this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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chapotraphouse
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At my first internship my car's timing chain snapped on the bw parkway. Harrowing is... An accurate description of the wait for a tow.
It took weeks to get a new engine, luckily my dad was willing and able to pay for a used engine to be installed and I could use public transit to get to work from my newly acquired sublet.
I was doing the "subway to bus to half mile walk" thing for two months or so (almost the whole internship).
I mentioned that I needed to leave at 345 to catch the 4 o'clock bus to a senior coworker and he asked why. I explained the car situation and he said "why don't you just get a new car, they're much nicer."
It was the first time I realized that there were people who simply assumed that driving a 20 year old shitbox was an aesthetic choice or something.
Mind blowing.
AAAAAAAAAAAA I have had this said to me so many times and some folks just DO NOT GET IT. Like, I am a lucky person who probably could afford a new car, but I'm also a {mechanic|hobby}. I fix my 25 year old rusted out truck because I FUCKING LOVE THAT TRUCK. Which, shit, I guess is an aesthetic choice. Shit! I'm the reason your coworker was a prick!
That said, it's, like, A LOT more reasonable to keep a shitbox running than to sign up for fucking years of car payments on something shiny that also might just fucking break AND that I'd have no fucking clue how to fix.
Oh my fucking g dash d this TRIGGERED a memory of a coworker who was so fucking into their cars shininess and newness that they spent almost their entire salary on cars. Tiny apartment, new car every six months, bought not leased, would sell the old one. Like, there's neurodivergent and then there's my dude it is clear you have never had to have sleep for dinner.
You just dug up some very old painful memories of me doing just that once upon a time. I buried that well.
Thanks.
I'm in a much more comfortable place and I have plenty to eat now, but I may well be a leftist today because I didn't want anyone else to go through that.
I think it really is the empathy from that that makes us leftists. Or maybe that being leftists gives us the empathy in that situation. Either way it's all tied together. Then there are folks who come out of it and think "well nobody helped me and i survived so fuck you" and become ~~fascists~~libs
One of the most fucked up things about
is that he watched his son die of cancer, and his take-away from that was telling people afterward that no one deserved a better outcome and he used that as a basis for blocking attempts to nationalize medicine.
I definitely attribute my leftism to my upbringing. My mom worked three jobs at times raising me and my siblings. The meager gov assistance we got helped us eat as kids. We still got our heat shut off in the winter, luckily we still had electricity, so all four of us slept in one bed in the room with a space heater.
When my wife and I were young and we were just starting out WIC and EITC let me finish school instead of working more than one full time job while going to school.
I worked so hard to make our lives better, but I have been lucky enough to have someone willing to help me in situations that could have been catastrophic.
So many people don't have that and that first catastrophe derails everything for them. It shouldn't have to boil down to luck. It hurts my heart to think of all the suffering we could avoid and all the good we're not getting because we let luck decide more than effort and innate ability.
Nobody asked to be born. Dignity, food, shelter, water, freedom, are all human rights.
I worked with a guy many years ago that bragged to everyone that he had the same kind of car as the general manager of the store and had one of those extremely sensitive car alarms installed. People made a game out of kicking his tires and watching him come running out of the store because he had a dongle that would alert him when it was going off.
I still drive a 20 year old car lol.
In part because I'm not sure how anyone can afford a new vehicle large enough to hold my family.
And in part because new cars are data collecting machines used by capitalists to further exploit the working class and squeeze as much value as possible from us. Between the abusive hardware/software interactions, the intentionally difficult to service designs, and shitty end user experience I tell everyone to buy old cars or at the very least clip all the antennas they can on their new one.
Not long before going over 5 mph is a monthly subscription and you have to watch a two minute thirty second ad before you can turn on the radio.
Let me be the one to say please step away from the lathe
Nah this site would cheer that because "kkkarbrains owned" never mind the people who live where there is literally no public transit
To be honest, if I didn't live in Amerikkka and instead somewhere where Ladas were common I'd do it. Aesthetic, simple, cheap, and no built in capitalist spyware.