KPower are now swapping the robust K-series honda engines into the NC Chassis MX-5 miata. They offer full service installs as well, for a flat labor fee of $2950.
Let us all imagine the Miata as it was supposed to be, with a roots-blown K-series, and pray:
"Lord, protect me from the things I want, and my want of things."
One of my college classmates who remains a close friend sent it to me before I had had a chance to check NY Mag’s website today. He is absolutely their core demographic - 35, highly educated, lives in the West Village, and taking the year off to figure out what he wants to do next (he made $3-4MM after his employer - a startup - sold).
He noticed that a female classmate of ours had “liked” The Cut’s post about the article on Instagram; this surprised me. She is also, obviously, ~35. Moderately attractive, perma-single (or at least no man has made it to social media, and she has attended a number of weddings and parties over the years). She is from a very wealthy Charleston family; she owns a house there and has a place in NYC (hybrid schedule NYC CRE job).
As I commented below, I have nothing negative to say about this woman.
As is fairly widely known on here, I earned an undergrad degree at a small, elite, and certainly elitIST liberal arts college situated in a small town in Virginia. There was literally nothing to do except go to class, study, drink, and (occasionally) sleep.
I was probably in the middle of the bell curve for males in terms of alcohol consumption - about 50 a week (I drink less than 50 drinks a year now). The women drank quite a bit, too. My close male friends and I have observed that virtually all of the women, whether single or partnered, are in far better physical shape than they were when we were in college.
Despite that fact, a number of the women seem to have (voluntarily) given up on finding a husband and/or becoming a mother. Of the most beautiful women in my class (of about 400 grads total):
-One is from a sizable, big money Texas family. She earned a top MBA, lived a charmed life in NYC, got laid off during COVID, and now lives in a small, unremarkable town in rural New England with her dogs. She abandoned the G-wagen and platinum blonde and couture for bangs, bad tattoos, and a Subaru.
-One earned an Ivy League grad degree in applied mathematics (after having earned a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Math) before moving to LA to be a stylist. She lives in Echo Park and posts frequently about her various mental illnesses, the patriarchy, etc. She got married and divorced last year.
I clicked like on the comment, because well-told, but allowing such cruel fates to befall these women's lives makes me shudder.
My college experience similarly combined elitism, challenging academics, and probably the best beauty-to-brains ratio in all of american collegiate life at the time. Difficult to draw comparisons. But it felt like the Studio 54 of its day.
Your stories are just like mine.
The facially flawless, 9.5/10 5'4 waif with the best drawing ability in art classes and 9 figures of connecticut wealth: cats
The gorgeous, zaftig-in-the-cool-way-not-Bryce's-girls east-coast daughter of a local law and political dynasty: MANY cats
Of all the things we've so badly fucked up... how did *this* particular unforced error come to pass?
The Texas girl has siblings who achieved far less academically but are married with children.
The LA stylist has a brother who is gay; their stepfather is a billionaire whose own children reproduced.
Another girl who is not *particularly* attractive but was genuinely nice and down to earth (nothing to prove) works for the investment bank her multi-billionaire father owns (she looks like him wearing a wig). Mid-30s, single, no kids. Her best friend married her brother. Without giving everything away (this is a public thread), you can probably guess where I went to school, which makes it easy to figure out the family I’m talking about here (hint - the I bank is HQ’d in Little Rock and is a sponsor of the Williams F1 team).
As the world burns to the ground, I find the ironies of postmodern society often feel like little victories... the world treats boys like defective girls, but the result is that women became defective men.
Ugh. "The oppression of marriage". Then why do women seem to get the best deal out of divorce? I got a buddy going through a nasty divorce and I'm not sure his soon to be ex was oppressed.
It's nasty because of kids and nasty because they were marry for all of 18 or so months.
There was no infidelity. She just thought she could stay at home and be a content creator without actually taking care of the kids while he was doing a real job.
I don't have a problem with splitting it down the middle of the SAHM or SAHD does their actual job. The problem is men can get screwed on this front.
Maybe judges should assign some real value here and if that part of the contract isn't held up then maybe you don't get half?
In a just world, it would be like that. In the real world, my wife thought she could stay at home and be an alcoholic without actually taking care of the kids while I was doing a real job. When the divorce was final I got the kids and she got 60% of our assets. If there was any justice she would have left with her personal effects and not a damn thing more.
Look, I'm boomer and as right wing and anti snowflake as the rest of this readership, but.....I liked the piece. I thought it was well written, thoughtful, and truthful. The author came across not as a dingbat, but a smart pragmatic young woman who perfectly executed the OODA loop within her environment. She observed her status and choices, oriented, decided her way forward, and acted. Admittedly, her brother may be slightly pissed! Thanks for this Sherman.
I anticipated that it would set the tongues wagging in here, which is why I shared it. The comments on the website and on the Instagram post were predictable.
I'm three paragraphs in, and she's said nothing indefensible. It's just not a high-status outlook or "luxury belief" to hold - thus controversial to some.
People [outside of here] may not know this but pure, individualistic "for love" marriage is a nigh-unprecedented luxury of the postwar industrialized middle-class-or-better West. Most other civilizations still have parental input into marriage and most WESTERNERS would have had substantial parental input if not something along the lines of arrangement had they been living in 1910.
Big age gaps work for everyone. He gets youth and beauty and at least some of her best years; she lets him spend time in the investment banking salt mines for a decade+, he gets to enjoy strange women for a decade+ and she gets to take vague, purblind stabs at career before being politely allowed to stop maintaining the illusion of caring.
Honestly it totally makes sense. Kudos to this woman, who seems happily matched.
2 paragraphs in and the Harvard Grad. was looking for a dude to "Settle" with.
Further down "A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe."
Further down some more. What she says about her brother and girlfriend? She's a complete asshole. They are going to read this. I'd have nothing to do with the buffoon.
That woman is so close to getting it. She puts the words down herself but still can't see. The stuff about girlfriends fixing up their boyfriends but not getting the long term benefit. The observations about two people stumbling to grow up together. "I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling towards every milestone." Well that's the whole point of a marriage, isn't it? The wife helps the husband grow up and she herself is there to benefit until the end.
The author felt herself to be too valuable at age 20 and decided to skip all that. Now she's empty, although still married, and writing for free on the internet. She sees everything more or less accurately but can't analyze the problems at all. She writes she'll expect a lot from him when raising a child. After she admits herself that he has done basically everything for her over a decade? At what point does she carry her own weight? They'll hire a nanny and she'll be posting about divorce in five years.
Sometimes I think that women, under the influence of feminism and leftist nonsense have permanently damaged relationships between women and men. Women have allowed themselves to be convinced that they they're all high value and that most men simply don't live up to their now high standards. Sort of a Bizzaro Lake Wobegone where only half of the population is all above average. When I ask them how that math works out they just say that men "aren't keeping up", which would mean there's been a massive change in the past generation or two after thousands of years of human society. They believe that women have finally thrown off the shackles of the patriarchy. They simply can't compute the notion that women have had an equal role in shaping society and that the patriarchy is a fiction.
They put a lot of stock in their financial independence and the fact that they don't need a man. Then they go on Facebook singles groups wearing their casual misandry on their designer sleeves in filtered photos taken from the most flattering angles, ready to take offense at just about anything if expressed by someone with a Y chromosome, and simultaneously complain that they are single and that there are no men worthy of them.
And, of course, bigger picture is that on the exact same arc of women rising to lead modern society - more women in Congress, more women running large corporations, more women in professional careers - modern society has suddenly turned into a frantic, dysfunctional dystopia where everyone is vain, talks a lot, and no one seems to know how anything actually works...
What confounds me is that the political right, such as it exists, has not been able to *capitalize* on leftist lies through truth-telling.
Obviously censorship plays a part, but amazed that the truth is just so well-hidden and so well-lied-about. Blog-dot-jim says the truth is the right's best weapon, but this doesn't seem to be the case, at least at the moment
Assuming a 50/50 split in sexes, I find the line "Those guys are going to be lonely later" odd when it's used by many. Which may be true, but unless polygamy takes hold or the women go lesbian, if it's not those lonely guys not stepping up, which guys are they going to hook up with for the long haul.
So I'll add to this that this girl went to the same high school as my wife in Miami and was taught by my sister-in-law there. She just sent this article our way, and if you know Miami and know that the author is a Miami girl, it does make a lot more sense given the values of too many folks down there.
Given what she wanted, you do have to admire her for willing to dive in and go and get it. In that regard she's not too different than other elite school girls, it's just that her chosen "vocation" was a bit of a throwback.
You say this but bridge lights are pretty vulnerable.
Many bridge lights be effectively turned on/off by radio signal for moments when a boat is passing through. Also, there’s a lot of industrial lighting controllers that both have their management interfaces open to the internet and still use default credentials. This means that your “fancy” bridges with RGB LED arrays (or even the Vegas sphere if configured similarly) can be tampered with by just about anyone with a pulse.
They're exemplary in their patience, explaining to Tyvequious for the 17th time that they're arresting him for Possession With Intent To Distribute, Resisting Arrest and Assaulting A Police Officer without raising their voices.
When the guy clearly deserves a wood shampoo and rough ride to the county jail.
I'm dealing with the race to the bottom at work right now...I helped hire a former employee back under a contract house (he used to be direct) at like 75% of his former salary and crappy benefits. His family is on vacation for Spring Break but he stayed behind to work because he has like 10 vacation days all year. He get no bonus, fewer holidays, unpaid sick days, and is under constant pressure to perform in an environment where cutting him loose is a phone call away at the mercy of our boss, essentially.
This is the new normal. We just don't hire direct anymore. We have people with no skin in the game tasked with managing complex engineered systems while we pay them less than they're worth.
I'm pissed. It isn't fair. It isn't just. It isn't the way we should treat people.
Good man. There is a lot of skeleton crew operation going on in a lot of companies, certainly from the service industry. The elements that have put that into motion don't show signs of reversing course and I don't yet see an easily worked out solution. I've next to zero response on job applications and inquiries for, well, too long in my book. Even for positions I may be overqualified for or simply more entry level positions (which are in no way beneath me). Everybody's hiring but nobody's hiring.
That story sounds similar to one my fiancé told me about one of her colleagues... Any chance this is taking place at a major automaker who's former world headquarters in A.Hills has a big star on the top?
Well let's be honest, as much as I love ol Momma Mopar in my heart, it's not exactly an American company anymore, and I'll be surprised if there isn't a Micheal Perna real-estiate sign up by the end of 2025.
Examples like this direct-to-contract demotion and the events of last Friday are an example of how PSA is simply going to gut everything in a way Cerberus or Daimler only dreamed they could have. That being said, there is irony in the fact that management is asking for more in-person "work" to be done, and adding more traffic enforcement on campus from AHPD... shame really, cause I did enjoy allegedly seeing how fast I could "dodge" potholes on the ring road.
You certainly are! I'll take some blame as well. I don't even work there, but I work nearby, so the lady and I carpool when she has to go in. I have to imagine a few people were unnerved by a Compass maintaining double-nickel speeds all the way around to the north end. Not that there was anyone really around to witness such a thing.
The gutting is curious, because the American arm makes all of the money. That the most profitable products are all very specific to the North American market gives me hope that some semblance of former Chrysler survives to keep designing and building them.
Jeep and Ram aren't going anywhere, no. It is also good that they still actually build some of these in the city of Detroit as well.
The gutting, though, is happening in the American engineering base. Their plan is literally replacing local, experienced, but expensive engineers with remote engineering in "lower cost countries." Most all the engineers based in CTC will eventually be replaced with someone who's never seen a Wrangler or a Ram, and maybe never will, but they will be 80% of the cost to employ. Stallantis is calling this "efficiency." Eventually, they won't need CTC anymore (there's already been talks of selling the place) because all the positions formerly based there will be in India and Mexico, and the positions that STLA believes should stay expensive will be filled by the French. I don't see it ending with good cars that Americans want to buy, but that's obviously the goal.
Yeah, I've read articles to that effect regarding CTC sale and offshoring of engineering. I just don't want to believe that management would shift responsibility for hyper-American products overseas where, as you say, the locals have never even seen a Wrangler or Ram. Since, with rare exception, Chrysler had never been strong in midsize and smaller vehicles, I'm almost OK with the competency centers for those products living elsewhere. (And by that I mean France and Italy, not India.) But I sure hope something of Chrysler survives in Auburn Hills.
A lot of companies try and shuffle employees as contractors. If he's not really a contractor, BIG fines. If it's a big company, I'd think they know the rules well enough but a lot of companies don't.
1. Guntherwerks and social media influencers - I see this in the gun world, too. The value of the product to your life or shooting is inversely proportional to how many "influencers" are talking to you about it, and exactly inversely proportional to how much "lifestyle marketing" is used to push it. Sigarms' "Legion" marketing is an excellent example of this. It's a Sig, with certakote and maybe a couple of nice to have features (SAO on a P226 isn't bad) but there's a challenge coin and a "community" that you have to buy the "Legion" to join, and...
No, thank you. To quote what we would have said when we were 19: That's gay.
2. The Radical and the halo: In my second go through college I took forensics as an elective because it seemed like it would be mildly fascinating and it fit my working full time plus running a side hustle plus trying to get another degree schedule. It was more than mildly fascinating, as I ended up having Dr. Drew Richardson as my professor for that class. Dr. Drew was formerly the head of the FBI's Chem/Bioweapon unit, one of the last of the people in the Bureau who carried a gun as an agent AND who had a PHD. These days the Bureau prefers the gun toters, the number crunchers, and the people who use a pipet to be kept neatly apart.
He was one of the world's foremost experts on the polygraph and fought the Bureau to try and get rid of it for essentially any personnel screening. He was also a bit of a contrarian as he was one of the few voices in the wilderness saying that a lot of what is considered "forensic science" has precious little actual science behind it. The sound of that drum is still softer than it should be today, but it's getting louder.
The dude loved paragliding and did it as much as he could. He had great videos of it in just about every class.
Dr. Drew and I hit it off right away because the first day of class he saw I was reading a book on Delf Bryce and in a class filled with mostly disinterested college students and one active duty police officer trying to advance in his career and already hopelessly out of his depth, I was the guy he could "vibe" with. Delf was a heavy influence in FBI firearms and tactics, although I'd argue an entirely destructive one because his techniques weren't applicable past him (he had such superior eyesight he could literally *see* his fired bullets...which makes "point shooting" much easier). Delf was a snappy dresser and good looking and he could do some amazing trick shooting....which got the attention of J Edgar Hoover.
When J. Edgar wasn't busy blackmailing politicians, assassinating political rivals, or taking mob bribe money through his massive gambling habit, he was wearing a dress and sucking dick. I'm convinced he wanted to savor the flavor of Delf himself and upon that basis Delf became the rock upon which all of FBI firearms training was based for decades. He looked the part and the trick shooting was great PR. And J. Edgar could fantasize about him when he was engaging in unnatural acts with the underage boys the mob provided him with. Win/win/win for ol' Edgar!
Of course, I didn't go that deep with Dr. Drew about it because to him Delf was a legend. And he still had faith in the Bureau despite the number of times they'd gone after his career for stubbornly insisting on scientific and moral principle.
