This one is for all the @redstateinsurgents@a.gup.pe
My neighbor bought a new 64K truck (I know because he constantly mentions the cost) had a lift kit installed for 15K (I know because he constantly mentions the cost) has four kids who are bullies (I know because I see and hear them), and constantly complains about gas prices and property taxes, despite the fact that he is one of two houses in the neighborhood with kids.
Most of property taxes go to fund the public schools, which his children attend. Basically the neighborhood is subsidizing his children’s education, but he thinks he deserves to pay less in taxes. I explained this, and he told me I was full of shit, but I think he knew I was right, because he started revving his engine early in the morning the day after that and did it for like two weeks.
Hilariously, he stopped doing it not because I complained – I’m up early anyway – but because his wife came out in pajamas and started screaming at him for waking her up. Quite the metaphor for Republicanism.
I gotta get out of this neighborhood.
But you are so close to the action! Set up a camera and make a documentary!
Sounds like the family in the Intro of “Idiocracy”…
I really need to rewatch that, thanks for reminding me!
I watch it every once in a while… It started off funnier and now it’s almost too close to reality.
Well I will make due with fascinating, like a documentary voiced by David Attenborough but dirty :)
I’d watch a Netflix series based on your life, but I’d be concerned that it would get cancelled without proper closure…
I work in a gas station, there is a MAGA regular who is constantly complaining about how broke she is, she buys 2 packs of unfiltered camels a day, that’s $14.60 a pack, over $800 a month just for cigarettes cause she buys the most expensive packs in the store.
at those prices meth is cheaper.
Being serious here, but since I moved away from alcohol and started using LSD and MDMA I’m actually saving when going to party. A beer at the club have the same price that an LSD tab!
At this point, I actually think the meth is more socially acceptable, too.
its not hard to get a prescription either. Insurance will pay for 60% of it.
I keep reading shit like that, Gas was too expensive, thanks Biden! Just shifting blame left and right. And hey, I come from the midwest where gas is essential because everything is so goddamn far apart - but I drove a civic.
Oh I’m so sorry you went out, spent way too much on a giant truck, bragged to all your friends how you just have to have a hemi/cummins, did everything you could to reduce efficiency, and now you have to spend even more on gas? What a shame. Just, such a shame.
You don’t want to even do a tiny bit of introspection there? I drive an EV now, and they just rage that for a full “fill up” I spend $6. Total. My monthly travel bill (when not riding transit) is now about $15.
“Introspection”??? What are ya some commie professor using nerd words nobody can understand? Move back to Oxford ya daisy sniffer!! 😜
“I’ll have you know that I use this truck once a year to pull something a sturdy station wagon could handle just fine! And what if you need a really shitty version of a U-Haul? Then who are you gunna call?!? I saved $200 moving that one time and all it cost me was an extra $35k and a gas bill with numbers mathematicians are still trying to describe properly.”
Trucks: If you don’t have a fifth wheel RV then you may just be a complete dipshit.
God I hate the moving argument, the once a year thing. Yeah once a year I need something large from Home Depot. They have trucks I can rent literally there on site, or I go to the uhaul and rent one for $30 for the entire day. That’s not “manly” though to them
Right? And moving in a truck sucks. A minivan or full-sized van are way better. My grandma used to have a GMC Safari and that shit was awesome for moving. It could actually take an amount of stuff, was clean inside, AND it could be used easily while it was raining(and locked).
Another old coworker had a racebike and he literally made parts for MotoGP race teams and he had a Mercedes Metris van. Nice and low and easy to get bikes in and out of. Two other coworkers went to the track once and sold their Mazda 3 hatch and whatever Sedan to buy F150s and it was so funny watching them try to get a Ninja 250 out of the super high bed one day.
And then another coworker at my last job was all proud of hauling some dirt but my dad’s STi can do that just fine so…
Yeah, given that it’s around a hundred bucks (at best) a month for a pickup, and I can rent a pickup from a big box store for 20 bucks…the math works out to do that as often as weekly and still save money, considering registration/tag/maintenance. That’s considering that my wife and I have one car, and one motorcycle: the differential in going from a car to a truck isn’t as egregious as motorcycle or no second car, of course.
Also, it’s always fun to get a huge haul of materials with my motorcycle gear on, seeing folks clearly wonder if I’ve thought through my decisions.
