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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • Homes here tend to be about that size unless they’re older than about 1980. We also have a lot of absolutely massive mansions built out in the middle of absolutely nowhere that’ll drive that number up quite a bit. If you’re willing to drive 30 minutes to the grocery, you can get a 5000+sqft house for well under $500k. I have a buddy who just bought a 5200sqft place on 8 acres for about $450k. If you really want to live somewhere undesirable like the place my parents moved to a few years ago, their whole subdivision has a few dozen houses all over 7000sqft, and they sold for about $400k



  • It’s definitely become a thing within the past decade, especially with products/ads directed more towards women. Remember that obese is not “Jabba the Hutt” levels of fat, and someone who looks like this is far past obese at 5’4" (1.61m) and 200lbs (90kg). Then, you have companies like Dove ( with ads like their “Body Positive Trailer” showing characters that are well past Class III obesity. That’s an extreme example, but it’s become quite common overall to show severely overweight people as “normal”

    Companies have realized that people are getting fatter and fatter globally, so like any good capitalists they’re going to take advantage of it. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dove is owned by Unilever, who is also the world’s largest producer of ice cream, and suddenly their push for “body positivity” makes a bit more sense.

    Now, before people go and attack me, I think that there have been many positive changes in how people are being more realistically portrayed in media and appreciate the push for more realistic body standards. Shaming people for looking “different” is not okay, and that includes being overweight.

    However, what’s not okay in my mind is how quickly it’s become “being severely overweight is totally okay if you #slay queen, yaaaas”. I’ve noticed a growing trend of these types of ads, generally portraying black/PoC women (who are already statistically far more likely to become obese) who are hundreds of pounds overweight as doing all kinds of “fitness” and/or “boss babe” kinds of activities, which seems like they are trying to convince the broader audience that it’s totally okay to be 200-300lbs overweight because this obese black girl was shown wearing athletic wear.





  • I might add a couple of suggestions to make things as painless as possible. Get the H&K sound system and Tech package. The tiny screen looks super crappy in such a nice interior and the base sound system SUCKS. No, seriously, it’s absolutely abysmal and is legitimately far worse than the one in my wife’s base Kia Niro. I’m not super snobby when it comes to audio systems and mostly listen to podcasts and such, but it’s barely passable even for that. Second is if you plan on getting a BEV, get one with a heat pump. It makes a massive difference in range even if it doesn’t get super cold where you live.

    Also, after having a 33kWh REx and now the larger 42kWh BEV, I don’t miss the REx at all. It’s not a road trip car by any means, but I got it from Atlanta to Detroit with zero issues, it was just a slow trip. I’ve driven it all around MI and done a couple of road trips to Chicago in it, and had zero issues.



  • The best way I can describe the tires is that they have far, far more grip than they have any right to given their size. For street use, the EP500s are more than sufficient and I’ve never felt like I was wanting for grip. For AutoX, they do okay, but definitely severely hamper the performance of the car. It’s RWD, so you’re not over stressing those narrow fronts too much when you really push it, but it still likes to understeer more than I’d like, but I think that’s also a symptom of being unable to turn DSC all the way off, because it feels a lot more balanced when I put it in the “everything, including ABS off” mode.

    I’ve got plenty of experience with hot hatches; my first car was an APR stage 2 tuned Mk5 GTI, and I regularly drive my friends’ FoST and FoRS. It definitely doesn’t feel quite as sporty as those, but I find it far more fun as an around town daily. We’ve also had an F-Type R, ZL1, and M3, and while they’re phenomenal experiences and super fun to drive, any time you’re even pushing them a little on public roads, there’s just that incessant nag in the back of my mind both knowing the car can give so much more, but also that doing so is insanely risky. I feel like I get to push my i3 a lot more on public roads without being downright reckless, and it just makes it way more fun to drive because of that.

    With all that said, the TL;DR is that they’re way more fun than they have any right to be, and ignore preconceptions or hangups on the performance numbers you might have,



  • Sandy Munro lost all credibility when it came out that, while going on about all these wild claims about Tesla’s incredible manufacturing prowess and how everyone else was shit, he held a fair bit of Tesla stock and even went on to gloat about how much he made off it during 2020.

    Absolutely zero integrity and no reason to trust a single word he says anymore, because not only has he shown that he won’t disclose serious conflicts of interest, but that he’ll also gladly abuse them for personal gain. He realized he can make way more money shilling Tesla and selling merch than he ever did with his normal business, and rides off his company’s past reputation.

    Even if you ignore that, his analyses are basically entirely cost focused, and having seen some of the reports on projects I personally know quite well, he takes an incredibly simplistic view towards component design and focuses on almost entirely on cost/simplicity, with basically zero regard for longevity, function, NVH, etc. Which, for the massive 500+ page reports that are purely for cost and build analysis, is totally fine. However, he then spouts it to the public as if everyone else is an idiot for not wanting their cars to be rattling shitboxes.

    He’ll praise things like Tesla re-using the suspension from the Model 3 1:1 onto the Model Y because it saves on manufacturing costs and such, but will completely ignore that, until some fairly recent part changes, the Y had literally one of the single worst rides of anything on the road today, because they added 100s of pounds of weight and didn’t even bother to change the spring rates.


  • For real. I’m less than 5 years older than some of my wife’s friends, and they were almost awestruck that I have basically ZERO ads in our house. Every device has uBlock, Sponsorblock, ReVanced, SmartTube, whole house has PiHole and a couple of other things. And these are CS majors and engineers, so it’s not like they aren’t at least semi tech-savvy. They just accept the ads as if they can’t do anything about them.

    But I say fuck it, because literally every content creator I like does zero sponsorship or ad deals, and they all manage to make fantastic content. I’ll give them $1000 via their Patreon or merch before I’ll watch a single ad for shit like Raycons or Raid: Shadow Legends. Ads are absolute cancer and the more ads you see for a product, the shittier it is, almost guaranteed.