Drew Dowdell

Yeah, someone skilled with a rifle in Utah and they immediately wanted to blame a democrat

One can acknowledge that it is a horrible and uncalled for thing to happen while simultaneously not mourning the loss and acknowledge that the world is a slight slightly better place today. That said, its interesting watching one side tie themselves in knots trying to blame the other now that it’s come out that this was red on red crime.

when buying the oil filter on eBay, something else snuck into my cart

I think you'd come to regret that trade once the interior of the Camry starts creaking and squeaking over every bump.

SRT as a brand got canceled. They were a separate operation inside of Chrysler (the corp). They operated sort of like how AMG did/does. They still use the SRT badge, but now it's just a trim-line, not a full department set free to go around hellcatting all the things.

Personally, I like Plex better for storing things like CDs and LPs, but there is a bunch of technical setup you have to do ahead of time. iTunes has a lower technical threshold but is less flexible. That said, it is a LOT of work to digitize LPs. You have to listen through each one the entire way, break up the tracks and name them manually, clean up any pops and hiss, and keep the files organized. CDs, you kinda just drop it in the laptop and it rips it at like 6x speed and downloads all the album information for you. iTunes is really good for the CD bit. dBpoweramp Music Converter & CD Ripper is a good ripper alternative (make sure to buy PerfectTunes with it to get all the album art and track info database, it's $27 and well worth the upgrade). I think Amazon lets you store your own MP3s in their system if you have Prime and that music player is available on GM EVs.

When it happens, you won't hear about it directly. You'll feel an electricity in the air. You'll hear car horns honking, maybe some fireworks going off, you'll have 47 unread text messages. Entire nations will be celebrating. and you don't even have to ask what it is I'm talking about.

We're mid-west? We're mid-atlantic rust-belt by my estimation.

They got pretty darn close with the earlier SRTs. My partner is really putting the miles on ours. He does a lot of business travel and the thing just works. I know they had a reputation for being unreliable, but we've had very few issues with ours now at 82k miles. The only thing mechanically I've had to do to it outside of standard maintenance was a thermostat about a month ago, it was stuck open. It would have been a 10 minute job if I hadn't also taken time to detail a bit under the hood.

I haven’t made any updates here in a while because, well, it just runs. I haven’t needed to do anything to it. Coming up to an oil change that I do on both bikes every September. We took it on the back of the truck to Rehoboth Beach for vacation in July and yesterday I took it out to a client in Altoona PA, 250ish miles round trip. It performed beautifully and cruises effortlessly at <censored> mph even over some steeper mountain highways. Gas range is a little short and I required 2 stops for gas, 42 mpg up and 45 mpg back.

That’s a great evolution! Someone who at the Sam’s Club near me owns one of those final ones

As always, there's an app for that. I have a Plex home server, mostly for video. You could load all of that music on one and have a built in app on your dash to access your entire CD library from the PlexAmp. License for the software is a one-time $120 (I bought it 10 years ago when it was like $70). No more USB sticks. Just be your own private streaming service. You can share with friends too if you wanted (I share my movies with @Paolino). ..... but not if you have a GM EV. That said, you could also store all of your CDs in Apple iTunes on your phone...... ..... but not if you have a GM EV.

Even if you don't use many apps. Imagine GM deciding which music you can listen to because they have some sort of agreement with TimeWarner to favor just their library. That's basically what's going on here. You might actually like Pandora. You create an initial play list based on songs that you know and love already, and it plays those, but then it analyzes that and suggests other songs you might also like. You get a thumbs up or thumbs down on your CarPlay screen and that not only adds that song to your playlist or not, but the app learns more what you like and tailors future suggestions around that. You can have different playlists for different genres. From the perspective of learning what you like, Pandora seems to have the best algo of all the music apps. And it's cheap, like $6 a month. The downside is that you can't use it to play a specific song that you want to hear right now.

They shouldn't be that confident. They're not a software company. The problem is that GM gate-keeps apps. If they allowed unfettered access to the Google Play store for anything that was Android Auto compatible, I'd have less of a problem with it. But the fact that GM limits me to the apps they approve is a BIG problem. I'm an Apple Music and Pandora music user. I also use a few other streaming apps for free radio stations in Europe and my local NPR station, only Pandora is available in-dash none of the rest are available on a GM EV. You prefer Waze over Google Maps? Too bad. I have an excellent weather app called MyRadar that shows updated rain radar maps on my CarPlay display..... GM says "too bad". I know it sucks to do, but sometimes I have to take Teams calls from the car, I can do that with CarPlay. In a GM EV? Too bad. I have a widget for TripIt app in car play that shows my travel itinerary and will even update me on screen if my plane is delayed. GM says "Oh well, you don't need that". THAT is my issue with not allowing Car Play or Android Auto. GM deciding what apps are best for me and you. I'll note that all of these apps exist in the Google Play store and would be available if GM ungated them. Volvo uses the same base OS in their vehicles and doesn't gate-keep apps so they should all be available in a Volvo. (But I have no way of checking). The perverse effect is that even though Volvo has CarPlay, you need it less in a Volvo because you can just get the apps that you want from the Google Play store.

