x436413 (u/x436413) - Readit News

x436413 commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

HeyLaughingBoy · a year ago

And for a horse that's not used to loading, a livestock trailer is often much easier because they're more comfortable getting into it than, e.g., a 2-horse slant.

Judging by the number of horses my wife hauls, most horse owners don't have their own truck/trailer. Which makes sense: for most people, the trailer won't be used very often, and hay is usually delivered by the farmer, so don't need a truck for that.

How did we get so far OT?

x436413 · a year ago

you're limited to one horse at a time with livestock trailer, and if load is a problem, you can use a straight load and i guess remove center divider in a straight load. because i train rather than haul, i'd opt for taking time with load of course.

personal farms don't need to haul, there's no disagreement about that, but op suggested that you can run a horse business this way. it took me a while to realize that he has a vanity farm that's funded by his tech money, so you know he can gradually grow, he doesn't need to board, or train, or any of those other things people in the business diversify their income sources with.

i don't think we're OT at all. in horse business and generally farming you have two types of vehicles relevant to this conversation, trucks and gators. you absolutely need both. your truck can act as a gator, but your gator can't act a truck. you can use pretty much anything as a gator, i've got an old cherokee, an atv with a hitch and an actual gator doing the gator business. op uses a ford focus. the electric pickup from original post is probably a solid gator. kei trucks can be used as gators. but none of this stuff replaces a truck, which you still have to pay shit ton of money for.

usually in conversations like this it's horse people who come in and say "nah we need a truck to haul", but this time op suggested that you can in fact run a horse business with a gator, which prompted some questions from me

x436413 commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

alabastervlog · a year ago

My family background on one side was poor-rural and yeah, being surprised at this reads like a class difference to me.

x436413 · a year ago

this whole subthread started with some cornell guy saying that you can run a horse business off a back of a gator, because your neighbors can haul for you, which is pretty much as cloud people as it goes. i'll venture that there's not a single horse farm in u.s. no matter how poor that is not subsidized with tech money that outsources its hauling. we're talking about running a business here, not hauling daisy to county fairgrounds three times a season.

x436413 commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

PaulHoule · a year ago

Often these "farmers" are horse traders or people I know with a CDL who have the right equipment and also do other work for me like cut my hay. One of them is "retired" but he waved to me driving a dump truck when I was photographing a sign for my Uni that had a field of daffodils in front of it this morning.

The farmers I associate with care a lot about their animals and I expect them to take the same care with mine. As a rural person I judge people based on relationships and reputation and not on how much insurance they have. I'd trust any of these people to haul a horse in a big-ass trailer than I would trust myself or my wife.

x436413 · a year ago

you're not a rural person, c'mon, you're a wealthy cornell tech with a vanity farm. ithaca is dollar horse country, everyone knows that, so yeah i totally buy that in your fairly unique circumtances running a horse business off a back of a ford focus works. i read you as suggesting that the rest of the industry is silly for buying trucks, and you've got it figured out, but you simply punted on the hauling problem.

x436413 commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

PaulHoule · a year ago

Just pay somebody. In a rural area there are a lot of farmers with a big truck and a trailer and it costs less than the monthly payment on a big truck.

x436413 · a year ago

i'll be honest, if the rest of your profile wasn't at least somewhat corraborative, i'd say you're larping, but what you're saying is at least irresponsible. most farmers in rural area have livestock trailers, not horse trailers, hauling for hire (including if you're hauling for students at your barn or whatever) requires CDL and a bunch of other documentation, which you're not typically going to have as a farmer, and more documentation if you're hauling interstate (my vet is across a border), but would i even trust random joe dirt to haul for me? i've hired professionals to transport horses, and i have a handful of people who could haul in a bind and unlicensed but i wouldn't rely on them to be available in an emergency. last year i had to haul an old mare, she was colic, she laid down in the field, covered in sweet, and had to be put down at the vet, but overall it was less than an hour from load to vet. if i had to rely on "farmers", that would prolong her agony. now i just train, so i don't usually have freak accidents, but at riding barns, with students, on trail, something happens from time to time. riding barns i work with tell me horror stories all the time. i'll give you a benefit of the doubt, maybe your wife knows the details, and ithaca being horse country, maybe she's got a friendly neighbor on speed dial, but then you're at best outsourcing your responsibilities to someone else. what other things you can save on to make your operation profitable, at the expense of safety and well being of hoss?

x436413 commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

PaulHoule · a year ago

I like it. My wife runs a riding academy and we use a Honda Fit the way some people would use a pickup truck: we can fit 10 bales of wood shavings in the back. [1] We’re dreading when it fails because they don’t make the fit anymore and compact hatchbacks seem to be on the way out. Recent experiences have made me a bit of a Buick enthusiast and I can see driving a 2005-ish sedan except that I won’t get those sawdust bales into the trunk. We are also thinking of fitting in EV into the fleet, so far the used Nissan Leaf has been the main contender but this is a pickup truck I could get into.

[1] We were profitable from day one because we didn’t buy a $80,000 pickup on day one the way everybody else does.

x436413 · a year ago

how do you haul hoss though? i would imagine you then outsource to professional hauling services? what do you do for vet visits, when it's not a farm call?

x436413 commented on Alain Delon has died theguardian.com/film/arti... · Posted by u/xnhbx

082349872349872 · 2 years ago

Didn't Vladimir Vysotsky have a french girlfriend?

