This one is for all the @redstateinsurgents@a.gup.pe
I keep reading shit like that, Gas was too expensive, thanks Biden! Just shifting blame left and right. And hey, I come from the midwest where gas is essential because everything is so goddamn far apart - but I drove a civic.
Oh I’m so sorry you went out, spent way too much on a giant truck, bragged to all your friends how you just have to have a hemi/cummins, did everything you could to reduce efficiency, and now you have to spend even more on gas? What a shame. Just, such a shame.
You don’t want to even do a tiny bit of introspection there? I drive an EV now, and they just rage that for a full “fill up” I spend $6. Total. My monthly travel bill (when not riding transit) is now about $15.
“I’ll have you know that I use this truck once a year to pull something a sturdy station wagon could handle just fine! And what if you need a really shitty version of a U-Haul? Then who are you gunna call?!? I saved $200 moving that one time and all it cost me was an extra $35k and a gas bill with numbers mathematicians are still trying to describe properly.”
Trucks: If you don’t have a fifth wheel RV then you may just be a complete dipshit.
God I hate the moving argument, the once a year thing. Yeah once a year I need something large from Home Depot. They have trucks I can rent literally there on site, or I go to the uhaul and rent one for $30 for the entire day. That’s not “manly” though to them
Yeah, given that it’s around a hundred bucks (at best) a month for a pickup, and I can rent a pickup from a big box store for 20 bucks…the math works out to do that as often as weekly and still save money, considering registration/tag/maintenance. That’s considering that my wife and I have one car, and one motorcycle: the differential in going from a car to a truck isn’t as egregious as motorcycle or no second car, of course.
Also, it’s always fun to get a huge haul of materials with my motorcycle gear on, seeing folks clearly wonder if I’ve thought through my decisions.
Trucks come, or used to anyway, in more reasonable configurations than maga drones get. A carbureted 300 I6 gets like 25mpg but it isn’t pointlessly big and loud and it’s a 6 so they don’t want it.
I just picked up an early 2000s used truck because I have a hobby where a truck bed is useful. $7500.
People were trying to tell me that I should get a new one, I can resale it in a few years and it’ll retain it’s value.
I don’t need a shiny new truck. I’m going to throw wood and sheet goods in the back. And I can actually see out of the damn thing, unlike anything recent.
Well, carbs are ass but they had fuel-injected 6cyl Rangers and Mazda B2500s. Those were solid trucks and for jobs where having a bed you could just toss shit into is actually important they worked great. Plus you could reach into the bed unlike these new giant fucking things and that’s coming from a dude who’s 6’-5”.
The biggest thing is that if they actually had any braincells and truly bought the vehicle for practical reasons they’d probably all own GMC Savannas and stuff but it’s all about the image so…
It’s all a manufactured outrage. They supposedly buy these cars because “gas is cheap” and then they lament when gas goes few cents up.
BTW: the gas will likely go up when US will decide to put on the final squeeze on Russia. Currently Russia escapes sanctions by selling their oil through intermediaries. This is purposefully ignored right now to keep the oil prices low.
Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.
As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.
They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.
It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.
I agree what you wrote, but I have problem with this paragraph:
It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.
While it is true that US produces enough oil domestically to have enough for itself the price for oil is global.
US has option to of course close its exports and not be affected by it, but in the process it will lose its allies who will suffer even more by that (this sounds more like that trump would do, as it would piss off allies which we need and it could be sold internally as protecting Americans)
The other option would be to keep market open, but then the price hike would affect us but it would be smaller, because it would be shared among everyone.
“How can you commute to work with EV that only have a range of 400miles? OP are you lying? I have to travel through mud road through a jungle so you must have too, it’s impossible to not drive a diesel tank here.”
To be faire there aren’t that many EV that could go 400 miles, and and they aren’t that cheap neither. And that without even considering the pain of public chargers. Context : i was about to buy an EV a week ago to travel regularly from Luxembourg to Paris. I gave up after reading how painful it is to 1. Know which charger is available. 2. Whether that charger accepts my payment card. 3. Almost no charger accepts a débit card
Hmm, my thinking was that journeys that use the full range of the electric vehicle are the exception though.
So in your example, it makes sense to have a ICE vehicle as you require the range. Most of us though don’t need that range. Most of us are unlikely to regularly be driving over 200 miles for a commute, and therefore EVs make sense for all of these people.
For your scenario, if you are motivated enough to do this, it might even work out cheaper to buy an EV, and rent an ICE car for your longer trip. But fair enough that this would be much less convenient.
One source for my thinking: https://www.statista.com/chart/24684/average-duration-of-a-one-way-commute/
I mean, there’s not a lot of people travelling 800km round trip regularly, majority of people probably travel less than 40km per day, with quite large percent of the commute time spend on idle either in traffic light or traffic jam. That’s petrol wasted not travelling. I’m generally mocking those who think their exception is the rule.
“Well I bet your power bill went way up!” Maybe. But not by as much as my gas station bill went down.
But that’s the Right? They talk about rights and personal responsibility, but the fact is they only want rights they can use to keep others down, and to hell with personal responsibility. They want to buy their giant-ass gas guzzlers and not be responsible for the fuel costs, they want coal and natural gas (drill baby, drill) wrecking the environment but don’t want to be responsible when a hurricane wipes out their towns. They want their guns but want the rest of society to be responsible for preventing school shootings. Oh, another school shooting? Ain’t my problem.
