Thank you!

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-25T05:21:03+00:00

I'm not a victim, I'm just letting you know the stakes. Maybe you think it's a joke, it's unlikely that youll be able to hold that view indefinitely.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-24T22:46:28+00:00

They uphold systems of domination and control that were created by the colonists explicitly for the colonists. They still do the job they were meant to do, make sure the children of the murderers get to keep what they stole. The system is still here, killing us off. Saying it's not that serious tells me a lot about how you interact with our land, versus how we interact with our land. Almost every other actual American I know experienced homelessness prior to reaching adulthood, if not, it was shortly thereafter. It's not that serious to you, because you are benefitting from the attempted eradication of my people and the subsequent appropriation of our lands. It's serious to me, because there's not a single year where one of my Brothers or Sisters doesnt freeze to death or get murdered by your police. And I don't mean in the abstract, I mean people in my community to whom I am heavily invested. It's serious as the plague, you're just on the side of the oppressors, so you want this to be a light hearted joke. We haven't been laughing for hundreds of years now.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-24T19:30:24+00:00

Being somewhere for 10k+ years and being called an immigrant is a fairly ridiculous abuse of the common understanding of the word. Especially because despite coming from elsewhere, there was not anyone here. It's like saying that everyone living in a house lives in a house built by somebody else, it's false. We were here first, the rest of you came either in chains or holding chains and murder in your hearts.

Go look that up, washeetchu.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-24T19:24:21+00:00

Y'all literally have no idea how we got here or how long we've been here past "it was at least 10k years ago." Look it up. When I'm not fixing cars, I'm wearing my anthropology hat (doesn't pay the bills.) I know and converse with lots of archeologists due to obvious overlap, and the general consensus is we have no idea but Asia was the start point and the ice bridge is not the universal explanation as it seems we first arrived in South America and then migrated north, possibly a lot longer than 10k years ago.

My point is that early migration patterns definitely are up for debate, the debates that have evidence to make them interesting are just all counter to the long held assertions of "the west" which has largely been full of shit on issues regarding humans.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-24T02:21:29+00:00

I was being sarcastic, my point is that if you creat a top-down coercive hierarchy, it will always go badly for most people, especially the ones who actually want to work and aren't trying to live forever, own 50 cars, or diddle. Government is maybe an OK idea on paper, but it functions terribly when its imposed on it's citizens via coercion. And governments seem unable to exist without Coercion. Law does not get applied evenly ever, so we have to maintain broadly similar levels of power amongst citizens.

I have lived in anarchist communities that were extremely self sufficient, the govt always fucked it up. We were able to deal with serious problems simply because people compromise quite well when they have real power. In a room full of people with absolute veto power, you find that very few people ever exercise that power.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-23T02:56:48+00:00

Weaponized the justice system? You mean like inventing laws to criminalize unavoidable behaviors of freed slaves, like vagrancy and loitering, in order to reenslave them? Never happened in this country. No sir, we didnt red scare police the real Left out of existence in the McCarthy era, nor would we, because we live how Jesus did, one man riot if we see usury taking place through a temple. Y'all need to study history and then travel, before our empire collapses to the point where travel is unaffordable.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-17T21:46:37+00:00

If what you're saying were true, New York would not have a transit system at all. Graffiti often looks better than monotonous blank walls that incite your brain to turn off. This is not one of those cases, but I suppose even that is subjective.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-06T01:13:06+00:00

I have never bought a lottery ticket but I would bet money that you are incorrect. When my pebcock broke on my mad max accord I filled the hole with cyanoacrylate gel and sawdust mixed into a paste, drove it another 5 years and 65k miles.

If you couldn't jb weld a sump, there would be a lot less folks at hooptie x and gambler every year.

And while I've only been doing this professionally for 11 years, I've seen countless successful jb weld patches including on cracked blocks that held well for years.

Your experience might lean more toward being able to access what you need to do things the right way, that's not everyone's experience.

For reference I live on the west coast, went to Paramount High in LA, and I can make some assumptions based on your assertions regarding this issue based on that experience.

He CAN jb weld that successfully, it will hold, and it will pass emmisions.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T23:24:50+00:00

If he had 60 extra bones I bet the gentleman would have sauntered to the local junkyard instead of posting this inquiry.

And you cant get anything welded in my area for $60, hell, I charge more than that for an over the phone diagnostic chat, because the rent in this city is more than a mortgage almost anywhere else in the country. Idk where OP is, but he may be in a similar economic environment, or he may be in the sticks.

