solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22hr ago
It feels like we broke something that was working perfectly fine, and now we're trying to fix it with band-aids.
Low fertility and increased lifespan probably would've broken it on its own. Mass divorce and familial dysfunction just poured salt on the wound, transforming "part of life" into a potentially Sisyphean burden. What happens when it's not "sweet grandma" but a malingering, toxic trainwreck that the children have spent years doing their best to avoid?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23hr ago
And for some reason young people seem completely oblivious as to how much of their taxes flow to the old, and suggesting you redistribute this somewhat triggers empathy and accusations of killing your sweet grandma.
People are irrational about it (mostly in the sense of being unaware that a mass-affluent elderly upper-middle class is very much a new thing) and old people are going to be the beneficiaries of a ton of idiotic slopulism as the median age marches ever higher, but boomer (and soon to be Gen X) luxury communism is an indirect subsidy to the working age who would otherwise be expected to care for/house their elderly/infirm relatives, an especially acute problem in an era of inverted population pyramids and increased lifespans. Imagine being an only child to parents who had you fairly old and both wind up dying of drawn out illnesses (This gets really fun if they're divorced and don't live near each other.) It would be hard to be a net loser in such a scenario as a Joe or Jane 30 to 40-something average taxpayer if the government is picking up the tab. Worse, while the old are collectively wealthy, that wealth is very unevenly distributed. For the under through lower-middle class Social Security/Medicare/Disability are the only reason most get to retire and maintain the polite fiction of being financially independent. For the upper-middle class, boomer luxury communism is a direct subsidy to expected inheritances.
Unfortunately, the expectation should be ever greater political pressure to increase welfare directed at the old.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
Update on the motor pool:
The $500 Civic project has ground to a crawl, aside from replacing the battery (with Walmart's cheapest 51R) and confirming that the car does indeed run and drive, and the A/C works along with three of the four windows. The clutch pedal feels like shit (engagement is too low), but I'm confident that bleeding and adjusting the master cylinder will fix it. The old owner will be back in town this weekend at which point we'll do the needful with paperwork and see if he has to get a replacement title (The title exists and is legible but looks like a dog ate it.).
Speaking of titles, and actual work, I had to replace the starter on the other Civic. It was...not as bad a job as anticipated. I didn't have to pull the bumper, did have to pull the knock sensor, and did have spend $15 on washers to make the slightly different (case is thinner where it bolts to the engine) Amazon special fit the car, but at $60 from Amazon versus $80-$300 from Rock Auto and $325 from the parts store I can afford washers and the job was easy enough that I wouldn't hate myself if I had to do it again. I have a strong prospective buyer from this car, an old friend who fell in love with it (I let her drive it.) and is going to need a car in a few months.
The rational, but unwanted car may have a buyer (probably not, but I can probably sell the thing for five grand) if I choose to go all out and ditch all three for what I think I want (test drive pending).
What I think I want is a 10th gen Civic Si, preferably blue like this but I'd settle for silver, since I've seen one in person, thought it looked nice enough, and it looks like silver is easier to find than blue. Is it a Type R? No, but I don't have Type R money and these are allegedly easy enough to tune without much work as long as you're okay with settling for ~250HP before stuff starts breaking, and what the L15 lacks in top end power or K-series potential it makes up for with torque and gas mileage (My K24 Civic is fun but gets atrocious fuel mileage on premium by the standards of a Civic.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
21d ago
No, the US and Iran were not at war since 1979. Reagan and everyone else involved in Iran-Contra would have been executed for treason if that were the case.
Words have definitions, and war is one of them. If you seriously believe that the United States and Iran have been at War for 47 years, Oliver North is still alive. I suggest we get that treason trial started.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
29d ago
I'd take my old job back, driving for a locally-owned Doordash (We were in business before Uber/Doordash where I live, but they eventually wiped us out.).
It was so easy that it barely felt like a job, literally being paid to drive around in circles listening to music, chat with bartenders, gossip with dispatch, and do some light auto repair on the side (I was the guy who got called before one of our drivers resorted to taking their car to a real shop.). Perfect barfly hours (start at 11AM, done when happy hour ends and the olds start going home), and when you're done for the day, you're done for the day, no responsibilities aside from maintaining a roadworthy car, not getting a DUI, and being ready by 11.
