The EGR gasket did not arrive yesterday. Today I am therefore going to push the Fiero out of the garage and get after the front brakes.
Incidentally, here's the U-joint from the Jeep's passenger side front axle:
Top and bottom is what all four bearings should have looked like. Left and right were decidedly less than optimal.
Funny part: this u-joint could, theoretically, be cleaned up and reused. In a world where replacements weren't available (or were cost-prohibitive) one could do exactly that. But in this world, at a replacement cost of $9, it's not worth the effort.
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Crude oil is trading somewhere around $45 a barrel, and here in the Fungal Vale gas is selling for well over $3 a gallon as if crude were still twice as expensive as it is. Because one piece of equipment at one refinery went "poit" and let out its magic smoke. Thanks, EPA. Thanks, NIMBY-ites.
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Larry Correia gets it right.
The real lesson to be taken from Trump and Bernie is that many Americans are so damned tired of the establishment and the media that they’ll root for anybody, no matter how crazy they are, if they’ll just quit sucking up and actually stand for something.He's predicting the elections will come down to Hillary vs. Cruz.
Hillary--there are some very serious security breaches arising out of the private server fiasco but we've seen this show before; like her husband Slick Willie, Hillary is coated with an advanced low-friction coating which protects her from having things stick to her. "Slick Hilly", we could call her.
Fun Hillary Clinton Fact: the coefficient of friction of Hillary Clinton's skin is not actually zero because you still have to consider the Van Der Waals force. (That was a Hillary Clinton Fact and a physics joke two-fer! I'm smart!)
Bernie Sanders is, as Correia points out, not doing very well versus the "black lives matter" idiots, and furthermore made the critical mistake of replying (correctly) that "all lives matter", which the "black lives" morons insist is nothing but pure racism and bigotry.
You should read Correia's entire post, because it's got so much good stuff in it I can't possibly quote it all here. But Correia posts his own Hillary Clinton Fact!
Hillary is a sort of woman shaped carbon based life form.Huzzah! I am no longer a lone voice in the wilderness!
I really hope he's right about Jeb Bush not being the GOP's nominee. I really do. I'm not the only person suffering from "Bush fatigue".
On Jeb Bush… Ain’t gonna happen. He was the media’s initial pick, and it was even more painfully obvious than when all the democrats showed up in our open primaries to “cross the aisle” to nominate McCain, and then promptly ditched him for Obama on election day. But Jeb’s got zilch. Actual conservatives don’t like him, the Tea Party hates him. On the issues, he’s mumble mumble amnesty and mumble mumble that’s not what Common Core was supposed to mumble. Seriously, do you know any actual voter who likes Jeb? Can you think of one? I can’t. Jeb has all the suck of the old, dying, big government GOP, so the conservative base will be even less enthusiastic for him than they were for Romney and McCain, with the added benefit that his last name is Bush, so automatically half the country hates him....and I'd bet that nominating Bush would hand victory to the Democrats, because I sure as hell ain't voting for another Bush. Particularly not when he's the most liberal of the three that have been up for the job.
The election is fifteen months away and a lot can change between now and then, but seriously, I don't see Hillary being hauled off to jail; and even if she is, she can still run. Worst case, Obama has to pardon her--and if you don't think that can happen, you'd better think again, bud, because while Obama doesn't like the Clintons he's still a Democrat and he's going to do what he can to advance Democrat interests. (Liberal: "Hillary was pardoned for the e-mail thing, so it never happened." This would be uttered in all seriousness. Reply: "Oh, so, since Nixon was pardoned, Watergate never happened, right?" "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU NAZI NIXON IS EVIL HOW DARE YOU COMPARE HILLARY TO HIM")
Hillary has turned over her server, but if you seriously think anything incriminating was left on that machine, all she has to do is say that it was "someone on her staff" who did that, not her. The mysterious someone will take the fall, spend a decade in a minimum-security prison ("country club"), and retire to luxury thereafter, once he/she/it is safely out of the public eye.
But don't get your hopes up: Hillary Clinton will not go to jail over this. She won't even be prosecuted, much less charged or indicted. The people who support her don't see anything wrong with her behavior, and probably think it's all been manufactured by the GOP working with some bad eggs at the FBI, because those guys are a bunch of nazis anyway.
And pests won't be allowed to get in the way, either. Bernie Sanders' campaign stops are being interrupted by Clinton operatives. If Biden tries running, he'll get squashed.
The Democrat nominee will be Hillary.
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Fred Reed really does understand the race problem.
{Why] do blacks not fit into American society? First, very poor education. People reading at the level of middle school or below cannot find work in a technological society in which automation is putting literate whites out of work. Second, a culture of hostile dependency brought about by condescending racial policy that requires nothing of them.Worth reading.
What to do? To suggest that blacks need to make their kids do their homework is racism. To suggest that marriage is key to upward mobility is racism. To suggest that blacks really need to stop shooting each other is racism. To suggest that PhDs ought to be required to write English is racism.
Merry Christmas.
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Michael Flynn has a cogent discussion of the issues surrounding gender dysphoria.
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The biggest hard drive so far is an SSD storing 16 terabytes. It's a 2.5 inch drive, so they mean "large" in logical terms (data stored) rather than physical (form factor).
Shucks, anyone can make a large thing powerful. It really takes skill to make small things powerful. If someone tried building a 5.25" full-height hard drive with today's technology, they could easily pack a few dozen terabytes into one, if not more. (To say nothing of how much an 8" HDD could store.)
But 16 TB in the 2.5" form factor...that's only possible with silicon, and state-of-the-art silicon to boot.
...it costs about $7,500, of course. It's not even the size of a deck of cards.
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Late to bed, early to rise--I'm going to have a nap before I start wrenching, because the past few days have shown that if I wrench first, intending to nap later, instead I end up wrenching, then wrenching more, then doing this and that and the other thing...and by the time Mrs. Fungus gets home I'm exhausted.
The Fiero's brakes are primarily an issue with the sliders. They need some TLC. I can do an uncomplicated brake job in about an hour; it's all stuff I've done before. This will take longer because I'm having to do other things, like replacing the brake hoses, which means bleeding the brakes and-and-and, but (again) it's all stuff I've done before and I'm not worried about that.
I just really need that f-ing EGR gasket to get here so I can get started on making the thing run correctly. Argh.
Well, one thing at a time, right?