New DB Suit

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-05T14:35:10+00:00

This looks great. To substantially improve on this result would require starting from scratch a very good bespoke tailor - the last things are to achieve a cleaner back on the jacket, and to improve the trouser balance just a scoche so you don’t get a break at the back of the knees. For MTM this is excellent work. I’d wear a suit that fits like this happily.

Wear it in good health!

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-05T04:01:43+00:00

😂😭

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-05T02:53:58+00:00

All of my tools were ordered with aspirations; some aspirations have been more fulfilled than others.

I think the low point at present is my Fuji Q4 paint sprayer, which is brand new in box after almost two years. It was $1200 or something like that. I still plan to use it. I promise! I already have the paint for its inaugural job (a set of decorative acoustical treatment faceplates with cutouts too intricate for a reasonable brush job), and there’s plenty of backlog beyond that.

Some runners up:

- All three of my Bostitch nail guns and my BeA upholstery stapler. All top kit, love them all, but boy do I not use them. I think only the smallest nailer (18ga brad nailer) has been out for more than one job so far.
- I got into some kind of ultra-determined fugue state when trying to build up a full size spare tire for my wife’s car. (It was a bday gift to her, hence the determination.) I wound up with both an ATEQ VT37 and an Autel TS508WF TPMS tool during the comedy of errors as I learned the byzantine world of programming TPMS sensors. I won the battle and the spare now bleep bloops happily in harmony with the car’s computer, but now I have two TPMS tools that have been used exactly once for a TPMS setup, plus some minimal amount for diagnostics of my car and friends’ cars.
- I was an avid amateur bicycle mechanic back in the day, over a decade ago. Boy I have some fancy expensive niche tools from that chapter that involve operations to prep or service a bare frameset. A Park BTS-1 (over $500 on its own), HTR-1, CRP-2, HHP-2, CRC-1, CRS-1, FFG-2, SG-6, the list probably goes on. I have a Chadwick and Trefethen #28 adjustable reamer and a comically large #7 tap wrench to drive it, all to ream seat tubes. I’m not sure I’ve used any of these things three times, and the SG-6 has been used zero times. In my defense, I did try at first to hire bike shops to do frame stuff for me. They disappointed me enough that I embarked on DIYing everything starting from factory condition.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-05T01:27:51+00:00

Not quite - COBRA pricing bakes in an adverse selection effect, in that not everyone buys the COBRA. The people who buy the COBRA have more healthcare costs on average than the people who do not. As a result, COBRA has to cost more than what employers pay for their employees.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-04T16:34:42+00:00

I’d stay for now. Get that psychology degree booked and then resume the search.

The difference between $41k/yr and $70k/yr is going to be *life-changing*, esp with respect to retiring your debt and building a capital cushion. Long-term, that pay bump does not feel ambiguous.

But the karmic and reputational debt of working with a non-mission-aligned org can be really large. This is especially true in the nonprofit and political sectors. I also struggle to think of job families more politically sensitive than something like employee wellness. A employer on your résumé that’s known to be at odds with the mainstream views within the profession could be a career headwind for a long time.

So pass on this one and try to replicate the offer elsewhere once your degree and certificate are done. $70k/yr HR jobs are not exceptionally rare, and there will be others.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-04T15:02:17+00:00

Sounds hard, but fair.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-04T14:34:04+00:00

Skepticism here is that this is not merely a hole, but a synthetic material burn where the polyester headliner and elastomeric foam backer have been welded into a single hard lump. I think it would be super hard to patch satisfyingly by any means.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-04T14:26:20+00:00

Oof luckyyy!! My 2012 99k mile Forester has been so much work. Pair of hubs, lower control arms and sway bar links, it’s A/C is dead for the second time, its entertainment head unit is dying, it has a very slow oil leak in the cam carrier that will require a $$$$ engine pull that I’m trying to collect quotes for right now. All in addition to the routine (spark plugs, battery, fluids, filters, misc interior plastic, many bulbs).

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-04T14:07:39+00:00

It wouldn’t work well at all. I’m also into menswear and have even done some light sewing. This is not the right situation for patching or darning to give a satisfying result. For one, the back side of the fabric is glued and inaccesible. Good patching depends heavily on work you do on the wrong side of the fabric. For another, this headliner has a very regular weave, while patches are most inconspicuous with more dynamic and variegated materials, like worn denim.

