just signed a blatantly Unconstitutional State Law into effect taxing the income of anyone making one million dollars or more.
The State Constitution expressly forbids an Income Tax and the voters have shot it down repeatedly, knowing full well that in short order that the one million dollar cap is going to drop to fifty thousand in no time.
The ink wasn’t even dry on it when a challenge was filed.
Large companies that originated here are already fleeing the state and it’s going to get worse.
Hey guys, as some of you are aware I’ve been concerned about Johno. It has been 6 days since I had heard from him. That’s very unusual for him. He’s really good about annoying me with 15-20 emails a day. I had some emails from him last week that were in the trash on my iPad but I hadn’t deleted them yet. Some of them were sent to multiple people and I was able to see their names and addresses. So I tried reaching out to them on a one by one basis. Finally a person named Dee got back to me. Dee said Johno hadn’t been emailing for about a week. After some back and forth I suggested Dee contact the police and get them to do a welfare check. Dee said they only corresponded by email and texting and had no idea where Johno lived. I said the hospital had his address. To make a long story short, I stayed up
In contact with Dee until about 3:30 am. I woke this morning to find a new email from Dee telling me that the police had been in touch. They ended up doing a forced entry into Johno’s home and he was found deceased in his bed. No further details except that they thought it had been a few days. Johno occasionally would send me articles from a paper over there called gumshoe news. It turns out that Dee is the owner and editor of the paper.
When Johno first appeared on the scene 5-6 years ago I didn’t care for him. I thought he was arrogant, not funny, and if I ever met him I was going to punch him in the face and knock him out. About 3 years ago I started emailing him. He was cautious about me as well. After a few days we had become friends. He had a dry sense of humor and I eventually learned how to take him and found him funny. He told me that he never found me funny. I will miss him.
I know that he would send you guys some emails too. Obviously you all meant something to him for him to do that.
I just felt that you should know the news that I was able to learn. I know that he was also in touch with Wirecutter Kenny Lane. I have not ever been in touch with him. If any of you have a way of contacting him, maybe let him know too.
“Y’all ever wondered why diesels are so loud, especially the old mechanical ones? This is why… the injection system! This P-8600 is like a mini engine pumping out almost 1200cc of fuel. It’ll be bolted to the side of an IH pulling tractor and tearing up the track this spring!”
This is a mechanical fuel injection pump that is going on a high horsepower Pulling Tractor.
Get a load of how much diesel it is dumping in just a few seconds.
I looked it up so you don’t have to.
1200 CC’s is 0.3170074 of a gallon, so almost a third of a gallon.
I couldn’t even guess how much money that thing cost to build and test.
Leigh might have a better idea.
It will give you a better understanding of why they belch so much black smoke at full throttle.
We live in Suburbia, on a corner with one street that doesn’t go through and stops at a driveway and at the entrance to a Cul De Sac going the other way.
Normally it’s fairly quiet although for some reason there is more traffic than one would think.
At least I do.
Garbage pick up is every Monday and every other week everyone puts out a rolling recycling bin with cardboard, plastic bottles and pop cans. There are smaller, stackable bins for glass bottles, newspapers and something else we never use that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
Since I haven’t even seen a newspaper in years we obviously don’t use that one either.
Also since I have worked a Swing Shift off and on for the past eight or ten years, there are times that I will be sitting out on the front porch having a smoke at One or Two O:Clock in the morning.
Over those same years, I have occasionally seen people going through the recycling bins pulling out the recycleable plastic bottle and pop cans in the middle of the night.
Sometimes on foot but mostly someone with a little pick up or car they throw them in the back of.
I doesn;t bother me a bit as long as they are respectful enough not to leave a mess, which I have never seen anyone do.
People do what they gotta do and we are obviously not going to do anything with them.
The last two Pick Up days have been different.
The last time two weeks ago and just now this morning a few minutes ago, there have been guys out there in broad daylight going through them.
Something has changed and it is indicative to me that people are getting squeezed harder than ever trying to survive.
I’ll tell ya, growing up poor goes a long ways to learning how to fix things but these days the stuff they make was designed not to be fixed in the first place.
What began as a routine check triggered by a persistent odor led to an unsettling discovery: a hidden lab operating inside a California warehouse containing dangerous pathogens including HIV, malaria, COVID-19 and Ebola.
I went back to school at 29 to a Community College to get a degree in Auto Repair. As you know, Community Colleges offer two year Associates Degrees.
After one full year, a Ford Motor Company sponsored program opened up that was very limited and hard to get into. For one you had to get a Dealership to sponsor you and it was only open to 24 candidates, every two years.
So I managed to get in and I kicked it’s ass. After THREE years of going to a TWO year college,I graduated Phi Theta Kappa, made the Dean’s List 3 times and hade a 3.71 GPA.
The whole time being half drunk.
I’m sure I could have gotten a 4.0 if I had really tried.
I went to school for 3 months and then worked at the Dealership for 3 months, getting paid to learn and getting college credits for it.
I worked there for 9 years.
There were days that I drove 30 miles to work, sat there all day with nothing to do and drove home, not making a nickel because it was all Flat Rate, otherwise known as Piece Work.
That started happening so often that I finally decided that I couldn’t afford to work there anymore.
It finally got to the point that I had had enough and went to work as a Field Mechanic for a well known local equipment rental outfit at a SIX DOLLAR an hour pay cut and was still taking home just as much as I was working at the Lincoln/Mercury dealership.
In those 9 years I bought THOUSANDS of dollars worth of tools and tool boxes plus going to seemingly never ending training update classes.
So when I say that I lived what this story is saying, It is the absolute truth.
Back then, in the late 80’s Ford was screaming for new technicians to work on their then new computerized vehicles. When I left in 1999, Ford Motor companie’s premiere vehicles had 11 computers in them and they all talked to each other through one twisted wire that had another one twisted to the first one for redundancy. They called it Multi-Plexing.
The wiring harness that went through the Firewall and completely wrapped around an engine shoe horned into an engine bay had One Hundred and Eleven Wires in it.
That was 27 years ago.
What they have now for technology is Light Years beyond what I ever fought with and today’s cars are downright ridiculous to work on.
Yet the pay is not really that much more than it was back then.
Once again, Ford is screaming for new technicians, saying they have 6.000 empty bays with no mechanics in them nationwide but this time they are screaming into the void because the word is out and nobody wants to have to go through all of what I did for no more money than some chick sitting at a desk typing data into a computer makes.
So their cries go on deaf ears. Which is absolutely self inflicted and well deserved.
The very first thing that needs to happen is for them to scrap the Flat Rate pay system and guarantee their techs a Living Wage.
This video is well worth the watch to see what the state of Vehicle Repairs are in right now and you can guarantee that it is going to get much, much, worse.
