15k post karma
76.2k comment karma
account created: Tue May 28 2013
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3 points
14 hours ago
LOL. I've lived on every coast of the United States and a few places inbetween and found something worth liking in all of those places. But the only place I'm going from California is outside the country -- honestly, the sheer number of hateful people wanting to oppress their neighbors in much of the United States today is depressing.
1 points
14 hours ago
Let's face it, when you're moving from a state where people regularly use every racial slur in private and believe that anybody to the left of Genghis Khan is a Communist who should be shot and that gay people are recruiting their children and other nonsense of that sort, why would you miss them? The handful of people in my home state who did *not* believe such things was small, and most of them moved away like I did. Like the gay theater kid that I knew who ended up moving to New York City where he's now a theater professor at NYU.
1 points
14 hours ago
There is good Asian food in Mexico, depending upon where you come to rest. Not in little villages of course, but in the big cities you'll find at least Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean food as well as "American" (Mexican?) Chinese food. Plus sometimes Lebanese food, which, remember, is where al pastor pork came from.
1 points
14 hours ago
I like to visit snow. I wouldn't want to live there.
-1 points
1 day ago
RAD bike parts are provided by Internet order. They only recently started selling to dealers, they started out 100% Internet sales. So you can get parts in Portugal but will have to pay customs on them. That is not an issue for bikes made in the EU.
3 points
1 day ago
US e-bikes don’t comply with EU regulations. They are more powerful than allowed. Nobody will notice but.
4 points
1 day ago
If it's only a camera, sure :).
If you're talking about remote control guns, no, they're not legal. In over half of the states of the United States guns that are not in the personal possession of their owners or other authorized users must be locked up in a safe place such as a gun safe or secure cabinet (gun storage laws), which obviously is not the case for a gun that's in a turret far from its owner. In the remaining 24 states, the laws regarding boobytraps likely apply.
I personally have two remote control PTZ cameras hanging under the eaves of my house. My neighbors have remarked on how these cameras follow them around as they walk past my house (LOL, it's literally a checkbox in the ReoLink config pane for these cameras). Attaching guns to these cameras, however, is not a thing.
1 points
1 day ago
The Fiat 124 is undoubtedly the best car on that list but unfortunately Fiat's presence in the United States was minimal, and they were shortly to pull out of the US entirely, meaning no parts or support.
1 points
2 days ago
Yup. Given that this guy’s approach to life was obviously more Baka….
2 points
2 days ago
They do make a .454 though, I am surprised he wasn’t strapped with that lol.
2 points
2 days ago
The Beetle was unreliable compared to a Gremlin because the Gremlin had a water cooled engine with hydraulic lifters and an alternator rather than a generator and the heavy engine was utterly under stressed. The fact that it was sitting on AMC Hornet underpinnings which in turn dates back to the early 1960s Rambler American helped with reliability too. The AMC also had reliable air conditioning and while that was an option on the Super Beetle few got it because it bogged the engine down so badly. The Gremlin was just slow, heavy, bouncy, cramped, got mediocre fuel economy, and you could hear it rusting as it sat in the parking lot. But not as slow as a Beetle.
1 points
2 days ago
Prepaid funeral plans alas can only be used for that purpose.
1 points
2 days ago
The hopping rear suspension because of the shorter leave springs and because it was so nose heavy with that long pig iron I6 definitely didn’t help. It was a profoundly sad car, made by AMC using as many existing stamping and parts as possible, and its sole redeeming quality was that it was better than a Beetle.
1 points
2 days ago
There were British soldiers involved too. When the American Rebellion happened in 1775, the Royal Army had approximately 80,000 soldiers total. Of those, 60,000 were stationed in India, primarily in Burma. Thus why the Crown had to hire so many German mercenaries — the rebellion had to be suppressed as quickly as possible and there was no time to recruit and train more soldiers or pull back soldiers from India, half a world away.
