Aroooo

8 hours? Look at Mr. Iron Gut over here.

Coming from out west, Menards was absolutely next level for doing house projects.

I’ve got a buddy whose father is a handyman/electrician in Germany, and comes over to the US fairly regularly. He was astonished at how helpful hardware store employees (specifically Menards) are here, and his jaw almost dropped when they actually went with us to try and find an item.

You know that you can use drills and saws more than once, and for more than one kind of thing, right? I’ve used the same drill for plumbing, electrical, woodworking, and probably 100 other projects at this point. A basic mechanics set and a basic combo kit of power tools from any hardware store will allow you to do 90% of projects around your house, and will take up about as much space as a medium moving box.

It’s definitely become a thing within the past decade, especially with products/ads directed more towards women. Remember that obese is not “Jabba the Hutt” levels of fat, and someone who looks like this is far past obese at 5’4" (1.61m) and 200lbs (90kg). Then, you have companies like Dove ( with ads like their “Body Positive Trailer” showing characters that are well past Class III obesity. That’s an extreme example, but it’s become quite common overall to show severely overweight people as “normal”

Companies have realized that people are getting fatter and fatter globally, so like any good capitalists they’re going to take advantage of it. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dove is owned by Unilever, who is also the world’s largest producer of ice cream, and suddenly their push for “body positivity” makes a bit more sense.

Now, before people go and attack me, I think that there have been many positive changes in how people are being more realistically portrayed in media and appreciate the push for more realistic body standards. Shaming people for looking “different” is not okay, and that includes being overweight.

However, what’s not okay in my mind is how quickly it’s become “being severely overweight is totally okay if you #slay queen, yaaaas”. I’ve noticed a growing trend of these types of ads, generally portraying black/PoC women (who are already statistically far more likely to become obese) who are hundreds of pounds overweight as doing all kinds of “fitness” and/or “boss babe” kinds of activities, which seems like they are trying to convince the broader audience that it’s totally okay to be 200-300lbs overweight because this obese black girl was shown wearing athletic wear.

I’d believe it. One time at a concert we all did acid and molly. At a certain point I needed to go down the stairs to another level, but as I attempted to go down, there was an usher telling me I couldn’t go downstairs. So I said “Oh, sorry, my bad” and walked away. A few minutes later, my friends come find me and walk me down that same staircase, and the usher said nothing, which I thought was odd.

It was later after sobering up that my friends told me that what actually happened was I had walked right up to the usher, stared intensely at them for a solid minute, before saying “Oh, sorry, my bad” and walking off.

Another time, I had a buddy get incredibly high and was trying to run to the police station up the street because we were “mind controlling him”, and then later that evening after calming him down, was watching porn and having conversations with the actors as if they were speaking directly to him. Not even masturbating, mind you, just watching porn to converse with them.

Drugs are a hell of a drug.

Nah, something like the IONIQ5 handles the modern “low-poly” look 1000x better than the cYbErTrUcK does.

You mean the 2020 Roadster they took millions on deposits for?

Let’s be real, if you want an EV and a real truck, you’re going to buy an F-150 Lightning, Silverado EV, or RAM EV and get a truck that’s at least somewhat compatible with normal truck accessories, and has a service network that’s not going to just offer you Uber credits when you need to get to a jobsite

I might add a couple of suggestions to make things as painless as possible. Get the H&K sound system and Tech package. The tiny screen looks super crappy in such a nice interior and the base sound system SUCKS. No, seriously, it’s absolutely abysmal and is legitimately far worse than the one in my wife’s base Kia Niro. I’m not super snobby when it comes to audio systems and mostly listen to podcasts and such, but it’s barely passable even for that. Second is if you plan on getting a BEV, get one with a heat pump. It makes a massive difference in range even if it doesn’t get super cold where you live.

Also, after having a 33kWh REx and now the larger 42kWh BEV, I don’t miss the REx at all. It’s not a road trip car by any means, but I got it from Atlanta to Detroit with zero issues, it was just a slow trip. I’ve driven it all around MI and done a couple of road trips to Chicago in it, and had zero issues.

No one ever does! Myself included, until I was actually driving back from a Model 3 test drive when they first came out, and happened to see one parked out front of the BMW dealer. I had completely forgot they even existed, decided to look it up, found to my surprise it was RWD, and drove back over to test drive one. I bought a 2017 REx a month later and loved it so much I bought my '21 S since I knew they weren’t going to make them anymore. The normal i3 is good, but the S is absolutely the way to go.

The best way I can describe the tires is that they have far, far more grip than they have any right to given their size. For street use, the EP500s are more than sufficient and I’ve never felt like I was wanting for grip. For AutoX, they do okay, but definitely severely hamper the performance of the car. It’s RWD, so you’re not over stressing those narrow fronts too much when you really push it, but it still likes to understeer more than I’d like, but I think that’s also a symptom of being unable to turn DSC all the way off, because it feels a lot more balanced when I put it in the “everything, including ABS off” mode.

