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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.
So close it hurts. Even the history revisionary stuff about Nazis is spot on.
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 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
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.
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…
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!
Except for Honda Elements. Well they at least super held their value.
…and I tanked it by borking a self-repair but still got ~$900 scrap for it.
Such a cool rig and I’ll miss it forever.
It’s insane how much people would pay for them especially during 2020. Rare case hahaha.
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.
Thank god you didn’t actually do that. If car retain value, then it mean the buyer can also afford a new one. Why get used when new one cost roughly the same?
Well, carbs are ass but they had fuel-injected 6cyl Rangers and Mazda B2500s. Those were solid trucks and for jobs where having a bed you could just toss shit into is actually important they worked great. Plus you could reach into the bed unlike these new giant fucking things and that’s coming from a dude who’s 6’-5”.
The biggest thing is that if they actually had any braincells and truly bought the vehicle for practical reasons they’d probably all own GMC Savannas and stuff but it’s all about the image so…
Sigh, we need Kei Trucks. Preferably electric ones.
“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?
To be faire there aren’t that many EV that could go 400 miles, and and they aren’t that cheap neither. And that without even considering the pain of public chargers. Context : i was about to buy an EV a week ago to travel regularly from Luxembourg to Paris. I gave up after reading how painful it is to 1. Know which charger is available. 2. Whether that charger accepts my payment card. 3. Almost no charger accepts a débit card
Hmm, my thinking was that journeys that use the full range of the electric vehicle are the exception though.
So in your example, it makes sense to have a ICE vehicle as you require the range. Most of us though don’t need that range. Most of us are unlikely to regularly be driving over 200 miles for a commute, and therefore EVs make sense for all of these people.
For your scenario, if you are motivated enough to do this, it might even work out cheaper to buy an EV, and rent an ICE car for your longer trip. But fair enough that this would be much less convenient.
One source for my thinking: https://www.statista.com/chart/24684/average-duration-of-a-one-way-commute/
I mean, there’s not a lot of people travelling 800km round trip regularly, majority of people probably travel less than 40km per day, with quite large percent of the commute time spend on idle either in traffic light or traffic jam. That’s petrol wasted not travelling. I’m generally mocking those who think their exception is the rule.
That’s when I use my ICE vehicle, or rent one for the longer journeys. but 99% of all my driving is in city and I charge at home - so it’s really a non-issue.
I drove a Nissan Almera (basically altima but with a 1.6 liter engine) on roads worse than most pickups have ever driven.
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.
“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.
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.
Someone should rerun the Jerry Falwell ad with Trump on the headline
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.
What? No. The president has a “gas price” lever that they start turning down a month and a half before an election. As always.
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.
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.
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!
I find it so funny Americans complaining about gas prices. Where I am in New Zealand, fuel prices are perpetually high because of our location. If my calculations are correct I pay the equivalent of USD$5.67/Gallon for regular (I have to use mid grade). I use a 1.8L Miata infrequently and fuel prices are still pain.
That’s still incredibly cheap compared to european gas prices. Here in Germany it’s (converted to Freedom Units) around US$8/Gallon.
That’s still really cheap! I’m stationed in Antarctica and here to fill my F150 it’s about US15$ per gallon!
Man, you guys. Out here at my homestead on the Jovian moon Ganymede I have to pay $10,500/gal. And don’t get me started on the radiation shielding tax.
Bro, don’t get me started…
I’m out here in the 34^vz dimension, and a gallon of gas costs more than I make in a year, partly because there is only one dimension at this time that still hasn’t stopped burning fossil fuels, despite the immense and obvious damage it does to the environment, but also because we here in 34^vz have evolved past the concept of money.
What you driving out there? Toyota moon rover?
Standard issue Toyota Hilux brother.
Surely the immigrants are to blame?? Or the gay kids! Yes, they did this.
Surely the immigrants are to blame??
The Immigrants:
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?
🤔
$100k watches? I have seen many instances of the pickup truck driving stereotype but I’ve never seen any of them wearing any sort of watch, let alone an expensive one. Is this specific to some country?
It’s a reference to the 100k Trump watch. So still specific to the US
Oh okay that makes sense. I hope we see a story about some tool like that buying a shitty $100k Trump watch and getting their comeuppance. This is definitely someone who would complain about gas prices because there’s no way they could afford a watch like that without feeling hardship.
They do feel hardship, but there are quite a few people that see donating to trump and trump merch as necessities (and not all of them are Americans).
People who like to be flashy with their money do buy expensive watches, but I only see them in the hundred TO thousand range. Anyone flashing a hundred-thousand dollar watch is out of their mind complaining about fuel prices.
The rest of the meme tracks in suburban Kentucky.
$100-1000 watches are not being flashy with their money. Almost everyone I see with a watch has a watch in that range. Flashy watches are usually 2K absolute minimum. Apple watches are like 300-700 and they’re everywhere.
I had a friend who was REALLY into watches. He had a 7K watch he loved to show off, and he would research watches literally every day and knew tons about them. Walking around with him was wild because we would walk by some random dude in a tshirt and he would suddenly lean over and whisper “he’s wearing a Goobly-Gluk Goober FX367, that’s a 25K watch!”
