Today I Learned (TIL)

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

I had the numbers at one point because my inlaws that lived near Albany would argue about how they were propping up the coty whenever I saw them. Wall St and banking along with their employees were the largest taxpayers in the state.  Without the city upstate would be something like the fourth poorest state in the country with pretty much only dairy farms left to pay the bills. My wife, her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles all had government or service industry jobs. Whenever they brought this up they were unable to name someone that produced anything. The thought was that without the city to complain they would make billions off fracking and all the money they were sending to the city would be used for tax breaks to lure in manufacturing.  

In reply to Wally (Forum Supporter) :

The big picture can be difficult to see, I will admit, if you only see one part of it.

I still vividly remember speaking with an older lady in a "retirement village" - think well kempt housing development based around about fifty cute little manufactured homes, basically a classy trailer park.  She claimed that the property taxes paid for the whole city, police, fire, everything.  Their property taxes would have to be on the order of $200k/year for the numbers to math out...

TIL that I need to develop and have ready to go in my mental file a good response when it comes up in conversation that the person I just met did a lot of time in a federal penitentiary.  Other than knowing to not ask "what were you in for", all I could come up with on the fly was "uh, where at?"

TIL: While reading about ex-hurricane post-tropical cyclone Lee, Maine is the most forested state. I thought that I had read years ago that my home state of North Dakota was the least forested state, so I searched "Most and Least forested States" and came up with this:

The most heavily-forested regions of the U.S. are Maine, New Hampshire, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and West Virginia; the least heavily forested regions are North Dakota, Nebraska, and South Dakota.[2]

Wikipedia.org: Forests of the United States

My neighbor died in his sleep last night. He was a Vietnam veteran who was divorced and had two children, both disabled (probably from the agent orange he handled all the time). The ex wife now has to sift all his stuff, answer all these questions, and grieve because they were still friends.

TIL (or at least reinforced): Have a plan. Write it down. Let people know where to find it.

He was going to sit down and figure all this stuff out this week. Beers with another neighbor scheduled for this afternoon and a negotiation date for the ex wife scheduled for next weekend. He didn't make it.

wae said:

TIL that I need to develop and have ready to go in my mental file a good response when it comes up in conversation that the person I just met did a lot of time in a federal penitentiary.  Other than knowing to not ask "what were you in for", all I could come up with on the fly was "uh, where at?"

 

I always liked to small talk with my customers.  A common question I'd ask to get a conversation going was "Where did you move from?"  One day I'm in a not so nice apartment complex for the area.  Guy responds "Oh I just got out of prison for murder."  He had a Buick Roadmaster wagon so I changed the conversation to that.

TIL that Imperial was its own brand under the Chrysler umbrella from 1954-1970 (like Cadillac is to GM), rather than Chrysler(brand)'s top model (like Eldorado was to Cadillac), as was the case after 1970. 
 

Thank you, Steve Magnante. 

Talking with a former co worker.

19% of auto techs in the US are between 25 and 50 years old.

19%.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

Talking with a former co worker.

19% of auto techs in the US are between 25 and 50 years old.

19%.

 

Awhile back I read that the average age of a construction worker is 62. 

I haven't worked with someone younger than my 40 years old in...15 years?

There is many more 70+ year olds working around me in construction than there should be really, they can't retire and there's work to be had 

there's an entire genre of country rappers,

I did not know this.  

In reply to Noddaz :

It's a rabbit hole. Starts with covers of rap songs with a redneck bent, usually playing in the mud. Then original artists, mostly drinking and mud. Then it really splits up, there's a MAGA contingent, there's pure whitetrash with songs about their pill habits and trailer park gangs, the Nashville aiming sets like JellyRoll, if you go deep enough you start finding biker (1% not squid) rap, weird crossovers with cartel rappers, and yes, even the poseurs like Forgiato Blow whose grandfather created Autotrader so he's a trust fund kid playing the part. 

I found this genre earlier this summer thanks to cowboy troy, Brantley gilbert, and pandora. Im quite enjoying it. 

My pandora station of choice this week, however,  has been rebel: hard rock country. Very worth a listen. Mix it with corb lund, tom macdonald, and ray wilie hubbard on shuffle. You'll thank me.

