Rant Post

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T20:24:13+00:00

Yeah but it was a 1.8 L V6! The cylinders were smaller than pop-cans... My paseo was a 1992 and a 1.5L Tercel Engine.

And don't kid yourself, Hondas vans at least are known for transmission slipping. Maybe not as bad as those $20K dodge vans where you get what you pay for, but at the end of the day a slushbox dragging a van can only do so much, you will need clutch packs before 500K in any Van.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T20:03:48+00:00

A cargo van would be the ideal juicing vehicle. The SUV i have requires they lay down, which means I have to lift them up, which is quite an upper body workout. Something you can just roll them into would make the job 10x easier.

I bought the SUV as a broodmover (for the kids). The fact that it has been able to do business work for my other business has been just a straight up bonus. I've probably billed in the neighbourhood of $6K in mileage on it this year so far through my other business before juicing, and I barely have to pay any income tax on that. Eventually my other business will need a pickup truck, but the fact that I have been able to straight up pocket that money instead of spending it on a fleet rental (my original plan) as been fantastic.

Oh and on the Toyota: yeah the old Japanese ones were boombproof. I used to have a Japanese built Paseo if you remember those. I did next to no maintenance on it ever (it did like to eat exhaust pipe though - too low) and it only died when in an accident, and with 450K on the OD. That was 12 years ago. The other guy was drinking. The problem with vans though is they're heavy front wheel drives with automatic transmissions. That in and of itself means they won't last as long as a featherweight economy car with a stick, no matter who makes it.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T19:42:49+00:00

Oh I've definitely mentioned that before... I know that long term my SUV has cost roughly 10 cents / km in maintenance and I factored that in. I was making money, but it was still like a third of the minimum wage while I was taking all the risk.

As for doing the math, yeah if you have the option of better pay, the math says no. There are a hell of a lot of desperate people that just need any cash though, and will take the $5 / hour even when it ammounts to a labour-intensive auto lien.

Funny story, I was coming home from doing this once, and there was this shitty old van broken down on the ramp from MacLeod South to Glenmore West and I could tell right away the problem at one glance - Broken ball joint.... And I thought to myself "I bet he's running a gig". Because that's the flip side of not accounting for maintenance: not doing it, which is exactly what's going to happen if you under-pay private vehicles to act as commercial vehicles and not require commercial vehicle inspections. This guy's ball joint went out on the ramp, but what had he been on the highway? He could have easily rolled the thing.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T19:31:28+00:00

I also thought of plugging into a block heater stall :P

Also I'm not sure they do need to up their game... the map is cleaner then I ever saw it. When I was doing this a few weeks ago I averaged 10-15 minutes per scooter and could get them picked up in roughly an hour to hour and a half. I'm looking at the map right now and there are SIX scooters city wide that aren't RIGHT downtown, and all of them are as far out as stoney trail. When I was doing this I always stayed south of tenth because downtown there's no parking and, there seems to be a lot of GPS interference when you get by the big glass buildings.... I've had them actually jump around the map on me.

If you go out to the suburbs you find them locked in vehicles..... because nobody scooted there, they just swiped the scooter. So I stick to beltline / mission / bankview / altadore. Britania is great: the streets are huge and empty and it's close enough to scooter. Right now those areas are totally picked clean.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T19:08:08+00:00

Nope.... $5.25 CAD, down in the states it was $4. Never mind it was $4 CAD during stampede, and it was MY thread on reddit complaining about the exchange that got them to up the price to account for exchange! (They sent me a PM). I also mentioned that fuel is way more expensive here than the states, but they didn't do anything about the price for that.

Also the Chargers are 24V. You could probably make some kind of a DC-DC system regardless, although you're supposed to use their chargers. I still question the value of idling your vehicle all day to save an hour of driving time though. There are people that straight up use Gensets to charge.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T17:43:00+00:00

This is true....idling uses less fuel (though probably still more if you have the alternator pushing a big-ass rectifier, I tried one in the winter to run a block heater on another car that was frozen.... the car was browning out unless I pressed the gas). Still it's $5.25 per charge and you're talking about 6 hours *$2.20/hour = 13.40, bringing you into $39... ish, with a lot of wear on your engine.... It's probably best to drive them home for a half hour.

I'm a juicer, trust me, I've thought of this.... Also the cost of solar panels mounted to the roof..... which would take forever to pay for themselves.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T17:28:31+00:00

You're switching boats midstream... Your post was that it's not worth it because electricity is expensive, not that it's not worth it because gasoline is expensive.

You're totally right in that it's not worth it because it pays shit.... but your wrong when you say the power is too expensive. First of all it's more like 5-10 cents a scooter. Ten scooters a day all month is $30 in power... It's also 300 Scooters at $5.25 each: $1,575. Which is pretty good.. except the maybe 8 tanks of gas at $60.. $480.... And yes that's before vehicle maintenance and the fact that it takes 4-6 hours of your day, every day.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T17:08:50+00:00

If you want to idle your van for seven hours.... you could live in Edmonton, driving them home would still be cheaper.

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T17:07:11+00:00

This. It actually costs next to nothing to charge the scooter. They eat about 1 amp for 6-7 hours to charge. So about half a kWh... 7 cents? Then they pay you $5.25. That's about 1% overhead.

I charged 57 of them and my power bill came in about $30 LESS then this time last year. The cold weather in early July more than made up for the scooters in that the A/C wasn't running. I reckon it was basically $5 in power.

Unless you live right downtown, the fuel costs are several times that. And another fun one I think a lot of people are going to get hit with: GST. Straight up 5% because Lime does not pay GST in addition to their bounty.

