Yeah you actually want other to sell you goods because it means they now hold USD, and global trade can be done in USD. You get an actual tangible good in return for imaginary currency you can print as much of as you want so long as you maintain military dominance (which you also fund with the same currency you print) - it's the economic privilege the USA enjoys and now wants to throw away for no reason. From the point of view of the trade, the USA is winning here, because they buy a tangible good that has a base value that is inherent in the material, but the selling country only gets currency that can be devalued quite quickly if these kinds of economic policies of destruction continue.

The drop in global demand for USD is gonna cause massive issues for the US, especially as it is going to impact treasuries and other countries buying US debt, which in very real terms means massive shrinking of budgets and a higher overall cost of servicing existing debts. This is what the whole fear over Japan and China unloading all their US treasuries is about and is why the US wants to replace everything with century bonds as the interest payment on the debts Japan / China hold makes up for 75% of income taxes collected, and they have hit wall with their ability to continually expand that debt.

The real solution would have been to remove trade barriers, not put more of them up, but I think it's clear at this point that the goal is an attempt at mutual economic suicide, with the hair brained idea that somehow, once all economies are destroyed, the US will somehow come out ahead from being "less destroyed" than the rest.

No one in the US administration has considered the possibility that countries will increase trade with each other and bypass the US, or make their own economic agreements. It's literally like a shop owner having a tantrum and raising all their prices on customers depending on their race, and thinking they are the smartest shop owner on the street for doing so, without considering that 1 - they will go out of business, and 2- customers will just go to other shops.

You know what's wild - I recently listened to a 3 part podcast on the Jonestown suicide cult / Jim Jones, and they had a bunch of audio recordings of Jim Jones speaking to his followers... the dude sounds exactly like trump, speaks like him too. Similarity in phrases, inflection, gaslighting, etc.

I think those who still have brain cells left are too afraid to speak out, but more than that I think many of them are completely convinced that what is happening right now is a good thing, and they just need to continue to have faith in their glorious leader who will lead them to the promised land.

The grocery store buys your money from you and pays you in food.

Yeah good catch - its basically just not even filtering the incoming air - which is stupid dangerous - easy to grenade the turbo / score the cylinder walls that way.

That's the crank case ventilation - the original design puts it back into the air intake to reburn it, as ford had to do this to meet emissions standards, although for larger trucks in that year they could just vent it to the atmosphere.

It looks like there used to be a hose on there, probably running down through the engine along the frame, to vent it below the truck when driving, otherwise everything in the engine bay is gonna eventually be covered in oil from all the crank case gases just venting in there.

Travel with a flip phone, although this probably puts you on a list as well.

Just 45 more months to go! (Or potentially more).

What infrastructure specifically are you talking about here that Airdrie residents get for free?

Calgary would argue that they subsidize Airdrie because they use Calgary infrastructure but do not pay property taxes to Calgary.

Why would Airdrie pay property taxes to Calgary when the majority of the thing property taxes are used for do not benefit Airdrie residents? The main highways used by Airdrie to get to Calgary are provincial, not municipal. As for maintenance of waste water, sanitation, parks, and non provincial roads, none of these are really used by residents of Airdrie.

This kind of argument is an argument in favors of placing tolls on everything - if someone comes from Edmonton and drives through Calgary, they also aren't paying for any of the infrastructure that they may or may not enjoy while visiting.

Airdrie and Chestermere will likely fight to retain their own municipalities though. Airdrie would see huge increases in property taxes if they were part of Calgary, so their protectionism measures will fight to keep them separate.

Eventually when you drive out there you won't see a difference between when one municipality ends and another one begins though, but its still a separate municipality, and Calgary will be the city proper, and the rest will be the Greater Calgary Area.

I don't think he is smart enough to be malicious - literally a case of stupid and anyone with any intelligence has already left government positions.

Years ago when I worked in (municipal) government I saw the same thing - when the writing on the wall came many people would retire or move laterally so they did not have to deal with idiots.

You get new upstarts being given positions in the new team who are eager to please and are willing to suspend their own judgements to follow orders for the hope of a payoff down the line.

Bad decisions are further compounded with more bad follow up decision as no one wants to go against the grain - and they don't care either - as their livelihood is not actually impacted by the decisions. The new US oligarchs can easily afford to lose 50% or 99% of their wealth and continue the same lifestyle they had before, so none of these actions are consequential to them.

It's all a big meaningless game to them of trying to impress each other.

The writing on the wall to convert debt to century bonds was there and pointed out by many as soon as Japan (largest holder of US debt) started selling US treasury bonds in favor of Japanese ones. I believe it's $1.4 trillion worth of US debt that Japan has been unloading that pays around 4%, and about 75% of all income tax collected in the USA goes to servicing this debt. That coupled with all the carry trade investors using the Yen being screwed as the Yen interest rates increased due to Japan choosing to invest in domestic products meant the US treasury and a large segment of the markets threatened to go insolvent unless something changed - and fears of them defaulting on bond payments led China (2nd largest holder of US debt after Japan) to start unloading all their US debt.

