They get some flack for being relatively heavy, but based on my brief experience with the car, some of that weight might've gone toward refinement and comfort. The interior seems to hold up well (other than the stitching at the top of the rear seats, they almost all tear at the seam), and the ride over freeway expansion joints was measurably better than say my FC convertible. If you're looking at 928s, you're probably more interested in a GT cruiser experience anyway. However, it would be remiss of me to not mention that the GTO was built by Holden in Australia, and though the engine is shared with the C6 Corvette, I've heard that certain suspension components and body panels can be difficult to source, or at least take a while to be shipped to your door.
I always found them to be dull. They were fast in a ground level Lear Jet kinda way, but while they were impressive in their ability to cover lots of miles at triple digit speeds in comfort, they were never any fun. The 944S of the era was a dramatically more enjoyable car. Sacrilege ahead, but it always enjoyed the 944S more than any contemporary 911. Especially with the stock suspension. The 15 inch wheels were perfect. If your driving plans include inhaling states at 100 mph+, go for it. Otherwise, meh. I do have to add that detailing the engine of a 928 an incredible pleasure.
Around 1994, my girlfriend bought a used 1978 928 with money she got from a settlement after getting hit by a drunk driver. Never mind that she was also drunk at the time. Anyway, when it ran it was a true joy to drive. When it didn’t, which was often, it was a nightmare of expensive, difficult to find parts and the local mechanics had no idea how to work on it. I can’t imagine the situation has improved in the 30 years since.
So what else should we consider? BMW 6 series? The Merc coupes are more sedate in their pace, looks, prices, pretty much every way. I’m not considering the SL in this comparison.
I’m rather fond of my 2 series coupe. 4 series if you need more room. Lexus RC-F would probably be the least hassle. I’d love to have an S5 but I don’t fit with a helmet.
You won't be able to make REAL pace in any car from this era without spending insane money on stuff like torque tube bushings. I will go one further than Fat Baby and say... RC350.
If the styling works for you, the E63 6-series seems like a good fit. I wonder if a W126 coupe would actually be cheaper to keep going - I stop and check my retirement account every time I see a clean 560SEC listed.
I've started to get bullish on the E63 cars, I'd love to own a M6 if someone else was paying for and managing the maintenance, but I think you can have 85% the experience with a 645/650 for much less purchase price and maintenance hassle.
The original e24 6 series M6 or 635csi, had the original version of the S38, as well as the e28 M5. If you liked the E34 I imagine the e28 would blow your hair back.
FWIW, we've had a couple e60 5-series in my family, though they were a pair of low-brow 525 and 530. But I think they share a lot of parts, esp. electronics.
Anyway, they were more reliable than we'd anticipated with the exception of a very sensitive TPMS.
The more time of spent with fancy cars with exotic engines, the more I’ve started to admire American V8s. Powerful. Simple. Easy to service. Easy to find parts. Run forever. Yeah, you lose some exclusivity, but you also don’t get to know all the local mechanics, and the guys at the parts houses.
I had a friend who used to be a Porsche mechanic help me do some work on my 96 Mercedes SL and he said the way it was built reminded him of working on a 928 in that everything was engineered to be as complex as possible and not terribly mechanic friendly.
I bought it as a weekend car that my wife could drive since it was an automatic and it drives wonderfully, it has all of those old world Mercedes qualities and really does feel like it was carved from a solid block of granite even with the top down.
Yes you definitely need to worry about the top. Mine has 11 or 12 cylinders that will all eventually leak—not all of mine leak but enough do that the power top is inoperable. The good news is that you can manually raise and lower and even fully latch the top manually with the special MB tool. I have two of them because it helps with the rear latches. There are places that will rebuild the cylinders and the last time I looked it was around $800 plus shipping to have the set done. The bad news is that then you have to remove and then replace the cylinders and this is where things get dicey. All of the pieces you need to remove are either difficult to get to or covered with what is now almost thirty year old brittle plastic panels that have an excellent chance of breaking if you look at them the wrong way.
One of my map lights in the rear view mirror housing was undone so I bought a new light and lens and while removing the mirror broke the housing not realizing that these were no longer available new and a good used one was $500; early on I found one for under $300 and I’m kicking myself for not buying it.
Mechanically pretty much most parts are still available—it shares a lot with the W124–but some other parts can be incredibly expensive. My car has a mysterious coolant leak, I think it’s a hose that’s under the manifold but I haven’t dug into it yet because it just looks like a lot of stuff needs to come off. If there’s an easy way and a difficult way to build something the engineers chose the hard way.
A little bit of deferred maintenance on one of these will quickly snowball into an expensive laundry list and my car is at the point where it doesn’t make sense to put anymore money into it because these cars essentially have no value unless they are in top shape. I thought I bought mine cheap ten years ago and it wasn’t anywhere cheap enough—free might not have been cheap enough.
PS "Liked" for the info and detail, not because of the ultimate financial outcome.
It's silly to say, "oh, I think my next car will be either a NB Miata or an SL500..." but that's kind of my thinking right now. I feel like values for both have hit the market bottom, and I might be kicking myself in 5 years.
I thought I bought at the bottom of the market when it was just another old car but it’s amazing how these things aren’t worth a bucket or warm spit especially when they’re needy. I’m sure as soon as I take a ridiculously low offer for it values will skyrocket and the Insurance Company blog will be telling us how they’re the hottest appreciating car on the market.
I briefly owned a R129 and learned that the German word for "fuck you" is "plastic." I went through a tube of JB Weld plastic-weld epoxy, a good chunk of a tube of JB Weld plastic-weld putty, and two full tubes of Gorilla 5-minute epoxy fixing random plastic bits. Granted, it was a Florida car that spent its entire life baking under UV rays, but still.
On the plus side, the previous owner had all of the hydraulics done in 2022, so I didn't have to worry about that.
If you get the Porker pay all the money for the best one you can find, then save extra for the first repair bill. Or, S550 Mustang, the nicest Infinity G35/G37 that hasn't been vaped in by a Hoonigan t-shirt kid, BMW 650i, if you need to have a little German suffering, or M6 if you want an alternative but equal amount of 928 suffering, if a manual isn't necessary, and you're real about what your costs will be to operate a 928, then I'd say you can't do better than a Lexus LC500.
If German is a must have for whatever reason, the S5/RS5 coupe recommend themselves for this duty. To say nothing of an E550 benz coupe which (though it will likely break!) would be worlds more reliable and repairable when broken than a 928.
Personally if I was so motivated, I would be looking (people, hold your noses) at Camaros. Best engine in the V8 game. One will fit your price point:
non-SS, V6 1LE 6MT - in the 20s-30
SS 1LE probably around 40 give or take ten grand
Z28 - probably 50 grand BUT comes with an LS7 and the good suspension, IIANM
ZL1 1LE, a car that is to the porsche 928 what a 2024 Camry is to a Model T, in the upper 60s...
(If you were to choose to finance this, by the time you were to have sold, you would surely have lost less irrecoverable money than buying a 928 and keeping it roadable.)
Disenfranchised democrat here - not really sure where I am at the moment - but sitting on the outside looking in, the Republicans need to get their act (back) together. It was / is theirs to lose. Focus on comparing the 4 years under Trump to those under Biden. While there's a lot more complexity and nuance between those two presidencies / time periods; for the average voter it's hard not to realize the difference in the economy and petty crime.
If the Republicans want to win - be laser focused on inflation and safety.
Everyone needs to get their shit back together. As far as I'm concerned, there is nobody worth voting for in either party. There are cultural reasons I won't vote republican, and I've been absolutely disappointed by the democrats who beg for votes by promising stuff they never deliver on. To hell with them all, I say.
But voter sentiment is always bifurcated. I can't remember the last time any "average voter" felt they were better off now than 4 years ago (without the benefit of hindsight).
Even now, in economic polling, most "average voters" say their individual situation is better or improving, but say "the Economy" is going to hell.
I predict punches thrown, ugly things said, and no tour at all. Noel sells out High Flying Birds tours with no problem, and still works with the other members of Oasis, so this is probably another short-lived reconciliation.
Shouldn't someone put together an arena tour featuring those lads, Bush, and The Kinks?
The stage could be designed like a boxing/wrestling 'ring' and the crowds could place bets at the door concerning which group would fall apart on any given evening...
That was just a bonus. I still remember that moment, and totally expecting Kamala to come back with something sharp sounding. Nope, Tulsi just roasted her.
I read tonight that RFK Jr and Gabbard are on the Trump transition team which I think is good news.
The paradox of an outsider getting elected is that they really don’t have an effective team to govern. As Redford said in ‘The Candidate’ when he got elected: “What do we do now?” Exactly.
This paradox is supercharged by what I believe is one of two of Trump’s greatest weaknesses which is poor personnel choices.
What makes you think he's learned that lesson? Saw something where RFK Jr said he was told by Trump that Pompeo implored Trump not to open the books on JFK's assassination when Pompeo was running the CIA. A Trump agreed. And Pompeo was one of Trump's best picks.
Sounds like in that regard Trump has learned, but if his best picks were jerks the obvious jerks must have been beyond horrible.
There is no one around from 63 that could have been a player in all that. Other than the CIA itself.
Thanks! Somewhat adjacent, I don’t categorize people as conservative or progressive or whatever. But whether they are process oriented or outcome oriented.
I’m process oriented so I can accept outcomes I don’t like as long as the rules are clear and the process is fair.
Progressives on the other hand are primarily outcome oriented so they don’t care how they take Gabbard or Trump - or Biden for that matter - as long as they are gone.
No, no revolt, and no specific example, either...just thinking about the concepts.
"I’m process oriented so I can accept outcomes I don’t like as long as the rules are clear and the process is fair." - The concern I have with process orientation is that the rules in life are never clear nor are they fair, so someone will get steamrolled. But this (process orientation) is the basic philosophy of our country up to now, and I think most Americans see it this way.
The logical conclusion for outcome orientation is war, or at least enough aggression/rioting/destruction so that others are afraid to stand against it. As a Christian, I can't support this "end justifies the means" approach.
The idea that Tulsi could have won a Democratic primary is the most absurd thing you've written this year. She no longer has any policy positions in common with your average Democrat, or, for that matter, with the mythical center. She is endorsing Trump because she has become a Trumpist, with the economically lethal combination of protectionism, isolationism, patronage, tolerance of corruption, and political control of monetary policy that makes up Trumpist ideology.
"The idea that Tulsi could have won a Democratic primary is the most absurd thing you've written this year."
I'm saying she could win a general.
"the economically lethal combination... that makes up Trumpist ideology."
At the risk of sounding like the prototypical hick sitting outside a gas station in rural West Virginia: if Trumpist economic ideology is so lacking, and presumably the competing vision of Biden/Harris was so superior, why is the economy visibly worse after the latter replaced the former?
0. It's not worse, at least not country-wide. It's a mixed bag. Prices are higher, but unemployment is lower, and workforce participation is higher. The reason everyone feels worse is mostly sky-high housing prices, which neither Trump nor Biden did anything real to fix.
1. Trump didn't actually implement most of his current agenda, including the most destructive parts, in his first term. He didn't get control of the Fed, he didn't manage to implement Schedule F in time to do anything with it, he didn't engage in mass deportation, he only imposed a few tariffs (but those did have a destructive effect), and he didn't get the Supreme Court ruling giving him carte blanche to be corrupt until he was already out of office.
The Dems voters are the people who are doing well in the currents circumstances. The Republican supporter are the ones being screwed. Not that Mitch gives a shit about the poor, but at least he doesn’t show contempt for them as obviously the Dems do.
And why the heck can’t we edit comments on the app? Maybe someday I’ll actually slow down, reread and edit my comments, rather than just trying to fire something off between calls.
Not all of us; and that's a big reason I'm frustrated with Dems! Anyone who isn't a campaign contributor is getting screwed by anyone who runs a campaign. I believe that to be the case for either side of the aisle.
Fewer migrants, which was something that Trump discussed more in 2016 and needs to return to, would be a concrete benefit of not reelecting the the Biden/Harris administration.
I'm not sure I'd believe any of the official numbers coming from the government. If they measured inflation the way they used to the number would be at the very least twice what they've been reporting. As for unemployment, they don't even count a lot of people who are "no longer participating in the labor market." How many are they not counting? Enough to make the numbers they give us absolutely worthless.
Millions of jobs disappeared during the government's response to covid, and then they've slowly trickled back, and everywhere you look there are "NOW HIRING" signs even years later, but when my wife applied to some of these jobs no one ever called her back. I have no idea what their numbers even mean. 800K? Who counted them? How did he decide what to count? They could have said 8 million or 80K for all the real world meaning the figure has.
