I do think a Korean car makes sense if you're gonna buy something new off the lot for a 16 year old. They may blow up more than others, but they have the best warranty in the game and they're still pretty cheap to buy and run. The Commander's Honda is cooler though...
Somehow real life keeps getting in the way of watching Formula Drift live streams this year. Previous rounds have overlapped with my own drift days, working on a newly acquired 1964 Imperial Crown 4dr, or in the case of this weekend, cruising around Detroit with a baker’s dozen old cars with about 2 people in each car. I’ve previously mentioned a friend who has an old house on Grand Blvd and recently bought an old filling station on Mack. This weekend was the second cruise he’s organized through the city in what is becoming an annual event. He led the pack in his ‘26 Dodge Bros, which apparently didn’t like the pressure of leading. It vapor locked, leaked fuel, and backfired its tailpipe off all day long (literally, it blew the tailpipe off on Woodward in Campus Martius). The day before and the day after, it ran just fine. I failed to get my Imperial roadworthy in time, so I once again piloted his 1953 Chrysler New Yorker. The NYer is a patinaed tank of a car with manual brakes, manual steering with a gigantic wheel and aggressive self-centering, a 331 hemi under the hood, and a very strange but effective transmission. It’s basically a 2 speed automatic with “low” and “drive” ranges, effectively making it a “four speed,” but it still has a clutch pedal that must be depressed to change ranges and to select reverse. There is no “park” position so you park it in neutral or in gear with the parking brake, which is a band that grabs a drum on the driveshaft. The gear pattern is as follows: R,L,N,D, with those letters. To back the car out, you first apply the brakes, return the parking brake by pulling the T handle out then twisting it counter-clockwise before pushing it back into the dash, push in the clutch, move the shift lever to L, then pull back towards yourself to unlock the gate into R, and continue moving the lever until you feel the reverse dog engage thru the linkage.Then, with your foot STILL ON THE BRAKE, release the clutch. The engine will bog slightly and the car will work against the brakes as the clutch is engaged, but the fluid coupling will then take over and allow the engine to stay running while the car stays stationary. Then you simply lift off the brakes and ease into the throttle. The fluid coupling starts transmitting torque to the wheels, and you begin to roll (which you will need to do before having any steering capability). Once you’ve maneuvered into a place where you can proceed in a forward direction, you stop with the brakes, clutch in once again, pull the shift lever down to D (waiting for the gearbox to sync up which can be felt thru the lever), once again staying on the brakes while letting the clutch out, before finally setting off in normal automatic fashion. Getting the automatic shift to occur however, is another quirk of this transmission; after accelerating to say, 30-35mph, lift off the throttle and wait… until you feel the trans make its way into the next gear. This usually takes about 2-3 seconds - slow ones. Then you may resume acceleration or speed maintenance. Other cars we had in our varied and eclectic group were 2 Model Ts, an absolute stunner of a ‘56 Bel Aire, a sweet custom Dodge B van, an E30, and even a little blue Trabant 601! We were a hilarious and charming sight to behold and be-heard with our honking horns, squeaking suspensions, and modified exhausts. Everyone loved us! I did not see one frown all day from any of our spectators or from any in our group. I’m bummed I didn’t get to drive my own car despite having one now (the E36 was NOT an option for this event), but the lady and I still had a great time with great friends.
With the actually fun and interesting story out of the way, here is your Formula Drift New Jersey (FDNJ) recap! I actually did watch some of ProSpec this time, because it was on Friday. I was mainly watching to see my boy Cory Talaska finally put it all together and make it into the Great 8! He was knocked out by the eventual winner, Connor O’Sullivan, but only after forcing a one-more-time battle. Cory’s lead runs were excellent, and his entry technique and style was absolutely PEAK! I’m very proud of him and all my close friends who work on his team; they did a kick ass job and showed what they can really do this weekend! Runner-up to O-Sully was Amanda Sorenson, putting her name in the history books as FD’s first female podium finisher. I have to say, her driving has come a LONG way and she really did perform well. Little brother Brandon didn’t do so well in Pro however, getting knocked out in Top 16 by insurance defrauder and game-playing Taylor Hull. I’m getting ahead of myself here (partly rushing because I didn’t expect the O/T to come out in the morning hours today), so let’s start our Pro report with their Seeding 16 results. Our machine gun Cadillac driving Kentucky man Jonathan Hurst took 2nd overall here, after a very intense battle against ProSpec champ Dmitriy Brutskiy. To get there, he first retired RTR rookie Ben Hobson (who has yet to make any impression beyond “wow” this year), Brazil’s favorite C7 driving cowboy Joao Barion, and BMW driving, beard wielding Andy Hatley. Brutskiy’s path to the Seeding final was paved by Derek Madison (bummer cause D Mad’s S14 was the first pro level car I got to ride in 4 years ago), Mike Power (who took out FD pensioner Vaughn Gittin Jr), and then Frederico Sceriffo and his Ferrari 599, “Fiorella.”
As I said earlier, I didn’t watch any of the Pro battles. So here is a summary of where all out regular characters ended up:
Hurst beat Alec Robbins in Top 32 before being eliminated himself in Top 16 by Chris Forsberg. Sceriffo and Fiorella earned a losing battle against Backchis in Top 32, but at least they made the show this time. Backchis ended up clearing a path to the finals through Turek and Gushi. Conor Shanahan once again showed his insane chasing and transition skills, but was knocked out by Aasbo in Top 16. YouTube superstar Adam LZ then dispatched the 3 time champ in the Great 8 on his way to the 3rd spot on the podium, proving you can still have a competitive car with a front radiator. James Deane’s battles really were like leveling up thru a video game. Starting with the easily handled Kyle Mohan, followed by Rome CP, then Forsberg, then Dylan Hughes, before finally taking on Odi Backchis for the win; and win Deane did!
We are now at the halfway point in the season. Anything can still happen, but with a 74 point lead over Odi, James really seems to have a comfy shot to become the first 4 time FD champion. Aasbo is in 3rd trailing by 114 points, and Simon Olsen is till holding fourth despite not turning a wheel all weekend.
I think it would be cool to see James win a 4th title, but only because it’s been 5 years since the big man won his 3rd. I’d be really excited by Olsen coming out and upsetting more of the top dogs, and I just feel bad for Ryan Turek because he’s been doing this shit for just as long as Forsberg and Gittin Jr but has still never taken it all. FDSTL (St Louis) is next on July 20th.
Back in my teenage years I had strong envy for anybody whose parents bought them a car in general. The thought of getting a new car was an utterly foreign concept. My parents were against the whole concept of me having a car. They had huge fears that their car-nut kid would slack off on school or school activities in order to get a job to support any car I could come up with. So I was forbidden to buy a car. My first vehicle didn't happen until my freshman year of college when they gave me dad's 15 year old 1975 Mazda Rotary Engine pickup. The same one he repeatedly would use to get a load of barkdust or manure in the morning when he knew I had a date that evening. Dad has a sense of humor and knows how to get a kid to wash his truck. Conveniently the truck became mine sometime after he had blown the engine in it. Their thought was that I would sell the dead thing and use the money for school. Instead $550 of leftover financial aid money turned into delivery of a used replacement engine. Engine swap took much longer than the weekend I had envisioned, but it ran eventually and was my car for the next three years.... until I blew the replacement engine. Sold it for $350 to a guy who towed it away with a 1977 Mazda Rotary Engine pickup. He apparently installed engine #3 as I passed it on the freeway a couple years later.
Trying to do my part to make the substack's comment section special.
I'll see if I can dig up the pictures to expand my first car story to feature length. Not sure if it will be Harambe worthy, but I'd enjoy if reader submitted First Car Stories became a regular thing.
You say they're an 'unserious' engine, but I reckon if the Rotary had received the same immense level of R&D that modern Petrol and Diesel Turbo 4's had had, they could've become the new frontier of the internal combustion engine.
I have the feeling where the Rotary could be made efficient enough to the point where it's extraordinary advantages in power/size ratio could more than compensate for the disadvantages.
I'm not a mechanical engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.
i dont want to give you the impression that i dont like rotaries or anything in fact id quite like to own and modify one some day but of every company that has ever dipped a toe into rotary development (and over the last 60ish years theres been a lot) none of them save mazda have ever produced anything more than a handful of prototypes or very few production vehicles
i cant see much of a way forward in terms of practical and efficient engines for passenger vehicles but i wouldnt mind being wrong
Let's not neglect that Wodehouse himself supplied an unforgettably hilarious simile referring to GKC himself: "The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin."
Old GKC bequeathed us with numerous superb paradoxical zingers, but they are often buried in the midst of long chunks of dense, complex arguments. "In our day, defending any of the cardinal virtues has all the exhilaration of vice." "1000 young women demonstrated in the streets, 'we will not be dictated to!' and then all ran off to become stenographers." "The Christian philosophy has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried." (All those from memory, so more paraphrase than quote.)
It is very hard to write humorously without descending into facetiousness. Woodhouse not only manages this book after book but also manages to inject some real feeling into his stories.
So he was like a 100-year-old Terry Pratchett? Is that where Pratchett's style comes from? I'm digging the examples I'm finding on the ol' wykeepedia. I figured Pratchett wouldn't be original, but never bothered to research what prior art has similar clever wordplays. I crack up at those kinds of British witticisms.
Roald Dahl is the same. I'm listening to all his classics again with the kids and discovering a new level of joy at how he wrangles words to present an idea.
I've just spent twenty minutes down the rabbit hole, trying to justify the memory, unsuccesfully. As best I can recall, it was a throwaway line from one of Dahl's short stories (Playboy?) about the two things every American man knows that he knows. Couldn't find it in "The Great Switcheroo" and it's possible I've conflated it.
"There are two things in this world at which I happen to know I excel. One is driving an automobile and the other is you-know-what. So to have him sit there and tell me 1 didn’t know how to behave with my own wife was a monstrous piece of effrontery."
Roald Dahl, 'The Great Switcheroo'
For those of you who haven't: next door neighbors plot and execute a wife swap. Results are not generally what you'd expect.
I wasn't kidding upthread: Wodehouse stands among the truly greatest masters of the English language. Milton, Shakespeare, Burke, Lincoln. The fact that his fiction delivers such reliable warmth and encouragement only adds to the man's legacy. It amuses me, meanwhile, to observe how few English-speakers can (1) pronounce or (2) spell his name.
I could not love his work more if it had only been an excuse for Fry and Laurie to team up. Saying the same thing about Shakespeare is only odder because Kurosawa never filmed a Wodehouse plot.
Seeing and cringing at the battle scars my neighbors' 16-18 year old drivers are accruing on their RX330 and clean single owner 09 CRV (that I helped them locate and buy in the midst of carpocalypse), boy do I think it's an awful idea to buy a new driver a brand new car. My tune might change if they started selling base model compacts with those excellent unpainted black plastic bumpers, like what the '90 Civic Wagon had when I was in HS that I shared with my mom.
My son will get my '13 CX-5, if it survives the next few years. I saw what my nephew did to his dad's car and was appalled. I'd like to think that my boy will be a bit more responsible, but boys will be boys. No new cars for kids.
I took really good care of the rusty Honda I was given access to. Would regularly wash it, wax it, kept the interior spotless. Every spring I'd grind down and touch up the fenders with some more bondo and paint. I did the brakes on it, oil changes, my brother and I replaced the balljoints. I did some dumb ricer crap on it but nothing too tasteless or irreversible ('99 Si wheels, '94 Accord lip spoiler, fake SiR badge, modest muffler tip). I have recurring dreams to this day of finding the car in some shed in my parents' back yard and going for an evening cruise in it.
I love the "modest" fart can, and the badges that write checks the car can't cash!
I did okay in the Accent I drove at the end of the 90s. I kept it reasonably clean and there really wasn't anything I could do to it to make it sexier (it WAS a Hyundai Accent, after all). But it did have air conditioning, which was more than I could say for most of my friends' cars.
Yeah mine was a sad-sack throttle body injected D15B2 saddled to an *automatic,* so yeah it was a total dog. But boy was the handling fun on that "golden age" Civic. And the visibility, particularly in the Wagon, was like sitting in a fishbowl with the thin pillars and that super low dash. I had all kinds of dreams and schemes to manual swap it and convert it to PGM-FI (multiport injection off of a D16), or even better, buy my dream car, a 3rd gen Prelude Si.
Oh how I miss the greenhouses in that generation of cars. It was shocking when I got my first "modern" car in Japan: A Mazda Premacy (the 5 mini-minivan here) with A-pillars so thick they swallowed the sun. Maybe my old Accent or any of the Subarus I drove would have crushed me in a rollover, but it would have been a heck of a way to go if I managed to put one of those in the air!
I, too, covet old Preludes. My dream is a rust-free, bone-stock, end-of-life Prelude Type SH. It's probably more achievable (and practical) than an S1 Esprit with a Yamaha SHO V6 swapped in.
OT: bailed out on looking at the very promising sounding Mazda3, and a "SVM" Aveo5 that I was geeking out over. I've been on this "simplify life" kick much of the year (sold off all but one motorcycle, sold my old suburban) and I need to stay the course. A third car is another vehicle to maintain, inevitably a backlog of wear and tear to correct, a trip to the BMV, etc. At 35, I think(?) I'm *finally* starting to value my time more. Tore into my FIL's old pressure washer with my 5 year old to diagnose it has having a locked up bearing on the pump, that's the sort of low key and easy wrenching I enjoy these days.
Re-read all of Jack's old TTAC rental review pieces on the 2011+ T&C/Caravans, as well as the 2012 Camry SE 2.5 track review, to make myself appreciate and enjoy what I already have.
I'll at least finish out the year with the current lean "normie" fleet of vehicles, as test of willpower if nothing else.
The venerable '78 XS1100E. I had actually listed it on FB for $2900 but then had a change of heart. I figure I have every bit of $4000 into that bike, to say nothing of the time invested. Even if I barely ride it, Id' rather mothball it under a dust cover with the carbs drained dry and fuel stabilizer in the gas tank, I'm not hard up for cash.
So that coffee drips through faster and is a bit less likely to stall during the brew. I successfully drilled them out using my "black oxide coated bit. It chewed up the bit a bit, but :emoji-man-shrugging:. I did knick part of the little riser in the middle, which fills me with displeasure, but c'est la vie.
Europe is all kayfabe. Nobody that they are wringing their hands about on the 'far right' is anything close to even moderate right (especially Meloni and LePen). The clusterfuck that is Euro politics both on the local national and Euro level is purposely designed to keep them marginalized and impotent anyway.
I wonder what plea deal Julian cut. Trump could have gotten him released on day one of his presidency.
I didn't want this thread to turn into political infighting, but...
I think Trump's fundamental flaw is that he loves the USA and actually believes in the rule of law. And has bad judgment regarding the character of his subordinates.
I think that the reason he let his people be savaged by the legal system is that he believed that justice would prevail in the end. Not realizing that his enemies were willing to pervert the legal system to bring him down. Thus he did not interfere with any of the FBI and DOJ persecutions of his people.
Also that he trusted his advisors when they said "so-and-so is a good bloke and you should hire him" and he ended up governing from a viper's nest.
If he's president on 1/21/2025, will he issue a pardon for the J6 defendants? I'm not sure. Perhaps all his rhetoric about the "deep state" and "draining the swamp" is just to appease his supporters. Or maybe he actually believes it this time around.
I'd like to believe that he is smart enough to learn those lessons from the first go round, but nothing he says or does would suggest that he has. The VP announcement tomorrow will be a big tell.
None of that has anything to do with how Trump's administration treated Assange. If anything, it was a step up in aggression from Obama. With all the other stuff going on, he would be even less focused on this.
Exactly. His administration wanted to bury Assange and none of the pardon talk amounted to more than Trump’s usual “we’re looking into that and will have something interesting soon” deflection he uses for anything he doesn’t care about.
It’d be very on-brand for Trump to attack Biden now for letting him go.
European politics is not difficult to understand. NATO countries are literal vassals to the US MIC (refer to a leaked copy of Swedens contract to join NATO). The majority of the population of Europe doesn't want to be at war with Russia. The political leaders signed on the "do whatever the US says" dotted line when they ran for national office in a NATO country. PMs and presidents are failing because the war is costing Europeans a LOT of money for no benefit other than being saved from the threat of the Russian horde rolling over our borders.
The problem with this scenario is that it is using the playbook from the cold war. Putin will slowly destroy Ukraine, but they are not about to roll over Latvia or Romania. Vlad wanted - and had - the EU as paying customers. Why would he want to repeat the mistakes of the USSR and have to occupy and suppress all those lands when he can just make bank selling us gas, oil and fertilizer?
