#sell my car in toronto

[sellurcar]

Sell your car in Toronto

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[justtogetthrough]

It's only Wednesday but this week has been intense and just... damn. I'm so tired.

Also.

My house sold 🙃

This nightmare officially ends on March 9th!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[ceasarslegion]

OK...I'm asking....

Yay!

So this happened in what I consider the worst job I ever had. And that is saying something because I very much worked retail in a mall. I had just graduated uni, I couldn't afford toronto anymore, and I needed a full-time job to make ends meet now that the stability of university was gone. So I went to edmonton because I had one family member I could stay with until I got on my feet. And I was not in a position to turn away a job that paid.

So I took a door to door sales position. For telus. I can hear the canadians in the room wincing so to everyone else: telus is one of the three whole mega megacorporations that control the ENTIRE canadian telecommunications network. And all three of those companies are buddy buddy and have us all by the balls. That's why canadian phone plans are the most expensive in the world. Not in the developed world: in the WORLD.

The meth lab incident happened on my 3rd whole day on my own. I was in St. Albert, which is this suburb of edmonton that is like if a kale smoothie and that guy who won't shut up about bikhram yoga had a baby they abandoned in an HOA meeting. Which is what makes this that much more unhinged: it was in the most cookie cutter suburbia part of the EMR.

So I was doing my knocks in my blue Jay's hat and my telus branded polo shirt with my clipboard and I knock on my next door. I'm greeted by a middle aged woman who proceeds to dump on me that she's divorcing her husband of 30 years and moving to New Brunswick. I'm like okay cool I just wanna sell you cable packages, good luck with that?

I write that off and continue along the cul de sac until I knock on this other lady's door. And when I say talkative I mean a real chatty Kathy. She practically grabs me by the collar and plops me down on her deck chairs, shoves a coffee in my hand, and says "HEY TELUS GUY DID YOU KNOCK ON METH GUYS DOOR???" And points to the house of the lady who just told me she was getting a divorce

At this point I have forgotten about my commission. I have forgotten about my shitty supervisor and how every part of this job sucks and how I wanna go back to Toronto. I have thrown away my clipboard I have started sipping her coffee that could very well be spiked with something and I go "you have to tell me about the meth guy"

That house I knocked on? The weird oversharing lady who was getting a divorce? Her husband was running a meth lab out of the basement THEIR ENTIRE MARRIAGE and she ONLY FOUND OUT THEN?? He called it his man cave and said that she wasn't allowed in?? And then one day she went down out of curiosity and it was a METH LAB??? All the bonuses he said he got at work were meth money.

I'm still enamored by how this happened. Did it not smell? Like for those who don't know edmonton there is a HUGE meth problem here. Like across the political aisle we all agree that something has to happen about all the meth, the details get foggy and that's where people argue, but needless to say I have smelled and been offered meth before just by virtue of living downtown. That shit REEKS. Like you know meth smell because it somehow smells like the word "meth." You will know what you are smelling even when you've never smelled it before. And it lingers. It hangs. It gets into walls. I know when I've taken a train car before because the smell of that guy who hotboxed it with meth smoke last week will still kinda be there. There's no way that house didn't smell like ass down to the foundation.

And the "you arent allowed in my man cave" excuse... im enamored by both the sexism towards his OWN WIFE and the way she just... went along with it for 30 years? Never set foot down there? The sexism and the just believing it?

I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the meth lab and this lady I was on the porch of kept actively trying to buy internet deals from me. Like she was the only person I ever pitched who was TRYING to get my bundles. I ended up just handing her my list of products and told her to check off what she wanted and was like "more meth lab?" And she went right to "yknow i think if I was your age I would've been a boy now. We didn't really have those terms when I was a kid" I DID NOT BRING THAT UP MA'AM I DONT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR GENDER CRISIS TELL ME MORE ABOUT THE METH LAB

That job was so shit that that was the only one I ever quit with no back up plan and did not regret for a second. I then went to the mall and handed out CVs and got my retail job by the end of the week from doing that.

