Drew Dowdell

Well that’s certainly an interesting twist!

Uh.. I don't know. I haven't had to configure that app in so long. I'll check. Yup, there was a 10 item max I changed it to unlimited. You should be able to add stuff now.

Except in extreme cases, Individual taxes matter a lot less than corporate taxes. Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, but his W2 salary has stayed the same ~$81k for 20 years. His personal wealth is 90% paper based on the share price of the companies he owns. But when he does sell stocks, his tax rate is generally only 15% because he only pays Capital Gains. On the flip side, the actual corporation of Amazon pays very little of their income to taxes. This is where the bulk of the cheating is. Walmart is not only just as bad with the cheating, they are actively predatory. They'll hunt down some financially struggling town and promise to build a store there if they get a property tax exemption for the next 10 years. The town, being short-term greedy, accepts. Walmart builds the store and starts placing a burden on the local infrastructure. After the 10 years are up, Walmart threatens to close the store if they don't get an extension on their tax exemption. They'll cook the books to make the store look like it is barely profitable or even losing money. They'll claim "they want to keep the store open because they care about the community". If they get the extension, they continue to be a burden on the local infrastructure without paying towards its upkeep. If they don't get the extension, they close the store and move 10 miles down the road to the next gullible town and repeat the process all over again. The store they close they "Sadly, wanted to keep it open for the good of the community, but it just wasn't a good business decision." All the while they are doing this, they are having their workforce subsidized by Federal Tax dollars by compensating their employees so poorly that they need to go on Food Stamps (redeemable at Walmart), Section 8, and Medicare. Then they funnel a huge amount of their profits back through the Walton fund as charitable tax write offs and pay the family huge sums of money to sit on the board. And it's all legal.

I just wanted to see if, in addition to all the car geeks, we have Star Trek geeks too? I've always kinda thought about my vehicles as classes of ships from the series. I just wondered if any of you Star Trek (or other Sci Fi series) thought about it in the same way. Like my Toronado is a Constitution Class - Old and out of date, requires a bit of tinkering down in engineering to keep running right, not particularly fast, but be good to her and she'll always get you home. I already have my other two thought out, but I want to see if anyone else participates before I share them.

Still way too warm for us here... but I can't wait for my first ski trip of the year.

An Audi having electrical issues?! I'm shocked! SHOCKED I SAY!

I ended up pulling the trigger on this pair of Linksys Velop Wi-Fi 6 for $299. Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System 2-Pack https://www.costco.com/linksys-velop-ax4200-wifi-6-mesh-system-2-pack.product.100701373.html my airport crashed multiple times today while I was trying to work

Don't do that. Blow it back onto the grass and then suck it up into the mower if you want it gone. Grass on the street is bad for motorcycles and bicyclists, plus it looks like crap.

I have a leaf blower, but I don't find it particularly useful at clearing the lawn of leaves. I just hook up the mulcher attachment on the mower and let'er rip. I do use the leaf blower for porches, the truck bed, or my garage, but I don't need super high power for that.

If you keep up with it once or twice a month over the summer, you probably won't need the commercial grade one again. It's when you go years without that you need the commercial grade one to catch up.

It's just one room that has the signal issue and is is diagonally the furthest distance away.

Here's what you do. Rent a commercial grade one from Home Depot to get it into decent shape. $32 for four hours. Then you can maintain it easier with the EGO tools.

Yeah, those prices align what I paid for attachments for my gas powered string trimmer. I'd have to look a bit more closely, but I wonder if my existing attachments will work in the EGO system.

So, you all know I lost my job with the energy company almost exactly a year ago. Then Covid hit and jobs became scarce. I got a contracting job in June with a local government as their Project Manager and also acting as Director of I.T. Well, Friday (tomorrow), my contract is officially up. My boss has decided to extend my contract by 30 days and then January 11th, hired me as a direct employee. I'll be getting a 5-digit raise to come on plus my health insurance costs will drop by about $4700 a year. We're still figuring out the title, but at the moment Director of Special Projects is most likely. I really enjoy working there and I'm happy to have this whole thing settled.

I don't get a choice on the modem. Fios drops an actual ethernet cable into my basement and I have to take it from there. So that's the downside. The upside is that all I have to do is call in with my credit card number and they'll increase the speed to 1.0 gigabit. I don't need that much though.... 60mbps is fine for me. If only I could get the wifi to be that speed. I already tried the Nighthawk, though a different model that still had Wifi6. I didn't like it. The interface was painfully slow. Wifi was more reliable in that it didn't drop like it does now, but without an extender, I couldn't reach into my office for signal. I'm not spending $700 on a mesh system. I found a set of two Wifi 6 Mesh Linksys Velop routers on Costco for $300 plus shipping. It's more than I wanted to spend, but the only other option I'm seeing is the Google Wifi, but I can't bring myself to pull the trigger on something that is already out of date. I woke up this morning to no internet at all. The Airport had crashed and it took two reboots to bring it back before I was able to get on for work. I think I'll be pulling the trigger on this today.