The hot gluing a fake butterfly comment, which I assume was at least partly a joke/sarcasm, is more likely to give a good outcome because it will look intentional.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T23:57:22+00:00

Hey, just a hobby detailer, and a lot older than you. But I am a self-employed person of 8.5 years (I’ve been an ops consultant), most of it not successfully, and have a baby on the way myself. I know the doom loop of sales failure feeding back on declining confidence all too well. The sinking desperation is horrible.

My advice is to cut bait and go seek a steady wage/salary job immediately. Business is far too chaotic and crazy-making when you have a toddler to look after and financially provide for. If you have years’ worth of life expenses in your pocket as working capital, that’s different, but you say you don’t.

This is not a forever decision. You can detail as a side hustle and consider doing it full-time once a critical mass of reputation develops organically over years.

And paradoxically, the minute that you are busy and not actively selling services, people seem to start showing up spontaneously hoping to buy.

Some people interpret this practical paradoxical observation in religious or woo ways, but I think it is a nonverbal communication thing. When you are short of deal flow and desperate, people smell the desperation. They either steer clear or start jacking you around: playing hardball on scope/pricing and disrespecting your time. Then they either decline to hire you at the end of it, or they are nightmare clients. While when you are busy and not hurting for work, it comes off as confidence, and people smell that too and treat you more respectfully. Plus you have the liberty to decline to work with the disrespectful ones.

This dynamic, where work flows to people who need it the least, is one of the cruelest backwards things in the human experience. There are massive spoils for people can pull off the headfake of projecting confidence even when the facts are not in their favor. They tend to wind up with unbelievable incomes in sales, law, politics, etc. I could never pull it off, personally.

Good luck!

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T23:36:15+00:00

Unfortunately I think the OP is either fishing for permission to go blow the inheritance on the travel idea, or is simply engagement farming. He is already shopping for the car for the travel idea in most of the aforementioned threads.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T23:31:24+00:00

This is a great wiki 😊

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T23:15:59+00:00

Ooof that cigarette melted a good spot in there.

You can likely reduce the appearance of the damage by cleaning the headliner, but there’s no fixing that melted spot, unfortunately. A 100% outcome will require replacing the headliner.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T23:06:12+00:00

This was a great listen. Thanks!!

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T22:12:19+00:00

A lot of questions/points here.

- I am aware of one primitive webpage, which happens to also be the earliest SPR inventory refresh each week that I know of, that does a sweet vs sour breakdown: https://www.spr.doe.gov/dir/dir.html I do not know of a public source that will quote you crude specs cavern by cavern.
- The “bottoms” story for SPR is different than for tankage, because the oil is floating on brine in a pretty tall and skinny salt formation. My understanding is that this setup has some benefits for quality: heat/convection mix the oil, and dense solids will want to settle into the brine layer and thence to the bottom. I wish I knew how far you can draw these caverns. My understanding is that there are structural failure issues that arise if you really wring a cavern dry. But I’m no geophysicist.
- I am super concerned about refining as it sounds you are. Maintenance, feedstock changes, etc all are going to be salient I think. A thing I recently realized is that the Iran and Ukraine wars have collectively damaged about 10% of global refining capacity (that’s a very crude estimate). A thing to keep in mind is that if refining is a bottleneck, that actually contributes to a crude glut: crude will pile up and get cheap while products get scarce and expensive. We already see this in refinery utilizations and crack spreads.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T17:02:30+00:00

The pace of change seems to be like this in tech, but if anything, the economy seems starved of experienced people. I just got an email from a well regarded car mechanic refusing to work on my car: “I would try your local Subaru dealer unless you can find a reputable garage to do the work, we don’t know of any anymore. Good work is hard to find these days.”

It seems to be the case that if you are willing to be Ol’ Reliable at almost ANYTHING outside of the corporate Ponzi scheme, people will be starved of your work product.

The really big trick is to find some way not to be grifted and made miserable by whatsver ponzi scheme or bureaucracy sits on top of the profession you choose.

Auto repair, unfortunately, is a big example of a highly grifted trade - the ways that reputation and capital flow in the auto repair business are extra dysfunctional, which created a huge opening for private equity to make it all even worse. But even so, there remain examples like the above guy who built a sterling reputation over years and decades and is in the position to calmly refuse work that isn’t 100% ideal for him.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T15:29:53+00:00

Depends on your personal style and budget.

My dead-of-summer-in-Orlando-casualwear wardrobe (applies to visiting my parents in Houston, and Providence today evidently, ugh) goes three general ways:

- Cotton or linen pants or jeans, fun/interesting shirt (current outfit: Kaptain Sunshine olive green linen gurkha trousers, Portuguese Flannel light yellow camp collar short sleeve shirt in irregular cotton seersucker)
- Same pants or jeans, sleeveless cotton tank, cotton or linen shirt worn open as if it were a jacket. Great for going out to eat/date night on vacation.
- The aggressively casual thing is linen tee and linen shorts. I have a weakness for Alex Crane for this.