The kick in the ass is that adjusted for inflation I made the same to better money (more money but no health insurance; I made $50K/year back in 2016 which is roughly $70K a year now) driving around slinging Chinese and sushi 10 years ago than I do now at my real job (logistics coordinator at a trucking company). Covid, post-covid inflation, and competition from the big national companies ruined all that but it was a fun gravy train while it lasted. I'm hoping for a promotion soon or at least a fat bonus soon to fix or at least salve the money problem and I don't hate my current job, but God it sucks in comparison. Whiny/stupid drivers (Most of them are decent, but the stupid and whiny take most of your time.), insane/delusional customers, inconsistent freight levels, constantly getting fucked by tank washes, and reams of paperwork. I'm on call 24/7 and have been woken up before 7AM by a driver on four of the last seven days.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
29d ago
The only thing that would keep me from keeping this new Civic is that one of my other cars is that same Civic, but an Si model with a JDM K24 (the original engine cracked the block at 195K miles; it still ran for another 30K but I went ahead and did the motor swap when the original clutch died) and some other mild mods (intake/nice sounding exhaust, short shift kit). It's bad on gas by Civic standards and annoyingly expensive to insure but otherwise punchy/fun to drive and I don't have a long commute.
The third car is actually the nicest on paper but likely first on the chopping block because I never liked it that much (Hell, I sold it once and wound up inheriting it back.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
29d ago
The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30.
It probably didn't help that both semifinal games were rather far away for the teams in question. Indiana v. Oregon was played in Atlanta while Miami v. Ole Miss was played in Phoenix.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. I already have an extra car that I need to sell but $500 was too good a deal to pass up. Depending on how well it cleans up and how much I like it I'll either flip it or sell one or potentially both of the other cars (I don't love either one of them.), pay off all my debt, and enjoy the beater/cheap insurance life for a year or few until something else I want comes along (I want a Civic Type R, but I don't have Civic Type R money.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I looks like I might be the proud owner of the used car holy grail, an actual $500 Honda Civic (I think it's an '09...I know it's a non-Si sedan with a stick shift.). This is definitely a case of the friends and family discount (an old buddy of mine hasn't driven it in years, it's been sitting at our old boss's house, and he just wants to get rid of it) and a neat opportunity to either flip for profit or sell one of my nicer cars to net some cash, a fun little rehab project.
The good news is as follows: I almost bought the thing back in 2020/15K miles ago and did some work to it then, so I have reason to believe that the brakes are fine. It has enough miles on it (I think 210K.) that if the R18 in it was going to crack its block it most likely would've done so by now. I know that it runs and the A/C works. I think the battery is still good (It's sitting on a charger.) and believe that the clutch still works (I know that I replaced the clutch cylinder a few years ago, and it's getting long in the tooth, but it did work last I checked.). The paint is not bad by late oughts Honda standards, and I like the color. The things I know are wrong with it are relatively minor (It needs a bolt for one of the back shocks, a window switch and regulator, the tires are showing cords, and the interior is trashed and disgusting.).
The only real potential snag is that the title looks like his dog ate it, so if I can't sneak that past a disinterested county clerk I'll have to wait for a replacement.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I, uh, don't worry about my parents' health much. There's nothing I can do about it. They're both incredibly stubborn people who will (not) take care of themselves, bonus points for the stepmom.
I will say that I wasn't ready for the moment I felt compelled to protect my father (a big, imposing Marine veteran) in a physical altercation. He ran his mouth and picked a bar fight he couldn't win, the other guy fought dirty, and in a flash I went from being as annoyed with his drunken bullshit as everyone else in the bar to being willing to fuck that guy up or get my ass kicked trying if he wouldn't take my offer of "this is over; we're leaving". I was...32?
