Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.

Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.

It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?

That's a decade or two out of date. Maybe more. Here's this weekend's list of sex and fetish events in SF. There's a nostalgia tour for tourists of SF's sex history, and a screening of porn films from a Berlin festival. Yawn.

Dealers try to mystify and generally complicate the process of buying a car by offering to arrange financing, making you a trade-in "deal" and obfuscating the true cost of the car. Fortunately you can get a detailed break down of the dealer's costs (including factory to dealer incentives) from Consumer Reports. Then you arrange financing elsewhere (or pay cash), sell your existing car yourself, decide on how much markup you'll pay, and resolve not to buy any additional services or warranties through the dealer. If you do those things you won't be walking into the dealership like a lamb to slaughter. They might as well try to fuck the Rock of Gibraltar. Some of them will try, but you just walk out the door and find a dealership that will sell you a car on your terms.

The last car I bought I walked into the dealer; the salesman saw I had the printouts and said, "I'm not stupid. How much are you going to pay?" I named a price 5% over the dealer's true cost. I could have opened with 3%, but I appreciated not having to go through the whole ridiculous ritual. It was a reasonable offer and the salesman immediately accepted. Half an hour later we finished up the paperwork; I dropped off a cashier's check the following day and drove my car off the day after that. It was all low-key and civilized, and by executing the deal quickly the dealership earned a fair paycheck for a couple hours of work.

This is the way buying a car should be: you tell the dealer which model you want, hand over a check and drive off. Letting the dealer do anything else "for you" is asking to be screwed over. Despite what the salesman claims, there is nothing the dealer can do to make your life simpler, except maybe fetching your plates from the motor vehicle registry. Do everything else yourself, including determining the price you'll pay for the car.

I'm sure there's some religions I'm not against. I'm against, ironically, the extremely bigoted ones. Which includes Christianity, specifically. Christians believe themselves to be superior. Ironically, I feel that makes them inferior. Is it ironic both because of my sense of superiority (relative) or because it's the opposite of what they're trying to achieve? Sure. But then, if there is something that puts people below other people, it's treating people badly. And that is what people do when they think they're better than other people.

I don't go scraping Jesus fish off of people's cars or anything. But some assface did scrape the Darwin fish off one of my cars gone by. And that, friend, is why I am anti-religion in a nutshell — that is, writ very small. There are good people who are also religious, even though their religion is doing harm. I suppose I'll do my best to hate the sin and not the sinner.

Yeah. And their reaction was more of the same. I am not impressed.

Get it right: I'm anti-religion.

Maybe he just meant "conductor". Or maybe he meant strands. But it's a fact that some cables with which devices will charge just fine at 5V1A will not supply 5V2A to a device successfully. I like to think the device is detecting low voltage on a brief test charge and then giving up, but probably it's just trying over and over again to charge and failing forever. Even the 7W for the Nexus 7 2nd has been a problem.

Mu.

You mandate that all cars speak some sort of common language for negotiating power levels, and guarantee a certain amount of interoperability. It worked in the automotive industry well enough for this purpose with OBD-II. Sure, there's all kinds of secret bullshit going on, but you can get basic powertrain codes. It's easier to go out-of-fold with the euro stuff than the American stuff, amusingly enough. And the euro stuff is more likely to use standard output values, whereas the american stuff will require odd conversion factors before data is usable. There's no good reason for that, the Ford PCMs for example are plenty powerful enough to do the conversion, it doesn't need to be left to the scan tool.

I'm with you there. Finding a cheap USB cable that will pass 5V@2A reliably is nontrivial.

Well, they've talked about making Roadsters again eventually. And then there's the X coming.

Every automaker is now making or thinking about making EVs, or at least hybrids. This is a massive step in the right direction. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that after the Prius, the Tesla is one of the biggest influences in this movement. But I would prefer to never deal with another $tealership again. You know we still say that over in car-land, I guess we're less mature than the people who get angry when you type Micro$oft — you know, the kiddies too young to remember Compu$erve.

Almost all car dealerships' sole purpose is to see how much they can overcharge you for stuff, including how much more vehicle they can sell you than what you need.

Sometimes I think I should sell cars, because I actually care about people. But I guess I'd have to sell Subarus, because I won't lie to people. There's only so many jobs doing that. What, Selling Subarus, or selling without lying? Yes.

At least you can mostly escape the latter. Get yourself an introductory eye exam someplace, or hell even pay for it, and use the numbers to order lenses online — fit in some frames you picked up anywhere you like. There's lots of good ones out there at flea markets and yard sales.

They don't actually deserve to do that. Their first function is to overcharge you as much as possible for a commodity product that is available from many different sources. Their second function is to try to milk you for service revenues. Typically, dealerships depend on service for a significant portion of their income and automakers depend on parts sold to those dealership for a significant portion of theirs. The parts themselves are grossly overmarked and a tidy profit can be made selling them at 60% or less of the list price in most cases, especially from everyone but the base Japanese brands.* The Germans exemplify this but Ford and Chevy are right up there. If you manage to locate a scrupulous dealership you can actually get the parts at reasonable prices — which, of course, the internet has already enabled. The hilarious thing, though, is that the really good prices on many of these parts actually come from dealerships. This is notably true in the Audi parts market. Audi Marin? Evil right down to their black little hearts. Won't work with you at all on parts pricing. But I can go to any of several sites online and get a nice quote from a dealership that has precisely what I need for somewhere half to two-thirds the price they want around here. On the other hand, back when I was buying Nissan parts, my local dealership would give me parts at reasonable prices. And back when I had a local Ford dealership, they would also modify the ridiculous Ford list prices down to something sane and based on their cost for me. Obviously, I buy my Mercedes parts on eBay.

So basically, given that the dealership's job is usually to fuck you over, why in shit would I give one tenth of one fuck about them today? The ones that are worth a crap will continue to exist, because they already fulfill a valuable function. The ones that don't won't be missed. Am I supposed to care about the jobs? Because I assure you that those people don't give a shit about IT jobs lost to outsourcing — another part of a natural process which I call progress. And I say this as an on-again, off-again IT professional.

* And maybe the Koreans, I haven't dealt with them yet.

San Francisco is peopled by the self-entitled and the disenfranchised and very little in between. This is a natural factor of the immense property values. Sooner or later there will be a big earthquake and it will all slide back into the sea and we can all have a good laugh. In the meantime they will continue gentrifying the last vestiges of personality out of it.

I heard once about this thing called the crusades...

Maybe we oughta just burn down all the churches

The bastards now are so full of themselves that they don't even pretend anymore.

Well, that is part of it - to show you what's there place and your place. Like at the airport, nobody expects to find a bomb in the keester of a midwest sales manager, but he's gonna get the anal probe so that he knows just who's in charge. It's worse than most people would treat a dog, really.