All we can do is kick up as big of a stink as we can to get this nonsense to stop. I beat up GM on social media as much as I can about the EV-Carplay thing.

Similarly, the 2019-2020 K900 was a proper luxury sedan that looks imposing going down the road. These are the years of its only refresh and it lost the V8 in favor of a turbo V6 but it gained tech and looked great.

I’m perfectly fine with 1996 tech. I’m getting more suspicious of modern tech because of the issue of spying. I think my 300C hits a sweet spot on technology in that it has things like car play , automatic braking, and adaptive cruise, but it’s not calling home and telling mom every time I accelerate too hard.

This is a 328 hp / 326 ft-lb 4-cylinder, but I think your point holds.

Like a crossover version of the Buick Electra Concept in China I mean... they're actually already doing it. LGA is in the final stages of a total rebuild now. EWR is getting completely rebuilt too. That said, there's only so much they can do with the real estate they have. It's kinda the reason for the weird design EWR had in the first place. They were trying to cram more gates in. LGA was NEVER intended to be the major hub that it is. It was suppose to be for short haul flights (by our modern standards) mainly and when JFK was built, that was for the longer haul stuff. LGA had to extend the runway into the Hudson to accommodate the larger planes. The airport was originally built in 1939.

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled beautiful cars thread. Please keep it to cars.

Can we stick to cars please? I'll clean up this thread later today.

Samples, lots more to come. VID_20250821_163330_00_686.mp4 VID_20250821_162533_00_871.mp4 VID_20250821_221432_00_758.mp4

He was sleepy joe because we could all sleep at night and he wasn't up at 2 a.m. posting unhinged tweets. You're right about all the rest, but here's some additional context. The Chinese EVs are so cheap because there is a price war going on in China in the EV market right now. They are being sold at a loss even in their domestic market because they have so many companies producing them, they are trying to outlive each other to eventually dominate the market. The Chinese goverment also is subsidizing the purchase of EVs on the consumer end while supporting the industry with subsidies. It's the EV tax credit and battery plant subsidy we did but times 10. The Chinese want entry to the North American market for the same reason. They don't want to just sell here, they want to put the legacies out of business so they can raise prices later. They did this with the solar industry already. We once had a booming solar panel production capacity in North America, but China came in and undersold everyone and now China controls that market.

Keeping this non-political, but still educational on the topic of alternative types of voting. The basic idea is that no one can get elected without 50% + 1 of the vote. We would no longer have elected officials who win with 43% of the vote. People who don't get their first choice have their votes moved to their second choice candidate. That way, people can now safely vote for third-parties without fear of having their vote thrown away and helping elect someone they dislike. For example, people who voted for Jill Stein may have selected Hillary Clinton as their second choice back in 2016 and that would have produced a very different 10 years for all of us. You don't have to vote for every candidate on the ballot. If there's only 3 candidate you like out of 5, you can vote for just your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd pick, leaving the others off. In the NYC Mayors race, there was an active campaign by supporters of the progressive side to encourage people to not even rank one of the competition. It worked. Most people picked the two progressive candidates, and their combined vote was well over 50% (56% from memory), making Zorhan Mamdani the winner of the primary. The two candidates actively campaigned together and said, "Hey, pick both of us and rank which one of us you'd like first". The runner up is highly likely to end up serving under a Mayor Mamdani after the general election making the voters for both candidates happy.

Right now, states and even cities can institute Ranked Choice voting, but it might only be for certain elections. Zohran won the primary for NYC mayor partially because of RCV. But that's only NYC. State level elections are the traditional sort, you pick between two parties or you throw away your vote on a 3rd party. In the general election in NYC in the fall, voters are going to get to choose between 4 candidates, the current Mayor Adams (running as an independent this time), former governor Cuomo (was running for the democratic nomination, lost to Zohran, now running as an independent), Zorhan Mamdami who won the RCV democratic primary, and a no-name republican nutjob who will lose. My position is that all elections, whether for president or dog-catcher, need to be ranked choice and every race should have a box for "none of the above". If I interpreted your question wrong and you don't understand how RCV works, Balletopedia has an explainer and video on ranked choice voting.