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David Burge Profile picture
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
Karma's janitor
165 subscribers
May 7 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
If I get hit by a car the day before I turn 65 who inherits my fucking money So if I understand this correctly it's my fucking money, except I can't fucking check the fucking account balance, or fucking borrow against, or use as fucking collateral, or fucking leave to my kids, or fucking touch until they say so
May 1 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Who's this "we" Nutlick "our children," but for companies Image
Apr 29 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
RIP math So if, I'm understanding this correctly, there were 119 million fentanyl junkies waiting around on American street corners for their pushers to deliver 22 million fentanyl pills that they were going to split 5 ways into 119 million deadly doses
Apr 28 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Education has deteriorated so drastically in California and NY nobody there is even aware of this Once again, this is an example of Simpson's Paradox at work. States like CA and NY have overall reading & math scores above MS and LA, but when adjusted for socioeconomic factors - school lunch eligibility, family income, race - Southern states are now outperforming.
Apr 26 • 29 tweets • 12 min read
A happy belated License Plate Day to all who celebrate from #DavesCarIDService! On April 25, 1901 the state of New York became the first to require license plates on automobiles. Oddly, though, it did not *issue* those plates; it merely required registrants to display one prominently on their vehicle, bearing the owner's initials.

Material and construction was up to the registrant - metal, wood, leather, whatever, it didn't say. Cars were still rare enough that the initials were though sufficient to track any car down. But within a few years numbers were added, and other states quickly followed suit. Most of those very early pre-1905 license plates nationwide were of the homemade leather variety.

The first 2 photos are of extremely rare surviving 1901 NY license plates; #3, a 1902-03 NY plate with number and owner initials. In #4, a 1904 Iowa leather plate. Iowa became the first state west of the Mississippi to require license plates that year.Image
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Image The distinction of the first state to *issue* its own license plates goes to Massachusetts. In 1903 Masshole car registrants receive a uniform state plate, #1 going to Frederick Tudor, descendent of Boston's famed "Ice King" Frederick Tudor, who made his fortune shipping ice from the frozen north to the American South, the Caribbean, even as far as Calcutta.

The 1903 plates themselves were quite spiffy and durable, porcelainized iron plates in Navy blue and white. And worth a pretty penny today. The pair in #1 were issued to Joshua Sears of 12 Arlington St. Boston, and are the lowest number 1903 MA plates known to exist.

Within a few years states adopted the time-honored medium of sheet aluminum, stamped by a hardworking state prison convict working his way to rehabilitation. While the 1903 MA plates are quite valuable, the most expensive American plate on record is #2, a survivor aluminum 1921 Alaska Territory, which fetched $60,000 at auction.Image
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Apr 23 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Not a single citation from the legacy press after I did all the work for them, smdh They even got this wrong, the mystery wasn't whether it was a 1940-41 Ford Deluxe woody, it was whether it was a *1941-42* Ford Deluxe woody. It obviously isn't a 1940, and I conclusively determined it was a 1941 per the fender top marker lights. Again, smdh Image
Apr 22 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The mystery USS Yorktown car is a 1941-42 Ford woody wagon, I have spoken Sir you picked the wrong fight
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Apr 18 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
cc: @NobelPrize "Let's bring down inflation with 150% tariffs and 0% interest rates" is perhaps the most galaxy brained economic theory I have ever attempted to ponder
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I live in Austin TX which, as you might have heard, has a few California transplants. I know a lot of them, and without exception they are painfully aware of why they they left CA and do not want those mistakes repeated here
"Those damn California libruls moved into Austin and turned it blue" is probably the most clueless reaction I get on this site. Austin has always been lefty, and if anything Cali transplants have made it less so.
Apr 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Having lost my beloved Kum & Go baseball cap, I would be deeply indebted to you for a replacement.

I will never forgive the Mormons for the calumny of destroying America's most trusted Kum-themed brand name This is like when the changed the name of Marshall Field's to Macy's, only one billion times worse
Apr 10 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
I see a lot of commentary on this, but as a car-type-of-person I will offer my $0.02 (a thread) First, yeah, Boomer Bait. The Nova SS in race #1 and 1940 Ford pickup in #2 are both highly modified. Stock form, the Nova would've had ~14 second 1/4 time rather than 10. And stock 1940 Ford wouldn't even had broken 20 seconds.

