really believe we will go further than very low-speed robotaxis for downtown areas (at 20 mph you can solve basically anything by slamming the brakes) and some L4 autonomy on the highways – a few steps further from what GM, Mercedes and BMW already have.
Fun part is, the FSD will still be L2 at this point.
I'm more comfortable assuming Elon IS defrauding people. Simply because I'd rather accept he is intelligent and Evil than downright stupid.
BTW, the Toyota stuck accelerator thing was absolute bullshit.
If it happens to one person, it's bullshit, if it happens to 100, there is a design flaw. You don't see an esteemed brand like my Audi having unintended acceleration issues*
* I shouldn't have to say this is a joke but I'm going to anyways.
Social contagion. At lot less of a leap to get get attention than mutilating your genitalia.
To this day I do not understand what mechanism caused the deaths in the Explorer "fiasco". Were blow outs and tread delamination not a thing previously? How do you get from tire failure to roll over on a public road in the ballpark of legal speeds for the conditions?
As I recall -- and I apologize for being too lazy to research properly -- the issue was that the Firestone tires had a specific operating pressure -- let's say 35.
To get the ride qualities Ford wanted out of these relatively heavy/large wheel and tire combos that were foisted on the second-generation Explorer, Ford lowered the operating pressure to 28, without Firestone's active consent.
Starting at 28 meant that a lot of them got down to the low twenties real quick. At which point the belts were SERIOUSLY deforming every go-round, which led to intense heat buildup and consequent delamination.
Then, once the tire blew, the situation was possibly compounded by the vehicles, being 90s SUVS, perhaps not being the best handling things around, then once a rollover did occur, the roof crush or rollover standards at the time for said vehicles perhaps not being the most robust, enhanced the severity of the situation. In addition, given that the failures were tire-related, there seemed to be a lack of notice for a time that this was happening in the field, the end result of that being the TREAD act of 2000 being passed.
We had a 95 Explorer 2 door with Goodyears which did not have the same problems. If I remember correctly, it was 26psi on ours. Drove it at those pressures precisely once (steering felt really squishy and dead) and kept them in the low to mid thirties ever after. Then it felt twitchy. Never did feel comfortable driving it very fast.
There were two very different wheel/tire packages on those: 15" wheels with narrow tires and fender-flare trucks like the Bauer and 2 door expedition with 16".
The '95 and newer trucks didn't have the issues like the first-gen did because they used a different front suspension. The problem was with the first-gen Explorers that used the Twin-Traction Beam (TTB) front end with 2 big swing arms.
speaking to Elon's hubris: I've heard, from people who worked at Tesla at the time, that the reason the Model S could seat 7 is because Elon had five kids at the time the car was being designed and the reason he developed the Supercharger / NACS standard is because he hated how the SAE J1772 plug looked.
I believe both cases. At the same time, a lot of this approach made Tesla what it is. All that geeky shit with SF-based names for stuff and features and everything basically LOOKING like in sci-fi, that works on the target audience.
But I also think that Tesla is way past the point where it starts to be a hindrance. Case in point – steering wheel buttons instead of stalks. If you sell to geeks who basically hate cars, hate everything traditional and want to live in a sci-fi world, it's a great idea.
However, for Tesla to really succeed and realize the expectations already baked in their stock price, they need to be able to sell a Model 3 to a guy who, until that point, always bought Camrys or Škoda Octavias. And they hate that stuff.
He should've bought Stellantis instead of Twitter and sell Teslas with traditional looks and controls rebadged as Chryslers and Peugeots.
"However, for Tesla to really succeed and realize the expectations already baked in their stock price, they need to be able to sell a Model 3 to a guy who, until that point, always bought Camrys or Škoda Octavias. And they hate that stuff."
Sir, I believe you're a bit short of vision here, which is admittedly rare for you.
People will adapt in the long run to whatever the automakers give them. You might as well say, AS MANY DID, that the Honda Accord wouldn't go mass market because it had lighting and wiper controls on steering wheel stalks instead of the dashboard... and let's not forget the fact that as recently as 1970 the vast majority of cars sold in America, automatic AND manual, used column shift.