Funny enough, I must've made an impression (I can't fight for shit but I'm crazy and loud, inherited that from mom's side.) because that incident took on a fishing story-like life of its own where I allegedly brandished a chair in my father's defense.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I was car shopping back then and while I can't comment on the lightly used market the mid and low range were reasonable (I was at a food delivery company at the time, so that was the sort of shopping I did.) if you weren't looking for a truck or SUV. My goal was under 10 years old, 100k miles or less, and under $10K and there was a decent selection even accounting for my weird tastes (I wanted something not silver, white, or black, and it had to have a stick shift.). I was closing in on a Mazda 2, and early 2010s models were running for about $7500 at the time.
I actually blundered into a private party deal that I couldn't pass up, a loaded one year old Mazda 3 with 15K miles for $17K. It was retired lady's recently passed husband's car, a stick shift that she couldn't drive, had one minor scrape on the bumper, and the interior reeked of cigarettes but otherwise it was mint and I knew how to fix the cigarette smell so I offered her NADA "rough trade-in" and she took it. The bank had it valued at $21.5K, and on that note interest rates were lower then. I was able to put 20% down and finance the rest of it for 2% interest.
Funny enough, I never liked that car all that much (It's a perfectly nice car but doesn't feel particularly "fun" to drive. It's too SUV-like and the tall gearing makes it feel slow.) and sold it once but wound up getting it back (The guy I sold it to died and left it to me because he owed me a ton of money.). I will say that it's been perfectly reliable and if I was looking to recommend a compact car to someone who doesn't want to pay the Honda/Toyota tax I would go with a 2nd or 3rd Gen Mazda 3 without hesitation.
By contrast, the lightly used market for stuff I want now is mostly ridiculous. An 8-10 year old Civic Si with under 100K miles runs over $20K and even the cheapest Type-Rs are pushing $30K, with a lightly used example pushing $40K. Another issue for normies is that the mid-2010s had several "dud" cars that appear nice but have major problems that should be avoided and infest the "affordable" end of the used car market. I'm talking about Nissans with their CVTs, Ford Focuses with the Powershift automatic, Hyundai/Kia products with the Theta engines that blow up, GM SUVs with the Ecotec 4 cylinders, Fords with the 3.5 V6 that has the nightmare water pump, etc.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
There really weren't a lot of old people around in 1926 period, let alone a government subsidized upper-middle class of retirees. In 1920 less than 1/20 Americans were over the age of 65. Now it's 1/6.
That there were bad years in the 70s and early 80s doesn't change the fact that no one under the age of 40 has experienced anything like the sustained economic growth we had from 1985-2005. The 1970s sucked compared to the 50s and 60s but still had faster growth than the 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s so far.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The Twitter generational war, be it over sandwiches or houses and cars, has been dumber than usual this week, and that's saying something.
My thoughts as a mid-millennial who mostly missed the crash (not being able to score even any variety of job as a freshman in college was irritating, but otherwise it wasn't that bad) but fucked around and failed to launch throughout his 20s (I delivered food with a side of dispatching for 14 years LMAO, but since that gravy train ended have managed to use those experiences to switch to an office job in trucking that appears to have potential to make a real career out of.) are otherwise as follows:
Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s, but it's not Cash for Clunkers that caused it, but the loss of production during the Great Recession and Covid years (along with inflation) making either 15 year old beaters or lightly used cars more expensive. That said, even if it feels a touch overpriced compared to the $2K shitboxes of the 2010s (Back then, my pick for best pizza delivery bang for the buck was a Bush era Ford Focus.), one can get a 15-20 year old Corolla on Marketplace for $3500-$5000 depending on one's tolerance for ugly and it'll probably work fine. If not, it's a Corolla. Get on Youtube, buy some tools from Walmart/Harbor Freight, and fix it, or find a friend who can and will (Car guys tend to identify themselves by talking about them all the time.). Don't want to pay the Toyota tax/want something nicer? Get a Mazda 3. In my experience they're very reliable and have depreciated more heavily (Mine has 100K miles on it and the only non-maintenance thing I've had to do to it was replace the belt tensioner, a pain in the ass but the part was $30 on Rock Auto.).
Pack a lunch to work or spend $28 on Doordash? Who the hell eats lunch at work anyway? Unless my boss is paying for it I don't eat lunch at work; I'd rather work through it and leave early or play on my phone. If I had to eat out and pay for it, there's an Italian place downtown that does a two slice or two Chicago dog and drink special for $7.