[incorrect-murderdrones]

ANDDD WE HAVE A QUOTE MASTERPOST! ALL QUOTES BELONG TOO: @the-island-of-quotes HAVE FUN AND FOLLOW THAT PERSON :D -Mod Kai

N: This is what Victor would look like if he was doctor Seuss.

Uzi: There's a socket in my pocket, maybe this will help me fix my sprocket.

Uzi: It's not a 5, or a 6, or a 10, I have seem to have lost all of those again.

Uzi: And when it comes to wrenches, it seems all of them have disappeared off my fucking work benches.

Uzi: So even though there is a socket in my pocket I can't even use it to fix my fucking sprocket

*Next day*

Uzi: Another tool another day, I dropped some more shit in this fucking engine bay.

Uzi: But it's okay because I bought this car to get from point A to point B.

Uzi: And after one week of ownership I'm kinda hoping this thing gets crushed by a fucking tree.

Uzi: I've wanted to sell this car since week one, but nobody wants to buy it when it has every problem under the sun.

Uzi: This car will just remain broken and collect some dust, and eventually this piece of shit will start collecting rust.

Uzi: But at this point I don't really care! I have the time, nor money or energy to try and repair.

Uzi: I'm just gonna say fuck this, and sell this shit on craigslist to some guy named Chris.

______________________________________________________________

V: I now proudly present, the life and times of earnest Hemingway in aproxamently 3 and a half minutes. GO! Born in Chicago in 1899, son of a physician and a musician, reasonably uneventful childhood, decided to study Journalism. Enlisted with the Red Cross during World War I, got BLOWN up in Milan and spent 6 months in hospital with severe shrapnel wounds in both legs. Fell in love with a nurse, they decided to get married. He came home to prepare, she stayed there and ditched him for an Italian soldier, which initiated a life long pattern of him rejecting women before they had a chance to reject him. Got a job as a foreign correspondent, fell in love with his roommates' sister, married her and moved to Paris. They hung out with Gertrude Stein. They kicked it with Pablo Picasso. He started writing in earnest, no pun intended. Moved to Toronto, had a kid, moved back to Paris, published a couple of books. Cheated on his wife, got divorced, married the other woman. Converted to Catholicism... Cut his head open after pulling on a cord thinking he was flushing a toilet and instead ripped a skylight from the roof and smashed it onto HIS FACE! Moved to Kansas City, had another kid, his dad committed suicide, he shot a lot of bears for some reason. Had a car accident, had another kid, went to Africa to kill some wild animals and got dysentery karma! Published another book, moved to Cuba, SHOT HIMSELF IN THE LEG WHILST AIMING AT A SHARK! Cheated on his wife, got divorced, married the other woman. Published "For Whom the Bell Tolls," sold half a million copies in a couple of months and got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Cheated on his wife, got divorced, married the other woman. Became the self appointed leader of a band of village Militia outside of Paris and was subsequently brought up on charges for contravening the Geneva Convention, and GOT AWAY WITH IT LIKE A FUCKING CHAMPION! Got pneumonia, moved back to Cuba and spent most of his spare time on his boat TRACKING NAZI U-BOATS WITH A MACHINE GUN AND A PILE OF HAND GRENADES I AM NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP! Had a few more car accidents, three more concussions, got CLAWED WHILE PLAYING WITH A LION... Got depressed, drank. Got fat, published a couple more books, went back to Africa to shoot some more wild animals, and barely survived two separate plane crashes in the space of 24 hours, winding up with a fractured skull, internal bleeding, cracked spine, ruptured liver, first degree burns, and a paralyzed sphincter muscle karma! Won a Nobel Prize, had a file opened on him by J. Edgar Hoover, left a bunch of shit in a safe in Cuba and moved to Idaho, paranoid that the feds were following him WHICH THEY WERE BECAUSE HE SPENT MOST OF THE 1940S WORKING FOR THE KGB, AGAIN NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP! Suffered from hepatitis, nephritis, hypertension, hemochromatosis, anemia and impotence, karma. Got committed, received way too much electroconvulsive therapy and came out all fucked up, started hinting at suicide so immediately got recommitted, received another couple of months worth of electroconvulsive therapy, got released, put both barrels of his favorite 12-gauge shotgun into his mouth and BLEW HIS FUCKING HEAD OFF! WHAT A GUY!

