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solowingpixy

the resident car guy

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joined 2022 September 05 02:43:31 UTC 

				
User ID: 410


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
solowingpixy


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
the resident car guy

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 02:43:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Wellness Wednesday for March 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you want some comedy (I like to laugh at my problems and I'm less in a mode of "active despair" and more "This place is a fucking joke, so I might as well laugh at it.), here are some highlights from my last month of the beer service technician life:


We're in week four of a fleetwide maintenance freeze. I'm driving 5K miles a month. It's been about 12K (pretty much all highway) miles since I last got an oil change, not like the engine is going to seize tomorrow but really not how one should treat a $30K truck. I did inspire a companywide "Hey, check your oil" message after a week of complaining that my truck was over a quart low on oil, asking for permission to top it off. I don't know if they forgot to pay the fleet maintenance bill or if the company is too broke to pay it, but it's not reassuring, and if this goes on long enough it's a race between one of my tires showing cords and the timing chain starting to get noisy. I'm going to laugh if the solution to the tire problem (right front tire is wearing very unevenly and the inner part is pretty much bald) is just to swap it with the spare (It is a full-size spare, so this would work.).


On a related note, apparently my district has the highest rate of unpaid invoices in the company, so we're going to have our line cleaners start badgering locations about unpaid invoices (Isn't this what our accounting department gets paid to do?). I got sent on a call to a place (to work on a 23 year old glycol chiller that's begging for death and gather details for a quote on a new chiller that will almost certainly be turned down) that just got current on an invoice from two years ago. Shockingly, they didn't have checks on site after being told they'd have to pay by check, so it looks like I'll be driving by tomorrow to collect (and probably hear about how said chiller isn't cooling sufficiently after having told the customer that calling an HVAC is most likely throwing good money after bad on it; playing bill collector at an ethnic restaurant with ESL staff is super fun).


We're really pushing it on some of these calls. We're charging full-price for preventative maintenances on keg boxes (These don't really have anything to "maintain" aside from cleaning the condenser coils and this practice was described as "ripping people off" by our CFO. Did I mention that I'm out of coil cleaner? I might get some more next week and was told to make due without it in the meantime instead of stopping at a store and buying some.). I drove 2.5 hours and charged a bar $180 ($65 for the part) to replace a shank on a keg box, really to replace the spacer (that we don't have in stock) that had cracked. I understand needing to charge a markup and labor, but this part can be ordered online for $20 and replaced in 15 slow-moving minutes. Needless to say, the customer was not amused (I was apparently the third person sent to fix this.) and paid up but asked that I express her displeasure to my boss.


I drove 10 hours round trip to install two shanks only to find that the parts I was sent with didn't fit. Why we ordered shanks 10.5 inches long (and waited months for said parts to be custom made) to replace parts ~2 inches long, I don't know. I drove six hours round trip to install a nitro infusion box because our install technician did a sufficiently shit job with a surly attitude on a previous install that the customer asked the we send anyone else. I drove eight hours round trip (complete with the CEO himself badgering my superiors asking for my ETA; would've been nice to have known the urgency of the situation or even what exactly I was supposed to be working on without having to call my supervisor and ask, and thank God it was a reset button because I didn't have the condenser fan I was sent to check on hand and/or would've felt like a total jackass telling the customer "I don't know why your compressor isn't turning on; call an HVAC tech.") to press a reset button (high pressure tripped out on the compressor of a glycol chiller). I all but wasted four days doing almost nothing (not that we had many calls to run anyway, and my boss didn't have access to our list of outstanding PMs until halfway through the month) waiting on a chiller to show up because we screwed up getting it shipped. These screwups, low call volume, and our huge service area make for a lot of one-call days and mostly two call days (or three easy, low-value calls), which makes it impossible for me to actually hit 40 hours a week, let alone the overtime I was promised. For example, today I was supposed to drive 2.5 hours to my first call, .5 hours from that location to the second call (actually reasonable!), 2 hours to the third call, and then 2 hours home (The third call canceled, so I was spared that in favor of a PM nearby. Too bad it was going to be the money-making call of the three.). This is not great when all three calls wind up being one hour, low-profit jobs.


