Honestly, my advice, unpopular as it might be, is that unless you plan on riding a motorcycle you should probably get an automatic transmission car instead of learning on a manual transmission. Manual transmissions–in the US, anyways–are largely relegated to performance vehicles where people want them. But the hard truth is that automatic transmissions do a better job at driving efficiently and keeping the engine at a safe and ideal load than any driver with a manual. And it’s a lot less hassle for most of the driving that people tend to actually do. For instance, it’s uncommon to have a cruise control on a manual transmission car, which makes long drives more tiring, and stop-and-go traffic puts less wear on an automatic transmission.

If you plan on riding a motorcycle though, you must learn to use a clutch, because all non-electric motorcycles use a clutch (usually a wet clutch, but Ducati uses a dry clutch); manual transmissions are lighter and more compact, and weight matters a lot on a motorcycle.

I say this as someone that learned to drive on manual transmissions, and exclusively had cars with manual transmissions up through about 2022.

Learn to shift based off the sound of the engine, dont stare at the tachometer.

Do not do this.

Every engine has a different redline. The redline is based mostly on piston mass, which doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to engine displacement, given that it’s common to have 4, 6, or 8 cylinders in a car. If you’re shifting primarily based on engine sound, you can be shifting too low in one car, and then too high in another. The tachometer is a much more reliable way of learning where you should shift in any given vehicle.

Also, constantly running your car in the maximum power band–which tends to be close to the redline–probably isn’t great for it.

I’m guess that you don’t live in the US? Almost all cars in the US–whether training vehicles or not–are gasoline, and it’s mostly larger pickup trucks that are diesel. VW is one of the few companies that sells consumer cars that are diesel, and I’m not sure that they do anymore, not after there was that huge scandal about intentionally cheating EPA emissions standards with their diesel cars a decade back.

Thought I could/should work through discomfort and then pain at the gym, supersetting overhead push-presses and triceps dips. LOL, nope, gave myself a labral tear and tore my supraspinatus. My shoulder now has an unpleasant popping feeling + significantly less strength when I’m doing anything like a bench press with my elbows properly tucked; I’ll likely never be able to do narrow grip bench press or triceps dips again.

Why was this dumb? Because I was a personal trainer, and I fucking know better than to try and push through pain. But I was trying to get back into lifting seriously after losing a lot of time to the pandemic.

Okay, people in the US generally didn’t though. How is the information going to get to them, when mail took months, phone calls were not realistically possible, and telegraphs were incredibly expensive? Unless it’s getting reported by the major news outlets, the majority of people in the US simply didn’t have access to that information. Given the propaganda that was coming from both sides at the time, reports might not have even been very believable to the average citizen.

Average people simply didn’t have access to information at the scale we now enjoy at that time. Leaders of countries and militaries might know, but unless it was being reported by wire services and in local newspapers, the average person would have had no rational way of finding out about it.

Not where I am; DOT 5.1 costs 2-3 times as much as DOT 5 locally.

DOT 4, $.375/oz.

DOT 5.1, $1.42/oz.

It’s 3.8x more expensive to buy DOT 5.1 locally.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?

You can use DOT 5.1 to significantly increase that wet boiling point, but it’s expensive for normal car use. I usually use it in my motorcycle, since I’ve experienced brake fade on that before, and it’s… Not fun.

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I’m constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)

It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.

SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.

Trucking used to be a way a person could provide for their family, remain independent, and feel in control.

Still can. There are still owner-operators, and they have significant control over how they do their job, as long as they aren’t caught cooking their books (…which is what most drivers used to do before there were crackdowns, because you got paid per mile). They usually get paid a lot more than fleet drivers, because fleet drivers aren’t responsible for the maintenance of the truck.

I have noticed that ICE usually wants to conduct their splashy raids in areas with very low gun ownership, e.g., NYC, Boston, etc.

Linemen for the power company will always stay busy regardless of the economy, and it pays stupid well.

My boss is a former lineman; he quit because there was a lot of bullshit dealing with the power company. I gather that the pay in my area wasn’t that great either. When storms roll through, shifts are going to be long and brutal.

InRangeTV and A Better Way 2A.

I’ve met other supporters of both groups, and they’ve all been pretty cool people.

I’m strongly considering supporting Galen Druke’s GD Politics now that FiveThirtyEight has been shuttered.

Vampires can enter your home whenever they choose. They’re just all autistic and really hate going into someone’s house without being asked to come in first.

Hmmmm.

So what does it mean if I enjoy practicing hojojutsu on my consensually non-consenting partner…?

Even better: you have a specific legal right to resist police attempting to illegally enter your home. :D IIRC, the law was passed after the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that under then state law you had no right to resist even blatantly illegal actions by police.

An M134 shoots up to 6000 rounds per minute, and it shoots 7.62x51mm NATO (.308 Win). 12 seconds would be a maximum of 1200 rounds. If I’m buying some of the very best match-grade ammunition I can get (Hornady 168gr ELD-M) at $2.15/round, that works out to a maximum of $2580. Which ain’t chump change, but is still about $397,420 short of $400,000.