Drew Dowdell

A blue wave in the House is nearly certain and will go a long way to halting the current wave of shenanigans. The midterms are 13 months away and given how many decades have passed since Jan 20, 2025, I'm not convinced we'll even make it. A blue senate is unlikely. There aren't enough flippable red seats to take. Maybe a longshot like Andy Bashir taking out McConnell.... but I think he's gonna run for Prez.

No. He had a gross misunderstanding, intentional or not, of what DEI is. The rest of that quote does not improve the context. He said he specifically questioned the pilot's competence because of skin color. Just like he questioned Justice Jackson's abilities to be a supreme court justice. Direct quote: "If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us! They're coming out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action." Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. Kirk then played a clip of Jackson Lee speaking in Congress, saying she had been admitted to educational institutions on affirmative action. Kirk then went on to make his point again: "We know. We know. It's very obvious to us you are not smart enough to be able to get it on your own. "I could not make it on my own, so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving." That's not how Affirmative Action worked. It didn't take spots away from those more deserving, it took slots away from the mediocre old-white-boys club who only would have gotten in because they're a legacy. A black pilot is a pilot because he completed all the required training, not because of some quota. DEI DOESN'T HAVE QUOTAS. DEI is just about making sure that anyone qualified is able to apply and potentially win the position regardless of gender, sex, race, religion, sexuality, etc. So to wonder if United/Delta/American put a black pilot in the driver seat just because he was black and they needed to meet a quota is just plain racist. There's a pilot shortage anyway, so anyone who is white and qualified is going to be able to find a job if they want one. No. That's a cop-out "Well I don't agree with everything Mussolini did, but at least he made the trains run on time." Don't say you agree with some of the things a nazi says without being able to very strongly qualify it. He was a bigot against race, sexuality, gender, women, and more. So unless its "Well I agree with him that the sky is blue", you're probably better off just not agreeing with him on anything.

This was the first school shooting Republicans cared about. There was another school shooting within minutes and it barely made the news .

I think you need to look deeper at this. He made his money, millions of it, by talking, so he has a natural desire to keep the conversation going. He was also incredibly disingenuous about it. It's all well and good to say we shouldn't build walls, but he was responsible for building or reinforcing most of them. This tweet is just rage bait designed to get the right wing angry at the gays, many of whom serve in the military. May is Military Appreciation month. So not only is he spreading bigotry, he's also spreading misinformation.... and he did that All. The. Time. When he got shot, he was in the process of trying to blame mass shootings on trans people. I frequently see people say that he was taken out of context, but when you go look up the entire context, what he's saying is even worse. You know what dead guy you don't have to ever explain context about? Mr. Rogers. Did you know he also kept a public list of professors who taught on subjects like feminism, LGBT issues, or even just American history that he didn't like? He posted these professors pictures and contact information on his website and turned his supporters loose on them flooding them with death threats, sending barrages of e-mail and phone calls to universities to get these professors fired, some of them even having to uproot their lives and move. Doesn't sound very in the spirit of "just keep talking" does it? Imagine having 100,000 people e-mail your boss saying you need to be fired in the worst terms possible. That's not very freedom of speechy of him. He spread Covid misinformation too, something which conservatives have been 100% wrong about on every angle of the subject for over 5 years now. His entire operation was grift. Getting people angry in order to extract money from them. Heck, his memorial service yesterday was selling Merch! His wife set up a gofundme even though they've been bringing in millions for years. So, while you feel you may have some alignment on his views, I would highly encourage you to find out what he was really about and the positions he took specifically to build the very walls he was claiming to want to pull down. But feel free to post a position he had that you agree with and I'll take a wack at it.

It really does, though some non-wrapped are better than others, and I do like wood on the wheel as well, we have that in the 300. Honda non-wrapped wheels tend to be good. Chrysler, GM and Ford non-wrapped wheels are awful. VW and Toyota are tolerable but nothing special.

Sooooo jealous! A crossing on the Queen Mary 2 is definitely on my bucket list. That reminds me that I need to start accumulating Carnival stock. If you are a shareholder with at least 100 shares, you get onboard credits up to $250 depending on the length of the cruise. The stock is only about $30/share right now.

Yeah, someone skilled with a rifle in Utah and they immediately wanted to blame a democrat

One can acknowledge that it is a horrible and uncalled for thing to happen while simultaneously not mourning the loss and acknowledge that the world is a slight slightly better place today. That said, its interesting watching one side tie themselves in knots trying to blame the other now that it’s come out that this was red on red crime.

when buying the oil filter on eBay, something else snuck into my cart

I think you'd come to regret that trade once the interior of the Camry starts creaking and squeaking over every bump.

SRT as a brand got canceled. They were a separate operation inside of Chrysler (the corp). They operated sort of like how AMG did/does. They still use the SRT badge, but now it's just a trim-line, not a full department set free to go around hellcatting all the things.

Personally, I like Plex better for storing things like CDs and LPs, but there is a bunch of technical setup you have to do ahead of time. iTunes has a lower technical threshold but is less flexible. That said, it is a LOT of work to digitize LPs. You have to listen through each one the entire way, break up the tracks and name them manually, clean up any pops and hiss, and keep the files organized. CDs, you kinda just drop it in the laptop and it rips it at like 6x speed and downloads all the album information for you. iTunes is really good for the CD bit. dBpoweramp Music Converter & CD Ripper is a good ripper alternative (make sure to buy PerfectTunes with it to get all the album art and track info database, it's $27 and well worth the upgrade). I think Amazon lets you store your own MP3s in their system if you have Prime and that music player is available on GM EVs.

