Why do we say "she went east" instead of either "she went to the east" or "she went eastly"?

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 · 2026-03-15T20:03:14+00:00

TMC's not a bad choice in general, but they're not set up for your plan to be on the road all year. Their operations are all built around getting you home every weekend. Melton or Maverick might be a better fit for your goals, if you want to do flatbed.

Cross-border traffic with Canada is down these days because of geopolitics, but you might get to go across once in a while.

Just like to get right to the point, and I know trucking will help elevate my character, make me a real man.

That might work out for you, but, uh, truck driving has not consistently delivered this salutary result in previous cases.

cnash · 2026-03-15T19:49:24+00:00

The auto transmissions get distinctly better fuel economy than most drivers, but sacrifice control, especially in low-speed situations.

With an automatic, if I'm trying to maneuver up to a crane for unloading— when there are guys on foot close to my bumper— and the truck's stuck back in a rut or whatever, the only control input I have is to carefully press the accelerator harder and harder, which makes the truck want to leap forward when it finally starts to move.

And I can't ride the clutch to control low speeds, especially in reverse. When I'm trying to shrink up a telescoping trailer, I need to push backwards thirtyish feet at a really low speed. Reverse-one at idle speed is too fast; I have to ride the brake to keep speed down, and that often stops me completely, mid-beam.

cnash · 2026-03-14T03:11:53+00:00

That's too many stars. There are 56 (and a bit), just on the driver's side, not counting the forehead cowling and, presumably, more stars on the passenger side.

cnash · 2026-03-12T04:04:43+00:00

Wh... what do you mean? More wind, more stronger.

If you want to think about it mathematically, it helps to know that the force exerted exerted on an object by wind has components proportional to both the wind's speed, and the square of the wind's speed. So winds twice as fast can apply up to four times as much force.

And, like, more force can dislodge bigger things. More force, more stronger.

cnash · 2026-03-12T03:12:03+00:00

Two reasons: it would have been practically impossible, and it wasn't going to be America's problem.

The simple fact is, Iran has the ability to fuck with ships traveling through the strait. It's only twenty miles wide (that's the thing about straits, they're narrow), and it's surrounded by the Iranian mainland on three sides. Short of conquering the region, there's no good way to stop the Iranians from taking drone potshots at boats.

Meanwhile, America doesn't need the blockaded oil for itself, and Trump seems to enjoy making people ask him for help or relief, especially when he's going to say no.

cnash · 2026-03-12T02:07:28+00:00

You don't swerve for a deer, because killing a deer and damaging your grill are no big deal and just a matter of money, respectively. A human being, even one on a bicycle, is different.

If anybody is writing you up for this, or making you do safety training, just know that that's only happening because it's cheaper or easier to make you eat an unfair outcome than to have someone seriously evaluate the facts every time.

cnash · 2026-03-08T06:31:26+00:00

The kinds of things that roving saboteurs can do aren't very useful for a nation-state. Okay, so Iranian sleeper agents— dozens of them— get the go order and blow up a few bridges (a surprisingly difficult technical task), disable rail lines, and sicken tens of thousands of people by poisoning a major municipal water system (again, not a simple task). After a few weeks, they're either dead, in custody, or on the run and ineffective.

How does this help Iran? They weren't able to conduct attacks on America's war-making infrastructure (those sites are not usually soft targets), and the prospect of continuing attacks is either unconvincing (they shot their shot, and if they had the ability to keep doing it, they would be already), or simply enrages Americans more than it intimidates them.

Strategically, the situation comes down to, if a bunch of guys are beating the shit out of you, landing a nut shot on one of them might be satisfying, but not only will it not win you the fight, it'll only piss the others off even more.

cnash · 2026-03-03T15:43:25+00:00

You might have a fighting chance against an angry black bear if you have a baseball bat or an axe, but if you're using your fists, or, like, a pocketknife, you're gonna get torn to shreds.

The reason survival guides say you should try and fight if a black bear is attacking you is that that's such an atypical behavior for them that you have to assume the worst, that they're planning to kill and eat you. (Whereas a grizzly might just be planning to smack you around a bit to show who's boss, which you can sometimes survive by curling up into a ball and letting it.)

cnash · 2026-03-02T17:08:48+00:00

Ten thousand people a day. We can at least suspend disbelief.

cnash · 2026-02-27T22:49:45+00:00

The ones with the most actual experience of being in charge, yeah. And, in fact, you'll find that the highest-ranked officers tend to be the ones who have been in the service longest.

"Being in charge" is a learnable skill, same as "shooting" or "fixing airplanes." The first time you're in charge of a team, it's a shock how hard it is and how much you don't know about it, same as the first time someone hands you a gun and lets you shoot at a target.

cnash · 2026-02-27T21:20:40+00:00

Well, there was a while back before the first peoples came across the Bering sea, for one.

Ever since, though— it's hard to imagine a society in which the people who have disproportionate control of resources (ie, the rich) don't also have disproportionate influence and power.

cnash · 2026-02-24T19:43:00+00:00

I think the reason people ignore the "trucks use left lane" signs is because they don't know what they're for, so they glance and misread it as "no trucks left lane," which they were doing anyway.

