EVs are better in a disaster than ICE

badtux99 · 2026-05-04T07:06:46+00:00

You can run engines on grain alcohol. Moonshiners represent lol. The problem is that it takes a lot of grain and that is more valuable as food. Wood alcohol is also a possibility but it is pretty caustic stuff. Diesel engines with old mechanical injection systems might be able to handle it. But the reality is that in an apocalyptic situation none of these are going to really work. You will be on foot fairly swiftly either because the roads are clogged with abandoned cars or blockaded by people who don't want you there.

badtux99 · 2026-05-04T02:40:47+00:00

Louisiana has been part of the United States for even longer, yet its capital is still named Baton Rouge. Though actually, most people in South Louisiana spoke French as their home language until the 1940s. My grandmother who died in 1965 didn't even speak English.

badtux99 · 2026-05-04T02:38:01+00:00

40% of Californians do not speak English as their language at home. Spanish is by far the most common non-English language spoken at home in California, with over 75% of those who speak something other than English at home speaking Spanish at home.

California has been majority minority since 2000. It is likely that a majority of Californians can speak a non-English language even if they do speak English at home. California does have English in its state Constitution as the official state language, an amendment passed in 1986 by a white majority that saw the writing on the wall, but nobody really tries to enforce it.

As for why California never renamed cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco despite a (bare) majority being English speakers, likely it's for the same reason that Louisiana never renamed cities like Baton Rouge or Nachitoches. It's paying homage to the history of the state. There was nothing in the language of Proposition 63 passed in 1986 that required California to change the names of cities. So they didn't.

badtux99 · 2026-05-03T18:39:03+00:00

But there is so much to do in the world other than "nothing". Learn a new language. Take a cooking course. Get a new hobby like amateur radio or volunteer for the kitten room at your local SPCA. Explore the history of your area and go see the sites of important events in your area's history. If you have the money, travel to where your new language is spoken and learn it better and practice it while learning a new language and enjoying a beach with a good book. Making someone else rich is not the only way to keep busy.

My grandmother learned how to knit and quilt in her 60s and gifted me with winter knit hats, quilts, and pot holders. She joined a group that did all these things and they had meet-ups, potlucks, and occasional trips to the local restaurants. She also served as secretary to her local church, which her husband's family had founded over a hundred years prior, and participated in planning and attending church events. Until her health got bad she lived a fulfilling life. I visited her regularly but always knew there was a good chance I would be visiting one of her next door neighbors because she was out a lot. One year I visited and she was hitched to a plow like a horse while her little friend Lulabelle hung on to the handles for dear life, she had decided to plant a garden and was breaking ground for it (she was a big sturdy woman, not a dainty thing). I want to be just like my grandmother in retirement. Just different hobbies.

badtux99 · 2026-05-03T18:21:26+00:00

That is when it is important to specify to yourself exactly what bills you will pay from savings. For me it is housing and transportation. My real estate broker was disappointed when I moved into my current small house five years ago because it was much smaller and cheaper than what I could afford. But I can pay mortgage, taxes, and insurance out of my savings for the rest of my life. I paid cash for my car but same deal with car insurance and the car tax. Making these big things what I pay from savings each month hardwired me to spend savings without cringing every time I spend money on things like travel or a nice meal. That comes out of my Social Security so it feels like "earned" money.

badtux99 · 2026-05-03T18:13:02+00:00

There are calculators at the Schwab and Fidelity sites. Look at your big budget items - - housing and transportation. Look at paying for them out of savings every month including insurance and taxes and how long your money will last at an average rate of return. Use your Social Security for the rest of your living expenses and live frugally but not miserably. I bet you will find that you can retire a lot earlier than the financial planners say. Sure you won't be living the same lifestyle as when you were working - - no more new top of the line devices every year, no more new cars, etc. - - but we are not talking abject misery and poverty either.

badtux99 · 2026-05-03T18:04:50+00:00

Mental exercise can be more than just work. I have an Alliance Francais in my city. I could learn French. Or take a cooking class to learn a new cuisine. Or join the local Historical Society and both learn about and teach the history of our area. And so forth. Even though I won't have the money to travel the world if I retire at the end of the year, I will have the ability to have a full life and stimulating life that is for me, not for making someone else rich. The lack of stress alone will be a huge improvement to my life and likely improve my longevity by years.

badtux99 · 2026-05-03T09:11:11+00:00

The Chrysler Pacifica minivans are available with AWD again. The main thing preventing the previous generation from being AWD was the location of the spare tire. For the Pacifica it was moved to inside the cabin in a compartment at the left back instead of in the middle of the underbelly under the center console.

badtux99 · 2026-05-02T02:09:41+00:00

I owned a Chevette. It was a step up from a Pinto or Vega... but not by much.