______________________________________________________________

N: Welcome to applebees! What'll it be? Apples or bees? Congrats, you get bees!!!

______________________________________________________________

Doll: Now that I've added the milk to the cereal tell me, is that milk now a beverage, a broth, or a sauce? Answer carefully Khan, you're wife's life depends on it!

______________________________________________________________

Uzi: If the conspiracies about life being a simulation are true whoever is controlling my Sim I JUST WANNA TALK!!

______________________________________________________________

N: Do you think god stays in heaven because he too fears what he's created? That's a quote from Spy Kids 2 have you ever seen it it's like peak cinema.

______________________________________________________________

Uzi: Who needs sleep when you run on equal parts NyQuil and Methamphetamine?

______________________________________________________________

V: Just remember Uzi people die when they are killed!

______________________________________________________________

V: Ha! You're pointless!

Doll: Thirty nine buried.

*Gunshot*

Doll: Zero found

______________________________________________________________

N: Which one of you was gonna tell me tea tastes different if you put in hot water?

Uzi: Y- you we're putting it in cold water???????

V: N. Answer the question N!

N: Yeah??? I thought for like five years people just put it in hot water to speed up the tea-ification process, didn't realize there was an actual reason.

J: You don't have the patience to microwave water for three minutes??

Doll: Why are you. Putting it in the microwave to boil it?

J: Do you think I have the patience to boil water on the stove?

Doll: It takes less than a minute!

J: Doll is your stove powered by the fucking sun!?

Doll: How long does it take to boil a cup of water on your stove?

J: LIKE SEVEN MINUTES!

Doll: Just stick the mug on top of the stove on medium heat and it boils in two minutes, less if you use a saucepan.

Lizzy: Crying your putting the whole mug on the stove??? On medium heat??? Your stove is enchanted!

Uzi: Every drone in this exoplanet is a fucking idiot.

Cyn: DO NONE OF YOU OWN A FUCKING KETTLE!?!?! REMEMBER TO FOLLOW: @the-island-of-quotes AS THEY OWN THESE QUOTES :D

[coimbrabertone]

Building a Schedule for Indycar: the Struggles of a Recovering Series.

So, in the past week, the shoe dropped - Indycar announced they were going to Fox for 2025. People immediately got fired up, worried that all the worst features of the Fox NASCAR booth were going to infect Indycar and kneecap a series that has such good racing and needs to grow.

Ultimately though, I don't think that's going to be all that much of a problem, actually.

IMS Productions will remain involved in the television product and Fox will put every race on network Fox. That I think is a good thing, and it should give Indycar an opportunity to grow.

What I'm more interested in, however, is the 2025 schedule dropped today as well, and that...disappointed me quite a bit.

The schedule is more or less the same as 2024, with two caveats: one is that Thermal Club is going to be a points race now, and Milwaukee will be a single race instead of a doubleheader like it's scheduled to be in 2024.

This...isn't particularly good.

The biggest reason has little to do with Indycar. That is that, like I've talked about before, NASCAR is flirting with going international as soon as 2025, and it's no secret that they've been flirting with Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City, and the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal. Both of which hosted Nationwide Series races as recently as the 2000s, but they would be firsts for the Cup series.