Trucks come, or used to anyway, in more reasonable configurations than maga drones get. A carbureted 300 I6 gets like 25mpg but it isn’t pointlessly big and loud and it’s a 6 so they don’t want it.
I just picked up an early 2000s used truck because I have a hobby where a truck bed is useful. $7500.
People were trying to tell me that I should get a new one, I can resale it in a few years and it’ll retain it’s value.
I don’t need a shiny new truck. I’m going to throw wood and sheet goods in the back. And I can actually see out of the damn thing, unlike anything recent.
Oh my god why do people think cars retain their value? They depreciate immediately when you drive them off the lot. Cars are not houses people, they do not appreciate in value.
Yeah, the one saying that was claiming that after your initial deprecation after driving off the lot, trucks tend to hold their value for a long time. So might as well.
He’s also the guy that’s last minute panicking about saving for retirement in his 50s.
Go figure.
Just tell him to sell his truck, sounds like that’s a retirement plan!
“How can you commute to work with EV that only have a range of 400miles? OP are you lying? I have to travel through mud road through a jungle so you must have too, it’s impossible to not drive a diesel tank here.”
“I mean sure most of my driving is only to work and back and I could install a charger at home to charge once a week, but what if I need to drive from Chicago to Dallas?” Uh, you could rent a car? Or like most Americans you probably have… 2 cars? Take the other one?
“Well I bet your power bill went way up!” Maybe. But not by as much as my gas station bill went down.
Power bill went up by $15 a month. Gas bill went down by $140.
But that’s the Right? They talk about rights and personal responsibility, but the fact is they only want rights they can use to keep others down, and to hell with personal responsibility. They want to buy their giant-ass gas guzzlers and not be responsible for the fuel costs, they want coal and natural gas (drill baby, drill) wrecking the environment but don’t want to be responsible when a hurricane wipes out their towns. They want their guns but want the rest of society to be responsible for preventing school shootings. Oh, another school shooting? Ain’t my problem.
It’s all a manufactured outrage. They supposedly buy these cars because “gas is cheap” and then they lament when gas goes few cents up.
BTW: the gas will likely go up when US will decide to put on the final squeeze on Russia. Currently Russia escapes sanctions by selling their oil through intermediaries. This is purposefully ignored right now to keep the oil prices low.
Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.
As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.
They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.
It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.
I agree what you wrote, but I have problem with this paragraph:
It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.
While it is true that US produces enough oil domestically to have enough for itself the price for oil is global.
US has option to of course close its exports and not be affected by it, but in the process it will lose its allies who will suffer even more by that (this sounds more like that trump would do, as it would piss off allies which we need and it could be sold internally as protecting Americans)
The other option would be to keep market open, but then the price hike would affect us but it would be smaller, because it would be shared among everyone.
Obsolete Biden stickers! Lol I hope they have boxes of these dishonest attacks on a candidate who’s not running anymore…
I saw a lady apolozing to Trump for not donating because she had to pay her medical bills and was living in disability. So she was basically giving her disability check to Trump every month. 😖
If you’d see that in a movie it would be a weird comedy where someone’s head spins around 360° for no reason so the viewer doesn’t know anymore what to believe and what not.
Change watch to guns and you nailed it
Gas is cheaper right now than it has been in years
It was the cheapest I had seen since 2021 last week for like 36 hours and then overnight jumped up 12%.
It always goes down slowly over a three week period and then hits a low for 1 day and then goes up 10% or more overnight.
Problem is, when gas is at a low price, everyone wants to fill up their tanks thus increasing the demand. And obviously gas stations and gas companies are greedy people, so they won‘t lower the prices again until it starts hurting their turnover.
Personally I don’t believe that’s the case. Most people fill up when they need to fill up not because it reached a magic price. It’s not like most people have a choice and can say they aren’t going to drive to work this week because gas needs to drop a few more cents before they go fill up.
It’s not like most people have a choice and can say they aren’t going to drive to work this week because gas needs to drop a few more cents before they go fill up.
That’s true, however if your tank is half full and you see a damn low price most people will absolutely go and fill it up before it goes up again.
Eh, maybe it’s different for people that only have to fill their tank every 3-4 weeks. I need to refill at least once per week so it’s rare I save any significant amount of money filling up 2 days before I regularly would.