All that said, my broad take is that things really are worse than they were in the mid/late 2010s. I spent that decade as a drunk slinging burritos and sushi in a college town and never had money problems in spite of an outrageous bar budget and my only real quality of life sacrifice was living in various shitty apartments with cheap/freecycled furniture and having to do laundry at a laundromat. I have a real salaried job now and make more money than I did back then (and without beating the shit out of my car) but I still feel broke (and objectively am; that career change was brutal) in a way that I didn’t/wasn’t in the 2010s. Job hunting in ‘24/’25 was a miserable, hopelessness inducing experience and I doubt I’d have gotten the job I have now without knowing my current boss from my time bartending.
As for the Boomers/Xers and quality of life, I think their real privilege/crime isn’t so much a money or standard of living thing, but fertility related. Boomers and Gen X were the last to spend their younger years in an America with a relatively normal age distribution instead of the rapidly aging gerontocracy we’re in now. From 1930 to 1980 the median age in the US increased from 26.5 to 30 years old. From 1980 to the present that number increased from 30 to 40 years old, mostly from 1990-present.
In 1926 the median American was around 26 years old. Thanks to the baby boom, the median wasn't much older in 1970, 28, and was 30 in 1980. Today, it's 39, and will likely be over 40 by 2030. The old have never been so proportionately numerous.
This is aggravated by the fact that economic growth has been declining since the 1980s, and especially since the end of the 90s. Barring 2021, all but the oldest Millennials never experienced 4% GDP growth as a member of the labor force. All but the youngest of Gen Z have never experienced 3% GDP growth in the workforce, again barring 2021.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Honestly, I suspect that the drivers are right, and if it were up to me we'd buy manual transmissions and as little of that stuff as can be ordered. The non-safety electronics on these trucks are frequently unreliable trash, so why would the safety systems be any better? I say this as one of our brand new trucks with 30K miles on it randomly went into derate or something and had a sudden and complete loss of power going 65 miles an hour down the road this afternoon and is now dead on the side of the road waiting for a tow.
On a more broad perspective (including auto safety), I do find it discouraging that all this expensive technology has accomplished precisely nothing in terms of safety (at best, enabling keeping a worse class of driver on the road; I suppose one could argue that we'd have even more deaths without the new tech given the current state of drivers).
Speaking for myself, the only safety device I appreciate on newer cars is the backup cameras (They really do make parking a pickup truck easier.), and even that's compensating for the fact that cars are built like tanks these days with frequently poor outward visibility.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Driver facing cameras: We don't have them, but even rumors about us getting them causes drivers to look for other jobs.
Most generally, "safety scores" generated by the on-board ELD that penalizes for things like speeding (mostly problematic on not always correctly mapped rural roads), harsh braking, following too closely (This one can be a pain in major cities.), etc. The company recently tightened up the guidelines without notice, applied them retroactively (much to the chagrin of operations), and cost a bunch of drivers their quarterly safety bonuses.
Thirdly, collision avoidance/lane departure tech on company trucks. Apparently these have a false trigger rate somewhere above zero. Of course, most of the drivers I hear from wish we'd go back to manual transmissions (I guess the ones who don't care/like the automatics aren't as vocal about it, but our drivers are also a fairly old bunch for the most part.).
Finally, I don't think drivers are seriously opposed to ELDs as a concept, but many of them have trouble working with the (rather bug prone, in my experience) tablets.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas.
I know that I grew up under a rock by late '90s/early '00s standards (rural Alabama) but I had no idea that Metallica had an album other than the Black Album until 2006. Before then I didn't have access to high speed internet/a decent PC so I pretty much listened to whatever my father did (so, a lot of Eminem and System of a Down), with my contribution to the family's music collection being Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause and Cocky. My sister bought more CDs but it was late 90s boy bands and then stuff like Pink and Avril Lavigne.
On that note, as a Gulf War baby I don't have much for 90s nostalgia. Okay, I remember Space Jam, but otherwise I remember the late 90s at best, movies like Blue Streak and Chill Factor. If I were to be nostalgic for a time it's more mid-aughts than the 90s, stuff like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, the height of the Playstation 2 era.