On the bright side, I actually managed to catch my boss off the record at the bar and we had a relatively honest conversation (We both have about the same tenure in our current positions.) about things. She expressed mounting frustration with me repeatedly getting sent to undo install's fuckups (I don't care, but it's got to be screwing with her numbers, as is having to scrounge for blatant make-work for lack of calls or access to the PM list.), inventory (or lack thereof; we had to punt a job for another week because we don't have the materials needed to do it, and had to split a job a job with another company because we didn't have a secondary gas regulator in stock) issues, and constant issues with line cleaners' personal vehicle reimbursement (chronically being paid out late and/or less than promised) causing endless drama. She fessed up that she and her immediate superior really were told when I was recruited to the company that said reimbursement was going to be a lot better than it wound up being, that multiple friends of hers that she'd referred to the company had been "screwed" by this, and that she and her boss had been made to look dishonest. Apparently whoever was in charge of rolling out the vehicle reimbursement had the ratio of company owned vehicles to employee owned vehicles backwards (70/30 in favor of company vehicles when the actual ratio was 30/70) such that the company was blindsided by the expense of reimbursing line cleaners for using their vehicles (Before covid every employee got a company car, but they had to sell off most of them to survive the shutdown.).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In my opinion as an alcoholic barfly who actually worked for the bar for a few years: maybe (in the right bar in the right location, but sure as shit not the bar I worked at), but no. For context, the bar I worked at catered (or at least aspired to cater) to grad students and professors in a college town, wound up being a hangout for retired/nearly retired professionals during happy hour and townie millennials during night shift (This demographic is rapidly aging out of the bar scene to an extent that the bar faces an existential crisis because Gen Z doesn't really drink that much.)


The odds are long, and worsened by the fact that bars are A. sausagefests and B. often skew old in their clientele. The drinks are cheaper at the place I worked at, $10-$12 cocktails, yes, but we also sell $2 PBR pints as long as the distributor doesn't screw up and run out of them, $4 domestics (including Miller Lite and Yuengling pint cans, Budweiser stuff comes in 12oz bottles), and $8 shifties (any domestic plus any well shot; my usual is a Budweiser with a shot of Jameson). You justify the cost because you like drinking and talking, and while getting laid probably isn't in the cards a good conversation probably is. As the millennials age out even the "interesting conversation" part is starting to become questionable.


In my experience young (and especially young and attractive) women rarely come to the bar alone, usually with a friend/spouse or in a group of friends who are having their own conversation and don't want an outsider butting in. There aren't dramatic rejections; you just pick up on the fact that you're not part of the group and that their conversation, game, or whatever was for them, not for you. The rare young woman who does show up alone (usually in-between relationships) will be subject to insane amounts of competition for attention from every single guy aged 21-80. The older guys have the money to buy her drinks and are sexually non-threatening, and thus will win most of her attention.


Very early millennial to Gen X and older women (and men) tend to be way less introverted and more willing to talk. It's hard to pry younger people away from their phones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.


Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.


I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.


If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.


Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.


As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.


In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I just finished Metro 2033. I'd liked the game some time ago, was bereft of things to do (not terribly sick, but just enough to deter me from my usual weekend plan of socializing at the bar) and figured I'd brush back up on it before deciding whether or not to go for purchasing Metro: Exodus because I wasn't really feeling another replay of Far Cry 4, 5, or New Dawn (FC6 was just too bad to play through IMO).


It was a slog for most of it, the (translated into English) prose not entertaining enough in its own right to carry the slow pace before the plot got into gear. The last third of it was good enough to make me consider Metro 2034 and Metro 2035. If nothing else, reading Metro 2034 will be a shorter time investment than replaying the first two games.


For more fun junk food, I recently polished off the latest of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn series. Basically, imagine a Tom Clancy novel set in a contemporary American civil war-like scenario and see also: Kurt Schlicter's People's Republic* series. Both are fun if cheesy, the perfect sort of book to kill a long day of flying with, but IMO Blue Dawn was just a bit better/more compelling even if the editing could've used some work.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not OP, but no.


If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.


Supermajority black places in America tend to suck either because they're super rural literal plantation country equivalents to the crappy left-behind parts of Appalachia (The black belt in Alabama is like this.), or because they had/have sufficiently severe crime problems that all middle class people including the black middle class fled the place.


