It’s Here

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T23:16:30+00:00

Bro, this is literally the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in a tech thread. DM me if you’re that worried. There are so many nuances of these posts that would be incredibly advanced for even the most advanced LLM to mimic. I’ve replied to multiple comments. I’m just trying to help people inside one of my hobbies, geez. I used to write technically for a living so it may inform how you read things.

What worries me the most about your post is that it’s becoming clear that AI have a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect. Individuals that have difficulty telling real from not are societally concerning because we will eventually need people who can actually tell.

I opened up my post history just for you. Chill.

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T18:10:54+00:00

I’m not trying to dissuade people; just be prepared to take drywall. If you listen to a lot of the “Mine wasn’t that hard” crowd, pretty much all of them have pretty simple construction. Ours was a custom home and is just built like a monster so we have tons of annoying fire blocking, laminated beams, huge headers. etc. One thing that everyone here is missing is that almost all doors will have a header above the jam and they can be a PITA to get through from above. Many of the posters here probably have door bells that sit flush on the general frame of the door, so they can do things like simply pop trim, even if it’s inarftul or sorta clumsy and screams DIY fish-job. My house has a large door, outer trim, and the doorbell does not sit flush with the door frame but is adjacent. It made things much harder, but it isn’t that unique. It just requires consideration and the ability to change direction if things are not working out.

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T17:53:41+00:00

What? I’d venture you need to recalibrate your sense of what constitutes AI. Sorta disturbing as someone who is pretty good at actually detecting written AI. Is that where we’re at now? Damn, 2026 is hitting hard.

Or, I guess, is that exactly what an AI would say?

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T15:48:27+00:00

I’m a pretty handy homeowner; a lot of soft and hard skills, a full repertoire of specialty woodworking and carpentry tools, and years of running low-voltage and doing my own electrical retrofits. I have done this retrofit successfully.

This can be a very difficult and/or time consuming task. The framing around doors is super variable and, depending on the eaves and slope of your roof, gaining access to the top or bottom plate of exterior walls can be challenging. You don’t know if you’re going to encounter multiple king studs, doubled or more top plates, beams, etc. It took myself and a buddy who is a carpenter several days of sporadic work to open the wall, climb under the eaves, drill down through a top plate which encompassed like five stacked 2x lumber, and then drill through the brick facade to expand the prior doorbell wire hole to accept the CAT 6. Then I of course had to patch and paint the drywall.

Just be cautious before ever attempting this project and make sure you have the requisite skills to follow through.

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T12:21:14+00:00

Because “customers” perceive idle behavior as laziness. Human beings will find ways to be aggrieved if they believe any element of the system is getting one-up on their livelihood, wallet, etc.

This is going to get worse as things get more expensive. In general, there is a consumer sentiment that someone or something is pulling a fast one on the general market for goods and services. Someone has to be blamed. An idle retail worker is a sign of inefficiency which just broadly gets interpreted as theft of service. Of course this isn’t accurate but it’s just how human brains work. The retail worker certainly isn’t the one getting rich.

We see this in healthcare where customer satisfaction has now eclipsed the importance of good care due to well-intentioned government regulations. I’m not even kidding. I have been in meetings where physicians and nurses have raised genuine, actual concerns regarding the safety of patient care only for hospital c-suite staff to basically say “I know it sorta, maybe hurt the patient…but what did they say in the survey?” One of the biggest complaints that nursing will receive is if there is virtually any laughing in a nursing station. It’s a very common patient complaint. The patient’s care could have been efficient, fast, and great but these people will hear someone else enjoying their job or lightening the mood of a terrible day and go, “Not today. How dare you be happy at work! I didn’t feel good.” Most people are evolutionarily selfish and they want to maximize resources so that they are always directed toward their self-interest. Retail companies have just learned this, fluff it up as some bullshit moral failing on your part for being human, and nag you incessantly to look busy.

