solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.
Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.
The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).
I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.
Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.
How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.
The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.
I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.
Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15d ago
It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.
With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.
My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.
I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.
Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.
On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
30d ago
I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.
It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).
As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.
Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).
My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).
Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Much to my chagrin as a Raider fan, Harbaugh really does seem to be doing an admirable job of turning the Chargers around. It's infuriating that all three of our division rivals (even the Broncos are much improved) have had the good fortune and sense to hire known quantity, "can't go wrong" coaches and should be set for the next decade while we're going to have to undergo a total rebuild.
On the bright side, seeing the Charger turnaround at least leads me to believe that Tom Telesco can drastically improve the talent level on the Raider roster, assuming he can get us an at least decent quarterback. The Chargers have always had a talented, if underachieving roster while the Raider roster has been chronically talent-poor such that it's hard to tell where the roster problems end and coaching problems begin. The two feed each other given that only risky young coaches or known mediocre retreads will touch our current roster. Unfortunately nothing about his Chargers tenure or what we're doing this year leads me to believe that he can find the right coaching staff. We wasted Carr's prime years on a rebuild that never produced even an average defense and I'm afraid that we're going to run Maxx Crosby into the ground before we get an offense worthy of his effort.
As much as I don't want to blame Mark Davis for everything (IMO JDR and Gruden were probably the best coaches available in those given years, even though he overpaid for Gruden by giving him GM powers.), hiring Josh McDaniels (He really must have a silver tongue.) was so monumentally stupid that I'm at a loss for words, especially after we had a front row seat to his wrecking of the Broncos.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
2004 was a rough time to be a liberal. Dubya won an election that was close, but not that close, and massively improved his numbers with Hispanic voters compared to 2000. The GOP won its fifth straight House election (and actually had a capable Speaker) and a 55 seat Senate majority. If you were a doomer, Bill Clinton was looking like he papered over a losing platform with sheer charisma and the blue dog Democrats were not quite dead but dying fast. Unless you were paying attention to Illinois politics, you'd probably not heard of Barack Obama.
For fun, here's a bit of what passed for terminally online leftism back during the W era. For bonus points, here's his predicting that Hillary would lose back in '05, and his take on the Borderers long before Scott Alexander.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Find someone you need to stay alive to piss off. Maybe it's an actual person, maybe it's an inner critic, the weak part of yourself that wants to give up, whatever, doesn't matter. Spite is a powerful motivator (at least, it is for me). Leverage the worst parts of yourself to motivate you. A most base example: I don't want to lose weight because I care about my health, but because I'm vain.
With that, I'm not sure of your background, expectations for life, age (I'm guessing mid-late 30s), etc. but for me (possibly one of the bigger fuckups on this forum) I look at it this way: I had a shrink throw up his hands during a consultation and ask how I was still alive. I took it as an insult. Sure, my life was intolerable at the time (as opposed to this time if I seek therapy again, where it's more a case of "I need to get better, decommission the neon sign on my head that attracts dysfunctional people into my life, and quit making shitty decisions to get where I want to be"), but I wasn't ready to quit (In fact, I sought therapy because my lifestyle at 23 was going to get me killed and a recent near-death experience had made me realize that I wanted to live.).
I've wasted most of my adult life, and at the age of 33 am giving it a half-assed go at getting things together, getting a career, and getting toxic people who use me and drag me down out of my life. Do I expect a happy ending with a family? No, I'd love one but am hoping for a smart but neurotic woman who also missed the boat and whose crazy clicks with mine, a partner to complain about the world with. Do I want to finally be a career man to impress my father? No, my easy gravy train job went out of business and I'm tired of being broke, dealing with roommate drama, and driving a 15 year old piece of shit car that I have to work on regularly.
I'm not exactly an AA success story, but I quit being a terrible (drinking until blackout every night) alcoholic the same way. At some point in my late 20s I just ran out of energy and got tired of feeling like shit every day, so I cut down on drinking, have days (sometimes multiple in a row!) where I don't drink at all, etc. and I don't wake up hating myself most of the time. I recently encountered a 36 year old CA who drinks like I did when I was 22 and good God now I understand why the 8th Step exists.
