Rent A Tire?

Are these people fucking nuts?

When the tires on their Dodge Caravan had worn so thin that the steel belts were showing through, Don and Florence Cherry couldn't afford to buy a new set...

The Rich Square, N.C., couple last September agreed to pay Rent-N-Roll $54.60 a month for 18 months in exchange for four basic Hankook tires. Over the life of the deal, that works out to $982, almost triple what the radials would have cost at Wal-Mart.

Just how stupid do you have to be to do some dumb shit like this?

Look, if you can't afford new tires then you buy second hand tires from a tire shop. They won't last anywhere near as long as new tires, but you aint' payin' 1k for tires that cost $300.

Secondly, if you cannot afford to purchase at least second hand tires, then you cannot afford a car. LA Times

The 92%

From A Voice For Men:

Luca Steffenoni, expert of crime, computed in a book that accusations are used in 86% of the divorces. A research by Prof. Camerini et al. showed that in Italy 80% of persons accused of child abuse are fathers, and they turn out to be innocent in 92.4% of the cases.

Remember. Women never lie about abuse. Never. If she makes a claim, you must believe it because she would never lie.

Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind

Some couples who work in tech seem to be trying to step back the most. “At least once a month my wife and I jump in our car and drive until cell service drops off (yes, this is possible) and spend the weekend engaged with all things analog,” Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, said — on e-mail. “We read, we walk all over the California hills, we cook, we meet people who don’t work in technology.”

Other couples have told me of a “no gadgets in the bedroom” rule. (Kindles are sometimes an exception.) Some say they leave their phones at home when they go for Sunday brunch. Rather than take a picture of their bacon and eggs to post to Instagram, they can now enjoy each other’s company, and do that strange thing called talking.<

Yes please. I certainly am one who thinks folks spend far too much time in their phones and completely ignore the rest of the world. Particularly annoying when you're on a "date". At first I thought it was simply that I was uninteresting, but I think we have a growing set of people who cannot devote the attention necessary to maintain a conversation.

More Gender Bullshit From The Verge

I'm not sure what kind of editorial overview goes on over at the Verge, but whatever it is, they apparently have no straight males who are still have their testicles attached and backs that contain anything resembling bones. Most recently they posted a report about alleged gender bias in the NY Times. Apparently an "assistant professor" at  UNC Chapel Hill ran a script  "Jailbreak the Patriarchy" to determine is a patriarchal cesspool.

You'd think a "professor" of any type would automatically be skeptical of a tool who's very purpose is biased to analyze data. That's why we have SPSS, SAS and other actually neutral statistical tools to do such work. But when you put a biased professor up with a biased tools you can expect biased  bullshit to be the result.

Instead of working from scratch, he relied on a well-known browser extension called Jailbreak the Patriarchy, which swaps gendered words on a web page ("he" becomes "she," "wife" becomes "husband," and so forth.) From there, he pulled a full week of New York Times articles from late February and early March 2013 — a total of around 1,400 pieces, excluding corrections and paid obituaries. Using his scripts, Caren picked out both some general metrics and specifics about the kinds of words that were used.

Yeah...instead of  you know..doing his own research he uses a fucking browser extension. Where the hell do they award these degrees? Lets look at his results:

After determining the thousand most common words used in these sentences, he subtracted things like proper nouns, weighted the numbers to compensate for the larger number of male sentences, and found the 50 that were most disproportionately associated with a gender. For men, that included largely sports or political words: "male" sentences got 61 mentions of "governor," for example, compared to 2 mentions for "female" ones. "Baseball," "teammates," "bank," "economy," and "political" also skewed heavily male.

Hmmm....I see.

Well how many male governors are there in the US? Well actually it's easier to find the number of female governors  ever in the US: 36. There are 50 states. The number of female governors ever is 36. But this idiot thinks that the fact that 61 mentions of governor as "male" is a sign of bias?

Lets take the rest of the list. Basball weighs heavily male? Why How could that be explained without "Patriarchy"? Oh right  MLB is a male only dominion. Which means if you mention baseball in any national capacity you will mention males.  Don't think that's fair? Fine? When the women can out hit the men (distance and speed). Out pitch the men (speed) Outrun the men (speed), then they can go try out for the Mets and Yankees. Then watch the female references rise. Until then it's not bias.