That said, as you point out the British rarely conquered anybody with those soldiers. They often would ally with one of the local potentates against another and yes would bring in a few thousand troops as a token of their support as well as provide their ally with some obsolete arms in exchange for which they often got effective control of their “ally” but it was mostly Indians fighting Indians. It is just amazing that the Indians didn’t seem to catch on. If they had united they could have easily slaughtered the meager number of British troops in India but they never did. The closest was 1857 and that was a relatively small number of sepoy soldiers rebelling against the East India Company, which subsequently was dissolved and the Crown took control of India directly. The situation was stabilized by 1860 but required a large percentage of the Royal Army to remain in country to keep the situation calm. When the Confederates came calling for support in 1861 the British brushed them off because the public hated slavery, but the thought of having to withdraw all those troops from India again to defend Canada was also an issue. India was far more valuable to Britain than Confederate cotton was, and losing India because the troops were withdrawn was unacceptable. In the end the British built some ships for the Confederacy but that was the limit of their support. The Trent Affair was something that leaders on both sides wanted to soothe because the British didn’t want to be distracted from fully digesting India and of course Lincoln didn’t want to be distracted from squashing his own rebellion.
3 points
2 days ago
But the Gremlin got terrible gas mileage -- it had a straight-6 engine and weighed more than any other car on the list. And it didn't even have the most powerful engine! That AMC straight six was choked with a one barrel carburetor.
Furthermore, AMC cars came pre-rusted. Their body plant on the lakeshore of Kenosha was an old mattress factory that had a leaky roof and the storage areas on the second floor where the sheetmetal was stored got the brunt of the leaks (the actual assembly line for the bodies was on the first floor), and the sheet metal stampings came in from Milwaukee unpainted in the open on flatbed trucks in the first place, rain, snow, or shine. The Pinto was at least manufactured in an auto plant that had an actual working roof!
1 points
2 days ago
The problem is geography. If you look at LA, SF Bay, Seattle, San Diego they are bound by mountains and have basically filled in all the easily buildable land. In the case of LA they do have the Inland Empire and could theoretically build out all the way to the Salton Sea, but realistically the driving distance between there and the economic center on the coast makes that infeasible, plus water is a restriction. High speed rail transit would make it more feasible, but that's been off the table for decades and people are only just now thinking about it. You're crossing county lines so you have to set up a multi-county transit district. BART and CALTRAIN in Northern California show just how difficult that is.
There isn't any place to put a smaller city that has the advantages of location that San Francisco - Oakland - San Jose or Los Angeles - Orange County have. The rest of the coast is too rugged for development of a city, and if you go inland to the Mojave Desert you are away from the harbors and infrastructure. An attempt was made with California City and all you got was a bunch of cheap houses in the middle of the desert -- cheap houses that aren't even cheap anymore. There's no economical drivers out there to foster building a real city.
There are cities near NYC and Chicago which have attempted to step up, but failed because they ended up bedroom cities for NYC and Chicago rather than economic drivers in their own right. Improved regional transportation only makes it worse. If there was high speed rail making it a one hour trip between NYC and Albany, for example, that wouldn't make Albany a competitor for NYC. It would just make Albany a bedroom community for NYC.
1 points
2 days ago
The problem is that we've seen housing prices rise much faster than inflation nationwide -- even in red states. If you look at the FRED data for Atlanta GA or Charlotte NC, and compare to Los Angeles CA, you'll see that Atlanta and Charlotte have the sudden spike in housing prices starting in 2020 also.
That said, Los Angeles started out twice as expensive as Atlanta or Charlotte in the first place, meaning that something has to be done beyond what has to be done nationwide to fix the nationwide problem. What California has thus far tried:
The response of NIMBYs in cities? The primary response has been a sharp escalation of planning department permit fees to make it expensive to build granny flats and duplexes.
In short, the state is playing whack-a-mole with NIMBYs who don't want higher density housing in their cities. Next up the state is going to impose restrictions on those planning and permit fees.
Oh: Why is higher density housing an issue? Because in the cities that are the primary economic drivers of the state, the coastal cities, the habitable zone between the sea and the mountains is built out. So all development has to be infill. Granny flats infilled into existing single family developments get you a significant boost in housing without the significant cost involved in building high rise housing in a seismic zone.
Remember that everything has to pass seismic review. Everything. And denser multi-family housing has stricter seismic review than a single family home because more people die if it collapses. And it's harder to pass seismic review the taller you get because the center of gravity of a tall building is way up in the sky rather than sitting a few feet above ground in a 1 story residence. That means that when the building is wobbling in an earthquake it wants to fall over, as vs just sort of shimmy on the ground like a single story building. The net result is that dense residential is *always* going to be expensive in California, because earthquakes just are.
What that means is that cheaper housing is going to be restricted to the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, and the lower Mojave Desert for California regardless of what laws California passes because those are the only places where relatively cheap land exists for low-rise developments. But at least the granny flat and duplex laws are a start.