I mention all of that because Dr. Drew removed the rollover guard from his riding mower. A couple of years after my class with him, he was on the side of a hill mowing and the mower rolled over on him, snapping his neck and killing him. I'm sure that this guy who had been on the scene of every major terrorist incident around the globe in the prior 25 years, who had dealt with the most deadly substances known to man, actively fought violent criminals to the death, and spent his leisure time strapped to essentially an airboat fan and a parachute hundreds of feet in the air never thought that the riskiest decision he would ever make was removing the hoop on his lawnmower but as it turns out his assessments on that particular risk turned out to be fatally flawed.
Consider the odd confluences of life where you drop a throwaway line about your Radical that just happens to get read by a dude who lost an unlikely friend with an extremely unlikely career of spiting in the grim reaper's face because of a lawnmower rollover.
I'm not saying that I'm a messenger from God...but if one were to believe that any amount of life is, in fact, non random...well...maybe buy that halo.
3. Baltimore - As a part of my unusual circle of acquaintances I have buddies who are (or were) Navy Nukes and intelligence types. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about that crash being a deliberate event, but most of it seems to be worked backwards from the outcome rather than by understanding the factors at work.
Pulling off a cyber-attack to produce that specific outcome would have required a lot of setup and the kind of precision in timing and location that is incredibly unlikely. Hacking a ship and doing so in a manner that will steer it directly at the most vulnerable part of the bridge makes for a good movie plot but it wouldn't be very plausible to people who know how ships work.
Poorly maintained equipment used by poorly educated personnel routinely produces disaster all over the place. And that seems to be the primary explanation for what happened here. Procedural mistakes by a low rent crew using a boat that probably wasn't maintained as carefully as it should be isn't as sexy as cyber attack, but it's a lot more believable.
If that worries anyone, it shouldn't because the crisis of competence gets way, way worse:
A generation of social experimentation on the US military combined with enthusiastically searching the world for new wars to get into has had it's toll on readiness and capability. Naturally the people at the top of the chain will deny that any gaps exist and they'll pretend it's still the military that just beat Hitler and Hirohito, but the catastrophic incompetence we've only seen peeks at here and there is becoming a pervasive feature.
This is one reason why we shouldn't be in any hurry to go finding more wars, especially not with near peer adversaries who are watching us *very* closely and probably have a much better idea of our true capabilities than any of the saber rattling dipshits in the State Department.
This is embarrassing and I encourage all my enemies to make fun of me after I die, but: I'm not gonna bankrupt myself to race in something with a dorky halo brace. At that point I might as well buy myself a Spec Corvette and a pair of lacy panties.
I generally try not to hate on the modified Porsche stuff too harshly. Mostly because I don’t have one and cannot afford one so my lamentation should count to no one. That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design.
Half ass street / race cars has to be some sort of generational thing. You’re either all in one way or the other. A six point is about tops with factory safety equipment. I don’t even like driving my full cage car without helmet as it makes me nervous. Conversely I refuse to cage my c5 while it has stock seats, belts and bags. Like the rest of the car it’s playing pretend until someone gets killed. Guy really got lucky.
As for the boat and Biden…ugh. My thoughts will put me on a watchlist much less the discrediting of any supporters here.
The truth is you can't make a 993 more curvaceous than the Turbo or 4S without ruining the proportions, like those ghastly butt-injection instagram trollops. Better to leave it alone
There is untold grandeur in subtlety. Changing dimensions in millimeters seems like a waste of time on paper but it couldn’t be further from the truth. When you start adding 2-3” of flare things go pear shaped in a hurry. The idea is to look at something and just be captivated without being able to quite figure out why. It’s not glaring and in your face, they just look “better” and more masculine. It’s exactly what makes a Singer the star over these.
So yes, it’s absolutely doable when done right. Maybe in another lifetime I’d be doing it myself.
"That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design."
Agree. Also every time he cuts up another car, someone makes a corny cinematic video about it. My friend told me he was going to make a bingo card for the videos, squares include: car owned by by a 20 something manchild whose father bought it new, owner blathers on about “passion,” montage of Nakai cutting up fenders then rubbing roofing tar into the seams, cigarettes and staring, owner helps position the windshield banner, etc.
"my passion for cars is so strong i invited a japanese vagrant over to hack up my fathers investment grade 911 into a mockery of individuality for clout"
He's using the rear wing of a dusty Koenig Competition Evolution Testarossa as a workbench. You can see it back in the corner of his shop, under that pile of A'PEXi titanium exhausts and Seibon carbon fiber hoods.
I kinda wouldn’t mind an RWB as a track rat. They were kinda cool until they overdid it and then sorta sold out to the bug men.
I’d gladly have the dude over to drink Coke, play some Indie Jap Punk and cut on some otherwise lame duck Carrera. Just leave the “real” ones alone. I’d probably stuff an Ls3 in it anyhow.
I am convinced that in the not-to-distant future a small number of very talented mechanics and bodymen will all but print money undoing all the damage done by the RWB nitwits.
Alas, it'll probably be someone like Singer, building cars for people who buy Singers.
"This week on Handyman Corner, we're gonna put overfenders on one of those fancy-boy European sports cars. If you don't have titanium aerospace rivets and a hydraulic gun, just use the leftover wood screws from when you built the kids' treehouse. Should work fine. Let's get started."
the first one, the stella artois, was neat as an expression of nakai's own personal taste and an extreme looking car with massively wide fenders and elbow deep dish ssr wheels
the rest are cookie cutter and each is built just as horribly as the first making none of them worth the money
but man the original when it was the only one in existence was tough looking
At least flares are tolerable. I’m not a fan of stripes, especially the “carrera” ones that end up on a lot of 911s. If I ever end up with a 911 that has those, taking them off will be a day one change.
The front fenders are horrendous. The lack of sculpting on an otherwise curvy car really throws it off without pronounced arch and definition. Acceptable for an aero build long tail style but the front and rear look penned by different people.
Good design is based on refinement. Singer knows this and exploits upon it. Every element has been retouched with a product designers eye, not necessarily someone purely automotive as they are very in touch with materials and finishes.
When you try to design by exaggeration you near always lose purity of design. Couple that with a loss of direction and cohesive theme and you get this sort of HotWheels looking variant that does some things well but nothing exceptional. The lack of cohesion means you can change lines or features around in the valances but it won’t fix the “off-ness”.
You cannot fix bad design by focusing in on the detail points but you can exemplify good design by doing the same.
Very apt. Any thoughts on the MZR Datsun 240Z? I think it borrows too heavily from Singer when it really ought to pull design cues from other Nissans and it's own racing heritage.
I'll take the white one, if I had to, because the wheels aren't black. They've been around forever. Those AMs don't look as bad as I expected. Most of the other RE-IMAGINED Brands do. Years ago, their output looked more hideous.
In Baltimore. Fucking Baltimore! Of all the cities in the US. Not a single road worker was a Black American? And 22 people on the ship, making what, a dollar, three dollars a day?
Our fundamental problem in society is that the people who make decisions rarely have any practical experience actually doing any of the things they are making decisions about. The people who decided that having third worlders with a reputation for faking competence in a wide array of technical tasks pilot a gigantic projectile through bits of critical infrastructure can't steer or maintain a ship any more than the people on that boat could.
Cheap labor seems like a great idea in a board room...but almost nobody in that board room is looking for the cheapest cardiac surgeon when they need one. Or asking for the most discount manufactured parachute when they go skydiving. Cheap labor is abstract and, thus, equivalent. One worker is no more valuable than another. In fact, the more expensive ones are often much more trouble because they're always bothering you with reasons why your plans aren't going to work. The Indian sailors aren't going to fire an email up the chain saying "Hey, the boat is in a bad way and if we don't fix it we're going to drift into a bridge or something and shut down one of the most heavily trafficked ports in the entire fucking hemisphere." They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do! Score!
I mean, it's not like the ship is going to end up drifting into a bridge and shutting down a major shipping port or anything!
"They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do" - That sums up my issue with cheap offshore software developers perfectly. I manage two independent teams, one contract team offshore in India and the other full time employees dispersed across the country. The onshore team is invested in the product - they are busting my balls constantly about things that are going to cause problems. 99% of the time, they're right. Their bug rate is so low it's practically 0. The offshore team never says a word about anything...and the churn for rework is tremendous.
That is why they called the raping, pot smoking hillbilly the "first black president" and the actual first "black" president was in reality a half-white, half-immigrant ivy league striver rather than the great-grandson of slaves who endured the Night Riders, Jim Crow, made the Great Migration, and missed out on the generational wealth created by the GI Bill and saw their families destroyed by the War on Drugs. Immigrants are fine, poor Americans, white or black, can get fucked.
I think that had it been Hamilton rather than Russell behind Alonso that crash never happens.
Because Lewis would have been thinking about what kind of dick move *he* would try if he were the car ahead, and so would have been alert to anything dodgy.
Georgie on the other hand was entirely focused on the hero move he was setting up, and just assumed Fernando would be a compliant accessory.
Many of them are not, or do not consider themselves to be, americans.
And this is per their own admission, under government name, in books/on twitter/in fawning ny mag profile.
At this point many of the most powerful people are international. On numerous different axes it would be difficult to append the label "american" to them at all
"How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?"
One goes to the right preschool, the one that required several letters of recommendation drafted before birth, and then continues to the right "country day" school, the right prep school, Dartmouth, and Harvard Business School, all straight through, or maybe with one "gap" year to go tour all the same European tourist attractions and nightclubs as all the other gap year people.
In the early 21st century, it is possible to go through that entire process, living about 25 years of life, without ever talking to a blue-collar person except in the role of a cashier or clerk.
So of course the lines on the expense part of the P&L are going to seem more vivid, more real, and more important than the people they represent.
Extreme and growing social stratification is a major part of why the elites have the ethics (or lack thereof) that they do today. The reasons why it has happened are numerous, but if you follow them far enough, they all come down to physical separation. I'll leave it as an exercise to each person reading this comment to determine how you would best get people of all American social classes at least occasionally occupying the same space at the same time, not in a service context.
Not sure I agree, at least as a millenial of the milennial class. Wealth continues to be what it was (only amplified) but the explanantion you provided doesn't jive even slightly with the actual people I know who went to the exact schools you mentioned. Maybe they're out of touch, but they lean toward liking america even if they perform leftist obeisance on whatever conscious level.
The people *truly* disemboweling the industry in the nation... are the same people who funded Reagan.. and Clinton.. And yes Biden's political careers. It's not even partisan, the political class are their lackeys. They don't care about America or think of themselves as americans. It's just a profit center.
"I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless."
This is charitable - and the Lord commands us to be charitable. Are they out of touch? We couldn't be more agreed. We differ on whether they're clueless or malicious.
10 million Americans having decent factory jobs would not realistically threaten these people. But they act as if such MFG base was a threat and don't *just* ship the jobs away for money but *as if they viewed the competing political power center of manufacturing to be a threat requiring neutralization.*
IMO this qualifies as malice. Without taking anything out of context, you could pick an example at random from yesterday's newspaper: let's go with Larry Summers. His ideas about economics & manufacturing policy have picked this country barer than bones in a desert. He didn't have to do it. And he is far too smart to be called clueless.
Perhaps his biggest crime was meekly stepping down from his post at Harvard instead of standing up to the feminist harridans. Perhaps if he had taken a stance against the ideological totalitarians instead of being a pussy, it might have been a watershed moment.
I worked on about three dozen completed M&A transactions during my career as a junior mistmaker. I worked almost exclusively in service of depositories (i.e., banks) of all sizes. That industry is experiencing ongoing consolidation, and it is exceedingly rare for a non-bank entity to purchase a bank. One of the rationales for those deals (and essentially all “strategic” M&A) is “cost saves;” nota bene that “synergies” are incremental revenues unlocked or created by a combination, whereas cost saves are just that - efficiencies.
The process is obvious. If two businesses who do essentially the same thing combine, they will no longer need two of each of the non-revenue generating jobs. When working on the sell-side, one of the tasks that fell to me as a junior grunt was the first cut of taking the target’s employment roster and “right-sizing” it, with the goal of cutting ~30-40% of the seller’s non-interest expense.
Most sellers went out of their way to protect vulnerable employees (single mothers, those with one household income, those with disabled parents, etc.) and cut those who could better afford to lose their job.
"Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse."
That's a deeply controversial statement in the law. Some feel it is axiomatic. Others think it's a drastic simplification of something far more complex. And the whole debate often elides the issue of what the *correct* policy about the purpose of companies should be.
My own view, as a lawyer who does a whole lot of corporate governance work, is that we take too narrow a view of what the interests of shareholders actually are. Everyone from MBAs to lawyers to the shareholders themselves assumes that the shareholders obviously just want the highest possible return of cash this quarter, regardless of any other implications. But in the end shareholders are people. Very few people are driven solely by money and the ones who are are almost universally viewed as d!ckbags.
Shareholders, as people, want to live in prosperous and sustainable communities. They want employees who will go out and sing their praises. They want to be involved in selling incredibly cool products and services. They want to give something back once their businesses succeed. Corporations, in promoting the interests of shareholders, should be free to take all of those things and more into account, not just the one interest out of all of them that is the most corrosive and the easiest to hate.
In your M&A scenarios, the most important decision came far before you got involved. and it was in almost all cases a decision focused narrowly on short-term financial interest. The most toxic aspect of Wall Street today is that it zealously enforces that focus in every case, even on businesses where the ordinary shareholders don't share it.
0-Most of these banks are private, or thinly traded (i.e., not really public); this makes deals harder, because you have to value the buyer’s stock (most bank deals are not cash deals), as well.
1-Community bank shareholders ARE invested (in multiple senses of the word) in the services that their banks provide to small communities; I strenuously believe that these services are very valuable, and I would advise most people to bank at a community bank, because they excel in terms of customer service.
2-That said … if you’ve tied up $100K or $1MM or even more of your own money in First State Bank of Somewhere for years (or decades) with little to no dividend, limited if any liquidity, and challenging prospects to create shareholder value going forward (particularly in the face of the tech spend necessary to keep your head above water vs larger institutions), maybe you start to think about a sale? Particularly if leadership is aging and there is no credible successor in place.
3-People are typically risk averse and loss avoidant. They rue the loss of their job to a successful M&A process, but would they feel the same way about being turned down for a “no-show” job? I.e., they’d expect the local community bank to pay them $50K or $100K a year to do just about nothing and create no value. I think most people understand that that’s not realistic.
I'm an ordinary shareholder in as much my 401k has much of my own wealth investment in these companies. For me personally, I want all my investments to return me the most money they can. For my own personal view,.I honestly don't care about a lot of the sustainable.and community crap of these companies. Maybe I'm just jaded but any company I've ever worked for, the investors and CEOs only ultimately care about the stock price and bottom line.
I brought this up just a few days ago on TTAC on an insurance article. I basically said that it's a contradiction for everyday folks to complain about their auto insurance prices when many if not most everyday people have some form of investment into these companies. Everyone over in TTAC sited greed. Damn straight I want my investments into insurance companies to return me the most it can.
When I am a shareholder, I do not give a damn about quarterly results. I want management to be working on a ten-year time horizon so I can give them my money and forget about it for a while.