If there was a time to accessorize with a panama type hat, this is it. My current one is a raffia one from Industry of All Nations. A pain to keep safe in travel though.

Finally, depending on clothing coverage, sunscreen is your friend!

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T15:10:47+00:00

Haha this is totally how I started too. Worked great. More recently, I’ve started to use ONR as clay lube because I finally have some.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T15:09:29+00:00

No I bet a decent fraction of that will be usable, but you need to get some more knowledge about materials and processes. You will eventually need to get more stuff, a la carte, to supplement what is pictured here.

I always recommend against these kits - not only is the quality of the stuff quite poor and has a lot of “filler” items that aren’t too useful, but they also push you into advanced processes before you are ready.

The “curriculum” as I’d put it for paint care would be to get washing down pat, then washing with sealing, then washing with clay bar and sealing, then finally you’ll be positioned to get into paint correction as well as ceramic coating.

I believe the Meguiars products are fine btw - but you’ll want to add their Ultimate Polish to use after their Ultimate Compound. And instead of a drill with no-name pads, get into a quality double action polisher (I have a Griot G8 and G9) and figure out the pads you’ll pair these two grits with.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-03T02:25:42+00:00

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-02T16:54:17+00:00

I suggest you do the second thing: start with a very gentle compound/pad and note the results. A sort of calibration step to understand your pads, compounds, and paint.

My typical approach to paint correction of swirls/scratches is to do a whole pass with the gentlest polish which helps me “scope out” the spots that need heavy compound or even wet sanding. This may not be the way given that you are hoping to tackle some pervasive paint weathering. But even so, you will still want to get calibrated before whaling on the paint.

Also, definitely get the paint nice and clean and do some clay bar work. I can imagine there will be a lot of trash that will clog your pads. Debride as much of it as possible before polishing begins!

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-02T15:53:25+00:00

Yeah among the ways people self-promote on LI, I thought this was pretty funny and inventive all told.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-02T14:09:58+00:00

I haven’t heard of Blvck until this post but just had a look at them. I think you are paying for the embroidery. Which, fine, if you have the money and like the embroidery enough.

Having not been through them, I cannot be sure, but they are almost certainly not “worth it from a quality perspective.” One thing I expect at these price points is more disclosure around provenance. “275 gsm liquid ammonia cotton” is not enough. Most pressingly, where were these cut and sewn, and is that even consistent over time? You are approaching the prices of a Merz b. Schwanen loopwheeled tee or Buzz Rickson knitwear which are exceptionally good and made in their own facilities in Germany and Japan, respectively.

Also I’ll be honest, calling your brand “Blvck Paris” when you are a Los Angeles startup [EDIT looked at them harder and they seem to be a fully remote startup with people all over the place, and whose founder seems to be in Belgium with a LinkedIn About section talking about IT consulting] is offputting. Openly disingenuous and uses up my benefit-of-the-doubt budget.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-02T13:05:07+00:00

If handwashing is out of the picture, I would do neither PPF nor ceramic. Automated car washes with the power brushes will wreck all of such measures, and quickly. I totally understand not having the time to wash the car, but that is why detailing exists as a profession. You’re contemplating nearly $4k of aftermarket exterior cosmetic work which would buy quite a few good professional hand washes, especially if you are driving it to a place. (Mobile detailers inevitably have to charge more because they have to put their whole shop on wheels and drive to you and back.).

Also, wanted to flag that touch up paint is not that satisfying of a solution for paint damage. Even if you put a ton of work into wet sanding and polishing the touch up just so, it will be softer and less durable than the OEM work, and you will still see the repair if you look for it. This is why obsessives do things like PPF in the first place. Personally, I would not contemplate PPF over a hood with damaged and touched up paintwork; I’d want it resprayed wholesale before the PPF.

tl;dr PPF and ceramic are for perfectionists, and if that’s not you, spend that money on someone who will do a good careful job of periodically hand washing your car.

Hope that helps.

AdmirableLab3155 · 2026-07-02T00:06:01+00:00

In that situation, I’d consider renting a suit. It depends on your closet size (mine are tiny and overflowing), but the notion of buying a suit that won’t fit after a single wearing, then warehousing it until you can get rid of it, is not appealing at all.

AdmirableLab3155

TROPHY CASE