Putin has been in power for 24 years and has never shown any interest in invading Western or Central Europe. We have seen that with our own eyes. The whole fucking point of the EU was to have us all be business partners so that we didn't go to war. You can sell to people whose land has been bombed back to the middle ages.
The question of how EU countries would defend themselves without the US is non-trivial, but since 1992 the protection racket and MIC boondoggle of NATO has become ever clearer.
The people see it and are tired of it and the neoliberal mindset behind it. The EU national leaders have sold out to the neoliberal system and will defend it to the end. The biggest sellout is the UK, which is why they have PMs with the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
Every national EU pol who supports continuing fighting the war against Russia is suffering, and those who were not even parties 5 years ago are now viable. See Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany for a great example.
I am not at all surprised with what is happening in France, Germany, the UK, Slovakia, Hungary, Czechia, or Italy. Meloni came in opposed to the war and changed her tack faster than you can say, "Pinapple on pizza is blasphemy." She is no longer beloved like she was, and should look to Macron and Johnson for her future if she continues.
NATO: keep the US in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down.
Russia did not want to level Ukraine, as it is not in any country's interest to have a failed state full of black market weapons on their border, like say early post war Iraq or modern Mexico. They could have gone full shock and awe on Keeeeeev on day one but did not for this reason.
Russia is playing politics, NATO is playing chicken.
They were forced to leave Kiev because they weren't able to hold Hostomel Airport and the planned airbridge to resupply troops could never be established.
A nuclear armed regional power (and ex ally) requests that a corrupt NATO puppet (and historic route of invasion) remain a demilitarized buffer state. Reasonable or no?
NATO played Ukraine 'let's you and him fight' and Ukraine had to FAFO. Slow grind it is, then.
I'll take the "no" on that. Did Ukraine invade Russia? Did NATO invade Russia? You might not value Ukraine's democracy and independence but the people of Ukraine do, and are willing to fight and die for it. Americans are very lucky that we don't have the misfortune to have a land border with Russia, so we will never be subject to the charming practices of Putin's regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Mistreatment_of_Ukrainian_POWs
Perhaps tldr response to this and your concurrent comment above/below:
I'm not going to argue the validity of perhaps century long ethnic feuds between those that live there, being neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but this brinksmanship is what starts World Wars, which I do not want. NATO has been openly goading the Russians into escalating and they (the Russians) have IMO shown a remarkable level of restraint. At the minimum, the US has played a large hand in intelligence and targeting on the part of the Ukraine, on top of supplying materiel and financially propping up that cokeheaded clown's government. I'm a hothead, but I would have dropped one of those AWACs playing the 'I'm not touching you' game across the border on day one.
Russia will come out of this stronger than they went in and be tighter with China (and the Norks, lol). We and NATO will be weaker. NATO would have absolutely put nukes in Ukraine if they had been allowed to join. Russia is within their rights not to tolerate that.
"Russia will come out of this stronger than they went in"
Respectfully disagree.
1. Europe has weaned itself off russian energy exports. When the war ends, I don't see Europe buying oil and gas from them again.
2. If they keep Ukraine, the economic sanctions will remain. Sure "sanctions don't work" in the short term. But over decades, they have a profound effect -- in widening the gap in prosperity between the sanctioners and sanctionee. Compare North and South Koreal. Or Cuba and any other Carribean country (except possibly Haiti).
3. If they lose, the rest of the world will be extracting reparations for the destruction caused in Ukraine.
3b. If they win, they'll have to rebuild Ukraine themselves. After all there's no point in conquering a wasteland. And rebuilding an occupied territory will always be extra expensive because of resistance and sabotage by the occupied people.
4. Russia suffers from the Dutch disease: their natural resources sector has crowded out the manufacturing, and to a lesser extent the service sector of the economy. When raw material exports dwindle, see #1 & #2, there's nothing left.
5. They willingly sacrificed their entire cohort of military aged men (16-29). Whether via battlefield losses of mass exodus. Russia never fights a war without losing half a million soldiers -- in WWII, they had to reconstitute their army THREE TIMES. Whether they win or lose, there aren't enough people left to repopulate the country.
5a. Russia has a first world birth rate, but a third world mortality rate. This doesn't help.
6. Russia spends nearly half their government budget on the military and/or the security apparatus (surveillance state). To use a cliche, it's unsustainable. And a massive drain on any GDP they do have.
7. Being tighter with China is no prize. Much like the Porsche/VW tie-ups, every deal Russia made with China usually ended up with them getting fucked by China.
7a. Having seen the world united with their Russian sanctions, China is scared shitless. Imagine a world where nobody will sell them raw materials, and nobody will buy their counterfeit purses.
For these reasons, I believe that Russia is on it's way to becoming the next Cuba, or even North Korea, instead of emerging stronger afterwards.
i thought ukraine had loads of nukes and we promised to defend 'em if they gave them up. also putin only wanted assurance that ukraine wouldn't be in nato. wasn't all that long ago.
The West has tried to destroy Russia for nearly two centuries, indirectly mostly by the British and the US - overthrowing democratically elected governments, NATO expansion to and nuclear weapons on its borders, etc. - and directly by the French and the Germans through invasion.
"The West has tried to destroy Russia for nearly two centuries, indirectly mostly by the British and the US - overthrowing democratically elected governments,"
No, I believe they didn't. 90% of EU gas used to come through pipelines in Ukraine. Ukraine made €4 billion+ a year in transit tarrifs (plus they skimmed product) from the deal. Everyone was happy... except Blackrock
Putin went to the UN and the US as late as Dec 21 with a peace plan and was soundly rebuffed.
Putin is a dictator. Dictators get overthrown and usually die violently when the people convince the military that the dictator is not keeping them safe. 1/7 of all Russians died in WWII. The area of land decimated in Russia during WWII is equivalent to the area from the East Coast of the US to the Mississippi.
In WWII the Nazis invaded Russia through Ukraine, and had a lot of help from Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Those same Nazi groups still exist in Ukraine today, and hold greatly outsized power to their political representation, particularly in the military.
The CIA had set up listening stations all along Russia's border with Ukraine. 38 biolabs were set up in Ukraine by the US. In Dec 21 Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference that maybe Ukraine should get nukes again.
It is not that I think Russia is a "good guy" and for sure Putin is not. But he is a rational actor. After nearly 30 years of encroaching NATO and Russian red lines constantly being crossed he had to choose between rolling the dice on scaring Ukraine into going back to neutrality, or sure death (of Russia and himself) if Ukraine continued on its path of being "NATO in all but name."
His plan would have worked if it hadn't been for those meddling kids! And by "meddling kids" I mean Boris Johnson carrying the US message to NOT accept the Instanbul agreement.
Russia pulled back from Kiev and the exact reasons why we may never know. It took until the fall of 22 for Russia to finally commit. Now they are just grinding down Ukraine until Ukraine capitulates, and signs a peace deal that will be similar to Istanbul, just with a much smaller Ukraine remaining, and a shitton of dead Ukrainians (and Russians).
The "Nyet means nyet" missive from 2008 was real.
Realpolitik means that major powers, even those not as powerful as the US, have spheres of influence they will not allow crossed. That is and has been Ukraine for Russia since WWII.
'They could've gone full shock and awe on Keeev...'
I just can't get enough of this Slavaboo shit where Russia is God walking on the face of the earth and Putin is the Pope/Jesus, and so therefore, any self evident Russian corruption or incompetence is really just our beloved KGB bureaucrat playing 4D Chess.
I disagree with your notion that Russia is playing politics. They have gained nothing from the full on Invasion of Ukraine. Quite the opposite. After the genius occupation of Crimea in 2014, which went by without any relevant consequences, they have now been heavily sanctioned and Ukraine has been heavily armed by western nations. As a result, the losses have escalated massively compared to 2014 and Russia gets left behind China and the US.
The sanctions have definitely worked, otherwise Russia wouldn’t have depleted it’s reserves of hard currency. There are definitely means and ways outside the US Umbrella, but they are mostly limited to an alliance with the Chinese, who are the new enemy of the US. The Chinese are playing everything pretty smart right now, I am sure they will exploit Russias weakness to get some good deals on Oil and slowly populate the Russian border regions with Chinese nationals. In fact I would be willing to bet that Russia will become a Chinese puppet state in the next 20-40 years.
How dare you heart this, Baruth. MacArthur was insane. Almost completely insane. After rubbing his face into the cheese grater that was the Korean Peninsula, he was *convinced* that our pathetic military could sweep all of China.
I rewound time to see a younger MacArthur's acts in Toland's "The Rising Sun." MacArthur seems as insane in 1942 as he was in 1953. He just bounced to Australia while ordering his generals to fight to the last man on the small peninsula in southwest Luzon. That went poorly. We'll see how he redeems himself. He kind of reminds me of Trump, to be honest. Like, one of those guys where you can't tell whether or not he believes the bologna he's constantly spouting.
Russia isn't seeing material hardship due to the sanctions, ergo the sanctions and their effects aren't.
They have worked to debilitate and immiserate other countries so we should ask if Russia is a one off or the age of sanctioning is coming to an end?
Moreover a large number of hard assets changed hands from foreign to Russian ownership in what would seem to be a SNAFU on the part of the sanctioners.
Do any of the NATO countries of western Europe have any true leverage in terms of maybe resources or industry that they can use to influence policy? From my perspective it seems they're all beholden to Russia to keep the lights on, and China for everything they own. Also, do any of these countries actually like each other? Some friends of mine just got back from the race at Le Mans, and were astounded at how inconsiderate the French fans were to everyone else, not just American tourists. I know that's a small sample size, but I get the impression that Europe is full of old grudges.
I just don't get why the American right has done a 180 from mistrusting totalitarian Russian leaders to trying to argue that they are better than the West. (Well, I do - they twist themselves into whatever knots they need to to justify whatever Donald Trump thinks - but I don't understand why they have to do that in the first place.) This comment is maybe the perfect example. So many wrong things in it.
"The majority of the population of Europe doesn't want to be at war with Russia."
Well, sure, but the majority of the population of Europe wants to be under the control of Russia even less. That's why the peoples in the east, most immediately threatened by direct military action, are putting both money and mouths behind Ukraine. It's why even leaders like Meloni in the west are not taking anti-Ukraine positions. (She changed not because she is a US puppet but because domestic political survival requires it.) People in the west are not worried that Russia will invade tomorrow, but they are worried that they will be under the economic control of Russia. It's also why Germany moved heaven and earth to change the majority of its energy supply after the invasion. If their peoples were pro-Russia, leaders like Scholz and Macron would be happy to go with them. It would be a distraction from the real fight in European politics, which is over immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
"The political leaders signed on the "do whatever the US says" dotted line when they ran for national office in a NATO country."
Ask Donald Trump how much he thinks the NATO countries "do what the US says." If the US (regardless of faction in the US) had its way they would all be meeting or exceeding the 2% target.
"Putin will slowly destroy Ukraine, but they are not about to roll over Latvia or Romania. "
"Putin has been in power for 24 years and has never shown any interest in invading Western or Central Europe."
Putin will tell you loud and clear what he wants to do. Read his 2021 manifesto and then his 2024 state of the union speech. There are two themes running through them. The first is the idea that the Soviet Union was stronger than today's Russia as a result of geography. He is pretty clear about what he sees as a strategic imperative to put the Soviet Union back together. That includes the Baltics for obvious naval reasons; it includes the Caucasus; and it includes all of what today make up Ukraine, Transnistria, and Belarus.
But beyond that, it includes a heavy dose of pan-Slavism. Putin is extremely concerned with his legacy, and really wants to be the tsar who did what even the most powerful tsars before him could not accomplish - to create a Russian Empire that includes all the Slavic peoples. That implies not only control of the former Soviet Union but also a substantial chunk of eastern Europe, most of what used to be in the Warsaw Pact. It further implies subjugation of non-Slavic people who are in places with large Slavic minorities (the Baltics, much of the former Yugoslavia outside Serbia) and non-Slavic people who geographically separate Slavs (Romania/Moldova and Hungary). He's ardently expansionist and the reason he hasn't tried expansion until his Ukraine adventure was simply a lack of leverage.
"Every national EU pol who supports continuing fighting the war against Russia is suffering"
Mainstream EU politicians' woes have nothing to do with Russia. They are about immigration. Jordan Bardella is not running around promising to stop aiding Ukraine. He's running around saying that he will slow down immigration and force existing immigrants to assimilate more. That is what's driving continental European politics right now. As for the UK, the issue right now is that the Conservative Party is both the UK's AfD and the UK's CDP in the same party, and they are so busy fighting each other--again, mostly over immigration--that they can't do a thing to fight Labour.
The 'American right' knows it isn't our business. We don't have to like or 'trust' Putin to not want war with him or not meddle in politics on his borders. If he and his voters think that his positions are in the best interest of the Russians, then so be it. The small countries of Eastern Europe will eventually ally with them *if* they believe that it is better than what Brussels and Washington has on offer. Orban's issues with the EU mirror this, or Poland before the leftists were installed. "Infinity migrants or no money"
"I just don't get why the American right has done a 180 from mistrusting totalitarian Russian leaders to trying to argue that they are better than the West."
There's no contradiction here, any more than there is between the Democratic peacenik position during the Brezhnev years and their bloodthirsty barbaric yawp in 2024.
You called it: Putin is a tsar, right down to his protection of Christianity. That's why the Left hates him, and why the Right at the very least doesn't want to lose half of the Eastern Seaboard to radiation over support for a country most of us couldn't find on any map besides an old version of Risk.
Protection of Christianity my ass. He’s the protector of a bastardized sect that worships the nation and Tsar above God and is under total state control. And the kicker is that, state church or not, the Russian population is even less religious than most western countries.
I'm not claiming he is Constantine reborn... not that Constantine didn't have sound, hard-won reasons for endorsing Christianity.
As far as Russians being religious or not, wasn't it difficult to practice religion at all until about 1980? No wonder much of the population doesn't believe.
Yet, when I read it, I ask myself: "Has the Patriarch licked Putin's boots as thoroughly as the Antipope Francis has licked the boots of immigrants, gay sex, globalization... hell, he just got done telling his bishops to shut their mouths on abortion and basically render Roe v. Wade unto Caesar. What about the modern Catholic church differs in any significant way from global homogenization?"
The proper response to that, if there is one, is that the deranged buffoonery of Jorge Bergoglio doesn't prevent millions of American Catholics from pursuing their faith. The same is true with Patriarch Kirill.
As someone born into one Protestant denomination who had a tortuous journey to still-very-tentative belief within another, I am very poorly equipped to defend anything involving the Roman Catholic Church or its hierarchy. To me, "Christianity" begins with the teachings of Jesus, not popes or saints, and tends to err when it departs, as it very often does, from those teachings.
Edit to add: that is an excellent argument you linked.
Since you quote me I'll respond. I'm not on the right. I'm a social democrat who lives in social democratic Austria for 30 years and prefers the politics here to those of the US, even if the US will always be my "home."
Do you read Russian? I don't and I'm betting you don't either. I've heard lots of interpretations of "what Putin wants" and "what Putin says." I watch "what Putin does." Until Feb 22 Putin never lauched a war of aggression. Chechnya was a western attempt at a color revolution, Georgia attacked Russia (UN report). Russia claims their invasion of Ukraine was to avoid a huge loss of life in the Donbas. This is legal under the UN charter, but I'm not an international lawyer so I can't judge if their case would win.
Where is Putin's overrun of Poland so that he can get to Czechia and Slovakia - both fully Slavic countries. Putin is 71. He better hurry up!
If Putin is "ardently expansionist" where is the evidence of this? What countries has Russia started a war of expansion - a la Hitler's "Lebensraum" expansion?
I am sorry to assume you were American; it's an American blog and a point of view that is quite common in my experience on the right in America.
But I continue to believe you are far too credulous toward Putin.
I read Russian poorly, but my views on what Putin wants are informed by reading the official English translations of his speeches and manifesto. And when you evaluate what he does, I think it's important to put it in the context of both what he says and the situation he is in. He is the leader of a country with vast natural resources, but a limited and declining pool of human capital and an antiquated industrial base. He cannot realistically participate in the modern tech economy beyond a limited amount of services provision, and he has a hard time competing with more modern industrial development to his west. As a result he has not been in a position to do much about his stated ambitions.
The invasion of Ukraine (for which the stated rationale was clearly not credible, especially because the invasion went so far beyond the Donbas) makes vastly more sense as an expansionist project. The goal was by all accounts not to occupy Ukraine permanently (except for Crimea and the Donbas) but to install a puppet government similar to the one currently in Belarus, which would cede Crimea and the Donbas by agreement and end all ambitions to join NATO or the EU (regardless of the wishes of the populace). That would give him access to Ukraine's industrial and agricultural development, which is far ahead of what exists in Russia today.