Meanwhile management incentives ARE for quarterly results. This is not for my benefit.
My counterpoint is this: Much of what is done by corporations and wealthy people is legal only because they wrote the law to make it legal. To take a rather unimportant example, the only reason that Ticketmaster is allowed to exist is because they crippled the FCC. The only reason poorly maintained ships manned by near slaves and sailed under flags of convenience are allowed in US waters is because the people you are defending wrote laws to make it possible.
There’s a long list of things that someone went out of their way to make/keep legal. Because there are plenty of folks who have insufficient moral qualms over inflecting needless financial and/or physical harm to make a buck.
In a sense, we’re all to blame because we don’t demand better.
Ain't nice, but that's a fact. I worked in IT that had mom + pop size banks and credit unions as clients. One client would buy the other. Either the buyer's name went above the door or they made a holding company and kept them separate. Even separate, the back rooms had no need to be separate. You really can't do much for customer (the public) facing aspects of the business. If a branch had 10 people before and wasn't going to be closed, chances are you'd still need 10 people. Usually what takes a hit is the back room for the loan dept and call centers.
Most of the reports we generated were just online documents. But, there were small volume forms that would print on customer (Financial Inst.) printers. Stuff like late notices, late fee notices, Time Deposit stuff.
All the institutions had their printers hooked up to us. I wrote a program that would print this form, for this FI on that printer. We had in some cases holding companies that owned 3 separate banks. Banks A, B + C. Sometimes this form for the 3 went to Bank A, another to B another to C. When that occurred, you knew that the people that used to handle that stuff at the other FIs probably weren't there anymore. If A,B, C were geographically close together, at best some of the people moved to a different location. But definitely not all of them.
Indeed - a corporation’s purpose is to deliver and maximize shareholder value. However, isn’t this a far broader topic than the role of a corporation? Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t think your point really gets to the heart of the issue, which in my mind isn’t why corporations function the way they do, but rather the broader macroeconomic policies which allow corporations to function the way they do in the #currentyear.
I kept reading waiting for the counterpoint until I realized it was just another flex. Should have known better.
The pablum at the end about the token sparing of some of the little people at the expense of othered who could “afford” to get kicked to the curb just reinforces MC’s point about social stratification.
I suspect your safety net is far larger than some factory worker who got his job shipped overseas due to M&A, and your timeline for getting a new job is far shorter. Beyond that, totally the same.
2. Keep certain employed based upon them being a welfare case vs. job performance.
3. Merged bank fails due to mismanagement.
4. Seek taxpayer-funded bailout.
Welcome to clown world. Even if this country comes out ahead on paper, we still lose. This is why they swiftly shut down OWS and turned people against each other by way of identity politics.
If you're too big to fail, you are too big. That should be national policy. Bring back anti trust! Burn google to the ground! Hang whoever is in charge of Microsoft Outlook from a light post. I'm serious about all of these ESPECIALLY the Outlook one.
My biggest revelation in moving from a wealthy suburban county of Chicago to semi-rural North Carolina is just how economically segregated Northern Illinois is. I am not talking about race, just economic separation along well defined dividing lines from one town or neighborhood to the next one. Unlike where I’m at in NC.
When my friends ask me my perspective on leaving Chicago, I don’t say how much I enjoy the South, I first ask, are you prepared to give up the following things when you move? Because you definitely are giving up good things in Chicagoland that you take for granted and never think about, and you’re never going to find them down here.
What struck me about Chicago when I lived there was how you could have the Orthodox Jews on one side of the street, the Russians on the other, both of them a block from the Indians, and everything just kind of worked.
That was Devon Avenue and a bit unlike most Chicago areas with their established dividing lines. I loved the Indian section on Devon, used to go eat there a lot.
I noticed this when I went to visit my good friend that moved to Owensboro KY last year. His neighborhood is upper middle class but right outside the entrance is lower income apartments. Downtown Owensboro has 1mm+ luxury lofts along the Ohio River and 2-3 blocks over across "Main Street" are essentially wooden shacks at least a hundred years old. I'm a Detroiter and can vouch for the same segregation by economic status.
My suspicion, having done zero research, is probably Indiana money from Evansville across the river. cheaper taxes and real estate prices on the KY side, which is why my buddy lives there. It's a small town compared to what I'm used to, so it's likely a small percentage of overall prices. Just what I saw on Zillow during a dinner "downtown".
Thanks, I always wondered about that. Kentucky is the rare southern state with bad state finances. Coming from Illinois, that tells me that the Kentucky state government is corrupt.
Perhaps we should bring back the military draft. A U.S. Army unit during WWII would have had men from all walks of life. I'm not naive, the affluent, educated, and connected probably had an easier entry into the officer corps, and yes, because of Woodrow Wilson the military was racially segregated - but even the black units were diverse in terms of socio-economics.
The United States of America made the very CONCEPTS of aristocracy and monarchy obsolete in the late 18th Century. We've since proved, in ten thousand ways and in one-tenth the time, that a nation of free commoners makes an utter, hilarious mockery of the greatest empires and all their trappings & pretensions.
The world's kings and their minions have been trying to undo that accomplishment ever since.
You presume that our elites ever saw you or me as their own people. In the sense that their ancestors essentially actually owned our ancestors, perhaps. But they are not your countrymen. We the proles have to learn the same lesson Franklin learned in the cockpit and set ourselves on a course of rejecting all the powers of popes and princes. Especially the ones that claim to be our countrymen one moment and then shove a bayonet into our spine the next.
Good luck finding any color native born American willing to do manual labor, outside, overnight in a dangerous environment.
I’m in a constant state of hiring to maintain a crew of 6 tradespeople in the home repair/renovation business. We pay +/- $30/hr, company provided vehicle and tools- not chasing the bottom of the barrel at all.
I don’t agree with the very porous border situation here recently, but if there were no jobs, the flow would decrease considerably.
The legal immigrant workers I’ve employed, hands down, have a stronger work ethic than the native clock-puncher/wall-leaner class.
There is a huge shortage of willing and able people to do manual work. Government can help fix the “able” part with an increased focus and incentives towards trade schools and education. But the “willing” part is a much deeper issue, and one that I don’t have any policy suggestions to resolve.
There’s ample blame to go around in this shit show, but 6 hard working people that left their homes, cultures, and extended families to do hard, dangerous, thankless jobs that few others in this country would be willing to take should not be part of that blame game.
Nothing you said above can be disagreed with, but: in a world without a porous border, maybe we'd see that blue-collar workers get the protection and safety that seems to have drained out of many industries since 1995. And then they'd be more willing to work the jobs.
I was barely entering the workforce in ‘95, so can’t comment one way or the other, but would be curious what safety/protections you see that have left?
Unions are what comes to mind for me. I can see some logic in them for a factory setting, but at least in construction they seem exclusionary and a large contributor to the significant construction and housing cost differences between the NE and Sun Belt.
I think there’s ripe opportunity for unions in the service industry today. That’s where the majority of the blue collar workforce (at least using a wage definition) is employed and will be given current trends vs in a factory. And while automation might reduce some of the staffing needs you aren’t going to be able to offshore the majority of retail work.
There's a full-court press to reduce service and retail jobs and it will continue until they're all gone. With regards to workplace safety I see all sorts of things happen on construction sites nowadays that didn't pass muster in 1995, largely related to noise and protective equipment
Thats the thing though, there is a huge shortage of people willing to do manual trade work which means the squared away guys can command more than 30 an hour.
I am surprised collisions of this nature haven't happened before. I am very interested in the technical report on the nature of the casualty that caused that red over red situation.
I am equally interested in what procedures are required by merchants ships when transiting in and out of harbors, their might be some low hanging safety fruit there.
I think this will be more like the USS McCain incident, as in a difficult situation that where the sailors failed to rise to the occasion, rather than the Fitzgerald incident where the sheer incompetence at every turn was stunning. In a more civilized time the CO, OOD and whoever was standing watching in the CIC would have had the good sense to kill themselves after filing their final reports.
On top of that why is the instant decision of an old man with dementia putting me on the hook for a bridge that Baltimore might not really need? Their are plenty of harbor crossings for the traffic as is. The hazardous materials material can detour inland. Maybe given the choice Baltimore could find a more productive use for the insurance payout? Where is Biden even getting the money to commit?
I wasn't wondering where the federal government will get the money, more where does the executive get the authority to wake up in the morning and gift Maryland a new bridge before breakfast.
Do you suppose Trump ever feels responsible for pick…
I can’t even finish that without laughing. He never takes responsibility for anything.
Remember when Trump was publicly attacking Powell for raising rates pre-COVID? Trump wanted to print money forever, too, since inflated market values are his sole indicator of success.
The McCain and Fitzgerald collisions happened because we're prosecuting a forever war against the Enemies of Democracy, and everybody's just plain worn out.
No. In the Fitzgerald disaster exactly one officer took any level of responsibility for what took place. A female ensign was the only person to actually roger up to accountability for what happened on that boat. Literally every other individual in the chain command on that boat lawyered up, pointed fingers at everyone else, and immediately started whining about it not being their fault.
She was the only one who admitted that she failed her crew and her responsibilities.
And *that* is why that collision happened.
It's not just this one instance, either. Across the military various academy grads or people with the right networking avoid accountability for failures to do their duty or outright malfeasance while those who don't have connected patrons suffer the full weight and penalty of the UCMJ for even honest mistakes beyond their ability to handle. You should hear what my friends with high level security clearances have to say about the kid gloves afforded to Hillary, Biden, Wolfe (who was leaking classified information to a reporter he was fucking and ended up with hardly any penalty when his defense put out their intention to call all the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the trial...which prompted a letter from Lisping Lindsay Graham to the DOJ encouraging them to not go hard on Mr. Wolfe) while they know of situations where a sailor who sent a picture to his family ended up facing criminal charges for leaking classified info.
Or my (all former, now) FBI buddies who stared in mute rage as Strzock and McCabe outright lied about an entirely illegal political operation where they mishandled classified information, lied on top secret warrants, abused the civil rights of dozens of people, and lied to investigators only to receive no meaningful consequence. Meanwhile my buddies had all either personally been the target of DOJ witchunts or had seen other good people face criminal charges for honest mistakes or one instance of bad judgement.
Forever war isn't helping, certainly, but the fundamental problem producing these outcomes is a two tiered system of accountability where those who have all the power face none of the consequences for their decisions. And that is entirely by their design.
What the hey? Did somebody say “guest post?” Jack, did you see that somebody said GUEST POST? Have your loyal readers—maybe even some subscribers—ever mentioned this before?
I vaguely recall reading at either RG or ACF, possibly even from our host himself, an unofficially accepted theory that the Fitz crash was due to a lovers' triangle. Two Navy wahmens were banging the same XO or somesuch and refused to talk to each other during the crossing.
Or perhaps it was simply comedic /pol greentext fabrication.
It has happened before. The original Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa Bay collapsed in 1980 when it was hit by a freighter during a squall. 35 people were killed. There's a famous photo of a car that stopped about two feet short of going over the edge.
Correct! And to illustrate the growth in ship sizes over the last few decades, the replacement bridge was built with a lot of margin to accommodate the largest ships sailing in the early 80’. (Example: the cruise ship from The Love Boat TV series was about 45,000 ton displacement.)
Now the only cruise ships sailing from Tampa are the older ships that are under 100,000 tons displacement (most in the 80,000 ton range). Anything newer and larger does not fit under the current Skyway Bridge.
If the will existed, America could wall itself off from the rest of the world, expel all - ALL - the troublemakers: The illegal aliens, the H1Bs, the Deep Staters, the career criminals, the elected Democrats, the welfare queens, everyone - and be our own self-contained little world. EVERYTHING we need to construct, operate & populate a moden industrial civilization exists in the Lower 48 + Alaska right now.
The rest of the world needs America far more than America needs the rest of the world.
"If the will existed" - but, apparently, it does not.
These are fringe views - even among honest, God-fearing, populist Trump supporters and conservatives. People (the normies) would need to be onboarded, via some sort of massive propaganda apparatus, and significant coordination mechanisms *including criminal justice.*
Which is to say, we'd better stop "wishing in one hand" on this blog. The shit hand is getting really full
I don't think it exists either. And on top of that, this isn't merely a geography problem to be solved, the connections, identities and loyalties of everyone are very, very intertwined and a simple us vs. them movement does a great disservice to the welfare of all involved. Or maybe a catalyzing event(s) happens and we all get real black and white about things and act/move accordingly. I've been thinking more so lately, and semi-humorously relaying to others, that the reason no one has acted on any of these mounting, compounding issues is that the shelves in all the stores are still fully stocked.
That’s the case for sure. I was stationed on Oahu and they say that if the ships stopped coming the islands would be out of food in 4 days. You could hope they would get serious about food production in that case…
In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten increasingly disdainful of conservatives who keep pretending the will does exist. The wishful thinking that Trump has the competence to fix anything, and the raging at everyone, including family, who’s stupid/evil enough to stand in his way. It’s a non constructive, borderline insane mentality.
If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side. You’re as bad as the lizards and shitlibs you rail about.
Unfortunately I think that the best any of us can do is keep our heads down, positively influence our own spheres as best we can, and hope that the cultural wind shift in our lifetimes.
Debating deleting the above comment, but, on serious note, you wrote: "If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side."
This is really funny, given the state of american media and american jurisprudence. Doesn't current media propaganda paint white parenthood as evil, interracial parentage as the highest good, white men as evil, white people as traitors to humanity (and one another), white existence separate from extreme diversity as the ultimate sin, black-on-white revenge violence as justifiable, etc?
And does not the current system punish loads of people for simply trying to maintain a modest existence in the country of their ancestors, to defend themselves or their homes, to protest an obviously stolen election, etc? Is not importing tens of millions of 75-iq beggars & literal cannibals an act of outright traitorousness - a crime carrying the punishment of death?
I'm sure that I'm misreading your comment but we're already in an environment where outright evil is being propagandized and resistance to that evil is being criminally & civilly punished. Do you truly feel that it would be immoral to sanction the people perpetrating this evil, destroying (whatever remains of) this nation?
They do it, so we should do it back to them? Yeah, that's not justice, it's brinksmanship.
Dude, maybe take a step back from politics if my comment has you so wound that you felt you needed to double reply. You called me a cuck for disconnecting for this bullshit, but you raging at the dying light is just as impotent and a lot more stroke-inducing.
And if you insist on fighting a fruitless war, at least identify the right enemy. As the commenter Tim has so eloquently pointed out here, this isn't about right vs left, it's up vs down. Instead of fighting with your neighbor because you think your shitbag politician is less dangerous than his shitbag politician, or dehumanizing him by treating him as an NPC that needs to be cajoled into your way of thinking or else, maybe open a dialogue with him and figure out what your common problems are.
You'll have to pardon my enthusiasm. You're obviously a solid guy and I know I'm not alone in appreciating the sense and moderation you bring to these debates. You make some great points - though I wish I saw it in the @Tim way. The West's predicament can be a class struggle and an identitarian one as well. The enemies can be class members above, below, left and right--and identity or affinity groups similarly arranged.