While watching a retro-Soviet russian program, I was amused to see a videotape on a desk clearly labeled «Эммануэль» — "Emmanuelle".

(I'm pretty sure Americans could watch that even despite subtitles?)

EDIT: come to think of it, both france and russia (as well as bits of africa?) used SECAM, which probably helped cultural exchange a great deal. Back in the day, it was easier for us to get not-broadcast-in-the-US anime than not-broadcast-in-the-US BBC programs, despite the language barrier, because the former were NTSC but the latter PAL.

Sting has a great story about watching Soviet children's programming while at uni (probably explaining his lines "I don't subscribe to this point of view / It'd be such an ignorant thing to do / If the Russians love their children too"), but I kind of wondered if his friend who built the SECAM decoder had, at least originally, been more interested in picking up cross-channel programming than cross-iron-curtain?

x436413 · 2 years ago

vysotsky's last wife was french-born, though she was ethnically at least part russian, her father fled during the soviet revolution. but you could look at it as a long history of a weird kind of friendship between the two countries: during the french terror french nobility fled to russia, establishing and strengthening burgeoning francophone tendencies of russian aristocracy. then during communist terror in russia, russian nobility fled to france, establishing the fifth column there, but also perhaps ensuring and cultivating soviet-french relationship through 20th century.

i'm pretty sure everyone had a copy of emmanuelle on vhs at some point, but very much within the cultural sphere i was talking about in op. like speaking of emmanuelle, there was a handful of porn movies that the entirety of europe, france and late perestroyka su watched, that americans never heard of.

the secam bit might be relevant, but i distinctly remember pal/secam switch on both the tape player and the tv. i think maybe the technical followed social, La tulipe noire was played in soviet cinema in the 60s and it was a huge huge success.

x436413 commented on Surveillance Watch – the hidden connections within the surveillance industry surveillancewatch.io... · Posted by u/nabla9

x436413 · 2 years ago

is this available in a sqlite format† or does anybody know what open dataset supports this? i'd like to explore the connections, but the visualization is both slow on my machine, doesn't quite work on firefox, and is perhaps not in a way i would personally find useful.

†machine parsable format

x436413 commented on Alain Delon has died theguardian.com/film/arti... · Posted by u/xnhbx

cryptica · 2 years ago

It's interesting how celebrity culture works that most Americans have probably never heard of this guy.

French people know essentially every American movie star but there is almost no culture flow in the other direction when it comes to film.

Some might suggest that there is a language barrier since French is not as widely spoken as English internationally... Yet I was surprised to find out that, for example, a lot of Russians above a certain age know about French film celebrities. The language barrier does not seem to have been a problem in that case.

I think maybe it's partly because most Americans will refuse to watch films with subtitles whereas people in most other countries who don't speak English are used to it.

x436413 · 2 years ago

alain delon was huge in soviet union and by extension in various zones of soviet influence, because france was soviet friendly state and their cinematography was pretty good. back before the anglo-american establishment gained full cultural dominance, the world was divided not just along the comic lines of "axis", there was more subtlety to it. there was a whole cultural space that existed separately from english speaking world, and it wasn't restricted to specific countries. it was more like european/soviet/communist-regime sphere, where europeans were socialist sympathetic, soviets were open to their influence and various communist regime countries provided exciting, ethnic backdrop and variety. it is to this day a kind of secret language (now mostly dead) that i share with random old men from kenya: they too have watched alain delon movies, can sing along to joe dassin, know who dalida is, etc.

x436413 commented on The Bad Politics of Bad Posture newrepublic.com/article/1... · Posted by u/e0

andrei_says_ · 2 years ago

What helped you undo it? I see so much advice floating around and I know 90% is bs but not sure how to identify the 10%.

x436413 · 2 years ago

my advice is not universally applicable, sorry. i had a very strong mysore style ashtanga† practice in my 20s, that i at some point abandoned. i simply picked it up again, and it still took me close to a year to get my spine dynamic enough, get my muscules moving to arest and maybe revert some of the ossification? it's not visibly there at this point, but through close athletic observation i know it's not ever going to be 100%. i've complemented it with an occasional chiropractic adjustment and massage, but that's about it. i didn't start it exclusively for the purposes of fixing the hump, i realized that i'm getting old (in my 40s now) and that i will greatly regret slowly degrading into old age without having the experience of fit working body again.

†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysore_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_vinyasa_yoga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUgtMaAZzW0

x436413 commented on The Bad Politics of Bad Posture newrepublic.com/article/1... · Posted by u/e0

x436413 · 2 years ago

i also didn't get past the lede, there's a lot of evidence that slouching is unhealthy, that bad posture has all kinds of effects on musculature, ossification, organ displacement. i actually started to develop a hump in my 30s from being a techie which took a lot of work to undo, but now i see those hump precursors on teenage girls. looking into the background of the author, Daniel Felsenthal, "Daniel Felsenthal is a fiction writer, poet, essayist and critic with work in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation". how is this person at all qualified to comment on these subjects? why does he think he is? imho journalism has utterly discredited itself at this point.