Addendum to this: I would be a lot less worried about the long-term effect of a second Trump presidency if his economic policies were the same as the ones his administration ended up pursuing in his first term. We can muddle through yet another tax cut for the highest incomes. But, now, he's promising many things that are all much worse.
Wherein the data analysis points to the middle/lower middle seeing the greatest proportional gain from the tax cuts and somewhere north of half the taxpayers having their burdens reduced with more tax revenue coming from the highest brackets.
Literally, you are operating based on a different set of facts from others here present. Which one is right?
I'm in a place -- a relatively high-tax blue state -- where the SALT component of the TCJA actually increased a lot of upper-middle-income taxpayers' total tax burden (including my own, by about half a percent). My high-income Californian sister-in-law saw her effective tax rate go up several percent.
The picture looks different if you're in a lower-tax state, where the effect for the locals is even better than the total picture your study described.
Maybe those are taxes people in blue states should have been paying 'their fair share' to borrow a term all along.. if you did a do over, instead of grandfathering in expectations of preferential treatment, you know most people would agree with the Trump admin and not otherwise.
"We can muddle through yet another tax cut for the highest incomes."
Makes it sound a great deal like the plain Jane talking point of "tax cuts were just for the rich" when in reality it aided the people most who need relief most. You will forgive any misunderstanding, I hope.
re: SALT (state and local tax) deduction affecting blue states.
You did it to yourselves.
While the Trump tax cuts (TCJA) were working their way through congress, all the democrats were too busy "resisting" instead of negotiating a compromise deal that included SALT. Then in order to make the numbers work, republicans capped SALT deductions to 10K. Only the upper income people in high tax blue states had more than $10k in SALT deductions. As they say; if you're not at the table, then you're the meal.
Next time, stop "resisting" and engage in dialogue with the other side.
BTW. The WSJ often rails against the SALT deduction because it transfers tax revenue from the feds to high (income) tax states that can't control their spending.
"It's not worse!" is laughable. But by all means keep asking vast swaths of the nation who they are gonna believe, the inflated numbers the government has to keep revising down months later or their own bills and paychecks.
Economic Policy aside one has to be blind to not notice the number of non-English speaking foreigners in the local Walmart. I'm also not blind to the fact that the citizens of the county I live in will soon be footing the bill for a new elementary school to address the significant and sudden increase in elementary aged students along with the new teaching staff that will need to speak a second language.
It is the most effective anti-poverty measure ever taken by the United States, with almost all of the benefit going to people who can't work, so I'm very concerned with the future of it. "Young immigrants and immigrants' kids are going to save it" is not even an exaggeration, it's just the truth.
No they won't. Nothing can save SS in the long run. Maybe for you and maybe for me, I'm 58, but I don't expect to get anywhere close to the payments projected in the letter I get from SS every so often. And what if all these new Americans decide they don't want to pay half their wages to keep retired Whitey living in the style to which we've become accustomed? I'm not an accountant, but I am an historian (amateur but one of my degrees is History), and I don't see how we can keep running up trillions in debt for much longer. The biggest unreported news of the past couple of years is the impending death of the petrodollar. What can't go on, won't. Maybe Sherman will tell me where I'm wrong.
SS will get funded. The politics guarantee it. We may have to cut other things to do it, and if we have to, we will. Universal social insurance programs are the most popular things the government does, full stop. They poll far higher than anything else.
I don’t expect to receive anything from Social Security. Knowing that, I will need to provide for my own retirement* plans.
*I cannot foresee myself “retiring” in the conventional sense. I have a good friend who was a co-founder of Regal Cinemas; he went on to start and sell a few more enterprises. He is in his late 60s and has no need to work. That said, he is an active venture capitalist because he derives so much satisfaction from doing so. In fact, he literally put me in the frame to become a co-founder of an extremely exciting business today. It could be the greatest opportunity of my career to date. Obviously I am grateful. I admire him, and hope to emulate him over the course of my own life and career.
Why are you shopping at Walmart? Serious question. I haven’t been in one since 2011.
My parents - who are divorced - live in my hometown. My mother shops (for certain things) at Dollar General because it’s quick, easy, cheap, and she won’t see anyone she knows. My father drives ~90 minutes round trip to shop at Target in lieu of Walmart (and also not to have to bump into people he’d rather not interact with).
Well (and this may sound silly), Target had that thing last year where they hired a satanist to design clothes or something for them, among them a scrotum-holding bikini for child-age "trans" whoevers. Also, they cheered on the burning and looting throughout 2020. The Target is directly across the street from the cheaper and friendlier Walmart in our town, so we do 75% of our grocery shopping there. The other 25% is split between Meijer (which I also don't really like but my wife is a coupon shopper and they have great deals every week) and the local supermarkets.
being in walmart increases my heart rate because the place just feels like a funhouse mirror in which im forced to compare myself to everyone else there and i get a sense of impending doom and feel the need to leave immediately
We haven't been inside a Target store since the Obama 2nd term when they went all in on the trans restroom thing. The more recent venture into child grooming/clothing confirmed we are doing the right thing. Dollar General is ubiquitous and my wife will sometime pick up random items there out of convenience. We go to Walmart about once a month for specific products that are always in stock and well priced. If you want to understand demographics in the United States you can learn a lot by shopping at Walmart once in a while.
I moved a lot when I first moved out as an adult and I quickly learned that the local Walmart was better than anything else at telling me what a potential new area was like and became my first stop before looking for housing in any new area I was moving to.
I spent the first 18 years of my life living in a town so humble, so remote that we had to travel 30 minutes each way for the EVENT of going to Walmart!
My hometown was blessed by Walmart in 2013, so I still haven’t made a pilgrimage.
Sir, I'd suggest reading more scientifically correct sources.
I'm sure those close to the power in Soviet Russia could also always say it's a 'mixed bag', since they were, much much better off than 99% of the rest, and they were the ones that generated the stats too.
I'm saying this as a friendly, since I'm not a US citizen nor political, just based on my observations in life since 2007 or so.
my sole issue with tulsi is that have a vague recollection of her being referred to as pineapple mommy and i have no idea if i read that somewhere or hallucinated that myself
I like both versions. Hopefully some girls in Hawaiian blouses at the bar tonight where I can work that into the conversation. “Say, what’s your preference, pineapple or coconut?”
She's the only recovering Democrat who would have received votes in the Republican primary, I can assure you. I would also take issue with your characterization of the center as "mythical", when roughly 1/3 of the population is moderate, and can be swayed to vote for an Obama, Bush Jr, or Clinton as circumstances dictate.
The “mythical center” doesn’t mean moderates, who tend to have very heterodox opinions spanning left and right. It refers to a set of positions beloved among the DC establishment that are not actually held by many ordinary voters, and nearly all proposals to run “centrists” or to start “center” parties involve these positions and never get off the ground because no one supports them.
What? Most of her political positions are the same as they were 4 or 5 years ago, and she was considered "center left" then. The only thing she has moved slightly more "right" on is gun control.
She has always questioned unnecessary wars. So did most democrats after Bush with Iraq/Iran. The democrats did not seem to lock step with the neocons until some time during the Obama administration.
Tolerance of corruption? The reason she got out was because OF corruption.
I just think the hyperbole here is hilarious. Trump's positions today are just slightly right of Bill Clintons and Tulsi's are just slightly left of Bill Clinton's.
But that says more about the modern democrat party, no?
- Climate change (was a hawk, now a skeptic/denier)
- Gun control (was for assault weapons bans before she was against them)
- Immigration (was for weaker border enforcement, now for stronger)
The only thing that she's been consistent about is what you might call anti-war positions, if you're feeling charitable, or isolationism, if you're not.
To be clear we don't know if she's actually flip-flopped on anything, since she has issued no policy statements nor taken any probing questions from the media. All of the reverses have been by anonymous campaign staffers. As a matter of fact, the only person to go on record, the Harris campaign's comm director, Michael Tyler, today denied that Harris was no longer opposed to fracking.
Anti-war? Nah, she just doesn't want Israel to win.
I'll take Trump's trying to keep us out/get us out of wars over what the last four years has netted us with the Bush/Obama/Hillary/Biden foreign policy people back in the driver's seat.
Thank goodness we've had "adults" back in control instead of Orangutan Man with the big red button, right?
We are going to disagree on this, but I don't think Trump would have handled the Ukraine crisis in a way that promoted our interests, at all. (It is not in our interest to have a reconstituted Soviet Union.)
"(It is not in our interest to have a reconstituted Soviet Union.)"
As someone who was born in 1971, I had an automatic head-nodding response to that... but let's take a minute and think.
What was bad about the Soviet Union?
0. They wanted to spread Communism globally, including in the USA, through supporting the ideology wherever it appeared;
1. They wanted to spread Communism in Europe and elsewhere through military intervention -- the much-derided reactionary "domino theory" that turned out to be absolutely correct in reality.
You can dislike Putin and Russia all you like, but there's no evidence that he wants to do anything besides restore Russia to approximate USSR borders. Sucks to be Ukraine in that situation, but it's perfectly harmless to be, say, Vietnam, or El Salvador. Putin has no political philosophy that has as a core belief the idea that it must spread to the four corners of the globe.
In 1980, there was a very real concern that the USSR would attack the USA in order to conquer the country and install a communist puppet government. What's the risk to the USA now?
If Germany feels threatened by the USSR they should feel free to militarize and prepare for war. It's not really my issue, nor should it be the concern of any American.
In truth, the recent "new Chinese map" where Vladivostok et al are given ancient Chinese secret names is probably more indicative of future conflict direction than anything else happening right now.
You mean, other than being the single nation-state in known history that has murdered the most of its own people? Putin has shown no reluctance to do the same thing. Putin does not have the exact same ideological agenda as the Soviets, but many of the effects are the same.
I also see little evidence that he'd be satisfied to reconstitute the USSR and then leave everyone else alone. In general, the idea that power-hungry people have a limit to their ambitions is not well supported by history. Until he miscalculated by invading Ukraine with an army, which had the effect of scaring all of Europe straight, he was doing a very effective job of bringing Germany within the soft influence of Russia, through a combination of cheap energy and very effective propaganda. Europe, not the USA, was always the main thing we were worried about with the Soviet Union, and an enlarged and emboldened Russia would be no different.
Today, there's another element - industrial capacity. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the more enterprising eastern European countries (notably Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Estonia) have built Europe's industrial base substantially. Meanwhile, Putin's government has wasted a lot of resources through corruption and really has not rebuilt the decaying Soviet-era industrial base. Today this is forcing Putin to kowtow to China for industrial help, which he absolutely hates. If he could get all that new, low-cost industrial capacity in eastern Europe, he would have far more leverage to prevent the Chinese from renaming Vladivostok.
Here's how I see this all playing out with an isolationist US president in office.
First, with the flow of weapons dried up, Ukraine has no choice but to cry uncle. Zelensky is killed, and the Russians finish annexing the five Ukrainian regions they've claimed and engineer a sham election in the rest of Ukraine, which a candidate in the mold of Lukashenka wins. From that point on, Ukraine is bigger Belarus.
Next, the same thing happens in Georgia, which is a far softer target than Ukraine. In Moldova, they see the writing on the wall, and a compromise to split the country is brokered: all Russian-speaking areas become another Russian vassal state, while the Romanian-majority areas form a small rump state that is so weak it probably has to unite with Romania on unfavorable terms.
With a larger army that includes Georgian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Belarusian "assistance," Putin confronts NATO with a choice. Do you want to double your defense budgets overnight, or do you want to arrange for deals involving energy and industrial production (including weapons production) on Russian terms? I genuinely don't know how that would go, but even the best-case scenario is far more expensive for both the EU and the US than it would be to fully fund the current war in Ukraine.
Do you think Harris has the strength to stand against this agenda?
Your studies of history will show you that Trump's isolationist stance will soften as soon as he is in office. The last thing he wants is another Afghanistan with his name on it.
He's also a stronger negotiator than Harris and while we don't want a negotiated solution to end the war, we need someone that can say "pull your troops back or ill authorise every F16 in Europe to go to Ukraine"
I'm not sure that Putin wants USSR borders. He definitely did not want Ukraine to join NATO, and I don't blame him one bit.
Imagine it's 1984 and Mexico decided to join the Warsaw Pact. How would you find out about it?
If you lived south of an Air Force base, you'd probably hear an unusual amount of jet noise, and then look up to see the skies practically darkened. For TV watchers, it might be through the familiar two-tone EBS Alert Signal, followed by "Please stand by for a message from the President of the United States."