Putin's manifesto would imply straightforwardly that he wants to take similar action in, at the very least, Georgia, Transnistria, and the Baltics. And it's not a far stretch from there to see that he would want to develop control over the most industrially developed of the Slav lands - which are further west in Europe. It would give him the modern industrial base he does not have today and a whole lot of potential to generate Western currency and develop military strength.
I have already heard quite a bit from people about “I would never buy my kid a new car.” Okay, cool. I would and did. Here’s why:
1) I do not have the time or bandwidth to deal with an unreliable car, nor does my son. I travel for a living and he needs to transport himself to soccer and track and weightlifting seven days a week. The car needs to work absolutely perfectly, or it needs to be picked up and replaced with a loaner car when it doesn’t.
2) yes, he’ll bang it off of something. He’s already had a slight mishap with the entrance to the garage (much like his uncle did at his age), which was nothing that Meguiar’s and a touch up pen couldn’t handle. Why is it worse to have a fender bender with a new car than an old one? It isn’t. It costs no less to fix.
3) I would much rather have my son carrying a 4.0, lettering in three sports as a sophomore, and captaining his club team than working as a bagger at a grocery store or flipping burgers. I see zero value in “having him work for it.” I can afford to have him focus on things that are important. Learning how to take shit from a $15 an hour assistant manager isn’t one of them.
4) we live in rural Kentucky, and a Forte GT line might as well be an S Class as far as his classmates are concerned. It immediately made him the coolest kid in school for at least a week, and as he’s a bit of a misanthrope (who would have guessed), that’s been a new and fun experience for him.
Crash safety is a big one for me. I've got an (almost) 14 year old and have been considering a single cab long box newer model full-size truck. IIHS loss data shows all full-sizers well below average for driver/passenger injury payments. A single or extended cab limits passenger and distractions.
A new or lightly used 2WD can be had reasonably in the north, and would solve my need for occasional truck use. When snow/ice are present he can use my winter-tire shorn car or I'll just get a set of winters for the truck.
All valid reasons. I think the reliability trumps all but do not get any backlash for buying new. Not like you bought an S class as his first car.
The Honda is also a good choice for The Commander. Accidents happen and neither of these cars are collectable but they are safe.
Son started with a family owned 05 Camry and didn’t have any accidents thank goodness and is now on to his grandmother and grandfather’s barely driven Avalon. A banger car for college if not quite cool. Should last and allow him to get something fun while he can enjoy it.
This is how they learn. Let them make their mistakes and gain the knowledge safely.
I salute your choice and hope that stay safe while enjoying school.
The cool factor is a bonus and hope he parlays that into asking the person he is interested in out. The confidence bump can be a good thing.
Mark, your son is luck to have a father as involved as you just like John is lucky to have a dedicated father. However I would take issue with you statement “Learnung to take shit from. $15 an hour Assistant Mgr is not one of them.” Yes that is important because it teaches the young person that they have to respect authority and it teaches young people to take responsibility. Bagging groceries at 16 at Krogers is not a bad job and it provides a young person with a sense of self worth and responsibility. Plus the ability tobwirj with people of different backgrounds and different outlooks. Oh and Managers at Kroger make well into six figures as they are responsible for a multimillion dollar operation with a 2-3 percent profit margin.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’d much rather have him in the gym or on the pitch or practicing his saxophone. His time is more valuable than $12 an hour.
No, if all he can get is a $12 hr job and no more, his time is worth exactly $12 hr. You can opt him out of a job, but whatever resume burnishing he's doing instead of bagging is you subsidizing him at an arbitrary rate.
That’s a poor future time orientation way of looking at it. The things he’s doing now are ensuring that he’ll be worth $250k a year in his thirties instead of continuing to be worth $12 an hour as a wage laborer. Being a bagger or a dishwasher teaches him absolutely nothing and is a poor use of his time.
I'm not suggesting you're wrong not to have him do whatever he'd get paid $12 hr, I'm suggesting that at this point in life that's what he's worth to an employer. Hopefully he will be worth more in 20 years.
Fwiw, as a father of two boys nowin their 20s, I can pretty well assure you your best laid plans will not be as straight as you think. My history major who ended up not going to law school is making over $200k doing self taught software. My other ended up deciding to get an engineering degree after never giving it a thought until sophomore year. He's in an incredibly interesting career path now four years out of school. You never know.
For sure. I majored in jazz studies, for God’s sake. And while I can still blow a mean solo over Mister Magic, I don’t think any of that made me a sales and operations executive.
Has your son ever had any kind of job? That $250K/yr job is still going to need for him to learn some basic job skills for him to succeed.
Being a bagger or dishwasher teaches you about showing up on time, doing your job well, working within a team in a commercial environment, and the pain of taxes withheld.
It will also likely give him some encouragement to work towards that $250K/yr future as opposed to being a wage laborer.
I don’t think there is anything that being a bagger teaches you that captaining a state championship team doesn’t, save for the taxes (and he hears his father bitch about that enough), and the reverse isn’t true at all. He doesn’t show up on time, he shows up 30 minutes early. He’s not just responsible for his own work quality, but for the work quality of an entire team. He’s the only one on the field who’s allowed to speak to the officials.
Leading 18 young men into a physically demanding competition every day isn’t just about the games. It’s about demanding excellence in every warmup, every drill, every touch of the ball. He has more respect from the team than the coach does. He’s responsible for upholding the standards of a club that has won two USSF national titles.
He’s also worn the Kentucky badge as a member of the state team, and will hopefully wear the Stars and Stripes someday. And he’s likely going to captain his HS team as a junior, having been selected for the honor over fifteen seniors.
I can’t imagine any part time laborer job that would replicate any of that. I would never trade one second of his time with his club or school teams to have him wash a dish.
This might be overvaluing the things he's learning at an unpaid rate and undervaluing the things he might learn getting paid 12 dollars an hour. Who knows, as it's all a dice roll.
I played sports and was in school clubs but my grades in high school started to suffer so my folks asked me to drop Football. I was a mediocre player but I did enjoy it and learned from the experience.
Once I got to both driving age and of working age my folks made me a deal. I had to pay them for a car and the insurance it costs to operate the car.
My parents at the time probably could have afforded to get me a car without me actually working, I don't know. A teacher and a nursing salary wasn't all that great in the mid to late 90's. At any rate I started working at Radio Shack at 16 for minimum wage. I was lucky enough to learn basic electronics in the late 90's while I was taking several programming electives in high school which steered me into Computer Engineering. But then there is a twist.
The store shut down and I ended up working in a paint store mixing, matching, and delivering paint for contractors at 50 cents above minimum wage. I continued making 50 cents above minimum wage up until my second year of college where they gave me a 1.50 raise. I worked with the company for a total of 7 years between high school and college
while getting an engineering degree. What was invaluable to me was the amount of things I learned working in a paint store that directly has impacted my engineering profession.
I get that "bagging" or "flipping burgers" might not be the best use of a kid's time, especially a talented one. There are loads of other minimum wage jobs out there that can offer a wealth of experience and information.
I'm glad it worked out for you. As you said, it's a dice roll.
My college job made me quite a bit of money (there were weeks I made over $1000 working part time, and that was in 1998 dollars) and set me up for what most would consider to be a good career in sales. However, the time I spent selling saxophones hugely impacted the time I spent PRACTICING saxophone. I would have been a much better musician if I had spent that 20-25 hours a week practicing. But would that life have been as good or rewarding as the one I got? As Aslan says, No one is ever told what would have happened. But anyone can find out what will happen.
I would never ask my son to drop a sport, ever. If his grades dropped, I don't think taking away the one thing he loves more than anything would help. Also, that would be a failure of commitment to his team. With him, they're state championship level. Without him...they're a .500 team. Not fair to the rest of the kids to punish them because he's not handling his business. Luckily, that's never been an issue.
Mark's reply doesn't go far enough: It's a poor PRESENT time orientation way to look at it. If you lost your job this morning, could you replace it in 24 hours? 48 hours? No, you would need some sort of a SUBSIDY (savings, spouse, unemployment) to pay your expenses while you searched for work, which requires both "clock time" (hours per day) and "calendar time" (even if you had a 15 minute interview with your college roommate the CEO, it would still take time for HR to prepare an offer).
The difference is that a teenager doesn't have savings, spouse, or unemployment.
This is in addition to Mark's point about his son being in a preparatory phase of life.
I believe this boils down to some sort or Rich Dad Poor Dad way of thinking.
There’s a reason why I had poor dad and the older I get the more I realize how flawed the paths were laid in-front of me to take, in a way to also be poor. You can argue some sort of work ethic garbage but the reality of $12/hr ($5.15 when I started *barf*) is coming to terms with being a slave and then having a flawed sense of value that $24/hr job is some great thing to have because it’s double. It moves your target far lower.
If he’s able to START where $35-50+ is the basement number without having to live a broke dick lifestyle !both physically and mentality then fine. Fair? Nope. Life isn’t fair. We are supposed to work hard so our children don’t HAVE to start where we did or below. The idea is to give them every possible advantage.
It’s an annoying thing to think about as I know plenty of people that never knew struggle in their lives and were held by the hand from rich to richer. Does it make them a bad person? No. Can it make them out of touch and likely far less humble? Likely. Does that matter? Not to them. They are the ones making the real money.
So long as he’s a decent enough human it’s not much my business to say otherwise. I’ll go back to pretending I’m actually doing half decent in life when in reality it’s nothing past acceptable in 2024. At least I got to ride my bike to work at Big Lots. All that taught me was being poor sucks.
I had a rich dad and worked at 16. The absolute best reason to work at 16 is you can make 12k a year tax free and fully fund your Roth IRA (or dad/mom can). Work 16-22 60 days a year at $15 an hour can turn into a lot of tax free money. Dad funded my roth IRA
That last sentence, you nailed it. We weren’t poor, but far from rich. My parents both were in sales of some sort. I’m pretty sure most of my dad’s 401k was diverted to paying for me to play hockey and attend private school. That sounds a lot better than it was, we were solidly middle class.
I got saddled with the poor dad thinking. Got my first job at a bicycle store when I was 15. Other than gaining a massive amount of respect for small businesses and their owners, I got nothing out of this job. The real life skills (owning/learning from mistakes, motivation, etc.) all came on the ice.
While my dad certainly had good intentions intentions, all working really did was waste the best years of my life. Instead of doing something worthwhile, I was arguing with jerkoffs over which brake shoes they needed for their Cervelo.
The greatest lesson I learned from sports is that while skill is important, it’s all about who you know. This goes 10 fold in a small town.
All of the “important last names” were starters. Do you know who often wasn’t? The ‘non popular’ team captains. We tended to rotate them but being leader in practice didn’t correlate to game day.
I also watched 80% of our team WALK after my sophomore years and the varsity team was left with freshman to get it done - they couldn’t.
Same shit went for baseball. Basketball I both suck at and have no interest so no comments there.
I got heavy into BMX, freestyle and eventually mountain biking; budget of course.
As an adult I loathe sports. Unless it has wheels I’ve very little interest and anything mainstream can go away. I skip over the F1 portion weekly.
I miss watching stadium truck racing, monster trucks and swamp buggies, WRC coverage and 90s televised IMSA / spec racing. God bless grandma and her cable television.
Unless I can compete myself you can have it. Football (and the like) is now fat has beens dressed up like cheerleaders and screaming at each other. I don’t have a good parallel back to the business world other than the fat has been business owners seem to be attracted to younger athletes because it’s the closest form of cheerleading they can have - in-person flattery and general dick sucking behavior.
I have a friend who has a VERY Rich Dad. That’s in terms of both personal wealth and his outlook on life / taxation / wealth preservation, etc. Hence the capitalization.
This story isn’t really about him, though.
The VERY Rich Dad spends his winters at Brays Island Plantation in SC, where one of his seasonal neighbors is Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Apparently, Robert is (very) cheap, petty, argumentative, and consequently rather unpopular within the community.
Based on the anecdotes I have heard, he cares quite a bit!
He carries around a box of books so that he can bestow a signed copy upon anyone who is so unfortunate as to fall into conversation with him.
My buddy’s father has overheard him dispensing unsolicited personal finance “advice” to both a Mellon and the fellow who inherited Little St. Simons Island and later sold it to Hank Paulson.
"Although his family was not rich, he attended a predominantly wealthy elementary school because of an anomaly in the school-district boundaries. The wealthy kids had newer toys and refused to invite Kiyosaki and his friend to parties, telling Kiyosaki it was because they were “poor kids.” Sounds like he was scarred deeply by that humiliation and has lived his whole life since trying to prove to some rude nine-year olds from the 1950s that he now has the money to be worthy of their party invitations. He told Meet the Street that he has never been back to Hawaii. I suspect such a visit would rid him of these demons from his childhood."
[Oddly, long after I posted this comment about Kiyosaki reminding me of Blake, Blake emerged from obscurity when his wife was shot to death as he returned to a restaurant to get the gun that he forgot there. My comparing Kiyosaki to Blake had nothing to do with guns and murdered wives. Also, a Los Angeles Times article about Blake’s murdered wife, Bonny Lee Bakely, said she told friends that she wanted to marry a celebrity like Blake “to show up kids who made fun of her in school.” That is reminiscent of my analysis of Kiyosaki’s lifelong pursuit of money and status as an overreaction to insults he received in elementary school.]
I can see both ways of it. I personally didn't have a choice but to start working menial jobs in high school and college, and I do believe it has made me a better and well rounded person overall. Those jobs taught me how to interact with people from all kinds of backgrounds. I learned how to make unlikely friends and how to deal with people I didn't care for. I learned that labor with a purpose makes one fit, and feel good. I also learned how to keep the "authority" figures from walking all over me, which is something I think gen Z is embracing to almost an excessive point. I still believe my post-graduation summer job as a service porter at my local Ford dealer was probably the most important job I ever had.
Now, when it comes to my own kids in 20 years time? I don't have any yet, but I will try my damndest to make sure they don't HAVE to work as young as I did, but I will encourage it if they find a suitable opportunity. My very first job was working the bayou themed arcade at Joe Duhmar's Fieldhouse, and I didn't learn shit there.
You’d be shocked how many executives want to hire only former athletes, especially for sales roles. They view athletes as disciplined people who know how to compete. And those are skills that Gen Z and Gen Alpha definitely do NOT have.
I think kids learn so much more from pushing themselves to finish the last fifty meters of a 400m dash than they do at menial jobs, and their time is limited. I always feel terrible for kids who have to miss practices or film study because they’re working a part time job.
The wealthy kids I know who worked jobs are typically more down to earth than the wealthy ones who didn't. Probably the only time they interact with the actual lower and middle classes.
Being someone who was way involved in school as a kid and forbidden from having a job, I agree with your suggestion but for a different reason. Not with you on the respect authority thing. It's probably very unlikely someone like Mark's son has an attitude problem and I don't think I did either. I would have liked a little more independence. There was a long period in my life (probably >3 years) where $100 a week of my own money would have made a serious difference to me. Instead, I passed on a lot of activities cause I didn't want to beg for $20.
I was obsessed with cars from an early age, and started working various after school jobs at age 14 in order to buy my own. At 17, I spent nearly $4k (which was basically everything I had) on my first car. Though I don't necessarily regret any of this since it was what I wanted, I think your logic is spot-on. The summer before my Junior year of high school, I was walking out the door at 8am on a Saturday to knock out another 8 hours of my 48 hour work week, when my dad stopped me at the door. "You have your whole life ahead of you to work, you're only a kid once, what the hell are you doing to yourself?"
If your son is thriving in athletics and academics, I'm nearly certain that those environments are going to be more beneficial to him in the long run than washing cars at a dealership or running fence line at a farm like I did - captaining a team might even teach him to be a leader and/or work for himself, rather than clocking in every morning on someone else's hamster wheel. He'll also not be driving a literal antique with no airbags or ABS.
These are 5 really great reasons to buy this car for this kid, Mark. High school is hard, even if you're smart and a good athlete. If you can buy your way out of the Sunday Scaries for even a week or two, its worth it.
I will most likely either buy (or lease) my daughters a new/newish low end car, or they’ll be gifted a hand me down if the economics make sense. I don’t see the wisdom in making them buy a beater.
They won’t have a job during the school year (school is their job) but they absolutely will work a 40ish hour a week job once they are able in the summer, to teach them responsibility and self reliance, as well as to remove me from funding their every wish. I think budgeting, prioritization, and money management are skills that can only be learned hands on (coughs, looks at wife who was handed everything).
I wish my son had summers off. He’s even busier in the summer. We just got back from San Diego for a college tryout and we have three more this summer. He has weightlifting three days a week, soccer conditioning in the morning and practice in the evening three days a week, and the actual season starts July 15th, with games beginning that weekend. There are two dead weeks PER YEAR.