Today i learned that the flaps beat the crap out of Amazon and rockauto on some seals i needed. Like, by 66% less.

In reply to RevRico :

TBH the stereotypical gangster rapper and redneck have a lot in common socio-economcially, so this was just an eventuality. I remember seeing a copypasta about it a long time ago.

Today I learned 48,000 BTUs of mini splits for a whole house can be rather expensive, like $38k before rebates. Although a service upgrade 200A costs $6k (something else I learned today) and is part of that total. 

TIL that there's fake off grid builds on YouTube.  This dude is more scared of his chainsaw than the wood is.  He's doing all kinds of wtf stuff that city people would say oh that's smart.

In reply to Stampie :

Once we were out with a couple from our church and I asked them about where they met. (I knew there was an age spread). 

The lady says it's awkward but she was the baby sitter when he was married to his first wife.  She says nothing happened and they got together when she was an adult. 

In reply to Antihero :

This is for Pete as well. The public education system I experienced, concluding in 1970, had a "guidance" system in place that vigorously promoted "clean careers" to everyone. "don't get your hands dirty" was a mantra. This has not changed in the half century since, and I suspect is also the mantra in the private education systems. The then available pretty good hands on tech classes and school were promoted to the unintelligent exclusively. The actual shop classes have deteriorated into oblivion since due mostly to liability. The result is what we see, and it keeps me busy!$.  Terrible to project out time wise. Construction statistics may be scewed by the under reporting of young aliens, but there is the only solution in the near term. Open the borders.

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

I can actually see that happening in a non creepy way.  Once you get over a certain age, the hardest part about meeting people is meeting people.  Then you recognize someone years later while schlumming it buying home supplies at the store, you start talking, realize you have more in common tune-wise than you'd have thought, and things happen.

One of my friends ended up marrying his friend's sister after they both had divorces, but if you say it like that it sounds ominous.  In reality they both got out of bad relationships. and peripherally knew each other, and started talking after the fact and realized that they both were on the same page life-direction wise, and they're good for each other.

GIRTHQUAKE said:

In reply to RevRico :

TBH the stereotypical gangster rapper and redneck have a lot in common socio-economcially, so this was just an eventuality. I remember seeing a copypasta about it a long time ago.

Listen to the music, it's the same.  Talking about how awesome your neighborhood is, the quality of your friends, mistreating women and/or getting mistreated by them, and name drop some product placement once or twice every verse.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

About 20 years ago, a paramedic co-worker and I had a very serious bunch of conversations about starting a cleaning business that specializes in crime scenes and places where very messy natural deaths had occurred.

  Our thought process was that we have already been walking through these houses anyway and we were used to the horror of it, so we might as well make some money off of it, since people would likely pay anything to just make it all go away. 

TIL that Band Camp is actually a real thing. 

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

GIRTHQUAKE said:

In reply to RevRico :

TBH the stereotypical gangster rapper and redneck have a lot in common socio-economcially, so this was just an eventuality. I remember seeing a copypasta about it a long time ago.

Listen to the music, it's the same.  Talking about how awesome your neighborhood is, the quality of your friends, mistreating women and/or getting mistreated by them, and name drop some product placement once or twice every verse.

Which is pretty much everything I hate about rap in one paragraph.  You forgot to mention how it's basically a long-winded pissing contest.

I love instrumental hop-hop, though, so it's not just a 'get off my lawn' age thing.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

My Milwaukee 1/4" hex driver can remove lug nuts that I'd torqued to 100 ft-lb that morning.

 

Someone else needed my air hose and I needed to remove some wheels NOW so I jokingly stuck a 1/2" adaptor into the driver so I could put a 21mm socket on it.  BzzzzzzBAP. 

I lived without one of those impact drivers for a long time. Had I known how easily they remove those damn Phillips screws from honda rotors I would have bought one a long time ago. I've always struggled with those and my dewalt driver zipped it out like it wasnt even there.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

I've posted this before. Our provincial government is promoting the trades, and giving presentations through the schools. One of my buddies is a teacher, and the day after one of these presentations got a call from an irate parent. She was furious that her university bound son was now interested in becoming a tradesman. It was a grade 8 class.