Possibly, if I have time (which has been in short supply lately), but I would have to do research and anything I produce is going to be half-assed. I dispatch for a mid-sized trucking that's a subsidiary of a larger company (meaning that they're very risk averse, as anything trucking screws up exposes the company as a whole to liability). I don't handle brokering.
The company I work for exclusively does tanking and (limited) hazmat tanking, so we're not really exposed to competition from the cardboard nameplate crowd. That said, compliance and litigation costs have been brutal in the last 5 years, as have been the effects of our efforts to enhance safety on driver retention. Fatalities aside, trucking companies have also been subject to the same issues as the rest of the auto industry in terms of property damage liability (Everything is expensive and costs more to repair.).
Fatal truck accidents were up something like 30% in the last 10 years as of 2024, but it's worth noting that overall accident fatalities spiked from 2020-2024, and only now do we have early estimate data for 2025 suggesting that we're back to the pre-pandemic trend (I wasn't able to find truck fatality data for 2025.). That said, while truck fatalities did spike during the pandemic and have fallen some since peaking in 2022, they were also increasing before the pandemic at the same time that car fatalities were falling, so it seems that truck fatalities are something of their own issue not strictly correlated with traffic fatalities as a whole (Note, much of the increase in traffic fatalities concerning cars has been from pedestrian deaths.).
Non-domiciled CDL holders (aka. foreign drivers) have been involved in a rash of high profile accidents, prompting a crackdown on non-domiciled CDLs, but the federal government doesn't track accident rates based on CDL type, so there is no data that presents a smoking gun suggestion that non-domiciled CDL holders have a higher crash rate than US citizen drivers.
This Supreme Court ruling stabs at a related but different and potentially more meaningful problem, so-called "chameleon carriers" and companies like Super Ego that hire them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
FWIW, I've had similar results doing it the ghetto way, aka. Chinese peptides, 16 weeks in. I more or less followed this article and went with retatrutide from a vendor that was cheap but had reasonably good test results from those who'd submitted them. I've probably saved what I spent on it ($250 for a 6-month supply. Having to pay with crypto was annoying to my non-crypto using self, but not a dealbreaker.) from cutting my grocery/takeout budget (I don't know about my bar budget. I'd say I've been drinking less/going out less frequently but it's still easy to spend money in a hurry when I do go out.).
As far as side effects go, I've had mild nausea/heartburn at times, not so much at the time I've eaten something, but more from waking up in the morning still full. Hangovers have been rough, but it's hard to disentangle side effect from just drinking on an empty stomach. The main negative I'd say is that there's some substance to the FUD about increased heart rate. It was noticeable and irritating for the first two months, not so much since then, and the last time I took my blood pressure it was okay/as expected if not great: 132/80 at a BMI of 27 (I really have to be careful about my weight when it comes to blood pressure. It starts going up quickly if I allow myself to become overweight at all.). Other side effects have been to be expected with a fairly aggressive calorie deficit, a lack of energy and being cold AF most of the time (I keep my place at 76F and my boss likes it at 68-70F at the office, so I'll be that guy wearing a jacket inside during a Southern summer.).
Note, due to a math error I started off on a higher dose than intended, 4mg for the first two months instead of 3mg. Since, I've increased the dose slower than indicated by OP's graph, going with 5mg instead of 6 for the third month and 7.5 instead of 9 for the fourth month. In hindsight I'd have started out with a lower dose and escalated more slowly instead of being sloppy and impatient so I wouldn't have been so tired.
I've bounced between 190 and 225 since my mid 20s but started this at 235lbs (went from a semi-physical job to being a desk jockey at a trucking company and put on 20lbs in ~6 months). Roughly 16 weeks in (I skipped a week two months in due to being sick AF.) I've lost 45lbs. My goal for now is to get back to my college weight, 170. Maybe I'll go for 160; I'm not overly muscular or particularly active so there's no reason to lie about muscle that isn't there.
On another twitter rumor, reta hasn't been a magical "not an addict" shot. Being allowed to vape in the office is still my favorite perk on the job, as is the free Diet Mountain Dew. On the other hand I've been drinking less, though I'm not sure how much of that is the shot versus being thoroughly bored with the crowd at my usual bar and/or busy at work for the last few months. My patience for being at the bar and not entertained has been very low as of late.