I see your point, but turn signals are still different. You use them all the time and it's annoying to have them elsewhere. Headlights? I've seen them everywhere from a button to a knob to steering wheel stalk and no one really gives a shit.
Also, if Tesla stayed vastly ahead of others in other respects (range, efficiency, price), then people would probably adapt. But will I buy a Model 3 which annoys me on several levels, or will I add 10-15% to its price and have the BMW i4?
To make it worse for Tesla, if they keep their typical timeline (at least two years behind schedule), they might find themselves overtaken to the "Golf territory" by VW, Škoda, Cupra, Renault, possibly also Kia/Hyundai. And then this is just a final nail in the coffin.
"Also, if Tesla stayed vastly ahead of others in other respects (range, efficiency, price), then people would probably adapt. But will I buy a Model 3 which annoys me on several levels, or will I add 10-15% to its price and have the BMW i4?"
Most people will ask themselves the question: Which car confers more prestige?
In that respect, BMW has shot themselves in the foot Stateside. If the Glorious EV Transition had happened in 1993 instead of 2023, BMW would have had a 24k-gold brand image with which to sell EVs. But they're spent decades embarrassing themselves.
It's not as bad here, people still consider BMWs worth the money. Also, the Tesla is a very prestigious brand to some, but very un-prestigious to others. Most people are either thinking Tesla is light years ahead of anything else, or they think it's a unreliable piece of shit with unusable ergonomics, or they just don't give a crap, don't like cars in general and buy them the same way you or I buy refrigerators. In which case the Model Y makes a lot of sense.
Still, even for people who don't love beemers that much, the i4 is vastly superior in UX and in the fact that it works exactly like the 330d you had before.
Similar is true for the Enyaq, which, unlike the VW IDs, seems to also be built by people who have experience building cars. Not that its platform is especially good (and the software was terrible until recently), but it just feels... car-like.
The interior differences between a German car and a Tesla ALONE make it worth it.
I knew a guy who went to William & Mary at the same time as one of the Kennedy's. Who never attended a single class - just sat outside when the weather was nice surrounded by all of the better looking girls there. All of whom obviously wanted to be a 'missus Kennedy' and many of whom I'm sure were given auditions.
Then of course after he graduated (I don't recall if he got honors or not) he went to law skool (rinse and repeat) and got a job in NYC that requires him to have passed the bar (I don't know if he ever did - for some reason they made him take the test which last I heard he'd failed like 26 times? Might be off a bit there).
I forget if this is the same kennedy who death spiraled into the Long Island Sound one night because the gods of physics and flying in the weather don't look the other way just because of your last name. But it is funny (well it's sad to be honest) how many people will give unearned accolades to someone just because of their last name. Even if they're a lazy shiftless bum. Guess money CAN buy everything...
I honestly don't remember anymore. It's been so long and I honestly don't care enough to look it up :-/
Yes it was Jr.
Human beings naturally love aristocracy, hierarchy, and celebrity. The natural consequence of a biology built around needing to be acutely conscious of where you fit in the 200-person tribe at all times lest you die from having the wrong impression.
A truth that needs shouting from the rooftops but, er, we don't do that because it's counter to the happy smiley people fantasy.
I wasn't sure if the plane crash was that (weather, and wasn't it also nighttime and he was not instrument rated), or something more sinster. I have heard told that he'd figured out who had murdered his father and uncle and was ready to publish. He had a magazine that could do it too - George!
But of course that is too ridiculous to take seriously. That would make him the first... wait the second... ok the third of his family brought to heel by force
He wasn't rated for the flight he was trying to do. So what happened to him is what happens 99 percent of the time - death spiral and dead.
I don't recall if he even HAD his pilot's license, but he wasn't qualified to fly in the weather. He got the leans, stopped trusting his instruments, and that, was that. If you can't trust your instruments over ALL else - you should never fly instruments. If you don't know how to cross-check so you can tell if one is bad - you should never fly instruments. If you are easily susceptible to vertigo, you probably shouldn't fly on instruments.
ESPECIALLY not over the water at night. That's like the deadliest thing there is.
