Wednesday ORT: Air Fryer Supreme, Commander On Track, Sex For Rent

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yet another young woman showing up to take my job

Looking for something else great to read today? Check out our own Lynn Gardner’s coverage of the Greenbrier Concours over at The Self Starter, on page 18. Last week’s Perfecting Equilibrium also has a few nice words regarding your humble author; I’m always eager to signal boost that sort of content.

Usual rules apply for today’s political topics: you’re free to attack any public figure and you’re free to attack me, but fellow readers are sacrosanct. Let’s go.

“Six minutes (and 22 seconds), Porky Fresh.”

Oh, how Radical owners around the world are wailing today, now that the Chinese Air Fryer Over 9000 has laid waste to the SR8’s 6:48 Ring time! We have our excuses prepared: the Gen3 SR8, as operated by your humble author, is nontrivially faster than the Gen1 car that set the time. (But likely not 27 seconds faster.) The RXC500, which should be as fast as the Xiaomi, never got a proper test due to weather and traffic circumstances. (Radical set all their times during public days, you see.)

At least we have some company in our disgrace, including the infamously unreliable AMG:ONE. (I’m told there is an example on display that hasn’t moved for two years, because nobody can get it started and they also can’t figure out how to tow it out of its location inside a showroom.) And we also have the mild consolation that, unlike the seven-minute Air Fryer, this SU7 isn’t remotely close to being street legal. It’s as prepped as Xiaomi knows how to make it, and driven by…

…well, nobody seems to know that. Interesting, right? Western automakers usually publicize their driver, while Xiaomi seems to deliberately omit any reference to the nut behind the wheel. He’s certainly brave, I’ll give you that, and if he occasionally seems to be quite a bit behind the car in the more difficult segments… my God, man, wouldn’t you be as well?

God willing, this stunt will be the final nail in the Ring-time coffin, and the automakers can get back to doing God’s work, by which I mean reinventing the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Brougham.

It’s been a good week for Xiaomi; they’re claiming in just 18 hours they got 240,000 “lock-in” orders for this Porsh-lookin’ thang, as well:

Knowing what we know about Chinese sales numbers, I’ll continue to view that claim with some skepticism, although in a country of a billion people it doesn’t seem too hard to sell that many cars in 18 hours. Chrysler sold all 2,200 300C Finals in about six hours, and unlike the above “YU7” the 300C Scat Pack isn’t even faster than your average Taycan!

The daughter wins, but the son also rises

if i’d known he was gonna win, i’d have fixed the fuckin’ thing ahead of time

She’s still a little annoyed with the old folks at Waterford Hills, so Mini Danger Girl decided to skip their race this weekend and run with SCCA Race Experience at Nelson Ledges instead. It’s a great program designed to compete with the various “affordable enduro” series out there. $385 gets you a 3 hour enduro race with just one mandatory five-minute stop.

I hadn’t seen The Commander all week, largely because (I kid you not) he was observing a refueling mission over the Atlantic, so I asked him if he wanted to come try the Time Trial that is the other part of SCCA Race Experience. Rather naively, I thought I would be able to sit with him during his drives and provide a bit of coaching. He’d never been on a full-sized track before, and hadn’t done a race start since running Margay Ignite 206cc in… the fall of 2020. He’s had his drivers license for three months, which is also the sum total of his stick-shift driving time.

Well, SCCA doesn’t allow for in-car coaching during these weekends, so I did the most sensible thing, which was to hand him a Shoei RF-1400 “Faust” helmet and wish him good luck. I mean, it’s not like Nelson Ledges is the fastest track east of the Mississippi, it’s not like it hasn’t killed some people, and it’s not like he was driving a 146,000-mile V6 Accord on Goodyear “WeatheReady” all-seasons. Okay, that’s all actually true, so I spent his trio of his sessions completely freaked out.

Oh, and it rained, so the track had standing water in a couple tricky spots.

Imagine my surprise when John went almost immediately to the top of the Group C charts — and improved over the course of the day. He was the fastest “Stock 6” driver of Saturday, ahead of two BMWs, and the third-fastest Stock driver overall, behind a C8 and a Camaro SS LT1 but ahead of two C7 Vettes. He managed to beat about a third of the “expert” group, regardless of vehicle. At one point, to my dismay, I looked out towards “The Kink” at Ledges and saw that his right rear wheel was off the ground at what I later found out was 117 miles per hour.

“Significant ABS in the wet patches,” he reported afterwards, along with speeds in every corner. Intellectually I know that as a trained pilot he monitors all gauges by default, but I still had to laugh because I never know how fast I’m going in any corner.

the new balance 997 is the choice of all kids who don’t care about rizz

In the debriefing, two adults complained of not being able to catch John in their C7 GS and BR-Z, respectively. “His mother’s fast,” the group leader replied by way of explanation, which gave me pause until I realize that they consider Danger Girl to be his mother. John’s actual mother quit track driving in 2003 when a Dodge Daytona ES (remember those?) did a full 720 right in front of her 330i Sport… here at Ledges, actually.

With my complete rookie kid sitting on top of his class, it was mandatory that Mini Danger Girl and I take the overall win in the 13-car enduro race, just to avoid embarrassment. And we would have done it, too… had the crew put gas in the car before the start of the race. Our extra stop cost us about five minutes and forty-five seconds; we finished first in a two-car class but fourth overall, trailing our old pal and overall winner Cagri Yilmaz in his NASA champion E46 by… about four and a half laps, which at Nelson works out to five and a half minutes.