If anything, judging by hiring patterns alleged and observed I'd be fascinated to see where various immigrant groups rank in terms of in-group bias. Alas, the famous graph had small sample sizes for even black and Hispanic Americans and the Asian-American sample was so small as to be useless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think it's so much that (The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.) as a bias toward "low rates good", belief that inflation was "transitory" and would correct itself more quickly than it did (Strictly speaking, it was, in the sense that inflation in the late 40s was also transitory.), and fear that raising rates would slow down the economy more than it did (Volker's rate hikes made for a nasty recession in the early 80s.). There's also the inconvenient problem that high rates are bad for the government's balance sheet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is sickening, but that's the world. Absent foreign intervention (and Ukraine has been lavishly supplied by foreign benefactors relative to the Confederacy) Ukraine finds itself in roughly the same situation as the Southern Confederacy did during the American Civil War (and the combat looks a lot like the eastern theater of that war, aka. a static attritional grind with both sides unable to adapt to the fact that technological advances have invalidated their tactics,), outnumbered by the foreign enemy and stuck with frontier territories of dubious loyalty (There are probably more Ukrainians fighting in the Russian army than all foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine combined. General Sherman's personal escort during the March to the Sea was a cavalry regiment from north Alabama.).


As a Southerner, at what point did/does the dying cease to be worth it? In retrospect I find myself angry with the likes of Jefferson Davis, brave with the lives of people like me and for what? Being perpetually poorer than the north? The "slaveocracy" whose idea of white supremacy was to import, support, and nourish ever more non-whites? The CSA richly deserved to die, and the only tragedy is that Southerners were shockingly able and brave enough to keep the war going and incur genocide-tier casualties in doing so. Ukraine pre-2014 had transformed itself from one of the better off Soviet republics to one of the poorest countries in Europe, literally worse off than Belarus.


I don't proclaim myself able to speak for Russians or Ukrainians, but from my perspective as an American this war isn't our war. I don't like the eastern-European emigres who have far too much influence in our government. There isn't going to be justice in that region. Justice probably entails digging up the graves of those responsible for failing to manage the fragmentation of the USSR into at least a customs union.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don’t actually believe Russia has an overly functional nuclear arsenal




Why do so many people say this about Russia, but not China, India, or Pakistan? Say what you want about Russian military performance in Ukraine, their equipment does conspicuously seem to work. The armored vehicles run, drive, and shoot things (Even the Ukrainian T-64s, which had a reputation for being garage queens during the Cold War, don't seem to elicit complaints about being unreliable.). Their planes fly and drop bombs. Even their navy, ridiculously expensive method of storing and launching cruise missiles that it's been in this war, has to be blown up by Ukrainians to sink, and the missiles do launch and hit things if not shot down first. My Twitter feed is bereft of Russian missiles blowing up during launch N-1 style.


Their rockets were recently considered good enough to send American astronauts on. Ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads aren't exactly new technology. "Lol their nukes don't work." strikes me as the same caliber of cope as 2022 predictions that Russian military logistics would collapse for lack of tires.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For me, the frustrating part is that I could be a lot better at this, but the training was just so limited that there's far too much that I don't know or don't know enough about to speak with confidence on. Post training, the problem has been similar to the problem I had during training: most of our calls are fairly unsophisticated stuff and our call volume has been low, so it's hard to learn and retain knowledge. TBH, while my supervisor is prone to excessively exuberant positivity, it appears that our standards are just low (in keeping with the pay).


During a call earlier this week I noticed a massive nitrogen leak on something someone else had done (I suspected us due to the fact that the gas lines were the same brand we use.), due to the fact that every crimp connection on a splitter was loose (fitting was too small for the size of gas line used, clamps can only do so much). I mentioned it to my supervisor and she laughed; apparently we installed that setup last year. I don't know if it was our install team (wouldn't be the first time) or the previous service tech (also wouldn't be the first time) that did it, nor am I immune to making mistakes, but come on, at least make sure your crimp connections are tight. Oh, and to add insult to injury the same supervisor forgot to add a gas regulator to the quote on the job I did. I should've caught that (and called my boss and was like "I feel like I'm missing something here."), but for some dumb reason I assumed that the pressure straight out of the non-adjustable blend box would be okay to run cold brew coffee since it isn't carbonated. Our parts inventory is a total shitshow so our other guy who could've done it today didn't have a regulator, nor did we have one in our storage unit, but I have two in my truck (but was on a call 200 miles away from where he was), so I get to drive 5 hours round trip to deliver him a regulator tomorrow and run one call, with another call possible/probable depending on customer approval.