The only previous Cup races outside of the US were exhibition events. Calder Park, Australia in 1988, Suzuka, Japan in 1996 and 1997, and then Twin Ring Motegi, also in Japan, in 1998.

Indycar, meanwhile, has a long series of international races - see my Champ Car: the World Series that Actually Was blogpost for details there - but that has disappeared. In 2024 and 2025, Toronto will be the only Indycar race outside of the United States.

That is not good enough.

In terms of drivers, Indycar is as international as it has ever been, but the newest race on the calendar is the return to the Milwaukee Mile. I think that's neat, but, with all due respect, nobody in Milwaukee gives a crap about seeing Rinus VeeKay racing against Linus Lundqvist. Go to Europe, particularly to a track that has been ignored and mistreated by F1, and you might just have an audience that does want to see those guys race.

Even if Europe is too much, too soon, what about Pato's rabid popularity in Mexico? What about the long history of Indycar drivers from Brazil? What about the fact that between Scott McLaughlin, Scott Dixon, and Will Power, about half the guys that have won this season have been won by guys from New Zealand and Australia. Tap into that market.

If you don't, well...half the Supercars field is moonlighting in NASCAR these days and Kyle Busch is now being linked with a Bathurst 1000 ride.

If Indycar doesn't start planning something now, NASCAR is going to beat them to down under as well.

I feel passionately that Indycar needs to expand internationally again. I'm not saying that it needs to be all it once, but please, start doing something, because your rivals aren't standing still.

And now for the other problem.

Ovals are a hard sell nowadays. I understand that. They're far away from city centers, many have underwhelming amenities, and a lot of casuals see it and just think it's a bunch of left turns. I understand all of that, however...

The Indianapolis 500 is the only big oval left on the schedule. It is the only track 1.5 miles or larger on the schedule, and it will be next year as well.

That is a problem.

More than that, it is starting to show in the oval racing product. A stat came out after the Indianapolis 500 saying that Josef and Pato have finished 1-2 eight times in recent history. Looking into it more specifically, six of those are on ovals dating back to Gateway 2020. Since then, only two indycar oval races have featured a top two that did not include either Josef or Pato:

Texas 2021 race one, when Scott Dixon won over Scott McLaughlin. Indianapolis 2021, when Helio Castroneves won over Alex Palou. More broadly, going back to Texas 2020, the top two oval finishes include the following drivers: Scott Dixon, Simon Pagenaud, Josef Newgarden, Will Power, Takuma Sato, Patricio O'Ward, Scott McLaughlin, Helio Castroneves, Marcus Ericsson, and David Malukas.

That is ten drivers.

Simon Pagenaud, Takuma Sato, and Helio Castroneves have all more or less retired.

Down to seven.

Of the remaining seven, Pato O'Ward and David Malukas are the only ones that can really be described as young. Marcus Ericsson and Scott McLaughlin are older, but they came from F1 and Supercars, respectively, so I can count them in the new pile as well.

Other than those four, the ovals have been dominated by experienced guys who have been in Indycar for years.

There is a severe lack of top end oval talent from the young drivers in Indycar. One reason for that is that the Freedom 100 is gone, and IndyNXT drivers don't get much preparation for the big tracks.

The other is that Texas Motor Speedway is gone too, so those young drivers, whether they be from IndyNXT or the European ladder, aren't getting that experience in Indycar either.

At minimum, Indycar should put one of their smaller ovals ahead of the Indianapolis 500 to make sure drivers are prepared for the 500.

Beyond that, then I think Indycar should make it a priority to add one or two big ovals to the schedule. Return to TMS, revive an old race like Homestead, Kansas, or Michigan, go to one of the unused NASCAR tracks like Kentucky or Chicagoland, I'm not being picky. Just do something to make sure our drivers are getting experience on these types of tracks.

Otherwise, you're just going to keep seeing Josef Newgarden win on the ovals, occasionally challenged by Pato O'Ward, one of his Penske teammates in the form of McLaughlin or Power, or Scott Dixon pulling some bullshit fuel strategy out of his asshole.