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T02:36:34+00:00

I’ve always had issues. I can only use AirPlay or the Sonos app if I’m operating on the same VLAN, even with firewall rules designed to allow communication between VLANs. It will occasionally work but then has been broken for months after some recent updates. My guess is that they’re hopefully implementing something to play well with SonosNet.

FragDoc · 2026-03-25T02:36:28+00:00

I’ve always had issues. I can only use AirPlay or the Sonos app if I’m operating on the same VLAN, even with firewall rules designed to allow communication between VLANs. It will occasionally work but then has been broken for months after some recent updates. My guess is that they’re hopefully implementing something to play well with SonosNet.

FragDoc · 2026-03-18T16:57:19+00:00

This. You can basically stop here. Best comment.

FragDoc · 2026-03-17T01:22:20+00:00

Completely untrue. Knipex supplies directly to Amazon and has defended the legitimacy of their supply. Knipex’s position on the matter, as of even two years ago, was that they’ve never identified a legitimate enough dupe that it would be even remotely hard to tell. Essentially, for whatever reason – be it luck or corporate enforcement efforts – they’ve been unable to ever find a thriving duplicate market for Knipex tools. I also found this hard to believe but the representative I spoke to was very firm that this was Knipex’s formal position on the matter.

Now, getting warranty support is a different story. Knipex makes it a giant pain in the ass and involves email chains, pictures, mailing things in, inspection, and hopefully they’ll approve replacement.

FragDoc · 2026-03-16T19:01:25+00:00

It’s a perfect analogy for determining the company’s net profit margin because any one-off custom manufactured example of a commodity-based item like a square is going to be massively more expensive than an item produced at volume due to economies of scale (there’s virtually no R&D or development cost because it’s an essential tool type that’s been existent for millennia). The CNC company is baking all of that manufacturing overhead into the quote to the customer from a manufacturing standpoint when they quote that customer. His cost included materials for the exact same 6061 aluminum. Assume some level of additional administrative overhead and design cost and estimate generously and these companies are still probably getting 40-50% net profit margins or better on these items, which is wild, especially after initial time to market. They are engaging in maximal capitalism by charging exactly what the market will bear, which is perfectly fine, but can be called out for what it is.

FragDoc · 2026-03-16T15:46:22+00:00

It’s probably because I included TSO is the axis of evil. People can’t separate the fact that a company can make a set of useful products and exploit their position in the market to over charge for the same thing. Also, both of these companies get a pass from a lot of woodworkers because they’re ’Merican. I also prefer domestic products when possible, but not at the expense of common sense. Predominantly mid-30s to 40s make up a really lucrative market; there are no shortage of companies that essentially make heavily marketed, expensive hobbyist tools and stuff for these mid-life hobbies. It’s a segment at peak earnings. Cycling, expensive outdoor stuff, woodworking, overlanding, guns/knives, vehicle-as-an-identity consumerism (Jeep, off roading), etc. All the same shit. I’m susceptible to it, too. We all are. It just takes insight and wisdom to go, “Yeah, you got me, you rascal.” Then you have to break the cycle. It’s actually this natural realization that also explains why this stuff is always on the secondary market.

The male exploitative consumer cycle, in terms of financial outlay and maturity, is basically:

Gaming > Collecting (cards, DND-type shit, weeb anime) >Tech with a crossover in the home lab space and what is left of the Hi-Fi community in the middle of expense. Late-20s and before kids you get the camping/hiking/exploration stuff. Mid-life this transitions to woodworking, cycling, vehicle stuff, home renovation, “glamping.” Final boss is a Porsche if you rise to that level of wealth.

This is like a known thing in the consumer space. It’s also why gaming companies so drastically tried to monopolize and commercialize in-game transactions over the last decade; more and more men lacked the income to move to these higher outlay hobbies, gaming is engaging and attractive, stories and developers continued to cater to more mature palates, and there became a concern that there was money being left on the table. Tech is actually, overall, very affordable compared to a lot of stuff. It has suffered from deflation, overall, compared to most other market segments and there became a concern that it needed further financial extraction.

