Wednesday ORT: 2026 F1 Cars, Caramel, Lizards, Amelia

All subscribers welcome

Good evening, friends. Today we will have an unusual-for-ACF rule: No U.S. Politics. This is because I will be short on moderation and response time until tomorrow afternoon. Plus, we already had it all out on Sunday. So…

A season on the brink

Longtime Drive To Survive viewers will remember the season when Williams F1 couldn’t even make it to the first test. The implication was that Claire Williams, bless her lovely heart, wasn’t fit to run the team. It’s certainly true that the men in blue have had a dramatic turnaround lately — but the more things change… Williams is once again unable to properly participate in early testing. Apparently the car is significantly overweight (66 pounds!!!) and it’s failed the FIA crash test.

Meanwhile, Mercedes and Red Bull are rumored to have an “engine trick”, the Ferrari livery is drawing unfortunate comparisons to the awful Vettel/Raikkonen 2016 season, and Audi is reported to be in excellent shape, technologically.

After the first test I’ll invite you all to make your guesses for the season results, but for now let’s just trade rumors.

Ain’t nobody got time for that

A friend of mine was approached about selling his very fancy NA Miata. The buyer was enthusiastic, he had a strong but not unbelievable offer, and he wanted to complete the deal quickly… through “Caramel”.

Apparently, Caramel is a new middleman for Bring-A-Trailer auctions, which have been suffering some credibility issues as of late. I haven’t managed to ascertain all the costs and procedures involved, but I want to briefly put this in context. For much of American history, the secondhand car sales process went like so:

0. You put a “For Sale” sign on the car and parked it out near the road. Maybe, maybe, you do a newspaper ad.

1. Someone sees it. They come up to the house and you negotiate.

2. They pay in cash or a check that can be immediately cashed.

3. You sign the title.

4. End of story.

Here’s how it works now:

0. You list your car with an online service — Middleman #1.

1. You sell the car and deal with a payment processor — Middleman #2.

2. Maybe the buyer wants to use Caramel to “ensure the transaction”, or he wants to use an escrow service — Middleman #3.

3. You hire a shipper — Middleman #4.

4. The car is shipped to a mechanic for a PPI — Middleman #5.

I read recently, and have had it confirmed by people recently familiar with the matter, that pretty much all dating on major college campuses is done now via Tinder and Bumble. Think about that for a minute. You’re on, say, the OSU campus, which has 65,000 young people wandering around in various states of undress depending on the weather. Everywhere you look, there are people who are attractive or interesting to you… so you keep your head down, keep your earbuds in, and go back to your dorm room to swipe on the app.

The “tech bros” and VCs have managed to insert a mandatory profit step into college kids having sex. “Oh,” you reply, “I wouldn’t use the app… I’d just talk to people.” As the Balkan fellow in Taken says: Good luck. As fate would have it, The Commander is auditing a physics class at Ohio State in his spare time, so I went down to have lunch with him. Rather than pick him up in the ES300, which could humiliate him in front of cute girls, I parked the Lexus somewhere dark and walked to meet him. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had earbuds in and their face pointed at the ground. It was like playing Frogger to not knock them down. If you tried to get a woman’s attention in these circumstances, you would likely come off as “creepy”, which is modern speak for “doesn’t use an approved middleman app for casual sex".

We had 120 years of continuous technological innovation in this country. Now we have… an endless procession of middlemen. Let’s not even get into the fact that I counted over a hundred delivery robots in the course of a 1.8 mile roundtrip walk. Can you imagine being rich enough in college to have robots delivering your food? What are you doing with your time? Are you too busy swiping?

After some consideration, my friend told the buyer to pound sand. Said he wanted to do it the old fashioned way. Which upset the buyer. But they might have both dodged a bullet:

The girls school had 82 nationalities!

We sometimes discuss “lizards” on this board. No, we don’t mean actual lizards in human outfits ruling the world. No one believes that. We mean people who are devoid of normal human emotion. The obvious example is always Mark Zuckerberg, but to be honest I think Zuck is trying to be a normal person. He’s traveling around, he’s training to fight, he is interacting with as many people as he can given the deranging circumstances of his wealth and responsibilities.

The woman in the above post? She’s a friend of an acquaintance, and I found this post working backwards from a comment she left on said acquaintance’s page because I saw the name and thought she might be married to someone else I know. Turns out that’s not the case — it’s actually her maiden name, she didn’t take her husband’s name because… who knows why.

It certainly isn’t because he doesn’t spoil her appropriately. Just read this post. Do you want to know this person? Are you impressed by her? Would you spend a moment of your life listening to her talk about her year in Spain? The opening sentence — Life abroad for a year in Spain was the reset I never knew I needed after 15 years of go mode… You wanna know what she’s been doing in “Go Mode”? Working at a yoga studio and traveling to Europe every summer.

She’s basically the Wichita Lineman.

I’ll never get over the fresh orange juice for 3 Euros. Bitch, that is four dollars! Most places in America will sell you a bottle of wine, be it “Two Buck Chuck” or “Thunderbird” or “Alizee”, for less than that!

It really boggles the mind. You’re seeing a completely alien viewpoint on life here. It’s like she is… a lizard from outer space.

Guess what? She can buy and sell most of us.

Finally, a woman to defend Britain

You can’t make this stuff up: the British government paid a king’s ransom (literally) to some jag-off group to make a Humans Of Flat style interactive website that, more or less, is intended to intimidate young English men and women into staying quiet about what’s happening to their country. The villain of the website is “Amelia”, a purple-haired bigot fascist Nazi whatever who is trying to radicalize “Charlie” into doing crazy stuff like marching and protesting against perfectly normal diverse activities like the thousand-plus Rotherham rapes.

You’re supposed to hate Amelia. You’re supposed to be scared of her. That isn’t how it worked out. And I’ll now direct you to a Substack that explains it all, hilariously:

Amelia Sans Merci

I adore all the Amelia fan art. For perhaps the first time, we are seeing the use of AI for a genuine artistic — which is to say contextual — purpose. There was once a time where most of the people who hated the UK’s coercive behavior would have had to just, ya know, write something angry and incohesive. Now they can design a snarky comment.

Here’s to you, Amelia. But make no mistake: when the UK’s not-so-secret police find the people who made the art, they will be punished far more severely than, say, a grooming gang that raped a thousand innocent and powerless women over the course of a decade or more. Because the latter… makes the cheap labor flow.