I understand that purists are happy about Milwaukee coming back, I understand that there is a portion of the fanbase that desperately wants the Cleveland airport race to come back, but I ask the fans to think of this: what does Milwaukee do that Iowa doesn't? What does Cleveland do that Mid-Ohio or Toronto don't?

I'm not saying this to disparage Milwaukee or Cleveland either. I like that Milwaukee is back and I'd love to see a Cleveland revival as much as anyone else, but those won't really move the needle.

What I think might is an international expansion.

What I think might is more opportunities for Indycar to show off that brilliant racing from the Indianapolis 500 - all the reactions coming out of Indy were about how people can't wait to see that again. Well, they got to wait a year for it. Indy is all we got in terms of superspeedway racing.

Just after we got two back-to-back good races at Texas though, with a Penske duel in 2022, and Pato dominating 2023 before a caution gave Josef Newgarden the opportunity to snatch a win.

Indycar is a long way off the peaks of the CART era and everyone has different ideas on how to get the series back on the right track, but in my opinion, these are the two most important things schedule wise. Tap into the international market and get on the big ovals again. Both because the series needs to, and because that 200+ mile per hour racing product is something super special that only Indycar has.

On a more personal note...

I usually try to post these on Monday but I'm a bit behind on my AO3 writing right now so I wanted to get this out of the way now. I might have a small blogpost out next week coming out of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but consider this the main blogpost for June 17th.

In the meantime, I have a chapter for my NASCAR story to finish, and then I need to have a chapter for my CART story done by the 23rd.

No rest for the wicked.

[mad-hare]

So today I had to go to Mississauga to get the plate off my car (only one because the second one was lost in the accident). I don’t feel like it was worth it!

Driving down the 401 was fine till Toronto when I start to lose it. Google maps kept redirecting me on and off the collectors/express, trying to make me change like 4 lanes in under a km on a crowded ass highway, at this point I’m crying. Eventually manage to get off at the airport and take a nice quieter backroad meant for cargo trucks lmao.

I get to the garage and they let me in and I ask a mechanic to show me where my car is in the impound lot.

He asks me, “is the car a total loss?”

Yes.

“Did you settle yet?”

No.

“But you released it to the insurance company?”

Yes.

“Why on earth would you release it before settling. Now you can’t argue for more money because you’ve already given them your car.”

That’s not true.

“Say if you were trying to sell your purse for $10, I offer you $5, you say no and give it to me anyways and keep bartering?”

The insurance industry is heavily regulated here. They are contracted to replace the value of the car for us. (This isn’t Facebook marketplace).

“Yea, well, it’s regulated but it’s not THAT regulated.”

If we are too difficult with the insurance company they can drop our case (okay I read this on Reddit and I’m not sure it would happen that quickly).

“Well whatever I guess you know more than I do there’s your car good luck getting your plates off.”

(He leaves and I ask a different guy to get it off for me).

-Insurance adjuster friend said they just want an excuse to charge the insurance company for storage fees.

-Garage super friendly during accident claims that they are just going to do their best to get as much storage fees from the insurance company as they can but they will NEVER charge me for it.

-The release paper I signed from the garage however states that owner can be charged for extra storage fees that insurance won’t cover, which I guess doesn’t matter because the car is a total loss and we’re not ever taking it ourselves.

-I think the garage is just trying to put up a high storage fee so the insurance company abandons it there so they can use it for parts.

After this annoyance I spent an hour and a half driving down the lakefront road of Toronto, which was much less stressful for me going 40km/h in 40km/h zones. What’s really bad for me is the highway, when you are going fast and have to slow down suddenly, because I was rear ended I am very uncomfortable with vehicles behind me that think they should be going 100/h in heavy traffic.

