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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m not going to tell you not to shame us (yes, I still own a model 3) but be careful about who you take a shit on. We want to shame the rich first, not force people into worse situations.

    I’m glad that everyone you know had the financial flexibility and independence to freely change vehicles. However, for many people (myself included) switching from an 18k USD Tesla to something else will involve loans, increased insurance, and other costs that are not financially feasible.

    My eventual goal is to get out of my Tesla (edit - and I strongly encourage others to do the same), but it’s not going to happen overnight and that doesn’t make me less valid as a progressive. In fact, if I’m keeping this 6-year-old rolling bucket of bolts out of a scrapyard, I say that’s the best possible action.


  • Sorry in advance for being captain obvious, but I feel like I can’t get over this. Your comment is *valuable and I completely agree with your take here, but then the elephant in the room is: how do the people with power actually choose to use these tools? It’s not like I can effect change on healthcare AI use on my own.

    So yes, it really can be first pass, good sanity check type of tool. It could help a good doctor if it was employed in a sane and useful way. And if the people with power over the system choose to use that way, I believe it would be a genuine benefit to a majority of humanity, worth the cost of its creation and maintenance.

    Or, it could be used to second guess the doctors, cram more cases through without paying them fairly, or “justify” not having enough qualified experts to match our collective need.

    Just framing how it is used a little bit differently suddenly takes us from genuine benefit to humanity, into profit-seeking for the 1% and lower quality of life for the remainder of us. That is by far my largest concern with this. I suppose that’s my largest concern with a lot of things right now.







  • Support your local co-ops! Glad to see they were able to step in and help.

    Target c-suite can generally go eat a urinal cake. Not that I ever really shopped there anyway but after they caved to bigots they went up there with freddies/kroger and amazon on my shit list.

    Also sorry for the rant in advance: I wish small grocers were more fairly prioritized in general. Here in Portland we do have a few and I’m lucky enough to be kind of near one, but some areas are completely out of luck. Even the ones we do have tend to cut a fine line on prices due to how crazy jacked up properly values and rents are. Trash single fam and large business zoning rules are really blocking a lot of progress.




  • It depends heavily on where you live.

    Where I grew up, the main concern was that snow piled up quickly during heavy storms. Most people knew how to deal with it and would be fine, but the incompetent people (who to be very clear aren’t always new to the area…) made things extremely dangerous for everyone else. Doesn’t matter if you’re an expert at driving in the snow if some asshat with worn out 3-season tires plows into you and injures you. But we had the infrastructure to withstand cold and snow, even if most of it was old and janky. The human aspect of it was a little messed up (plow drivers making min wage and working max legal hours, people being left to shovel 3-4ft of heavy plow walls in their driveway, etc) but they managed to deal with it. Core things like power and gas were mostly buried and kept working so you could stay warm at home, and homes were designed for temps well below freezing.

    Long time ago I did experience a blizzard in Wyoming. Holy crap, like nothing else I’ve experienced. We literally couldn’t see the road 20 feet in front of us at times. You get snow-blind if you stare at it too long. We saw so many cars that had driven off the road on accident because they lost track of where the pavement was.

    I live in Portland OR now, we don’t get many blizzards but our ice storms are rough. If we get snow people stay home if they can, it rarely lasts longer than a few days before it all melts.


  • Not verifying the load capacity of a customers vehicle.

    My past job made the customer sign off the paperwork before we loaded them up and this guy did sign off on the paperwork that his truck could take the load. So, I wasn’t technically liable. I was newly certified and was the only driver around that day. We were a small shop that only took a few deliveries a week, and customers wanting samples back after delivery was even rarer (destructive testing is fun!).

    Since I was new to this, I didn’t intuitively know the difference between a flatbed and a normal passenger pickup. So yeah. In my ignorance and with this guy’s sign-off in hand, I try to load his ~1000lb pallet of bigass metal test samples into his. Personal. Pickup.

    The truck just kept squatting and squatting, even though I still had weight on the forks… until it finally made a horrific creaking noise. I immediately unloaded the pallet and went to apologize. The guy was mortified but he kept it cool and called his actual delivery guy to come with a flatbed the next day. I did that one too, thankfully his delivery guy just cracked up when I explained what happened (even gave me some quick advice too!). They kept doing business with us, at least, but his reaction in that moment is still seared into my mind.