Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs

If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer

That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.

1. Texas can’t even properly support their own power infrastructure inside their own state

2. The vast majority of the population of Texas (Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Ft Worth) are solidly blue. The state maps are gerrymandered to death such that 100,000 square miles of empty land has the same voting power as over ten million citizens. This is the sole and only reason Texas is consistently “red”, is via rampant voter disenfranchisement.

Refuses, or is forced?

A thing we see over here in America sometimes is the same group, or even the same man, having control over both public and private options of a given service. The public option is stripped of funding and only operates at minimum wage, while the private option has 5x the funding and hires industry experts. This then easily paves the way for “the public option is trash and doesn’t work, we need to privatize this entire industry”. Suddenly your post office is owned by an individual and you’re paying a weekly post subscription.

Be very, very cautious and suspicious of private options attempting to supplant public ones. It’s a key tactic that our homegrown American fascists like to use and it’s upsettingly effective on the general public.

Not to be confused with the elusive cocktopus

Thanks for this. At the beginning of the comment,

Do you think we’re all just a bunch of rubes?

My answer was, well kinda, yeah. By the end of it my opinion has changed.

I do still think that this is appreciated more as a performance piece than a painting, if that makes sense. You appreciate the action behind what produced this piece, and maybe by extension the piece itself but the meaning lies in the artist’s actions off the canvas. I do still think that yeah this is a pretty trash painting in as much as we define a painting. But you’ve given me a new perspective on it that I had not in fact considered before. I’m no stranger to wrestling demons but I never connected that to Pollock’s pieces before. I’m still not sure that I do, but I can understand and appreciate why you would.

There is also no good art without bad art. Even if I don’t think the result was successful, he was trying something new and novel and that has to happen to evolve our art. I don’t much like Picasso’s cubism either, but I can’t deny that it was a bold step in a new direction that then inspired other artists after him. Maybe this is similar.

I still don’t like Pollock much, I think his art really could have been made by anyone, and the only reason we know his name is because of luck and nebulous connections to CIA psy-ops, and every art magazine ceaselessly jerking him off in their articles when he was popular. But maybe I’m wrong. I do appreciate your new perspective on his work. Maybe the fact that it could have been made by anyone is part of the actual message that’s trying to be communicated in these pieces.

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I actively like a lot of abstract art. But yeah, I definitely could have done some of this. Jackson Pollock comes to mind. Give me a CIA payroll and a handle of whiskey and I, too, could randomly splash a series of paints at a canvas and go drop it off at an art museum.

Just look at this, this is trash art. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it, Pollock is the most popular whipping boy of the abstract art scene specifically because this is garbage. Life Magazine looked at this and posted an article asking “Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?”

No, he’s fucking not, just look at that. Art is subjective to the viewer, of course, and art that I like may be art that you don’t like. But come on. There is no subject, whatsoever. There is no meaning. There is no color balance. There is no clever use of space. There is no subliminal message behind the apparent chaos of the artwork.

Compare this with, for example, the works of František Kupka, such as Complexe.

This is still recognizable as abstract art (or more accurately, not recognizable as anything else); but it has a clear direction of composition. I’d hang this on my wall, I wouldn’t see this in a museum and dare think “I could make this”.

A Pollock, though? My dog can make a better Pollock than Pollock did, by dipping her tail in a series of colors.

I fix cars for a living every day.

reliable

Maybe, compared to a BMW or other “luxury” car marketed to rubes. But a Honda or a Toyota would totally eat VW’s lunch in regards to reliability, at half the purchase price.

relatively easy to repair

The VW Beetle is famously easy to repair, basically every modern VW model sucks ass. It needs some proprietary tool to access half the vehicle on more than half the models. I do not like working on them. We also get wonderful examples of German Manufacturing Precision™️ where you have a half a millimeter clearance to remove a part. This was worse in older VW’s in my experience (the Germans really took to AUTOCAD like fish to water when that became common, methinks) but it still happens.

comfortable interiors

Actually totally agree here, the interior of most modern VW’s is pretty nice. Shame that doesn’t extend under the hood.

VW also got caught straight up lying about their emissions testing a few years ago so that also destroyed basically all trust that I had in their brand. They’ll sell you a car that runs, but there’s really no knowing if the numbers that it reports are actually accurate.

A complete lack of all moderation, an owner / management team who studiously ignores all the child abuse on their platform because it is profitable to them to ignore it, and a legislative and judicial system that is unwilling to prosecute businesses for anything in general and child abuse in particular.

It’s a perfect microcosm of the American condition, really.

When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income… yeah that isn’t exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70’s-80’s. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.

I don’t know if you were present in the “millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps” conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn’t come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they’ve made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.

“When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that’s all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It’s easy, you just don’t want to work.”

No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.

Kids these days don’t even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.

Do you live somewhere that you get a lot of snow and therefore a lot of salt in the roads? Rotors can rust and that can make you need to change them more often.

If you don’t live somewhere that rust problems are common though, you might want to have somebody inspect your calipers, or try a new mechanic. You really shouldn’t be having to change rotors every time. That’s a lot of money.

It was, until I found out that Slate was created by an ex-Amazon manager and their prime investor is Jeff Bezos.

Slate was founded in 2022, and operated in stealth mode until it revealed the Slate Truck on April 24, 2025.[4] It was originally called “Re:Car”, as a project within Re:Build Manufacturing, a domestic manufacturing incubator co-founded by Jeff Wilke, the former CEO of Amazon’s consumer division.

[…]

Slate raised at least $111 million in Series A financing, including an undisclosed amount from Bezos. Several other wealthy individuals also invested, including Walter, the controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and CEO of Guggenheim Partners, and Tull, who is a lead investor of Re:Build Manufacturing.

Per their Wikipedia page.

If you grind your brakes all the way down to the backing plate then yeah you’re going to mess up the rotors. If you change your brakes around 2mm when it starts hitting the squealer tab you can usually get 3 or even 4 brake changes out of a set of rotors though. It’s not a sure thing but it’s true more often than it isn’t.

You’re probably right.

That doesn’t change my opinion, though, that everyone at Apple can go suck-start their own asshole, and they’ll never receive another cent of my money for as long as I live.

I already wasn’t buying their shit but this has signed and sealed that for the rest of eternity.

You can take the man out of the clown suit but you can’t take the clown out of the man.

As long as he’s still furiously folding balloon animals while I’m getting canned, I’m still satisfied.

Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?

In my talons, I shape clay, crafting life forms as I please. Around me is a burgeoning empire of steel. From my throne room, lines of power careen into the skies of Earth. My whims will become lightning bolts that devastate the mounds of humanity. Out of the chaos, they will run and whimper, praying for me to end their tedious anarchy. I am drunk with this vision. God: the title suits me well.

I do love GLadOS, but she doesn’t hold even half a candle to SHODAN.

And “sinus rhythm” in this case would be… normal sinusoidal heart function, right?

Incredible. Thanks for the translation.