To get to the car rental place, and he tells me the $200 fee because the car was from the Mississauga location. Well I never picked it up there it was brought to me in the middle of the night without much say. At this point I start sobbing at the thought of driving 1.5hrs back on the highway and then taking 1.5hrs of public transit to get to union station. Decide it’s not worth it because every moment with the rental car was so stressful for me. Leave the car there, walk 10 min to the go train, get to union and get on via rail.

Canada has no fault insurance meaning no matter what you essentially take 50% of the blame for any accidents. Like even if someone hits your parked car if you’re not in it.

[harveyguilleniconodelamoda]

Sustainable Accessories: Vitaly Warp Necklace

It's May the 4th, and you know what that means!

....

Well...a lot of things actually. It's Star Wars Day, for one. Filming for season six of WWDITS is officially over, for another (yes I'm crying about it). But most importantly for this blog, it's Harvey Guillén's birthday weekend!

Harvey has been out and about this weekend, celebrating with friends and coworkers and looking fabulous as usual and sharing the fun with us all via his Instagram stories. But there's one new addition to his wardrobe I want to focus on in particular:

These comfy-but-stylish black overalls and the mesh watercolor shirt are familiar style staples for Harvey (that post is in the drafts, I promise). But something we haven't seen before is that striking necklace he's wearing! So I did a little research, and this is what I found:

This is the Warp necklace, part of the Experimental collection from Vitaly, a Toronto-based company that sells accessories "made for the future with 100% recycled stainless steal" (per their Instagram bio). Their website promises pieces made from the remnants of machines, car parts, and skyscrapers that are waterproof, hypoallergenic, and tarnish-proof.

Vitaly is also dedicated to inclusivity in fashion, which is why all their jewelry is genderless. In an interview with Schön! magazine in 2021, Vitaly CEO Shane Vitaly Foran said:

"We believe that jewelry (and fashion in general) should be inclusive. We want our pieces to be a tool for self-expression, whatever that expression may look like. So we never want to say ‘this is a men’s ring’ or ‘this is a chain for women.’ No matter how you identify, we want to create pieces that make you feel strong and empowered."

This fits so well with Harvey's overall style ethos, which is all about inclusivity and breaking down barriers in the world of fashion!

According to Vitaly's website, the Warp necklace is "an otherworldly neckpiece that uses curving, organic forms to create an alien appearance with a mask-like effect." It retails for $240.

Although this price doesn't meet my usual $100 affordability threshold, I'm hesitant to recommend cheaper alternatives due to the company's overall ethos of sustainability, inclusivity, and the fact that these are genuine art pieces that I've been able to specifically identify the source of (similar to how I didn't want to direct readers away from the artists of PansyAss Ceramics in my last accessories post). It feels ethically iffy in a way that saying "I don't know exactly which boots these are but here are some places you can find very similar boots" doesn't, you know?

I will say that Vitaly is considered a mid-range brand in terms of prices, and does have both frequent sales and many pieces under $100 if you're interested in their style!

(I'll also say that my brain, which has been trained by Taylor Allison Swift to look for easter eggs in everything, wonders if this futuristic piece is an allusion to an upcoming project or role. Something with aliens or futuristic tech, perhaps? Will we see the return of my beloved Dr. José Francisco Morales Rivera de la Cruz in a future installment of the DCEU? Harvey has teased before that this is a possibility! I can only hope.)

[allthecanadianpolitics]

I want to second that other anon on the Brampton situation as someone who was born and raised there until I moved away at the end of 2020; yea its the fucking city planning and infrastructure that sucks. Apologies for long ass rant:

Every. Single. New house in Brampton built since before I was born has been a 3-5 bedroom, single family cookie-cutter home. Its especially obvious in the north side where all the recent development is. Every neighborhood is a labrynth, I lived in the same house for 20 years and could still get lost walking around my neighborhood cause of the damn maze-like layout AND CAUSE EVERY HOUSE LOOKS THE DAMN SAME. It takes 20 minutes on average to walk to your nearest bus stop and anywhere between 20 mins to an hour for the bus to show up. If you don't have access to a car, you're fucked.