The century bonds is a scheme to try to delay repayment for as long as possible, with the hope that by the time 100 years has gone by it's gonna be not only totally someone else's problem, but perhaps large scale economic changes will occur which means it never has to be repaid. It's the closest thing you can get to a "yeah I probably am not paying you back" kind of thing. The idea that countries would want to hold that for long term security only makes sense when the issuer is viewed as ultra safe - and the actions of the USA are in the opposite direction.

The only problem with #2 is that the revenues they are going to be collecting are based upon imaginary numbers that don't factor in the decrease of purchasing as consumers think twice about buying non essential items.

Not sure what their plan is to get out of this downwards spiral except to gaslight everyone that there is an eventual light at the end of the tunnel, but that light will probably only come after massive global changes that surely involve wars.

I got 550k km on my engine. Even with the EBPV pedestal delete it will high idle upon cold start, but generally when it's super cold I plug it in. My exhaust temp sensor will show that even in the brutal cold it is hovering around 0 degrees C (32f) when I go to start it - meaning when its plugged in the heat is dissipating enough through the engine and down into the exhaust manifold.

Agree though that generally you start the engine and start driving - just stay out of the RPM's until it hits operating temp.

The US economy going south is part of the plan, I mean it's literally the whole point of it all.

The rest of the plan makes no sense to most economists - basically reduce economies of all countries, force external debt holders to convert their debt into century bonds, restart manufacturing in the US (i.e undo all the economic policies that nixon instituted and all the forms it grew into - but without returning to the bretton-woods system), charge other countries for the "protection" the USA military provides (in conjunction with leaving NATO etc), and then, maybe then, the USA will have a slightly stronger economy in relation to other countries than it has now, and this economic difference should match the tariff rates charged, so in essence american consumers will see no increase in their price of goods.

This is like... bad cocaine fueled nightmare fanfiction from a wanna be hedge fund investment manager - which is, unsurprisingly, exactly where the plan came from.

smoot hawley

Right.. 2 world wars, countless new trade agreements, and a lost generation just to undo the damage.

Tough to say what is and what is not a bubble - the DJIA / SPY looks like a bubble post 1994. I think the london stock exchange has the most years of data - going back to the mid / late 1600's. From their perspective everything past 1909 is a giant bubble.

That being said though, if you look at the history of large market "corrections" (and this also depends on what % you use to define a correction), what we are seeing is decrease duration between corrections over time (at least past the 1930's).

I don't know if it's worthwhile to think of this in terms of seismic events - are a bunch of small earthquakes releasing the pressure so the big earthquake does not hit, or is the frequency of the small earthquakes increasing pointing to the fact that the big quake is getting closer and closer?

Long term markets will recover of course, but we are just stating to see downwards action at the end of a massive bull run across many time scales. Bear markets tend to be much shorter than bull markets, but still average around a year until recovery and often give back 2-10 years worth of "gains".

Time in the market wins out overall (or at least it has historically - but of course past performance etc etc), but with all economic metrics suddenly dropping like in freefall at all once, I think time in the markets over the next 12 months is just a waste.

Of course this can all change over the weekend as the SunnyDking utters some new BS between rounds of golf - but I somehow feel the rest of the world has been fooled twice now, and are unlikely to continue getting economically gaslit.

I don't think we need to wait as long as July.

Maybe by next week we can make it a decade worth of gains gone?

Even in cold climates the pedestal delete is fine - I'm up in Canada and have seen -40 winters with the 7.3 without issues. The function of the EBPV pedestal is to get the engine up to operating temperature faster because at operating temperatures the emissions profile is the lowest - it has little to do with anything else. Still perfectly start-able and drive able with it deleted.

p0236 p0340

Likely both these share 5v wiring. Get a wiring diagram and build a load tester with a halogen bulb and a fuse - you can start testing your wires. It's a bit time consuming, but if you are methodical about it, it's not that big of a pain - and while you are at it you can fix any of your broken / chaffed / weak wires. When I did mine I also rewrapped the whole wiring harness and ended up re-soldering a bunch of things.

Weak or problematic wiring can often cause strange issues, for example that only show up under load, or go away under load, or randomly come and go.

The issue is that it is nearly impossible to work on 10+ year projects that will have long term benefits but short term costs when all the parties only have a (relatively) short term outlook.

2020 (covid) market saw a 30% drop in 1 month - so far we have seen a 9% drop in 2 days. I think next week will show this market crisis to be bigger than the 2020 crisis, which means it can start to compete with the subprime mortgage crisis or the dotcom bubble crisis.

I think next week and the one after is deep red, as even a diversified global etf like xeqt gets hammered because all the markets are getting hammered - there is no safe haven from this.

I think the opportunity of a lifetime is going to come soon, but it is not today. The great depression was a market crash of 90%, and it took 9 months to bottom out and 15 years to makeup for lost gains.

Is this all for growing actives?

With an operation of this size I would suggest an auto bagger.

Biggest problem with the star seller program is that my most popular product is shipped in letter mail envelope everywhere globally, and within Canada I can ship in a bubble mailer as an oversized letter for a few dollars, whereas to ship tracked would cost 10x as much.

My second shop has star seller status, because the way I set up the shipping only has tracked / expedited parcels, but on my main shop I allow people the option to receive items untracked, tracked, etc.