It’s a nice idea for him to have a summer job but unfortunately impractical. He can referee some youth games (which pays $35-75 per game) for gas money but that’s it.
Yup, if you have a kid with a legitimate shot at a college scholarship the ROI probably isn’t there for a summer job. My daughters have shown no such proclivity thus it won’t be an issue. My older daughter does recreational cheer and isn’t good enough in the gymnastics department to make it past high school, and my youngest is 7 and has minimal athletic ability aside from Irish dance which again not much of a chance for scholarship I bet.
Irish dance is intense. Our cousin’s daughter (so technically also our cousin) is a National champion and travels worldwide to compete. I unfortunately have both a dancer AND a soccer player $$$$$$$$$
I’ve written this here before but I made a deal with each of my four that if they got a full ride, either academic or athletic, I would buy them a new car when they got it. Three of the four pulled it off. My son still drives his 2011 Jetta 2.5 and my daughter her 2012 Fiat 500 Pop. It’s what she wanted in the budget. All four of them totaled cars at one time or another. Two of them was not their fault. Those were their high school beaters. All of them but the youngest drove our 2003 Honda Pilot at one time or another. That was one of the best cars I ever owned. We called it the green goat because it could go anywhere and did.
Totally, and I mean totally, depends on the kid. Your son has "earned it" in my vernacular, and your reasoning is sound. Many if not most other kids have not (including most in my orbit). I would definitely prefer my child excel, and be rewarded, that endure the mind-numbing drudgery of the menial jobs I worked to survive.
You talk about your kid like he's some Fortune 50 CEO. My goodness, a 16 year old kid might miss a soccer practice or gym session, God forbid! Get real man.
I'm incredibly real. Do you have any sense of what the competition level is like for young men who are at the top of this field?
The last college ID camp he attended had 48 players, all of whom were there by invite only. 40 of them were in MLS Next academies, which is the preprofessional program for Major League Soccer. The program was looking for 3 players total.
The head coach looked at all of them and said, "Your only job over the next 4 hours is to impress me. Don't make a safe, smart play. While you're doing that, some other kid is scoring off of a bicycle kick. Impress me or go home."
My son was fortunate enough to be one of the 15 kids invited back for the second day's session. 33 other kids, all of whom are considered good enough to play professional soccer someday and attended the SoCal camp from Ohio, Tennesee, Texas, Florida, Minnesota, and many other places, got sent packing. Every single Division I college ID session is like this. You can only come if you're invited and you probably won't get to stay for very long.
On the pro side, the local USL League One team, which is like AA baseball, just selected 8 high school kids for their U20 team. All of those kids had to sign a contract and quit their high school teams immediately. My son didn't try out because he loves HS soccer and knows that he won't have that opportunity to represent his community and his school, but he also knew that he wouldn't be able to turn it down if he was selected. So he just didn't go. We'll see if that was the right decision or not.
So yeah, he takes it incredibly seriously because this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life. You act as though 16 years old is young. For a soccer player, U17 is the year that decides if a kid will play in college or professionally or not. There's a 17 year old starting for Spain in the Euros right now.
Well that was quite a rebuttal, I stand corrected. I also feel privileged to have a marketing executive take time out of the middle of his day to type up a multi-paragraph response to my trolly post!
I'm glad to see your son is making the choices he wants to make, regarding not signing his life away so he can do what makes him happy, i.e. play high school ball vs signing with a NEXT academy. It is those types of decisions that will hopefully prevent him from looking back on this time in 5-10 years and wishing he had done it differently.
I agree that at the level it sounds like your son is playing he is on the right path vs having a part time job. As someone who had to walk away from the ODP team because my parents were not in a position to provide the monetary or time commitments it required, I'd have killed for the opportunity you're providing your son.
But, looking back now I do not feel like the jobs I had as a kid, or my decision to go to a college that did not offer collegiate sports were bad decisions. I did learn some valuable life skills in those jobs that I did not get on the field in a team environment. Not to mention the industry experience I got through the co-op program my college required me to do in order to graduate.
I'd say the biggest one was that it exposed me to a much more diverse group of people vs. my sports teams, and taught me the value of money as I worked to increase my wages through gaining new skill sets and negotiating the worth of those skills.
Who knows, maybe I would be pulling down twice as much as I make now if I had played soccer or ran track in college. Can we get an update post in another 10 years on where your son is tracking against that 250k mid-30s salary target? If he makes it to the show that shouldn't be an issue, by his mid-20s, and he can buy you a new Kia as repayment.
John should be grateful for a pre-crashed Accord as you have noted, as he has aged he has shown little interest in automobiles. Now the ACF community needs to get Bark on the line and ask him: what were you thinking? A young person should not have a new car unless they give up their phone, as I have seen to many 16-18 year olds traveling at 80MPH down the road typing on their phones or making home movies with the video feature. Just an old guy’s humble opinion.
i really dont think its possible for the youth or really most people to just give up their phone considering how critical a component they are for existing in modern society
also nothing stopping them using a phone in an old shitbox
As the daily driver of a 110k mile Hyundai Elantra GT that I purchased new I routinely advise people to avoid Hyundai/Kia products until they have a decade-long track record of proving they're capable of washing swarf out of engine blocks and avoiding fire-related recalls.
That said it's a better choice than a VW for the long term if you keep after maintenance and park outside.
Strong advocate for the Jetta as a non Jap beater. We've got a 2018 in the family that's gone from 12k to 100k miles in about 3 years and it's been flawless. Decently fun to wheel around too. That little 1.4 (now 1.5) punches above it's weight
I've heard some Not Great things about the 1.5, but in general the current gen Jettas are very solid cars for the price. My mom and sister both have one with the 1.4. Literally the only issue was a bad wheel bearing on one of them at ~65k miles that was covered under warranty.
They are spacious, super efficient (normal to see 40+ mpg on 87), very cheap to buy and run, and drive well for what they are. Quiet, comfortable, punchy enough... I like them a lot. I never loved the design, especially the front ends, but they are overall good cars for the money.
interesting to hear about the 1.5- as a rule, i avoid 4 cylinder VAG cars like the plague, but the 1.4 has been faultless so far. i imagine the GLI of these gens are a lot of fun for what they are as well- but i have had nothing but bad experiences with any gen of the 2.0T. the 6 cylinders have been much, much better to me.
2 friends on 2 gens (a 2012 and a 2019) spun bearings on bone stock GTIs, and my mother had a 2018 Q5 that burned oil so bad at ~23k miles that we got rid of it. my B8 S4 was much better but was also starting to burn oil at 90k. my R32 however has been flawless.
The GLI looks so good on paper. 228 HP and 6 speed manual could be fun. Too bad the engine is hit or miss. My son has the 2.5 inline five in his 2011 Jetta and it is bullet-proof.
A week late, I have some suggestions for the 24 Hours of Le Mans:
Remove the chicanes on the Mulsanne. The cars accelerate fast enough now, and our understanding of high-speed aerodynamic stability has improved enough, that AFAICT there's little to no safety benefit anymore (any crash north of 180mph is very unlikely to be survivable). Being the world's only 300mph/500kph race would surely bring some more eyeballs to the event.
Instead of "reducing costs" by replacing the top-flight prototype class every half-decade, forcing all existing teams to develop a completely new car, maybe try reducing costs by *not* doing that? If they must do, can they at least bring back a fan favorite like Group C or GT1?
Can they get rid of the asinine BoP system? The frickin' *point* of sportscar racing is to find out who builds the best sports car. It's okay if some are quicker than others!
ive always wondered how to keep top fuel about the building of the fastest quarter mile cars without disrupting the notion of what a top fuel car actually is
very easy to slow them down but not without changing a whole lot
i know that the tire construction exists but youre basically putting rubber pucks under the cars at that point given how hard they are also im almost certain you wouldnt have the profile of a modern race slick but something more rounded like a land speed tire
There are other things that could be done, such as having an inner and an outer air bladder that are separated by another layer of rubber, providing a degree of redundancy against blowouts.
aside from the cost complexity and weight of such a tire the notion of making one to handle incredibly high speeds and loads demanded of it is at odds with a tire that can generate a large amount of lateral grip in a racecar as the deformation of a tire and its compound is what makes it stick to the road broadly speaking
The inner tire would be made of a much harder compound, since its purpose is only to bring the car to a controlled stop. I am not a tire engineer, but AFAICT 300mph-capable tires is a solvable problem, and has been solved for the Bugatti Chiron, a much heavier vehicle than an LMP even accounting for downforce.
Tires can be redesigned for that use case, monitored for temp, etc.
I like the idea of no chicanes which would be an interesting challenge. Certainly for tires, but also for additional stress imposed mechanically and humanly.
Would go a long way towards bringing the element of conservation back to endurance racing.
Seeing how exciting F1 has been I regret canceling my F1TV subscription several years ago but that was when it was the Leeis Hamilton racing series. Perhaps I'll take a look again.
As someone in the conservative camp I want to point out that "conservative" and "liberal" mean very different things outside the US. The backlash seen across the EU isn't surprising heck even Canada had a shock election recently when a super blue district swung the other way for the first time in decades. Central planning has its consequences and the anointed as it were hopefully will learn a lesson. Or not.
I commend Bark for buying his son a new car. Lessons can still be taught even if a child is given something far nicer. A KIA Forte though? I double as a Hyundai/KIA backup tech and I wouldn't touch anything that doesn't contain their 3.3 I6 turbo or 3.8 V6. The I4 cylinders are absolutely trash and you'll probably have an engine replacement at your second factory service. VW Jetta FTW!
The Jetta is a penalty box. It’s not the Jetta we grew up with (and that I owned as a first car). The Kia has every safety feature under the sun, a 10 year warranty, and is slower than dirt. Checks every box.
Many things are not like they were when we grew up. I won't argue, the warranty is impressive however time has a value and seeing these new cars in and out of the shop every month makes me wonder if it's worth it. Still, I think it's cool you bought him something newer. Congrats!
The Jetta ad rang a bell. Back in 1985 my future ex-wife and I embarked on a move from Boston to Plymouth, Massachusetts, which included a commute the likes of which I'd always sworn I'd never do, having grown up in an environment of subways, taxi cabs and non-driving parents. The two-year, UNLIMITED MILEAGE warranty on our new VW Scirocco steered us away from the Corolla GT-S hatchback that was in contention, that and the VeeDub's front-wheel-drive for snowy runs. Incidentally, the choice of the German-built 'Rocco over the Pennsylvania GTI was deliberate, as both shared the same German-assembled 90 HP engine and close-ratio gearbox. The quality of the rest of the two cars was night and day; you could tell the difference by slamming the doors right there in the showroom!
The only repair I can recall over the 150,000 mile we drove the car was a problem with the driver seat recliner, covered by the warranty. Over the course of my ownership of ten VWs I've never understood their reputation for poor quality. My last, a 1998 VR6 Jetta, went to its new owner with 254,000 miles on the original clutch.
One thing I'm missing in the article is the reference to an automatic transmission. What have I overlooked?
That may be it then, since my ten VeeDubs maxed out at generation 3. And the fourth gens sold in the US were made where? Mexico? Brazil? Not Germany, except for SOME GTIs and Jettas. The clue is a VIN that starts with "WVW" indicating a German-made VW. And in my experience that DEFINITELY makes a difference.
Incidentally, Mk this-and-that has always bugged me because it's fanboi talk, not any kind of manufacturer designation. And despite appearances, I'm not a fanboi of any make.
I do think a Korean car makes sense if you're gonna buy something new off the lot for a 16 year old. They may blow up more than others, but they have the best warranty in the game and they're still pretty cheap to buy and run. The Commander's Honda is cooler though...
Somehow real life keeps getting in the way of watching Formula Drift live streams this year. Previous rounds have overlapped with my own drift days, working on a newly acquired 1964 Imperial Crown 4dr, or in the case of this weekend, cruising around Detroit with a baker’s dozen old cars with about 2 people in each car. I’ve previously mentioned a friend who has an old house on Grand Blvd and recently bought an old filling station on Mack. This weekend was the second cruise he’s organized through the city in what is becoming an annual event. He led the pack in his ‘26 Dodge Bros, which apparently didn’t like the pressure of leading. It vapor locked, leaked fuel, and backfired its tailpipe off all day long (literally, it blew the tailpipe off on Woodward in Campus Martius). The day before and the day after, it ran just fine. I failed to get my Imperial roadworthy in time, so I once again piloted his 1953 Chrysler New Yorker. The NYer is a patinaed tank of a car with manual brakes, manual steering with a gigantic wheel and aggressive self-centering, a 331 hemi under the hood, and a very strange but effective transmission. It’s basically a 2 speed automatic with “low” and “drive” ranges, effectively making it a “four speed,” but it still has a clutch pedal that must be depressed to change ranges and to select reverse. There is no “park” position so you park it in neutral or in gear with the parking brake, which is a band that grabs a drum on the driveshaft. The gear pattern is as follows: R,L,N,D, with those letters. To back the car out, you first apply the brakes, return the parking brake by pulling the T handle out then twisting it counter-clockwise before pushing it back into the dash, push in the clutch, move the shift lever to L, then pull back towards yourself to unlock the gate into R, and continue moving the lever until you feel the reverse dog engage thru the linkage.Then, with your foot STILL ON THE BRAKE, release the clutch. The engine will bog slightly and the car will work against the brakes as the clutch is engaged, but the fluid coupling will then take over and allow the engine to stay running while the car stays stationary. Then you simply lift off the brakes and ease into the throttle. The fluid coupling starts transmitting torque to the wheels, and you begin to roll (which you will need to do before having any steering capability). Once you’ve maneuvered into a place where you can proceed in a forward direction, you stop with the brakes, clutch in once again, pull the shift lever down to D (waiting for the gearbox to sync up which can be felt thru the lever), once again staying on the brakes while letting the clutch out, before finally setting off in normal automatic fashion. Getting the automatic shift to occur however, is another quirk of this transmission; after accelerating to say, 30-35mph, lift off the throttle and wait… until you feel the trans make its way into the next gear. This usually takes about 2-3 seconds - slow ones. Then you may resume acceleration or speed maintenance. Other cars we had in our varied and eclectic group were 2 Model Ts, an absolute stunner of a ‘56 Bel Aire, a sweet custom Dodge B van, an E30, and even a little blue Trabant 601! We were a hilarious and charming sight to behold and be-heard with our honking horns, squeaking suspensions, and modified exhausts. Everyone loved us! I did not see one frown all day from any of our spectators or from any in our group. I’m bummed I didn’t get to drive my own car despite having one now (the E36 was NOT an option for this event), but the lady and I still had a great time with great friends.
With the actually fun and interesting story out of the way, here is your Formula Drift New Jersey (FDNJ) recap! I actually did watch some of ProSpec this time, because it was on Friday. I was mainly watching to see my boy Cory Talaska finally put it all together and make it into the Great 8! He was knocked out by the eventual winner, Connor O’Sullivan, but only after forcing a one-more-time battle. Cory’s lead runs were excellent, and his entry technique and style was absolutely PEAK! I’m very proud of him and all my close friends who work on his team; they did a kick ass job and showed what they can really do this weekend! Runner-up to O-Sully was Amanda Sorenson, putting her name in the history books as FD’s first female podium finisher. I have to say, her driving has come a LONG way and she really did perform well. Little brother Brandon didn’t do so well in Pro however, getting knocked out in Top 16 by insurance defrauder and game-playing Taylor Hull. I’m getting ahead of myself here (partly rushing because I didn’t expect the O/T to come out in the morning hours today), so let’s start our Pro report with their Seeding 16 results. Our machine gun Cadillac driving Kentucky man Jonathan Hurst took 2nd overall here, after a very intense battle against ProSpec champ Dmitriy Brutskiy. To get there, he first retired RTR rookie Ben Hobson (who has yet to make any impression beyond “wow” this year), Brazil’s favorite C7 driving cowboy Joao Barion, and BMW driving, beard wielding Andy Hatley. Brutskiy’s path to the Seeding final was paved by Derek Madison (bummer cause D Mad’s S14 was the first pro level car I got to ride in 4 years ago), Mike Power (who took out FD pensioner Vaughn Gittin Jr), and then Frederico Sceriffo and his Ferrari 599, “Fiorella.”
