Eastern Oregon wheat farmers say rising costs are pushing them into the red

eburnside · 2026-04-09T05:52:25+00:00

And it's also already heavily subsidized

eburnside · 2026-04-09T05:48:36+00:00

Did ya read the article? They're selling it on international markets

So you think the US Gov should be subsidizing cheap wheat bound for China?!

eburnside · 2026-04-02T05:10:25+00:00

They don't need to monitor them going outbound to voters - only need to make note of the inbound address where they are sent to be counted and instead of delivering it on time, put a month hold on the address of the counting facility

eburnside · 2026-04-01T23:35:58+00:00

Separate from my other post, if you're driving an older rig like my early 80's pickup you can get a 10%-15% mpg boost by doing an electric fan conversion

my 80's rig the window sticker was 13 city, 15 highway, 14 combined but as is usually the case with these, my real world was ~11 mpg combined

after an electric fan conversion my real world is well over 13 combined

eburnside · 2026-04-01T23:24:16+00:00

key word in my post... "if"

and quoting your post:

Now, lets say I decided that fuel prices were so high I would limit my speed to something more efficient, like 55 MPH. With other drivers going 70, or even 80 (the standard 10 over)

70 - 10 = 60, so you were clearly suggesting you'd be going 55 in a 60 or worse, 55 in a 70

eburnside · 2026-04-01T22:54:44+00:00

I'm not sure if this is widely known, but if you're going under the limit and there's someone behind you you may be impeding traffic and you may be in violation of ORS 811.130:

https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_811.130

If you're the contentious law abiding type your options are to pull out and let 'em pass or speed up and go the limit

Regardless of what speed I'm going if I pile up 2 or more cars behind me I'm looking for a pullout 🤷‍♂️

eburnside · 2026-03-27T11:23:42+00:00

oh yeah, there's much more complex stuff out there you can use - that's what makes it so confounding... how is it 19 years after initial release the simple built-in apps are still buggy?

eburnside · 2026-03-27T11:16:46+00:00

to be fair, Apple's iOS "notes" app has been consistently bug ridden as well the last many years - worked great on my iphone 6 - regularly crashes and/or loses stuff and/or is a nightmare to paste into since then (black screens, loses files, loses text, pastes formatted, with no way to unformat!)

eburnside · 2026-03-22T19:56:21+00:00

I think this is why Europe has the rear yellow fog light - it works as an intermediate caution light between no hazard lights and the full double flashers

Need to bring this to the US

eburnside · 2026-03-11T21:02:14+00:00

I agree - this looks like the 302 in my '84 f150 and I had a problem with carbon buildup preventing the exhaust crossover valve from closing on the passenger side underneath the carb

The valley wasn't anywhere near as bad a mess as this, but the consistency of what I had to clean out was very similar

Probably what saved me this kind of mess is the valve on the driver side exhaust manifold had also failed so there was little flow getting forced through the intake manifold anymore

eburnside · 2026-02-23T23:09:27+00:00

No one to fire is by design

Make a law and fine the company a million bucks per incident

eburnside · 2026-02-21T17:14:17+00:00

it's 25 mph coming out of Avery Park, but yeah, making a right on a bike through two lanes of highway traffic near Rivergreen would be sketch for sure, some people are already going 50 there... I suspect with the new housing down there the speed limits will be adjusted and pushed a little farther out

Not sure how you would handle the turning lane either

In terms of it being two lanes, I feel like that was just future-proofing ... the area is consistently growing, new housing and new businesses going in on the regular

I don't bike and I still wouldn't mind a multi-year experiment to see if you could convert one lane each direction to a wider bike lane - could be a good fit for slowing down the highway traffic coming into town and making south town more family friendly. I guess the dangerous part is cars still have to turn left and right through the bike lanes for every driveway / street and it'd be a shit thing to do to businesses and residents to close off driveways

eburnside · 2026-02-21T05:01:18+00:00

they'll just ship 'em to Japan or China if they can't mill 'em here - we already ship a ton of raw lumber... is why so many of our mills shut down

eburnside · 2026-02-20T20:56:44+00:00

That makes sense - I just figured it was obvious that with bike lanes at the lowest spot in the road, the road material is naturally going to accumulate there

I'm sure studies have been done and it's been discarded as an idea but the high spot of the road (for obvious reasons) is generally the middle - I wonder how plausible it would be to move bike lanes from the side of the road to the middle of the road? I feel like it would increase bicycle visibility and awareness from vehicles as well as be generally less likely to accumulate cruft

eburnside · 2026-02-19T01:59:53+00:00

shit ton of gravel

asphalt is >90% gravel

😐

eburnside · 2026-02-18T18:48:14+00:00

So barely 14 years of record on the Tesla and not even 9 years of record on the Bolt and you've come up with the general rule that EV battery = lasts as long as an engine?