A few minutes later, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild union would say something to the effect of:
"My fellow Americans, earlier today we learned that Mexico had decided to join the Warsaw Pact. While the United States is not an imperial nation, we cannot share a 2,000 mile border with a Soviet Satellite. After speaking to the President of Mexico to confirm these developments, I have directed the armed forces to secure our former southern neighbor. The Navy is implementing a complete blockade between Mexico and international waters. The Air Force is denying any air traffic into or out of Mexico. Army paratroopers are securing the national capitol and all state capitols. I have asked the governors of all southern border states, as well as the adjacent states, to activate their National Guards to secure the border, and all have agreed. If you are a member of the National Guard in any state, please contact your commanding officer at this time.
The Mexican people are not the enemy, and we hope for their peaceful cooperation as we work together to stabilize the situation and maintain peace in our hemisphere.
NATO had already agreed quietly not to let Ukraine join, despite the Ukrainians' wishes. Putin invaded anyway based not so much on the fear of NATO as on his own view, supported by very twisted history, that Ukraine and Russia were a single nation and that Ukraine's decision to align with the West constituted an unforgivable insult to that nation. Read his 2021 manifesto. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
A better Cold War analogy would be if President Reagan had published a book-length screed explaining why Mexico was really part of the American nation; we had massed troops at the Mexican border; and the leadership in Mexico went frantically calling to Gorbachev (and everyone else outside the US sphere of influence) for help.
Alrightee then. We’ve a vegetable in charge of the country, we’re spending bazillions on wars nobody wants—or can explain the compelling US interests in perpetuating—our major inner cities are dystopian hellholes, as the school year starts again we’re “educating” a generation of frighteningly unintelligent yutes, yada, yada, yada. However, all is right with the world. Lists once again start—as God intended (it’s somewhere in Leviticus)—with the numeral 0.
The spread of Soviet style Communism around the world during the height of the Cold War is now the American Imperial gambit, using color revolutions, sanctions/World Bank/IMF and arms deals.
The whole issue is that the State Department was given carte blanche by Biden's crew. They renewed talks of bringing up NATO membership for Ukraine (even though they maybe didn't have serious plans to actually do this), knowing full well that this was an seriously unacceptable arrangement for Russia from a national security standpoint. The hypothetical example below of Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact or having Chinese military advisors on the ground after a chinese supported coup is on point. The US *wanted* Russia to pull the trigger and to get into a bloody mess on their border, that was the whole point. The giddiness of various congress-critters over how they can use Ukraine as a bloody battering ram (with exactly zero regard for crippling casualties on the Ukrainian side) is very much out in the open. In their view, the US MIC is making bank (and by extension so are they), EU cut themselves off of Russia's oil/gas which we now sell them our own at elevated prices, Russia is getting a bloody nose... who cares about 500k+ dead Ukrainian men?
Free trade globalists are just like the people who throw money at failing schools and add more restrictive gun laws to the most restrictive gun law states. Keep telling the kid in Saginaw, who doesn't know who his dad is and whose mom is addicted to fentanyl how awful protectionism is.
Speculation I read is that Zuck sees a lot more of the real data than we do and maybe he’s placating the right a little bit in anticipation of a change in the political winds come November. One can hope.
I would probably cross the aisle to vote for Tulsi, except her gun control record gives me pause (I’m nearly a one issue voter), and it appears she hates nuclear power which is nonsensical to me.
She has moved her position slightly more right on gun control. I saw a few interviews a few years back and she has reconsidered some of her position here.
I'm more conservative than Trump, and if Trump ran against Tulsi, I'd probably vote for Tulsi because I think she'd be a more effective leader as president, even if I have more in common with Trump's policies.
As far as Zuck goes, I don't necessary blame him.
My problem is, why isn't he pointing directly to the individuals that did this? Why aren't those people fired?
Zuck actually sees less than people think because they've (a) shut down a lot of their internal toolsets, and (b) they don't meaningfully store any temporary, deleted, or taken-down data.
I'm sure he could get "most" of whatever he wanted to see, but depending on the query or report, it would be a VERY big internal ask.
CA still exists, sort of. Their teams have gone off to form other identical companies like Propria.
But really that work has just been mainlined (and I use that word deliberately) into the portfolios of most large market research/digital services consultancies. The biggest expense is still usually buying space, so scale matters.
Why go to a niche shop run by pollsters similar to Mark Penn, when you can go to a place with $2B of buying power... run by the actual Mark Penn?
I'm neutral on her, but 2016 must have fundamentally set something in motion with her.
On a similar note, RFK Jr is not well. The only I remember from the Arnold documentary was, when Arnold was asked about his friendship with him and his conspiracy-mindedness, was how gracefully he answered it.
Something like, "Look, my personal feelings are personal, but if your father and uncle were assassinated like they were - and the subsequent investigations and records were handled they way they were - wouldn't that do something to you too?"
It was great to see you guys and capture some moments over the weekend! I'll be stopping by Woodward Camera in about 90 minutes to pick up my film, hopefully there's some usable frames on there (apparently I wound the finished roll in my vintage Oly backwards and ripped it off the spool. I'm not sure if that prevented them from developing it, as they did not provide that information in the email. I sure hope it's ok!). I hope we get to meet again in a more relaxed setting soon, with more time to chat, but I'm always down to go snap photos of cars doing cool shit!
Wow Zucc, what an unexpected birthday present! As much as I resent social media sometimes, as exploitive as Zucc is, and although Meta did bend to the will of government at the time, I do have a strange respect for this letter. Yes, he should have had this spinal cord all along, but the letter really does shine a light on a serious issue and puts a much-needed boundary back in place - at least in theory. This is me taking it at face value, mind, and there might well be more serious shit hidden in Zucc's closet - as Jack alluded to. I'm not sure government meddling would necessarily reveal that pile, either.
Hey sorry I missed you. I shot a couple rolls too, will develop next week after the Hamtramck Labor Day festival, a must-make annual event. If you haven't heard the Polish Muslims you have sadly missed out. This weekend Jack White may drop in too.
Woodward Camera is terrible. I must have developed 500 rolls with them over the years before going with tiny Express Photo in Livonia.
Jacks Radical is kinda cool I must admit. I had to leave to go to Portland early Sunday. Next time.
Ah man! I was sort of following Jack around for the most part unless he was tending to racing business, and I generally tried to stay out of the way of anybody. We'll meet somewhere I'm sure! I've only had good luck with Woodward thus far! I scan and convert myself now so all they need to do for me is develop. My buddy likes Express in Livonia but that's far out of my way, and Woodward can be an easy stop after work. Granted, my negative collection is more like 50 rolls instead of 500+.
The most fun moment around Tulsi joining Trump, was Bobby’s tweet, welcoming her to the Justice League, and all the great memes that followed. Lots of rumours that there are more former Dems about to join the Trump team. Bernie next? Kidding!
Speaking of Made in USA, I just ordered a Malco Eagle Grip. Malco apparently stopped making them in the old Vice Grip plant, and some folks who have ordered them have received Snap On branded ones. Anyhow, they are supposedly the best Vice Grips you can get, and, again, they were made in the USA, which is important to this Canuck. Be interesting to see what the delivery guy brings on Saturday.
Thanks for the link. I likely wasn’t in the market at the time,so they fell off my radar. My pair of fake Vice Grips fell apart, so I went hunting for the best ones I could find. The local store had Vice Grip branded ones, but seeing the Made in China on the back of the package annoyed me so much, that I paid twice as much for the Malcos.
Last time I looked into it, more then 2/3s of all of Canadas economic activity is with the US. Not just trade, but ALL economic activity. However, no good Canadian can ever admit that the damn Yankees are who we owe our comfortable lives to.
The thing that annoys me the most about Canadians is their total assholery towards America and Americans. We have the best neighbours any country has ever had. We should show a little gratitude.
might be because american politics us so much more interesting than ours which boils down to trudeau being a complete retard and his eventual replacement pierre not being all that much better on policy but the optics are great
That graph is frightening. Overseas duty should be the only reasonable justification for mail in voting, and frankly those numbers are so small as to probably justify banning it entirely.
In person. With ID. One day. Purple finger.
Pols are dumb. Zuck may not have Epstein level dirt, but it's probably close.
And Zuckerberg is likely an order of magnitude more dangerous that Epstein in weaponizing that data because he lacks any humanity whatsoever. Epstein was at least driven by the very human senses of greed and lust. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a wannabe Bond villain autistic like Zuckerberg. He's a human Skynet.
And anybody who could build a worldwide computer network from scratch isn't normal by any stretch of the imagination, or subject to the same incentives.
Let's not dehumanize Zuckerberg (or anyone) over a bullshit DSM "diagnosis," especially not one of the most controversial, elastic, and broken entries. Let's dehumanize him over his demeanor and past behavior.
thank you dr piech shall we add horespower as well
real talk though but is redbull shitting the bed or what because thats a massive gap to a mclaren of all things and hearing talk of lando actually maybe being the best driver on the grid makes little sense
anyway congrats on your record and best of luck getting the thing to pass sound
exhaust systems are an interest of mine and trying to figure out why some drone and some can be both quiet and not kill power is fascinating
also saw david vizards vid on his trick cyclone mufflers and a bit on how they worked but there will always be the target of a light weight and durable muffler that meets sound and also fits
the math is fun but implementing it in practice is hard
We used a Vizard book as course material in High Performance Fuels class. I'll have to look for that video, the man is a mad genius!
I think Jack's mufflers have a decent packing solution now, and should they try the "laguna tips" again, I think it should be a pipe that fits into the Radical tips tighter and they should point it either directly right or right-and-slightly-up. These were discussed in the pit on Sunday.
It's possible that I was tripping the meter from the "Esses" or "swamp" section next to where we were pitted... I think up and to the right would work, but that's when the whole "you're gonna melt the wing" conversation happens.
Eeeesh, I hadn't considered the wang... or the fact that pointing the sound to the right would just make the car louder thru Swamp. Maybe it's just a PR6 track until someone breaks the GTX record again?
mid-'60s a man talked to me at sebring about his intake manifold patent which put little rings in the tubes; he said the wave charging thus produced would overcome the apparent restrictions of those little narrowings. who knows?
jokes aside i dont know why they bother with coed mma or other sports
theres a definite strength advantage but everyone already knew that so what is the actual point other than to pretend that skill can overcome strength except when it cant
Because it’s fun, and it’s a learning opportunity.
I love rolling with skilled women. It gives me an opportunity to try out flashy and/or low percentage technique in real time on someone who’s not going to be able to stack me on my neck and hold me up in the air like they’re painting the floor with my head when I botch something new
The ladies get experience rolling with people with a size and weight advantage which is beneficial in competition because no one in their weight class is going to be as strong as a man.
And it’s insulated a lot of women from people selling them nonsense self-defense shit that puts them in even more danger.
I also think classes with a mix of people are more fun than sausage parties
when i was a kid i read in reader's digest about the first time judo/jiujitsu/whatever was in the olympics. they had no classes because the art would make everybody equal, right. apparently the swedes just picked up all the orientals and threw them onto the mat enroute to the gold...at least i think it was the swedes.
I got too old to do Jiujitsu years ago. But rolling with women is so stupid. Ok, you are 5'8" and 115lbs. I, at the time, am 6'2" 215lbs and can literally bench press more than double your weight. If I wanted to kill you, no magical arm bar is protecting you. 135lb dudes? Yeah, plenty of them could kick my ass. All the chicks in the class, bar the lesbians, end up fucking one of the instructors 100% of the time.
I've worked with many of the content and policy folks at Meta (past tense, because most of those teams have been gutted) and they generally did not feel pressured by DC. Rather - at least in the context of COVID - they had the thankless job of trying to tamp down the truly absurd crap at the beginning (esp. the hucksters who were shilling useless, if not outright dangerous, "cures" or "preventions"), which Trump only made worse... and then having to fight the eventual over-reach from the last-dying-breath-lockdown-zealots, which groups like blue-state teachers' unions, whose oldest (and most senior) members didn't want to go back in-person, only made worse.
Like most "first principles" Silicon Valley types, Zuck's "first principles" are his billions. As for his truly grating self-satisfaction about the CZ grants, ask any local leader which was easier to deal with during COVID: CZ and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation?... or the government?
I can only imagine the kind of crazy stuff that races around Meta platforms... but that's part and parcel of being a social media, right? Having explicit government intervention, even if it felt light at ground level compared to more pressing imperatives, is a morally different thing.
Honestly, I have very conflicted feelings about this.
Re: COVID, I remember reading how Vermont had the "least conflict" in drafting and adhering to an agreed-upon public health strategy. The thing that came up time-and-again was that the two major online news outlets shut down their comments section during the peak of the rancor, which forced people to "town hall" the process IRL (to the degree that was possible, given the time).
The caveats are obviously many: VT is a small and homogenous state, it has a rich history of town hall civics, etc. But my gut tells me there's something to it, esp. given social media/comments' tendency to turn something volatile into an actual explosion. And that's not a dig against conservatives. You should see the blue-on-blue online savagery in my town!