As I said earlier, I didn’t watch any of the Pro battles. So here is a summary of where all out regular characters ended up:
Hurst beat Alec Robbins in Top 32 before being eliminated himself in Top 16 by Chris Forsberg. Sceriffo and Fiorella earned a losing battle against Backchis in Top 32, but at least they made the show this time. Backchis ended up clearing a path to the finals through Turek and Gushi. Conor Shanahan once again showed his insane chasing and transition skills, but was knocked out by Aasbo in Top 16. YouTube superstar Adam LZ then dispatched the 3 time champ in the Great 8 on his way to the 3rd spot on the podium, proving you can still have a competitive car with a front radiator. James Deane’s battles really were like leveling up thru a video game. Starting with the easily handled Kyle Mohan, followed by Rome CP, then Forsberg, then Dylan Hughes, before finally taking on Odi Backchis for the win; and win Deane did!
We are now at the halfway point in the season. Anything can still happen, but with a 74 point lead over Odi, James really seems to have a comfy shot to become the first 4 time FD champion. Aasbo is in 3rd trailing by 114 points, and Simon Olsen is till holding fourth despite not turning a wheel all weekend.
I think it would be cool to see James win a 4th title, but only because it’s been 5 years since the big man won his 3rd. I’d be really excited by Olsen coming out and upsetting more of the top dogs, and I just feel bad for Ryan Turek because he’s been doing this shit for just as long as Forsberg and Gittin Jr but has still never taken it all. FDSTL (St Louis) is next on July 20th.
yeah just write a whole guest post as a comment thats fine
Sorry bro! You were the first one to hit like on it, too. So thank you!
im going to support you whether you like it or not
Great stuff!
Thank you, sir!
So on the topic of first car stories.......
Back in my teenage years I had strong envy for anybody whose parents bought them a car in general. The thought of getting a new car was an utterly foreign concept. My parents were against the whole concept of me having a car. They had huge fears that their car-nut kid would slack off on school or school activities in order to get a job to support any car I could come up with. So I was forbidden to buy a car. My first vehicle didn't happen until my freshman year of college when they gave me dad's 15 year old 1975 Mazda Rotary Engine pickup. The same one he repeatedly would use to get a load of barkdust or manure in the morning when he knew I had a date that evening. Dad has a sense of humor and knows how to get a kid to wash his truck. Conveniently the truck became mine sometime after he had blown the engine in it. Their thought was that I would sell the dead thing and use the money for school. Instead $550 of leftover financial aid money turned into delivery of a used replacement engine. Engine swap took much longer than the weekend I had envisioned, but it ran eventually and was my car for the next three years.... until I blew the replacement engine. Sold it for $350 to a guy who towed it away with a 1977 Mazda Rotary Engine pickup. He apparently installed engine #3 as I passed it on the freeway a couple years later.
Harambe grade story if there was one.
No shit! Don't put this in the COMMENTS.
pinned, motherfucka
Trying to do my part to make the substack's comment section special.
I'll see if I can dig up the pictures to expand my first car story to feature length. Not sure if it will be Harambe worthy, but I'd enjoy if reader submitted First Car Stories became a regular thing.
Harambe is impatiently drumming his fingers on a stone carving of Hillary’s skull, waiting for you to write this up.
Ahh Rotaries, My friend recently bought a purple 1984 Mazda 323 wagon with the rotary from an early RX7 swapped in..
That car is a laugh.
rotaries are an unserious engine
makes them lovable
A friend of my son is in the midst of LS swapping a 1974 Mazda pickup. He figured out how do to it without cutting the firewall.
Not bad for a 17 year old.
It's kinda sad really.
You say they're an 'unserious' engine, but I reckon if the Rotary had received the same immense level of R&D that modern Petrol and Diesel Turbo 4's had had, they could've become the new frontier of the internal combustion engine.
i get what you mean but i very highly doubt it
there are mechanical laws and limitations to internal combustion engines and they cant be overcome
hundreds of billions of r and d wont change the fundamental drawbacks of what a rotary is
Yes.. but.
I have the feeling where the Rotary could be made efficient enough to the point where it's extraordinary advantages in power/size ratio could more than compensate for the disadvantages.
I'm not a mechanical engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.
im not an engineer of any kind clearly
i dont want to give you the impression that i dont like rotaries or anything in fact id quite like to own and modify one some day but of every company that has ever dipped a toe into rotary development (and over the last 60ish years theres been a lot) none of them save mazda have ever produced anything more than a handful of prototypes or very few production vehicles
i cant see much of a way forward in terms of practical and efficient engines for passenger vehicles but i wouldnt mind being wrong
I saw a 323 GTX last year here in Hooterville. I had totally forgotten about them.
AWD as I recall.
Yes it was.
Just here to appreciate the username 'Galahad Threpwood'.
I can't believe we've never talked about Woodehouse before on ACF.
I like to make the provocative statement that Wodehouse was the finest writer in the English language. People laugh. Then they read his books.
And illiterate me thought you were referencing 'Guybrush'. Oh well.
so im not the only one
I had to look that up, but it seems the derivation is the same: inimitable Wodehouse characters.
Exactly. The fellow looks exactly how I imagine Freddie Threpwood to look.
He's among the greats, perhaps the least serious writer besides Mark Twain to be there.
Yep. But we should keep in mind Chesterton's point that funny is not the opposite of serious; it's only the opposite of unfunny.
Chesterton too!
A very well read gentleman!
I've often wanted to reference Chesterton here but do not have the articulation to present his ideas in a comments section.
I've wrestled with something similar; it's tough to quote Chesterton in conversation. Attempts often end in some variation of, "here, read this".
Let's not neglect that Wodehouse himself supplied an unforgettably hilarious simile referring to GKC himself: "The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin."
I feel the same struggle with other comedic masters such as Monty Python or Mike Judge…
I've said 'Rule 7; nah poofters' on ACF before and was surprised by the positive response.😄
Old GKC bequeathed us with numerous superb paradoxical zingers, but they are often buried in the midst of long chunks of dense, complex arguments. "In our day, defending any of the cardinal virtues has all the exhilaration of vice." "1000 young women demonstrated in the streets, 'we will not be dictated to!' and then all ran off to become stenographers." "The Christian philosophy has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried." (All those from memory, so more paraphrase than quote.)
It is very hard to write humorously without descending into facetiousness. Woodhouse not only manages this book after book but also manages to inject some real feeling into his stories.
🤣
So he was like a 100-year-old Terry Pratchett? Is that where Pratchett's style comes from? I'm digging the examples I'm finding on the ol' wykeepedia. I figured Pratchett wouldn't be original, but never bothered to research what prior art has similar clever wordplays. I crack up at those kinds of British witticisms.
Roald Dahl is the same. I'm listening to all his classics again with the kids and discovering a new level of joy at how he wrangles words to present an idea.
Surely, Dahl could write. But did he know how to drive a car and make love to a woman?
Literally, yes.
But I feel like I'm missing something....?
I've just spent twenty minutes down the rabbit hole, trying to justify the memory, unsuccesfully. As best I can recall, it was a throwaway line from one of Dahl's short stories (Playboy?) about the two things every American man knows that he knows. Couldn't find it in "The Great Switcheroo" and it's possible I've conflated it.
"There are two things in this world at which I happen to know I excel. One is driving an automobile and the other is you-know-what. So to have him sit there and tell me 1 didn’t know how to behave with my own wife was a monstrous piece of effrontery."
Roald Dahl, 'The Great Switcheroo'
For those of you who haven't: next door neighbors plot and execute a wife swap. Results are not generally what you'd expect.
"People laugh. Then they read his books."
I read his books, and laughed.
Sadly, I thought that was an Archer reference and did think in that context we should talk about woodehouse more.
I wasn't kidding upthread: Wodehouse stands among the truly greatest masters of the English language. Milton, Shakespeare, Burke, Lincoln. The fact that his fiction delivers such reliable warmth and encouragement only adds to the man's legacy. It amuses me, meanwhile, to observe how few English-speakers can (1) pronounce or (2) spell his name.
I could not love his work more if it had only been an excuse for Fry and Laurie to team up. Saying the same thing about Shakespeare is only odder because Kurosawa never filmed a Wodehouse plot.
Seeing and cringing at the battle scars my neighbors' 16-18 year old drivers are accruing on their RX330 and clean single owner 09 CRV (that I helped them locate and buy in the midst of carpocalypse), boy do I think it's an awful idea to buy a new driver a brand new car. My tune might change if they started selling base model compacts with those excellent unpainted black plastic bumpers, like what the '90 Civic Wagon had when I was in HS that I shared with my mom.
My son will get my '13 CX-5, if it survives the next few years. I saw what my nephew did to his dad's car and was appalled. I'd like to think that my boy will be a bit more responsible, but boys will be boys. No new cars for kids.
I took really good care of the rusty Honda I was given access to. Would regularly wash it, wax it, kept the interior spotless. Every spring I'd grind down and touch up the fenders with some more bondo and paint. I did the brakes on it, oil changes, my brother and I replaced the balljoints. I did some dumb ricer crap on it but nothing too tasteless or irreversible ('99 Si wheels, '94 Accord lip spoiler, fake SiR badge, modest muffler tip). I have recurring dreams to this day of finding the car in some shed in my parents' back yard and going for an evening cruise in it.
I love the "modest" fart can, and the badges that write checks the car can't cash!
I did okay in the Accent I drove at the end of the 90s. I kept it reasonably clean and there really wasn't anything I could do to it to make it sexier (it WAS a Hyundai Accent, after all). But it did have air conditioning, which was more than I could say for most of my friends' cars.
Yeah mine was a sad-sack throttle body injected D15B2 saddled to an *automatic,* so yeah it was a total dog. But boy was the handling fun on that "golden age" Civic. And the visibility, particularly in the Wagon, was like sitting in a fishbowl with the thin pillars and that super low dash. I had all kinds of dreams and schemes to manual swap it and convert it to PGM-FI (multiport injection off of a D16), or even better, buy my dream car, a 3rd gen Prelude Si.
Oh how I miss the greenhouses in that generation of cars. It was shocking when I got my first "modern" car in Japan: A Mazda Premacy (the 5 mini-minivan here) with A-pillars so thick they swallowed the sun. Maybe my old Accent or any of the Subarus I drove would have crushed me in a rollover, but it would have been a heck of a way to go if I managed to put one of those in the air!
I, too, covet old Preludes. My dream is a rust-free, bone-stock, end-of-life Prelude Type SH. It's probably more achievable (and practical) than an S1 Esprit with a Yamaha SHO V6 swapped in.
That generation was a roller skate!
Many’s the time I hooned..oops..BORROWED my Mom’s 1990 Civic EX automatic! (Basically the CR-X/Civic Si chassis with the sedan body!)
108hp was never such a hoot!
Remembering what I did to cars at 16, my children aren't getting anything nice and new for awhile
OT: bailed out on looking at the very promising sounding Mazda3, and a "SVM" Aveo5 that I was geeking out over. I've been on this "simplify life" kick much of the year (sold off all but one motorcycle, sold my old suburban) and I need to stay the course. A third car is another vehicle to maintain, inevitably a backlog of wear and tear to correct, a trip to the BMV, etc. At 35, I think(?) I'm *finally* starting to value my time more. Tore into my FIL's old pressure washer with my 5 year old to diagnose it has having a locked up bearing on the pump, that's the sort of low key and easy wrenching I enjoy these days.
Re-read all of Jack's old TTAC rental review pieces on the 2011+ T&C/Caravans, as well as the 2012 Camry SE 2.5 track review, to make myself appreciate and enjoy what I already have.
I'll at least finish out the year with the current lean "normie" fleet of vehicles, as test of willpower if nothing else.
I am down to just the ST, what's your one moto?
The venerable '78 XS1100E. I had actually listed it on FB for $2900 but then had a change of heart. I figure I have every bit of $4000 into that bike, to say nothing of the time invested. Even if I barely ride it, Id' rather mothball it under a dust cover with the carbs drained dry and fuel stabilizer in the gas tank, I'm not hard up for cash.
While I have your attention, what's the best drill bit to make the holes in my stainless steel Kalita wave larger? https://kalitausa.com/products/kalita-wave-185-stainless-steel-coffee-dripper
I have a set of bits Craftsman claims are good for soft metals. I'm assuming stainless steel isn't a soft metal: https://www.amazon.com/Craftsman-9-66020-Black-Oxide-Drill/dp/B00370OBGE
I’m hardly a machinist but locally at Home Depot etc you should be able to find some cobalt bits. That and some cutting oil and care should(?) do it
stainless isnt soft but why do you want to poke holes in that thing
So that coffee drips through faster and is a bit less likely to stall during the brew. I successfully drilled them out using my "black oxide coated bit. It chewed up the bit a bit, but :emoji-man-shrugging:. I did knick part of the little riser in the middle, which fills me with displeasure, but c'est la vie.
if it was a preexisting hole you might have been able to open it up with a punch
Hmm. I didn't think about this. I don't really have punches, but I have a bunch of different sized drill bits. I'll _file_ that away, Speed.
id still recommend a punch to make the small indent which makes drilling on flat sheet far easier
https://www.amazon.ca/Hardness-HRC58%C2%B0-62-Plastic-Puncher-Breaker/dp/B091MZZJK1
kinda like this but doesnt need to be this exact one
Europe is all kayfabe. Nobody that they are wringing their hands about on the 'far right' is anything close to even moderate right (especially Meloni and LePen). The clusterfuck that is Euro politics both on the local national and Euro level is purposely designed to keep them marginalized and impotent anyway.
I wonder what plea deal Julian cut. Trump could have gotten him released on day one of his presidency.
Monkey Island was a decent game.
Trump did no such thing the first time and wouldn't if given a second opportunity.
I didn't want this thread to turn into political infighting, but...
I think Trump's fundamental flaw is that he loves the USA and actually believes in the rule of law. And has bad judgment regarding the character of his subordinates.
I think that the reason he let his people be savaged by the legal system is that he believed that justice would prevail in the end. Not realizing that his enemies were willing to pervert the legal system to bring him down. Thus he did not interfere with any of the FBI and DOJ persecutions of his people.
Also that he trusted his advisors when they said "so-and-so is a good bloke and you should hire him" and he ended up governing from a viper's nest.
If he's president on 1/21/2025, will he issue a pardon for the J6 defendants? I'm not sure. Perhaps all his rhetoric about the "deep state" and "draining the swamp" is just to appease his supporters. Or maybe he actually believes it this time around.
I'd like to believe that he is smart enough to learn those lessons from the first go round, but nothing he says or does would suggest that he has. The VP announcement tomorrow will be a big tell.
If he picks Haley, eff him.
Tim Scott is a reasonable guess, but not a lock.
Massey or Tulsi would be good for a laugh.
Please, Tulsi. Would be just the second VP candidate you could rub one off to.
(The first being Truman, of course.)
None of that has anything to do with how Trump's administration treated Assange. If anything, it was a step up in aggression from Obama. With all the other stuff going on, he would be even less focused on this.
Exactly. His administration wanted to bury Assange and none of the pardon talk amounted to more than Trump’s usual “we’re looking into that and will have something interesting soon” deflection he uses for anything he doesn’t care about.
It’d be very on-brand for Trump to attack Biden now for letting him go.
Pence already has. That's an establishment Republican position.
European politics is not difficult to understand. NATO countries are literal vassals to the US MIC (refer to a leaked copy of Swedens contract to join NATO). The majority of the population of Europe doesn't want to be at war with Russia. The political leaders signed on the "do whatever the US says" dotted line when they ran for national office in a NATO country. PMs and presidents are failing because the war is costing Europeans a LOT of money for no benefit other than being saved from the threat of the Russian horde rolling over our borders.
The problem with this scenario is that it is using the playbook from the cold war. Putin will slowly destroy Ukraine, but they are not about to roll over Latvia or Romania. Vlad wanted - and had - the EU as paying customers. Why would he want to repeat the mistakes of the USSR and have to occupy and suppress all those lands when he can just make bank selling us gas, oil and fertilizer?
Putin has been in power for 24 years and has never shown any interest in invading Western or Central Europe. We have seen that with our own eyes. The whole fucking point of the EU was to have us all be business partners so that we didn't go to war. You can sell to people whose land has been bombed back to the middle ages.
The question of how EU countries would defend themselves without the US is non-trivial, but since 1992 the protection racket and MIC boondoggle of NATO has become ever clearer.
The people see it and are tired of it and the neoliberal mindset behind it. The EU national leaders have sold out to the neoliberal system and will defend it to the end. The biggest sellout is the UK, which is why they have PMs with the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
Every national EU pol who supports continuing fighting the war against Russia is suffering, and those who were not even parties 5 years ago are now viable. See Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany for a great example.
I am not at all surprised with what is happening in France, Germany, the UK, Slovakia, Hungary, Czechia, or Italy. Meloni came in opposed to the war and changed her tack faster than you can say, "Pinapple on pizza is blasphemy." She is no longer beloved like she was, and should look to Macron and Johnson for her future if she continues.
Sorry for the long rant!
Yes, all this.
NATO: keep the US in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down.