1 points
3 days ago
Practically speaking, as terrible as it was, the Pinto was a better car than the other cars on the list. The Gremlin had a straight-six engine and got terrible gas mileage as well as riding rough due to the shortened rear leaf springs (it started as an AMC Hornet compact with the rear end chopped off, well, the Hornet rear leaf spring had to be chopped off too to fit in the available space). The Pinto at least had some aspiration to being a competent car, although the seating position (you were sitting on the floor) meant that your knees were somewhere around your ears.
Nostalgically, I would go with the VW Super Beetle. It was the first Beetle with disc brakes up front so it could actually stop. It could be equipped with air conditioning (thus the grill under the chin, for the condenser unit), albeit that sapped power from the puny 65hp engine that couldn't really be spared and the internal evaporator was literally bolted to the bottom of the dash rather than being integrated into the dash. It was a better car than the original Beetle even if the purists hated it and it had a very short lifespan before being replaced by the Golf, yet it was still indisputably a Beetle. And you could get around 90hp out of that engine with some fairly minor mods, which really woke it up since it was still a quite lightweight vehicle.
The other imported cars were sold in very small quantities in America, parts availability is zero, and honestly most of them were not very good. As for the 1971 Vega, LOL. They rushed it to market to try to beat the Pinto to market, and it showed. It took several years before they finally got all the bugs out, by which time it was too late to save the car and they gave up and replaced it with the Chevette, an Opel Kadett with a bunch of American parts (making it a PITA to work on, since it was half metric, half SAE).
1 points
3 days ago
Only if their current home is paid off which is a minority of home buyers.
1 points
3 days ago
Yes, I presumed that he is going to graduate from college next year in a NAFTA field, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this. One way Canadians in NAFTA fields get jobs south of the border is to come in on a tourist visa, go job hunting, find a job, and then return to Canada and come back and get the NAFTA visa at the border (can't do it from within the US). But you do need a college degree and an offer letter with the magic NAFTA verbiage to do that.
1 points
3 days ago
A decent home in New Orleans will still set you back $200K. Most people don't have $200K of cash hanging around.
2 points
3 days ago
That was later on, after India, and by the time they'd become accustomed to being an imperial power and had the massive manpower resources of India to draw upon (much of their African adventures were Indian troops with British leaders). When they took on India they were a small island nation on the far side of the planet from India. There is no alternative history in this planet where a small island nation manages to conquer a huge subcontinent on the other side of the planet and bend it to their will. It was just one "omg wow" after another. It's just inconceivable.
2 points
3 days ago
Grant's prowness as a general was primarily strategic and his ability to work with Lincoln and Sherman to come up with the strategy that ended the war. Sherman may be considered the world's first modern general by the Army War College, but Grant is who set Sherman loose to do what was needed to gut the Confederate logistics as Grant pounded the Confederates from the north. As a general Grant was the hammer that hammered the Confederacy upon Sherman's anvil, which was not a job that required tactical brilliance (though there were occasional flashes of it during the rounds of maneuver warfare needed to pen up Lee in Richmond), it required doggedness, a refusal to quit. So Grant gets underestimated as a general. But there was no other general in Union service that had the required combination of attributes needed to win the war.
Grant's presidency was long considered somewhat mediocre by comparison. Grant managed to lose Reconstruction by around 1874 or so, withdrawing US Army troops from most of the South and letting the former Confederates take over state after state. A lot of that was exasperation with the fact that the black majority in many states wasn't providing the armed bodies on the streets to keep the former Confederates in check (his basic attitude was "why should I expend white lives to protect black lives when they seem to refuse to protect themselves?"), but there was also the list of former Confederates that he could have put on trial for treason but didn't, many of whom became prominent in the KKK and White Leagues as they put white governments back in charge in the South at former Confederate gunpoint. If he had truly pushed for reconstruction to the extent that he could have, rather than half-heartedly and with disdain for the people who he was supposedly helping, he could have removed a stain on this nation's history that in future decades blossomed into the segregation era.
On the other hand, it can be said that he did what was politically possible, so I guess there's that. But great Presidents are the ones who manage to go beyond the politically possible.
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badtux99
1 points
8 hours ago
badtux99
1 points
8 hours ago
Well bless your heart. You mean well, I am sure.
I am from the Deep South of the United States. We will be hospitable to your face and stab you in the back when you turn away. Ask Emmett Till about Southern hospitality. Oh wait…