Anyway re: VT and COVID, I'd love to hear the lived experience of any Green Mountain ACF'er on that...
On the other hand, I don't want DC to umpire free speech, esp. online. Electeds craft legislation around the loudest, most extreme examples, especially if they come with kids' tears, and don't bother to study any relevant data...
Which, of course, is harder to get than a NA V8 in a nice RWD sedan. So again, Zuck (and Elon) can go kick rocks.
Meta literally opened a portal for the intelligence agencies to specifically target voices they didn't want to hear from, and even coined new terms like "malinformation" to classify truthful claims the government didn't like. That is a matter of public record now. They were most definitely pressured by DC...but I'll grant were mostly willing accomplices due to the political predilections within these companies.
RFK, Jr. says that those portals at Facebook AND OTHER OUTLETS were created 37 hours after the "Biden"/Harris administration was inaugurated. So let's not accuse Facebook of doing anything _sua sponte_.
"new muffler internals were fashioned from ACE Hardware chicken wire and FMF 2-stroke packing."
I don't know why, but reading that bit gave me great joy. Congrats on the lap record and DG's wins. It's awfully strange to think of the Radical as a heavy car, but when you're lined up against Formula cars I guess that's the way it is.
My own club racing season is in a bit of a limbo right now, as during my last race at Nelson Ledges, my transmission was causing the whole car to shudder in 5th gear, and since I knew the synchros were not long for this world anyway, I pulled the transmission once I got home to swap in one of my spares. I also pulled the clutch, (because who drops a transmission without replacing the clutch while you're in there) where I then found that the disc had worn a considerable valley into the flywheel. The FC RX-7 flywheel is too small for my local machine shop to mill flat, so I took it to Logan at Defined Autoworks, only for him to find that his machinist has closed up shop indefinitely. Our new tentative plan is to try and match the balancing done to my original flywheel onto one of Logan's spares, luckily he has a balancing machine for engine rotating assemblies, but the particulars of this process are foreign to me. Defined is an awfully busy shop though, so if it can't be done in the next week or so, I'll probably throw the old parts back into the car at least to finish out the season.
Initially, the goal for this season was just to make it to and complete a race weekend, and find out what this fairly old (but new to me) race car needed in terms of deferred maintenance in order to get through 6 or 8 races a year. Now that I've dipped a toe into club racing, however, I want all I can get, at least within the usual constraints of time and money.
Other racing that maybe 5 of you might care about: MX of Nations is in England this year, October 4-6. MXoN is essentially the Olympics of motocross, with selected racers representing their respective home countries. Team USA this year includes Chase Sexton, who has been incredibly fast this outdoor season, and Ohio's own Aaron Plessinger, whose experience with woods racing should in my opinion be advantageous across the pond, where tracks are not nearly as meticulously groomed as they are here in the states. I'm particularly interested in seeing how they stack up against Dutchman Jeffrey Herlings, who rides a 450 as if he'd like it to be completely used up after a 30 min moto, with seemingly no concern for self preservation. If I remember correctly, the last time Herlings raced in the US, he pulled away from our best pros by half a track in short order, though that was years ago. MXoN SHOULD be a bigger deal than it is to American motocross racers and fans, but it gets overshadowed by our own outdoor and Supercross championships.
Is RFK Jr's endorsement of Trump all that different from Bernie's support of Harris, or is that a foolish comparison? As the election draws nearer, I think more and more Americans are looking for a third lever to pull, and becoming increasingly disheartened.
In 2024, there's no reason that voting via other than in-person methods cannot yield the same level of security as in-person votes. Does anyone really think a 70+ year old volunteer squinting at a license with a 5+ year old photo is secure?
It's a red herring that distracts from real issues.
We should be looking for ways to make voting easier, not harder. Our participation rates are way too low.
I don't disagree that voters need to be better informed, but that's a different issue than access. Based on age and income of the respective parties, I'm not surprised at all about the swings in mail-in voting. That doesn't suggest nefarious actions, just socioeconomic realities.
I'd love to see a list of the top 25-50 policy questions that matter most to voters, put forth to all candidates, and force a specific, written answer. Require any broadcast news medium to blanket the airwaves with the answers for a week before polling starts.
I'd also love to see compulsory voting. Have a "none of the above" option for each choice.
"Does anyone really think a 70+ year old volunteer squinting at a license with a 5+ year old photo is secure?"
Having worked at least adjacent to security and encryption issues for 27 years... yeah, I do. Cause here's the issue. Any individual interaction like what you've described above can be compromised with relative ease, but doing those compromises on a broad scale is essentially impossible.
Popping the hashes on a Dominion box is a magnitude of expenditure harder than conning a single in-person vote verifier -- but once you do it, the keys to the kingdom are yours and it's no harder to fake a million votes than it is to fake one. Similarly, if I can get a polling office to take an Al Franken trunk full of votes, that's ONE effort that yields massive results.
Consider this: Banks take their security much more seriously than any voting operation in American history, yet they regularly get roasted via exploits both small and large. The minute people can vote via blockchain or something like that, you might as well shut down the process because there's no hope of a legitimate outcome.
I write all the above in the forlorn and naive hope that some state actor hasn't already cracked AES and/or SHA-256, by the way.
Good point about the expected outcome of the hack - 1 vote vs. millions.
I am not fluent on how mail in votes are processed, but isn't Dominion providing the machines that record and count the in-person votes? If they also tabulate the mail in votes, fine, but then the risk/point of failure has nothing to do with how the vote was received (in person or mail or however else).
Agree wrt to a blockchain or other tech-only vote recording mechanism.
"isn't Dominion providing the machines and record and count the in-person votes?"
Yeah, which is why those machines should be kicked out of the process. At the very least, there should be a paper record generated in real time for purposes of verification.
I'm not in favor of electronic vote recording -- but if I have to pick between wacky Dominion machines being operated in person and, say, voting by Internet, I'd still pick the former.
"Australia’s manual voting system has one of the most complex and time-consuming counting operations in the world. While it can at times require patience, the counting process delivers integrity to the results, concentrating on accuracy in a highly transparent manner."
Respectfully disagree. It has nothing to do with intelligence. First few personal examples that come to mind:
1. I spent 10+ years of my career traveling out of state M-Thur or M-Fri 40+ weeks a year. I was gone for many birthdays, anniversaries, and election days.
2. Spent my youth in a state where a large portion of the populace worked 14 on / 7 off on offshore oil rigs. Have several friends that still commute 8-10 hours for those jobs to this day.
3. Any number of "regular" jobs that, combined with school, family obligations and transportation create major roadblocks to get to a polling place
Open Thread Question for the Esteemed Polis:
How do we feel about the Porsche 928?
If not one of those, then what?
weird headlights and expensive to fix
what about it makes you want it and what would you be satisfied with in its place
either way you should buy a miata
Sorta lux, sorta fast, pretty cool car. Back seat is kidable.
I was recently impressed with how quiet and comfortable the ride was in a 2006 GTO. It’s probably faster than a 928 and simpler to work on as well.
I’m sure that would be measurably better in all respects.
They get some flack for being relatively heavy, but based on my brief experience with the car, some of that weight might've gone toward refinement and comfort. The interior seems to hold up well (other than the stitching at the top of the rear seats, they almost all tear at the seam), and the ride over freeway expansion joints was measurably better than say my FC convertible. If you're looking at 928s, you're probably more interested in a GT cruiser experience anyway. However, it would be remiss of me to not mention that the GTO was built by Holden in Australia, and though the engine is shared with the C6 Corvette, I've heard that certain suspension components and body panels can be difficult to source, or at least take a while to be shipped to your door.
I would seriously consider trading my E36 for such a GTO.
How about a E36 GTO? It is the worst of both worlds!
That's not what I want from an e36... and I kinda don't want an e36 anymore anyway
Speaking of _your_ GTO, how about a riding (wrenching?) For Harambe for that beast?
I always found them to be dull. They were fast in a ground level Lear Jet kinda way, but while they were impressive in their ability to cover lots of miles at triple digit speeds in comfort, they were never any fun. The 944S of the era was a dramatically more enjoyable car. Sacrilege ahead, but it always enjoyed the 944S more than any contemporary 911. Especially with the stock suspension. The 15 inch wheels were perfect. If your driving plans include inhaling states at 100 mph+, go for it. Otherwise, meh. I do have to add that detailing the engine of a 928 an incredible pleasure.
I think if you go in with your eyes really open about what it costs to run, they're a true joy to own and drive.
A friend of mine owns FIVE of them.
Yeah but how many live under tarps and grow moss in the winter?
Zero. They all live in his climate-controlled home garage.
Around 1994, my girlfriend bought a used 1978 928 with money she got from a settlement after getting hit by a drunk driver. Never mind that she was also drunk at the time. Anyway, when it ran it was a true joy to drive. When it didn’t, which was often, it was a nightmare of expensive, difficult to find parts and the local mechanics had no idea how to work on it. I can’t imagine the situation has improved in the 30 years since.
So what else should we consider? BMW 6 series? The Merc coupes are more sedate in their pace, looks, prices, pretty much every way. I’m not considering the SL in this comparison.
I’m rather fond of my 2 series coupe. 4 series if you need more room. Lexus RC-F would probably be the least hassle. I’d love to have an S5 but I don’t fit with a helmet.
You won't be able to make REAL pace in any car from this era without spending insane money on stuff like torque tube bushings. I will go one further than Fat Baby and say... RC350.
If the styling works for you, the E63 6-series seems like a good fit. I wonder if a W126 coupe would actually be cheaper to keep going - I stop and check my retirement account every time I see a clean 560SEC listed.
I've started to get bullish on the E63 cars, I'd love to own a M6 if someone else was paying for and managing the maintenance, but I think you can have 85% the experience with a 645/650 for much less purchase price and maintenance hassle.
I had an E34 M5, that engine was amazing. Would LOVE to have another car with that engine.
The original e24 6 series M6 or 635csi, had the original version of the S38, as well as the e28 M5. If you liked the E34 I imagine the e28 would blow your hair back.
FWIW, we've had a couple e60 5-series in my family, though they were a pair of low-brow 525 and 530. But I think they share a lot of parts, esp. electronics.
Anyway, they were more reliable than we'd anticipated with the exception of a very sensitive TPMS.
E31 8 Series?
The more time of spent with fancy cars with exotic engines, the more I’ve started to admire American V8s. Powerful. Simple. Easy to service. Easy to find parts. Run forever. Yeah, you lose some exclusivity, but you also don’t get to know all the local mechanics, and the guys at the parts houses.
I had a friend who used to be a Porsche mechanic help me do some work on my 96 Mercedes SL and he said the way it was built reminded him of working on a 928 in that everything was engineered to be as complex as possible and not terribly mechanic friendly.
Especially the top mechanism!
How has your SL been to keep running? Is it just the top you need to worry about?
I bought it as a weekend car that my wife could drive since it was an automatic and it drives wonderfully, it has all of those old world Mercedes qualities and really does feel like it was carved from a solid block of granite even with the top down.
Yes you definitely need to worry about the top. Mine has 11 or 12 cylinders that will all eventually leak—not all of mine leak but enough do that the power top is inoperable. The good news is that you can manually raise and lower and even fully latch the top manually with the special MB tool. I have two of them because it helps with the rear latches. There are places that will rebuild the cylinders and the last time I looked it was around $800 plus shipping to have the set done. The bad news is that then you have to remove and then replace the cylinders and this is where things get dicey. All of the pieces you need to remove are either difficult to get to or covered with what is now almost thirty year old brittle plastic panels that have an excellent chance of breaking if you look at them the wrong way.
One of my map lights in the rear view mirror housing was undone so I bought a new light and lens and while removing the mirror broke the housing not realizing that these were no longer available new and a good used one was $500; early on I found one for under $300 and I’m kicking myself for not buying it.
Mechanically pretty much most parts are still available—it shares a lot with the W124–but some other parts can be incredibly expensive. My car has a mysterious coolant leak, I think it’s a hose that’s under the manifold but I haven’t dug into it yet because it just looks like a lot of stuff needs to come off. If there’s an easy way and a difficult way to build something the engineers chose the hard way.
A little bit of deferred maintenance on one of these will quickly snowball into an expensive laundry list and my car is at the point where it doesn’t make sense to put anymore money into it because these cars essentially have no value unless they are in top shape. I thought I bought mine cheap ten years ago and it wasn’t anywhere cheap enough—free might not have been cheap enough.
PS "Liked" for the info and detail, not because of the ultimate financial outcome.
