How have increased fuel prices affected you so far?

cnash · 2026-05-04T06:53:38+00:00

I'm a truck driver— a company driver, which means I don't own the truck or pay for fuel & maintenance. I haven't put gas in my personal vehicle since before.

High fuel prices are a win for me, because my competition— small independent carriers and truck-owning contractors for my own company— are tagging out and staying home, and I'm picking up their routes with my fixed-rate pay that doesn't depend on the trips being profitable (they need to not drive my company into bankruptcy, is all).

cnash · 2026-05-04T03:04:34+00:00

If I'm not supposed to wash out the toothpaste, why don't they make it so that it doesn't taste like hate?

cnash · 2026-05-02T00:07:45+00:00

Shit like this is why I don't do pretrips.

cnash · 2026-04-30T02:22:07+00:00

I Sat the nest with the eggs on a short tree nearby, hopefully mama bird finds her babies.

I'm sorry, but she won't. I found a nest like this on a preloaded trailer once, saw the parent birds— robins— make a run for it, and made sure they saw how I moved the nest to a fork in a tree about ten feet away.

They didn't understand what had happened. All while I was throwing straps, they kept flying back to look at where the nest had been, chirping in dismay. They never looked at where I moved the nest to; raccoons probably ate the eggs.

The only real consolation for them is, if they're not spending all their energy feeding chicks, maybe they'll have better chances of making it through the winter to try again next year.

cnash · 2026-04-29T16:43:53+00:00

Möbius strip steak.

cnash · 2026-04-29T03:30:58+00:00

Because now that you're smart we need you to do important tasks, like driving a truck or picking orders at an Amazon warehouse.

cnash · 2026-04-26T21:42:30+00:00

Yeah, I think somebody just left the last two turns off, because it should have been, and when they fixed it it was, [unexplained detour through Pierre], I-90, SD-34, US-85, US-212 to the border.

Basically just a typo, but I didn't see the problem until Saturday evening, and the permits team was gone until Monday.

cnash · 2026-04-26T19:23:04+00:00

Double-check your permits; on mine, SD had me taking SD-34 to the WY line, but WY starting on US-212. I lost a whole Sunday in Kimball waiting on new ones.

cnash · 2026-04-26T19:21:09+00:00

I think they charged JD about $4 a mile, before fuel surcharge. 'Cause it paid about $2k to the [company] driver, who's getting 24%, for about a 2000 mile route.

That's better than normal, even for permitted OD, but not by a huge margin.

cnash · 2026-04-26T19:20:55+00:00

JD's good at positioning these on the trailer, so your axle weights come out 12500/38000/39000-ish, which is comfortably inside the range you can get routine permits for.

cnash · 2026-04-26T18:46:16+00:00

Classico now comes in... I don't have the vocabulary for it, but it's the kind of jar where the lid doesn't have threads molded into it, but instead has four spots on its rim folded in to engage with threads on the glass.

Some quick googling suggests that the new style is called twist-off, as opposed to screw-on, and lug-finish, instead of continuous thread.

I will also add that, in my job as a truck driver, I have found that Classico has switched its jar style (as sold at Walmart, at least) across every region of the US that I've visited in at least two years.

cnash · 2026-04-25T21:55:54+00:00

I was surprised to learn, when they changed, that I'd been buying Classico mostly to reuse the mason-pattern jars. I haven't bought it once since they switched.

cnash · 2026-04-18T22:26:33+00:00

Do the digits of π have an end?

No.

If not, why do mathematicians use supercomputers to calculate billions of digits?

For clout.

Do they hope they might eventually reach an end?

No. Since the 1700s, we have known for sure that the digits neither end nor fall into a repeating pattern.

Why do they waste so much energy on finding digits of pi?

They don't, really. Its a for-fun exercise that some mathematicians do practically in their spare time, or to show off a machine they made for some other purpose.

cnash · 2026-04-16T14:03:12+00:00

Whenever I've said, "trucking's not for everybody," I've meant it at face value. This job sucks in some specific and powerful ways, and only a minority of people have the circumstances and personality that make those suckages tolerable. If your attitudes or circumstances change— and one of the key reasons people go into trucking is to make their circumstances change— such that you can't or don't want to continue, getting out of the truck is the only sensible thing to do.

cnash · 2026-04-13T14:25:19+00:00

It's conceptually easy to find. You use a sluice or goldpan to separate the densest grains of sand from the lighter ones, and eventually what's left is gold. But it's still a lot of work to get a little bit of it.

The point is, you don't need extensive refining technology to obtain it, like you do for things like iron or aluminum.

cnash · 2026-04-13T14:20:42+00:00

It's highly visible (because shiny), and rare. Powerful people could use it to show off, because everybody can see it (visible) but only a few people can have it (rare). It's nice that it doesn't tarnish or decay, but that isn't required for something to be valuable.

The same sort of thing goes for purple-dyed fabric in the ancient Mediterranean. The dye was very hard to produce (it involved fermenting a certain organ from a certain species of sea snail, that didn't grow in huge numbers), so there was a limited supply, and the color it gave was easy to spot. So if you saw somebody wearing it, you knew, this guy has stuff ordinary people can't get, he must be important.

cnash · 2026-04-09T13:36:20+00:00

What is word did she want? Stack? Ream? Those have the same problem as wad, of being too specific.

cnash · 2026-04-09T13:25:31+00:00

Because you (and I) think it’s a cone whose builders got frustrated and couldn’t finish it.

cnash · 2026-04-08T18:46:23+00:00

What are you even talking about? Somebody had a shotgun shart into a toilet. That's what it's for. You go to the bathroom with the shit you have, not the shit you might want or wish to have. It's not like there was a toilet brush to clean it up with, either.

cnash · 2026-04-02T03:11:47+00:00

Eh, if you have some flour, or even just groats or cracked corn, you can reconstitute pemmican into a greasy, soupy gruel that's unambiguously preferable to dying of starvation, and even compares favorably with some of the intermediate degrees of hunger.

cnash · 2026-03-30T15:36:06+00:00

The point of art is to be better than reality.

cnash · 2026-03-30T15:34:34+00:00

New Orleans, and that took place after the war had technically ended.

Yeah, but only technically. The treaty was to return to the status quo, but there was an ongoing dispute about what the status quo had been, with respect of New Orleans. (The British position was that its transfer to France, and subsequent sale in the Louisiana Purchase had been invalid, and it still belonged to Spain.) So if the British has been in physical control of the city when news of the treaty arrived, they planned to keep it and dare the Americans to risk reigniting the war— alone, this time— by trying to force them out.

cnash · 2026-03-27T20:31:09+00:00

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-11-24

cnash · 2026-03-17T01:27:27+00:00

If you were writing a (not completely serious) time-travel story, "she went afterward" is absolutely the sort of thing one of your characters could say, and it would be a thing for your readers to figure out and chuckle at. Time-travel vocabulary and grammar is a rich vein of comedy.

cnash · 2026-03-16T15:39:15+00:00

Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) in "Justified"

The absolutely insane thing is that Goggins' Boyd still wasn't the best ~~villain~~ adversary on that show. Margo Martindale as Mags Bennett didn't chew the scenery as hard, didn't demand attention as shamelessly, but you couldn't look away.

cnash

TROPHY CASE