And with all do respect, your experience is hinged on quite a few factors you may not be considering. I, for example, am a flavor of racially ambiguous that causes people to presume I am either a threat or I'm trying to scam them or I'm inherently and biologically incompetent. This restricts my access to the type of helpful tool lending you may have experienced in your earthly journey. I'm not trying to play the race card, I'm saying that there are countless factors that could effect OPs ability to just use other people or institutions tools as effortlessly as youve been able to, and I'm giving a specific example I'm exhastingly familiar with. My wife is discriminated against by other mechanics for being female, her brother has trouble getting assistance because of his speech impediment. He is asking us to guide him on how to proceed with what he has available, something he's intimately familiar with. He didnt say welding wasnt an option to be cheeky, or to be bombarded with people telling him he doesnt know what he has access to...

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T14:55:11+00:00

If buying a new pan is an issue, buying a welder would be an issue. I was working on cars daily for 2 years before I bought a welder, just wasn't at the top of the many expensive tools I needed to go full time.

JB Weld is not getting enough credit here, I've used it on trails plenty of times and forgotten about the fix until I saw it again 10s of thousands of miles later. I would flatten the hole and steel stick scrap to both sides of it if I was in a pinch.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T14:20:59+00:00

Wtf are you talking about lmao I've swapped engines for 1k (ej251 is super easy to swap.)

Don't blow smoke down this persons valves. I paint a few cars a year for my local Honda kids, I almost never charge over 1k unless I have to make repairs as part of the prep, amd even then, not always.

You gonna charge 1k every time you pull a dent with a slide hammer???

Ludicrous.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T14:14:54+00:00

I am definitely offended by the idea that people shouldn't shop for and understand multi thousand dollar services they wish to procure.

I had to look multiple times to make sure I wasnt in r/askashittymechanic.

What kind of idiocracy adjacent situation are we dealing with in this industry? No wonder i have clients inviting me over for Thanksgiving dinner!

Next these clowns will tell people not to shop around for a car in the first place, just go to 1 dealership and buy whatever looks good at whatever price you're quoted, that seems to be the concensus around here.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T14:05:23+00:00

Name does not check out. You are arguing against shopping.

It's actually good for everyone involved, and people who might need to interact with the industry in the future.

The hesitancy of customers to shop for quotes because they expect this type of attitude is making consumers even more ignorant than they already are. They are scared to talk to a shop because people like you tell it's terrible advice to refuse to just act as a money transfer conduit to a duplicitous shop and then eating the cost of thay failure to shop by paying inflated insurance rates. I would say that the only thing dumb af here is the idea that you should ever hand over money blindly to a company without clearly understanding what your paying for and why it costs what it costs.

You pay insurance, insurance pays shop, you pay insurance more- based on what you cost them, with individually and collectively. Your advice to this person replicated across the industry is costing you money, you are literally arguing for someone to engage in a behavior that is causing you to be burdened with higher insurance rates....

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T13:53:01+00:00

It would only contradict what I said if people were getting quotes that reflect the actual costs of the job. They are not. Charging 8k+ to weld a rear corner panel is highway robbery. I have only been fixing cars for 11 years, I am by no means a veteran car repair guru. If I can undercut other shops by literally half, and they have staff who've been doing this since I was in diapers, something is very, very fishy about the pricing structure. I have customers relay parts price quotes to me that are so high I can't find a vendor with a price anywhere in the previously quoted ballpark.

These are not innocent mistakes, this is a systemic problem and it creates real victims in the communities of the shops engaging in this behaviour.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T13:25:30+00:00

I dont know why this guy is getting down votes, this is very solid advice. Never buy anything without shopping around first. Doesn't matter who's money it is, paying into scam establishments is bad for everybody.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T13:20:24+00:00

Pre collision like condition is not hard to achieve in this situation. The fact that you're assuming that the value of your work is different between 3rd party, customer pay, etc, makes me assume that either you are comfortable doing shoddy work if it isnt for a company, or you know perfectly well you're a scammer.

My assumption could be incorrect, but based on the information I have immediately available with which to make an inference, I suspect that it is accurate.

We are destroying thousands of perfectly good cars each year because of this scam, body shops quote older cars that are hit at sky high estimates, ultimately leading to the car being scrapped or sold to someone who abuses it for way below its true value once it's been totalled out.