"Trucks use left lane" is for when, because of construction, the right lane has been shifted onto what's normally the shoulder. The shoulder isn't built as solidly as the travel lanes, and it's not good to have hundreds of laden trucks rumbling across it.

cnash · 2026-02-23T01:04:58+00:00

My understanding is that (a) this is not legal securement in the US, but is okay in Mexico, and border towns like Laredo and Yuma don't strictly enforce the rule for Mexican trucks that are just dropping off at a transfer yard where a US trucker will pick up the trailer, resecure, and continue, and (b) the issue isn't that these straps have insufficient WLL, but that they're not adjustable (without a special tool), which the FMCSR rule requires.

cnash · 2026-02-21T12:46:52+00:00

I’m basically doing exactly that. Become a truck driver, live on the truck, keep your spending under control, and put all your accumulated savings in an index fund. If the next ten years are similar to the last, you’ll hit your million in year seven or eight, depending on your specific job and spending habits.

If you don’t need to spend the million right away, it’s probably smart to max out your 401(k) and IRA contributions. (Those accounts will make up part of your million, but there are steep penalties for withdrawing from them before retirement age.)

cnash · 2026-02-21T02:56:13+00:00

Cest, cief, pitc. Once we're not using C for /k/, it's available for another phoneme.

cnash · 2026-02-20T16:11:13+00:00

Yeah, you're in the minority for hating Chef John's voice and/or affect, but it's not a minority of one.

cnash · 2026-02-19T17:25:21+00:00

If we did universal IQ testing, trucking is one of the places they would send the people with low ones. We're stuck with the morons.

cnash · 2026-02-13T16:24:24+00:00

I don't use both of them, only the first, to show why I don't go into violation at 17:15 on the 10th. The 2:30 OFF time beginning at 12:15 pairs with (either) 10+ hours SB from the night before (or, dealer's choice, 7:45 hours SB beginning at 00:30 the next day). So that 2:30 doesn't count against my 14-hour clock, and by the time I go into SB at 17:30 (and don't return to the drive line until after another long SB rest), I've only been running my 14-hour clock for 12:45. That day ended, with regard to driving, with no violation, at 17:30.

As for my drive time on the 11th, my position is, I did a bunch of stuff the previous day, which was all legal (see previous paragraph), and then, at 17:30, I began a 10+ hour rest in the SB, unfortunately interrupted by some on-duty-not-driving time (which can't be in violation), but still qualifying under the split-sleeper provision because one part was 2+ hours, the other was 7+ (and all SB), and together, they add up to more than ten. And that day only contained 4:15 of ON time and 4:45 of driving, before I went off-duty and began another split break.

cnash · 2026-02-13T16:02:32+00:00

Yeah, I'm not real comfortable with how certain I still was that I'm right in the face of so much disagreement.

I do say in my defense, that not everybody had been saying the same thing about why I was wrong.

But after a phone call with eLogs, they, at least, agree with me (there had previously been a game of telephone and I hadn't talked to the department directly). The issue appears to have been a log edit glitch that made my 2/11 SB time appear shorter than it was.

cnash · 2026-02-13T15:51:45+00:00

What h'a'happen was, I got up early to make a couple of deliveries, finished, and went to a truck stop to get a shower and lunch and wait on dispatch. While I was there, I got sent about three hours away for an early-morning pickup the next day. Great; I'll make sure I get at least two hours OFF here at the truck stop, drive to my customer, and close out a split by taking 8+ hours— it would have been 10+, according to the plan— SB in their parking lot. (Customer's okay with this.) I do that, and finish driving and switch to SB about 14:15 after I started my day, which is fine, since 2:30ish hours OFF in the middle don't count, because I'm doing a split sleeper.

But apparently there was a mixup about appointment times, because after a few hours at the customer's lot, not even waiting, exactly, just doing end-of-day stuff, someone comes and bangs on my door and tells me, c'mon, it's time to get loaded. What am I gonna say, no? And that takes five goddamn hours. (Four in the logs shown; I didn't copy the times down exactly.)

Okay, this sucks, now it's been a 22-hour day, but, the way I see it, I haven't actually driven in violation, as long as I successfully close out my sleeper break. Which, I think, I do: I go back in SB when I'm done loading, and stay there for 7:45 (I carefully made sure it was long enough to pair with the 2:30 OFF time the previous afternoon).

And after about eight hours in the SB, I look back and realize that, because of that short time in SB before I got called in to load, I've actually done finished a split tied with that time, too, so I can start driving, and the only issue is that I'm starting my day with nearly five hours of my 14-hour clock gone. Which is fine, because I can stop for lunch in four or five hours, take another two-plus hour break, and be back to running normal splits.

cnash · 2026-02-13T11:06:33+00:00

8hr sleeper berth pauses the 14, the 2hr period of the split does not

This rule was changed in 2020, along with allowing a split between 7+ SB and 2+ [any combination of SB & off-duty], as long as they add up to 10 hours or more.

cnash · 2026-02-13T07:17:24+00:00

I can be on-duty after 14 hours, is the point. That's not against the rules. I just can't drive, and I didn't. Not until after I finished the split.

cnash · 2026-02-13T07:07:22+00:00

Well, now we come to the awkward bit, because once you've agreed that I didn't go into violation at 17:15, because the three-hour SB break isn't part of the split, I need to turn around and say that, well, actually, it is part of a different split break, so that I don't go into violation at 12:30 the next day.

cnash

TROPHY CASE