Russia did not want to level Ukraine, as it is not in any country's interest to have a failed state full of black market weapons on their border, like say early post war Iraq or modern Mexico. They could have gone full shock and awe on Keeeeeev on day one but did not for this reason.
Russia is playing politics, NATO is playing chicken.
>"Russia did not want to level Ukraine"
They sure have a funny way of showing it.
Yep. By not leaving Kiev during the initial push right?
They were forced to leave Kiev because they weren't able to hold Hostomel Airport and the planned airbridge to resupply troops could never be established.
If by outright 'leveling', then yes.
A nuclear armed regional power (and ex ally) requests that a corrupt NATO puppet (and historic route of invasion) remain a demilitarized buffer state. Reasonable or no?
NATO played Ukraine 'let's you and him fight' and Ukraine had to FAFO. Slow grind it is, then.
So it goes.
I'll take the "no" on that. Did Ukraine invade Russia? Did NATO invade Russia? You might not value Ukraine's democracy and independence but the people of Ukraine do, and are willing to fight and die for it. Americans are very lucky that we don't have the misfortune to have a land border with Russia, so we will never be subject to the charming practices of Putin's regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Mistreatment_of_Ukrainian_POWs
Perhaps tldr response to this and your concurrent comment above/below:
I'm not going to argue the validity of perhaps century long ethnic feuds between those that live there, being neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but this brinksmanship is what starts World Wars, which I do not want. NATO has been openly goading the Russians into escalating and they (the Russians) have IMO shown a remarkable level of restraint. At the minimum, the US has played a large hand in intelligence and targeting on the part of the Ukraine, on top of supplying materiel and financially propping up that cokeheaded clown's government. I'm a hothead, but I would have dropped one of those AWACs playing the 'I'm not touching you' game across the border on day one.
Russia will come out of this stronger than they went in and be tighter with China (and the Norks, lol). We and NATO will be weaker. NATO would have absolutely put nukes in Ukraine if they had been allowed to join. Russia is within their rights not to tolerate that.
"Russia will come out of this stronger than they went in"
Respectfully disagree.
1. Europe has weaned itself off russian energy exports. When the war ends, I don't see Europe buying oil and gas from them again.
2. If they keep Ukraine, the economic sanctions will remain. Sure "sanctions don't work" in the short term. But over decades, they have a profound effect -- in widening the gap in prosperity between the sanctioners and sanctionee. Compare North and South Koreal. Or Cuba and any other Carribean country (except possibly Haiti).
3. If they lose, the rest of the world will be extracting reparations for the destruction caused in Ukraine.
3b. If they win, they'll have to rebuild Ukraine themselves. After all there's no point in conquering a wasteland. And rebuilding an occupied territory will always be extra expensive because of resistance and sabotage by the occupied people.
4. Russia suffers from the Dutch disease: their natural resources sector has crowded out the manufacturing, and to a lesser extent the service sector of the economy. When raw material exports dwindle, see #1 & #2, there's nothing left.
5. They willingly sacrificed their entire cohort of military aged men (16-29). Whether via battlefield losses of mass exodus. Russia never fights a war without losing half a million soldiers -- in WWII, they had to reconstitute their army THREE TIMES. Whether they win or lose, there aren't enough people left to repopulate the country.
5a. Russia has a first world birth rate, but a third world mortality rate. This doesn't help.
6. Russia spends nearly half their government budget on the military and/or the security apparatus (surveillance state). To use a cliche, it's unsustainable. And a massive drain on any GDP they do have.
7. Being tighter with China is no prize. Much like the Porsche/VW tie-ups, every deal Russia made with China usually ended up with them getting fucked by China.
7a. Having seen the world united with their Russian sanctions, China is scared shitless. Imagine a world where nobody will sell them raw materials, and nobody will buy their counterfeit purses.
For these reasons, I believe that Russia is on it's way to becoming the next Cuba, or even North Korea, instead of emerging stronger afterwards.
i thought ukraine had loads of nukes and we promised to defend 'em if they gave them up. also putin only wanted assurance that ukraine wouldn't be in nato. wasn't all that long ago.
Actually we should give Ukraine nukes now
"...the people of Ukraine do, and are willing to fight and die for it." Well except for the hundreds of thousands of young men who aren't.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-faces-an-acute-manpower-shortage-with-young-men-dodging-the-draft/#:~:text=The%20BBC%20recently%20reported%20that,age%20men%20leaving%20the%20country.
The West has tried to destroy Russia for nearly two centuries, indirectly mostly by the British and the US - overthrowing democratically elected governments, NATO expansion to and nuclear weapons on its borders, etc. - and directly by the French and the Germans through invasion.
"The West has tried to destroy Russia for nearly two centuries, indirectly mostly by the British and the US - overthrowing democratically elected governments,"
What is this supposed to mean?
Yep.
No, I believe they didn't. 90% of EU gas used to come through pipelines in Ukraine. Ukraine made €4 billion+ a year in transit tarrifs (plus they skimmed product) from the deal. Everyone was happy... except Blackrock
Putin went to the UN and the US as late as Dec 21 with a peace plan and was soundly rebuffed.
Putin is a dictator. Dictators get overthrown and usually die violently when the people convince the military that the dictator is not keeping them safe. 1/7 of all Russians died in WWII. The area of land decimated in Russia during WWII is equivalent to the area from the East Coast of the US to the Mississippi.
In WWII the Nazis invaded Russia through Ukraine, and had a lot of help from Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Those same Nazi groups still exist in Ukraine today, and hold greatly outsized power to their political representation, particularly in the military.
The CIA had set up listening stations all along Russia's border with Ukraine. 38 biolabs were set up in Ukraine by the US. In Dec 21 Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference that maybe Ukraine should get nukes again.
It is not that I think Russia is a "good guy" and for sure Putin is not. But he is a rational actor. After nearly 30 years of encroaching NATO and Russian red lines constantly being crossed he had to choose between rolling the dice on scaring Ukraine into going back to neutrality, or sure death (of Russia and himself) if Ukraine continued on its path of being "NATO in all but name."
His plan would have worked if it hadn't been for those meddling kids! And by "meddling kids" I mean Boris Johnson carrying the US message to NOT accept the Instanbul agreement.
Russia pulled back from Kiev and the exact reasons why we may never know. It took until the fall of 22 for Russia to finally commit. Now they are just grinding down Ukraine until Ukraine capitulates, and signs a peace deal that will be similar to Istanbul, just with a much smaller Ukraine remaining, and a shitton of dead Ukrainians (and Russians).
The "Nyet means nyet" missive from 2008 was real.
Realpolitik means that major powers, even those not as powerful as the US, have spheres of influence they will not allow crossed. That is and has been Ukraine for Russia since WWII.
Exceptionally well stated. Thank you.
Except that it's all bullshit and completely ignores the reality of Ukrainian and European history of the last 200 years.
In theory and I hope practice as well, we live in reality here at ACF. I know you're likely sick of going over it, but where is he MOST wrong?
Thanks
'They could've gone full shock and awe on Keeev...'
I just can't get enough of this Slavaboo shit where Russia is God walking on the face of the earth and Putin is the Pope/Jesus, and so therefore, any self evident Russian corruption or incompetence is really just our beloved KGB bureaucrat playing 4D Chess.
Would you have preferred 'large scale air strikes on military targets and civilian infrastructure' as is the US MO against weaker opponents?
What makes you think Russia has the ability to conduct a 'Linebacker II' style campaign?
They literally only have 12 strategic bombers that could do that, and their production of ballistic missiles is anemic.
I disagree with your notion that Russia is playing politics. They have gained nothing from the full on Invasion of Ukraine. Quite the opposite. After the genius occupation of Crimea in 2014, which went by without any relevant consequences, they have now been heavily sanctioned and Ukraine has been heavily armed by western nations. As a result, the losses have escalated massively compared to 2014 and Russia gets left behind China and the US.
The sanctions haven't worked against Russia and other countries are sure to have noticed there are means and ways outside of the US umbrella.
The sanctions have definitely worked, otherwise Russia wouldn’t have depleted it’s reserves of hard currency. There are definitely means and ways outside the US Umbrella, but they are mostly limited to an alliance with the Chinese, who are the new enemy of the US. The Chinese are playing everything pretty smart right now, I am sure they will exploit Russias weakness to get some good deals on Oil and slowly populate the Russian border regions with Chinese nationals. In fact I would be willing to bet that Russia will become a Chinese puppet state in the next 20-40 years.
i wonder how many future problems could be avoided if we nuke china until it glows
In hindsight, MacArthur might have had the right idea
So did Patton.
How dare you heart this, Baruth. MacArthur was insane. Almost completely insane. After rubbing his face into the cheese grater that was the Korean Peninsula, he was *convinced* that our pathetic military could sweep all of China.
I rewound time to see a younger MacArthur's acts in Toland's "The Rising Sun." MacArthur seems as insane in 1942 as he was in 1953. He just bounced to Australia while ordering his generals to fight to the last man on the small peninsula in southwest Luzon. That went poorly. We'll see how he redeems himself. He kind of reminds me of Trump, to be honest. Like, one of those guys where you can't tell whether or not he believes the bologna he's constantly spouting.
Russia isn't seeing material hardship due to the sanctions, ergo the sanctions and their effects aren't.
They have worked to debilitate and immiserate other countries so we should ask if Russia is a one off or the age of sanctioning is coming to an end?
Moreover a large number of hard assets changed hands from foreign to Russian ownership in what would seem to be a SNAFU on the part of the sanctioners.
Lol, lmao as the kids say
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/briefing/russian-sanctions.html
NATO: "keep the US in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down."
Close! The original quote from Hastings Ismay, the first NATO secretary general was, "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down"
That has definitely been the modus operandi.
Do any of the NATO countries of western Europe have any true leverage in terms of maybe resources or industry that they can use to influence policy? From my perspective it seems they're all beholden to Russia to keep the lights on, and China for everything they own. Also, do any of these countries actually like each other? Some friends of mine just got back from the race at Le Mans, and were astounded at how inconsiderate the French fans were to everyone else, not just American tourists. I know that's a small sample size, but I get the impression that Europe is full of old grudges.
I've been living and working in Europe for 30 years now. We mostly get along.
I think largely accurate.
Thanks.
I just don't get why the American right has done a 180 from mistrusting totalitarian Russian leaders to trying to argue that they are better than the West. (Well, I do - they twist themselves into whatever knots they need to to justify whatever Donald Trump thinks - but I don't understand why they have to do that in the first place.) This comment is maybe the perfect example. So many wrong things in it.
"The majority of the population of Europe doesn't want to be at war with Russia."
Well, sure, but the majority of the population of Europe wants to be under the control of Russia even less. That's why the peoples in the east, most immediately threatened by direct military action, are putting both money and mouths behind Ukraine. It's why even leaders like Meloni in the west are not taking anti-Ukraine positions. (She changed not because she is a US puppet but because domestic political survival requires it.) People in the west are not worried that Russia will invade tomorrow, but they are worried that they will be under the economic control of Russia. It's also why Germany moved heaven and earth to change the majority of its energy supply after the invasion. If their peoples were pro-Russia, leaders like Scholz and Macron would be happy to go with them. It would be a distraction from the real fight in European politics, which is over immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
"The political leaders signed on the "do whatever the US says" dotted line when they ran for national office in a NATO country."
Ask Donald Trump how much he thinks the NATO countries "do what the US says." If the US (regardless of faction in the US) had its way they would all be meeting or exceeding the 2% target.
"Putin will slowly destroy Ukraine, but they are not about to roll over Latvia or Romania. "
"Putin has been in power for 24 years and has never shown any interest in invading Western or Central Europe."
Putin will tell you loud and clear what he wants to do. Read his 2021 manifesto and then his 2024 state of the union speech. There are two themes running through them. The first is the idea that the Soviet Union was stronger than today's Russia as a result of geography. He is pretty clear about what he sees as a strategic imperative to put the Soviet Union back together. That includes the Baltics for obvious naval reasons; it includes the Caucasus; and it includes all of what today make up Ukraine, Transnistria, and Belarus.
But beyond that, it includes a heavy dose of pan-Slavism. Putin is extremely concerned with his legacy, and really wants to be the tsar who did what even the most powerful tsars before him could not accomplish - to create a Russian Empire that includes all the Slavic peoples. That implies not only control of the former Soviet Union but also a substantial chunk of eastern Europe, most of what used to be in the Warsaw Pact. It further implies subjugation of non-Slavic people who are in places with large Slavic minorities (the Baltics, much of the former Yugoslavia outside Serbia) and non-Slavic people who geographically separate Slavs (Romania/Moldova and Hungary). He's ardently expansionist and the reason he hasn't tried expansion until his Ukraine adventure was simply a lack of leverage.
"Every national EU pol who supports continuing fighting the war against Russia is suffering"
Mainstream EU politicians' woes have nothing to do with Russia. They are about immigration. Jordan Bardella is not running around promising to stop aiding Ukraine. He's running around saying that he will slow down immigration and force existing immigrants to assimilate more. That is what's driving continental European politics right now. As for the UK, the issue right now is that the Conservative Party is both the UK's AfD and the UK's CDP in the same party, and they are so busy fighting each other--again, mostly over immigration--that they can't do a thing to fight Labour.
The 'American right' knows it isn't our business. We don't have to like or 'trust' Putin to not want war with him or not meddle in politics on his borders. If he and his voters think that his positions are in the best interest of the Russians, then so be it. The small countries of Eastern Europe will eventually ally with them *if* they believe that it is better than what Brussels and Washington has on offer. Orban's issues with the EU mirror this, or Poland before the leftists were installed. "Infinity migrants or no money"
Not my circus.
"He's running around saying that he will slow down immigration and force existing immigrants to assimilate more."
best of luck getting foreigners to larp as europeans
surely this wont go poorly
"I just don't get why the American right has done a 180 from mistrusting totalitarian Russian leaders to trying to argue that they are better than the West."
There's no contradiction here, any more than there is between the Democratic peacenik position during the Brezhnev years and their bloodthirsty barbaric yawp in 2024.
You called it: Putin is a tsar, right down to his protection of Christianity. That's why the Left hates him, and why the Right at the very least doesn't want to lose half of the Eastern Seaboard to radiation over support for a country most of us couldn't find on any map besides an old version of Risk.
Protection of Christianity my ass. He’s the protector of a bastardized sect that worships the nation and Tsar above God and is under total state control. And the kicker is that, state church or not, the Russian population is even less religious than most western countries.
The same was true of the Tsar, I think.
I'm not claiming he is Constantine reborn... not that Constantine didn't have sound, hard-won reasons for endorsing Christianity.
As far as Russians being religious or not, wasn't it difficult to practice religion at all until about 1980? No wonder much of the population doesn't believe.
What Putin is protecting is exactly as "Christian" as the lifestyle of Donald Trump circa 2006.
Here's the strongest possible argument to that effect:
https://russiapost.info/society/post_soviet_civil_religion_instead_of_orthodoxy
Yet, when I read it, I ask myself: "Has the Patriarch licked Putin's boots as thoroughly as the Antipope Francis has licked the boots of immigrants, gay sex, globalization... hell, he just got done telling his bishops to shut their mouths on abortion and basically render Roe v. Wade unto Caesar. What about the modern Catholic church differs in any significant way from global homogenization?"
The proper response to that, if there is one, is that the deranged buffoonery of Jorge Bergoglio doesn't prevent millions of American Catholics from pursuing their faith. The same is true with Patriarch Kirill.
As someone born into one Protestant denomination who had a tortuous journey to still-very-tentative belief within another, I am very poorly equipped to defend anything involving the Roman Catholic Church or its hierarchy. To me, "Christianity" begins with the teachings of Jesus, not popes or saints, and tends to err when it departs, as it very often does, from those teachings.
Edit to add: that is an excellent argument you linked.
Since you quote me I'll respond. I'm not on the right. I'm a social democrat who lives in social democratic Austria for 30 years and prefers the politics here to those of the US, even if the US will always be my "home."
Do you read Russian? I don't and I'm betting you don't either. I've heard lots of interpretations of "what Putin wants" and "what Putin says." I watch "what Putin does." Until Feb 22 Putin never lauched a war of aggression. Chechnya was a western attempt at a color revolution, Georgia attacked Russia (UN report). Russia claims their invasion of Ukraine was to avoid a huge loss of life in the Donbas. This is legal under the UN charter, but I'm not an international lawyer so I can't judge if their case would win.
Where is Putin's overrun of Poland so that he can get to Czechia and Slovakia - both fully Slavic countries. Putin is 71. He better hurry up!
If Putin is "ardently expansionist" where is the evidence of this? What countries has Russia started a war of expansion - a la Hitler's "Lebensraum" expansion?