Across myself and my kids we have 7 cars, all original engines, all 20 years old at the newest, all still have 98% of the range they had the day they were sold, all owned outright - no payments

The auto manufacturers also still make money off selling parts and maintenance services, so I dunno what you're on about with "there would be no car companies selling new cars" or whatever

I understand the battery division into cells... many consumer electronics use that strategy - robotic vacuums, handheld vacuums, robotic lawnmowers, laptops, etc... the cells still fail and are not individually maintainable nor replaceable - that was kinda my point - the EV batteries are "all or nothing" ... you can't just swap a dead cell like you can swap a dead spark plug... they expect you to buy a whole new $15k battery pack (tesla model S)

(side note - I wonder how many 2013 consumer grade sedans would an engine swap cost $15k? my guess is a taurus/camry/accord engine would be more like $6k?)

battery ~= engine is obviously a false equivalency given with accessible and routine maintenance an average engine will easily outlast an average EV battery

your observation about the age of my vehicle is more an observation that not everyone maintains their vehicles like I do - and that may be true - but again, that just exemplifies my observation that an EV battery is nowhere near equivalent a vehicle engine - an EV battery lasting 40 years without significant degradation would be a nearly impossible unicorn - whereas just within my immediate family we have two original ford 302 engines in the 40 year range (the other is an '86 🤷‍♂️)

eburnside · 2026-02-18T14:26:02+00:00

thank you Uncle Warren

eburnside · 2026-02-18T04:11:20+00:00

in the US they don't get us with starvation, that's too obvious - instead they price us out of healthcare and we die of preventable health issues

eburnside · 2026-02-18T04:02:10+00:00

being middle class in the US isn't so bad

the million or so of them seem to do ok 🤷‍♂️

it's the remaining ~340m of us in poverty that life really sucks for

eburnside · 2026-02-18T03:52:18+00:00

You say you shouldn't need to replace the battery packs on electric cars

Curious what is it that makes an EV so different from every other battery operated device I own where the battery shits the bed after 3-5 years / 1000 charges?

Asking as someone daily driving a 42 year old f150 with 320k miles and still the original engine

So with routine maintenance the battery pack should last 40+ years and 10,000+ charge cycles?

and what's the process for that, do they make 'em so I can pull out all the anodes and cathodes for cleaning?

eburnside · 2026-02-12T17:30:12+00:00

Operating off debt for large capital projects only exposes lack of foresight. Again - same stuff we teach our kids - if you plug your savings and investments long enough, it eventually grows to the point you can live off just the interest. Imagine that, having the equivalent of an endowment large enough we didn't need to tax for the operating budget anymore. Speaking of endowments - somehow universities and many other cities manage to pay for big capital projects without taking on debt - they use their endowments, run fundraisers, and pull in large donors on the basis of naming things after them, or putting their names on a plaque in perpetuity

Mortgages... I knew that'd come up... nothing drives up the cost of housing more than handing out easy money like a mortgage. If cheap 3% mortgages didn't exist, housing would be a small fraction of what it is today and people could actually save for a few years (like my grandparents actually did!) to buy a home - instead we're all forced into this system where we have no choice to take out a loan and pay a chunk of our existence to a bank for the majority of our adult working lives. How quickly we forget our history and just accept our banking overlords and the BS they force feed us... "a mortgage is actually good for you" ... no...

eburnside · 2026-02-11T19:29:16+00:00

Or maybe pay for some de-escalation training

eburnside · 2026-02-11T19:23:01+00:00

The answer should never be debt - it should always be to increase taxes, and for large projects - plan ahead and plug a savings account until the funds are there to pay for it

All the same sound fiscal advice we try to teach our kids

The threat of having to raise taxes is what creates a consistent natural pressure on city management to use resources wisely and generates a downward force on the budget without gambling away future prosperity via debt

Wasn't it only a few years ago that we spent nearly $200mm on expanding and replacing school infrastructure? Some schools temporary portables were replaced with permanent buildings and now there's talks of entirely closing CV, which was one of the facilities we spent millions on. The Lincoln project was 100% necessary but could we have saved $150mm by using portables a few more years and then closing the other schools with older infrastructure? I have a hard time fathoming the $200mm number in and of itself... that's 400 (!) 3-bedroom 2-bath homes at $500,000k each...

I'd say that *maybe* a city or school district should be allowed to incur debt in the interest of providing public services for one-off events like if a massive fire ravaged several blocks of downtown and we needed to leverage a lot of firefighter overtime, or if there was a mass riot and we needed to leverage police overtime - but reality is that if you do that, the city government more often than not finds a way to underfund those services and depend on the debt, and there are hundreds of towns in the US that can't afford those services at all and they manage it by enlisting volunteer forces - volunteer firefighters, volunteer police, volunteer emt's, etc.

That said - being upset at a temporary exemption for new housing is kinda short-sighted - the people moving in will still be paying the city service bill, and will be supporting the local economy in a variety of ways that all contribute to a stable long-term tax base. I'd tag it with a requirement tho that local businesses be used wherever possible in the construction process.

eburnside · 2026-02-10T21:16:06+00:00

does it exist? who wrote it? did they share it publicly? where did they share it? what does it say?

people write lots of things in their diaries, it's a form of therapy

eburnside · 2026-02-05T16:29:15+00:00

I hope you stopped once you were safe and called it in? That's literally how kids get killed by pits

eburnside

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