But the modification is *the entire point*.
Mar 28 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Wait'll they realized that if we really wanted to hook up 8 million rural households with broadband we could just skip this bullshit, buy all of them Starlink terminals at $400 apiece, and save 92% off the DC retail politics price tag Same thing with California High Speed Rail. For the same price to build 10 miles of choo choo track somewhere between Merced and Bakersfield you could have given free $2500 fly anywhere flight vouchers to every man woman and child in the state of California
Mar 22 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
Internal combustion, electric, steam? Old hat, been there done that. Today's #DavesCarIDService salutes some mad geniuses who REALLY thought outside the box when it came to alternative vehicle power. Starting with Ron Main's rubber band-powered "Twisted" land speed record car.

Car-wise I was kinda jaded, thinking I had seen it all, until I saw this latex propelled green energy machine debut at 2008 Bonneville Speed Week.Image Yep, you read that correctly, rubber bands. The SCTA (Southern California Timing Association) land speed record book has hundreds of classes for different body types, engine displacement, wheel counts, and power sources. Which leads to a lot of innovation, and craziness. Main owns a number of those records, including the world's fastest Ford Flathead V8 at 302 mph.

And what's more innovative than inventing your own rubber band powered class? That was the intention with Twisted. Under the hood: a battery of 150 industrial rubber bands, the kind used to secure cargo on pallets. Anchored to a set of gears that could be wound up with an electric motor.

How to keep them from binding, though? The following content is for mature audiences only. Rubber, as we all know needs to be lubricated, and a team crew member was designated to apply friction-reducing lubricants. Main referred to him as "the fluffer."

How did it do? SCTA measures speed over flying mile, but allow for a vehicle assisted push start. The goal was pretty modest, 30 mph, but the biggest challenge was to sustain rubber band power for that one mile. Sadly it wasn't going to happen that first year, which was also the last year Twisted appeared there. The rubber band class record remains vacant, in case you want to attempt it yourself.Image
Mar 16 • 25 tweets • 10 min read
Time for #DavesCarIDService to get back on the road again! During SXSW this week, I lucked into a little behind-the-scenes access at the Luck Reunion music fest at Willie Nelson's Luck Ranch outside Austin. Lucky me!

That included a couple of the more notorious vehicles around: Willie's tour buses, including the original Honeysuckle Rose. Sorry for the blurry cell phone pix, maybe it was due to a contact high, I'm not admitting anything.Image
Image Here's a more competent photo of the "Honeysuckle Rose II," a Canadian-made 1990 Eagle Model 15 with custom interior by Florida Coach, and murals by an artist name "Rainmaker" (this is a car ID service after all). Willie's original tour bus was a 1983 Prevost that was totaled, without him in it. The various Honeysuckle Roses were all Prevosts:

I: 1983-90
II: 1990-96
III: 1996-2005
IV: 2005-presentImage
Mar 14 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
"We're not allowed to say <thing> in this country."

"But you just said the thing you said you weren't allow to say, on a podcast with a million listeners, and literally nothing happened to you."

"Oh so now I'm not allowed to say that I'm not allowed to say the thing?" I wish to clarify to all who are confused over this issue: others pointing out that the supposedly forbidden thing you said was 100% factually wrong, and you are obviously mentally ill and/or retarded, does not constitute "censorship"
Mar 11 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
JFC here comes the tech bros again with their robo fetish Image MIT genius: my prototype $50k robo-man does the work of the three hired hands that Kansas farmers use to harvest their wheat fields, according to the Wizard of Oz

Silicon Valley VCs: here's $3 billion
Mar 11 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Top B1G serial killers (minimum 2 deaths):

1. Jeff Dahmer OSU
2. Ted Bundy Washington
3. Ted Kaczinski Michigan
4. OJ Simpson USC
5. Donald Miller Michigan State *Bill Ayers (Michigan) disqualified on a technicality. Due to incompetence his bomb only accidentally killed three friends
Mar 6 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
So I watched 'Pepe Le Moko' (1937) with Jean Gabin and joked to my wife that maybe he was inspiration for Pepe Le Pew, and it turns out that was actually the case and now I don't even know what to think anymore Image
Image It's literally the movie where 'Let me take you to zee Casbah' comes from
Feb 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to my opinion posts.

I am going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: stealing pies from window sills and crashing trucks into liquor stores is bad I am aware that this change in editorial policy will be seen as abrupt and controversial, and may result in anger, mass boycotts, and loss of followers. But it is time to provide a voice to the reported silent majority of those opposed to pie theft and liquor store crashes.
Feb 19 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Stupidest, most brazen banana republic vote buying idea ever conceived. Every cent of waste cut should go to deficit reduction. This is like having $100k of credit card debt, canceling your Netflix subscription, and then celebrating your newfound fiscal restraint by going on a Disney Cruise
Feb 14 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Man, AI is somehow even more shit when it doesn't have any actual images to train on "Grok, make me a picture of Hitler thunderdunking on Michael Jordan"