Two camps. One just runs on the insurance as if it was stock. And if they ever need their policy, they are going to be financially bankrupted.

The other camp is actually insured and yes it’s ridiculously expensive.

For example if you just have a new bumper or body kit with standard insurance, and someone tbones you, you’re standard insurance will probably pay out but will assume your car is worth less than stock because of modifications.

But if you have that body kit, and you run over a pedestrian, you’re going to personally be responsible because the insurance will say you modified the crash tested crumple and pedestrian zones on your vehicle. That violets the contract you have. Not only will they not pay, they’ll drop your policy. Then you’ll have to pay the millions for paralyzing little Timmy.

Best case scenario for standard insurance is you buy a $500 Fiero, do $50k of modifications to make it awesome. Someone crashes into you, and they total your car for $500. That’s the value of the vehicle.

As another data point one of my collector cars is a low mileage 1980’s vintage. It’s worth 6 figures and while the past few years is a garage queen, I do actually drive it on the road. I have special insurance for it that will pay to “restore” the vehicle in the case of an accident. You can’t buy parts new, and 99% of mechanics won’t even touch it. So anything in a shop is going to be ridiculously expensive. That’s what my insurance pays for. To make it back to current condition after an issue. I pay 200x to insure the vehicle than I do to register it on the road with the government.

Fiero is the literal go to car, there is tons of info out there.

Emmisions is usually combined with safety and road worthiness in the context of a road inspection. Emmisions also has requirements like no check engine lights, no electric faults, etc. In a modern car if you disconnect the radio you’ll get a check engine light. It might even refuse to start without additional hacks. So you’d have to go old school. And some of those old school engines are better when running with a CEL but a modern parallel system in place of the 40 year old onboard diagnostics.

Insurance companies won’t cover vehicles with extensive modifications. Making a kit car is basically a giant red flag. You haven’t crash tested it to see how safe you are or how safe the school child you accidental mow down is. You also don’t have inspections and insurance as the builder to make sure every bolt and weld is actually secure. If you get into a wreck with your kit car, you’re going to be on the hook yourself for all your damage, all the other people’s damage, and all the property damage. Even a streetlight can cost 5 digits easily, 6 digits by the time you pay a city crew to remove the old one, do environmental inspections, install new one, etc. It’s ridiculous. But you need the insurance to register the vehicle in most places, so that’s why you get it. The cheapest crappiest insurance to allow you to register the car. Then you make sure your umbrella policies cover you. That’s why this is a rich man’s game, to drive custom and one off vehicles. The other trick being you actually insure it yourself with a trust, back that with general insurance for everyone else, and personal insurance for you. But you don’t even look at this sort of thing unless you’re in the 0.1%.

You can think of it like why a salvaged title vehicle won’t be insurable by most companies. It’s a liability game. The whole western world runs on liabitly, and that’s where the money is.

People do this all the time with kit cars. The issue is that a modern corolla is a unibody design. That body style and panels are actually the frame of the vehicle. You can’t really reshape it into an arbitrary shape.

This is why something like the Fiero is so popular as a kit car base. You take the panels off and you actually have a mid engine vehicle with a skeleton steel frame and then you can bolt on whatever you want.

Many areas allow kit cars to be registered under the original vin. Most insurance companies won’t cover you for anything. You might be able to trick one into covering the original vehicle with the original vin even though it’s modified. But if you ever need anything from them they’ll refuse and cancel your policy.

In jurisdictions with emissions or regulation testing, you’ll probably never get it approved for the road.

Many Lemmy instances block VPN posting. You can view, but not vote or post. I have a secondary private VPN I use sometimes for that. But honestly the whole thing just sucks.

The old ones have seats with about 72in of lie flatness which is 6ft. But unless you sleep like a Victorian ghost, most people bend their knees or legs somehow. My friend that is 6ft4in has no issues and he’s tall and wide.

Most of the new ones are 76in to 82in. 6ft 10in is pretty generous. And if you need longer, there are first class seats which are full beds and you’d have no issue.

I fly in a pod every few weeks for 12hr+ flights and it’s very comfortable. I am hoping blimp travel makes a come back as I’d love to take the scenic way back with a full suite one day.

Let’s use Flash!

I adjusted it for inflation already.

May your marinara sauce never cling to your pasta!

This is the sort of weird back in the day post that doesn’t make sense. Boomers not understanding house prices and minimum wage, that is true.

This plane ticket stuff is wrong. For about the same cost as a ticket back in the day you get way more. In 1955, a one way transatlantic flight was roughly £5k. That’s $6.3k freedom dollars, one way. You can today buy a ticket on that type of route for half that price that includes a lie flat bed, amenities and pyjamas, 2 hot meals, unlimited snacks, unlimited drinks, lounge access on departure and arrival, priority check-in, boarding an ungodly amount of luggage, etc. And in the lounges you get free food cooked to order, free unlimited drinks, free second tier food like buffets, etc.

If you want to spend the equivalent money or a bit more, you could fly even better. You can have a private chef onboard making a meal for you anytime you want. You can take a shower in the sky. You can have a literal bedroom and attached private living room in a mini suite just for you. And that’s flying commercial.

The other side of it is that now people can also buy a ticket for $25. Which would be completely unfathomable back when civil rights weren’t a thing.

The US is a hostile place for online hosting. All small and medium businesses should move their operations out of the US. I did years ago, never looked back. Only the big ones with lobbiests will remain, just as our dear lord and saviour capitalism intended.

I mean it’s pretty common. I’ve not eaten at Chick Fil A for years or shopped in a Hobby Lobby since the religious health insurance crap. Just two big examples. Many people choose to not support companies that are in blatant opposition to their values. And me not buying at hobby lobby did mean I purchased my supplies from an alternate vendor. So I could say I bought from alternate vendor to strike back at the conservative culture…

They’re like the last ones to the party lol

On your own private media server. If you plan on watching any content that the Mouse owns, you better archive and save it. Because they randomly edit or straight up delete content all the time.

All the Steamboat willy stuff will never be released on their shitty platform. Just like Song of the South won’t be.

Issue is definitely corporate greed outsourcing issues to a mega monolith IT company.

Most IT departments are idiots now. Even 15 years ago, those were the smartest nerds in most buildings. They had to know how to do it all. Now it’s just installing the corporate overlord software and the bullshit spyware. When something goes wrong, you call the vendor’s support line. That’s not IT, you’ve just outsourced all your brains to a monolith that can go at any time.

None of my servers running windows went down. None of my infrastructure. None of the infrastructure I manage as side hustles.

I’d actually love to take some sort of sea train, underground tunnel or floating death wave train one day. It wouldn’t be relaxing, peaceful, or cheap. But it would be an adventure.

Reddit moderators.

2nd worst, Lemmy moderators

Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can’t give coherent output to save its life. Useless.

I’m fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I’m forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I’m good at it.

The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don’t need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn’t even then. You’re just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.

I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they’re in “private beta stealth”. Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.

Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The “cloud” has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It’s no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.

But calling it “the cloud” gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It’s the same stupid reason many companies don’t own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It’s all mind boggling stupid.

It’s a Google updates issue since they’re blocked. Apple isn’t but they comply with the Chinese government just as much as they do in the US as does Google. Remember Google is banned because it would not comply with China. How quickly the Americans forget.

Most likely the corporate spyware that Microsoft enables, requires very recent Google services and Apple services to operate. It’s pretty standard in the corporate spyware world. Usually just a few months out of date at most.