I guess the moral of the story is to use what you want to be as a goal for the future rather than a cudgel to beat yourself up with now. Ask yourself: "Am I a better man than I was yesterday, last week, month, year, etc?" If you can honestly answer with a "yes", you're on the right path.
Tl;dr, ground your expectations.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.
Eh, Plan B became OTC for 17 and over in 2006 and for all ages in 2014. Last I checked, a course on Plan B is $20 at your local Walmart. I'd say that counts as "recent" and "fantastically effective".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I would also end all teen-pregnancy prevention programs, as they don't stop working when you turn 20.
This. Aside from the fact that most of America's fertility drop has been due to a wildly successful campaign against teen pregnancy (and say what you want about red states and their goofy abstinence only sex-ed, but red states had the biggest declines such that Alabama's teen fertility rate today is about where Massachusetts was in 2005), people don't stop seeing themselves as "young" upon turning 18 or 22. In my "millennial who grew up watching "16 and pregnant" cohort, the change seems to happen around 30 (when people either have a fairly stable career or have figured out that it's unlikely to happen) if at all, with many either missing the boat entirely or having trouble conceiving that they wouldn't have had 10 years ago.
Aside from being unconvinced that any pro-natalist policy within the currently acceptable Overton window would work, I am simultaneously convinced that the best solution to the problem is to just get rid of the mountains of still existing anti-natal policy that we take for granted as normal. An example of this is the government attempting to reconcile the fact that college educated people are richer by spending tons of money to make more people college educated (a massively time-consuming, K-selected career path).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I'm not necessarily in favor of such a policy (because said policy would open Pandora's box in terms of parties trying to engineer the franchise in their favor), and it would be more complicated than the status quo, but pretty much every parent files a state and local tax return in which they claim their children as dependents, so presumably it would be as easy as "anyone who claims a dependent child gets to vote".
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
So far in my SEC college town one could be forgiven for not knowing that an election is happening at all. I've seen one Harris bumper sticker, while Biden had a fair amount in 2020 and Bernie had an overwhelming amount back in '16. There are Trump stickers and signs, but not as many as in '16 or '20 so much as just the normal level of background noise.
Then again, there isn't a Senate election (and Doug Jones' campaign did far more than the necrotizing corpse that is the Alabama Democratic Party), there isn't going to be a single competitive House election, and Trump is going to win the state by something like 20 points (My only object of curiosity is how many counties he can break 90% of the vote in.) so neither party is spending any money (and they're probably both depleted after litigating over whether or not to impose another VRA minority opportunity district upon the state).
It's nice in the sense that I'd really rather not talk about politics with normies when I'm out at the bar (Thankfully, we have football to keep us distracted throughout the election cycle.), but it makes for a weird bubble that along with being overly online makes it difficult to have any sort of intuition as to what people are thinking out in the real world.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
Eh, the lack of success of dissident Russian liberals in their own country suggests that that ordinary Russians don't buy them. That said, one of my dear Russian-American (The mix of vestigial Russian accent plus taught in law school Southern accent is hilarious.) friends who I have an incredible amount of respect for (He's both genuinely smarter than me and vastly more driven.) used to be an uncritically turbo-America neocon who mocked me for my cynicism (I was an unironic Paultard in those days. Ah, high school.) and now is a pro-Trumper so disillusioned (and ruined in his Slavic friend group over the Z question, being unable to hide his great Russian chauvinism) that he moved to China.
I'd spend a lot of money for the privilege of a night talking with Artem in a bar (tough shit for me; he doesn't drink).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Why appeal to moderates when you don't have to? The formative experience for the modern Democratic party is the FDR-LBJ era when they wiped the GOP off the map for a generation and held the House for 48/52 years from 1933 to 1993. Anything less is apostasy to them, and they still haven't forgiven Gingrich for having the temerity to actually win and do something for once.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
In 1960, the median family that was black or living in greater Appalachia wasn't living that much better than the 1860 median family.