“Paging Hunter Biden...!”
Jews no longer getting special treatment in the US != Jews being bullied. I categorically disagree.
They're just being shoved in the same category as everyone else the machine comes after, and they don't like it.
I'm starting to get mildly irritated by 'check out the instawhore/substandard of "insert dipshit name here" being sent to you and the obvious breakdown of why people who can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag needs analysis. Who is this clown anyways, and WHY did I have to see that trucking picture at the top of the post? /jk
"Jews no longer getting special treatment in the US != Jews being bullied. I categorically disagree. They're just being shoved in the same category as everyone else the machine comes after, and they don't like it."
There's no sane way to disagree with you here -- but Harvard is clearly bullying Jews right now. Just because they ALSO bully Badwhites to the best of their ability doesn't mean that's not so. The US Government was perfectly capable of killing pregnant mothers in Idaho at the same time as they were undermining South American governments; so, too, can Harvard shit on Jews and whites simultaneously.
"I'm starting to get mildly irritated by 'check out the instawhore/substandard of "insert dipshit name here" being sent to you and the obvious breakdown of why people who can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag needs analysis."
This is a drum that I beat about as often, and indelicately, as Ringo Starr would, and I feel your pain -- but the fact that you long-ago internalized all the facts of the matter is more a statement of your discernment than anything else; plenty of people still need to hear the message a bit more before they get it.
You're a favorite commenter of mine, being willing to regularly upbraid me and force a bit of thoughtfulness on my part -- so if you want to suggest a topic for next Wednesday, I shall do your bidding, if I'm able.
Oh as much as I appreciate the offer, two things make it nearly impossible. I don't read as much or as widely as you or many other commenters and contributors here (looking at Sherman), and second, I don't know of a way to get in touch with you, since I don't have any social media contacts.
I'll keep the offer on hold for a while though. I don't have any topics off the top of my head.
lol I sent Jack the Rob Henderson piece yesterday!
Send Jack an email or just post a discussion topic idea in the comments when you have an idea.
This is gonna sound stupid, but I don't think I've seen his email address.
I’ll let him respond with it, or perhaps he will just email you to get the ball rolling.
It came through my email but I'm not a paid subscriber so I only got to read 1/3 of it.
Better than you get with a link to WSJ or NYT!
Is the WSJ worth a subscription? I know the NYT isn't
The reason Jews are important in this context is because they have enough of a history of victimization and semi-protected status that they could push back and make a huge stink about the two-tiered level of “justice” based on intersectionality and victimhood ranking and all the other modern bullshit.
I’m a straight middle aged upper middle class white male. No one gives a shit when I point out the corruption, hypocrisy, and general anti-Americanism it is to rank BLM and trans folks and whatever other flavor of the month is more of a victim than I am. “You’ve had your turn, get over it whitey.” “You’re a racist/biggot/homophobe/transphobe/Islamaphobe etc etc etc.”
But Jews have enough of a victim score that it makes the ‘elites’ sit up and notice. Jews already have an “ism” they can throw around, anti-semitism. So we can have the battle of the “isms”. Plus there are enough prominent Jews who have the resources and megaphone to call the bullshit out.
So I am more than happy to sit here and watch them loudly, angrily, question why “death to all Jews” is not hate speech and grounds for cancelling when “death to all trans” or “death to all blacks” or “death to all fatties (I might be able to claim this protection…)” is. And I think we’re all better for it. We’ve been trying to use Asians for this purpose for years, but no one seems to care. But using Jews works, for whatever reason.
Death to all fatties takes you and me off the table, but it also eliminates much of autowriting and it leaves the Brownell/Korendyke real-estate empire entirely the property of the probate court, so there's an argument to made for it!
If we’re honest us fatties are doing a good enough job of killing ourselves off, we don’t need help.
Nobody gives a crap about the Asians, as they're not as powerful or represented as Jews and don't embed themselves into the machine the way the Jews do either.
The Asians, which I mean Indians, here make Jewish nepotism look mild.
It's a question of perspective, if you widen your gaze, your opinion will align with reality.
If I was Indian, my tax prep business for Hotels would boom.