It's silly to say, "oh, I think my next car will be either a NB Miata or an SL500..." but that's kind of my thinking right now. I feel like values for both have hit the market bottom, and I might be kicking myself in 5 years.
"oh, I think my next car will be either a NB Miata"
i think bryce might have just the ride for you then if he hasnt sold it
he gave me a cracking deal on it and at that price you could sell it in 5 years and not lose a dime
its a great idea
I thought I bought at the bottom of the market when it was just another old car but it’s amazing how these things aren’t worth a bucket or warm spit especially when they’re needy. I’m sure as soon as I take a ridiculously low offer for it values will skyrocket and the Insurance Company blog will be telling us how they’re the hottest appreciating car on the market.
get the Miata
I briefly owned a R129 and learned that the German word for "fuck you" is "plastic." I went through a tube of JB Weld plastic-weld epoxy, a good chunk of a tube of JB Weld plastic-weld putty, and two full tubes of Gorilla 5-minute epoxy fixing random plastic bits. Granted, it was a Florida car that spent its entire life baking under UV rays, but still.
On the plus side, the previous owner had all of the hydraulics done in 2022, so I didn't have to worry about that.
Great looks, great noises, great expense to keep running well!
Alfa GTV-6. But it was more of a 944 competitor than 928.
I LOVE these... but nowhere near as comfortable or "cruise-missile"-feeling.
If you get the Porker pay all the money for the best one you can find, then save extra for the first repair bill. Or, S550 Mustang, the nicest Infinity G35/G37 that hasn't been vaped in by a Hoonigan t-shirt kid, BMW 650i, if you need to have a little German suffering, or M6 if you want an alternative but equal amount of 928 suffering, if a manual isn't necessary, and you're real about what your costs will be to operate a 928, then I'd say you can't do better than a Lexus LC500.
All great points!
If German is a must have for whatever reason, the S5/RS5 coupe recommend themselves for this duty. To say nothing of an E550 benz coupe which (though it will likely break!) would be worlds more reliable and repairable when broken than a 928.
Personally if I was so motivated, I would be looking (people, hold your noses) at Camaros. Best engine in the V8 game. One will fit your price point:
non-SS, V6 1LE 6MT - in the 20s-30
SS 1LE probably around 40 give or take ten grand
Z28 - probably 50 grand BUT comes with an LS7 and the good suspension, IIANM
ZL1 1LE, a car that is to the porsche 928 what a 2024 Camry is to a Model T, in the upper 60s...
(If you were to choose to finance this, by the time you were to have sold, you would surely have lost less irrecoverable money than buying a 928 and keeping it roadable.)
Either way, good problem to have - good luck!
Disenfranchised democrat here - not really sure where I am at the moment - but sitting on the outside looking in, the Republicans need to get their act (back) together. It was / is theirs to lose. Focus on comparing the 4 years under Trump to those under Biden. While there's a lot more complexity and nuance between those two presidencies / time periods; for the average voter it's hard not to realize the difference in the economy and petty crime.
If the Republicans want to win - be laser focused on inflation and safety.
Everyone needs to get their shit back together. As far as I'm concerned, there is nobody worth voting for in either party. There are cultural reasons I won't vote republican, and I've been absolutely disappointed by the democrats who beg for votes by promising stuff they never deliver on. To hell with them all, I say.
What are the cultural reasons?
They need to just start hammering Ronnie’s old question, are you better off than you were four years ago.
EXACTLY.
I thought Ronnie's old question was, "What's for dinner?"
Oh, you mean that other Ronnie.
to be honest i thought he was referring to you too
But voter sentiment is always bifurcated. I can't remember the last time any "average voter" felt they were better off now than 4 years ago (without the benefit of hindsight).
Even now, in economic polling, most "average voters" say their individual situation is better or improving, but say "the Economy" is going to hell.
Washington Generals of US politics
You make it sound like the Rs with the power really want Trump to win.
I would add immigration to inflation and safety. The situation is bad enough that it might flip some centrist voters who previously voted D.
I did not have the following in my bingo card for 2024:
RFK endorsing Trump
Tulsi endorsing Trump
Liam and Noel reconciling (for LOTS of touring money) and reuniting Oasis for 2025
The money has to be insane... Not that I'll be giving them any of mine.
I predict punches thrown, ugly things said, and no tour at all. Noel sells out High Flying Birds tours with no problem, and still works with the other members of Oasis, so this is probably another short-lived reconciliation.
anyway heres wndrwll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yQFebRcznA
Gdamn, you have found the Nathan Fiedler of cover bands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2fh8qfDiA&list=PLXxU9AarDl6MK33xw1mi0BXHdWImlfwry&index=2
heres the same guy with the same song but not at all
neil cicierega is a gem
Oh the tour will start.
Liam will need an audience of at least 30,000 for the break up.
Shouldn't someone put together an arena tour featuring those lads, Bush, and The Kinks?
The stage could be designed like a boxing/wrestling 'ring' and the crowds could place bets at the door concerning which group would fall apart on any given evening...
I’m neutral on Gabbard but incensed at what happened to her. I’d feel the same if it was the Trump administration doing it to a prominent Democrat.
Tulsi was the next great thing for the Dems, until she questioned the screwing of Bernie by the party in 2016.
And roasting the golden child in a debate.
That was just a bonus. I still remember that moment, and totally expecting Kamala to come back with something sharp sounding. Nope, Tulsi just roasted her.
The caramel child.
Should Trump win, imagine the thumb in the eye to the MIC she would be as SoD.
Tulsi as potential SecDef...I didn't have that in my bingo card, but that would be a very interesting pick.
I read tonight that RFK Jr and Gabbard are on the Trump transition team which I think is good news.
The paradox of an outsider getting elected is that they really don’t have an effective team to govern. As Redford said in ‘The Candidate’ when he got elected: “What do we do now?” Exactly.
This paradox is supercharged by what I believe is one of two of Trump’s greatest weaknesses which is poor personnel choices.
Agree on all counts. How about RFK Jr for HHS?
Be still my beating heart! 😀
he relied on people's recommendations he thought were on his side instead of backstabbers
Exactly.
What makes you think he's learned that lesson? Saw something where RFK Jr said he was told by Trump that Pompeo implored Trump not to open the books on JFK's assassination when Pompeo was running the CIA. A Trump agreed. And Pompeo was one of Trump's best picks.
Sounds like in that regard Trump has learned, but if his best picks were jerks the obvious jerks must have been beyond horrible.
There is no one around from 63 that could have been a player in all that. Other than the CIA itself.
Does Tulsi understand procurement? Isn't that 90% of the job? Seriously asking.
Rick, those are called principles and it's what decent people are made of.
Thanks! Somewhat adjacent, I don’t categorize people as conservative or progressive or whatever. But whether they are process oriented or outcome oriented.
I’m process oriented so I can accept outcomes I don’t like as long as the rules are clear and the process is fair.
Progressives on the other hand are primarily outcome oriented so they don’t care how they take Gabbard or Trump - or Biden for that matter - as long as they are gone.
That’s an interesting take; I’ll need to ponder it a bit longer. What do you do when you HAVE to have a specific outcome?
Revolt and start your own country? Not sure unless you have an example.
No, no revolt, and no specific example, either...just thinking about the concepts.
"I’m process oriented so I can accept outcomes I don’t like as long as the rules are clear and the process is fair." - The concern I have with process orientation is that the rules in life are never clear nor are they fair, so someone will get steamrolled. But this (process orientation) is the basic philosophy of our country up to now, and I think most Americans see it this way.
The logical conclusion for outcome orientation is war, or at least enough aggression/rioting/destruction so that others are afraid to stand against it. As a Christian, I can't support this "end justifies the means" approach.
The idea that Tulsi could have won a Democratic primary is the most absurd thing you've written this year. She no longer has any policy positions in common with your average Democrat, or, for that matter, with the mythical center. She is endorsing Trump because she has become a Trumpist, with the economically lethal combination of protectionism, isolationism, patronage, tolerance of corruption, and political control of monetary policy that makes up Trumpist ideology.
"The idea that Tulsi could have won a Democratic primary is the most absurd thing you've written this year."
I'm saying she could win a general.
"the economically lethal combination... that makes up Trumpist ideology."
At the risk of sounding like the prototypical hick sitting outside a gas station in rural West Virginia: if Trumpist economic ideology is so lacking, and presumably the competing vision of Biden/Harris was so superior, why is the economy visibly worse after the latter replaced the former?
0. It's not worse, at least not country-wide. It's a mixed bag. Prices are higher, but unemployment is lower, and workforce participation is higher. The reason everyone feels worse is mostly sky-high housing prices, which neither Trump nor Biden did anything real to fix.
1. Trump didn't actually implement most of his current agenda, including the most destructive parts, in his first term. He didn't get control of the Fed, he didn't manage to implement Schedule F in time to do anything with it, he didn't engage in mass deportation, he only imposed a few tariffs (but those did have a destructive effect), and he didn't get the Supreme Court ruling giving him carte blanche to be corrupt until he was already out of office.
The Dems voters are the people who are doing well in the currents circumstances. The Republican supporter are the ones being screwed. Not that Mitch gives a shit about the poor, but at least he doesn’t show contempt for them as obviously the Dems do.
And why the heck can’t we edit comments on the app? Maybe someday I’ll actually slow down, reread and edit my comments, rather than just trying to fire something off between calls.
Why use the app?
Editing works great under Chrome or Firefox (not Safari, apparently).
The app blows. Ever since downloading it my entire substack experience has gotten worse even when I'm not using the app.
Not all of us; and that's a big reason I'm frustrated with Dems! Anyone who isn't a campaign contributor is getting screwed by anyone who runs a campaign. I believe that to be the case for either side of the aisle.
Fewer migrants, which was something that Trump discussed more in 2016 and needs to return to, would be a concrete benefit of not reelecting the the Biden/Harris administration.
I'm not sure I'd believe any of the official numbers coming from the government. If they measured inflation the way they used to the number would be at the very least twice what they've been reporting. As for unemployment, they don't even count a lot of people who are "no longer participating in the labor market." How many are they not counting? Enough to make the numbers they give us absolutely worthless.
Even so they adjusted jobs down by 800k
Millions of jobs disappeared during the government's response to covid, and then they've slowly trickled back, and everywhere you look there are "NOW HIRING" signs even years later, but when my wife applied to some of these jobs no one ever called her back. I have no idea what their numbers even mean. 800K? Who counted them? How did he decide what to count? They could have said 8 million or 80K for all the real world meaning the figure has.
And are the new or replacement jobs full time or part time?
I no longer ever see help wanted signs. They disappeared about a year ago.
A former software engineer trying DoorDash and only getting 2 deliveries/day is not "unemployed" for statistical purposes.
"You volunteered, didn't you? We're paying you, aren't we?"
- Dr. Peter Venkman
Addendum to this: I would be a lot less worried about the long-term effect of a second Trump presidency if his economic policies were the same as the ones his administration ended up pursuing in his first term. We can muddle through yet another tax cut for the highest incomes. But, now, he's promising many things that are all much worse.
Perhaps you could read something from another perspective https://heartland.org/publications/measuring-the-effects-of-the-republicans-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-on-personal-income-taxes/
Wherein the data analysis points to the middle/lower middle seeing the greatest proportional gain from the tax cuts and somewhere north of half the taxpayers having their burdens reduced with more tax revenue coming from the highest brackets.
Literally, you are operating based on a different set of facts from others here present. Which one is right?
Both are right, depending where you stand.
I'm in a place -- a relatively high-tax blue state -- where the SALT component of the TCJA actually increased a lot of upper-middle-income taxpayers' total tax burden (including my own, by about half a percent). My high-income Californian sister-in-law saw her effective tax rate go up several percent.
The picture looks different if you're in a lower-tax state, where the effect for the locals is even better than the total picture your study described.
Maybe those are taxes people in blue states should have been paying 'their fair share' to borrow a term all along.. if you did a do over, instead of grandfathering in expectations of preferential treatment, you know most people would agree with the Trump admin and not otherwise.
"We can muddle through yet another tax cut for the highest incomes."
Makes it sound a great deal like the plain Jane talking point of "tax cuts were just for the rich" when in reality it aided the people most who need relief most. You will forgive any misunderstanding, I hope.
re: SALT (state and local tax) deduction affecting blue states.
You did it to yourselves.
While the Trump tax cuts (TCJA) were working their way through congress, all the democrats were too busy "resisting" instead of negotiating a compromise deal that included SALT. Then in order to make the numbers work, republicans capped SALT deductions to 10K. Only the upper income people in high tax blue states had more than $10k in SALT deductions. As they say; if you're not at the table, then you're the meal.
Next time, stop "resisting" and engage in dialogue with the other side.
