Over my 25 yrs driving and getting inspected here, I’ve found a mix of issues… I always inspect my car before dropping it off, most times in their own parking lot.

• good old boys that don’t care and pass it without obviously checking because they know they won’t make money on it anyway.
• ones that talk down to my wife because she must just believe any BS they make up (until I get involved, call them out, the apologize and I don’t go back)
• dealers that make problems for you to have to fix (had two places… one obviously shoved a screwdriver through my CV boot that was fine when I drove it in and wanted $989 to fix. The other said I was missing lug nuts that I know were there when I dropped it off and wanted to charge me $5/each plus $100 installation.)
• places that are actually good and fair.

One issue with the first is that the state doesn’t actually pay them enough per hour that it makes sense to take their time and do it right… they just crank them through finding obviously high money making issues and skipping the rest.

A law not saying you need to, is not the same as a law saying you need not to.

Mine has been arguing this point for a while. Apparently there wasn’t really a drop of issues here when they went into place, so they question the usefulness.

That said, they’re just done incorrectly in the first place. They are done by dealers/shops that lose money in doing them and are instead banking on charging you lots of money for problems they find and hope you get fixed with them. They need be done at an independent run spot with no interest in anything but safety and no way to be bought out.

I think the IDEA of Elon back then was charismatic and energizing. He was seen pushing space flight and EV’s forward into the future. Watching a video stream of the first Falcon flight to land the booster back on Earth was exciting. The fact that their stream was on the internet and full of interesting detailed real time telemetry and video was something new and different and felt like the future.

But watching Elon the man talk and stumble through even early interviews and press conferences was not, and to this day, I find it painful to watch. A great orator he is not. But then neither is Trump, I suppose.

Sure, but Elon isn’t charismatic in the slightest.

I’m torn here… PS5/XBox games brand new can easily go this high or much higher (definitely seen a bunch over $100, especially for special editions and such.) and I recommend absolutely no one does that either…

However, if no one bought them new for whatever the cost, I’d not be able to get used copies secondhand.

Sales are obviously the way to go, but used games basically account for the majority of my physical copies, especially for Nintendo stuff. I just happen to like physically owning things.

Don’t bow down to the psychopath! You know he’s going to just pull out of NATO anyway.

Sometimes I’ve found a site that gets partially blocked and causes a fuss. There’s an option to allowlist domain(s).

Also, some sites try to use ad domains to serve legit traffic, and some use legit domains to serve ads, so it’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well overall.

PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.

The number of tabs I have open from sites I’ve clicked on, started reading, said “eh, I’ll get back to this later” and never have, says no.