I am sorry to assume you were American; it's an American blog and a point of view that is quite common in my experience on the right in America.
But I continue to believe you are far too credulous toward Putin.
I read Russian poorly, but my views on what Putin wants are informed by reading the official English translations of his speeches and manifesto. And when you evaluate what he does, I think it's important to put it in the context of both what he says and the situation he is in. He is the leader of a country with vast natural resources, but a limited and declining pool of human capital and an antiquated industrial base. He cannot realistically participate in the modern tech economy beyond a limited amount of services provision, and he has a hard time competing with more modern industrial development to his west. As a result he has not been in a position to do much about his stated ambitions.
The invasion of Ukraine (for which the stated rationale was clearly not credible, especially because the invasion went so far beyond the Donbas) makes vastly more sense as an expansionist project. The goal was by all accounts not to occupy Ukraine permanently (except for Crimea and the Donbas) but to install a puppet government similar to the one currently in Belarus, which would cede Crimea and the Donbas by agreement and end all ambitions to join NATO or the EU (regardless of the wishes of the populace). That would give him access to Ukraine's industrial and agricultural development, which is far ahead of what exists in Russia today.
Putin's manifesto would imply straightforwardly that he wants to take similar action in, at the very least, Georgia, Transnistria, and the Baltics. And it's not a far stretch from there to see that he would want to develop control over the most industrially developed of the Slav lands - which are further west in Europe. It would give him the modern industrial base he does not have today and a whole lot of potential to generate Western currency and develop military strength.
Excellent! And don't apologize, we come here for long rants like yours.
"The biggest sellout is the UK, which is why they have PMs with the shelf life of a head of lettuce." 🤣
Thanks.
I have already heard quite a bit from people about “I would never buy my kid a new car.” Okay, cool. I would and did. Here’s why:
1) I do not have the time or bandwidth to deal with an unreliable car, nor does my son. I travel for a living and he needs to transport himself to soccer and track and weightlifting seven days a week. The car needs to work absolutely perfectly, or it needs to be picked up and replaced with a loaner car when it doesn’t.
2) yes, he’ll bang it off of something. He’s already had a slight mishap with the entrance to the garage (much like his uncle did at his age), which was nothing that Meguiar’s and a touch up pen couldn’t handle. Why is it worse to have a fender bender with a new car than an old one? It isn’t. It costs no less to fix.
3) I would much rather have my son carrying a 4.0, lettering in three sports as a sophomore, and captaining his club team than working as a bagger at a grocery store or flipping burgers. I see zero value in “having him work for it.” I can afford to have him focus on things that are important. Learning how to take shit from a $15 an hour assistant manager isn’t one of them.
4) we live in rural Kentucky, and a Forte GT line might as well be an S Class as far as his classmates are concerned. It immediately made him the coolest kid in school for at least a week, and as he’s a bit of a misanthrope (who would have guessed), that’s been a new and fun experience for him.
5) I wanted to.
#5 is the only reason that matters.
I didn't buy new for Junior, but it is the newest in our fleet and for reasons 1-3. And for all the updated crash testing.
Except for lettering in three sports and getting a 4.0. I wish.
Crash safety is a big one for me. I've got an (almost) 14 year old and have been considering a single cab long box newer model full-size truck. IIHS loss data shows all full-sizers well below average for driver/passenger injury payments. A single or extended cab limits passenger and distractions.
A new or lightly used 2WD can be had reasonably in the north, and would solve my need for occasional truck use. When snow/ice are present he can use my winter-tire shorn car or I'll just get a set of winters for the truck.
This is a great idea
Until I wind up with a shorty F-150 5.0 with an e-locker.
i see you live in a hilly area with snow so thats entirely justifiable
I'll aim for the safest, newest car I can afford when the time comes. The accident is almost inevitable, just a matter of how severe.
With a pickup there is the risk that they put friends in the bed.
wouldnt be a risk if wasnt so much fun
All valid reasons. I think the reliability trumps all but do not get any backlash for buying new. Not like you bought an S class as his first car.
The Honda is also a good choice for The Commander. Accidents happen and neither of these cars are collectable but they are safe.
Son started with a family owned 05 Camry and didn’t have any accidents thank goodness and is now on to his grandmother and grandfather’s barely driven Avalon. A banger car for college if not quite cool. Should last and allow him to get something fun while he can enjoy it.
This is how they learn. Let them make their mistakes and gain the knowledge safely.
I salute your choice and hope that stay safe while enjoying school.
The cool factor is a bonus and hope he parlays that into asking the person he is interested in out. The confidence bump can be a good thing.
Staying out of the new vs used things, I agree with the choice of car.
Mark, your son is luck to have a father as involved as you just like John is lucky to have a dedicated father. However I would take issue with you statement “Learnung to take shit from. $15 an hour Assistant Mgr is not one of them.” Yes that is important because it teaches the young person that they have to respect authority and it teaches young people to take responsibility. Bagging groceries at 16 at Krogers is not a bad job and it provides a young person with a sense of self worth and responsibility. Plus the ability tobwirj with people of different backgrounds and different outlooks. Oh and Managers at Kroger make well into six figures as they are responsible for a multimillion dollar operation with a 2-3 percent profit margin.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’d much rather have him in the gym or on the pitch or practicing his saxophone. His time is more valuable than $12 an hour.
No, if all he can get is a $12 hr job and no more, his time is worth exactly $12 hr. You can opt him out of a job, but whatever resume burnishing he's doing instead of bagging is you subsidizing him at an arbitrary rate.
That’s a poor future time orientation way of looking at it. The things he’s doing now are ensuring that he’ll be worth $250k a year in his thirties instead of continuing to be worth $12 an hour as a wage laborer. Being a bagger or a dishwasher teaches him absolutely nothing and is a poor use of his time.
The really successful kids are doing unpaid internships and such to make connections and leapfrog their peers.
I'm not suggesting you're wrong not to have him do whatever he'd get paid $12 hr, I'm suggesting that at this point in life that's what he's worth to an employer. Hopefully he will be worth more in 20 years.
Fwiw, as a father of two boys nowin their 20s, I can pretty well assure you your best laid plans will not be as straight as you think. My history major who ended up not going to law school is making over $200k doing self taught software. My other ended up deciding to get an engineering degree after never giving it a thought until sophomore year. He's in an incredibly interesting career path now four years out of school. You never know.
For sure. I majored in jazz studies, for God’s sake. And while I can still blow a mean solo over Mister Magic, I don’t think any of that made me a sales and operations executive.
Has your son ever had any kind of job? That $250K/yr job is still going to need for him to learn some basic job skills for him to succeed.
Being a bagger or dishwasher teaches you about showing up on time, doing your job well, working within a team in a commercial environment, and the pain of taxes withheld.
It will also likely give him some encouragement to work towards that $250K/yr future as opposed to being a wage laborer.
I don’t think there is anything that being a bagger teaches you that captaining a state championship team doesn’t, save for the taxes (and he hears his father bitch about that enough), and the reverse isn’t true at all. He doesn’t show up on time, he shows up 30 minutes early. He’s not just responsible for his own work quality, but for the work quality of an entire team. He’s the only one on the field who’s allowed to speak to the officials.
Leading 18 young men into a physically demanding competition every day isn’t just about the games. It’s about demanding excellence in every warmup, every drill, every touch of the ball. He has more respect from the team than the coach does. He’s responsible for upholding the standards of a club that has won two USSF national titles.
He’s also worn the Kentucky badge as a member of the state team, and will hopefully wear the Stars and Stripes someday. And he’s likely going to captain his HS team as a junior, having been selected for the honor over fifteen seniors.
I can’t imagine any part time laborer job that would replicate any of that. I would never trade one second of his time with his club or school teams to have him wash a dish.
100% agree Mark, I wish my parents had thought this way.
I can confirm, having worked both jobs and being dangerously close to the lower middle class in 2024.
I only make $12 an hour too :/
i look forward to seeing you and sherman next time im at the food bank
This might be overvaluing the things he's learning at an unpaid rate and undervaluing the things he might learn getting paid 12 dollars an hour. Who knows, as it's all a dice roll.
I played sports and was in school clubs but my grades in high school started to suffer so my folks asked me to drop Football. I was a mediocre player but I did enjoy it and learned from the experience.
Once I got to both driving age and of working age my folks made me a deal. I had to pay them for a car and the insurance it costs to operate the car.
My parents at the time probably could have afforded to get me a car without me actually working, I don't know. A teacher and a nursing salary wasn't all that great in the mid to late 90's. At any rate I started working at Radio Shack at 16 for minimum wage. I was lucky enough to learn basic electronics in the late 90's while I was taking several programming electives in high school which steered me into Computer Engineering. But then there is a twist.
The store shut down and I ended up working in a paint store mixing, matching, and delivering paint for contractors at 50 cents above minimum wage. I continued making 50 cents above minimum wage up until my second year of college where they gave me a 1.50 raise. I worked with the company for a total of 7 years between high school and college
while getting an engineering degree. What was invaluable to me was the amount of things I learned working in a paint store that directly has impacted my engineering profession.
I get that "bagging" or "flipping burgers" might not be the best use of a kid's time, especially a talented one. There are loads of other minimum wage jobs out there that can offer a wealth of experience and information.
I'm glad it worked out for you. As you said, it's a dice roll.
My college job made me quite a bit of money (there were weeks I made over $1000 working part time, and that was in 1998 dollars) and set me up for what most would consider to be a good career in sales. However, the time I spent selling saxophones hugely impacted the time I spent PRACTICING saxophone. I would have been a much better musician if I had spent that 20-25 hours a week practicing. But would that life have been as good or rewarding as the one I got? As Aslan says, No one is ever told what would have happened. But anyone can find out what will happen.
I would never ask my son to drop a sport, ever. If his grades dropped, I don't think taking away the one thing he loves more than anything would help. Also, that would be a failure of commitment to his team. With him, they're state championship level. Without him...they're a .500 team. Not fair to the rest of the kids to punish them because he's not handling his business. Luckily, that's never been an issue.
Mark's reply doesn't go far enough: It's a poor PRESENT time orientation way to look at it. If you lost your job this morning, could you replace it in 24 hours? 48 hours? No, you would need some sort of a SUBSIDY (savings, spouse, unemployment) to pay your expenses while you searched for work, which requires both "clock time" (hours per day) and "calendar time" (even if you had a 15 minute interview with your college roommate the CEO, it would still take time for HR to prepare an offer).
The difference is that a teenager doesn't have savings, spouse, or unemployment.
This is in addition to Mark's point about his son being in a preparatory phase of life.
I believe this boils down to some sort or Rich Dad Poor Dad way of thinking.
There’s a reason why I had poor dad and the older I get the more I realize how flawed the paths were laid in-front of me to take, in a way to also be poor. You can argue some sort of work ethic garbage but the reality of $12/hr ($5.15 when I started *barf*) is coming to terms with being a slave and then having a flawed sense of value that $24/hr job is some great thing to have because it’s double. It moves your target far lower.
If he’s able to START where $35-50+ is the basement number without having to live a broke dick lifestyle !both physically and mentality then fine. Fair? Nope. Life isn’t fair. We are supposed to work hard so our children don’t HAVE to start where we did or below. The idea is to give them every possible advantage.
It’s an annoying thing to think about as I know plenty of people that never knew struggle in their lives and were held by the hand from rich to richer. Does it make them a bad person? No. Can it make them out of touch and likely far less humble? Likely. Does that matter? Not to them. They are the ones making the real money.
So long as he’s a decent enough human it’s not much my business to say otherwise. I’ll go back to pretending I’m actually doing half decent in life when in reality it’s nothing past acceptable in 2024. At least I got to ride my bike to work at Big Lots. All that taught me was being poor sucks.
I had a rich dad and worked at 16. The absolute best reason to work at 16 is you can make 12k a year tax free and fully fund your Roth IRA (or dad/mom can). Work 16-22 60 days a year at $15 an hour can turn into a lot of tax free money. Dad funded my roth IRA
Sounds EXACTLY like rich dad talk.
That last sentence, you nailed it. We weren’t poor, but far from rich. My parents both were in sales of some sort. I’m pretty sure most of my dad’s 401k was diverted to paying for me to play hockey and attend private school. That sounds a lot better than it was, we were solidly middle class.
I got saddled with the poor dad thinking. Got my first job at a bicycle store when I was 15. Other than gaining a massive amount of respect for small businesses and their owners, I got nothing out of this job. The real life skills (owning/learning from mistakes, motivation, etc.) all came on the ice.
While my dad certainly had good intentions intentions, all working really did was waste the best years of my life. Instead of doing something worthwhile, I was arguing with jerkoffs over which brake shoes they needed for their Cervelo.
The greatest lesson I learned from sports is that while skill is important, it’s all about who you know. This goes 10 fold in a small town.
All of the “important last names” were starters. Do you know who often wasn’t? The ‘non popular’ team captains. We tended to rotate them but being leader in practice didn’t correlate to game day.
I also watched 80% of our team WALK after my sophomore years and the varsity team was left with freshman to get it done - they couldn’t.
Same shit went for baseball. Basketball I both suck at and have no interest so no comments there.
I got heavy into BMX, freestyle and eventually mountain biking; budget of course.
As an adult I loathe sports. Unless it has wheels I’ve very little interest and anything mainstream can go away. I skip over the F1 portion weekly.
I miss watching stadium truck racing, monster trucks and swamp buggies, WRC coverage and 90s televised IMSA / spec racing. God bless grandma and her cable television.
Unless I can compete myself you can have it. Football (and the like) is now fat has beens dressed up like cheerleaders and screaming at each other. I don’t have a good parallel back to the business world other than the fat has been business owners seem to be attracted to younger athletes because it’s the closest form of cheerleading they can have - in-person flattery and general dick sucking behavior.
I have a friend who has a VERY Rich Dad. That’s in terms of both personal wealth and his outlook on life / taxation / wealth preservation, etc. Hence the capitalization.
This story isn’t really about him, though.
The VERY Rich Dad spends his winters at Brays Island Plantation in SC, where one of his seasonal neighbors is Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Apparently, Robert is (very) cheap, petty, argumentative, and consequently rather unpopular within the community.
I cannot say that surprises me, but I wonder how much Robert cares about that.
Based on the anecdotes I have heard, he cares quite a bit!
He carries around a box of books so that he can bestow a signed copy upon anyone who is so unfortunate as to fall into conversation with him.
My buddy’s father has overheard him dispensing unsolicited personal finance “advice” to both a Mellon and the fellow who inherited Little St. Simons Island and later sold it to Hank Paulson.
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61654403-john-t-reed-s-views-of-various-real-estate-investment-gurus-part-3
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651011-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-1
"Although his family was not rich, he attended a predominantly wealthy elementary school because of an anomaly in the school-district boundaries. The wealthy kids had newer toys and refused to invite Kiyosaki and his friend to parties, telling Kiyosaki it was because they were “poor kids.” Sounds like he was scarred deeply by that humiliation and has lived his whole life since trying to prove to some rude nine-year olds from the 1950s that he now has the money to be worthy of their party invitations. He told Meet the Street that he has never been back to Hawaii. I suspect such a visit would rid him of these demons from his childhood."
http://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651331-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-2
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651587-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-3
[Oddly, long after I posted this comment about Kiyosaki reminding me of Blake, Blake emerged from obscurity when his wife was shot to death as he returned to a restaurant to get the gun that he forgot there. My comparing Kiyosaki to Blake had nothing to do with guns and murdered wives. Also, a Los Angeles Times article about Blake’s murdered wife, Bonny Lee Bakely, said she told friends that she wanted to marry a celebrity like Blake “to show up kids who made fun of her in school.” That is reminiscent of my analysis of Kiyosaki’s lifelong pursuit of money and status as an overreaction to insults he received in elementary school.]
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651907-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-4
Interesting!
The best lesson to a young man with prospects in a job like that is: 'I do not want to end up here.'
And 'there is easy pussy here'.
I can see both ways of it. I personally didn't have a choice but to start working menial jobs in high school and college, and I do believe it has made me a better and well rounded person overall. Those jobs taught me how to interact with people from all kinds of backgrounds. I learned how to make unlikely friends and how to deal with people I didn't care for. I learned that labor with a purpose makes one fit, and feel good. I also learned how to keep the "authority" figures from walking all over me, which is something I think gen Z is embracing to almost an excessive point. I still believe my post-graduation summer job as a service porter at my local Ford dealer was probably the most important job I ever had.
Now, when it comes to my own kids in 20 years time? I don't have any yet, but I will try my damndest to make sure they don't HAVE to work as young as I did, but I will encourage it if they find a suitable opportunity. My very first job was working the bayou themed arcade at Joe Duhmar's Fieldhouse, and I didn't learn shit there.