If you were Jewish you could drug and sodomise a 13 year old and evade prosecution.
thought the "widen your gaze" line was a crack at asians lol
The offending post-turtles were hired by whom, exactly?
Nuked CoD off the drive last summer during that Nickmercs controversy. It was a lockdown thing for me anyway, met a lot of people in lobbies, got into a few discords, got out of all but one. I took half a look at the new version that must be made for cocaine addicts, it is so twitchy that I get a headache just watching someone stream it.
Mr. Beast got famous with a video where he gave $10k to homeless people. He's not the subject of his videos... the other people are. This is why you see wannabe famous streamers uploading videos with titles like "giving out 5000 burgers to homeless people". I see these recommendations because I couldn't figure out the YT algorithm like I did with Instagram. When I open IG's "Explore" page, every other video is a gruesome death in some Chinese sweatshop or road accident where people go flying. Like the good old times when maddox.xmission.com was one of the most trafficked site on the internet. (God, that guy fell down hard.)
I got a chuckle though. I had no idea what a 'tanker' Corvette was but a short google later I found this:
"...is simply a larger fuel tank option (RPO N03) to give the C2 Corvette more range for endurance racing. The option gave the Corvette a massive 36.5-gallon (that's over 138 liters) tank (...) The Corvette shown here was bought new at Capital Chevrolet in Nashville, TN, by racer Anatoly "Toly" Arutunoff and was then exported to Germany and put into service as a race car by Arutunoff, who was one of only a handful of privateer Grand Prix entrants, and once finished fourth against the factory teams"
I don't consume ANY gaming content other than the games, so this NICKMERCS thing is new to me, and disappointing. You have to shake your head at the fact that the makers of a game that transparently socializes young men into the idea of killing random Arabs and Russians in generic Arabic/Slavic cities draw the line at... not wanting kids to get fucked.
Mr. Beast is to Jason Cammisa or DeMuro as Muddy Waters is to Joe Bonnamassa; one is a generational talent and the others simply fill space. Yes, YouTube is a fundamentally stupid field of art but he's the master nonetheless.
ACF members appear throughout history; we will eventually find that Napoleon was an early subscriber.
Maddox turned into everything he hated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WfRcnF4iZI
i had a'65 tanker too--and a '71 alloy-head 454 which was the most fault-ridden new car i've ever had
Would that have been an L88 car? I think those were the only ones that had the aluminum head other than the ZL1 cars.
LS6 was the 454 with aluminum heads. You also had the L-89, which was the L71 (427 435hp) engine but with aluminum heads.
True, I completely forgot about the LS6 in non-Chevelle applications.
Am I the only one seeing a ton of Tesla ads on YouTube?
Yes because I have (insert monocle) YouTube Premium and don’t see ads.
"What does this Tesla have in common with a locomotive?"
Runs on coal? Raced an Oldsmobile once?
It's a Simpsons joke.
I wouldn't let me kids watch it because I figured they could learn how to be smartasses all on their own. Also, I got tired of "Idiot Husband/Dad" jokes somewhere between The Honeymooners reruns and The Flintstones first season. At least Dinosaurs' take on it was self-aware.
Their tribute to Jam Handy films, A World Without Zinc, makes me wonder what a Jam Handy promotional film about Tesla would be like.
"COME BACK, ZINC!!!"
The Kentucky Fried Movie did the “Zinc Oxide and You” gag first.
“Which I can also afford.”
YouTube Premium is well worth the $10 or so it costs a month.
One side benefit that I didn’t realize until after I’d been paying for it for a while is that I do not see political ads. I also don’t have cable / watch TV.
I originally bought it because it enabled you to download YT videos to view offline. It is and was fantastic for flying with small children, among other things.
No. They make absolutely no sense for me but after a couple cocktails I almost ordered one.
PCs and Adblockers. Youtube had somehow gotten around the Adblockers for a bit but after a couple of days, the ads went silent.
I give directly to Youtubers sometimes if they have the heart with the dollar sign symbol. I wouldn't mind the ads, except when they insert them in the middle of a vid....Tesla....o.
AdBlock Plus does the same thing for free!