I think I get so carried away because if one wants to even slighly check the system, one has to do something (however stupid and pointless, "Beam Me Up" representative Traficant) that is anti-system. I continually make the mistake of falling ass-backwards into the illusion that electing Trump or Ramsawamy or RFK Jr would make a change. That probably is an illusion - or it may be only barely true. What I wonder is, is it fair to call this predicament brinksmanship, or would it be more appropriate to call it war?
To me it looks like war - moderate centrist people and right wingers alike are getting flayed alive these days - because they either didn't get the memo, didn't like the memo, refused to believe the memo, or remain unwilling or unable to take decisive action. I should be the last to call anyone out on inaction. But this struggle might be more dire than it appears. And if that's so, we are running out of time.
When someone bops you in the nose 5x eventually you gotta bop the guy back. "I'm not gonna sink to that level" is gonna get your ass kicked. That's the entire conservative party. The democratic party does whatever they want and the other side "never stoops to their level" so donald trump has to pay 200mm for committing fraud against no one. What he should do if he wins is throw those judges in Guantanamo bay and throw away the key. POUR ENCOURAGER LES AUTRES. Of course, he won't do shit, and he probably won't win because we're gonna see voter fraud that will make 2020 look mild.
Let’s start with giving all US counties the ability to join a bordering state, then watch the rapid and spectacular domino effect take place and realign the country. Then all the leftist thugs and their minions will be clustered in a few blue roach motels.
I see variations of 'purity tests' on the horizon should that geographic realignment take place. It would be the Divided States for sure, and there would be considerable upheaval (to put it very lightly) for a number of years before things hopefully settled out. Many of the Blue Islands are coastal cities already well set up for trade with their ports and road and rail infrastructure. Not to mention many factories being located there or nearby. The Seas of Red have the food, so ultimately, trading and cooperation would be necessary for both groups to do well and not simply subsist.
In my heart I’m An-Cap; some of us live exactly like this, but instead of ‘neighbourhood’ they say ‘compound’, and I know a few ranchers in Canada who have several families on the property.
I’ve never heard of someone doing this in a civilized area vs. the sticks, but I don’t see why a few families couldn’t agree to go in together on a subdivision and have a neighbours of their choosing.
And what is the criteria you'd use in deciding? And what criteria would you not want me using when deciding whether to let you buy the house next to me?
For the will to exist the problem has to first be understood. And that's why the fiercest battle is for control of the narrative. Because if you have control over the outlets of information then your narrative gets out and everyone else is a "conspiracy theorist" who can be dismissed.
I lived in Korea in the early 2000s before free trade happened and they were quite self-sufficient and proud of it.
Most of the cars were a little sad, but they could be repaired anywhere, and you could get a Matiz for a little more than a new scooter if you wanted.
Grocery stores were a little unusual. The Home Plus (a Samsung/Tesco partnership) had an entire aisle, a long one, of nothing but processed, tinned pork, and Spam was only a tiny section. Our first trip to the grocery store, we walked out with an overflowing shopping cart that was incredibly heavy and spent about $60USD.
People were tiny. When we started visiting again in 2012 there were a lot of properly fat people.
One commenter has suggested that Biden pushing the bill on taxpayers protects both the insurers and anyone that might be blamed in the related investigation.
You can bet your ass that the bridge won't get rebuilt in our lifetimes.
And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole.
I concur. They'll clear things at least and then the issue will sit dormant or "being studied" indefinitely. The port, associated businesses and their employees, plus all the commuters and companies that used the bridge, will simply have to deal with a considerably worse situation.
The rash of plane troubles are either narrative establishing efforts (by the media) to guide (ok, coerce) the public to a particular place, or they're a harbinger of things to come. Between this and the misprioritized hiring practices, all post-2021, I'm pretty content to stay on the ground and duke it out with the increasingly inept and comatose "driving" public.
I’d bet real money that a new bridge opens before 2030, and likely well before that.
It’s WAY too vital a piece of infrastructure to leave the ends of 695 dangling over the Patapsco like a tongue hanging out of a dead deer’s mouth to simply do nothing.
It will also be significantly easier to build a new bridge now that they don’t have to build it alongside an existing one, and they will not have to worry about diverting traffic.
We’re talking about one of the busiest roads systems in the country here, meaning one of the busiest in the world. There is no choice BUT to rebuild.
Yup. I've heard early estimates of December 2025. Now that feels very ambitious, but still. 2026 or 2027 is my early guess. I guess the Sunshine Skyway collapse in Tampa is similar to this, and that one did take 7 years or so to rebuild, but it was also over 40 years ago? This is a little more pressing than that one.
Source: I live here and know the hell that the commutes are gonna be with that bridge down and everyone having to go through the tunnels or the city.
At the time the bridge was built 50 years ago, the educated, informed decision was to build a tunnel that would not interfere with river traffic. Instead, to save money, a bridge with no redundancies to prevent catastrophic failure was built.
In the interest of time and money, a bridge again we will get.
Also, they don't let HAZMAT trucks in the tunnels. Nice to have the bridge to save a significant amount of time versus diverting all the way around the city.
That bridge carries more than 11 million cars per year. It is a key part of the Interstate 695 beltway around Baltimore, and one of three links that join the north and south halves of the city. The other two are bridges, which prohibit hazardous materials and have height and weight restrictions. That makes it a key link on trucking routes traversing I95, including those coming out of the Port of Baltimore, which handled $80B in cargo last year and is the 17th largest in the nation by tonnage.
I'd rather bet my ass that they're gonna rebuild that bridge as quickly as possible.
It's important to remember that the cranes that would have unloaded the containers are probably made by a Chinese company (in China) or a finnish company (with as much Chinese labor as they can get away with)
"This massive ship had just 22 crewmembers on board"
This is about what we had on board American flagged ships when I was sailing almost 35 years ago. Captain, 1st mate, 2nd mate and a 3rd mate. The mates all stand watch with 3 able bodied seamen (1 per watch) and maybe one ordinary seaman who usually works days giving us a deck compliment of 8. Engine Department had a Chief engineer, a 1st, 2nd, and two 3rd engineers. The Chief and the 1st don't stand watches, so you have three watchstanding engineers and three watchstanding oilers, maybe a day utility or electrician, and a wiper giving you an Engine Department of around 10. Steward Department is usually just 3, Chief Steward, Cook, and Steward's assistant. Also, our ships sometimes carried a radio operator but I didn't interact with them very much. Total of around 22. A steamship might have an extra third engineer or utility to help with heavy maintenance, so that's 23/24. That's really all you need.
None of these guys are going to be doing major repairs underway, especially on a diesel boat. I worked on the shore-gang for Sea-Land in Tacoma for a few months and we would swap out pistons or do other heavy work while the ship was in port for a turnaround and the engine was off, but most maintenance underway is simple preventative stuff like cleaning things like sea strainers or maybe cleaning a fuel oil purifier. Otherwise, an oiler is just keeping an eye on stuff, blowing down compressors and adjusting valves that control the seawater cooling to ensure everything is running alright.
I don't have experience with foreign officers but have heard that most of the officers from India have a good reputation. My guess is that the Officers are Indian and the crew from places like the Philippines. Again, all good workers with pretty good reputations - especially of they are working for a company like Maersk. It will be interesting to see what exactly happened.
I'm totally taking credit for the Sobotka reference.
But I don't think you're going to hear a damn thing about their plight. Those guys were forgotten decades ago. You'll hear plenty from the Clay Davis types who are going to want a piece of the new bridge Biden already promised. Sheeeeeeeit.
Open thread:
KPower are now swapping the robust K-series honda engines into the NC Chassis MX-5 miata. They offer full service installs as well, for a flat labor fee of $2950.
Let us all imagine the Miata as it was supposed to be, with a roots-blown K-series, and pray:
"Lord, protect me from the things I want, and my want of things."
Src: https://kpower.industries/blogs/news/how-does-the-k24-nc-stack-up-to-the-original-kmiata-swap
Src: https://kpower.industries/blogs/news/big-news-bmw-transmission-upgrade-for-your-miata?_pos=8&_sid=ad88c93fa&_ss=r
Src: https://mercracing.net/shop/mr1320-tvs-supercharger-kit/
Note they're also doing full K-swaps for the FR-S/BR-Z for a mere 3 grand: https://kpower.industries/pages/turn-key-swaps
Relevant to my interests, because my wife runs in two classes (SCCA STU and NASA ST5) that would permit a K-swap.
For those of us unfamiliar with the rules, what would the limitations be?
Displacement, compression ratio, power at tire, ???
NASA ST classes are dyno-sheet power to weight with various mod factors.
SCCA ST classes are based on displacement and weight with various mod factors.
This is because the SCCA isn't a bunch of morons.
$3k labor for a full engine swap of a modern fuel injected engine into a modern chassis seems pretty darn cheap! K24 into an FR-S sounds awesome.
This is a legitimate option if you set aside 25-30k for everything...
The Cut strikes again, and the girls are BIG MAD:
https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html
Get your popcorn ready!
To follow up:
One of my college classmates who remains a close friend sent it to me before I had had a chance to check NY Mag’s website today. He is absolutely their core demographic - 35, highly educated, lives in the West Village, and taking the year off to figure out what he wants to do next (he made $3-4MM after his employer - a startup - sold).
He noticed that a female classmate of ours had “liked” The Cut’s post about the article on Instagram; this surprised me. She is also, obviously, ~35. Moderately attractive, perma-single (or at least no man has made it to social media, and she has attended a number of weddings and parties over the years). She is from a very wealthy Charleston family; she owns a house there and has a place in NYC (hybrid schedule NYC CRE job).
I know so many of these women from college.
Some of them, last I saw them 5 or 10 years ago, were breathtakingly, stop-you-in-your-tracks-on-the-sidewalk beautiful.
Alas, so many of them are such pains in the ass that they're destined to die alone.
All that potential. Multiple thousands of years of conscientious breeding to produce such exemplary creatures...
all of that effort and work... POOF!... gone
As I commented below, I have nothing negative to say about this woman.
As is fairly widely known on here, I earned an undergrad degree at a small, elite, and certainly elitIST liberal arts college situated in a small town in Virginia. There was literally nothing to do except go to class, study, drink, and (occasionally) sleep.
I was probably in the middle of the bell curve for males in terms of alcohol consumption - about 50 a week (I drink less than 50 drinks a year now). The women drank quite a bit, too. My close male friends and I have observed that virtually all of the women, whether single or partnered, are in far better physical shape than they were when we were in college.
Despite that fact, a number of the women seem to have (voluntarily) given up on finding a husband and/or becoming a mother. Of the most beautiful women in my class (of about 400 grads total):
-One is from a sizable, big money Texas family. She earned a top MBA, lived a charmed life in NYC, got laid off during COVID, and now lives in a small, unremarkable town in rural New England with her dogs. She abandoned the G-wagen and platinum blonde and couture for bangs, bad tattoos, and a Subaru.
-One earned an Ivy League grad degree in applied mathematics (after having earned a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Math) before moving to LA to be a stylist. She lives in Echo Park and posts frequently about her various mental illnesses, the patriarchy, etc. She got married and divorced last year.
I clicked like on the comment, because well-told, but allowing such cruel fates to befall these women's lives makes me shudder.
My college experience similarly combined elitism, challenging academics, and probably the best beauty-to-brains ratio in all of american collegiate life at the time. Difficult to draw comparisons. But it felt like the Studio 54 of its day.
Your stories are just like mine.
The facially flawless, 9.5/10 5'4 waif with the best drawing ability in art classes and 9 figures of connecticut wealth: cats
The gorgeous, zaftig-in-the-cool-way-not-Bryce's-girls east-coast daughter of a local law and political dynasty: MANY cats
Of all the things we've so badly fucked up... how did *this* particular unforced error come to pass?
I wonder what their parents have said or done?
The Texas girl has siblings who achieved far less academically but are married with children.
The LA stylist has a brother who is gay; their stepfather is a billionaire whose own children reproduced.
Another girl who is not *particularly* attractive but was genuinely nice and down to earth (nothing to prove) works for the investment bank her multi-billionaire father owns (she looks like him wearing a wig). Mid-30s, single, no kids. Her best friend married her brother. Without giving everything away (this is a public thread), you can probably guess where I went to school, which makes it easy to figure out the family I’m talking about here (hint - the I bank is HQ’d in Little Rock and is a sponsor of the Williams F1 team).
Agreed. I REALLY wonder about the parenting part.
And what media, friends and environments shaped them
This is why the Bene Gesserit would never work in real life.
Perhaps. If I'm understanding the gom jabbar correctly they're doing what they're doing at gunpoint-
-and a lot of things work at gunpoint that mightn't otherwise
Like getting a nation of people to file taxes!
bet shes miserable
do you have her insta by chance
It’s private.
I have nothing bad to say about her, and I keep in touch with her intermittently.
As the world burns to the ground, I find the ironies of postmodern society often feel like little victories... the world treats boys like defective girls, but the result is that women became defective men.
Brilliant!
Ugh. "The oppression of marriage". Then why do women seem to get the best deal out of divorce? I got a buddy going through a nasty divorce and I'm not sure his soon to be ex was oppressed.
Is your buddy a “ CIS-male?”
WELL THEN OF COURSE SHE WAS!!1!
They split it right down the middle, and gave her the better half?
It's nasty because of kids and nasty because they were marry for all of 18 or so months.
There was no infidelity. She just thought she could stay at home and be a content creator without actually taking care of the kids while he was doing a real job.
I don't have a problem with splitting it down the middle of the SAHM or SAHD does their actual job. The problem is men can get screwed on this front.
Maybe judges should assign some real value here and if that part of the contract isn't held up then maybe you don't get half?
In a just world, it would be like that. In the real world, my wife thought she could stay at home and be an alcoholic without actually taking care of the kids while I was doing a real job. When the divorce was final I got the kids and she got 60% of our assets. If there was any justice she would have left with her personal effects and not a damn thing more.
Look, I'm boomer and as right wing and anti snowflake as the rest of this readership, but.....I liked the piece. I thought it was well written, thoughtful, and truthful. The author came across not as a dingbat, but a smart pragmatic young woman who perfectly executed the OODA loop within her environment. She observed her status and choices, oriented, decided her way forward, and acted. Admittedly, her brother may be slightly pissed! Thanks for this Sherman.
I enjoyed it, as well.
I anticipated that it would set the tongues wagging in here, which is why I shared it. The comments on the website and on the Instagram post were predictable.
I'm three paragraphs in, and she's said nothing indefensible. It's just not a high-status outlook or "luxury belief" to hold - thus controversial to some.
People [outside of here] may not know this but pure, individualistic "for love" marriage is a nigh-unprecedented luxury of the postwar industrialized middle-class-or-better West. Most other civilizations still have parental input into marriage and most WESTERNERS would have had substantial parental input if not something along the lines of arrangement had they been living in 1910.
Big age gaps work for everyone. He gets youth and beauty and at least some of her best years; she lets him spend time in the investment banking salt mines for a decade+, he gets to enjoy strange women for a decade+ and she gets to take vague, purblind stabs at career before being politely allowed to stop maintaining the illusion of caring.
Honestly it totally makes sense. Kudos to this woman, who seems happily matched.
Be sure to dig into the comments.
Holy shit they're great. thanks!
Women really don't like each other.
