Coming from an LS2 and going to a Shoei RF-1400 was a larger improvement than I thought. Same for my wife going from a Sedici to an Arai in the same ~$600 range as my Shoei. Comfort, quietness, fidelity of external audio

They think this will somehow be a quick trade war that ends in everything being the same price, but suddenly produced domestically. They are still delusional. They are still riding the 2020 inflation wave they call bidenomics.

In different words, I think we have a similar idea. I said completion, you said mastery. I said no way to apply the new knowledge, you said not enough room to house other topics of interest. So if you want to continuously expand your knowledge to a sufficient degree but don’t want to reach the end, what is the goal?

Lego is great. It gives you literal building blocks to skip the creation of building blocks and go straight to synthesis and assembly. It’s like if you made a painting with a book of stickers of common brush strokes. They’re limited in certain ways like being a square grid for the most part, but build until there’s a physical limitation. Either use some hinges, or start getting involved with other build materials.

General art is something I’ve enjoyed creating but my skill isn’t great. I’ve currently focused on building utilitarian things with a new home. Wish there was a shelf unit of these exact dimensions? Sounds like a trip to buy lumber then. Could be the perfect little monitor riser deck. You could say I’m bad at building things but I prefer to say I’m good at building bad things. They work, they’re just a little ugly.

But back to the main topic. While I certainly promote educational pursuits and productive use of time, if it causes this much stress every time, I think you should consider it might be some type of anxiety. I know the immediate goal is learn more, but where does it go from there? What’s the real underlying goal? It may not be obvious to you. Is it to create success in your career? To establish superiority over your peers? If it was purely a joyous pursuit, I don’t think you’d be posting about it like this. Don’t stop learning, but beware of burnout as well as be considerate towards yourself when you reach some end point in a topic.

The party of states rights (in areas they’re losing federally) makes yet another federal commandment in areas they want to gain ground on

What’s bad about performative actions in the form of executive orders applying rules to situations the president has clearly demonstrated he doesn’t understand?

AI instructions unclear, brass instruments coming right up

Ska intensifies

While I knew your answer, I just went through a similar thing with a Costco jacket. It’s a winter jacket with a false fleece liner. As in, there’s a 2" strip inside the jacket, just behind the main zipper, that just zips up. While it can offer an extra inch of belly room after too much hibachi, the main benefit seems to be that it starts about 3" higher than the exterior zipper. It’s pretty good for driving in that mode.

What times were these meetings? Was he sundowning?

I could see Trump being average among the atrocities of prior presidents. I see absolutely nothing wrong with hyperventilating at each and every one of them, though. Average doesn’t mean acceptable.

A few XKCDs had made me cry laughing. This was just a regular cry.

It’s not just duped kiddies, it’s the liberals that didn’t vote for Harris, too. There’s enough single-issue voters on Palestine to make a difference.

It was probably engineered that way. There’s at least a dozen popular single-issues that can completely flip/prevent someone’s votes. Abortion, taxes, guns, Palestine, transsexuals, original flavor queer, non-Christian, non-white, non-male, vaccines, net neutrality, and communist/socialist label are the 12 I submit today.

As Hemphill got to know the women, he convinced them to confide their past sexual traumas, which he then deliberately reenacted as he assaulted them, Curzer said. He took advantage of some victims’ inexperience, the prosecutor said, or crossed boundaries that victims had clearly articulated

I read the whole thing along with the other… Character issues. Pretty sure he’s well beyond what I’d consider fixable.

My 98 has the 2.5 Lima/Pinto, the slightly larger version of the 2.3 in your 90s Ranger, and consistently hits 21mpg on 50mph highway with traffic lights. My buddy with a 94 2.3 also gets about 20. However, I’ve read lots of good things about the 2.3 Duratech/Mazda L that started in 01. I just picked up a 2008 in much better condition but have yet to check the fuel economy. It’ll be interesting going from a clapped out long bed to a short bed with a hard tonneau and a bedrug liner. But, realistically, I’m driving empty 95% of the time so I’ll take the cover for a little extra aero.