BTW. The WSJ often rails against the SALT deduction because it transfers tax revenue from the feds to high (income) tax states that can't control their spending.
"It's not worse!" is laughable. But by all means keep asking vast swaths of the nation who they are gonna believe, the inflated numbers the government has to keep revising down months later or their own bills and paychecks.
Economic Policy aside one has to be blind to not notice the number of non-English speaking foreigners in the local Walmart. I'm also not blind to the fact that the citizens of the county I live in will soon be footing the bill for a new elementary school to address the significant and sudden increase in elementary aged students along with the new teaching staff that will need to speak a second language.
Those elementary-aged students will be the only reason we'll manage to save Social Security for my generation.
I'm not sitting around fretting over the future of Social Security.
It is the most effective anti-poverty measure ever taken by the United States, with almost all of the benefit going to people who can't work, so I'm very concerned with the future of it. "Young immigrants and immigrants' kids are going to save it" is not even an exaggeration, it's just the truth.
No they won't. Nothing can save SS in the long run. Maybe for you and maybe for me, I'm 58, but I don't expect to get anywhere close to the payments projected in the letter I get from SS every so often. And what if all these new Americans decide they don't want to pay half their wages to keep retired Whitey living in the style to which we've become accustomed? I'm not an accountant, but I am an historian (amateur but one of my degrees is History), and I don't see how we can keep running up trillions in debt for much longer. The biggest unreported news of the past couple of years is the impending death of the petrodollar. What can't go on, won't. Maybe Sherman will tell me where I'm wrong.
SS will get funded. The politics guarantee it. We may have to cut other things to do it, and if we have to, we will. Universal social insurance programs are the most popular things the government does, full stop. They poll far higher than anything else.
I’m 35.
I don’t expect to receive anything from Social Security. Knowing that, I will need to provide for my own retirement* plans.
*I cannot foresee myself “retiring” in the conventional sense. I have a good friend who was a co-founder of Regal Cinemas; he went on to start and sell a few more enterprises. He is in his late 60s and has no need to work. That said, he is an active venture capitalist because he derives so much satisfaction from doing so. In fact, he literally put me in the frame to become a co-founder of an extremely exciting business today. It could be the greatest opportunity of my career to date. Obviously I am grateful. I admire him, and hope to emulate him over the course of my own life and career.
Virtually none of them will EVER be *NET TAXPAYERS*, so your math doesn't work. You can't prop up entitlements by bringing in entitlement recipients.
"Virtually none of them will EVER be *NET TAXPAYERS*, so your math doesn't work."
That's just not what experience proves. Even right-leaning Cato recognizes it: https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states
Libertarian economics don't work when you import the Third World.
Oh, you’re right. That makes it worth it!
Tacos and empanadas for everyone!
Why are you shopping at Walmart? Serious question. I haven’t been in one since 2011.
My parents - who are divorced - live in my hometown. My mother shops (for certain things) at Dollar General because it’s quick, easy, cheap, and she won’t see anyone she knows. My father drives ~90 minutes round trip to shop at Target in lieu of Walmart (and also not to have to bump into people he’d rather not interact with).
Well (and this may sound silly), Target had that thing last year where they hired a satanist to design clothes or something for them, among them a scrotum-holding bikini for child-age "trans" whoevers. Also, they cheered on the burning and looting throughout 2020. The Target is directly across the street from the cheaper and friendlier Walmart in our town, so we do 75% of our grocery shopping there. The other 25% is split between Meijer (which I also don't really like but my wife is a coupon shopper and they have great deals every week) and the local supermarkets.
I don't do the shopping but I do pay the target tax. "But honey, they are Satanists" didn't work on the wife!
"Why are you shopping at Walmart?"
Great people watching. Almost as good as the county fair.
being in walmart increases my heart rate because the place just feels like a funhouse mirror in which im forced to compare myself to everyone else there and i get a sense of impending doom and feel the need to leave immediately
target is alright
We haven't been inside a Target store since the Obama 2nd term when they went all in on the trans restroom thing. The more recent venture into child grooming/clothing confirmed we are doing the right thing. Dollar General is ubiquitous and my wife will sometime pick up random items there out of convenience. We go to Walmart about once a month for specific products that are always in stock and well priced. If you want to understand demographics in the United States you can learn a lot by shopping at Walmart once in a while.
I moved a lot when I first moved out as an adult and I quickly learned that the local Walmart was better than anything else at telling me what a potential new area was like and became my first stop before looking for housing in any new area I was moving to.
I spent the first 18 years of my life living in a town so humble, so remote that we had to travel 30 minutes each way for the EVENT of going to Walmart!
My hometown was blessed by Walmart in 2013, so I still haven’t made a pilgrimage.
Sir, I'd suggest reading more scientifically correct sources.
I'm sure those close to the power in Soviet Russia could also always say it's a 'mixed bag', since they were, much much better off than 99% of the rest, and they were the ones that generated the stats too.
I'm saying this as a friendly, since I'm not a US citizen nor political, just based on my observations in life since 2007 or so.
my sole issue with tulsi is that have a vague recollection of her being referred to as pineapple mommy and i have no idea if i read that somewhere or hallucinated that myself
IT'S COCONUT MOMMY
THANK YOU
something something coconut milk
I like both versions. Hopefully some girls in Hawaiian blouses at the bar tonight where I can work that into the conversation. “Say, what’s your preference, pineapple or coconut?”
youre just gonna call random women coconut mommy to their face
let me know how that transpires
She's the only recovering Democrat who would have received votes in the Republican primary, I can assure you. I would also take issue with your characterization of the center as "mythical", when roughly 1/3 of the population is moderate, and can be swayed to vote for an Obama, Bush Jr, or Clinton as circumstances dictate.
The “mythical center” doesn’t mean moderates, who tend to have very heterodox opinions spanning left and right. It refers to a set of positions beloved among the DC establishment that are not actually held by many ordinary voters, and nearly all proposals to run “centrists” or to start “center” parties involve these positions and never get off the ground because no one supports them.
What? Most of her political positions are the same as they were 4 or 5 years ago, and she was considered "center left" then. The only thing she has moved slightly more "right" on is gun control.
She has always questioned unnecessary wars. So did most democrats after Bush with Iraq/Iran. The democrats did not seem to lock step with the neocons until some time during the Obama administration.
Tolerance of corruption? The reason she got out was because OF corruption.
I just think the hyperbole here is hilarious. Trump's positions today are just slightly right of Bill Clintons and Tulsi's are just slightly left of Bill Clinton's.
But that says more about the modern democrat party, no?
"Most of her political positions are the same as they were 4 or 5 years ago"
No. Since her abortive 2020 campaign, she's flip-flopped on:
- Abortion (was militantly pro-choice, now parrots Trump's "states' rights" position)
- Climate change (was a hawk, now a skeptic/denier)
- Gun control (was for assault weapons bans before she was against them)
- Immigration (was for weaker border enforcement, now for stronger)
The only thing that she's been consistent about is what you might call anti-war positions, if you're feeling charitable, or isolationism, if you're not.
To be clear we don't know if she's actually flip-flopped on anything, since she has issued no policy statements nor taken any probing questions from the media. All of the reverses have been by anonymous campaign staffers. As a matter of fact, the only person to go on record, the Harris campaign's comm director, Michael Tyler, today denied that Harris was no longer opposed to fracking.
Anti-war? Nah, she just doesn't want Israel to win.
My comment was about Tulsi, not Kamala.
"isolationism"
I'll take Trump's trying to keep us out/get us out of wars over what the last four years has netted us with the Bush/Obama/Hillary/Biden foreign policy people back in the driver's seat.
Thank goodness we've had "adults" back in control instead of Orangutan Man with the big red button, right?
We are going to disagree on this, but I don't think Trump would have handled the Ukraine crisis in a way that promoted our interests, at all. (It is not in our interest to have a reconstituted Soviet Union.)
"(It is not in our interest to have a reconstituted Soviet Union.)"
As someone who was born in 1971, I had an automatic head-nodding response to that... but let's take a minute and think.
What was bad about the Soviet Union?
0. They wanted to spread Communism globally, including in the USA, through supporting the ideology wherever it appeared;
1. They wanted to spread Communism in Europe and elsewhere through military intervention -- the much-derided reactionary "domino theory" that turned out to be absolutely correct in reality.
You can dislike Putin and Russia all you like, but there's no evidence that he wants to do anything besides restore Russia to approximate USSR borders. Sucks to be Ukraine in that situation, but it's perfectly harmless to be, say, Vietnam, or El Salvador. Putin has no political philosophy that has as a core belief the idea that it must spread to the four corners of the globe.
In 1980, there was a very real concern that the USSR would attack the USA in order to conquer the country and install a communist puppet government. What's the risk to the USA now?
If Germany feels threatened by the USSR they should feel free to militarize and prepare for war. It's not really my issue, nor should it be the concern of any American.
In truth, the recent "new Chinese map" where Vladivostok et al are given ancient Chinese secret names is probably more indicative of future conflict direction than anything else happening right now.
"What was bad about the Soviet Union?"
You mean, other than being the single nation-state in known history that has murdered the most of its own people? Putin has shown no reluctance to do the same thing. Putin does not have the exact same ideological agenda as the Soviets, but many of the effects are the same.
I also see little evidence that he'd be satisfied to reconstitute the USSR and then leave everyone else alone. In general, the idea that power-hungry people have a limit to their ambitions is not well supported by history. Until he miscalculated by invading Ukraine with an army, which had the effect of scaring all of Europe straight, he was doing a very effective job of bringing Germany within the soft influence of Russia, through a combination of cheap energy and very effective propaganda. Europe, not the USA, was always the main thing we were worried about with the Soviet Union, and an enlarged and emboldened Russia would be no different.
Today, there's another element - industrial capacity. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the more enterprising eastern European countries (notably Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Estonia) have built Europe's industrial base substantially. Meanwhile, Putin's government has wasted a lot of resources through corruption and really has not rebuilt the decaying Soviet-era industrial base. Today this is forcing Putin to kowtow to China for industrial help, which he absolutely hates. If he could get all that new, low-cost industrial capacity in eastern Europe, he would have far more leverage to prevent the Chinese from renaming Vladivostok.
Here's how I see this all playing out with an isolationist US president in office.
First, with the flow of weapons dried up, Ukraine has no choice but to cry uncle. Zelensky is killed, and the Russians finish annexing the five Ukrainian regions they've claimed and engineer a sham election in the rest of Ukraine, which a candidate in the mold of Lukashenka wins. From that point on, Ukraine is bigger Belarus.
Next, the same thing happens in Georgia, which is a far softer target than Ukraine. In Moldova, they see the writing on the wall, and a compromise to split the country is brokered: all Russian-speaking areas become another Russian vassal state, while the Romanian-majority areas form a small rump state that is so weak it probably has to unite with Romania on unfavorable terms.
With a larger army that includes Georgian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Belarusian "assistance," Putin confronts NATO with a choice. Do you want to double your defense budgets overnight, or do you want to arrange for deals involving energy and industrial production (including weapons production) on Russian terms? I genuinely don't know how that would go, but even the best-case scenario is far more expensive for both the EU and the US than it would be to fully fund the current war in Ukraine.
You had me at Zelensky is killed.
Mao was a bigger mass-murderer than Stalin, and we frankly don't know how many Chinese the CCP killed since they came to power.
Communism sucks at everything except killing unimaginably huge amounts of its own people.
This is 100% correct.
Do you think Harris has the strength to stand against this agenda?
Your studies of history will show you that Trump's isolationist stance will soften as soon as he is in office. The last thing he wants is another Afghanistan with his name on it.
He's also a stronger negotiator than Harris and while we don't want a negotiated solution to end the war, we need someone that can say "pull your troops back or ill authorise every F16 in Europe to go to Ukraine"
I'm not sure that Putin wants USSR borders. He definitely did not want Ukraine to join NATO, and I don't blame him one bit.
Imagine it's 1984 and Mexico decided to join the Warsaw Pact. How would you find out about it?
If you lived south of an Air Force base, you'd probably hear an unusual amount of jet noise, and then look up to see the skies practically darkened. For TV watchers, it might be through the familiar two-tone EBS Alert Signal, followed by "Please stand by for a message from the President of the United States."
A few minutes later, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild union would say something to the effect of:
"My fellow Americans, earlier today we learned that Mexico had decided to join the Warsaw Pact. While the United States is not an imperial nation, we cannot share a 2,000 mile border with a Soviet Satellite. After speaking to the President of Mexico to confirm these developments, I have directed the armed forces to secure our former southern neighbor. The Navy is implementing a complete blockade between Mexico and international waters. The Air Force is denying any air traffic into or out of Mexico. Army paratroopers are securing the national capitol and all state capitols. I have asked the governors of all southern border states, as well as the adjacent states, to activate their National Guards to secure the border, and all have agreed. If you are a member of the National Guard in any state, please contact your commanding officer at this time.