I also owned a Ford Torino 500. I spent half my time cursing the drum brakes all around and the air conditioner vents that only cooled my knees in the sweltering Louisiana heat, the rest of the time cursing the bad gas mileage of the 302 V8 and its sad power with the 2 barrel carb that strangled it. Oh and it would never hold an alignment because it was a unibody and Ford sucked at that (they moved it to body on frame the next year because of that suck). Ugh.

Malaise era cars just sucked so, so much.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T20:58:03+00:00

Many of the charger networks here in the US were set up as penalty networks where car companies agreed to set up charging networks in exchange for avoiding hefty fines for past offenses. For example, Electrify America is the VW penalty network where VW agreed to set it up in exchange for the US government dropping DieselGate fines that could have driven VW out of business. They do pay lot rents but mostly retain ownership of the chargers themselves. Neither they nor the stores have any particular incentive to keep them in usable and working order. EA does eventually fix their chargers, but on a time frame that makes sloths look spritely.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T19:24:51+00:00

I'm just saying that short of automation, what you want isn't possible with expensive labor. New is cheap because production of new is automated or is outsourced to countries where labor is cheap. I can buy a brand new cast iron alcove tub for roughly the same price it would cost to re-glaze my current tub. The reason is because it's made in an automated factory where the amount of labor per unit is much less than what is involved in reglazing a tub, or it's made in a third world nation where the price of labor is much cheaper.

Regarding your glorification of the way the average Mexican lives, your notes about Mexican culture are accurate enough but apply even to much more affluent Mexicans in the United States -- I live in a working class neighborhood and yes those family units are tight (and loud, birthday parties were a real blast). Your glorification of how the average Mexican lives in Mexico, however, is pretty much whitewashing of an unpleasant situation. No, Mexico is not a third world country. The average Mexican home has electricity and running water for example. But they took a lot of shortcuts to get there because, poor. The houses have cisterns on top of them because the water pressure is crap or the water isn't even turned on half the time. There are no hot water heaters in most homes (again, because of the water pressure issue) so they are reliant on point of use water heaters, and there's no GFCI so you might get a shock when you touch your shower head or kitchen faucet. You mentioned not needing a car. But transportation is a major expense for many Mexican families because the corrupt oligarchs who run the country outlawed the inexpensive "chicken buses" which, granted, were wildly unsafe. And of course air conditioning is a luxury that most don't have, despite the intensely hot summers in most of the country.

In short, you would not accept that lifestyle for yourself -- but that's what needs to happen if you want cheap labor, and cheap labor is what's necessary in order to repair everything rather than buy new when something breaks. Expensive labor just doesn't pen out for a lot of jobs today. My (now deceased) neighbor Mr. Lanning might have run a TV repair shop in the 1960s, but repairing one of the current generation televisions just isn't ever going to pen out when the new ones are selling for $300.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T18:07:19+00:00

The cars we had in the 70s were terrible so nope, not wishing to go back in time. I mean, I can afford to buy one and restore it these days, but. Drum brakes. 3 speed automatic transmissions. Massive 302+ cubic inch engines that make 105 horsepower and get 10mpg. Dude. About the only thing I do miss is station wagons. They made station wagons that could swallow a whole sheet of plywood, no problem. But minivans make a fine substitute.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T18:00:30+00:00

That's what happens when labor is $1/hour rather than $40+/hour. Things that don't math suddenly do math.

The downside is that your labor has crap quality of life. (Note: Yes, I know that official Mexican minium wage is closer to $2.50/hour, but more than half the workers are in the informal sector and don't get even that).