I’ve looked at the maverick as well. The price (of any newer car) is the main reason I went with an old ranger. That’s neat about the midgate, I hadn’t heard about that. While the 4ft bed of course reduces cargo space, my main concern is about long lumber. With an adjustable tailgate angle and bed pockets for cross boards giving it 6ft of support, the community seems perfectly happy with it for 8ft goods. That’d be awesome if a midgate fit 4ft wide goods through it, almost containing 8ft from rear seats to tilted tailgate. And a 40mpg hybrid? I’m in… Except for the price right now.

I’m no psychologist, but I do have racing thoughts as an engineer type shell over an artistic skeleton with a consistent stream of visual ideas. If you’re anything like me, then I ask, what other intellectual and creative outlets do you have besides reading up on subjects? Could the fear of completing a topic stem from realization you have no way to apply it?

Ranger fam unite! 4cyl towing is only 3500 I think. Less than a car+trailer because that’s what people always ask about in the ranger community. And that’s with the proper frame hitch. The bumper is like class 2

I have an older Ranger. I don’t do much truck stuff. The bulk cargo area is the draw, not the weight capacity. The heaviest load I carried was 800lbs of plywood, which was 15 sheets or something. I have a 4x8 trailer that can also help haul bulky household goods for moves, a motorcycle, lumber, or furniture. While the trailer is rated for 1700lbs payload and weighs 300lbs itself, I have never put more than 500lbs on it, despite filling the 4x8 floor stackef 4ft high. I made the trailer before getting the Ranger, so now they’re redundant and never actually hauled together.

If you’re already towing, this probably isnt the truck for you. If you aren’t towing, it provides an option to tow something if you have to. The reason I chose the Ranger is because it’s cheap, gets good fuel economy, and has the capacity to grab full lumber sheet goods on my commute home. While I could find a 30mpg car for the same price, I’m still in the mid 20s. Maybe I could spend 30k on a newer F150 V6 and get similar, but then it costs 10x what I paid. Bulk space and handling scratchy cargo is the main goal. I think of the Slate as being what the Ranger should’ve been now.

If it’s a US city you’ve heard of, racism probably won’t stop you from living there. You might find pockets, but larger cities should be ok overall. Often they’ll have pockets of people that might hate you for a myriad of reasons. Maybe their ethnicity already hates yours back home. Maybe you’re part of an immigration wave that happened at the same time as there’s, making the two hate each other to step on the other to lift their own (NY Italian and Irish in the early 1900s). Maybe they believe immigrants are consuming all the resources and you’re the reason they’re poor (general hate from whites across the country, but localized majorities do it too).

But, overall, cities will generally have less meaningful racism because, as it turns out, if you spend your life next to other races/ethnicities, you realize we’re all human living the same struggle. Urban/suburban metro areas surrounding them will be similar. Sometimes there’s simple cultural misunderstandings, but once you see the first generation children raised in the local area, you see it has nothing to do with race after all.

But this is not a guarantee it’ll be all dandy and magically happy. I don’t know your ethnicity and I don’t know where you want to go. Even if I did, I don’t know everything.

In my usage, ethnicity refers to somewhat socially-defined regional identities. Basically, what country/group is your ancestral origin. You might call this a nationality, but, to me, that implies I’m assuming you’re not a US national/citizen. This also gives a leeway to include ethnic groups not restricted to a particular country such as certain groups of Jews, nomadic groups like Romani, or sub-groups of countries like Sicilian.

But I really don’t ask often because it’s not really important and can easily be taken as an insult.

I can appreciate the personal part you added regarding losing faith. I left catholicism in my teens. Too many inconsistencies, too much abuse of power. It started by questioning how multiple christianities could have such different rules, followed by learning how most religion is abrahamic and even more diverse in interpretation, to finally saying fuck all this.

I got FC5 in 2020 and it became hard to stomach. It felt like a real potential reality of the US that year. Cults, vehement religious figures, gun fetish, and a classic Americana setting. The prior titles were all far away, imaginary lands offering even a small degree of dissociation. FC5 was just home. I’d relate it to Harry Potter villains in the sense that yeah, of course we know Voldemort is evil, but Umbridge is the most hated character. Not because she’s worse, but because we know a real-life Umbridge personally.

FC6 hit me kinda hard in a similar way. I got into it about a year ago, not long after the israel/Palestine conflict flared up. There’s a ton of genocidal themes there.

Just gotta have reading hormones. Everything smells better that way