The Mexican people are not the enemy, and we hope for their peaceful cooperation as we work together to stabilize the situation and maintain peace in our hemisphere.
Thank you, and may God Bless America."
NATO had already agreed quietly not to let Ukraine join, despite the Ukrainians' wishes. Putin invaded anyway based not so much on the fear of NATO as on his own view, supported by very twisted history, that Ukraine and Russia were a single nation and that Ukraine's decision to align with the West constituted an unforgivable insult to that nation. Read his 2021 manifesto. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
A better Cold War analogy would be if President Reagan had published a book-length screed explaining why Mexico was really part of the American nation; we had massed troops at the Mexican border; and the leadership in Mexico went frantically calling to Gorbachev (and everyone else outside the US sphere of influence) for help.
Beautifully written!
The USA wouldn't invade though.
They'd have sponsored some Mexicans to do that about a year prior.....
To improve that analogy, Brazil had invaded the US through Mexico in the last war and killed 10 (?) million Americans.
Alrightee then. We’ve a vegetable in charge of the country, we’re spending bazillions on wars nobody wants—or can explain the compelling US interests in perpetuating—our major inner cities are dystopian hellholes, as the school year starts again we’re “educating” a generation of frighteningly unintelligent yutes, yada, yada, yada. However, all is right with the world. Lists once again start—as God intended (it’s somewhere in Leviticus)—with the numeral 0.
That was the cause of the downfall in the first place!
Is there an ancient reference to C or .NET programming languages somewhere in the Old Testament? 😉
The spread of Soviet style Communism around the world during the height of the Cold War is now the American Imperial gambit, using color revolutions, sanctions/World Bank/IMF and arms deals.
'Are we the baddies?'
The whole issue is that the State Department was given carte blanche by Biden's crew. They renewed talks of bringing up NATO membership for Ukraine (even though they maybe didn't have serious plans to actually do this), knowing full well that this was an seriously unacceptable arrangement for Russia from a national security standpoint. The hypothetical example below of Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact or having Chinese military advisors on the ground after a chinese supported coup is on point. The US *wanted* Russia to pull the trigger and to get into a bloody mess on their border, that was the whole point. The giddiness of various congress-critters over how they can use Ukraine as a bloody battering ram (with exactly zero regard for crippling casualties on the Ukrainian side) is very much out in the open. In their view, the US MIC is making bank (and by extension so are they), EU cut themselves off of Russia's oil/gas which we now sell them our own at elevated prices, Russia is getting a bloody nose... who cares about 500k+ dead Ukrainian men?
Both Russians and Ukrainians are white, so in the eyes of the Biden/Harris administration, their lives don't matter.
To be fair I think it’s been amply demonstrated that Biden/Harris don’t care about brown lives either
Do you use the same route on your way home every day?
Some folks are more orthodox than the rabbis at the nearby kollel.
Free trade globalists are just like the people who throw money at failing schools and add more restrictive gun laws to the most restrictive gun law states. Keep telling the kid in Saginaw, who doesn't know who his dad is and whose mom is addicted to fentanyl how awful protectionism is.
have we tried making murder illegal yet
might be able to nip this in the bud
yer nutz! be well!
Speculation I read is that Zuck sees a lot more of the real data than we do and maybe he’s placating the right a little bit in anticipation of a change in the political winds come November. One can hope.
I would probably cross the aisle to vote for Tulsi, except her gun control record gives me pause (I’m nearly a one issue voter), and it appears she hates nuclear power which is nonsensical to me.
She has moved her position slightly more right on gun control. I saw a few interviews a few years back and she has reconsidered some of her position here.
I'm more conservative than Trump, and if Trump ran against Tulsi, I'd probably vote for Tulsi because I think she'd be a more effective leader as president, even if I have more in common with Trump's policies.
As far as Zuck goes, I don't necessary blame him.
My problem is, why isn't he pointing directly to the individuals that did this? Why aren't those people fired?
He has to thread the needle.
Chuck Schumer in 2017: “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you”
'That's a nice campaign you're running. It would be a shame if something happened to it.'
Bro half the fukcing country is more conservative than Trump.
Zuck actually sees less than people think because they've (a) shut down a lot of their internal toolsets, and (b) they don't meaningfully store any temporary, deleted, or taken-down data.
I'm sure he could get "most" of whatever he wanted to see, but depending on the query or report, it would be a VERY big internal ask.
I wonder if there's a current analogue to Cambridge Analytica or whatever they were called.
CA still exists, sort of. Their teams have gone off to form other identical companies like Propria.
But really that work has just been mainlined (and I use that word deliberately) into the portfolios of most large market research/digital services consultancies. The biggest expense is still usually buying space, so scale matters.
Why go to a niche shop run by pollsters similar to Mark Penn, when you can go to a place with $2B of buying power... run by the actual Mark Penn?
“they've (a) shut down a lot of their internal toolsets, and (b) they don't meaningfully store any temporary, deleted, or taken-down data”
Do we actually believe this?
As of last year, at least, that's what was told to me by colleagues there who were on their way out.
Tulsi is a fucking idiot
I'm neutral on her, but 2016 must have fundamentally set something in motion with her.
On a similar note, RFK Jr is not well. The only I remember from the Arnold documentary was, when Arnold was asked about his friendship with him and his conspiracy-mindedness, was how gracefully he answered it.
Something like, "Look, my personal feelings are personal, but if your father and uncle were assassinated like they were - and the subsequent investigations and records were handled they way they were - wouldn't that do something to you too?"
It was great to see you guys and capture some moments over the weekend! I'll be stopping by Woodward Camera in about 90 minutes to pick up my film, hopefully there's some usable frames on there (apparently I wound the finished roll in my vintage Oly backwards and ripped it off the spool. I'm not sure if that prevented them from developing it, as they did not provide that information in the email. I sure hope it's ok!). I hope we get to meet again in a more relaxed setting soon, with more time to chat, but I'm always down to go snap photos of cars doing cool shit!
Wow Zucc, what an unexpected birthday present! As much as I resent social media sometimes, as exploitive as Zucc is, and although Meta did bend to the will of government at the time, I do have a strange respect for this letter. Yes, he should have had this spinal cord all along, but the letter really does shine a light on a serious issue and puts a much-needed boundary back in place - at least in theory. This is me taking it at face value, mind, and there might well be more serious shit hidden in Zucc's closet - as Jack alluded to. I'm not sure government meddling would necessarily reveal that pile, either.
Hey sorry I missed you. I shot a couple rolls too, will develop next week after the Hamtramck Labor Day festival, a must-make annual event. If you haven't heard the Polish Muslims you have sadly missed out. This weekend Jack White may drop in too.
Woodward Camera is terrible. I must have developed 500 rolls with them over the years before going with tiny Express Photo in Livonia.
Jacks Radical is kinda cool I must admit. I had to leave to go to Portland early Sunday. Next time.
Ah man! I was sort of following Jack around for the most part unless he was tending to racing business, and I generally tried to stay out of the way of anybody. We'll meet somewhere I'm sure! I've only had good luck with Woodward thus far! I scan and convert myself now so all they need to do for me is develop. My buddy likes Express in Livonia but that's far out of my way, and Woodward can be an easy stop after work. Granted, my negative collection is more like 50 rolls instead of 500+.
I’m part Polish yet I’ve never met these people. Hopefully they’re closet John Paul II fans.
The most fun moment around Tulsi joining Trump, was Bobby’s tweet, welcoming her to the Justice League, and all the great memes that followed. Lots of rumours that there are more former Dems about to join the Trump team. Bernie next? Kidding!
Speaking of Made in USA, I just ordered a Malco Eagle Grip. Malco apparently stopped making them in the old Vice Grip plant, and some folks who have ordered them have received Snap On branded ones. Anyhow, they are supposedly the best Vice Grips you can get, and, again, they were made in the USA, which is important to this Canuck. Be interesting to see what the delivery guy brings on Saturday.
https://www.avoidablecontact.com/p/made-in-the-usa-semi-emergency-edition
Good to hear they're still out there!
Thanks for the link. I likely wasn’t in the market at the time,so they fell off my radar. My pair of fake Vice Grips fell apart, so I went hunting for the best ones I could find. The local store had Vice Grip branded ones, but seeing the Made in China on the back of the package annoyed me so much, that I paid twice as much for the Malcos.
it is nice to support our brothers to the south when we can
Last time I looked into it, more then 2/3s of all of Canadas economic activity is with the US. Not just trade, but ALL economic activity. However, no good Canadian can ever admit that the damn Yankees are who we owe our comfortable lives to.
well we are right next to the worlds largest economic powerhouse so it makes sense
vast majority of our population is on the border too
im quite fond of the arrangement
The thing that annoys me the most about Canadians is their total assholery towards America and Americans. We have the best neighbours any country has ever had. We should show a little gratitude.
yeah its disgusting and unwarranted
never understood it personally
It's kinda weird to me. I was in Halifax for work and a couple of those guys knew more about US politics than I did. That wouldn't take much though.
might be because american politics us so much more interesting than ours which boils down to trudeau being a complete retard and his eventual replacement pierre not being all that much better on policy but the optics are great
If you guys ever wanna get absorbed, I’ll vote yes. We’ll give capitán T his own little island somewhere.
wouldnt really solve any of our biggest problems although id wager if everyone could easily travel south they would immediately
actually that might solve the mass immigration problem by shifting them south
Yeah I doubt it would ever happen. But if America was brighter/more dominant/better at planning, I say we take Canada and Mexico.
canada makes sense because of an assload of natural resources but why mexico
aaron burr was right
Are these what you ordered?
https://www.amazon.com/Malco-LP10WC-Curved-Locking-Pliers/dp/B0924QDF47?th=1
That graph is frightening. Overseas duty should be the only reasonable justification for mail in voting, and frankly those numbers are so small as to probably justify banning it entirely.
In person. With ID. One day. Purple finger.
Pols are dumb. Zuck may not have Epstein level dirt, but it's probably close.
And Zuckerberg is likely an order of magnitude more dangerous that Epstein in weaponizing that data because he lacks any humanity whatsoever. Epstein was at least driven by the very human senses of greed and lust. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a wannabe Bond villain autistic like Zuckerberg. He's a human Skynet.
well weve seen his wife so we cant bribe him with women thats for sure
And anybody who could build a worldwide computer network from scratch isn't normal by any stretch of the imagination, or subject to the same incentives.
assuming it wasnt just darpa or some other govt agency doing it
gotta figure out what his autistic fixation is and get him on that
start with vintage lego sets and go from there
I always thought Facebook would be funded by the CIA (Oracle's first customer).
Hmm..that last sentence explains a lot!
Thats why you can. A cute mid would destroy zuck. He is still a man. Probably
if thats what he got for a billion then im not sure if he can be led to greener pastures
Perhaps his glow-up and physical training are leading to other, internal changes. _Mens sana in corpore sano_
One we’re going to learn he’s been a Mormon since 2012.
Billionaires not having super model partners seems to be missing the point of accumulating a billion dollars.
theyre marrying women you can get while unemployed
There are definitely unemployed men who have done better. Hopefully it makes them feel better.
Did you see that Zuck had a 7 foot tall statue of his wife made? This is what happens when no one gives you their honest opinion.
i have seen that grotesque thing
waste of metal
Did he get it from the Amazon? I mean, from Amazon?
Let's not dehumanize Zuckerberg (or anyone) over a bullshit DSM "diagnosis," especially not one of the most controversial, elastic, and broken entries. Let's dehumanize him over his demeanor and past behavior.
(And allow for some possibility of growth.)
If you want to make it one day and in-person, it's gotta be a federal holiday.
"You need high downforce, and light weight."
thank you dr piech shall we add horespower as well
real talk though but is redbull shitting the bed or what because thats a massive gap to a mclaren of all things and hearing talk of lando actually maybe being the best driver on the grid makes little sense
anyway congrats on your record and best of luck getting the thing to pass sound
exhaust systems are an interest of mine and trying to figure out why some drone and some can be both quiet and not kill power is fascinating
You seen quarter-wave pipe videos? Pretty cool shit.
sure have
also saw david vizards vid on his trick cyclone mufflers and a bit on how they worked but there will always be the target of a light weight and durable muffler that meets sound and also fits
the math is fun but implementing it in practice is hard
We used a Vizard book as course material in High Performance Fuels class. I'll have to look for that video, the man is a mad genius!
I think Jack's mufflers have a decent packing solution now, and should they try the "laguna tips" again, I think it should be a pipe that fits into the Radical tips tighter and they should point it either directly right or right-and-slightly-up. These were discussed in the pit on Sunday.
