Ace-Garageguy

"PAVEMENT ENDS" is a sign seen frequently in the desert regions of the Southwest.

Not rhymes with a lot of hot snot can be bought for a spot of thought.

Regularly checking your oil and other fluid levels is also prudent...but some recent vehicles don't have any provision to check auto-trans levels; why?

Most "car guys" have zero clue when it comes to real, in depth, automotive machine work. And today's generations of highly "educated" chair-weights whose definition of "work" is pushing a cursor around a screen with a mouse, or writing code that in some cases they don't even understand, tend to look down their noses at what they perceive to be grimy, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who actually get their hands dirty (OMG!!!) making and repairing things. The video below details the steps involved in re-grinding the crank journals on a big truck engine, but the self-same steps are identical to what every small-town machine shop in the USA used to be able to do on a daily basis on the garden-variety car engine. It's pretty obvious these skills are dying here, and why more and more tired engines end up as scrap metal instead of being reconditioned and returned to service. Rebuilding engines correctly, which involves a great deal of technical skill and a well-developed intellect, USES MUCH LESS ENERGY AND EMITS MUCH LESS CARBON than it takes to melt them down to make new ones. But nobody thinks about that, and there's not many people around who can do it anymore anyway. It's just too icky. (Insert old-man-yelling-at-cloud meme here )

Interesting take on a rational (but non-scientific) argument against accepting consensus in the face of conflicting EMPIRICAL evidence to the contrary, an argument that cited several instances where the consensus was just flat wrong, but was mindlessly rebleated by people who were more concerned with peer acceptance than truth. Scientific "consensus" also once held that the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the universe, and that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Damm good thing that a few heretics not hidebound by their "education" saw reality for what it is rather than what everyone else agreed it was. And nobody said "consensus is inherently wrong", a strawman if ever there was one. The point is that consensus isn't inherently right...in spite of the position most every "follow the science" rebleater assumes today...no matter how many of the willfully ignorant insist it is.

Pretty cool.

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let’s review a few cases.In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women. There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light. Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees. And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on. Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations of pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

That's exactly what these Atlantis kits are...repops of several original parts-pack sprues in a single box, for significantly less money than even one original these days.

Is that you playing?

Pretty obvious if you only modify one measuring contact face, the other two wouldn't be affected, eh? Prime reason to only do the mod on one cheap unit. Good that you posted the heads-up on this.

My point is that the tooling dates from the early 1960s.

"Reason" , defined as "the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth", is in increasingly short supply.

Sometimes it's prudent to do due diligence prior to purchasing. That Revell kit is a joke. It's so underscale, it's only appropriate to build a similarly styled Fiat. The AMT '34 3-window is a vastly superior starting point, and I have a thread on here somewhere that goes into detail about chopping it easily, and another one that shows the easy way to do front independent suspension on a '34.

Nice. Thanks.

Yeah, she's definitely one in a few billion, that's for sure. Back in about 2011, I found an old autographed black-and-white photo of her in a silver frame, in a junk shop in Chloride, Az.

Bummer. Glad you're not sleeping on the floor in the airport. Time was, Southwest was my favorite airline. Looks like the creeping global incompetence has invaded.

Technology is only a tool to augment human ability, but as it's becoming a substitute due to abject laziness, apathy, and complacency on the part of the masses, machines will ultimately be better people than people are.

Baffling indeed. Sources are out there, easy to find with a little effort. Oh...sorry. I said "effort".

I'd sure like to know how much eBay pays their third-rate techie dwerps, 'cause the site is continually glitchy, and different glitches seem to manifest almost every other day. I have to use eBay rather a lot for business, and I continue to do so because there's not much of anything I need available locally anymore, little in uncommon hardware, metal and plastic stock, machine tools, electronic bits, etc., and I refuse to support Bezos (Amazon) unless there's just no other alternative. I'm sick to death of having to devise workarounds for stupid almost every damm time I try to accomplish anything. I remember a world where things actually worked, a time where a lot of people in the USA made things and fixed things, and not every dammed thing came from China. But I guess "you can't live in the past", eh?

Y'all do know the basic kit is repops of ancient Revell parts-pack tooling from the early 1960s, right? The frame itself is on the left, below. Fiat body kit source, below center

60 F outside, low humidity, sun shining, birds singing. Nize day. Going for a hike shortly.

Day in, day out, people have problems with the concept of "one sentence".

The fact that there are people in the world, a lot of 'em, who simply cannot process concepts like "honor" and "duty" and "truth", and expecting them to, or trying to communicate with them, is less fruitful than attempting to teach calculus to a cat. No disparagement of cats intended.

Thanks for the reminder. I'd intended to make it this year, but prior commitments intervened. Next year...