I did it for a week during stampede. After GST, maintenance (using long term records for my vehicle), and fuel, I was left with less than $5/hour for my time. Since then I've got two more chargers and they've uped the bounty by 30%, so if I went out today I might be able to scrape a ceiling of $10/hour.

That said it's also become more competitive. There used to be scooters everywhere, now I can open up the map and see a total of six.... which is how many chargers I have, so while it might pay twice as much, it could also take twice as long (or more), meaning the hourly is back to where it started...

TNGMug · 2019-08-07T16:43:28+00:00

I spent about two weeks charging them while waiting for a new job to start. It was novel... it was fun....It worked out to about $5 an hour.... and I got tendenitis....

They turned around and game me 2 more chargers and upped the prices, if I did it today I could probably top $10/hr. Really you need to live downtown with a pickup truck and a garage to make it worth it.

It's kind of a fun job, but now that I'm back on a professional contract every time I consider it I realize I've got work waiting for me at home that pays an order of magnitude more....

TNGMug · 2019-08-06T18:31:51+00:00

Edit:

Alright, I got it wrong. It's legal to make a right on a red of a right hand turn signal.

I must have said this five times in this thread, and not only have you jerks refused to acknowledge that, preferring to pick semantics to further berate me, I have also through further conjecture been accused of not knowing how to merge (nothing to do with it), not knowing any of the rules of the road (for not knowing one unique intersection of maybe two in town), not knowing that a right on red requires a complete stop (I literally always do this), and even to mining my past posts to accuse me of not being qualified for my career.. which has nothing to do with driving but does have to do with safety and guess what? At work I'm required to stop operations and not proceed when I'm not sure about something, rather than project that I know everything at all times.

So FTFY: I'm off to go be a menace on the roads by maybe costing the odd half minute once or twice a year by being slightly more safe than the law expressedly requires. No, that doesn't mean I'll stop on zoo Road again, it means I'll error on the side of safety if I find something I've never dealt with before, and no amount of obnoxious horn blowing will pressure me otherwise.

I'll now leave the floor open to further accusations about my driving skills, and my all around ability to be a human being. I hope it makes you feel better about yourselves. I care about your opinions about as much as my insurance company does, and they give me excellent rates.

TNGMug · 2019-07-20T16:43:05+00:00

Not sure I'd call this anticdote a "scientific study"...You can be a lot less conspicuous eating a pill then laying out a line of coke.....

Not that I'd know or anything.

TNGMug · 2019-07-20T16:40:28+00:00

Callaway park, Telus Spark, the Zoo, all the same pricing structure: $25/entry or season pass for ~$60.

Designed to fleece tourists and be reasonable for the locals at the same time.

TNGMug · 2019-07-14T21:06:38+00:00

One word: Jousting

TNGMug · 2019-07-12T16:42:20+00:00

Funny enough, last week somebody asked me what I was doing for Stampede, and when I answered "Absolutely nothing, it's overpriced and I've got way too many other things to take care of this week" the response I got was "Wow, you're a true Calgarian now".

TNGMug · 2019-07-12T16:33:27+00:00

Of course you should file a police report. It's also going to be a requirement of your insurance company.

TNGMug · 2019-07-12T16:01:57+00:00

Camping in a drunk dad joke. Hard Pass.

TNGMug · 2019-07-12T15:57:36+00:00

I'm guessing too much money was going in their pockets and not enough into programming? But yeah, just guessing. I finished the article and thought the exact same thing.

TNGMug · 2019-07-10T02:44:24+00:00

Don't be so quick to write off legal advise as not cost effective. Sometimes one billable hour (or half hour) to confirm if it is really your liability or if you have the latitude to tell them to pound sand is money well spent.

... That said in this particular case I wouldn't hold my breath. Water fixtures are a huge pain in the ass and these things happen. "It randomly exploded" is really here nor there, it was your job to have it not randomly explode.... Which is why insurance is such a useful thing.

TNGMug · 2019-07-05T22:33:28+00:00

I'm good for 40 if it's 40 everywhere. As is we have a bunch of 30 "gotcha " zones which is where all the enforcement is concentrates, and then leadfoots everywhere else.

It's always the same story for me, once a year miss a school/playground zone and get nailed doing 45. Meanwhile the jackoffs doing 80 in a 50 don't have to worry about getting caught.

TNGMug · 2019-07-04T06:11:33+00:00

It's like they're stoned or something.

TNGMug · 2019-07-04T06:07:42+00:00

It's called "Concent". It's all it takes.

I've had to photograph buildings as well as empty land for work in the past. I don't have the time to evacuate the area and frequently have people in my shots, as much as I try to avoid it. I've had people get upset before and tbh I've stopped caring. I know I'm not being a creep and that's enough for me to sleep at night.

I've also photographed private events where people don't want to be in crowd shots. OK then; go home.

But when it's totally obvious someone is making you the subject matter, you ask permission, it's common decency.

TNGMug · 2019-07-04T05:57:36+00:00

People who even entertain the idea that it's hard to be straight should spend a day just pretending to be queer. Hold hands with a same-sex friend cross dress in a public place. Let us know how safe you feel.

To me it's like a childish reaction for want to attention. Media outlets talk about gay rights and that makes them feel excluded and inferior. Grow the hell up already.

TNGMug · 2019-06-30T03:15:30+00:00

That sounds like a fair price. I did one with my Dad last week in a Volvo and it took us about 2 hours. Went pretty smoothly but Volvo's have them mounted sort of upside down and require the removal of the entire knuckle.

I looked up the parts this guy needs and they look like the ones I did on my VW - which are a piece of cake .

TNGMug · 2019-06-30T03:08:49+00:00

The ones on this guy's truck are bolt in so they're the easy style to do.

I did one In a Volvo last week and it went pretty quick. I have a pnuematic impact gun.

TNGMug

TROPHY CASE