It's possible that I was tripping the meter from the "Esses" or "swamp" section next to where we were pitted... I think up and to the right would work, but that's when the whole "you're gonna melt the wing" conversation happens.
Eeeesh, I hadn't considered the wang... or the fact that pointing the sound to the right would just make the car louder thru Swamp. Maybe it's just a PR6 track until someone breaks the GTX record again?
"Maybe it's just a PR6 track until someone breaks the GTX record again?"
Yeah, because I'm pretty sure that I can run a 1:07 flat in the PR6, and it's a LOT cheaper!
https://www.designengineering.com/reflect-a-gold-heat-reflective-sheet-12-x-12/
this might save your wing
Is a space blanket cheaper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4w9fmb41Wc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5keTM9eyCOg
not sure which of these has it but theyre rather long
mid-'60s a man talked to me at sebring about his intake manifold patent which put little rings in the tubes; he said the wave charging thus produced would overcome the apparent restrictions of those little narrowings. who knows?
One of the things you learn in Jiu Jitsu is not to ignore the threat.
the other thing i learned in jiujistu is that im not as straight as i thought i was
Actually LOL
I'm never wrestling with you, Speed.
not like its any easier rolling with women
heres a fit and relatively attractive girl straddled by you with a flushed face grunting while you try to choke her
now dont get hard
i’m surprised you got the gals to roll with you after you embroidered “power bottom” on your gi.
never a bottom because i always come out on top
intimidation tactic regardless
A buddy of mine explained to me once that he never rolls with women because he’s 20 and couldn’t control his boners
jokes aside i dont know why they bother with coed mma or other sports
theres a definite strength advantage but everyone already knew that so what is the actual point other than to pretend that skill can overcome strength except when it cant
Because it’s fun, and it’s a learning opportunity.
I love rolling with skilled women. It gives me an opportunity to try out flashy and/or low percentage technique in real time on someone who’s not going to be able to stack me on my neck and hold me up in the air like they’re painting the floor with my head when I botch something new
The ladies get experience rolling with people with a size and weight advantage which is beneficial in competition because no one in their weight class is going to be as strong as a man.
And it’s insulated a lot of women from people selling them nonsense self-defense shit that puts them in even more danger.
I also think classes with a mix of people are more fun than sausage parties
when i was a kid i read in reader's digest about the first time judo/jiujitsu/whatever was in the olympics. they had no classes because the art would make everybody equal, right. apparently the swedes just picked up all the orientals and threw them onto the mat enroute to the gold...at least i think it was the swedes.
I got too old to do Jiujitsu years ago. But rolling with women is so stupid. Ok, you are 5'8" and 115lbs. I, at the time, am 6'2" 215lbs and can literally bench press more than double your weight. If I wanted to kill you, no magical arm bar is protecting you. 135lb dudes? Yeah, plenty of them could kick my ass. All the chicks in the class, bar the lesbians, end up fucking one of the instructors 100% of the time.
His head is back in the game.
Lists start at 0.
If Zuckerberg got strong-armed into censoring dissenting voices, it was a strong arm only by Lewis Skolnick standards.
Re: Zuck, he can go kick rocks.
I've worked with many of the content and policy folks at Meta (past tense, because most of those teams have been gutted) and they generally did not feel pressured by DC. Rather - at least in the context of COVID - they had the thankless job of trying to tamp down the truly absurd crap at the beginning (esp. the hucksters who were shilling useless, if not outright dangerous, "cures" or "preventions"), which Trump only made worse... and then having to fight the eventual over-reach from the last-dying-breath-lockdown-zealots, which groups like blue-state teachers' unions, whose oldest (and most senior) members didn't want to go back in-person, only made worse.
Like most "first principles" Silicon Valley types, Zuck's "first principles" are his billions. As for his truly grating self-satisfaction about the CZ grants, ask any local leader which was easier to deal with during COVID: CZ and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation?... or the government?
For many of them, the answer may surprise you.
Thanks for your more insider perspective!
I can only imagine the kind of crazy stuff that races around Meta platforms... but that's part and parcel of being a social media, right? Having explicit government intervention, even if it felt light at ground level compared to more pressing imperatives, is a morally different thing.
Honestly, I have very conflicted feelings about this.
Re: COVID, I remember reading how Vermont had the "least conflict" in drafting and adhering to an agreed-upon public health strategy. The thing that came up time-and-again was that the two major online news outlets shut down their comments section during the peak of the rancor, which forced people to "town hall" the process IRL (to the degree that was possible, given the time).
The caveats are obviously many: VT is a small and homogenous state, it has a rich history of town hall civics, etc. But my gut tells me there's something to it, esp. given social media/comments' tendency to turn something volatile into an actual explosion. And that's not a dig against conservatives. You should see the blue-on-blue online savagery in my town!
Anyway re: VT and COVID, I'd love to hear the lived experience of any Green Mountain ACF'er on that...
On the other hand, I don't want DC to umpire free speech, esp. online. Electeds craft legislation around the loudest, most extreme examples, especially if they come with kids' tears, and don't bother to study any relevant data...
Which, of course, is harder to get than a NA V8 in a nice RWD sedan. So again, Zuck (and Elon) can go kick rocks.
Meta literally opened a portal for the intelligence agencies to specifically target voices they didn't want to hear from, and even coined new terms like "malinformation" to classify truthful claims the government didn't like. That is a matter of public record now. They were most definitely pressured by DC...but I'll grant were mostly willing accomplices due to the political predilections within these companies.
RFK, Jr. says that those portals at Facebook AND OTHER OUTLETS were created 37 hours after the "Biden"/Harris administration was inaugurated. So let's not accuse Facebook of doing anything _sua sponte_.
"new muffler internals were fashioned from ACE Hardware chicken wire and FMF 2-stroke packing."
I don't know why, but reading that bit gave me great joy. Congrats on the lap record and DG's wins. It's awfully strange to think of the Radical as a heavy car, but when you're lined up against Formula cars I guess that's the way it is.
My own club racing season is in a bit of a limbo right now, as during my last race at Nelson Ledges, my transmission was causing the whole car to shudder in 5th gear, and since I knew the synchros were not long for this world anyway, I pulled the transmission once I got home to swap in one of my spares. I also pulled the clutch, (because who drops a transmission without replacing the clutch while you're in there) where I then found that the disc had worn a considerable valley into the flywheel. The FC RX-7 flywheel is too small for my local machine shop to mill flat, so I took it to Logan at Defined Autoworks, only for him to find that his machinist has closed up shop indefinitely. Our new tentative plan is to try and match the balancing done to my original flywheel onto one of Logan's spares, luckily he has a balancing machine for engine rotating assemblies, but the particulars of this process are foreign to me. Defined is an awfully busy shop though, so if it can't be done in the next week or so, I'll probably throw the old parts back into the car at least to finish out the season.
Initially, the goal for this season was just to make it to and complete a race weekend, and find out what this fairly old (but new to me) race car needed in terms of deferred maintenance in order to get through 6 or 8 races a year. Now that I've dipped a toe into club racing, however, I want all I can get, at least within the usual constraints of time and money.
Other racing that maybe 5 of you might care about: MX of Nations is in England this year, October 4-6. MXoN is essentially the Olympics of motocross, with selected racers representing their respective home countries. Team USA this year includes Chase Sexton, who has been incredibly fast this outdoor season, and Ohio's own Aaron Plessinger, whose experience with woods racing should in my opinion be advantageous across the pond, where tracks are not nearly as meticulously groomed as they are here in the states. I'm particularly interested in seeing how they stack up against Dutchman Jeffrey Herlings, who rides a 450 as if he'd like it to be completely used up after a 30 min moto, with seemingly no concern for self preservation. If I remember correctly, the last time Herlings raced in the US, he pulled away from our best pros by half a track in short order, though that was years ago. MXoN SHOULD be a bigger deal than it is to American motocross racers and fans, but it gets overshadowed by our own outdoor and Supercross championships.
Is RFK Jr's endorsement of Trump all that different from Bernie's support of Harris, or is that a foolish comparison? As the election draws nearer, I think more and more Americans are looking for a third lever to pull, and becoming increasingly disheartened.
"Is RFK Jr's endorsement of Trump all that different from Bernie's support of Harris, or is that a foolish comparison?"
Bernie *always* bends over for the establishment at the end of the season, whereas this aisle-crossing from an actual Kennedy might carry more weight.
I just registered for September at Ledges... I expect to see you there!
only if they paid no attention to trump's presidency. jeepers!
I love the fact that the Radical has $4500 billet suspension uprights and ... ACE hardware chicken wire. that there's right and proper racing.
In 2024, there's no reason that voting via other than in-person methods cannot yield the same level of security as in-person votes. Does anyone really think a 70+ year old volunteer squinting at a license with a 5+ year old photo is secure?
It's a red herring that distracts from real issues.
We should be looking for ways to make voting easier, not harder. Our participation rates are way too low.
Totally. We need more participation, and we need to address security issues.
If the electorate were informed and intelligent, you would have a point.
I don't disagree that voters need to be better informed, but that's a different issue than access. Based on age and income of the respective parties, I'm not surprised at all about the swings in mail-in voting. That doesn't suggest nefarious actions, just socioeconomic realities.
I'd love to see a list of the top 25-50 policy questions that matter most to voters, put forth to all candidates, and force a specific, written answer. Require any broadcast news medium to blanket the airwaves with the answers for a week before polling starts.
I'd also love to see compulsory voting. Have a "none of the above" option for each choice.
no more compulsory ANYTHING!!!
"Does anyone really think a 70+ year old volunteer squinting at a license with a 5+ year old photo is secure?"
Having worked at least adjacent to security and encryption issues for 27 years... yeah, I do. Cause here's the issue. Any individual interaction like what you've described above can be compromised with relative ease, but doing those compromises on a broad scale is essentially impossible.
Popping the hashes on a Dominion box is a magnitude of expenditure harder than conning a single in-person vote verifier -- but once you do it, the keys to the kingdom are yours and it's no harder to fake a million votes than it is to fake one. Similarly, if I can get a polling office to take an Al Franken trunk full of votes, that's ONE effort that yields massive results.
Consider this: Banks take their security much more seriously than any voting operation in American history, yet they regularly get roasted via exploits both small and large. The minute people can vote via blockchain or something like that, you might as well shut down the process because there's no hope of a legitimate outcome.
I write all the above in the forlorn and naive hope that some state actor hasn't already cracked AES and/or SHA-256, by the way.
Good point about the expected outcome of the hack - 1 vote vs. millions.
I am not fluent on how mail in votes are processed, but isn't Dominion providing the machines that record and count the in-person votes? If they also tabulate the mail in votes, fine, but then the risk/point of failure has nothing to do with how the vote was received (in person or mail or however else).
Agree wrt to a blockchain or other tech-only vote recording mechanism.
"isn't Dominion providing the machines and record and count the in-person votes?"
Yeah, which is why those machines should be kicked out of the process. At the very least, there should be a paper record generated in real time for purposes of verification.
I'm not in favor of electronic vote recording -- but if I have to pick between wacky Dominion machines being operated in person and, say, voting by Internet, I'd still pick the former.
Grok, go vote for Kamala 234mm times
Meanwhile on the other side of the world......
"Australia’s manual voting system has one of the most complex and time-consuming counting operations in the world. While it can at times require patience, the counting process delivers integrity to the results, concentrating on accuracy in a highly transparent manner."
https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/safeguarding.htm
Works when you only have 25mm population I suppose.
whats the point of voting when you live under draconian laws anyway
We don't get a choice! $80 fine or a letter with your reason if you don't. It at least fixes any graveyard voters.😄
oh yeah
forgot how stupid that was
No. It's easy enough. If you're not smart enough to figure out how to go down to the polling place and vote, then you shouldn't be voting.
Our participation rates are just fine.
Respectfully disagree. It has nothing to do with intelligence. First few personal examples that come to mind:
1. I spent 10+ years of my career traveling out of state M-Thur or M-Fri 40+ weeks a year. I was gone for many birthdays, anniversaries, and election days.
2. Spent my youth in a state where a large portion of the populace worked 14 on / 7 off on offshore oil rigs. Have several friends that still commute 8-10 hours for those jobs to this day.
3. Any number of "regular" jobs that, combined with school, family obligations and transportation create major roadblocks to get to a polling place
Those are good examples and we need to have access for them to vote, but respectfully that is a fraction of one percent of the voters not 57%.
These are kinda-sorta "corner cases" but I do agree that any coherent strategy for polling would have options for these people.
What I *dislike*: ballots being gathered en masse from housing projects, apartments, workplaces, and then being counted as "mail-in".
make it harder. then it's worth the effort