• 1 Post
  • 98 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: April 25th, 2026
  • DisasterTransport@startrek.websitetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Any Other Guys wish they were short/shorter
    2·
    4 hours ago

    6’0" here, so not that tall all things considered. For me there’s a small component of wishing to be more a little more feminine sometimes, but all things considered being a big strong man rules.

    I wish i were slightly shorter because this world is built for average sized people. Flying always winds up being an exercise in quantifying the value of my own suffering. Is 4-8 hours of claustrophobia, leg cramps, and general lack of dignity worth an extra $400? Sometimes, absolutely. Do i have an extra $400? hell no. I don’t even fly that often and i have strong preferences for aircraft. I will cry if i wind up getting tricked into economy class on a 737-800 again. The seats are 16 inches wide and i think the pitch is something like 28".

    I also can’t comfortably sit in a miata unless the top is down. I daily drove an AW11 for a couple of years and while it was tons of fun i looked like Mr Incredible driving to work and I hit my head constantly. Kitchen counters are way too short for me, i can’t imagine the back pain for taller people who like to cook.

  • DisasterTransport@startrek.websitetopolitics @lemmy.world•Democrats are already preparing Trump investigations if they retake the House
    2·
    22 hours ago

    what kills me about Schumer et al is that i was always taught that dual loyalty is an antisemitic trope because it’s founded on essentialism. The idea that someone might hold a loyalty to another country over their own based on their ethnicity is an unjust assumption, and it hurts American Jews (and their communities, and by extension yourself, as a member of their community) because as a group they really just want to get by, same as anyone else. They are our neighbors and our friends, and they want whats good for their homeland just like you and me. Jewish Americans are just Americans who happen to be Jewish.

    But it seems like everyone in the ruling class has decided that actually dual loyalty is part of being Jewish, and that actually you’re the antisemitic one for pointing it out, and that furthermore antizionist jews are antisemitic for their unjewish behavior.

  • DisasterTransport@startrek.websitetoFuck Cars@lemmy.world•Richmond drivers squeezed by rising car ownership costs. The average monthly payment for a new car in Virginia is now $637English
    21·
    2 days ago

    napkin math time. some of what follows i looked up but will not cite because i am on my phone and find text editing on this infernal contraption to be torment. some of it is pure conjecture because multitasking is also torment. when possible i will return and amend the numbers, but for now intend to favor cars whenever possible.

    Richmond has 108,990 households. Let’s round that down to a nice even 100k. If the average household has 2 cars, that gives 200k cars.

    Something like 30% of all cars carry a loan in the US. Let’s be nice and pretend everyone in richmond got a killer deal on financing their cars and the average payment is lower than it really is. We’ll go with the $525 average used car payment cited in the article.

    60k*$525/mo=$31.5m/mo. Call it $30m and we get an eyewatering $360m/y, just in loan payments. this does not include insurance, fuel, and taxes, or paper costs like depreciation, or shared costs like infrastructure, or abstract costs like hours of their lives stuck in traffic, or externalities like healthcare spending caused by sedentary lifestyle and exposure to pollution.

    Richmond, a city of 230k with a median annual income of about $65k, spends $360m every year on paying banks back for the privilege to incur all those other costs a real analysis would have factored in. Greater Richmond Transit Company’s approved budget for FY2027 is just over $100m.

    I can very confidently assert that Richmond spends more than $3.60 on car loans for every $1.00 it spends on its entirely free transit system. Perhaps some of those households are genuinely better served by this expense, but I’d wager the vast majority of them are much poorer than they need to be, just because they reckon cars are a necessity.