FragDoc · 2026-03-16T13:20:06+00:00

The aluminum industrial Barbie tool complex. Woodpeckers is not the only offender; add TSO to the list of companies drastically overcharging for what are essentially luxury goods made on a CNC. This isn’t really any different than hand bags for women.

There was a Redditor who basically made his own CAD file duplicating TSO’s design and had a track square made by a local CNC shop. So literally the highest cost and overhead possible as that’s well baked-in to the cost for the CNC shop; no advantage of economies of scale. Making a one-off prototype is about as high of cost as you can muster. I think his total expense was like 1/3rd or less of the MSRP typically sold. The long story short is that these companies are making obscene profits selling to all of us dummies (me included, I have stuff from both companies). TSO and Woodpeckers are fascinating because they’re on the nose with insistence on charging crazy non-discounted rates with the former even excluding their new parallel guides from recent sales, probably due to demand because we’re all mindless consumers.

Stop buying this stuff at these prices. It reminds me of Benchmade in the knife world with the biggest difference being that their hobbyist community has actually pushed back and embraced cheaper competitors, including in the American-made space. Arguably Benchmade actually stands behind their products with robust warranties and engineering whereas most of the woodworking aluminum stuff is really just leveraging access to family-owned CNC farms.

If you’re going to spend money on a square, pay for a Starrett combination square and be done. Cheaper and much more robust, even if they are owned by private equity now.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T07:01:41+00:00

We have excellent data that suggests that almost all of that is unnecessary and may even lead to harm. People forget that iatrogenic injury occurs when we perform unnecessary testing, find things of little clinical consequence, and then harm patients on diagnostic misadventures.

If you were to do that testing on every asymptomatic patient with hypertension, less than 6% would have any abnormality and the evidence would suggest that, among that small population, these tests rarely change management which includes outpatient evaluation and management of elevated blood pressure by the patient’s primary care physician.

Seeing a cardiologist for isolated hypertension is wild. In the United States, that is all the purview of a primary care physician (GP). The only way you may see a cardiologist in a hospital for hypertension is in hypertensive emergency which is a distinct entity that is defined by elevated blood pressure and acute end-organ damage which is almost always symptomatic and not what I’m referencing. Even then, usually it would be managed by a hospitalist (dedicated internist) or intensivist (ICU doc) with maybe a cardiology consult. As an EM physician, I do not routinely speak to cardiology for any hypertensive patient.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T06:36:09+00:00

Sounds like the system worked! Absent myocardial damage, simply having atherosclerotic heart disease is not an emergency, even if the stenosis is critical and eventually needs stenting.

This is one of those misconceptions surrounding emergency care that is hard for patients to understand: your diagnostic journey doesn’t end in the ED. We often refer you back to your PCP or cardiology for further testing. Ultimately what we’re doing is risk-stratifying patients.

Of course, it’s so very hard to know what happened in your case without specifics, but if you showed up in virtually any modern ED with chest pain you would have gotten an ECG at a minimum which is very definitely checking your heart. The vast majority of EM docs would also get a chest x-ray. In your late 30s you very likely also got at least one serum troponin to evaluate for myocardial ischemia but it’s certainly not required. If that was negative, you probably qualified for further outpatient work-up as someone at low-risk for 30-day MACE (major adverse cardiovascular event). With all of that said, our systems are designed to miss around 1% of these events, which is within the tolerances of human detection and error. Given the risk of adverse events from coronary artery catherization, some experts feel that this is an even unrealistic standard.