I’m also not sure why everyone would have the same price in mind to start immediately filling their tank at the “cheap” price to trigger a 12% increase amongst 8 different chains of gas stations all at the same time.
Many would be waiting for a few cents more or already pulled the trigger a few cents before.
I just don’t think gasoline follows most free market supply/demand rules as much as most things.
Whilst voting against addressing any issues that would improve their situation at every given opportunity.
How many magas can afford 100k watches?
Inaccurate.
$30k truck $300 Suunto watch Don’t smoke or drink 25 mpg
I’m doing ok.
I personally have pity for rank and file Republican voters.
They were simply easy marks our education system intentionally failed to teach critical thinking and reason to because obedient laborers don’t need that, and were then spoonfed sensationalist lies that appealed to their fears and anxieties, the easiest avenues for indoctrination, for the last half century under the guise of being “news” for the private profit of private shareholders and to turn them into useful idiot dependable votes for those same private shareholders to effectively capture their regulators and government that was once meant to protect us from them.
As just one in an ocean of examples, Fox “News” has been telling these poor sad bastards that “man made climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books!”
That’s not why.
They are taught that education is bad because the Bible teaches them everything they really need to know, and focusing on their weird version of ‘Christianity’^tm makes them better than all those academic eggheads in their luxurious ivory towers while the people who actually run things make sure no help ever actually gets to them.
And now, in the most (mo)ironic twist ever, they are saying hurricane Helene was intentionally created to lower republican turnout in the election. No, seriously.
I’ve heard shit that it was moved by the left with weather control machines so they could clear out areas to mine lithium
Surely the immigrants are to blame?? Or the gay kids! Yes, they did this.
Had a brief conversation with conservative Christian parent where they mentioned “the gays.”
I don’t care. Doesn’t affect me. Ex didn’t cheat with same sex.
It will affect you when they’re making decisions for you.
In what relevant way?
🤔
Surely the immigrants are to blame??
The Immigrants:
Even if you drive a small car being forced to pay about 15% of your total income just to get to work is still fucking expensive. And no, public transport or bike isnt a suitable option for everyone.
And no, public transport or bike isnt a suitable option for everyone.
So we need to build infrastructure for it. And more electric cars charged with greener fuel sources.
There’s only so much you can do with infrastructure to make up for the fact that most people want (for multiple good reasons) to live in suburbs.
IMHO we also need to clamp down HARD on landlords/HOAs. A big part of the reason I don’t want to live in an apartment/condo is that there’s a long list of rules I have to strictly obey. No political signs, no letting my cats outside, no string lights outside of Christmas season… Ridiculous.
Oh the horrors of an HOA wanting to preserve wildlife from the destruction of irresponsible pet owners. Theirs plenty of reasons to hate on HOAs and I wouldn’t live under one unless I didn’t have any other options but that’s a stupid reason.
Keeping cats indoors 24/7 is not healthy for them.
Sure. Let them out so they can fight stray cats, get preggo, get flees and ticks, and all of that fun stuff…
Sure. Let them out so they can fight stray cats, get preggo, get flees and ticks, and all of that fun stuff…
Mine’s spayed and wears a seresto collar (which is easily the most effective flea/tick control I’ve seen - they’re pricey for flea collars but being good for 8 months helps mitigate that. Both dogs and the cat wear them.). Now, she does occasionally get into fights with other cats in the neighborhood but that’s largely unavoidable. If it’s not going well she runs inside to her dog for comfort.
She was supposed to be an inside cat, but we put in a dog door for the dogs and she figured it out from them. It’s a pretty basic one without the bells and whistles and electronic lock controls and triple the price. If it were it wouldn’t slow her down much, she’d just come and go under the taller dog.
They can’t get pregnant if they’re spayed. They can be made resistant to fleas and ticks. And how are they going to fight stray cats, when they’re not in a stray cat’s territory?
Would you also just let your dog out like that?
K. I want you to look at somewhere like rural WV and imagine what public transit infrastructure or bike infrastructure that would actually be useful would look like. Preferably that wouldn’t cost more than the entire state budget to run and would be useful for people to use to get to work and to at least one major grocery store and one place to get appliances or furniture.
Say, Powelton, WV. Or Dry Branch, WV. Or Webster Springs, WV. Or Amma, WV. And these aren’t even the hardest examples in the state, but they’re ones I know well enough to likely be able to comment on your answers.