I’ve got plenty of experience with hot hatches; my first car was an APR stage 2 tuned Mk5 GTI, and I regularly drive my friends’ FoST and FoRS. It definitely doesn’t feel quite as sporty as those, but I find it far more fun as an around town daily. We’ve also had an F-Type R, ZL1, and M3, and while they’re phenomenal experiences and super fun to drive, any time you’re even pushing them a little on public roads, there’s just that incessant nag in the back of my mind both knowing the car can give so much more, but also that doing so is insanely risky. I feel like I get to push my i3 a lot more on public roads without being downright reckless, and it just makes it way more fun to drive because of that.

With all that said, the TL;DR is that they’re way more fun than they have any right to be, and ignore preconceptions or hangups on the performance numbers you might have,

The i3s is a fun as hell hot hatch. I absolutely adore mine, and can’t imagine ever selling it. It’s much larger on the inside than you’d think, and I move a ton of shit with it regularly.

Sandy Munro lost all credibility when it came out that, while going on about all these wild claims about Tesla’s incredible manufacturing prowess and how everyone else was shit, he held a fair bit of Tesla stock and even went on to gloat about how much he made off it during 2020.

Absolutely zero integrity and no reason to trust a single word he says anymore, because not only has he shown that he won’t disclose serious conflicts of interest, but that he’ll also gladly abuse them for personal gain. He realized he can make way more money shilling Tesla and selling merch than he ever did with his normal business, and rides off his company’s past reputation.

Even if you ignore that, his analyses are basically entirely cost focused, and having seen some of the reports on projects I personally know quite well, he takes an incredibly simplistic view towards component design and focuses on almost entirely on cost/simplicity, with basically zero regard for longevity, function, NVH, etc. Which, for the massive 500+ page reports that are purely for cost and build analysis, is totally fine. However, he then spouts it to the public as if everyone else is an idiot for not wanting their cars to be rattling shitboxes.

He’ll praise things like Tesla re-using the suspension from the Model 3 1:1 onto the Model Y because it saves on manufacturing costs and such, but will completely ignore that, until some fairly recent part changes, the Y had literally one of the single worst rides of anything on the road today, because they added 100s of pounds of weight and didn’t even bother to change the spring rates.

For real. I’m less than 5 years older than some of my wife’s friends, and they were almost awestruck that I have basically ZERO ads in our house. Every device has uBlock, Sponsorblock, ReVanced, SmartTube, whole house has PiHole and a couple of other things. And these are CS majors and engineers, so it’s not like they aren’t at least semi tech-savvy. They just accept the ads as if they can’t do anything about them.

But I say fuck it, because literally every content creator I like does zero sponsorship or ad deals, and they all manage to make fantastic content. I’ll give them $1000 via their Patreon or merch before I’ll watch a single ad for shit like Raycons or Raid: Shadow Legends. Ads are absolute cancer and the more ads you see for a product, the shittier it is, almost guaranteed.

FYI, he didn’t make it “open source”. It was a joke of a sharing agreement that basically said they could use your patents if you used theirs. It was purely so they could steal IP from anyone dumb enough to think that Tesla had some magic “secret sauce”, and took them up on the agreement.

I can tell you right now, personally knowing people who worked with him way back on the first Model S, he has always been an absolutely unhinged shithead of the highest degree. He loved going into an absolute berserk rage dropping tons of F-bombs in conference calls, all because someone gave him an answer he didn’t like.

otherwise your initial employees and partners are going to walk out the door and leave you with nothing.

Yeah, there’s a reason the original people at Tesla all left, and he was kicked out of PayPal. Literally the only reason anyone tolerates him in any way is for the financial incentive, and that’s the only way he’s kept people around.

Twice as expensive as what? A Lucid Air sure isn’t competing against a Model 3 if that’s what you’re saying. It’s priced almost identically to the Model S, so not really twice as expensive. Also, in case you missed it, the Supercharger network is opening to all brands, so that selling point is not a thing for much longer.

There’s literally no reason to pick a Tesla over another brand, unless you really enjoy paying $12k to beta test absolutely terrifying ADAS software.

I think that you really did a good job summing up an incredibly complex issue in a fairly neutral way. No matter how smart you are as a kid/teen, there’s only so much you’re ever going to see play out, and it takes some time to get all the “data points” to start seeing the bigger picture.

As for Israel/Palestine, it’s literally one of the single most complex issues in geopolitics, and while it’s easy for someone reading articles and watching TikToks to just say “if Israel just gave them their land back and everything would be good!”, it’s ignorant of a much, much, MUCH bigger picture.

This is not saying I support any of what’s going on. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that conflicts of any sort are fucking awful, but the reality is that if Israel just did pull out of the West Bank and ceded all the claims, there would be so many knock-on effects that are effectively impossible to predict, with none of them being particularly good.

Realistically, the only way you could ever hope to come to a “simple” solution that doesn’t result in a massive loss of life would be with a time machine.