Soup

Exactly! It’s hard to help when a lot of the help would be technically coming from someone else’s pocket and it doesn’t feel right to be spreading around. I help my friends with any mechanical stuff and only ask that they stay, help, and learn something new(also hoping that some new confidence will help them take care of themselves better). Sharing skills and time is the best way I’ve found so far.

Absolutely, though as someone who notices louder exhausts I gotta say that, as much as they stand out, they’re really quite rare. It’s the never-ending drone of tires on pavement, loud cooling fans, heavy diesel trucks, and whatever other clattering and clanging that make up the bulk of the noise. The main street where I live goes pedestrian in the summer and I remember just how much noise a late-ish model Honda Civic made as it drove across it slowly one day even though it’s engine was essentially silent. The contrast between the peaceful pedestrian street and this single, “very quiet” sedan was startling. I already had sorta known but that moment is really where I decided that there’s no such as thing as a “quiet” car.

Our school busses have gone electric, though, and city busses are rapidly being replaced with hybrids that are quiet when they sit or need to accelerate. Those have reduced a lot of noise, and that’s super nice, but again they’re not the bulk of the noise. Removing the worst offenders but keeping the “quiet” cars doesn’t actually help beyond making us feel like we did something. We gotta start making main, commercial streets pedestrian only year-round. We gotta start being aggressive about making public transit accessible. We gotta start building on a human scale.

Rant:

I have a vaguely ok life only because of my parents and my grandmother. Help from my family has helped pay for car parts(repairs), some exercise stuff, French classes, and hell I only finished the third “optional” part of my education because I was able to not work while I did it. I haven’t been able to buy a single one of my instruments myself, they’ve all been from parents or my grandparents and I don’t have expensive instruments(ok one was $50, that was a good feeling but I got real lucky there). If it wasn’t for the family plan phone I’ve got no idea how I’d pay for a phone on top of everything.

I’m do a bit to save, still. I fix my car myself almost every single time, even if it’s big stuff, but I can only do that because my dad has loads of tools and my parents’ driveway is large enough. I built my own computer, modified one of my basses instead of buying a more expensive one, have learned basic luthier skills to get my instruments playing out of their price range, and a lot of my home stuff is actually either on a longterm loan or was handed down. And you can forget buying clothes all that often; I’ll go a year not buying anything and when I do finally grab a nice new shirt I feel guilty. My place makes me look way richer than I really am and there are times I’m embarrassed by it given how vocal I am about our low pay problems.

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I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people have serious challenges and no support system. They don’t have tools or space to fix their vehicles cheaply, or parents to give them kitchen supplies, or friends who move away and leave their furniture behind for indefinite periods of time. They don’t get to stop working to go to school and further their education, and there is no one to save them if they get slapped by a huge bill out of nowhere. It is so GODDAMN expensive to be poor and if I can feel that then those with less…well that is no way to live.

It’s fucking disgusting how we treat the poorest among us and how we’ll turn around and act like someone like me is some wonderful hard worker while my classmates who get bad marks are dumb or lazy but no one accounted for the fact that they work nearly fulltime and help support a family while trying to also do school. Life gets easier the more money you have and yet we collectively choose to believe that people without it are lazy or not trying hard enough.

Without all this support and privilege and luck I’d be nothing and I’m not so insecure that I won’t admit that.

The problem with the car thing is that there is noise reduction on cars. It’s the tires that are making most of the noise you hear from regular cars so even electric vehicles will make more noise than you’d think. It’s always wild to me that my aftermarket muffler isn’t as huge a difference in disruption as you’d think(it’s also not a high-pitch, obnoxious one). Either way I still keep it quiet at night or near pedestrians, and where I live now I’m glad that I basically never need to drive.

I’m real happy to hear that you live somewhere much more compatible with being a human being!

Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too. Does help that the culture is also pretty bad around that stuff so maybe going to Europe was the moment they were finally taken out of the toxicity of their local community.

I took it to mean that they didn’t go out of their way to walk more, it was simply the better option to get around and so they just did that instead of driving a car. After moving from a car-centric city to one with a metro I totally get it and I do go for walks just for fun.

It’s not just about whether or not you can do something but about how available that thing is. Going for a walk can suck real bad in North America, surprisingly. Things like shitty food being the cheaper option, in a country racing to get its working class to be as disproportionately impoverished as possible, can make it hard to justify getting better quality stuff, too.

Mocked, yes, but saying they deserve to suffer…I dunno honestly yea I kinda agree but I’m trying to take something more productive from the data.

That they keep voting for people who “love the working class” and who “have great economic policy” but every classically Republican state is a fucking shithole that constantly needs money from blue states to stay barely afloat.

It’s yet more evidence that the GOP don’t have any interest and/or ability to properly run a country. All their ideas fucking suck and everything they touch is worse for it, and their base needs to realize this. Also educated or not it’s so insanely obvious these days just how bad shit is and whose at fault but us North Americans(I’m Canadian, same problems here but more boring) can’t stop but chase the right when the center falters. At this point people should be mocked, this shit’s inexcusable in ways it wasn’t as much even only 10-15 years ago.

For someone who doesn’t know much about this but has been watching a tonne of Youtube this doesn’t make a lot of sense and I could use some help.

Like, we’ve found mammals halfway between leggy land-bois and frickin’ whales but this thing that’s largely just a lion cub with mods is somehow special and different? I was expecting some absolutely wild and got a cat.

I tried reading through some stuff but I don’t have the skill to read through the source efficiently.

Isn’t Bluesky also Jack Doresy? So the same guy who was in charge of Twitter? It’s just Twitter 2.0. Bro got paid to have the same job lol

“Straighten out the legal system” god these people talk exactly like their own definitions of corruption. It’s gone so far beyond projection I don’t even know what to call it anymore.

0% of the time it works every time.