Stopped about ten paragraphs in.
If she’s happy, and he’s happy, what more matters?
2 paragraphs in and the Harvard Grad. was looking for a dude to "Settle" with.
Further down "A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe."
For fuck's sake.
There is nothing wrong with women who are this clear-eyed and merciless about it all.
Life is merciless
someone told her commas were free and she went nuts
Hahaha 🤣😂
Further down some more. What she says about her brother and girlfriend? She's a complete asshole. They are going to read this. I'd have nothing to do with the buffoon.
That woman is so close to getting it. She puts the words down herself but still can't see. The stuff about girlfriends fixing up their boyfriends but not getting the long term benefit. The observations about two people stumbling to grow up together. "I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling towards every milestone." Well that's the whole point of a marriage, isn't it? The wife helps the husband grow up and she herself is there to benefit until the end.
The author felt herself to be too valuable at age 20 and decided to skip all that. Now she's empty, although still married, and writing for free on the internet. She sees everything more or less accurately but can't analyze the problems at all. She writes she'll expect a lot from him when raising a child. After she admits herself that he has done basically everything for her over a decade? At what point does she carry her own weight? They'll hire a nanny and she'll be posting about divorce in five years.
The comments there on that are even better. I particularly like the ones from KumKum. No baggage there. No Sir Ree.
why did i read the whole thing
Nelson voice 'HA HA'
why would sherman do this
he made me read about some navel gazing waif whinging about aging and stuff
He was attempting to FORCE you to learn speed-reading (critical in information age)
thank you sherman
digesting massive volumes of pointless words was a skill i picked up in school
i dont remember any of it
The guy married her. She might have the looks of an "11" on a 10 scale for all we know. I think he's a fool and it wasn't worth it.
"Her looks make her an 8. Then she opens her mouth and instantly becomes an Ohio Hard 4."
Getting old sucks.
67. Tell me about it. 27? Not so much.
she spent the whole piece saying just that
tiring
She'll be self-deleting by 35. She's already lived a hard life and 35 will be her golden years.
Sometimes I think that women, under the influence of feminism and leftist nonsense have permanently damaged relationships between women and men. Women have allowed themselves to be convinced that they they're all high value and that most men simply don't live up to their now high standards. Sort of a Bizzaro Lake Wobegone where only half of the population is all above average. When I ask them how that math works out they just say that men "aren't keeping up", which would mean there's been a massive change in the past generation or two after thousands of years of human society. They believe that women have finally thrown off the shackles of the patriarchy. They simply can't compute the notion that women have had an equal role in shaping society and that the patriarchy is a fiction.
They put a lot of stock in their financial independence and the fact that they don't need a man. Then they go on Facebook singles groups wearing their casual misandry on their designer sleeves in filtered photos taken from the most flattering angles, ready to take offense at just about anything if expressed by someone with a Y chromosome, and simultaneously complain that they are single and that there are no men worthy of them.
It's very depressing.
And, of course, bigger picture is that on the exact same arc of women rising to lead modern society - more women in Congress, more women running large corporations, more women in professional careers - modern society has suddenly turned into a frantic, dysfunctional dystopia where everyone is vain, talks a lot, and no one seems to know how anything actually works...
Weird.
how could this have happened
Well said!
What confounds me is that the political right, such as it exists, has not been able to *capitalize* on leftist lies through truth-telling.
Obviously censorship plays a part, but amazed that the truth is just so well-hidden and so well-lied-about. Blog-dot-jim says the truth is the right's best weapon, but this doesn't seem to be the case, at least at the moment
Assuming a 50/50 split in sexes, I find the line "Those guys are going to be lonely later" odd when it's used by many. Which may be true, but unless polygamy takes hold or the women go lesbian, if it's not those lonely guys not stepping up, which guys are they going to hook up with for the long haul.
They think they're above those lonely guys. They think their grandmother settled for their grandfather.
So I'll add to this that this girl went to the same high school as my wife in Miami and was taught by my sister-in-law there. She just sent this article our way, and if you know Miami and know that the author is a Miami girl, it does make a lot more sense given the values of too many folks down there.
Given what she wanted, you do have to admire her for willing to dive in and go and get it. In that regard she's not too different than other elite school girls, it's just that her chosen "vocation" was a bit of a throwback.
Can anyone explain which purpose the HDMI meant to serve? I read that part twice and am still confused.
A prop to explain her presence at the HBS party (is how I read it).
Is the implication that the cord fit the party's theme?
Just that the party might have involved multimedia.
A connection so that they could show a video?!
Did not yet read past the title, but I will. Don't think this is anything new- what was the maiden name of Mrs Irving Berlin?
So you’re saying a Hyundai crashed in Baltimore. Have we conclusively ruled out teenage gangs being responsible?
The lights went out when they hacked it with a cell phone.
You say this but bridge lights are pretty vulnerable.
Many bridge lights be effectively turned on/off by radio signal for moments when a boat is passing through. Also, there’s a lot of industrial lighting controllers that both have their management interfaces open to the internet and still use default credentials. This means that your “fancy” bridges with RGB LED arrays (or even the Vegas sphere if configured similarly) can be tampered with by just about anyone with a pulse.
https://codykretsinger.com/info/This-Little-Light-of-Mine.html
Sad, comic, twist: someone was on the Key Bridge trying to hack a road crew's Hyundai (car) but accidentally hacked the Maersk's Hyundai (ship).
That's no Palisade... that's a CARGO SHIP!
Well, I didn't see 37 cops behind it with their guns drawn, screaming "DRIVER, SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!!!"
That sentence is about 7 "FUCKING"s short. IF YOU FUCKING <inaudible> I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. DON'T MOVE! WALK FUCKING BACKWARDS TOWARD ME!"
It's the key putting the citizen, presumed innocent, at ease so that you can cooperatively resolve the situation.
Of course! The fuck is wrong with me?
I really have no excuse, watching all those cop cam vids on YouTube.
Wisconsin is wall-to-wall scumbags, apparently.
I have seen more GOOD police behavior from Wisconsin than bad. Either they're just good at propaganda or maybe trying to make up for the Konerak Sinthasomphone thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer#Late_20s_and_early_30s:_subsequent_murders)
I'm a little reluctant to go to Arizona or Colorado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhWF239Bclg
They're exemplary in their patience, explaining to Tyvequious for the 17th time that they're arresting him for Possession With Intent To Distribute, Resisting Arrest and Assaulting A Police Officer without raising their voices.
When the guy clearly deserves a wood shampoo and rough ride to the county jail.
Might be a LITTLE early for that!
Still—ouch! 😲
I'm dealing with the race to the bottom at work right now...I helped hire a former employee back under a contract house (he used to be direct) at like 75% of his former salary and crappy benefits. His family is on vacation for Spring Break but he stayed behind to work because he has like 10 vacation days all year. He get no bonus, fewer holidays, unpaid sick days, and is under constant pressure to perform in an environment where cutting him loose is a phone call away at the mercy of our boss, essentially.
This is the new normal. We just don't hire direct anymore. We have people with no skin in the game tasked with managing complex engineered systems while we pay them less than they're worth.
I'm pissed. It isn't fair. It isn't just. It isn't the way we should treat people.
I'm on a 90 day contract right now, and I feel this in my bones.
Good man. There is a lot of skeleton crew operation going on in a lot of companies, certainly from the service industry. The elements that have put that into motion don't show signs of reversing course and I don't yet see an easily worked out solution. I've next to zero response on job applications and inquiries for, well, too long in my book. Even for positions I may be overqualified for or simply more entry level positions (which are in no way beneath me). Everybody's hiring but nobody's hiring.
That story sounds similar to one my fiancé told me about one of her colleagues... Any chance this is taking place at a major automaker who's former world headquarters in A.Hills has a big star on the top?
Former!?
HashtagTriggered
Well let's be honest, as much as I love ol Momma Mopar in my heart, it's not exactly an American company anymore, and I'll be surprised if there isn't a Micheal Perna real-estiate sign up by the end of 2025.
Examples like this direct-to-contract demotion and the events of last Friday are an example of how PSA is simply going to gut everything in a way Cerberus or Daimler only dreamed they could have. That being said, there is irony in the fact that management is asking for more in-person "work" to be done, and adding more traffic enforcement on campus from AHPD... shame really, cause I did enjoy allegedly seeing how fast I could "dodge" potholes on the ring road.
I will admit that I am part of the problem wrt the AHPD presence. Why wait for red lights on a private road when there’s no traffic, amirite?
You certainly are! I'll take some blame as well. I don't even work there, but I work nearby, so the lady and I carpool when she has to go in. I have to imagine a few people were unnerved by a Compass maintaining double-nickel speeds all the way around to the north end. Not that there was anyone really around to witness such a thing.
Just come work in the city. Every red light is a rolling 4-way stop if you have the bigger vehicle.
The gutting is curious, because the American arm makes all of the money. That the most profitable products are all very specific to the North American market gives me hope that some semblance of former Chrysler survives to keep designing and building them.
Jeep and Ram aren't going anywhere, no. It is also good that they still actually build some of these in the city of Detroit as well.
The gutting, though, is happening in the American engineering base. Their plan is literally replacing local, experienced, but expensive engineers with remote engineering in "lower cost countries." Most all the engineers based in CTC will eventually be replaced with someone who's never seen a Wrangler or a Ram, and maybe never will, but they will be 80% of the cost to employ. Stallantis is calling this "efficiency." Eventually, they won't need CTC anymore (there's already been talks of selling the place) because all the positions formerly based there will be in India and Mexico, and the positions that STLA believes should stay expensive will be filled by the French. I don't see it ending with good cars that Americans want to buy, but that's obviously the goal.
Yeah, I've read articles to that effect regarding CTC sale and offshoring of engineering. I just don't want to believe that management would shift responsibility for hyper-American products overseas where, as you say, the locals have never even seen a Wrangler or Ram. Since, with rare exception, Chrysler had never been strong in midsize and smaller vehicles, I'm almost OK with the competency centers for those products living elsewhere. (And by that I mean France and Italy, not India.) But I sure hope something of Chrysler survives in Auburn Hills.
Thanks for being a decent dude about it.
A lot of companies try and shuffle employees as contractors. If he's not really a contractor, BIG fines. If it's a big company, I'd think they know the rules well enough but a lot of companies don't.
He wasn’t converted, he left a couple-three years back to work for a startup. The startup folded and I submitted his resume for a job back here again.
Randomness about various subjects:
1. Guntherwerks and social media influencers - I see this in the gun world, too. The value of the product to your life or shooting is inversely proportional to how many "influencers" are talking to you about it, and exactly inversely proportional to how much "lifestyle marketing" is used to push it. Sigarms' "Legion" marketing is an excellent example of this. It's a Sig, with certakote and maybe a couple of nice to have features (SAO on a P226 isn't bad) but there's a challenge coin and a "community" that you have to buy the "Legion" to join, and...
No, thank you. To quote what we would have said when we were 19: That's gay.
2. The Radical and the halo: In my second go through college I took forensics as an elective because it seemed like it would be mildly fascinating and it fit my working full time plus running a side hustle plus trying to get another degree schedule. It was more than mildly fascinating, as I ended up having Dr. Drew Richardson as my professor for that class. Dr. Drew was formerly the head of the FBI's Chem/Bioweapon unit, one of the last of the people in the Bureau who carried a gun as an agent AND who had a PHD. These days the Bureau prefers the gun toters, the number crunchers, and the people who use a pipet to be kept neatly apart.
He was one of the world's foremost experts on the polygraph and fought the Bureau to try and get rid of it for essentially any personnel screening. He was also a bit of a contrarian as he was one of the few voices in the wilderness saying that a lot of what is considered "forensic science" has precious little actual science behind it. The sound of that drum is still softer than it should be today, but it's getting louder.
The dude loved paragliding and did it as much as he could. He had great videos of it in just about every class.
Dr. Drew and I hit it off right away because the first day of class he saw I was reading a book on Delf Bryce and in a class filled with mostly disinterested college students and one active duty police officer trying to advance in his career and already hopelessly out of his depth, I was the guy he could "vibe" with. Delf was a heavy influence in FBI firearms and tactics, although I'd argue an entirely destructive one because his techniques weren't applicable past him (he had such superior eyesight he could literally *see* his fired bullets...which makes "point shooting" much easier). Delf was a snappy dresser and good looking and he could do some amazing trick shooting....which got the attention of J Edgar Hoover.
When J. Edgar wasn't busy blackmailing politicians, assassinating political rivals, or taking mob bribe money through his massive gambling habit, he was wearing a dress and sucking dick. I'm convinced he wanted to savor the flavor of Delf himself and upon that basis Delf became the rock upon which all of FBI firearms training was based for decades. He looked the part and the trick shooting was great PR. And J. Edgar could fantasize about him when he was engaging in unnatural acts with the underage boys the mob provided him with. Win/win/win for ol' Edgar!
Of course, I didn't go that deep with Dr. Drew about it because to him Delf was a legend. And he still had faith in the Bureau despite the number of times they'd gone after his career for stubbornly insisting on scientific and moral principle.
I mention all of that because Dr. Drew removed the rollover guard from his riding mower. A couple of years after my class with him, he was on the side of a hill mowing and the mower rolled over on him, snapping his neck and killing him. I'm sure that this guy who had been on the scene of every major terrorist incident around the globe in the prior 25 years, who had dealt with the most deadly substances known to man, actively fought violent criminals to the death, and spent his leisure time strapped to essentially an airboat fan and a parachute hundreds of feet in the air never thought that the riskiest decision he would ever make was removing the hoop on his lawnmower but as it turns out his assessments on that particular risk turned out to be fatally flawed.
Consider the odd confluences of life where you drop a throwaway line about your Radical that just happens to get read by a dude who lost an unlikely friend with an extremely unlikely career of spiting in the grim reaper's face because of a lawnmower rollover.
I'm not saying that I'm a messenger from God...but if one were to believe that any amount of life is, in fact, non random...well...maybe buy that halo.
3. Baltimore - As a part of my unusual circle of acquaintances I have buddies who are (or were) Navy Nukes and intelligence types. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about that crash being a deliberate event, but most of it seems to be worked backwards from the outcome rather than by understanding the factors at work.
Pulling off a cyber-attack to produce that specific outcome would have required a lot of setup and the kind of precision in timing and location that is incredibly unlikely. Hacking a ship and doing so in a manner that will steer it directly at the most vulnerable part of the bridge makes for a good movie plot but it wouldn't be very plausible to people who know how ships work.
Poorly maintained equipment used by poorly educated personnel routinely produces disaster all over the place. And that seems to be the primary explanation for what happened here. Procedural mistakes by a low rent crew using a boat that probably wasn't maintained as carefully as it should be isn't as sexy as cyber attack, but it's a lot more believable.
If that worries anyone, it shouldn't because the crisis of competence gets way, way worse:
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/03/19/least-3-engineering-incidents-and-poor-leadership-kept-uss-boxer-deploying-investigations-reveal.html
A generation of social experimentation on the US military combined with enthusiastically searching the world for new wars to get into has had it's toll on readiness and capability. Naturally the people at the top of the chain will deny that any gaps exist and they'll pretend it's still the military that just beat Hitler and Hirohito, but the catastrophic incompetence we've only seen peeks at here and there is becoming a pervasive feature.
