To begin with: I truly believe in letting the reader have the last word. It’s why I don’t like to engage people in arguments in the comments sections of TTAC or R&T or elsewhere if I can help it. In a sense, there’s a social contract between writer and reader that includes a section entitled “What The Writer Owes The Reader”, and in that section there is a subsection entitled “The Reader Should Have The Right To Form And Hold An Opinion On The Writer’s Work.”
With that said:
Fuck this guy. Fuck him sideways. Fuck him for being stupid, for being willfully illiterate, for being pridefully uneducated. Fuck him for ignoring the entire point of the article: that not everybody has the time, resources, and money that the average boomerang dumbass living with his parents insensibly enjoys. Fuck him for internalizing the garbage financial and lifestyle advice handed out by people who know better but who make a good living trolling the morons out there. Fuck him for somehow thinking that I’d ask Matt or Tavarish to cover the radiator when I specifically noted that I paid for it. And most of all, fuck him for thinking he’s witty for writing “interwebs” to refer to something that brilliant men spent their lives creating so he could shit all over it. Fuck him for standing on the shoulders of giants and using that perch to drool on said shoulders.
Fuck him. The world is worse because people like him are in it. The majority of the globe’s problems are directly traceable to the actions of stupid people who refuse to acknowledge and abide by the glaring fact of their stupidity.
discomonkey82@gmail.com, congratulations. You’ve done it. Of all the people to comment on my work in 2015, you’re the worst. So far. Let us hope that this singular achievement remains unsullied by any rogue waves of mediocrity and ineptitude large enough to eclipse your personal high-water mark. Now go home and hit your computer with a hammer until all the lights go off. Thank you.
It’s a tossup whether his reading comprehension or his writing ability is worse: at this level of bad, the calibrations are harder to decipher.
I bet he isn’t even a real monkey.
Theres no way he read the article, right? Theres no fucking way he could have actually gotten through the article (btw Jack, excellent piece) and posted this shit. If he read that article he has deftly avoided some very astute and clear points that you made about the luxury that is owning an older car. It is a toss-up in terms of my preference between the two, but I’d like to think he’s more of a hothead that decided to disagree with you without reading the article rather than someone who just couldn’t understand your arguments.
On the upside, he commented using his full email address. I’m sure more than a few folks have taken the time to write him a personal note of encouragement, and perhaps sign him up for a few mailing lists that may or may not reflect his personal taste.
Sadly ;
He’s not alone out there ~
These types are everywhere spreading their hate and discontent instead of simply learning and moving on .
spamming his E-Mail is as bad as doing what he did , I hope you were joking .
-Nate
On the internet, anyone can be a doctor race car driver CEO stockbroker ballerina horseback-riding princess.
But on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
On the flip side, I’m a brain surgeon pretending to be a dog.
It’s my release.
I hope the two don’t collide when I’m at work.
*rimshot*
https://www.youtube.com/user/discomonkey82
http://instagram.com/discomonkey82
Further investigation proves we’re not dealing with a Mensa member here.
Shhh, little monkey, the adults are talking.
The likes of DiscoMonkey fail to acknowledge that time is money and it takes time and a bit of money to keep a car running. I’ve heard an argument that the most economical way to own a car is:
a) buy it brand-new and run it until the ‘wheels fall off’
b)buy a depreciated certified pre-owned car (2-3 year old), run it for 3-4 years and sell it as a still good used car to buy another certified pre-owned
In both cases the total life-cycle cost is minimized, which includes car price, maintenance costs, salvage value, downtime, etc. Owning a 20-year-old car is not the way to do it. Some people have 2 jobs, a kid and night-school — how could they possibly have the time to learn (from ‘interwebs’) and execute a radiator repair?
You better know from before. Otherwise, you pay the mechanic.
I have kids, do uni at night twice a week (classes alone) and had 1 job. When the semester is on, the car better keep going. There’s no way I’ll be able to do anything bigger than an oil change… and those get delayed.
I own a ~18 years old car. I have a rough idea on how to turn a spanner… and Jack is right.
The punk above missed the whole point.
From a longtime lurker, I just want to say I love your response.
My criticism is rather different. I think you broke that radiator. Oh, not you personally, but whoever got paid to work over the car, before taking it on that trip. I think so because I’ve done it myself. The radiator hose was leaking a bit, so I tightened the hose clamp a bit. That didn’t do much harm on the engine end of the hose, where it clamps onto a metal outlet, but the plastic outlet of the radiator eventually cracked (after two or three iterations of leakage and retightening), necessitating a new radiator. The crack was right under the hose clamp, and had gotten about halfway around the circumference before I spotted it (which fortunately I did before it blew; my cost was much less).
If I’d known better, I’d have known that radiator hoses just tend to weep a bit, and that this is due to thermal expansion and contraction; when they weep is actually when they are cold. So rather than tightening it, I’d just have left it alone, like your average poor person would have; the leakage wouldn’t have done any harm, being rather minor and happening only before the engine warmed up.
The other self-inflicted aspect of this is that I was using worm gear clamps, which don’t have any flexibility to accomodate hose expansion when hot, and thus, over time, crush the hose, which is what makes it weep. Likely the best thing to use would have been these heat-shrink clamps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH1po8kP9c8
which are what I switched to, and which haven’t given me any problems. (That video is also where I learned about thermal expansion/contraction being the cause.)
Anyway, if you’d really wanted the poor-person experience, you’d have just driven the car without spending $1500 on having it worked over — and this particular failure, at least, likely wouldn’t have happened.
Still, of course, I’m arguing that this particular cause of failure is so subtle that even auto mechanics get it wrong and people who write about cars for a living miss it, so the overall effect is to reinforce your point that car maintenance isn’t for everyone, and that getting a new car from the manufacturers can be quite a good deal.
Very good point — the mechanic might have been rushing a bit. For what it’s worth, the hose clamps were spring-steel types, no worm and screw.
I put the breakage down to the effect of taking a car that had been in Florida or LA its whole life and running it through a half-dozen starts at 10deg F, but I like your idea.
I concur with your thermal shock conclusion.
Oh, if there was nothing to tighten on the clamps, then that kills my idea completely. (Well, not the idea that the clamp might have contributed to the cracking, just the idea that last-minute tightening may have finally done it in.) I’ve seen clamps that look like wire springs but still have a screw to tighten them, but that doesn’t sound like it’s what you’re talking about.
Its amazing how you always seem to have just the right response for the situation!
every man has a breaking point….
Amazing Jack, must’ve hit a nerve to make you post this on your own blog. Please sign me up so Google can make more revenue off my spam address, the fact a lazy post has generated so many wasted key strokes in anger is what I like about the Internet so much. Imagine if you could convert that energy into say fixing a broken radiator? Cheers guys.
You mean, like the kind of nerve I hit to make you search for and find this blog? That kind of nerve?
I never liked disco, anyway.