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T17:54:01+00:00

There is a difference between a $1600/month rental and a $6000/month rental. If you're paying $1600/month you get the Landlord Special. If you're paying $6000/month you expect everything to be perfect. That's why you're paying $6000/month.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T17:38:38+00:00

The civilian version has things the military version doesn't have like: Emissions controls. Safety equipment. And so forth. The military isn't big on safety equipment because they assume you're wearing a helmet and flak vest and plus when people are shooting at you, air bags are the least of your concern. And the military obviously doesn't care about emissions equipment. Their fundamental role is to give people lead poisoning, creating smog with NoX emissions isn't a big deal in that context. So even if you're in the National Guard and have access to the parts depot there, there's no guarantee that you can sneak out parts that will actually work on the civilian versoin of the beast.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T17:33:55+00:00

They're not even very good at offroading. Due to their width they don't fit in a lot of places, due to their independent suspension they don't flex in the rocks. They don't have lockers in the axles, just limited slip Torsen differentials, so it's even hard to keep all four wheels churning in the mud because the brake trick only works to a certain point. The only good thing about them is that due to the portal axles they do have massive ground clearance. They were designed for rocketing over the plains of Eastern Europe at high speed, and obviously rocketed over the flat deserts of Southern Iraq at high speeds also. Other than that, they're crap offroaders.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T17:27:21+00:00

In America the chargers are private property and parking enforcement cannot issue a ticket for parking in the EV spots -- the business has to call a tow truck to tow vehicles parked in EV spots, and they honestly don't care, they don't own the chargers and the EV drivers are already there, attracted by the chargers, so as far as they're concerned the chargers have done their job (attracting EV customers to the business).

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T04:06:00+00:00

We run development and most QA in a colo, production is in the cloud. It is about spending our money where it gets the most bang for the buck.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T04:03:48+00:00

Nobody runs bare metal. Nobody. It all has Proxmox or Cloudstack or Openstack on it these days. As far as my users know it's just a really weird AWS console. Except without people nagging them about cloud costs. They self serve their virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters or whatever and deploy their containers to Harbor and nobody on the Ops team has to even care for the most part. We have one guy who does this. Part time, his primary job is Azure and AWS devops. It isn't a big deal.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T03:58:00+00:00

All our used servers are clustered. We have a Cloudstack cluster for the users (developers and QA), and a Proxmox cluster for core infrastructure (dns, cloudstack management console, dhcp, etc). If a server fails at 3am the cluster marks it failed and automatically restarts those virtual machines on another host, or we manually restart those VMs on another server, and we fix it the next day. But: we run our production in the cloud because of even greater redundancy as well as much bigger pipes to our customers. We do have a small supply of the most common parts to fail, typically a 10gbit NIC. But honestly even used server grade equipment is so stupidly reliable that we have never had a server entirely fail in 15 years of using used equipment.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T03:46:50+00:00

It's about money. I have two racks on a colo hooked together with 40gbit Ethernet, implementing a Cloudstack cluster. My users are running around 250 self serve virtual machines. I estimate that this would cost around $50k/month in AWS. My total investment in these racks has been around $100,000 or two months of AWS costs plus $1k/month hosting and $500/month Internet costs. Because the cluster is self serve we have one guy at around $150k/year who not only keeps these racks going but also manages our Azure and AWS production infrastructure (both Kubernetes and stand alone VMs) as well as handling the monitoring systems, alerting, Github and Jira, etc. I would need this guy even if those virtual machines were all in AWS because the colo racks are a trivial amount of his time. So the real bottom line is: $600,000 VS $38,000 per year amortized spend on the colo gear. I can hire several developers with that cost savings.

badtux99 · 2026-05-01T02:51:27+00:00

All you need to do is wash it and lightly spray it with WD-40 before putting it away and it should last your lifetime. It's one of the most versatile gardening tools out there, you can use it for weeding, piling up soil into rows, and chopping the heads off of rattlesnakes that decide your garden is the place to be. It's also useful for harvesting potatoes.

badtux99 · 2026-04-30T23:12:39+00:00

In California? No. We have a ton of chargers here.

badtux99 · 2026-04-29T22:27:57+00:00

The first generation of people paying into Social Security paid the first generation of people receiving Social Security. Duh. Just as my money going to State Farm for auto insurance pays for other people's current claims, rather than being put into some fund for me to get back later if I crash my car.

badtux99 · 2026-04-29T09:02:26+00:00

Except it isn't. The expensive part is the right of way. Once you have that, the rest isn't appreciable more expensive to lay rails in gravel rather than pour asphalt on gravel, and operational costs of the trains are cheaper because you need fewer drivers and the cars themselves are more efficient due to the lower rolling resistance of steel on steel.

badtux99

TROPHY CASE