Uh, no. I'm from greater Appalachia, TVA country. If you'd said 1920 or 1930 (I chose those dates deliberately because IMO given the choice contemporary neoliberals would've never electrified the South.) I might've agreed with you but rural white Southerners wouldn't have worshipped FDR/Truman and the Democrats 50 years past their terms if things hadn't gotten better when they were in office.
My Silent Gen grandparents were lucky to have 8th grade educations, worked in the fields as children, and went hungry such that they hoarded canned goods in their old age. My Gen X parents had 12th grade educations, didn't starve, and didn't endure child labor. People are nostalgic for the mid 20th century not just because of social mores but because we had incredible economic growth that we haven't come close to matching in the 21st century even with a giant immigration wave (Keep in mind that all that mid 20th century economic growth happened with de facto closed borders.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
IMO your last paragraph nails the problem, though I'd caution that the 2010-2020 GOP was built on demographic quicksand (because REDMAP was that good, and Democratic gains from '06-08 were reliant on a lot of soon to die blue dog Democrats).
What was the signature accomplishment of the Obama era GOP? Legislatively? I dunno? Shrinking the stimulus a bit? Scuttling the Iran Deal? SCOTUS killed 50 state Medicaid expansion? Meanwhile, the SCOTUS majority that voted liberal against W's signature culture war issue (same-sex marriage, and Trump's justices did the same with Bostock) was 40% Republican appointed. Why lie down and think of the courts when Republican-appointed justices turn liberal almost as quickly as Republicans can appoint them?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Update:
The roommate is gone, as is his annoying not housebroken dog. Kicking him out wasn’t as hard as I’d expected, and that fact leaves me with more self-recrimination than relief. I aggravated an ankle and pulled some muscle or ligament in my hip moving his bariatric chair out of my place but that was worth it (and both are progressively hurting less day by day such that I’m confident that I didn’t hurt anything serious; I’m just on the wrong side of thirty and out of shape so these things happen when lifting heavy things and moving them in weird ways) I should have done this years ago and my failure to do so cost me an enormous amount of money. I take no relish in the situation I’ve exiled him to (a tenuous couch surfing situation in a cluttered up house that smells in a way that just stresses me out the moment I walk in the door, and I am pretty lazy/lenient about cleanliness.), but I had to do it. My obligations toward him ended long ago, I have to defend myself, and I’ll leave it at that. He muttered something about contacting his family up north and that’ll probably be the correct course of action for him to take.
I’m relaxing right now with my door open, cats going in and out, and the A/C turned off like I like it (I’m bad about forgetting to turn the A/C back on and he’d pitch a fit about it.). The last week or so has been a rough mess of feeling badly emotionally dysregulated but as I’m typing this I feel like I’m on the other side of it and past the worst of it. If everything goes right and I don’t happen upon anything better to do I plan on renting a carpet cleaner and deep-cleaning the apartment over the weekend.
This is what winning looks like. Maybe I don’t have it in me to feel satisfaction or elation over finally fixing my own fuckup but I do feel relief. I feel at peace. I appreciate everyone here (and my IRL friends) who pushed me to quit putting off/tolerating things and get rid of him. To my buddy RJ in particular, you don't owe me shit. Sure, I covered a $70 or so tab and stayed out with you on Sunday night till the bars closed against my better judgment but you busted your ass helping me move his stuff with little notice. You're a true friend and I'll never forget that.
IMO people will keep saying "Get a Honda/Toyota" as long as 15-20 year old Corollas and Civics (and Camrys/Accords) are still superior to their competition, and IMO they mostly still are (With that, IMO some Ford and GM models are underrated.). Reputations will remain stickier as the average car continues to get older, and the average vehicle in the US is nearly 13 years old (and the average car is 14 years old!).
With that, for Chrysler it wasn't just the 2.7 V6, but the Neons that blew headgaskets, 4 speed auto transmissions made out of paper mache throughout the 90s and early 2000s, LH and cloud cars that just fell apart in a hurry, and pickup trucks that, Cummins diesels aside, are the worst of the big three (They're nice, but they fall apart fast and have relatively poor resale value.). The 300s/Challengers/Chargers are reliable as far as I'm aware, but guzzle gas so they aren't really economical and are police magnets in certain areas.
