here’s me, a grown ass adult with a car i paid off like 4 years ago - nothing special, a smallish commuter POS that gets 40mpg that i literally use to drive 4 miles to work and back.

i was paying about $630/year because i pay for a year at a time, and it’d be almost double that to pay monthly, like what the actual fuck? anyways, a few months ago i get this email from the insurance company telling me “hey get ready your policy will renew in 3 months, be sure to double check your payment method” so i log into my account and they were gonna raise my premium to $970/yr and there was literally no obvious way to see that they were gonna do that. it was a case of logging in, going through multiple levels of menus to get to the future policy, download a pdf of that policy, then view it offline.

well, i’m pissed, so i call them to find out what the hell they’re doing and why and they claimed it’s because i had gotten a speeding ticket. of course, they had zero information to share with me about that speeding ticket - no ticket number, no date/time, no address, nothing. i sure as hell don’t recall getting a speeding ticket, and in any case, with a spotless driving record, you’d think there’d be some kind of interfacing with me about it, but no. they claimed the ticket was real and i’d need to contact my DMV to find out more.

so i call them, the DMV, and after some hassle, find out they have ZERO record of any speeding ticket. so… back on the phone with the insurance company and they just wanna give me the shaft and the runaround no exceptions. i mean, i’m pissed now because it’s OBVIOUS fraud, right? Anyways, i get absolutely nowhere. so i tell them to cancel my policy and i woulda thought about contacting a lawyer about a possible case or something but, naw…

i still have the car, and it’s parked being unused. I swapped to riding bikes to and from work, sometimes an ebike, sometimes a fixie, and i’m the only cyclist on the road around here that I’ve ever seen and it’s sometimes really sketchy. but i plan to ride through the winter, dry or snowy, i don’t care.

it can get complicated, because i’m a single father, but honestly, fuck auto insurance, fuck cars, fuck car brain. we gotta make a stand at some point and I lament that we can’t really do it collectively.

the sharpie pro marker

pretty sure the venn diagram of f-droid users and adblocking users is such a huge overlap that this may not pay off too well.

As someone currently using a swamp cooler in a desert climate with daily temps around 40C, that statement is absolutely misleading!

A more accurate statement could be that they cycle 125-550L of water a day, but aside from what’s evaporated, it’s basically a closed-loop system, with very little water waste or loss.

evaporative coolers are very common in desert climates in the US. they work really great up to about 60% humidity and cost less than 10% to operate compared to ‘regular’ AC. they use little power (can easily be solar powered), and do not pollute.

i have both an evaporative cooler and an AC unit and have rarely felt the need to use the AC - the evap works exceedingly well for keeping the temps tolerable.

the only real downside is that it’s not just push a button and all your problems are solved. you need airflow. usually these things are mounted where the output vents into a central hallway or room, and you direct the flow of cool air by opening windows or doors - the path between the cooler vent and the open “exhaust” to the outside is what stays the coolest. Opening the whole house requires turning the evap cooler’s fan to a higher speed, but that’s so wasteful and we’re not ever using the whole house at once. i also turn it off when there’s a thunderstorm (because obviously the humidity spike makes this useless). It also doesn’t get used in the winter - it gets a canvas cover and some padding to seal off the air gaps so the house doesn’t get too cold and drafty.

it’s clear there’s a lot of people here who haven’t ever used or even seen this type of cooler, but i assure you this is common, and probably the most cost-effective summer cooling.

it’s not all about how much damage they can do, but also about how much they can protect the occupants: someone in a kei truck getting hit by a current f150 is more likely to die than getting hit by another reasonably-sized vehicle.

first step, though, is lowering speed limits across the board. i truly believe this is the first necessary step towards rehabilitating the US’s deranged auto-centric culture.