It’s not that difficult? I’m over here in rural Washington along long beach, raymond, Aberdeen and Pacific Transit is quite viable for getting to work grocery stores and whatever else you need. I know because I’m a driver for them, I’m currently doing from Ilwaco to Aberdeen.
From my first stop to my second stop is a half hour, then an hour to the next stop, then a couple quick stops in town, then another half hour to Aberdeen. And yet I still service about 30 people a day, people rely on me to get to work, to do shopping, to go see the doctor. We also have a service where people can call upon us for very specific needs that aren’t covered by our routes. Three of them actually
We have a Dial-A-Ride service where you can request that we pick you up and drop you off at specific places or the nearest other bus stop in smaller shuttle buses (prioritizes ada passengers if demand is high)
We have a shopper shuttle service that literally just runs between a big pile of different stores and restaurants that people like to go to and they make connections with most of our other routes
And then we have the veteran connect service where we help make sure that veterans are able to get to their medical appointments as far out as Chehalis and Vancouver as there is unfortunately no VA hospitals near us.
Almost every furniture store in existence can deliver straight to your house now, even if you manage to find one that can’t just go rent a U-Haul for the day it’s not expensive. There’s no reason for your daily driver to be a massive truck because you might need something big at some point doesn’t matter whether your rural or not.
I definitely know what it’s like to put some mileage on a car as I currently Drive a total round trip mileage of 160 miles per day for getting to/from work. But thankfully for my wallet I’m driving a smart fortwo which gets on average 43 miles to the gallon so that definitely helps. And the only reason I need to do that is because I’m the one driving the bus so I can’t exactly take the bus to drive the bus unfortunately as much as I wish they would let me just take it home
I think the difference in geography makes a, well, difference. It’s just a lot of people stuck in tiny towns that are several miles long in one direction and around 150 yards in the other, most of them up different hollows or branches of hollows. Mass transit that’s actually workable would be difficult. Hell, I used to date a woman who was a social worker who did in home adult education and more than a few of her clients had directions to get to them that involved things like turning off the road to drive several miles up a creek bed, because neither federal, state, nor county considered it a place worth running a road to.
I kinda think running a ferry line that went up and down river and across, with each line going from one set of locks to the next with a shuttle to take you from one side of the locks to the other and local busing could work, but only for the places on the Kanawha. But even then going from where I used to live to Charleston would look something like bus->ferry->shuttle->ferry->bus. Going to be hard to make that look attractive compared to a 20 min drive.
And mind you I actually like mass transit. The times I’ve been to Boston I literally just grab a 7-day pass for the T and take it everywhere, but something like it just doesn’t seem practical given the geography and population distribution here.
Same, but I ride my bicycle. The fuel is food which I cannot afford.
We are not the same.
So, as long as I’ve been on lemmy, I may have come across maybe 2 certified Trump supporters, yet… there are 36 downvotes on this post.
I wonder who the 34 other cowards are that refuse to stand and be counted. Also, I wonder how many of the bad-faith both-sides “leftists” we all know and love are amongst them.
I downvoted it because conservatives constantly make this exact same “joke” about how poor people actually deserve to be poor because they pay for Netflix or clothes or anything that isn’t food or rent. It’s not funny when they do it and because I’m not a hypocrite I don’t find it funny when leftists do it either.
Normally I would have just downvoted and moved on with my day, but apparently that makes me a “coward that refuses to stand and be counted”. Because attacking people for downvoting a joke they didn’t like is apparently 100% okay with Lemmings and totally not toxic behavior. Does not liking literally all of the comedy that comes out of the left make me a ‘bad-faith both-sides “leftist”’? If so, guilty as charged. I do not see the left as a monolith and feel no shame in criticising or disagreeing with what other leftists say.
They’re fucking hypocrites. That why it’s been upvoted so much. People detest hypocrisy.
Sooo… I’m not a leftists and I don’t think it’s a leftist meme. Democrats/liberals are actually staring to actually fight back for a change. And it’s working. They’re finally trading punches with the always-on-the-offense far right, and they’re kicking their fucking asses- and you’re going to play both sides in this?
Yeah. You’re a coward.
I didn’t downdoot it but it’s pretty mean-spirited and probably doesn’t reflect the majority of Trump supporters’ finances.
From my perspective, it’s spot on accurate. I know people exactly like this.
Fair enough.