Really expensive watches often don’t look it. Look up a Patek Phillipe Nautilus. 1.5M. Looks (to me) like a casio or something.
I don’t care about watches at all.
My bad, I was thinking hundreds to thousands.
I wasn’t thinking about smart watches, but I haven’t been sold on them yet.
It’s not that much but certainly out of my reach
In my mind, the $100k watch sterotype fits more with one of those pimped out Hummers than a $70k pickup truck.
I doubt those guys complain about fuel prices either.
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!”
So what you’re saying is, you don’t hate the fools, you pity them.
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
And all this with the dirt cheap gas prices in the US. In comparison to Europe, gas in the US is nearly free…
Sorry to hijack your comment, but seeing that “my grandchildren are in my daughters’ ovaries post” right above this one and your comment made me wonder:
Why is gas so damn cheap in the US while saying “healthcare is expensive” is a giant understatement.
Compared with Europe, where gas prices are regulated (and gas stations still seem to be doing just fine to the point that new ones keep popping up around where I live at an astounding rate) while it’s the healthcare that is subsidised and made availiable to all.
How come? Why aren’t gas companies in the US be as greedy as hospitals and pharma there? Why aren’t European gas stations few and far between, continuing to barely hold on, fail and ultimately closeleaving Europe gasless?
In the EU, fuel is heavily taxed and most people drive smaller fuel efficient automobiles. The fuel prices in Europe never bothered me, but I start laughing at the Americans who complain about $4.00 a gallon and drive gas guzzlers carrying fucking air.
As an American: because gas has to compete. You can’t ask to go to the cheap hospital, they don’t even usually tell you the price before administering medicine. So hospitals charge what they’d like and that’s that. Gas prices are highly competitive and we’re one of the world’s primary oil producers and refiners. Additionally the Biden administration has been using our strategic oil reserves to stabilize gas prices.
Isn’t there literally a law that prevents gas stations from being too competitive. Like you can’t lower your prices below a certain threshold lower than a station near you or some shit like that or am I just on crazy pills
I think you’re right. I didn’t know the details, but there is something like that.
Why did four people downvote this? It’s the truth.
Because they saw Biden.
They are greedy, but oil isn’t really found in Europe proper so they have to get it from other countries, which means transport, tariffs, losing money to that country via trade deficit, etc.
That is actually not the issue. The point is that about 80%+ of European gas prices are taxes.
They are greedy
U.S. fossil fuel subsidies stretch across the U.S. tax code, which makes detailing their costs complex. The IMF estimates they stood at $760 billion in 2022, a figure topped only by China.
However, that quote isn’t entirely fair to China.
Also it’s Reuters, so kilo of salt.
My conservative Christian, formerly maga parent recently raised the point and I had to remind them fossil energy is heavily taxpayer subsidized. Again.
" . . . and an RV and a garage full of boats and jet skis."
Oil Industry Guy When Gas Prices Go Up: “Oh no! It costs so much money to drive my big truck and cool my enormous house and afford business class airplane tickets and now I can’t afford my Carnival Cruise to Florida! This is the fault of the Evil Communist Green Party Democrats! Only Republicans can fix it!”
Oil Industry Guy When Gas Prices Go Down: “Oh shit! Oh fuck! I’m unemployed, broke, foreclosed on, and drowning in debt! This is the fault of the Evil Communist Green Party Democrats! Only Republicans can fix it!”
Oil Industry Guy When It’s Time To Form A Union: “Fuck you, you fucking socialists. I don’t need the government to do anything for me. I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps!”
But during all those scenarios…RECORD PROFITS FOR OIL INDUSTRY
Amazing how that happens seemingly no matter what.
…And a large and expensive gun collection, and tons of NASCAR paraphernalia.
Okay the 70k lifted truck is valid. But I don’t think maga people are out there buying 100k watches
Recently Trump was selling $100K gold watches; I’m assuming it was mostly maga folks who bought them
It was almost certainly a way to hide “donations” (bribes), from multimillionaires and billionaires, not random maga poor people
Not the people that can’t afford gas, what the post is about. They don’t have 100k to spend on a watch.
Yeah but they can’t afford gas while Trump is selling expensive jewelry lol
OK, substitute the NFTs and testosterone pills
Man. I stopped on the side of the road the other day to help a guy with a “need gas” sign. I’m not exactly well off myself, but I figured I could give him a ride. “I ain’t got no cash, but thanks for stopping!” Dude’s driving a pristine pavement princess. Priorities, man…
Crazy. Plenty of people on the corners panhandling in my town, but none of them can afford rent much less a gas guzzling truck.
That’s why I stopped, primarily. I don’t have a lot to give, but I can give some time, so I figured I’d help out how I could. Knowing it’s probably just a ploy for money is annoying, especially considering all of the other panhandlers around that do actually need help.
Forgot to include giant flags, which I guess you can include as maga merch.
In anglo Canada we have our own version of this that includes at least 1 oversized Canadian flag, at least 1 “FUCK 🍁 TRUDEAU” and 1 “FREEDOM” optionally also on flags or decals, something sloppily painted in white complaining about coronavirus mandates, and getting more common is something insulting Jagmeet Singh.
They have maga and Trump merch as well
It’s very confusing how they can fly a Maple Leaf and not know what country they’re in