I'm not a HBD absolutist (Culture matters.), but I'll bite. I spent a few years at a stem-oriented boarding school for allegedly smart kids, so I wound up spending a fair amount of time with the kids of educated immigrants. Note, outside of that my experience is limited by having spent all my time in a not especially diverse part of the South. Also note, the smartest and dumbest kids I met there were of domestic extraction. The usual white problem was having mistaken being weird/nerdy for being smart (Those kids usually couldn't put down the video games long enough to study and weren't smart enough to get away with that, so they failed out quickly.) and the usual black problem was that "smart by the standards of the school back home" didn't mean that smart (though there were a few who were that smart).
Indians are among the most heavily filtered demographics in America (See also: Africans), so yeah, by and large they're at least midwits. In my experience the Indian kids weren't shockingly brilliant, but they were at least above average and the studious ones are doing well in life. An unfortunate set I met were a professor's sons. I have no idea what happened to one of them (He was something of a druggie burnout in college.) and the other is one whose level of education badly exceeds his intelligence combined with a nasty case of arrogance (and obesity) to boot, basically an Indian neckbeard and one of the universally reviled people I've known. It's hard to describe, but we're talking about a guy who had an MS in economics but couldn't really hack delivering pizza because he sucked at reading a map and using it find things.
The Asians tended to be FOBs or close to it with lousy English skills (same at the SEC school I attended) and/or terminal cases of introversion, but excellent at math (and WoW at the boarding school). The more Americanized ones have fared very well. I can't comment further because they tended to stick to their own clique.
The most oddly overrepresented demographic at the school were Russians/Ukrainians whose parents came here after the fall of the USSR/the bad 90s, about half Jewish and half gentile (Hilariously, it never occurred to me as a teenager that my friend who is the weediest, most obviously Jewish Russian Jew to ever walk the Earth is Jewish. White Southerners don't have Jewdar by default. Sadly, he suffers from neuroticism to a life-crippling degree and I see plenty of posts on Facebook about his struggles with CPTSD due to a less than ideal childhood.). The Russian from St. Petersburg is one of the most intelligent and driven people I've met, also among the most intransigent and outspoken, for better or worse. His inability to hide his sympathies for the Z invasion in '22 led to an epic crashout and loss of (mixed Russian and Ukrainian) friend group. He's now relocated to China with a wife, kid, and a job as a university professor. The Ukrainian was kind of an asshole (We ran in different cliques.) but definitely smart and is doing well here as an engineer. Memorably, he came up to me after someone else got the history ribbon during senior awards for DEI reasons and told me that it was bullshit that I didn't get it, high praise from an enemy (The history teachers wound up concocting a different award to give me that amounted to "teacher's pet".).
Exiting the classroom, I can't say much about Arabs because the only ones I've interacted with run gas stations, vape shops, or restaurants. They're not common where I've lived.
Hispanics are a broad category. The white Spanish ones are, well, white people, and the castizos aren't far off. One of my dear friends falls into that category and when she gets too deep into ranting about her experiences as a brown woman I like to fuck with her by pointing out that she's whiter than I am (If I have anything like a decent tan going on.). The mestizo Mexicans (and, they're all Mexican, or at least were; todays illegals are from further south), once assimilated (The kids of the W. era illegals have grown up now.) strike me as not much different from working-class white people (Note: I said working class and not white trash. The Mexicans strike me as less trashy, for now at least.). Hispanics don't really have the same problems that black Americans do. Hell, they live longer than white Americans in spite of being fatter and more diabetic.
For fun, I'll pick on my own kind, as someone who also had a chain smoking Mamaw named Bonnie who got married at 13. JD Vance might've done better to pick up a copy of Understanding the Borderline Mother (It would not surprise me if Scots-Irish women were found to suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder at rates above the white American baseline.) than to try to find a political explanation for his family's dysfunction (and to be clear, one of the themes of the book wasn't frustration over being poor, because his family wasn't, but over being dragged down from an otherwise middle class life by bad behavior). Hillbilly Elegy was a mediocre political polemic (and is badly dated; it was written pre-Trump when Vance was still angling for the Romney-Ryan wing of Republican politics) but his story was a sufficiently compelling trip down memory lane that I really don't want to read it again and refuse to watch the movie.