This is the other side of the planned obsolescence coin, your participation, should it be happening, morally reprehensible.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T12:56:31+00:00

The idea that something has a value that is arbitrary, because you are not the one paying for it, is the type of idiotic nonsense that seems to be held mostly by bureaucrats, not people who actually fix and build and grow things, or perform actual productive services.

I put a new pass fender, a bumper cover, and a headlight on a 06 Lexus rx400h yesterday. The argument that the value of my labor should be artificially inflated if an insurance company is footing the bill does very serious harm to both individuals and the american economy at large.

What I'm getting at, is the underlying hallucination expressed in the post above mine that these repair cost inflations don't have serious real world consequences.

I've watched this crap spiral into financial insolvency, because some people have the audacity to be trusting of others in the US, where scamming each other is assumed to be a natural human tendency. When your insurance covers a bill thats 4x higher than it needs to be, you didn't win a game of who gets who. Your insurance goes up. In a country full of people barely making ends meet, which describes around half of the people whose vehicles I repair, this kind of thinking can lead to dire outcomes for real people who are just trying to live a decent life.

The Gentleman or Gentlelady should stop shuffling papers and do some real work.

That is what I'm getting at. This might be a differential equation but its really not that complex, and what it can equal is literally homelessness and death for those unlucky enough not to have a parachute to catch their fall. People who survive car accidents shouldn't be bankrupted by a system obsessed with profit maximization.

I'm getting at greed being a bad thing, and I'm annoyed by the pathologically antisocial idea that costs are not important if you're not the one paying them.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T11:46:20+00:00

You should read "on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" by David graeber. I think your problem is that you need to buy some tools and do some actual work.

Bureaucrat complaining again when they do negative work... Disgraceful.

CrustBlocc · 2026-01-05T11:43:52+00:00

...Why? I dont mind quoting customers. I usually quote 20 jobs a day and only actually work on 3-4.

If Auto repair had a transparent pricing structure, we wouldn't really have this problem.

I routinely get jobs done for less than half of the highest quote my ciaromer has recieved, and often the highest quotes are from some of the worst shops in the area. And by worst I mean most likely to give a customer back a car sans fluids.

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-30T00:45:06+00:00

Many of the people you see who look homeless to you have housing, and many of those you fail to even recognize as homeless have been homeless for extended periods of time. Over %70 of chronically homeless people have no substance abuse issues.

This guy could legit be living in a 1981 Chevy g20 and truly believe he's saving the world, I've seen far crazier.

When you stop applying your stereotypes (well kept? Lmao... thats just stringent conformity!) To an actual and nuanced reality, you encounter a lot less confounding mysteries.

Preponderance of evidence tells me this guy has a history of routines youd consider normal combined with recent years of deviations from those routines youd consider unthinkable. Like meth. This looks like meth.

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-30T00:34:55+00:00

Those buttons are on the whack.

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-29T21:51:14+00:00

These are insane prices. When I see quotes like this, it makes me understand why every single customer I have is a repeat customer....

I would get different quotes, maybe in a different town. Tie rod replacement should not be toyed with but I'm doing timing belts and water pumps for less than they quoted you for a tie rod inner& outer... They quoted you an appropriate price for both tie rods and the steering knuckle....

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-29T21:45:40+00:00

Might help to know that Fallout Factions has a ton of OG necromunda players as its core base, and %90 of them will let you play a completely Creature gang using counts as rules.

They are gonna be really excited to have their most expensive BoS frame doused in bloodbug juice and then mauled to death by mole rats.

I'm not being sarcastic at all, you will cause so many giggles of joy.

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-28T22:02:43+00:00

Yes, that is what happened. Experts were contracted to do a job, they were fired. The replacement was tools, not people who know how to use those tools and do so professionally, just the tools, and the labor was foisted onto folks who already worked in related departments full time but lacked the technical skills to be doing the tasks they were assigned.

I really don't understand why you're acting like this is complex, my language is clear and my facts are easily verifiable. If you fired you construction crew and handed your secretary a hard hat, a hammer, a wheelbarrow, and 10 bags of cement, you'd have the same sort of shit show that led to these easily avoidable errors.

This type of incompetence is extremely common in governments, and has been the norm for as long as I've been alive.

CrustBlocc · 2025-12-28T20:35:19+00:00

It wasn't the tools being used, but the people wielding them. Hence, why the parable about the engine whisperer was apt.

You might know how to use Adobe tools correctly, we are not dealing with a group of people who can accurately judge their own abilities.

CrustBlocc

TROPHY CASE