The drive time can wear on you (I was a delivery driver for 14 years and loved it, but driving on the interstate is mind-numbingly boring.). If I'm lucky my calls are an hour away. My shortest drive this week has been two hours to the first call, 90 minutes home from the second call. Three days with 5 hour round-trip drives. I drove six hours round trip today to sell a restaurant manager a $30 coupler and tell her that her line was foaming because that product was either improperly handled, defective from the brewery, or had a bad keg seal (My guess is one of the first two because the seal looked fine, but I'm certain it was a bad keg. If you swap products to different tap lines and the problem follows the keg, it's the keg.). We charged her nearly $500 in labor for drive time (not so much because of pure distance, but because it was to a part of the state that we don't normally do much business in). I get that we quoted her that much in hopes that she'd call someone else, and it's not my fault that the restaurant manager didn't think to swap the kegs before assuming that her system was broken, but man it's hard not to feel like a bit of an asshole when presenting that invoice for 30 minutes of work.


Apparently I have a call lined up next week that's a 9-10 hour round trip drive for a 1-2 hour job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This job fuckin’ sucks, man!


I’ve been meaning to write this update for 4-6 weeks, but here we are. The last week of training wasn’t any more illuminative than the three before it (for the same reason; low call volume; my trainer apologized to me several times for the “bullshit training” that I was receiving), and apparently the folks up north had intended to keep me for more time to make up for the slow pace, but due to communications SNAFUs they called it at that and sent me on my own.


The first week on my own nearly broke me. Lots of calls, almost all far away, and I barely/didn’t know what I was doing. Too slow/disorganized and not good at diagnosing, and there was one particular call where I had what I thought was the gas leak isolated to a bank of four lines and just couldn’t find it. I found and fixed a leak, but it wasn’t the leak. Not being able to fix a problem bothers me in a way that I can best describe as ego-killing, and adding salt to the wound my supervisor got bitched at for me getting too many hours when four out of five days involved 5-hour round trips between the calls and home (Uh, I was under the impression that overtime was expected with this position. I drive more than any service tech in the company due to the low-density market I work in.), which in turn meant that I got bitched at/nagged to take lunch breaks. Apparently the company is in the middle of an overtime crackdown. I asked to be demoted to line cleaning and was denied.


Since then, things have been weird and, well, slow. I have good calls and bad calls, and have gotten better at not letting the bad calls make me want to end it all (I’m not being serious, wasn’t in any danger then and am far from it now, but good God those first few weeks were rough.) while allowing myself to feel good about the good calls. We’ve been so dead in service that I’ve been repeatedly sent to cover line cleaning routes for lack of service calls.


The problem is twofold: The first one is the most clinical. I don’t make enough money at this job to afford doing it long term. Adjusted for inflation, I make about what I did delivering pizza for Papa John’s 10 years ago and could probably match or beat it if I went back to the Papa. I could almost certainly make more money delivering pizza for Domino’s. Overtime hasn’t happened, so I’m stuck in the worst-case situation where I drive 10 hours a week for free (first and last hours of one’s daily driving are unpaid) and simultaneously struggle to get close to 40 hours a week. It’s a nonexistent to negligible gross raise and a significant hourly pay cut.


The second problem is that I mostly hate this job. I’m better at not taking it personally, but I’m not good at correcting foaming beer problems. I’ve gotten better at finding gas leaks but am far from a maestro. I’m not as fast as I would like to be but I’m getting better at putting kegboxes together (I didn’t know how much that aspect of the job would resemble working in construction.) I can change parts and within the parameters I’m trained on (aka. Not involving the HVAC side of things) I like working on glycol chillers, if only because the problem is usually obvious (My most common calls there are either a broken/ pump/motor, failed temperature controller, or total loss of coolant due to a coolant leak.).