This is one reason why we shouldn't be in any hurry to go finding more wars, especially not with near peer adversaries who are watching us *very* closely and probably have a much better idea of our true capabilities than any of the saber rattling dipshits in the State Department.
Well said, and delightfully told, on all counts.
Both of my Radicals have the conventional roll structure that has served these cars for nearly thirty years, as seen here:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57e571fa414fb57216f8a07f/1595799044858-YQG5I2C0M0ASGTW23JW7/radical_sr3_side_view_rgb.jpg
The new ones have a halo bar, like so:
https://primalracing.com/assets/img/radicals/sr3-xxr/sr3-xxr-3.jpg
This is embarrassing and I encourage all my enemies to make fun of me after I die, but: I'm not gonna bankrupt myself to race in something with a dorky halo brace. At that point I might as well buy myself a Spec Corvette and a pair of lacy panties.
If you are going to die, can you please put it off until at least August. but BEFORE the renewal billing. Be careful out there.
"We should put a steel tube directly in front of the driver's line of sight, this will show how dangerous and manly it is to race one of our cars."
Yeah, that's another thing I don't like about the halo.
Fantastic read.
I generally try not to hate on the modified Porsche stuff too harshly. Mostly because I don’t have one and cannot afford one so my lamentation should count to no one. That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design.
Half ass street / race cars has to be some sort of generational thing. You’re either all in one way or the other. A six point is about tops with factory safety equipment. I don’t even like driving my full cage car without helmet as it makes me nervous. Conversely I refuse to cage my c5 while it has stock seats, belts and bags. Like the rest of the car it’s playing pretend until someone gets killed. Guy really got lucky.
As for the boat and Biden…ugh. My thoughts will put me on a watchlist much less the discrediting of any supporters here.
R.I.P. America. I so briefly knew you.
Well, regular 911’s look inflated and bulbous, so they had to turn it up to 11 for their target market. Garbage in, garbage out.
The truth is you can't make a 993 more curvaceous than the Turbo or 4S without ruining the proportions, like those ghastly butt-injection instagram trollops. Better to leave it alone
There is untold grandeur in subtlety. Changing dimensions in millimeters seems like a waste of time on paper but it couldn’t be further from the truth. When you start adding 2-3” of flare things go pear shaped in a hurry. The idea is to look at something and just be captivated without being able to quite figure out why. It’s not glaring and in your face, they just look “better” and more masculine. It’s exactly what makes a Singer the star over these.
So yes, it’s absolutely doable when done right. Maybe in another lifetime I’d be doing it myself.
"That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design."
YES
THANK YOU
If you hate the Gunther don’t google image search RWB..
If RWB stayed a one-off or even a handful of cars owned by the same friends who did track days together for whatever, I’d hate them a lot less.
Agree. Also every time he cuts up another car, someone makes a corny cinematic video about it. My friend told me he was going to make a bingo card for the videos, squares include: car owned by by a 20 something manchild whose father bought it new, owner blathers on about “passion,” montage of Nakai cutting up fenders then rubbing roofing tar into the seams, cigarettes and staring, owner helps position the windshield banner, etc.
"my passion for cars is so strong i invited a japanese vagrant over to hack up my fathers investment grade 911 into a mockery of individuality for clout"
please fill your stomach with 10w30 posthaste
He only LOOKS like a vagrant.
He's using the rear wing of a dusty Koenig Competition Evolution Testarossa as a workbench. You can see it back in the corner of his shop, under that pile of A'PEXi titanium exhausts and Seibon carbon fiber hoods.
yes that exactly
mass producing them was a mistake
Usually is.
I kinda wouldn’t mind an RWB as a track rat. They were kinda cool until they overdid it and then sorta sold out to the bug men.
I’d gladly have the dude over to drink Coke, play some Indie Jap Punk and cut on some otherwise lame duck Carrera. Just leave the “real” ones alone. I’d probably stuff an Ls3 in it anyhow.
Many of those RWBs have totally unmodified engines. All that bodywork... all that tire ...
for a max of 280 hp.
Guess they won't be chirping on their way out.
a track rat is probably what it ought to be in the same way a drift missile is a tool for a job that just happens to look fit for purpose
would be far more digestible if it were a flood damaged base model too
I am convinced that in the not-to-distant future a small number of very talented mechanics and bodymen will all but print money undoing all the damage done by the RWB nitwits.
Alas, it'll probably be someone like Singer, building cars for people who buy Singers.
100% agree.
RWB is for the same guy who'll Liberty Walk an F40.
i dont know who did that but i hate him
drywall screws in carbon bodywork are you kidding me
"This week on Handyman Corner, we're gonna put overfenders on one of those fancy-boy European sports cars. If you don't have titanium aerospace rivets and a hydraulic gun, just use the leftover wood screws from when you built the kids' treehouse. Should work fine. Let's get started."
what if red green was a billionaire
maybe that
the first one, the stella artois, was neat as an expression of nakai's own personal taste and an extreme looking car with massively wide fenders and elbow deep dish ssr wheels
the rest are cookie cutter and each is built just as horribly as the first making none of them worth the money
but man the original when it was the only one in existence was tough looking
At least flares are tolerable. I’m not a fan of stripes, especially the “carrera” ones that end up on a lot of 911s. If I ever end up with a 911 that has those, taking them off will be a day one change.
The front fenders are horrendous. The lack of sculpting on an otherwise curvy car really throws it off without pronounced arch and definition. Acceptable for an aero build long tail style but the front and rear look penned by different people.
looks like a marshmallow after you take it out of the microwave
also that car really shows how hard it is to improve on the design of a car without making it worse
singer made it look easy
Good design is based on refinement. Singer knows this and exploits upon it. Every element has been retouched with a product designers eye, not necessarily someone purely automotive as they are very in touch with materials and finishes.
When you try to design by exaggeration you near always lose purity of design. Couple that with a loss of direction and cohesive theme and you get this sort of HotWheels looking variant that does some things well but nothing exceptional. The lack of cohesion means you can change lines or features around in the valances but it won’t fix the “off-ness”.
You cannot fix bad design by focusing in on the detail points but you can exemplify good design by doing the same.
Very apt. Any thoughts on the MZR Datsun 240Z? I think it borrows too heavily from Singer when it really ought to pull design cues from other Nissans and it's own racing heritage.
Wasn't asked, but big fan of their Evolution model. Just the right amount of width. Not too "pompado." Muy bien
Everyone tries to be Singer. They are the “Rocket Bunny” of that genre. (I don’t like RB but it’s what everyone who does tries to copy).
The MZR cars seem to fall into modern tuner vs refinement, but it also seems they might offer different packages.
You know how long it takes to design a car? They make thousands - THOUSANDS - of drawings before they start sculpting the full-size clay models.
Eh, doesn't look too bad from here. At least it's not Mansory.
Fair warning, Not Safe For Lunch:
https://www.mansory.com/aston-martin
I'll take the white one, if I had to, because the wheels aren't black. They've been around forever. Those AMs don't look as bad as I expected. Most of the other RE-IMAGINED Brands do. Years ago, their output looked more hideous.
The Gunther stuff looks like absolute shit. They are everything a Singer isn’t.
In Baltimore. Fucking Baltimore! Of all the cities in the US. Not a single road worker was a Black American? And 22 people on the ship, making what, a dollar, three dollars a day?
Let's put Third Worlders in charge of a mobile object the size of a skyscraper.
That's fucking BRILLIANT.
Our fundamental problem in society is that the people who make decisions rarely have any practical experience actually doing any of the things they are making decisions about. The people who decided that having third worlders with a reputation for faking competence in a wide array of technical tasks pilot a gigantic projectile through bits of critical infrastructure can't steer or maintain a ship any more than the people on that boat could.
Cheap labor seems like a great idea in a board room...but almost nobody in that board room is looking for the cheapest cardiac surgeon when they need one. Or asking for the most discount manufactured parachute when they go skydiving. Cheap labor is abstract and, thus, equivalent. One worker is no more valuable than another. In fact, the more expensive ones are often much more trouble because they're always bothering you with reasons why your plans aren't going to work. The Indian sailors aren't going to fire an email up the chain saying "Hey, the boat is in a bad way and if we don't fix it we're going to drift into a bridge or something and shut down one of the most heavily trafficked ports in the entire fucking hemisphere." They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do! Score!
I mean, it's not like the ship is going to end up drifting into a bridge and shutting down a major shipping port or anything!
"They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do" - That sums up my issue with cheap offshore software developers perfectly. I manage two independent teams, one contract team offshore in India and the other full time employees dispersed across the country. The onshore team is invested in the product - they are busting my balls constantly about things that are going to cause problems. 99% of the time, they're right. Their bug rate is so low it's practically 0. The offshore team never says a word about anything...and the churn for rework is tremendous.
>head bobble
made me lol
The Elites actually hate black people. One of the reasons why all the racism BS is so farcical.
That is why they called the raping, pot smoking hillbilly the "first black president" and the actual first "black" president was in reality a half-white, half-immigrant ivy league striver rather than the great-grandson of slaves who endured the Night Riders, Jim Crow, made the Great Migration, and missed out on the generational wealth created by the GI Bill and saw their families destroyed by the War on Drugs. Immigrants are fine, poor Americans, white or black, can get fucked.
not just the blacks it seems
I was responding to a comment about the general population of Baltimore but yes.
" Justice For Fernando! "
I think that had it been Hamilton rather than Russell behind Alonso that crash never happens.
Because Lewis would have been thinking about what kind of dick move *he* would try if he were the car ahead, and so would have been alert to anything dodgy.
Georgie on the other hand was entirely focused on the hero move he was setting up, and just assumed Fernando would be a compliant accessory.
I think this is well said.
Fernando will not have done himself any favors in terms of moving to Luigi Hamiltone’s seat next year.
genuinely laughing at Luigi Hamiltone, which is so bad a joke it's funny.
Luigi's off season will consist of learning Italian Hand Gestures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWG-aCLx1h0
That name needs to stick, it’s perfect.
George thinks all other drivers are compliant accessories... He needs to be Magnussen'ed to his career's end.
I hope he throws a banana peel out of the cockpit next race.
If someone can pressure from behind, why not from in front?
All the effort to drive costs down as much as humanly possible and no thought given to their own countrymen.
How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?
unless they arent american in the first place
and yes the gumption wanks 911 is still dumb and competing in a (somehow) highly competitive niche
Many of them are not, or do not consider themselves to be, americans.
And this is per their own admission, under government name, in books/on twitter/in fawning ny mag profile.
At this point many of the most powerful people are international. On numerous different axes it would be difficult to append the label "american" to them at all
"How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?"
One goes to the right preschool, the one that required several letters of recommendation drafted before birth, and then continues to the right "country day" school, the right prep school, Dartmouth, and Harvard Business School, all straight through, or maybe with one "gap" year to go tour all the same European tourist attractions and nightclubs as all the other gap year people.
In the early 21st century, it is possible to go through that entire process, living about 25 years of life, without ever talking to a blue-collar person except in the role of a cashier or clerk.
So of course the lines on the expense part of the P&L are going to seem more vivid, more real, and more important than the people they represent.
Extreme and growing social stratification is a major part of why the elites have the ethics (or lack thereof) that they do today. The reasons why it has happened are numerous, but if you follow them far enough, they all come down to physical separation. I'll leave it as an exercise to each person reading this comment to determine how you would best get people of all American social classes at least occasionally occupying the same space at the same time, not in a service context.
Not sure I agree, at least as a millenial of the milennial class. Wealth continues to be what it was (only amplified) but the explanantion you provided doesn't jive even slightly with the actual people I know who went to the exact schools you mentioned. Maybe they're out of touch, but they lean toward liking america even if they perform leftist obeisance on whatever conscious level.
The people *truly* disemboweling the industry in the nation... are the same people who funded Reagan.. and Clinton.. And yes Biden's political careers. It's not even partisan, the political class are their lackeys. They don't care about America or think of themselves as americans. It's just a profit center.
Who, exactly, are the people you are thinking about?
I don't believe the people I'm talking about are evil. I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless.
"I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless."
This is charitable - and the Lord commands us to be charitable. Are they out of touch? We couldn't be more agreed. We differ on whether they're clueless or malicious.
10 million Americans having decent factory jobs would not realistically threaten these people. But they act as if such MFG base was a threat and don't *just* ship the jobs away for money but *as if they viewed the competing political power center of manufacturing to be a threat requiring neutralization.*
IMO this qualifies as malice. Without taking anything out of context, you could pick an example at random from yesterday's newspaper: let's go with Larry Summers. His ideas about economics & manufacturing policy have picked this country barer than bones in a desert. He didn't have to do it. And he is far too smart to be called clueless.
Larry Summers should face a public accounting, Robespierre-style.
Perhaps his biggest crime was meekly stepping down from his post at Harvard instead of standing up to the feminist harridans. Perhaps if he had taken a stance against the ideological totalitarians instead of being a pussy, it might have been a watershed moment.
So stupid as to be indistinguishable from evil is a common refrain of mine.
Even that gives them charitable benefit of doubt.
Should we?
[Edit: I believe at dinner table in mixed-political company we should, for persuasive purposes. But in our heart of hearts... should we?]
I’m going to be stealing this, thanks.
As a counterpoint:
I worked on about three dozen completed M&A transactions during my career as a junior mistmaker. I worked almost exclusively in service of depositories (i.e., banks) of all sizes. That industry is experiencing ongoing consolidation, and it is exceedingly rare for a non-bank entity to purchase a bank. One of the rationales for those deals (and essentially all “strategic” M&A) is “cost saves;” nota bene that “synergies” are incremental revenues unlocked or created by a combination, whereas cost saves are just that - efficiencies.
The process is obvious. If two businesses who do essentially the same thing combine, they will no longer need two of each of the non-revenue generating jobs. When working on the sell-side, one of the tasks that fell to me as a junior grunt was the first cut of taking the target’s employment roster and “right-sizing” it, with the goal of cutting ~30-40% of the seller’s non-interest expense.
Most sellers went out of their way to protect vulnerable employees (single mothers, those with one household income, those with disabled parents, etc.) and cut those who could better afford to lose their job.
That is your counterpoint?
Yes.
Jack and I went back and forth (one-on-one) a few weeks ago on a similar topic.
No one is entitled to a job. Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse.
"Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse."
That's a deeply controversial statement in the law. Some feel it is axiomatic. Others think it's a drastic simplification of something far more complex. And the whole debate often elides the issue of what the *correct* policy about the purpose of companies should be.
My own view, as a lawyer who does a whole lot of corporate governance work, is that we take too narrow a view of what the interests of shareholders actually are. Everyone from MBAs to lawyers to the shareholders themselves assumes that the shareholders obviously just want the highest possible return of cash this quarter, regardless of any other implications. But in the end shareholders are people. Very few people are driven solely by money and the ones who are are almost universally viewed as d!ckbags.
Shareholders, as people, want to live in prosperous and sustainable communities. They want employees who will go out and sing their praises. They want to be involved in selling incredibly cool products and services. They want to give something back once their businesses succeed. Corporations, in promoting the interests of shareholders, should be free to take all of those things and more into account, not just the one interest out of all of them that is the most corrosive and the easiest to hate.