Subaru IMO is unique enough (AWD in all their cars) that their customers are willing to tolerate issues like the EJ's headgaskets that other brands couldn't get away with. VW/Audi IMO have improved a lot since the crap they were churning out in the early 2000s, and German car buyers are less sensitive about long-term reliability since they are the most likely to lease their vehicles instead of buying them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Eh, I'm a bit more sanguine. Firstly, Trump supporters were probably high on copium before the candidate switch, and even Biden probably could have tightened things up a bit before the election.
Vance is disappointingly bad at message discipline (Please don't publicly project your mommy issues into your politics about women!) and the "hillbilly who made it out" schtick can be grating (I say this is someone from a close enough background that I I want to like him, but it comes across as less sincere than it probably is.), but it's entirely possible that the Democrats will stoop to their level and be emotionally indulgent with their own VP pick (Mayor Pete or Beshear, also a possibility that 2028 frontrunners are trying to stay out of it.) and in the end I don't think VP matters much or that Trump had a slam dunk option (DeSantis isn't any less awkward at Trump's style of campaigning.). It could have been worse; he could have picked Tommy Tuberville.
Harris will definitely be better at fundraising than Biden was, but I'm not sure how much that moves the needle on its own. She will definitely supercharge enthusiasm among the media, college educated women, etc. but those are the groups that needed the least persuasion in the first place and were unlikely to forget to vote or defect to Trump. Harris remains relatively untested at things that aren't intra Democratic Party politics and is likely to remain weak in the Midwestern swing states that actually matter for winning the electoral college. The Trump campaign can hit her for things she said during the 2020 primary while trying to outflank Biden from the left.
I expect polls to tighten up and that Harris will definitely get a DNC bounce, but we'll know more in a few weeks to a month where things really stand. With that, as much as I wanted DeSantis the first place I don't think he would be running away with this either. Presidential elections are hard and Republicans being bad at winning them has been an issue for them since Reagan was no longer leading the charge.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
There probably are better bars, and it also depends on what time you're going in. Happy hour is usually going to be a bunch of old men (who can be surprisingly cliquish!) and if you're lucky people 35-55 in for a drink or few after work (These can make for decent conversation.). The younger crowd are rarely going to be there before 9-10PM.
With that, I work at a bar (a cocktail bar that's more divey than it wishes it was) in a college town where the night shift mostly caters to grad students (Well, it wishes it could get more grad students in.), millennial hipsters, and the occasional disgruntled faculty members and actual, interesting conversations can be hard to come by. It's not so much that people aren't willing to talk to strangers (This does vary by age; Gen X and up are more receptive to this and Millennials and Gen Z less so.) as the fact that they usually go out with their spouse or in friend groups that take up most/all of their attention (This is especially true of Millennial/Gen Z women, who tend to go out in groups to avoid conversations with unattached men.). The vast majority of the single unaccompanied patrons are single men that are varying degrees of loser. Working at a bar will improve your social/conversational skills and I imagine that being a patron could as well but unless you enjoy drinking first and foremost it's IMO a really inefficient way to meet people and make friends. At least, it is at the place I work at and the other bars in town are either the same or worse (clientele I don't like, too loud to talk, too dead, etc.). Most of the time it's either the same regulars I deal with (and as bad as the alcoholics can be, the weirdos who don't drink are worse) either every shift or at least once a week or, worse, the place gets taken over by over-40s out for the weekend/for some nearby event that I have little to no interest in talking to. When I was working there consistently I'd say that I had a genuinely interesting conversation with someone new or who wasn't a regular once every 4-6 weeks.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Maybe it's generational
In my experiences working at a bar, it's definitely generational. Gen X and older of both sexes are vastly more receptive to conversations with strangers than millennials and younger. In particular, young women tend to go out in friend groups that aren't all that welcoming to outsiders, meaning that the rare unaccompanied young woman that is receptive to conversations tends to immediately become the subject of competition for the attention of every single man in the place.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.
As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.
I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.
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.
More options
Context Copy link