My supervisor is blowing nothing but sunshine up my ass about how great of a job I’m doing and judging by the shoddy previous work we’ve done I’ve had to correct on some calls I’m at least partially inclined to believe her, even adjusting for the fact that we’re longtime friends, but I don’t feel like I do a good job. I’ve done some good jobs and gotten lucky draws here and there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m good at my job. Good would mean fixing the hard calls. As of last Friday I was allegedly the top-grossing service tech in the company for the month of February (This probably means that I was the only one to install a glycol chiller, our biggest ticket item.), something that “never happens” coming from my market. If true (and I don’t think she’s lying), my response is less self-congratulation and more “Holy fuck, I guess everyone else is as dead as I am or worse, because I’m not doing shit and my sales are well below the old goal to make commission.”.


The good news is that I should be able to pass a drug test (My new year’s resolution was slow to get off the ground, but I’m pushing six weeks without fake weed, and I don’t really miss it.) as of next week and start shotgunning applications. I don’t know what or where to do next, but this ain’t it. If I fail such that I’m still working here mid-April, I’ll make my one year anniversary and get a week of paid vacation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Depends on the job, I guess, and I haven't taken the test in awhile. I usually get ISTP, but if I'm emotionally dysregulated (therapy-speak for "excessively stuck in my feelings, usually with a connotation of despair and self-pity but on rare occasions excitement?!) I'll score ISFP, and while I haven't taken those tests in 5-10 years I would consider myself a lot more extroverted than I did then (but probably not enough to earn an E over I).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm kind of there right now. I had a successful gig in food delivery (owner's crony/right hand man at a small company) for a long time before the market got oversaturated/our customers got broken by post-covid inflation and the company I worked for had the bottom fall out and blundered into the draft beer industry, which is also facing rough times (or, at least, my company is; I'm apparently the top grossing service technician in the company for this month right now and that's insane because I'm A. straight out of half-assed training and barely/not competent at my job and B. have been so slow that I haven't hit 40 hours in three consecutive weeks).


I loathe my job and can't afford to live on what I'm making, but I have enjoyed working on glycol refrigeration units (They're the closest thing to working on cars in this job, and that's the vocational area I have past experience/strength in.) so I'm thinking that I should look into working on refrigerators.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.


I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.


One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					




Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.


The only way that America will get either of those things will be in the name of of bailing out the Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Anti-old paramilitaries? Welfare for the old has been a core Democratic policy for nearly 100 years at this point, and old women are arguably their most loyal demographic. Add in the medical practitioners and their auxiliaries whose jobs are to care for the old in some variety and you have a massive chunk of the Democratic coalition.


Democrats at best are every bit as much a party of Gerontocracy as the Republicans are, if not moreso.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As an American it remains an insane oddity to me that Pakistan wasn't given the Gulf War treatment in 1998 after its nuclear tests. We didn't even totally suspend aid!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Disability prevalence is geographically concentrated, but largely in dying to dead rural areas where the working-age adult population skews old and uneducated and non-physically demanding jobs are scarce, but rents are cheap enough that it's viable to eke out a living on federal benefits, places like Hale County, Alabama, also profiled here by NPR.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm a big fan of the Car Scanner app. Combined with a $20 Amazon OBDII reader the free with ads version is highly useful for the shadetree mechanic on a budget.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Another update to the situation.


The job situation is...meh. On one hand, the company fixed the issue of commission being unattainable by scrapping it in favor of a modest hourly raise. If I get the sort of overtime I anticipate (10 hours of OT a week) the new position will at least constitute a meaningful raise, hopefully one where I can start getting ahead even if it won't get me to pre-covid financial status. Mercifully, the company saw fit to send me home for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's and run odd jobs instead of marooning me out of town "training" during slow weeks.


On the other hand, the hours are not fun and training has not been going well. The devil's bargain in "You'll get a lot of hours" is "You'll usually do two hours of unpaid drive time a day, one there and one back.". It's a first world complaint, but I didn't get to have much of a NYE party because I'd worked over 12 hours (including 5 hours of driving there and back) starting at 6AM so I was done for by midnight. The company truck I drive has been this market's service truck since April of '22 and has nearly 150,000 miles on it, so I'm looking at driving a shade over 1K miles a week.