In your M&A scenarios, the most important decision came far before you got involved. and it was in almost all cases a decision focused narrowly on short-term financial interest. The most toxic aspect of Wall Street today is that it zealously enforces that focus in every case, even on businesses where the ordinary shareholders don't share it.
I’m going to push back on this.
0-Most of these banks are private, or thinly traded (i.e., not really public); this makes deals harder, because you have to value the buyer’s stock (most bank deals are not cash deals), as well.
1-Community bank shareholders ARE invested (in multiple senses of the word) in the services that their banks provide to small communities; I strenuously believe that these services are very valuable, and I would advise most people to bank at a community bank, because they excel in terms of customer service.
2-That said … if you’ve tied up $100K or $1MM or even more of your own money in First State Bank of Somewhere for years (or decades) with little to no dividend, limited if any liquidity, and challenging prospects to create shareholder value going forward (particularly in the face of the tech spend necessary to keep your head above water vs larger institutions), maybe you start to think about a sale? Particularly if leadership is aging and there is no credible successor in place.
3-People are typically risk averse and loss avoidant. They rue the loss of their job to a successful M&A process, but would they feel the same way about being turned down for a “no-show” job? I.e., they’d expect the local community bank to pay them $50K or $100K a year to do just about nothing and create no value. I think most people understand that that’s not realistic.
I'm an ordinary shareholder in as much my 401k has much of my own wealth investment in these companies. For me personally, I want all my investments to return me the most money they can. For my own personal view,.I honestly don't care about a lot of the sustainable.and community crap of these companies. Maybe I'm just jaded but any company I've ever worked for, the investors and CEOs only ultimately care about the stock price and bottom line.
I brought this up just a few days ago on TTAC on an insurance article. I basically said that it's a contradiction for everyday folks to complain about their auto insurance prices when many if not most everyday people have some form of investment into these companies. Everyone over in TTAC sited greed. Damn straight I want my investments into insurance companies to return me the most it can.
When I am a shareholder, I do not give a damn about quarterly results. I want management to be working on a ten-year time horizon so I can give them my money and forget about it for a while.
Meanwhile management incentives ARE for quarterly results. This is not for my benefit.
And no company is entitled to good and loyal employees. The company must be worthy of that proficiency and loyalty.
Of course they aren’t!
One of my light bulb moments in the last decade or so has been seeing Conservative, Inc’s union bashing for what it is.
Yeah, the UAW and the Teamsters can go to hell, but so can anybody pushing “right to work” laws.
My counterpoint is this: Much of what is done by corporations and wealthy people is legal only because they wrote the law to make it legal. To take a rather unimportant example, the only reason that Ticketmaster is allowed to exist is because they crippled the FCC. The only reason poorly maintained ships manned by near slaves and sailed under flags of convenience are allowed in US waters is because the people you are defending wrote laws to make it possible.
There’s a long list of things that someone went out of their way to make/keep legal. Because there are plenty of folks who have insufficient moral qualms over inflecting needless financial and/or physical harm to make a buck.
In a sense, we’re all to blame because we don’t demand better.
Legal fictions, I believe, is the correct term.
Ain't nice, but that's a fact. I worked in IT that had mom + pop size banks and credit unions as clients. One client would buy the other. Either the buyer's name went above the door or they made a holding company and kept them separate. Even separate, the back rooms had no need to be separate. You really can't do much for customer (the public) facing aspects of the business. If a branch had 10 people before and wasn't going to be closed, chances are you'd still need 10 people. Usually what takes a hit is the back room for the loan dept and call centers.
Most of the reports we generated were just online documents. But, there were small volume forms that would print on customer (Financial Inst.) printers. Stuff like late notices, late fee notices, Time Deposit stuff.
All the institutions had their printers hooked up to us. I wrote a program that would print this form, for this FI on that printer. We had in some cases holding companies that owned 3 separate banks. Banks A, B + C. Sometimes this form for the 3 went to Bank A, another to B another to C. When that occurred, you knew that the people that used to handle that stuff at the other FIs probably weren't there anymore. If A,B, C were geographically close together, at best some of the people moved to a different location. But definitely not all of them.
Indeed - a corporation’s purpose is to deliver and maximize shareholder value. However, isn’t this a far broader topic than the role of a corporation? Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t think your point really gets to the heart of the issue, which in my mind isn’t why corporations function the way they do, but rather the broader macroeconomic policies which allow corporations to function the way they do in the #currentyear.
I kept reading waiting for the counterpoint until I realized it was just another flex. Should have known better.
The pablum at the end about the token sparing of some of the little people at the expense of othered who could “afford” to get kicked to the curb just reinforces MC’s point about social stratification.
Disagree.
I, along with a team of ~35 others, lost my job to M&A in 2019. Live by it, die by it. None of us cried over that.
I got a text 5 minutes ago from a friend whose entire team just got blown out (not through M&A); it happens every day.
I suspect your safety net is far larger than some factory worker who got his job shipped overseas due to M&A, and your timeline for getting a new job is far shorter. Beyond that, totally the same.
1. Merge banks because there’s money to be made.
2. Keep certain employed based upon them being a welfare case vs. job performance.
3. Merged bank fails due to mismanagement.
4. Seek taxpayer-funded bailout.
Welcome to clown world. Even if this country comes out ahead on paper, we still lose. This is why they swiftly shut down OWS and turned people against each other by way of identity politics.
“Bailout”
You do realize that the taxpayers made a profit on TARP, the last taxpayer-funded “bailout,” right?
Meanwhile, they got hosed on the automaker and airline bailouts.
If you're too big to fail, you are too big. That should be national policy. Bring back anti trust! Burn google to the ground! Hang whoever is in charge of Microsoft Outlook from a light post. I'm serious about all of these ESPECIALLY the Outlook one.
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but "mistmaker?" - Nice!
I can’t take credit for that one, sadly.
it is a nice turn of phrase, so you get credit for introducing me to it.
My biggest revelation in moving from a wealthy suburban county of Chicago to semi-rural North Carolina is just how economically segregated Northern Illinois is. I am not talking about race, just economic separation along well defined dividing lines from one town or neighborhood to the next one. Unlike where I’m at in NC.
Where people have no community and no sense of their neighbors, they feel safer banding together by class.
I have neighbors with a tenth of my net worth, and neighbors with 10x mine. But we do know each other.
I’m the same with my neighbors in NC. I much prefer living in an economically mixed area. People talk to each other over here.
You are not wrong
I knew it, obviously, just never thought about it until I moved to a place that’s pretty much the opposite.
I’m also not saying that it’s a bad thing, I’m all for people living with their tribe.
I've lived in a few other places. This is home. Awful politics be damned.
When my friends ask me my perspective on leaving Chicago, I don’t say how much I enjoy the South, I first ask, are you prepared to give up the following things when you move? Because you definitely are giving up good things in Chicagoland that you take for granted and never think about, and you’re never going to find them down here.
What struck me about Chicago when I lived there was how you could have the Orthodox Jews on one side of the street, the Russians on the other, both of them a block from the Indians, and everything just kind of worked.
That was Devon Avenue and a bit unlike most Chicago areas with their established dividing lines. I loved the Indian section on Devon, used to go eat there a lot.
Yep, I know Devon. Pronounced like the drug dealer, not the guy from "Knight Rider."
Had that Patel Brothers store with the racist "Celebrating our food..Our culture" over the front door.
'Had that Patel Brothers store with the racist "Celebrating our food..Our culture" over the front door.'
Somebody I'll be a billionaire and I'll put that same sign over Applebee's.
I like going to the synagogue but the truth is that I feel more at home in a kosher restaurant than in a shul.
I noticed this when I went to visit my good friend that moved to Owensboro KY last year. His neighborhood is upper middle class but right outside the entrance is lower income apartments. Downtown Owensboro has 1mm+ luxury lofts along the Ohio River and 2-3 blocks over across "Main Street" are essentially wooden shacks at least a hundred years old. I'm a Detroiter and can vouch for the same segregation by economic status.
What kind of industry or jobs are there in Owensboro to support expensive real estate?
My suspicion, having done zero research, is probably Indiana money from Evansville across the river. cheaper taxes and real estate prices on the KY side, which is why my buddy lives there. It's a small town compared to what I'm used to, so it's likely a small percentage of overall prices. Just what I saw on Zillow during a dinner "downtown".
Thanks, I always wondered about that. Kentucky is the rare southern state with bad state finances. Coming from Illinois, that tells me that the Kentucky state government is corrupt.
Perhaps we should bring back the military draft. A U.S. Army unit during WWII would have had men from all walks of life. I'm not naive, the affluent, educated, and connected probably had an easier entry into the officer corps, and yes, because of Woodrow Wilson the military was racially segregated - but even the black units were diverse in terms of socio-economics.
It’s the pursuit of the almighty dollar combined with Oikophobia, hate of one’s home country and culture.
1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”
But the lack of money is the cause of most problems.
I'd argue it's the concentration of money in the hands of a few that's the cause of most problems.
And that.
"kinds of"? I don't think the authors of the KJB would have wasted words like that. "All evil", surely?
You are correct.
And a pedant, alas!
Know why? This is why:
The United States of America made the very CONCEPTS of aristocracy and monarchy obsolete in the late 18th Century. We've since proved, in ten thousand ways and in one-tenth the time, that a nation of free commoners makes an utter, hilarious mockery of the greatest empires and all their trappings & pretensions.
The world's kings and their minions have been trying to undo that accomplishment ever since.
You presume that our elites ever saw you or me as their own people. In the sense that their ancestors essentially actually owned our ancestors, perhaps. But they are not your countrymen. We the proles have to learn the same lesson Franklin learned in the cockpit and set ourselves on a course of rejecting all the powers of popes and princes. Especially the ones that claim to be our countrymen one moment and then shove a bayonet into our spine the next.
covid ousted the brownshirts pretty damn quick
talk about sobering
Good luck finding any color native born American willing to do manual labor, outside, overnight in a dangerous environment.
I’m in a constant state of hiring to maintain a crew of 6 tradespeople in the home repair/renovation business. We pay +/- $30/hr, company provided vehicle and tools- not chasing the bottom of the barrel at all.
I don’t agree with the very porous border situation here recently, but if there were no jobs, the flow would decrease considerably.
The legal immigrant workers I’ve employed, hands down, have a stronger work ethic than the native clock-puncher/wall-leaner class.
There is a huge shortage of willing and able people to do manual work. Government can help fix the “able” part with an increased focus and incentives towards trade schools and education. But the “willing” part is a much deeper issue, and one that I don’t have any policy suggestions to resolve.
There’s ample blame to go around in this shit show, but 6 hard working people that left their homes, cultures, and extended families to do hard, dangerous, thankless jobs that few others in this country would be willing to take should not be part of that blame game.
They're not at fault. The system is at fault.
Nothing you said above can be disagreed with, but: in a world without a porous border, maybe we'd see that blue-collar workers get the protection and safety that seems to have drained out of many industries since 1995. And then they'd be more willing to work the jobs.
I was barely entering the workforce in ‘95, so can’t comment one way or the other, but would be curious what safety/protections you see that have left?
Unions are what comes to mind for me. I can see some logic in them for a factory setting, but at least in construction they seem exclusionary and a large contributor to the significant construction and housing cost differences between the NE and Sun Belt.
I think there’s ripe opportunity for unions in the service industry today. That’s where the majority of the blue collar workforce (at least using a wage definition) is employed and will be given current trends vs in a factory. And while automation might reduce some of the staffing needs you aren’t going to be able to offshore the majority of retail work.
There's a full-court press to reduce service and retail jobs and it will continue until they're all gone. With regards to workplace safety I see all sorts of things happen on construction sites nowadays that didn't pass muster in 1995, largely related to noise and protective equipment
Thats the thing though, there is a huge shortage of people willing to do manual trade work which means the squared away guys can command more than 30 an hour.
Most of the squared away guys end up working for themselves more so than chasing a higher w2 wage.
I am surprised collisions of this nature haven't happened before. I am very interested in the technical report on the nature of the casualty that caused that red over red situation.
I am equally interested in what procedures are required by merchants ships when transiting in and out of harbors, their might be some low hanging safety fruit there.
I think this will be more like the USS McCain incident, as in a difficult situation that where the sailors failed to rise to the occasion, rather than the Fitzgerald incident where the sheer incompetence at every turn was stunning. In a more civilized time the CO, OOD and whoever was standing watching in the CIC would have had the good sense to kill themselves after filing their final reports.
On top of that why is the instant decision of an old man with dementia putting me on the hook for a bridge that Baltimore might not really need? Their are plenty of harbor crossings for the traffic as is. The hazardous materials material can detour inland. Maybe given the choice Baltimore could find a more productive use for the insurance payout? Where is Biden even getting the money to commit?
'Where is Biden even getting the money to commit?'
Jerome goes brrrrrrrrrr
It's not Powell, who has been reducing the money supply for 18 months. It is congress and Yellen you need to be looking at.
To effectively combat inflation the FED and the Fed govt need to work together but that is not what is happening.
I cringe every time I remember that fossil Yellen is treasury secretary. Another Obama-era retread.
I hate that this is the best we can do as a country when it comes to public service.
Obama era??? You mean Clinton.
The bench isn't very deep.
She was a decent economist once but has been a politically-driven hack for a long time now.
Well said.
edit: spelling... damn app..
I wasn't wondering where the federal government will get the money, more where does the executive get the authority to wake up in the morning and gift Maryland a new bridge before breakfast.
Do you suppose Trump ever feels responsible for pick…
I can’t even finish that without laughing. He never takes responsibility for anything.
Remember when Trump was publicly attacking Powell for raising rates pre-COVID? Trump wanted to print money forever, too, since inflated market values are his sole indicator of success.
They are the entire West's indicator of success.
The McCain and Fitzgerald collisions happened because we're prosecuting a forever war against the Enemies of Democracy, and everybody's just plain worn out.
No. In the Fitzgerald disaster exactly one officer took any level of responsibility for what took place. A female ensign was the only person to actually roger up to accountability for what happened on that boat. Literally every other individual in the chain command on that boat lawyered up, pointed fingers at everyone else, and immediately started whining about it not being their fault.
She was the only one who admitted that she failed her crew and her responsibilities.
And *that* is why that collision happened.
It's not just this one instance, either. Across the military various academy grads or people with the right networking avoid accountability for failures to do their duty or outright malfeasance while those who don't have connected patrons suffer the full weight and penalty of the UCMJ for even honest mistakes beyond their ability to handle. You should hear what my friends with high level security clearances have to say about the kid gloves afforded to Hillary, Biden, Wolfe (who was leaking classified information to a reporter he was fucking and ended up with hardly any penalty when his defense put out their intention to call all the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the trial...which prompted a letter from Lisping Lindsay Graham to the DOJ encouraging them to not go hard on Mr. Wolfe) while they know of situations where a sailor who sent a picture to his family ended up facing criminal charges for leaking classified info.