But even if you DO have a car, there's still nothing to DO there. 90% of the city is JUST HOUSES. Heart Lake, Chinguacousy Park and Professor's Lake are like the only major recreational areas, and out of those Heart Lake is the most amount of nature left there; almost EVERYTHING is zoned for residential. Besides that, there's the big malls, and that's basically it. If you work IN Brampton, you probably either work an industrial job, or a minimum wage service job. Most 9-5 career jobs are in Mississauga or Toronto, which you then have to commute by car CAUSE THERES BARELY ANY TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE. I have a whole other rant about the 410 too, but at this point I'll just say it makes the 401 look like a pleasant drive.

Brampton doesn't suck cause of the people living in it, Brampton sucks because it doesn't function like a city should. And it doesn't function like a city should cause it was never designed to be more than a place to hold workers for Mississauga and Toronto when they aren't working.

Also more housing in Brampton won't help the housing crisis in the slightest, unless they're forced to be stupid affordable. New homes are easily several million, even 25yo houses are selling for over a million. Five years ago $1k/month for a 1-bedroom basement apartment was considered dirt cheap, its definitely much more expensive now. There'd have to be legislation involved to force the prices down.

~~~~

[airfieldddrive]

Rupi's Poetry (Revisited)

[A Writer's Achievement]

Walking with purpose across her living room, lighting candles and turning the ceiling lights off

Sitting down with much to do, at peace with herself as reflected in her lovely brown eyes

The sound of trucks and cars on the 427 fades in the distant night time

She's changed, and everything is going to be all right

And it's Rupi, writing poetry in her room

Writing words of love and words that are true

Calmly looking closer with her eyes, a pleasurable delight she has found at the sight of her body

Outside in the Indian garden, the full moon is bright

More than 4 million women, children and men scroll across their phones, reading what Rupi wrote slowly

She walks back and forth with pen and paper held firmly in hand

...And it's Rupi thinking about poetry that she is going to write for you

She writes about pain and suffering and love

Most of what she writes about is true

Far from here

Only she rightfully decides, who she is to embrace in her arms

Feeling good again

For some

Most of the time

[She's A Twenty First Century Woman]

She gets emotional like the kind of scholar that she is who reads book after book like a charm

With eyes that are clear, there is much to digest

Knowing what you know can only take you higher

Putting you in all

She's here again

Here to perform

Putting you in all

Love and peace

Find yourself being released

She's an author, poet, illustrator, performer and artist

She's a twenty first century woman

There is much to what she writes

And all her followers

who have come from many different lifestyles and career paths

will have the time of their life

by buying a ticket and sitting down inside

Where more than a few

are seated

hand in hand

Mostly everyone's glad

She's a walking breathing miracle

She sells eternal sanctuary

She will entertain you

No matter what the temperature is outside

with Rupi inside

Everyone will feel warm

[Brampton And Malton And Toronto Heaven Sent]

We've got a feeling

there's a time to work

and a time to rest

Walking in our hometown fields

Fields that have seen generations of children

Children of the west

British descendants and the rest

Now a land of many brown skinned entrepreneurs

Standing still above ground

Safe and sound

Beating down any personal struggles

The day's chaos has begun, the workplace can be tense and ill at ease

Working hard to please...

And the chance to live in a wonderful world

without hectic commotion

Because love is where all of us need to be

and overtaken by that emotion

And even though everyone's in a good mood

Better to play it safe than sorry as usual

September has been a month to celebrate

And to have a slice of some delicious wedding cake

One of many lovely couple's have sealed their matrimonial fate

A time for celebration

and wedding hall dancing

here on earth before God

[Why Is She So Beautiful?]

Wandering through the forest

the conflicts of the world she has left

Climbing up a mountain of success

To a plateau of fresh, green grass