I enjoyed the challenges of working traffic in a 100-horsepower car that was literally invisible to most competitors and which was 10-15mph slower on the back straight than the turbo Golfs and 3-Series Bimmers surrounding us on the time charts. Every pass I made had to be done in some horrifying place, like around the outside of the Carousel.

I took about 2 hours and 20 minutes of the 3 hours, covering the start and finish with MDG pulling a nice middle stint while I panted like a dog in the 85-degree heat and deep-throated a PATH water bottle in front of local children. After a few years of driving Radicals, the Spec Racer Ford feels like a straight-six F-150 with two bad plugs. I can’t wait until MDG moves to Formula Continental and I can borrow that from her.

And then it was all done. They gave MDG a winner’s plaque and we loaded up for home. The two hours’ drive back gave me plenty of time to think. Reader, there are times when I think my life has been nothing but bad luck, and worse choices, ever since February of 2019. But some of those choices led me to a day when both my recently-acquired daughter and soon-to-flee-the-nest son would win their class on the same day, and at the racetrack I’ve always loved more than any other. So I can eat the rest of it.

I can’t complain — but, like the man said, sometimes I still do.

Putting the ‘ho’ in ‘housing crisis’

From the Department Of Yes, That’s Really Happening comes this Canadian Broadcasting Company video about “sex for rent”. Apparently this is a big thing in Canada now. Young women, particularly international students, are being targeted by ads offering rent-free housing in exchange for sexual availability. When the CBC hired some, uh, female people to “sting” these would-be landlord players, eight out of ten were forthrightly explicit about what they wanted.

worst benefits package ever

As you can probably guess, the same CBC that embraces OnlyFans sex work is quite outraged at the idea of sex housing. I’m not certain I see the moral difference. The latter is arguably more dangerous, but the former is more public and if you OF content creators out there think that GPT- 6.0 won’t be able to figure out your social security number and kids’ names in 2028 from an image of your left shoulder taken during your online “bad girl phase” in 2016 then you’re too naive to be using the Internet.

Here’s what fascinates me about the whole deal, besides the whole “are people really THAT non-choosy” aspect: It’s obvious to me why this sex-for-rent thing is happening. Canada has effectively open borders. This country of 40 million people, already one-quarter immigrant, accepts half a million new immigrants every year. The net effect of this, as is always the case with substantial immigration, is to massively favor the people who hold capital over the people who perform labor.

Unrestricted immigration is great for landlords, because Canada can barely start 250,000 homes a year. It’s great for corporations who like cheap labor, it’s great for people who have something to sell. Canada subsidizes immigrants through tax revenue, so it’s basically a transfer payment from the government to landlords and shopkeepers in downtown areas.

As labor value craters and real estate soars, some hugely unpleasant things are going to happen. Sex-for-rent is merely the most obvious of them. And it can only get worse, because in ten years Canada will have five million more people looking to rent the existing stock.

I have dozens of highly progressive readers here on ACF, and many of you send me great stuff to read on the topics of immigration and human rights. All of you have your hearts in the right place. But I despise the fact that we use the best and most decent intentions among us to create and inflame a situation that amounts to “the rich get richer, and the poor can’t work.” It’s like nobody ever sat down and said “Why are all these Fortune 500 corporations and real-estate zillionaires so insistent that open borders are the only legitimate position to hold? Aren’t these the same people who poison the environment, exploit the weakest among us, and take what they want without mercy or decency? How is it that Corporation X wants to put drywall dust in baby formula but they also want an unlimited number of migrants? How are these positions compatible?”

I’ve come to believe that support for open borders is a flex. It’s the position taken by people who stand to economically benefit from having additional demand for their capital, whether the capital is real estate or investments or, I don’t know, Rolex Submariners. When you publicly state that immigration should be effectively unlimited, you are saying “I’m so rich, so successful, so unique and powerful, that I can only benefit from this.”

It’s like me saying, “Sure, I think women should be able to filter by height on Tinder.” That can’t hurt me, but it’s hell on the five-foot-eight crowd. And I can sound like a real advocate for women’s rights — “Nobody should ever have to take off their heels on a first date!” — while I laugh at what that policy does to other people.

Obviously, some of you aren’t landlords or capital-holders at all. You’re just decent people who want everyone to have the same chances you’ve had. And I admire that. Unfortunately for all of us, we live in a world that isn’t quite a zero-sum game but often has characteristics similar to a zero-sum game. So when you allow 500,000 “international students” to come into Canada every year, you have to consider the fact that you are, in fact, creating a crab-bucket situation when it comes to housing, jobs, opportunities, and resources. We wouldn’t be in a situation where female Canadian “newcomers” had to have sex with their landlords if we had… fewer female Canadian newcomers.

One of adulthood’s worst lessons is that things can feel good to us, or be beneficial to us as individuals, yet be inimical to society. Unlimited pornography. Low-cost recreational marijuana. Easy divorce. Lack of zoning laws. And so on. Maybe you’ll be at a dinner party this weekend, and someone will start talking about Trump and his fascist stance on immigration. And you might agree, in principle. Why not? But if you want to spark a real discussion, maybe ask your interlocutor something like, “If Canada can let in 500,000 people a year instead of 100,000, but some percentage of them have to literally get fingered by old people in order to live here, is that a good thing?” If you’re unlucky — and this is probably what will happen — you’ll be met with raw emotion. In a perfect world, however, this would get us all thinking about the consequences of feel-good decisions, for ourselves and others.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to file my application for permanent residency in Switzerland. Just one trip there a decade or so back was enough to convince me that I want to live in a squeaky-clean mountain village outside Lucerne for the rest of my life. It’s better than the township, even. Take note, Swiss landlords: I do all the stuff.