You’d be shocked how many executives want to hire only former athletes, especially for sales roles. They view athletes as disciplined people who know how to compete. And those are skills that Gen Z and Gen Alpha definitely do NOT have.
I think kids learn so much more from pushing themselves to finish the last fifty meters of a 400m dash than they do at menial jobs, and their time is limited. I always feel terrible for kids who have to miss practices or film study because they’re working a part time job.
I'm not an executive and likely never will be. I'll take the engineer that had the part time job.
I know of a wealthy hedge fund guy whose kids all worked in the local McDonalds as teens.
One of the things I respect most about Matt "Middle Class" Farah is that he worked at a Foot Locker for five years when his father was CEO.
The wealthy kids I know who worked jobs are typically more down to earth than the wealthy ones who didn't. Probably the only time they interact with the actual lower and middle classes.
Being someone who was way involved in school as a kid and forbidden from having a job, I agree with your suggestion but for a different reason. Not with you on the respect authority thing. It's probably very unlikely someone like Mark's son has an attitude problem and I don't think I did either. I would have liked a little more independence. There was a long period in my life (probably >3 years) where $100 a week of my own money would have made a serious difference to me. Instead, I passed on a lot of activities cause I didn't want to beg for $20.
Today's world is almost unrecognizable from when I was young, and all the more from when you came of age.
The world you came of age in no longer exists.
I was obsessed with cars from an early age, and started working various after school jobs at age 14 in order to buy my own. At 17, I spent nearly $4k (which was basically everything I had) on my first car. Though I don't necessarily regret any of this since it was what I wanted, I think your logic is spot-on. The summer before my Junior year of high school, I was walking out the door at 8am on a Saturday to knock out another 8 hours of my 48 hour work week, when my dad stopped me at the door. "You have your whole life ahead of you to work, you're only a kid once, what the hell are you doing to yourself?"
If your son is thriving in athletics and academics, I'm nearly certain that those environments are going to be more beneficial to him in the long run than washing cars at a dealership or running fence line at a farm like I did - captaining a team might even teach him to be a leader and/or work for himself, rather than clocking in every morning on someone else's hamster wheel. He'll also not be driving a literal antique with no airbags or ABS.
your father was 100% correct!
These are 5 really great reasons to buy this car for this kid, Mark. High school is hard, even if you're smart and a good athlete. If you can buy your way out of the Sunday Scaries for even a week or two, its worth it.
I will most likely either buy (or lease) my daughters a new/newish low end car, or they’ll be gifted a hand me down if the economics make sense. I don’t see the wisdom in making them buy a beater.
They won’t have a job during the school year (school is their job) but they absolutely will work a 40ish hour a week job once they are able in the summer, to teach them responsibility and self reliance, as well as to remove me from funding their every wish. I think budgeting, prioritization, and money management are skills that can only be learned hands on (coughs, looks at wife who was handed everything).
I wish my son had summers off. He’s even busier in the summer. We just got back from San Diego for a college tryout and we have three more this summer. He has weightlifting three days a week, soccer conditioning in the morning and practice in the evening three days a week, and the actual season starts July 15th, with games beginning that weekend. There are two dead weeks PER YEAR.
It’s a nice idea for him to have a summer job but unfortunately impractical. He can referee some youth games (which pays $35-75 per game) for gas money but that’s it.
Yup, if you have a kid with a legitimate shot at a college scholarship the ROI probably isn’t there for a summer job. My daughters have shown no such proclivity thus it won’t be an issue. My older daughter does recreational cheer and isn’t good enough in the gymnastics department to make it past high school, and my youngest is 7 and has minimal athletic ability aside from Irish dance which again not much of a chance for scholarship I bet.
Irish dance is intense. Our cousin’s daughter (so technically also our cousin) is a National champion and travels worldwide to compete. I unfortunately have both a dancer AND a soccer player $$$$$$$$$
I’ve written this here before but I made a deal with each of my four that if they got a full ride, either academic or athletic, I would buy them a new car when they got it. Three of the four pulled it off. My son still drives his 2011 Jetta 2.5 and my daughter her 2012 Fiat 500 Pop. It’s what she wanted in the budget. All four of them totaled cars at one time or another. Two of them was not their fault. Those were their high school beaters. All of them but the youngest drove our 2003 Honda Pilot at one time or another. That was one of the best cars I ever owned. We called it the green goat because it could go anywhere and did.
Totally, and I mean totally, depends on the kid. Your son has "earned it" in my vernacular, and your reasoning is sound. Many if not most other kids have not (including most in my orbit). I would definitely prefer my child excel, and be rewarded, that endure the mind-numbing drudgery of the menial jobs I worked to survive.
You talk about your kid like he's some Fortune 50 CEO. My goodness, a 16 year old kid might miss a soccer practice or gym session, God forbid! Get real man.
I'm incredibly real. Do you have any sense of what the competition level is like for young men who are at the top of this field?
The last college ID camp he attended had 48 players, all of whom were there by invite only. 40 of them were in MLS Next academies, which is the preprofessional program for Major League Soccer. The program was looking for 3 players total.
The head coach looked at all of them and said, "Your only job over the next 4 hours is to impress me. Don't make a safe, smart play. While you're doing that, some other kid is scoring off of a bicycle kick. Impress me or go home."
My son was fortunate enough to be one of the 15 kids invited back for the second day's session. 33 other kids, all of whom are considered good enough to play professional soccer someday and attended the SoCal camp from Ohio, Tennesee, Texas, Florida, Minnesota, and many other places, got sent packing. Every single Division I college ID session is like this. You can only come if you're invited and you probably won't get to stay for very long.
On the pro side, the local USL League One team, which is like AA baseball, just selected 8 high school kids for their U20 team. All of those kids had to sign a contract and quit their high school teams immediately. My son didn't try out because he loves HS soccer and knows that he won't have that opportunity to represent his community and his school, but he also knew that he wouldn't be able to turn it down if he was selected. So he just didn't go. We'll see if that was the right decision or not.
So yeah, he takes it incredibly seriously because this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life. You act as though 16 years old is young. For a soccer player, U17 is the year that decides if a kid will play in college or professionally or not. There's a 17 year old starting for Spain in the Euros right now.
Well that was quite a rebuttal, I stand corrected. I also feel privileged to have a marketing executive take time out of the middle of his day to type up a multi-paragraph response to my trolly post!
I'm glad to see your son is making the choices he wants to make, regarding not signing his life away so he can do what makes him happy, i.e. play high school ball vs signing with a NEXT academy. It is those types of decisions that will hopefully prevent him from looking back on this time in 5-10 years and wishing he had done it differently.
I agree that at the level it sounds like your son is playing he is on the right path vs having a part time job. As someone who had to walk away from the ODP team because my parents were not in a position to provide the monetary or time commitments it required, I'd have killed for the opportunity you're providing your son.
But, looking back now I do not feel like the jobs I had as a kid, or my decision to go to a college that did not offer collegiate sports were bad decisions. I did learn some valuable life skills in those jobs that I did not get on the field in a team environment. Not to mention the industry experience I got through the co-op program my college required me to do in order to graduate.
I'd say the biggest one was that it exposed me to a much more diverse group of people vs. my sports teams, and taught me the value of money as I worked to increase my wages through gaining new skill sets and negotiating the worth of those skills.
Who knows, maybe I would be pulling down twice as much as I make now if I had played soccer or ran track in college. Can we get an update post in another 10 years on where your son is tracking against that 250k mid-30s salary target? If he makes it to the show that shouldn't be an issue, by his mid-20s, and he can buy you a new Kia as repayment.
John should be grateful for a pre-crashed Accord as you have noted, as he has aged he has shown little interest in automobiles. Now the ACF community needs to get Bark on the line and ask him: what were you thinking? A young person should not have a new car unless they give up their phone, as I have seen to many 16-18 year olds traveling at 80MPH down the road typing on their phones or making home movies with the video feature. Just an old guy’s humble opinion.
i really dont think its possible for the youth or really most people to just give up their phone considering how critical a component they are for existing in modern society
also nothing stopping them using a phone in an old shitbox
At least with CarPlay and whatever other modern connectivity features, there’s the *idea* that they can text hands free.
I say this as a very grown man that despises speech-to-text with every fiber of my being and often neglects that feature.
How you expect them to clock in for the jobs that you want them to be doing without a phone for "2FA" (two-factor authentication)?
The bane of my existence!! 🙄
As the daily driver of a 110k mile Hyundai Elantra GT that I purchased new I routinely advise people to avoid Hyundai/Kia products until they have a decade-long track record of proving they're capable of washing swarf out of engine blocks and avoiding fire-related recalls.
That said it's a better choice than a VW for the long term if you keep after maintenance and park outside.
Strong advocate for the Jetta as a non Jap beater. We've got a 2018 in the family that's gone from 12k to 100k miles in about 3 years and it's been flawless. Decently fun to wheel around too. That little 1.4 (now 1.5) punches above it's weight
I've heard some Not Great things about the 1.5, but in general the current gen Jettas are very solid cars for the price. My mom and sister both have one with the 1.4. Literally the only issue was a bad wheel bearing on one of them at ~65k miles that was covered under warranty.
They are spacious, super efficient (normal to see 40+ mpg on 87), very cheap to buy and run, and drive well for what they are. Quiet, comfortable, punchy enough... I like them a lot. I never loved the design, especially the front ends, but they are overall good cars for the money.
interesting to hear about the 1.5- as a rule, i avoid 4 cylinder VAG cars like the plague, but the 1.4 has been faultless so far. i imagine the GLI of these gens are a lot of fun for what they are as well- but i have had nothing but bad experiences with any gen of the 2.0T. the 6 cylinders have been much, much better to me.
Apparently the 1.5s have some head gasket issues? Haven’t dug deep into that one yet, but a bit concerning.
Kinda shocking the EA888 has given you issues this far along in its life too.
2 friends on 2 gens (a 2012 and a 2019) spun bearings on bone stock GTIs, and my mother had a 2018 Q5 that burned oil so bad at ~23k miles that we got rid of it. my B8 S4 was much better but was also starting to burn oil at 90k. my R32 however has been flawless.
The GLI looks so good on paper. 228 HP and 6 speed manual could be fun. Too bad the engine is hit or miss. My son has the 2.5 inline five in his 2011 Jetta and it is bullet-proof.
That was a great engine and we all should have realized it would be, because it made NO POWER so it must have been good at something!
It did make good noises at least
258 lb ft, under 30k, electronic LSD, semi premium interior... life could be a dream
Actually had a sales guy try to talk me out of buying a cheery, used 95 CRX Si fot my sons first car. I should have listened.
A week late, I have some suggestions for the 24 Hours of Le Mans:
Remove the chicanes on the Mulsanne. The cars accelerate fast enough now, and our understanding of high-speed aerodynamic stability has improved enough, that AFAICT there's little to no safety benefit anymore (any crash north of 180mph is very unlikely to be survivable). Being the world's only 300mph/500kph race would surely bring some more eyeballs to the event.
Instead of "reducing costs" by replacing the top-flight prototype class every half-decade, forcing all existing teams to develop a completely new car, maybe try reducing costs by *not* doing that? If they must do, can they at least bring back a fan favorite like Group C or GT1?
Can they get rid of the asinine BoP system? The frickin' *point* of sportscar racing is to find out who builds the best sports car. It's okay if some are quicker than others!
I agree with all you said, but I'm going to be a little pedantic and point to NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Cars going 330mph every weekend.
But, seeing a road race with 300mph top speeds would be amazing!
Touché. Consider my original comment amended to read "the world's only 300mph/500kph *circuit.*" :)
If you're on a real computer, it is possible to actually edit your comments. Not on the dreadful phone app though.
But only for a limited time, and the edit window for OP is past.
And if the nitromethane classes were 1320 instead of 1000 feet it would be closer to 350+
ive always wondered how to keep top fuel about the building of the fastest quarter mile cars without disrupting the notion of what a top fuel car actually is
very easy to slow them down but not without changing a whole lot
I would be happy with stop racing ugly cars. Compare today’s cars with a 956 or 905.
gonna have to disagree with you there
sustained 300mph is going to cook tires and cause more high speed tire failures than anyone knows what to do with
just race real cars. i'll get interested in lemans again when i see a brz out there.
this is a much better idea
basically a stock car with basic safety equipment and you wind up with something akin to gt4 cars
Nailed it!
It would pop the engine in Hour Five!
With the tires currently used at the race, yes, but it's possible to design tires that can withstand much greater forces, such as landing gear tires.
i know that the tire construction exists but youre basically putting rubber pucks under the cars at that point given how hard they are also im almost certain you wouldnt have the profile of a modern race slick but something more rounded like a land speed tire
There are other things that could be done, such as having an inner and an outer air bladder that are separated by another layer of rubber, providing a degree of redundancy against blowouts.
aside from the cost complexity and weight of such a tire the notion of making one to handle incredibly high speeds and loads demanded of it is at odds with a tire that can generate a large amount of lateral grip in a racecar as the deformation of a tire and its compound is what makes it stick to the road broadly speaking
The inner tire would be made of a much harder compound, since its purpose is only to bring the car to a controlled stop. I am not a tire engineer, but AFAICT 300mph-capable tires is a solvable problem, and has been solved for the Bugatti Chiron, a much heavier vehicle than an LMP even accounting for downforce.
Tires can be redesigned for that use case, monitored for temp, etc.
I like the idea of no chicanes which would be an interesting challenge. Certainly for tires, but also for additional stress imposed mechanically and humanly.
Would go a long way towards bringing the element of conservation back to endurance racing.
would be a hellish engineering challenge to make the tires both work and last
i bet some are more than willing to attempt that problem
Catalunya is much better without the chicane at the end. Removing Monza’s would be interesting.
Would I have bought my son a Kia Forte? Probably not. Would I have bought it if the alternative was a Volkswagen-anything? F-k yes.
Zemmour in France should try and do something like what Meloni did in Italy. Goodness knows France needs some of its _Nationalité_ back.
Seeing how exciting F1 has been I regret canceling my F1TV subscription several years ago but that was when it was the Leeis Hamilton racing series. Perhaps I'll take a look again.
As someone in the conservative camp I want to point out that "conservative" and "liberal" mean very different things outside the US. The backlash seen across the EU isn't surprising heck even Canada had a shock election recently when a super blue district swung the other way for the first time in decades. Central planning has its consequences and the anointed as it were hopefully will learn a lesson. Or not.
I commend Bark for buying his son a new car. Lessons can still be taught even if a child is given something far nicer. A KIA Forte though? I double as a Hyundai/KIA backup tech and I wouldn't touch anything that doesn't contain their 3.3 I6 turbo or 3.8 V6. The I4 cylinders are absolutely trash and you'll probably have an engine replacement at your second factory service. VW Jetta FTW!
The Jetta is a penalty box. It’s not the Jetta we grew up with (and that I owned as a first car). The Kia has every safety feature under the sun, a 10 year warranty, and is slower than dirt. Checks every box.
Many things are not like they were when we grew up. I won't argue, the warranty is impressive however time has a value and seeing these new cars in and out of the shop every month makes me wonder if it's worth it. Still, I think it's cool you bought him something newer. Congrats!
The Jetta ad rang a bell. Back in 1985 my future ex-wife and I embarked on a move from Boston to Plymouth, Massachusetts, which included a commute the likes of which I'd always sworn I'd never do, having grown up in an environment of subways, taxi cabs and non-driving parents. The two-year, UNLIMITED MILEAGE warranty on our new VW Scirocco steered us away from the Corolla GT-S hatchback that was in contention, that and the VeeDub's front-wheel-drive for snowy runs. Incidentally, the choice of the German-built 'Rocco over the Pennsylvania GTI was deliberate, as both shared the same German-assembled 90 HP engine and close-ratio gearbox. The quality of the rest of the two cars was night and day; you could tell the difference by slamming the doors right there in the showroom!
The only repair I can recall over the 150,000 mile we drove the car was a problem with the driver seat recliner, covered by the warranty. Over the course of my ownership of ten VWs I've never understood their reputation for poor quality. My last, a 1998 VR6 Jetta, went to its new owner with 254,000 miles on the original clutch.
One thing I'm missing in the article is the reference to an automatic transmission. What have I overlooked?
Google “VW MkIV Golf problems!” 😁
That may be it then, since my ten VeeDubs maxed out at generation 3. And the fourth gens sold in the US were made where? Mexico? Brazil? Not Germany, except for SOME GTIs and Jettas. The clue is a VIN that starts with "WVW" indicating a German-made VW. And in my experience that DEFINITELY makes a difference.
Incidentally, Mk this-and-that has always bugged me because it's fanboi talk, not any kind of manufacturer designation. And despite appearances, I'm not a fanboi of any make.