Exactly! Those small turbos work a lot harder and turn higher rpm to keep up. that’s why I think comparing mileage doesn’t tell the whole story. Bring in something like Voltec or any other plug in hybrid and the matters are even more complicated

The point about the highway miles is more about the difference between a 5.3 V8 at a 70 mph cruise turning 1700 RPM and a 1.3T I3 at 70 mph cruise turning 3,000 rpm. Driven the same way over the same distance, the I3 will have made ~double the number of revolutions. It’s that discrepancy I’m trying to capture.

I didn’t say GM did run the stores. I’m saying the sales are spread thin over 10 stores compared to Benz with 4. That makes the dealership relatively less profitable and less likely to do upgrades and add luxuries. The difference between the interior of a Cadillac dealer and a Jaguar Land Rover dealer is striking. I’ve recently been in both.

I had a Nighthawk with Wifi6 from Costco and without the extender, it couldn't get signal to my office. ? At the moment the top two are the Linksys Velop Mesh 6 or the Google Wifi Mesh. I like the Netgear Orbi 6 Mesh, but they're obscenely expensive. $429 for a set of 3 at Costco. I don't like the Google Wifi Mesh for privacy concerns, but I checked my parent's wifi last night and you can change the DNS servers. Yeah, my parents have been happy with theirs. Coverage in their house is terrible because it's so spread out.

I think we need a different measure of how much a vehicle has been used rather than just mileage. I'm sure we've all seen those ads for used cars saying "All highway miles!", but I think in addition to that, we have to start to take powertrain setup into consideration. When I bought my Avalanche, it only had 12,800 miles on it which is insanely low for a 7 year old truck. But for all I knew, those could have been all city miles where the truck was idling and going through short bursts of acceleration. But I actually know it was mostly highway miles because these trucks also have an engine hour monitor on them. I don't remember what it was when I bought it, but I think somewhere just over 400 hours. It has 534 hours on it today. That means for its entire life it has averaged 34 miles per hour. This is part of the reason I think we need a better measurement of vehicle use. The other part is that on my suburban commute to work, I rarely break 2,000 rpm, but in the Encore, I was regularly going well over that because the little 1.4T had to work so hard compared to the 5.3 in the truck. A hybrid or Voltec powertrain also changes the calculus. I am helping my part-time employee pick out a new to him car and I've semi-sold him on a used Volt. I had to explain to him that the Volt motor only runs 50% of the time, so a higher mileage example is still okay. I think some sort of calculation for this should become standard. Probably a function of (Average RPM per mile * miles)/engine hours. This would give you a better idea of how hard the engine worked and for how long rather than the somewhat meaningless miles.

The man definitely had a type.

This is the rare case that one actually can. Supporting a bloat of excess dealers is costly, both for the dealers and for Cadillac. Here in the greater Pittsburgh metro I can only think of 4 BMW dealers and 4 Mercedes dealers. Cadillac has 10. Those 10 Cadillac dealers not only have to compete with the Germans, but also with each other. That means a race to the bottom on prices. Fewer Cadillac dealers will be able to charge higher prices without people saying "I'll just go up the street". And yes, I know Cadillac has a higher average transaction price, but there is a lot of overhead to run 10 dealers instead of 4.

I read a little more into it than what is on the surface. Cadillac has 880 dealers. BMW has ~350 and Benz has around ~360. I think this whole move is Cadillac trying to cull dead weight in the most palatable way possible. They can always "extend" a model run later with no consequences.

I manually approved your email change, but let me know if it comes back. If the system detects that you have an email bounce, it flags your account and forces you to change your email. I'm having a bit of trouble with the plug-in that manages this and have submitted a ticket to have it looked at. Please let me know if you continue to have issues (I suspect you will)

Go with the extra cost for the Electric @ccap41, you'll make it up over the next bunch of years. I bought a craftsman gas powered mower when I bought my house back in 2003. Briggs engine, self propelled, mulcher/bagger, the whole kit. The first 5ish years were fine. After that it started costing $50 - $90 a year in parts just to keep it running. Then you have to go out and get gas for it... it's a huge hassle. It was never enough to justify replacing it, but enough to be annoying on a weekend when I was trying to get things done and had to go get a part. When Albert's parents moved out of their house into an apartment a bunch of years ago, I got his dad's old Black and Decker corded pushmower. It's likely the same age as my Craftsman was, but I just threw it into storage at one of my apartment buildings and forgot about it for years. Eventually the Craftsman just got too irritating to deal with, so I put it out to the curb and went and got the electric. The thing is as basic as basic can be, but it just runs. I don't have to get gas, I don't have to change air filters, I don't have to change oil.... plus its very light weight. Eventually I'll need to get a battery electric because I want to bring my lower yard back from the wilderness and plant grass down there, but the B&D suits my needs just fine until I do.