Training has not been what I was hoping for. There's been no theoretical/classroom type training or assigned reading at all (I suppose I should just start binge-watching Micro Matic's Youtube channel.). I feel like it took me far too long to learn what, say, a John Guest fitting is. Service call volume has been very slow in the training market so most of what we've been doing has been low complexity. The week before Christmas was a joke in which we barely averaged a call a day and I found myself organizing shelves in the warehouse. I came in hoping to address my weakest area (troubleshooting a malfunctioning draft system) and I feel like I've made very limited progress there (because we've done very little diagnostic work). What diagnosis work I have seen us do has been of mixed quality and has often struck me more as guessing and aiming the parts cannon. I've been sent on service calls back home and feel like an incompetent hack because I can't give a diagnosis that I'm confident in and/or take far too long on a given job because I'm doing things that I've never done before and spend forever rifling through the truck to find the tools/materials in the truck (I'm going to have to reorganize that thing because it's a barely organized ADHD hoarder mess and it's somebody else's mess.). I am aware that theses things will improve with experience, but I was really hoping to get more of experience during training. Here's hoping this last week out of town will be better in that regard.


Installing cooler units is technically simple but can be brutal if they're mounted high on the wall or in the ceiling. The one we did involved (after removing the existing 100lb) manhandling a 150lb cooler unit up a ladder with one assistant below onto a wall mount 8 feet off the ground, using adjacent shelving for assistance. The 100lb one wasn't fun but was doable. The 150lb one exceeded the limits of my upper body strength (which isn't great due to a half-useless arm from a football injury). Aggravating the problem, the new cooler was larger and didn't really fit on the shelf, and we lacked the tools or materials to revise or replace the mount, so we made it "fit" (The install looked like shit, the sort of stuff you'd take pictures of to post a bad review.). I have no idea how they're getting these things into ceilings on top of the cooler without some variety of mechanical assistance. The only silver lining I have on that job is that I was probably getting sick without realizing it at the time, which probably didn't do my my lifting strength any favors.


TL;DR, I'll make at this job and give it a fair chance for a few months out of training, but it's probably going to be another trip to the occupational drawing board.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Stop smoking weed. It's not that I'm a big stoner or have ever been, but I dabbled in weed vapes a bit because they're by far the cheapest way to get intoxicated and it's just a waste of time. Aside from being high being kind of fun I can't think of any real positive. I tend to wind up staying up too late/sleeping poorly and get nothing done around the house/at all. I also really need to get a better job soon and pissing hot on a drug test isn't a restriction I can afford right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would add (while still oversimplifying; Japanese history is not my strong suit) that there was a strong internal rivalry between the army (who wanted to fight the USSR) and the navy (who wanted to fight the US/UK). The army faction sort of got their wish in 1938-9 but blew it by being defeated by the Soviets (General Zhukov won his first big victory there.) and were in turn discredited in favor of the naval faction.


This scene depicting that battle is hilariously inaccurate in some ways (No, the Japanese weren't using Kamikaze trucks; they had tanks, planes, and artillery of their own.), but the moral of "Oh fuck, the Soviets have more tanks." was true. Unfortunately for Japan, America had just as much overmatch in ship and airplane production as the Soviets did in tank production.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've lived in Alabama my whole life. Spoiler alert: our second generation Indians are plenty fat themselves, my personal favorites being the one who talks endlessly about his bodybuilding/going to the gym (He's not fat now, but nowhere near as buff as you would expect for someone who allegedly puts that much effort into the gym.) but is so lazy that he refused to change his own tire for years and the professor's kid who had a master's in economics but couldn't quite hack delivering pizza (The latter also happens to be one of the most insufferably arrogant and patronizing people I've ever met. He once told me that delivering pizza burns 250 calories an hour and that sort of fat logic, my friends, is how you wind up morbidly obese.).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not sure what insurance actually adds to the system




Health insurance companies are a tax collector (and insurance premiums a de facto payroll tax) that doesn't get voted out of office for raising middle/upper-middle class taxes, unlike politicians. Also, they (and the provider-level admins fighting them) are a massive white collar welfare program, with millions of marginally to highly educated workers drawing salaries to perform the office work equivalent of digging holes and filling them back up again for no reason.