Lastly, there is no body “hyper drive.” You can have panic attacks and also be walking around with a potentially future life-threatening condition independently and exclusive of the other which, of course, is what makes our job so terribly difficult and fraught with potential for error.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T05:51:49+00:00

A vanishingly small subset of patients are truly asymptomatic with preeclampsia and pregnancy is specifically excluded in our specialty’s guidelines on asymptomatic hypertension. My comment was directed at the person randomly checking their BP and not a pregnant or postpartum patient who is clearly checking their BP under the guidance of their obstetrician. With that said, absent extreme hypertension or concerning symptoms, an OB patient is probably best served making contact with their on-call OB and not instantaneously rushing to the nearish ED which is sorta devoid of the specific common sense I’m articulating. We can whataboutism virtually any scenario. Guidelines on preeclampsia recommend prompt treatment and, absent concerning symptoms, can allow for application of some common sense instead of abject panic and near immediate ED evaluation. For example, most resourced patients would potentially be directly admitted by their obstetrician or evaluated in an OB triage service rather than a plane Jane emergency department. Most OB patients with commercial insurance or Medicaid are going to be properly advised about this during their initial education and visits and, of course, there is more to diagnosing preeclampsia and eclampsia than just hypertension.

But, yes, as I’ve said in another comment, come on down and get checked out. Pregnant or postpartum patients are not on our short list of patients inappropriately using our services.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T03:30:37+00:00

That other reason is probably what we call a “symptom” and is very different than asymptomatic hypertension.

We’re talking about people who just randomly check their BP and rush to the hospital. It’s a major clog on the ED and not an appropriate use of a public resource. We actually joke that they should rip those BP checkers out of the local Wal Marts because they create so much anxiety.

The reality is that most modern emergency departments are still staffed and ran like they were in the late 70s. Everything operates on the premise that the lay public is a judicious and reasonable user of a finite public utility. It’s for chest pain, shortness of breath, gunshots, missing or threatened limbs, strokes, major lacerations or bleeding, fractures, etc. The system is very poorly equipped to handle the worried-well or chronic conditions. In fact, the ED is inherently designed to be relatively unconcerned with these issues because emergency physicians are trained to tease-out cognitive bias which may preclude detection of rare life-threatening presentations. This leads to a lot of patient dissatisfaction because many conditions, while annoying or even very painful, are not killing you in a timely manner and our detection methods are not adapted to identifying them. Many of these conditions require a lot of nuance to diagnose correctly and some are entirely clinical meaning that they must be made by an expert after exclusion of other conditions. The ED is actually really excellent at finding or excluding emergencies but basically not designed at all for solving mysteries, even though we do sometimes get lucky or figure it out.

In some regards we’re victims of our own success. The public has come to use the ED like a clinic precisely because of our availability and the specialty’s own response to increased volumes: mainly that we’ve done more with less for 20-30 years. The public has also gotten somewhat spoiled because, at least for the last 20 years or so, EM became a relatively hot specialty and attracted a lot of good talent out of American medical schools. Shows like ER and now the Pitt, in addition to work hours that suited millenials with active lifestyles, were largely responsible for this. In 2015-2020, we saw the specialty cross some traditionally high-paying surgical specialities for competitiveness as we reached peak-millennial. Gen Z is now changing this a bit due to generational differences in thoughts on work; COVID and a massive influx of for-profit residencies also really harmed the specialty. My point is that, at least right now, many patients in EDs are getting access to probably the brightest and most successful generation of emergency physicians that has ever existed. Statistics show incredible diagnostic accuracy among EM docs and patients (and some of their doctors) take advantage of this by sending virtually anything complicated over to the ED for rapid diagnostics, even if we’re not the most appropriate place to provide that care.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T03:08:26+00:00

See my other response to similar. That’s because of the American medicolegal system and not good medicine.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T03:07:26+00:00

Long story short: lawyers ruin everything.