Or my (all former, now) FBI buddies who stared in mute rage as Strzock and McCabe outright lied about an entirely illegal political operation where they mishandled classified information, lied on top secret warrants, abused the civil rights of dozens of people, and lied to investigators only to receive no meaningful consequence. Meanwhile my buddies had all either personally been the target of DOJ witchunts or had seen other good people face criminal charges for honest mistakes or one instance of bad judgement.
Forever war isn't helping, certainly, but the fundamental problem producing these outcomes is a two tiered system of accountability where those who have all the power face none of the consequences for their decisions. And that is entirely by their design.
Please do a guest post if Jack allows. I don't even care on what.
What the hey? Did somebody say “guest post?” Jack, did you see that somebody said GUEST POST? Have your loyal readers—maybe even some subscribers—ever mentioned this before?
dunno man ive never brought it up before
I KEEP SAYING THIS
Thirded.
I vaguely recall reading at either RG or ACF, possibly even from our host himself, an unofficially accepted theory that the Fitz crash was due to a lovers' triangle. Two Navy wahmens were banging the same XO or somesuch and refused to talk to each other during the crossing.
Or perhaps it was simply comedic /pol greentext fabrication.
Yeah, I was the fellow who put that forward.
Well, that TOO.
But we're running our military ragged fighting people we either shouldn't be fighting AT ALL, or who we could crush if we didn't half-ass it.
It has happened before. The original Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa Bay collapsed in 1980 when it was hit by a freighter during a squall. 35 people were killed. There's a famous photo of a car that stopped about two feet short of going over the edge.
Correct! And to illustrate the growth in ship sizes over the last few decades, the replacement bridge was built with a lot of margin to accommodate the largest ships sailing in the early 80’. (Example: the cruise ship from The Love Boat TV series was about 45,000 ton displacement.)
Now the only cruise ships sailing from Tampa are the older ships that are under 100,000 tons displacement (most in the 80,000 ton range). Anything newer and larger does not fit under the current Skyway Bridge.
If the will existed, America could wall itself off from the rest of the world, expel all - ALL - the troublemakers: The illegal aliens, the H1Bs, the Deep Staters, the career criminals, the elected Democrats, the welfare queens, everyone - and be our own self-contained little world. EVERYTHING we need to construct, operate & populate a moden industrial civilization exists in the Lower 48 + Alaska right now.
The rest of the world needs America far more than America needs the rest of the world.
"If the will existed" - but, apparently, it does not.
These are fringe views - even among honest, God-fearing, populist Trump supporters and conservatives. People (the normies) would need to be onboarded, via some sort of massive propaganda apparatus, and significant coordination mechanisms *including criminal justice.*
Which is to say, we'd better stop "wishing in one hand" on this blog. The shit hand is getting really full
I don't think it exists either. And on top of that, this isn't merely a geography problem to be solved, the connections, identities and loyalties of everyone are very, very intertwined and a simple us vs. them movement does a great disservice to the welfare of all involved. Or maybe a catalyzing event(s) happens and we all get real black and white about things and act/move accordingly. I've been thinking more so lately, and semi-humorously relaying to others, that the reason no one has acted on any of these mounting, compounding issues is that the shelves in all the stores are still fully stocked.
That’s the case for sure. I was stationed on Oahu and they say that if the ships stopped coming the islands would be out of food in 4 days. You could hope they would get serious about food production in that case…
You mean one can't subsist on a diet of only pineapples?
Have you seen how many free range chickens exist on the archipelago? When the spam runs out, start chasing the yardbirds.
In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten increasingly disdainful of conservatives who keep pretending the will does exist. The wishful thinking that Trump has the competence to fix anything, and the raging at everyone, including family, who’s stupid/evil enough to stand in his way. It’s a non constructive, borderline insane mentality.
If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side. You’re as bad as the lizards and shitlibs you rail about.
Unfortunately I think that the best any of us can do is keep our heads down, positively influence our own spheres as best we can, and hope that the cultural wind shift in our lifetimes.
Debating deleting the above comment, but, on serious note, you wrote: "If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side."
This is really funny, given the state of american media and american jurisprudence. Doesn't current media propaganda paint white parenthood as evil, interracial parentage as the highest good, white men as evil, white people as traitors to humanity (and one another), white existence separate from extreme diversity as the ultimate sin, black-on-white revenge violence as justifiable, etc?
And does not the current system punish loads of people for simply trying to maintain a modest existence in the country of their ancestors, to defend themselves or their homes, to protest an obviously stolen election, etc? Is not importing tens of millions of 75-iq beggars & literal cannibals an act of outright traitorousness - a crime carrying the punishment of death?
I'm sure that I'm misreading your comment but we're already in an environment where outright evil is being propagandized and resistance to that evil is being criminally & civilly punished. Do you truly feel that it would be immoral to sanction the people perpetrating this evil, destroying (whatever remains of) this nation?
They do it, so we should do it back to them? Yeah, that's not justice, it's brinksmanship.
Dude, maybe take a step back from politics if my comment has you so wound that you felt you needed to double reply. You called me a cuck for disconnecting for this bullshit, but you raging at the dying light is just as impotent and a lot more stroke-inducing.
And if you insist on fighting a fruitless war, at least identify the right enemy. As the commenter Tim has so eloquently pointed out here, this isn't about right vs left, it's up vs down. Instead of fighting with your neighbor because you think your shitbag politician is less dangerous than his shitbag politician, or dehumanizing him by treating him as an NPC that needs to be cajoled into your way of thinking or else, maybe open a dialogue with him and figure out what your common problems are.
You'll have to pardon my enthusiasm. You're obviously a solid guy and I know I'm not alone in appreciating the sense and moderation you bring to these debates. You make some great points - though I wish I saw it in the @Tim way. The West's predicament can be a class struggle and an identitarian one as well. The enemies can be class members above, below, left and right--and identity or affinity groups similarly arranged.
I think I get so carried away because if one wants to even slighly check the system, one has to do something (however stupid and pointless, "Beam Me Up" representative Traficant) that is anti-system. I continually make the mistake of falling ass-backwards into the illusion that electing Trump or Ramsawamy or RFK Jr would make a change. That probably is an illusion - or it may be only barely true. What I wonder is, is it fair to call this predicament brinksmanship, or would it be more appropriate to call it war?
To me it looks like war - moderate centrist people and right wingers alike are getting flayed alive these days - because they either didn't get the memo, didn't like the memo, refused to believe the memo, or remain unwilling or unable to take decisive action. I should be the last to call anyone out on inaction. But this struggle might be more dire than it appears. And if that's so, we are running out of time.
When someone bops you in the nose 5x eventually you gotta bop the guy back. "I'm not gonna sink to that level" is gonna get your ass kicked. That's the entire conservative party. The democratic party does whatever they want and the other side "never stoops to their level" so donald trump has to pay 200mm for committing fraud against no one. What he should do if he wins is throw those judges in Guantanamo bay and throw away the key. POUR ENCOURAGER LES AUTRES. Of course, he won't do shit, and he probably won't win because we're gonna see voter fraud that will make 2020 look mild.
really wish more people understood this
i dont want to play fair
i want to win
why bother with right vs left when both sides are massively retarded
"Developing The Will" is what I shall now call my design for an FTL colony ship, so we can start over elsewhere.
The Reconquista took hundreds of years and was followed by a Golden Age.
Good times, weak men, etc
Good books on subject?
Apologies, but not from me.
im voting for you
Let’s start with giving all US counties the ability to join a bordering state, then watch the rapid and spectacular domino effect take place and realign the country. Then all the leftist thugs and their minions will be clustered in a few blue roach motels.
I see variations of 'purity tests' on the horizon should that geographic realignment take place. It would be the Divided States for sure, and there would be considerable upheaval (to put it very lightly) for a number of years before things hopefully settled out. Many of the Blue Islands are coastal cities already well set up for trade with their ports and road and rail infrastructure. Not to mention many factories being located there or nearby. The Seas of Red have the food, so ultimately, trading and cooperation would be necessary for both groups to do well and not simply subsist.
See, I've long thought that neighborhoods should be like clubs where you have you be approved by the existing residents in order to move in.
So I'd be okay with this.
In my heart I’m An-Cap; some of us live exactly like this, but instead of ‘neighbourhood’ they say ‘compound’, and I know a few ranchers in Canada who have several families on the property.
I’ve never heard of someone doing this in a civilized area vs. the sticks, but I don’t see why a few families couldn’t agree to go in together on a subdivision and have a neighbours of their choosing.
They could start an Association of Homeowners and charge a fee every month!
Another terrible idea. We had to make this illegal for a reason. It’s going to be 10x worse if brought back.
Why?
If I have to live next to somebody, I want a say in who that somebody is.
We can have only SOME neighborhoods being shitholes or ALL neighborhoods being shitholes.
I say "Some."
And what is the criteria you'd use in deciding? And what criteria would you not want me using when deciding whether to let you buy the house next to me?
We did this once. It was called redlining.
"Redlining" was banks being financially responsible, and not lending money to people who couldn't pay it back.
how could they do something so terrible
Stranded on islands of blue in a vast sea of red.
Hey, do you suppose they'll start looking at each other and hallucinating hot dogs & hamburgers?
I do.
The great part is that the blue encampments will have nothing to barter with for food.
Not true. Readers of 'The Cut' will have something to trade.
Only if there’s a shortage of red state women. The blue state Karens will self deport after the realignment.
They'll have the ports. I guarantee you'd see them prefer to pay top dollar for overseas food rather than trade with rural fascists.
Yeah, let’s not do that. Sounds like a great way to further divide and accelerate a civil war.
For the will to exist the problem has to first be understood. And that's why the fiercest battle is for control of the narrative. Because if you have control over the outlets of information then your narrative gets out and everyone else is a "conspiracy theorist" who can be dismissed.
Or "anti-vaxx"
Or "racist"
Or "transphobic"
Or "liberal"
...etc.
Last time we tried that it ended up in the War of 1812.
I lived in Korea in the early 2000s before free trade happened and they were quite self-sufficient and proud of it.
Most of the cars were a little sad, but they could be repaired anywhere, and you could get a Matiz for a little more than a new scooter if you wanted.
Grocery stores were a little unusual. The Home Plus (a Samsung/Tesco partnership) had an entire aisle, a long one, of nothing but processed, tinned pork, and Spam was only a tiny section. Our first trip to the grocery store, we walked out with an overflowing shopping cart that was incredibly heavy and spent about $60USD.
People were tiny. When we started visiting again in 2012 there were a lot of properly fat people.
Self-sufficiency is a national virtue. Fuck globalism.
One commenter has suggested that Biden pushing the bill on taxpayers protects both the insurers and anyone that might be blamed in the related investigation.
You can bet your ass that the bridge won't get rebuilt in our lifetimes.
And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole.
"And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole."
Unfortunately for them, even the mighty G6 cannot occupy the same space as a Delta 757 with an ALL BLACK WOMYN crew!
Rob Schneider said it out loud:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KZ_rQ3Lt8jY
"WOOO!"
"What?"
I concur. They'll clear things at least and then the issue will sit dormant or "being studied" indefinitely. The port, associated businesses and their employees, plus all the commuters and companies that used the bridge, will simply have to deal with a considerably worse situation.
The rash of plane troubles are either narrative establishing efforts (by the media) to guide (ok, coerce) the public to a particular place, or they're a harbinger of things to come. Between this and the misprioritized hiring practices, all post-2021, I'm pretty content to stay on the ground and duke it out with the increasingly inept and comatose "driving" public.
I’d bet real money that a new bridge opens before 2030, and likely well before that.
It’s WAY too vital a piece of infrastructure to leave the ends of 695 dangling over the Patapsco like a tongue hanging out of a dead deer’s mouth to simply do nothing.
It will also be significantly easier to build a new bridge now that they don’t have to build it alongside an existing one, and they will not have to worry about diverting traffic.
We’re talking about one of the busiest roads systems in the country here, meaning one of the busiest in the world. There is no choice BUT to rebuild.
Minneapolis had the I35 bridge collapse in Aug 2007. The new one opened in Sept 2008. I expect this will be similar.
Yup. I've heard early estimates of December 2025. Now that feels very ambitious, but still. 2026 or 2027 is my early guess. I guess the Sunshine Skyway collapse in Tampa is similar to this, and that one did take 7 years or so to rebuild, but it was also over 40 years ago? This is a little more pressing than that one.
Source: I live here and know the hell that the commutes are gonna be with that bridge down and everyone having to go through the tunnels or the city.
At the time the bridge was built 50 years ago, the educated, informed decision was to build a tunnel that would not interfere with river traffic. Instead, to save money, a bridge with no redundancies to prevent catastrophic failure was built.
In the interest of time and money, a bridge again we will get.
Also, they don't let HAZMAT trucks in the tunnels. Nice to have the bridge to save a significant amount of time versus diverting all the way around the city.
That bridge carries more than 11 million cars per year. It is a key part of the Interstate 695 beltway around Baltimore, and one of three links that join the north and south halves of the city. The other two are bridges, which prohibit hazardous materials and have height and weight restrictions. That makes it a key link on trucking routes traversing I95, including those coming out of the Port of Baltimore, which handled $80B in cargo last year and is the 17th largest in the nation by tonnage.
I'd rather bet my ass that they're gonna rebuild that bridge as quickly as possible.
It's important to remember that the cranes that would have unloaded the containers are probably made by a Chinese company (in China) or a finnish company (with as much Chinese labor as they can get away with)
"This massive ship had just 22 crewmembers on board"
This is about what we had on board American flagged ships when I was sailing almost 35 years ago. Captain, 1st mate, 2nd mate and a 3rd mate. The mates all stand watch with 3 able bodied seamen (1 per watch) and maybe one ordinary seaman who usually works days giving us a deck compliment of 8. Engine Department had a Chief engineer, a 1st, 2nd, and two 3rd engineers. The Chief and the 1st don't stand watches, so you have three watchstanding engineers and three watchstanding oilers, maybe a day utility or electrician, and a wiper giving you an Engine Department of around 10. Steward Department is usually just 3, Chief Steward, Cook, and Steward's assistant. Also, our ships sometimes carried a radio operator but I didn't interact with them very much. Total of around 22. A steamship might have an extra third engineer or utility to help with heavy maintenance, so that's 23/24. That's really all you need.
None of these guys are going to be doing major repairs underway, especially on a diesel boat. I worked on the shore-gang for Sea-Land in Tacoma for a few months and we would swap out pistons or do other heavy work while the ship was in port for a turnaround and the engine was off, but most maintenance underway is simple preventative stuff like cleaning things like sea strainers or maybe cleaning a fuel oil purifier. Otherwise, an oiler is just keeping an eye on stuff, blowing down compressors and adjusting valves that control the seawater cooling to ensure everything is running alright.
I don't have experience with foreign officers but have heard that most of the officers from India have a good reputation. My guess is that the Officers are Indian and the crew from places like the Philippines. Again, all good workers with pretty good reputations - especially of they are working for a company like Maersk. It will be interesting to see what exactly happened.
thank you, sincerely, for the professional insights here. very helpful.
I'm totally taking credit for the Sobotka reference.
But I don't think you're going to hear a damn thing about their plight. Those guys were forgotten decades ago. You'll hear plenty from the Clay Davis types who are going to want a piece of the new bridge Biden already promised. Sheeeeeeeit.