When it happens, you won't hear about it directly. You'll feel an electricity in the air. You'll hear car horns honking, maybe some fireworks going off, you'll have 47 unread text messages. Entire nations will be celebrating. and you don't even have to ask what it is I'm talking about.

We're mid-west? We're mid-atlantic rust-belt by my estimation.

They got pretty darn close with the earlier SRTs. My partner is really putting the miles on ours. He does a lot of business travel and the thing just works. I know they had a reputation for being unreliable, but we've had very few issues with ours now at 82k miles. The only thing mechanically I've had to do to it outside of standard maintenance was a thermostat about a month ago, it was stuck open. It would have been a 10 minute job if I hadn't also taken time to detail a bit under the hood.

I haven’t made any updates here in a while because, well, it just runs. I haven’t needed to do anything to it. Coming up to an oil change that I do on both bikes every September. We took it on the back of the truck to Rehoboth Beach for vacation in July and yesterday I took it out to a client in Altoona PA, 250ish miles round trip. It performed beautifully and cruises effortlessly at <censored> mph even over some steeper mountain highways. Gas range is a little short and I required 2 stops for gas, 42 mpg up and 45 mpg back.

That’s a great evolution! Someone who at the Sam’s Club near me owns one of those final ones

As always, there's an app for that. I have a Plex home server, mostly for video. You could load all of that music on one and have a built in app on your dash to access your entire CD library from the PlexAmp. License for the software is a one-time $120 (I bought it 10 years ago when it was like $70). No more USB sticks. Just be your own private streaming service. You can share with friends too if you wanted (I share my movies with @Paolino). ..... but not if you have a GM EV. That said, you could also store all of your CDs in Apple iTunes on your phone...... ..... but not if you have a GM EV.

Even if you don't use many apps. Imagine GM deciding which music you can listen to because they have some sort of agreement with TimeWarner to favor just their library. That's basically what's going on here. You might actually like Pandora. You create an initial play list based on songs that you know and love already, and it plays those, but then it analyzes that and suggests other songs you might also like. You get a thumbs up or thumbs down on your CarPlay screen and that not only adds that song to your playlist or not, but the app learns more what you like and tailors future suggestions around that. You can have different playlists for different genres. From the perspective of learning what you like, Pandora seems to have the best algo of all the music apps. And it's cheap, like $6 a month. The downside is that you can't use it to play a specific song that you want to hear right now.

They shouldn't be that confident. They're not a software company. The problem is that GM gate-keeps apps. If they allowed unfettered access to the Google Play store for anything that was Android Auto compatible, I'd have less of a problem with it. But the fact that GM limits me to the apps they approve is a BIG problem. I'm an Apple Music and Pandora music user. I also use a few other streaming apps for free radio stations in Europe and my local NPR station, only Pandora is available in-dash none of the rest are available on a GM EV. You prefer Waze over Google Maps? Too bad. I have an excellent weather app called MyRadar that shows updated rain radar maps on my CarPlay display..... GM says "too bad". I know it sucks to do, but sometimes I have to take Teams calls from the car, I can do that with CarPlay. In a GM EV? Too bad. I have a widget for TripIt app in car play that shows my travel itinerary and will even update me on screen if my plane is delayed. GM says "Oh well, you don't need that". THAT is my issue with not allowing Car Play or Android Auto. GM deciding what apps are best for me and you. I'll note that all of these apps exist in the Google Play store and would be available if GM ungated them. Volvo uses the same base OS in their vehicles and doesn't gate-keep apps so they should all be available in a Volvo. (But I have no way of checking). The perverse effect is that even though Volvo has CarPlay, you need it less in a Volvo because you can just get the apps that you want from the Google Play store.

All we can do is kick up as big of a stink as we can to get this nonsense to stop. I beat up GM on social media as much as I can about the EV-Carplay thing.

Similarly, the 2019-2020 K900 was a proper luxury sedan that looks imposing going down the road. These are the years of its only refresh and it lost the V8 in favor of a turbo V6 but it gained tech and looked great.

I’m perfectly fine with 1996 tech. I’m getting more suspicious of modern tech because of the issue of spying. I think my 300C hits a sweet spot on technology in that it has things like car play , automatic braking, and adaptive cruise, but it’s not calling home and telling mom every time I accelerate too hard.

This is a 328 hp / 326 ft-lb 4-cylinder, but I think your point holds.

Like a crossover version of the Buick Electra Concept in China I mean... they're actually already doing it. LGA is in the final stages of a total rebuild now. EWR is getting completely rebuilt too. That said, there's only so much they can do with the real estate they have. It's kinda the reason for the weird design EWR had in the first place. They were trying to cram more gates in. LGA was NEVER intended to be the major hub that it is. It was suppose to be for short haul flights (by our modern standards) mainly and when JFK was built, that was for the longer haul stuff. LGA had to extend the runway into the Hudson to accommodate the larger planes. The airport was originally built in 1939.