Same thing with "teammates" again, most National level sports are male only (WNBA a notable exception). Therefore is you mention the word teammates it is most likely in reference to those sports that have all male teams. You don't go reporting on male teams and switch the gender of the persons you report on just for kicks.

Similar reasons exist for "bank", "economy" and "political" as, as is mentioned all the time by feminists, these are areas that are heavily populated by males.

Lets look at his other findings:

On the female side, words tended to relate to fashion, entertainment, or women's reproductive capabilities. "Memoir," "novel," "fashion," and "singing" were all female-skewed words, as were "gender," "kids," and "abortion." The words "victim," "cancer," and "violence" were also female words

Well nothing surprising there either. The vast majority of straight men do not as a rule obsess over "fashion".  Women have "abortions", men do not so no surprise there. Since feminism has a cottage industry in creating victims (Adria Richards anyone?) we should find it unsurprising that women are correlated with victimhood. You get what you create. Similarly since breast cancer is discussed ad-neauseum by the media, even though men are diagnosed and die of all non-gender specific cancers at higher rates than women , it should come as no surprise that cancer is "feminized". And make no mistake this is not "patriarchy's" doing. It is feminists who argued that women's health has and is ignored by male dominated medical industries. So please stop with the patriarchy arguing on that one.

"To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were," Caren writes.

Shocked? I'm not an "assistant professor" anywhere and I'm not "shocked" by any of it.

HTC One Forward Facing Speaker.....

This would be the N800 circa 2006

HTC One 2013

All kinds of progress.

Manufacturer's Recommended Replacement

BMW says that you should replace your pulley and tensioner every 60k miles. Why should you do this? Well the picture above is what happens to the plastic pulley when you don't replace it. In the front is the old pulley. Right behind it is the new replacement pulley. See the cracks at the edge of the old one? Shouldn't be like that.

See the difference in thickness between the back of the old and the start of the new? That's bad. Very bad. And no, that is not because I didn't line them up properly.

See my fingers pressing on the old pulley? Shouldn't be able to do that. Nope. Not at all. So what would have happened if that wasn't changed? Ohh....pulley would have probably shattered and the belt thrown. The battery light would have come on 'cause the alternator would no longer be spinning and the engine would soon overheat because the water pump would no longer be spinning.

Nothing much I suppose.

185k miles. I don't know if that was the original pulley but a word to anyone with an older BMW. Have you had your tensioners changed? Your engine making squeaking noises that change with rpm's. You'll wanna look into that.

NY Bike Tour Bends to Stupid

This morning I awoke to the news that the NY Bike Tour has banned the use of backpacks, saddlebags and hydration packs from the tour. Why? Boston.

This has to be the stupidest move I have ever seen and reflects the growing knee jerk "we must do something, ANYTHING!" reactions to tragic events. Let me explain a few things:

1) I have done the bike tour 3 times, the last being last year. It is usually cold (upper 30's) at the beginning. Many people, including myself, wear a lot of clothes at the beginning to deal with shit like standing for over an hour at the start line. to deal with shit called "wind chill" when moving at 12-20+ mph. We're usually also carrying food and drink 'cause 50 miles, particularly for those short of Tour De France experience will need to drink and eat something during the tour.

I have two water bottles on my bike and I usually go through both of them before the end.

So these backpacks that people have are often a necessary part of partaking of the tour, particularly as the temperatures rise and clothes are shed. I suppose that folks will be tying their shed clothes around their waists and hope to God their hydration and food they have on the bike and hopefully tucked into their jerseys (if they are wearing one, a lot of people do not) make it.

2) What about all the people along the route? You can't tell people who are NOT a part of the tour to not wear backpacks. We go through many neighborhoods that look much like the finish line of the Boston Marathon. These Bike Tour people do realize it was a roadside bomb that went off right? How exactly does their announcement do anything about the risk of any person on any of the streets the cyclists will be on will not leave a bomb? Oh right. Nothing.

Look. No one is coming to the Bike Tour with a pressure cooker on their back. No one is coming to participate in the Bike Tour to blow anything up unless they plan to go with it. In which case they'll just make the bike a bomb. Think about it. If you have the skills to make a bomb then you have the skills to open a bike frame of a cheap bike and place explosives in it.

Duh.

Anyway. I'm not riding this year and until this stupid rule is lifted, won't be riding in the future. I will not freeze, overheat or starve myself for the stupidity of the folks running the event.