I think you're right, and the original post is wrong to say that vans do it better every time, no exception.
However, I think that a van would be a more practical and better vehicle for a vast majority of people who are driving trucks. It's just that people don't care if things are practical, they want things that they think are cool.
You make good points and I agree that in this case, hiring a plumber right off the bat would have given you the better outcome.
As you mentioned, there is some risk to doing it yourself and this risk often motivates people to avoid even attempting to fix things. Part if it really is an exercise in learning about the thing and being realistic about how likely you are to succeed.
However, I don't think you should characterize the $300 as a total loss. You probably still have that big screwdriver and set of bolt cutters. Some of the toilet parts you bought might have been appropriate and included in the plumber's repair. You also probably learned a thing or two about plumbing, even if all you learned was that you'd rather hire a professional for future plumbing projects.
"The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy."
You're right, it would be super cool to kill lots of people and blow up all the infrastructure.
Well, there are legal proceedings trying to show that using the federal troops in this way is illegal and have them removed. What exactly are you proposing, that the LAPD start a war with the Marines?
I'm not trying to be negative about blaming people who are in bad financial situations but idk why more people don't realize that you can get things that you wouldn't normally be able to afford if you're willing to learn about them and do some work. Technicians/mechanics aren't usually geniuses, they've just read the manual.
I spent a lot of time having a very tight budget. I realized that the only way to afford my first car was to buy a busted one and fix it myself. I couldn't afford a mechanic but I could afford a repair manual.
But, I'm also confused by people who simply aren't curious. They don't want to know. They're totally content just not understanding how all of this technology around them works. Like, how are they OK with that?
You don't even have to shoot anything. You don't even have to be holding something capable of shooting something. The cop just has to say that from their perspective it kind of looked like you might have been holding something that could have been capable of shooting something and they'd likely be able to justify murdering you.
Build houses and fund education. I feel like I just came up with a miraculous solution to a majority of their complaints.
He's got a face for radio.
I appreciate a good shitpost. If only this were a Wikipedia article related to Richard Nixon.
I'm so good at not understanding stuff. My time has come.
Important context is missing. If traffic is light and you're cruising in the passing lane at the same speed as the rest of traffic, get out of the passing lane.
Edit: I'm enjoying the upvote/downvote ratio. 1/4 of people feel justified in creating a rolling roadblock. The other 3/4 of people would like them to change lanes.
That's terrifying. Those stupid cops will kill your baby with a flashbang, shoot your dog and then murder you becauese you were holding the TV remote during their veggie raid.
Even if he really was growing some pot plants, it shouldn't even be a big deal.
I understand that drawing doesn't work that way. What I'm suggesting is that drawing doesn't work that way because visualizing something in your mind is so far removed from actually seeing it.
For example, you could imagine that you want to paint a lake with mountains. You can get an idea of how you'll compose the image, what the colors are, how the strokes might make textures on the canvas, all the details. It's more than just knowing the facts of each object, color, line. It's an understanding of how it will look visually and you "picturre it" but it's nowhere close to the sensory experience of actually looking at the finished painting.
This is my experience, at least.
Not being flippant here: If you can actually see it, why not just see it on the paper and essentially trace what you see?
Interesting. Maybe if there's a spectrum of ability for visualizing things, I'm just closer to aphantasia than I am to vivid mental images which rival visual perception.
I should preface this by saying that this is just my opinion and that I may be completely wrong.
I'm convinced that for 99% of people thinking they have aphantasia, it's just a miscommunication about what it means to "see" something in your mind. When people picture something in their mind, they can't literally see it in the way that they would see something with their eyes. Seeing something in your mind is just having an understanding of what it would look like.
People will say that they can "see" whatever you're asking them to "picture" but they only ever hold an understanding of what the thing would look like. This understanding can be elaborate but there is not actually an experience that could be perhaps better described as a visual hallucination.
If you visualize a cube in your mind, you don't actually see it. You just understand where all the lines, faces, and vertices would be. If you rotate it in your mind, you understand how those angles and the appearance would change at each moment as it rotates. You can even superimpose where these lines would go onto something you're looking at, but still you don't actually see it there, you just understand how you would perceive it, where the edges would go, what it would obstruct.
The reason that I'm convinced that people only hold concepts and visual understanding in their minds and not actual images is that most people are pretty bad at drawing. When people do start drawing, they create a representation of the sparse landmarks that actually made up their visual idea and then they have to start filling in the details using reasoning and logic. Artists and people who practice drawing get better at this, are more attentive to detail and learn techniques to make more convincing images. If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they'd be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.
Furthermore, unlike "seeing" when you picture something while conscious, I think dreams actually do include visual hallucinations that can seem similar to actual visual perception.
I won't pretend to see the whole picture here but it sounds like we're talking about 7% female specific data vs everything else. Most of the remaining data may be non gender specific.
To present this as 7% female and 93% male is disingenuous.
As a counterpoint, breast cancer research (an issue predominantly affecting women) recieves far more funding than prostate cancer research.