defects galore

A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.

The point of being an executive is depositing huge checks while serving on the boards of other companies and voting for their executives’ huge checks. Are you new to this planet?

“Nothing’s on purpose, ma’am.”

The best description of her I’ve read is that she looks like a serial killer who is wearing the face of one of her victims as a mask.

At least he was in Greece and not Moscow - like some congresscritters I could name.

I’d go with Marjorie The Gathering myself. Yeah yeah you’re not supposed to hit a woman, but I’m not convinced she’s even human let alone a woman.

A third party is only likely to split the vote of the people who can’t stand trump.

TAP is a stupid acronym.

Unfortunately, the Nazis were only removed from power by an external military force much greater than them. Even after the war was utterly lost and the Allies were closing in on all sides and literally turning their cities into heaps of rubble, the Nazis never lost their chokehold on Germany. What external power is coming to remove Trump and his cronies?

Here are some scary facts about Treblinka: it was in operation for about 18 months, was staffed at any one time by about 25 German officers and soldiers and 100 civilian workers, executed people with the exhaust from a single salvaged Russian tank engine, and murdered about 900,000 people in total. People tend to assume that the Holocaust was a massive industrial-scale operation that used up a huge fraction of German resources, but in fact it was a remarkably low-cost operation for the most part. Even the transportation aspect largely made use of supply trains returning otherwise empty from the front. If Hitler had not been stopped militarily, Germany would have had no technical difficulty in carrying out his goal of literally exterminating the nearly 200 million people of the Soviet Union.

It was also modeled on our auto industry and car culture.

People come here to hoard broken cars & ripped tarps

Not to mention the enormous, life-changing $1700 per year of oil money everybody gets.

Oh, we’re weary all right.

Uh, airline tickets to India?

I spent a summer in south India a few years ago during monsoon season. I was fucking miserable in my jeans and shirts until I switched over to wearing loose, flowing clothes made of bleached kahdi (loose homespun cotton) like the locals. It keeps the sun off you and even when it gets soaked it doesn’t cling to your skin, and then whenever the rain stops it dries completely very quickly. Other westerners I met made fun of me for pretending to go native, but they had no clue how effective it was.

I still can’t fully understand wtf iambic pentameter means

I think it means five syllables … plus some fermented raspberry juice.

Where I live, a few stop signs have a square white sign below them that says “EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN”, i.e. you don’t have to actually stop if you’re turning right. It’s incredibly fucked up - it works fine if you’re a local and you’re familiar with these signs, but people new to the area don’t know anything about it and if they’re on the crossroad they actually expect the other driver to stop since all they see is the backside of the octagon. It’s pointless to have these signs anyway since people usually roll through stop signs as it is.

Why would you have failed? You are supposed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign.

It’s hilarious to me that Musk claims to work 100 hours a week but he’s the CEO of five companies. Even if the claim were true (and of course it isn’t) it means being the CEO of one of his companies is a 20-hour-a-week job at best.

I know many people who believe that “right on red” means they have the right of way to make the turn and don’t have to stop first or yield to traffic.