To twist the knife a bit more, his telling of the story comes across as claiming the sort of unconditional victimhood that can only be the luxury of the younger sibling. That, and while I deeply sympathize with his reactionary streak there’s an air of self-righteousness that’s a touch off putting in someone I’d otherwise want to like. I describe my mother as something of a cartoon villain but it’s hard to square “honor culture”/”honor” as I grew up to understand it with “writing a book outing Mom as a dysfunctional fuckup/bad person for all the world to read”. It never occurred to me to play the “write about my crappy childhood in a college admissions essay” card, but my little sister sure did.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
It's hard to say, not having a bigger picture view or more experience. There has been whining from customers and owner-ops about fuel surcharges and prices (Our fuel surcharge is up ~70%), but things have mostly blundered on plus or minus customers rushing in orders at the end of the month to try and get ahead of price increases.
Q4 of '25 and Q1 of '26 were "not great" as is. Q2 promises to be busier but simultaneously my terminal is slow due to our primary customer being in the middle of a plant shutdown that's gone past schedule along with other issues on their end. I'm hoping that we get into gear soon, and consistently because dispatching is more difficult when you have to farm guys out, beg for loads, and wind up with drivers stuck on the wrong side of the map.
Probably an adversely selected sample given Aella's audience, and going by my past talent for ruining millennial "complain about your family" sessions by talking about actual bad stuff I'm among the "adversely selected", but as a millennial with Gen X parents, uh... The two of them were married four times (Mom twice, Dad thrice) and of those four, my father's third marriage is the only one that I would call successful (and even then, I have no idea why my second stepmom puts up with my father's shit). Of the six aunts and uncles on both sides, none are married to their original spouses, save for one who is merely separated (They'll likely never divorce, just live in separate trailers in the same park; they had dinner together during Easter.).
My parents' marriage and divorce were insane disasters that only could've gotten worse if my father had given up and walked away, someone actually got murdered, or mom had been clever enough to accuse him of "abusing" my sister and I in court instead of just painting him as an irresponsible alcoholic and lecturing us about her victimhood in their episodes of domestic violence (Yeah, she lost some fights, but she won some too, and after their divorce mom kept having problems with domestic violence while dad did not. She hit my sister and I, not him.). They split for good when I was six and their post-divorce war dragged on for 15 years after that.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Of the stuff we deal with, our main trouble categories are asphalt, latex (If not washed immediately the stuff dries and has to be scraped out of the trailer by hand), and a particular class of water treatment chemical.
The latter isn't regulated as hazmat, but requires a polymer wash and apparently has a habit of expanding upon touching water, which is troublesome for a lot of plumbing systems. Furthermore, many places either prohibit or limit how much of that product can be washed in a given time frame due to wastewater regulations.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Allegedly she tried to take our safety guy back to the hotel while shit faced a few months ago, so yeah, probably. If I had to guess the bedroom is pretty dead because she lost all respect for the husband a long time ago.
Personally, I'm not into GILFs, or married women for that matter, and that's before you get into the can of worms of being someone else's drunken mistake when that someone else is the logistics boss for your biggest customer.
The "why" is relatively simple. "Old" at the time of Medicare's passing meant the Lost Generation, which was A. generally quite poor thanks to having spent their prime earning years in the Great Depression and B. didn't live all that long (My great grandfather of that generation died at the age of 70. His son, my grandfather, lived to see 86.).
Meanwhile, aside from free public education (which is in fact a large socialization of childrearing, albeit one done for the purpose of producing productive adults) I don't think childcare was something specifically on the radar at the time (as opposed to poverty in general) in large part because the standards of childrearing were quite a bit lower at the time (Another interesting question: Which has been subject to more expectation inflation? Parenting or eldercare?).
In the long term, this has become a problem due to demographics, inflation of expectations (in terms of Social Security benefits, but most acutely healthcare expenditures), and the emergence of a mass affluent upper-middle class of elderly capable of lobbying on its own behalf that arguably didn't exist before, say, the Silent Generation's retirement.
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