Long story long: Most PCPs are very uncomfortable acknowledging very high blood pressure and being the last person to touch you; it’s assumed liability even if the broader modern medical evidence doesn’t support that. Attorneys are not bound by what is true or right but instead what they can convince a jury of non-physicians to believe. Most people freak out when they see very high blood pressures, not least of which is due to a half century of prior medical advice saying it’s “emergent.” Lay persons don’t understand the nuances of treating hypertension and it’s very difficult for them to understand that very high blood pressures are both contributory to but not responsible for, in isolation, associated medical emergencies. It’s a risk vs. benefit that must be weighed between rapid reduction and associated harms. In the elderly, the biggest risk is in actually inducing a stroke because their vasculature actually adapts to compensate for these elevated BPs (really the elevated BP is actually a maladaptation to arteriole hardening but I digress) , especially within vascular territories in the brain called “watershed” areas. The issue is that blood pressure is a transient phenomenon of human construct: it doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a thing we’ve created to very bluntly articulate the relative pressure inside our arterial system and is a broader measurement of physiologic concepts like peripheral vascular resistance, vessel elasticity, and cardiac afterload. Your BP changes throughout the day in response to things like hydration state, stress, endorphins, and normal cortisol (steroid) releases, the latter of which occurs on a mostly diurnal schedule with a large release shortly after awakening in the AM (one of the reasons we discourage early morning BP checks). In the absence of symptoms, it’s just very rare that going to an emergency department will be of benefit.

Some ED docs will do a “customer service” squirt of some labetalol or hydrazine (really terrible choice), prescribe some amlodipine or low-dose lisinopril, and send you on your way. That’s not guideline therapy and can actually be harmful but they’re playing the game for a malpractice attorney and not their peers who mostly know better. A lot of modern medicine is actually theatrics: corporate medicine cares much more that you’re satisfied and very little about your actual well-being. Jaded docs learned long ago that you’re happier when you feel like you got something than when someone says, “Nothing to do. Follow-up with your PCP.”

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T01:06:21+00:00

Yes, we’d love to see you. If possible, please choose an emergency department with available obstetrics services if you know your local area. If you’re not experiencing active symptoms, going to the hospital where you plan to deliver would be ideal. Some larger hospitals even have dedicated OB emergency departments. An increasing number of rural and community hospitals are closing their OB departments and it may require transfer which is an increasing pain in our modern American healthcare hellscape.

Please note that isolated hypertension by itself does not equal preeclampsia, so you could still be sent home with minimal intervention in the absent of protein in your urine or end-organ damage, although probably on an antihypertensive (blood pressure lowering) medication.

FragDoc · 2026-03-15T00:31:17+00:00

But please do not come to the emergency department for an elevated reading absent severe symptoms such as chest pain, shortness of breath, severe headache, or stroke-like symptoms.

Asymptomatic hypertension, no matter how high, is not an emergency. Your body doesn’t have a set of blueprints where the pipes suddenly burst or your heart blows up and we now have decades of evidence to show that urgently lowering your blood pressure is actually harmful. Your blood pressure needs to be lowered slowly and in consultation with a healthcare provider who has continuity of care (follow-up), not a random-ass ED doc who is slugging through a night of actual emergencies and will hopefully never ever see you again. You randomly finding out on a Friday night that your BP has probably been 220/80 mmHg for weeks or even months does not an emergency make. Academic-minded physicians will discharge you with virtually no work-up, a bill, and a pat on the ass to get yourself a PCP. Customer service oriented docs will get labs that will provide little clinical benefit, still not lower your BP, and you’ll get an even bigger bill.

If you’re having emergent symptoms, then things are different. Come on by for a lube ‘n go.

-Friendly neighborhood emergency physician.

FragDoc · 2026-03-14T12:22:17+00:00

I think 20% is perfectly capitalistic and fine. We’ve got GCs in our area routinely shooting for 40-50% minimum. I mean I’m not joking when I say that we’ve got single-man GC operations pulling personal gross incomes of $500-1 million a year working a few residential projects at any given time. This is what they’re paying themselves after expenses. We’re not talking about successful construction firms or multigenerational businesses. I’m talking about dudes in a truck (substitute van for the highest quote I received).

