Month: September 2022

Engine Immobilisers, Good? Bad?

The other day there was a blog posting regarding a requirement in a budget bill that all new cars manufactured after some date have “remote engine immobilisers.” Most new cars already have engine immobilisers. The idea being that even if you put the key in the ignition and turn it, nothing will happen.

It requires that your key talk to the car and tell it that you are indeed authorized to use the car. It means that you can give somebody a “regular” key and they can use it to physically unlock your car but even if that key were to fit they can’t start the car.

This stops thieves from just forcing the lock or otherwise bypassing the ignition switch. There are stories of older car locks being bypassed by the thief jamming a big screwdriver into the keyhole and then forcing the cylinder to rotate. Just shearing all the pins that keep that cylinder from rotating.

Remote engine immobilization takes this to a new level. With this you can turn off the engine remotely. A kill switch.

Some OnStar vehicles have this. The police can call OnStar and have them disable a stolen vehicle at will. A very powerful way of catching car thieves. There are aftermarket versions of this as well.

Unfortunately it comes with a bit of extra. Who is authorized to kill your car? Will all police cars come with devices so they can kill the engine of any car they want? Will it become standard operating procedure for a cop to kill the engine of any car he stops?

Will Mayor Pete be able to kill any car that is drives to much in a given period of time?

Will M.A.D.D. get a law passed that immobilises your engine anytime you stop at a place that serves alcohol? And then you are required to blow to get your car to start again?

Will your voter registration be linked to your car. If there is “right wing extremest” in the area do all cars belonging to the wrong sorts of people get disabled?

In the Dresden Files novels, the main character drives a VW Bug. He drives it because as a wizard the more technically advanced something is, they more likely it is to break when he is near. The Bug has no electronics. It is dirt simple.

There might be a new call for “dumb” cars.

Kia and Hyundai drivers might want to take extra precautions to deter car thieves

It is a propaganda machine.

The New York Times:

The same New York Times:

As of Monday, 1,316 Times workers had signed a pledge not to return to the office. This includes 879 members of the News Guild, but also members of the Times Tech Guild and the union for Wirecutter, the paper’s product-recommendation spinoff.

“People are livid,” Tom Coffey told The Post. A 25-year veteran editor at the NYT, he works on the news desk and serves on the union’s Contract Action Committee.
He added that being forced to return to the office during a period of high inflation means workers will have to spend more money on gas, mass transit, clothing and lunches, despite the lack of salary increases.

New York Times workers pledge not to return to office (nypost.com)

 

Funny how things end up working out. You peddled (and keep peddling) a line of B.S. but do not enjoy the shoving it up your particular rectum.

I want the worst possible Balkanization

We got an offer on our house $30,000 below asking.

After closing we will walk away with less money than our original down payment, let alone the year if equity and $20,000 in improvements and upgrades.

Apparently it’s the interest rate hitting 6% that’s the problem.

That is driven by inflation.

I realize thai I will never really own a house.  My real estate experience will be one of value loss after value loss.

I want to go the way of Serbia and I want to go absolutely crimes against humanity with all 81 million Biden voters.

They decided getting rid of mean tweets was worth getting rid of all the equity in my house.

I don’t think that was a fair trade and I want vengeance.

They want you dead. Doubt it at your own risk.

FOSTER CO., N.D. (KVRR) — The man charged with criminal vehicular homicide after a street dance Saturday in McHenry, North Dakota claims the victim was threatening him after a political dispute.

Court documents show 41-year-old Shannon Brandt told State Radio that he hit a pedestrian who he claimed was part of a Republican extremist group.

Brandt is accused of hitting 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson, of Grace City, with his SUV in an alley just before three a.m.

He claims Ellingson had called some people and was afraid they were coming to get him.

Brandt’s family along with Ellingson’s family showed up a short time after a first responder arrived on scene.

Ellingson was later pronounced dead at the hospital in Carrington.

Brandt had fled the scene and was arrested at home in Glenfield.

He was booked for DUI after testing above the legal limit to drive and has since been charged with two felony counts of criminal vehicular homicide and duty in accident involving death.

He is set to appear in court on October 11.

Suspect Claims Teen He Hit With His Vehicle Was After Him After A Political Dispute – KVRR Local News

More “Republican extremist” bodies to follow. Mark my words.

Tuesday Tunes

There is a skill that everybody that carries and even those that don’t need to acquire.

Situational Awareness

My wife doesn’t have it at all. She has no ability to anticipate, to notice, to plan for what will happen.

On the other side there are the people that look at every trip into the city as a threat to their lives (I’m looking in a mirror) and plan for any possible event.

Situational awareness is more than pre planning. It is the ability to notice things and put together a gestalt that tells you “Here Be Dragons”.

Did you notice that little man sitting with his back to the wall sipping a drink? Did you notice that guy that is obviously right handed but never carries anything in his right hand? Did you notice that couple getting noisy in the back corner?

How about the two dudes that might not be friends with stiff bodies?

Did you notice the car that shouldn’t be on the street? Did you notice the van with the wrong public utilities symbol on it? Did you notice that the girl you are dancing with is to hot to be single?

Is she crazy? Is she trouble on two legs?

Or is she taken?

The worst infrastructure spending decision imaginable

It is no secret to readers of this blog that I harbor an intense, burning hatred of Pete Buttigieg.

This whole administration is a fucking dumpster fire train wreck clown show of ineptitude, corruption, and virtue signaling.

This latest example is a travesty of Titanic proportion.

Biden administration announces first major step to fight America’s racist roads
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced a large grant that’ll be used to dismantle a highway built to destroy a Black community. And there’s more.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday that $104.6 million in federal funds coming from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill will go toward a plan to dismantle Interstate 375, a highway built to bisect Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood and its epicenter of Black business, Paradise Valley.

The funds are being allocated to Detroit as part of a $1.5 billion grant program called Infrastructure for Rebuilding America, or INFRA, for states to move critical projects forward.

“This stretch of I-375 cuts like a gash through the neighborhood, one of many examples I have seen in communities across the country where a piece of infrastructure has become a barrier,” Buttigieg told the AP about the Detroit highway.

“With these funds, we’re now partnering with the state and the community to transform it into a road that will connect rather than divide,” he added.

A Bloomberg report on neighborhoods destroyed by racist highway construction noted the impact I-375 had on once-bustling Black Bottom, noting that “few traces of the neighborhood remain aside from historical markers.”

A feature on the neighborhood published in Grist noted that “the destruction of the epicenters of Detroit’s Black life started with the condemnation of housing through the National Housing Act of 1949,” which trapped Black people in cramped, low-quality housing. And Grist said the problem continued “when the city received even more funds through the National Highway Act in 1956.”

The very first expenditure of the much touted Biden infrastructure bill is to spend $104 million to eliminate a one-mile long spur of interstate in a dead section of a dying city.

A city in which one of the major employers, Ford, just cut 3,000 jobs making gas powered cars, because the Biden Administration is going balls deep into electric cars with batteries from China.

Yeah.

I bet the working class people of Detroit could find better ways to spend $104 million, but that wouldn’t allow Buttigieg to be a White Knight and fight racist roads.

It’s legitimately hard to figure out a more useless way of spending that money.

The one thing I do know is that at some point we will find out that the contractor that gets the job or the investors that own the surrounding land, or both, are big Hunter Biden art dealers or donors to Buttigieg’s husband’s charity, or some other corrupt as fuck shit.  I guarantee that.