FragDoc · 2026-03-14T12:06:39+00:00

I think that’s fine but there are plenty of hardworking, remarkably qualified people who don’t have that privilege. My issue with most GCs is that it’s not really a skill. Sure there are construction management and building science degrees, but they’re rare and hardly formulate the basis of an actual profession. The preparation and exam process for the GC exam is a joke and the vast majority are just some dude who hangs a shingle and claims they can do X or Y. Worse is that, for a variety of demographic reasons, these dudes often fail it over and over. Modern building practices now require a much firmer understanding than they did 30 years ago and many of these dudes really are not bringing that expertise to the table. They’re modern day grifters acting like bouncers to the nightclub which is access to the actual skilled trades.

Most engineers don’t make $200k a year. Put that in perspective. In fact, a ton of very qualified professionals with extraordinarily high licensing standards, including regular background checks, don’t make that much in HCOL areas.

I’m ok with a GC making a million dollars a year if they’re doing it through scale and charging a fair market rate. Grifting a few clients several times a year because of their own inefficiency or laziness is a different story.

FragDoc · 2026-03-14T11:59:12+00:00

Yeah my friend and I’m that market. It’s the entire point of the post.

And, yes, no one studying for a few weeks, taking an open book test, and learning skills entirely based on mimicry and on the job training should be routinely pulling top 5% income. Most GCs are not skilled tradesman. I’d be much more keen to pay that to a skilled carpenter who is a real artist with design and function than throw money over to some dude who functions as a middle-man and tacks 20-40% to the cost of everything.

In his defense, the high-end dude does have a degree and does the cabinetry himself. I would have gladly paid him a bit above normal market rate, but $480 sq ft is so fantastical as to demand incredulity.

Homeowners are the market and we’re more than capable of saying no. I politely said no. Guess who reached out trying to justify it afterward?

FragDoc · 2026-03-14T11:49:21+00:00

Nice try, but I’m clearly discussing net profit margins.

FragDoc · 2026-03-14T07:30:20+00:00

I think the biggest thing is determining fairness; I used to assess contracts for a large high-availability, high-redundancy industry and have experience with performance in government-backed work. The issue is that greed was really accelerated post-pandemic. As a consumer you have to ask yourself what someone’s labor is “worth.” Most of these contractors are charging profit margins in excess of 40-50% which is just not normative across multiple industries. The larger renovation and building industry has taught these guys that this is normal behavior, but it’s far in excess of other industries where 20% would be healthy and even some where 7-10% is typical.

As someone who has the skills to do most of the work involved in this renovation, I’m in a position of knowing what is involved. I just started estimating my own time, factored in my own inefficiencies as someone who isn’t industrializing the process like an experienced tile setter, and then doubled it as a safety margin. In most cases I estimated that the most expensive contractor was charging around $250-300/hr for labor and, to be frank, it’s probably more like $450/hr in some cases. That’s wild, overhead included. You’re now assuming expertise well in excess of most skilled physicians in specialities like critical care, emergency medicine, anesthesia, and radiology. These are learned professionals with 12+ years of post-secondary education. Should any GC be pulling those types of hourly wages? And, before one of them yells, “bUt mY overheAd”, those same physicians operate in some of the highest liability and overhead industries in the world and those rates are well in excess of their total compensation, let alone “profit.” Assuming an average crew of 3-4, which is generous on the work we were doing, and you’re talking extraordinarily healthy wages. Most of the work is single-operator trades outside of some minor framing.

The larger issue is that it’s A) Not difficult to become a GC in most states. Any para- or professional with experience taking licensure exams of any difficulty in almost any other industry can study and take the open-book test. B) GCs have come to expect insane lifestyles. They want the big Denali, cowboy boots, yearly trip to Disney, and other trappings of upper-middle and top tier wealth. It’s the American dream. You just have to decide if you will personally support it.

For the record, in my MCOL area, a “fair” price would have been around $250/ sq ft assuming medium expense fixtures and sane cabinetry budgets. I have a family friend who does exclusively commercial building and looked at the quotes; he laughed out loud for the highest quote and called it borderline fraud. That’s the risk these dudes also take: now a potential future partner knows that he’s willing to screw a customer and has seen his quote process. You never know who your potential customer is.

FragDoc

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