and tall trees full of life

Her young figure sits still

her reflection in the water she admires

that's natural

She's been published

and for that she's grateful

Salvador Dali's painting

"The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus" is beautiful

Such a brilliant painter

Narcissus blooms into a flower

Colourful and pleasing

Over and over

[Heydon's Farm]

If you go down to Heydon's Farm

You'll find a gathering of hovering Monarch butterflies

See forever eyes

that's not a surprise

Fox on the run

Over the road rocks by the jet

And there's the large lots

Memories of my mother there before

at the skating rink

where Michelle and her daughter are today

Just like everyone

Feeling both happy and sad

And of course there are good people in the world

Happy to be here

Championship drag racing

In a fast rush

Dealing with problems before the starting flag was raised

that had to be crushed

The moon and the prince

The prince was at the sticker factory

The sticker factory was beside the train tracks

The train tracks are still there amongst the enormous bustle

The bustle is what puts food on the table

and comfort all year round

Fly on a jet plane away

Sweet thing

Up on near the hikng trail

Places to go to and places you've been

You've changed into a fantastic human being

Yes

Happy as can be

And glorified as anyone can see

And fresh and clean in the morning

You've got everything

Always in

Never out

Wildwood wild things

throughout the summer blooming

in a roundabout

Changing seasons

Changes for one and all

Wish you were here

And some Hollywood stars are near

Time has come today

Time has come bringing change

Feel your body, it belongs to you and you alone

A gift from your mother and father

And from them you learn

what it is to work

during working hours

Earning your success

Making you feel tall

In my world

I hear a lot of lies

Up to here

listening to all these lies

Going with the flow

Rupi

In your world are there many that want you now?

And as you listen to your inner voice

To look for hidden doors, decorated floors and audience applause

Here for a good time

Everyone likes you a lot, they like what you've got

Your ancestral history can be felt and found throughout the land

Yes, deep in the land

And in the end, I heard before me, a clairvoyant having a spirit whisper in her head that in the end, we will find ourselves amongst those who all share similar interests

And that we'll all fit into our places

[Alpha Centauri Of The Constellation Centaurus]

With the stars of Centaurus shining bright around

A rocket ship moves slowly upward from its place underground

Rupi is strapped in, tilted back and coming up from beneath

Shimmering silver glitter around her head to below her knees

She lights up the fire in the skies

She knows she's doing well by the look in everybody's eyes

Her poetry is as rich as a sunrise

It ain't easy

Living in a painting and poetry fantasy

She is no longer alone

Made of hardy stock and thick to the bone

And the rocket engines roar

Roaring right down inside your soul

The stars of the constellation Centaurus shine alongside all of their moons

On stage, there's Rupi, reciting the words of a brand new poem

And it's Rupi, with her spoken words so true

At work and not lazy, thinking about the colour blue because it is such a fun thing to do

She's so far from here

Only she, and she alone rightfully decides who she is to receive in her loving arms

Rupi's back again, and everyone in the theatre will have a good time

[Poems]

Can't you feel your imagination get out of sight?

Pulsating colours, in the darkness of night

Like the galaxies that join after centuries, as the cycle of life expands and grows

She has come to your city and to a place that you call home

Rupi's standing shining in the sun, and she's reading with a loud voice

her favourite poems one by one

Poet of poets

Scholar of scholars

She has returned to read to the people, in theatre's close to their home

To make them feel glad that they've come, to listen to her reading her beautiful poems.

-Walter

October 18, 2019

Revisited and revised April 5, 2024

[wanderingmind867]

Avery Ho (The Flash of the New Earth):

Warning: This is a follow-up to my idea of a third dc universe created in 1986. And since Avery Ho is a character I know literally nothing about, i just let my mind run wild and i created this concept at school yesterday.

Avery Ho was a 21 year old pickpocket, and she was in big trouble. Living in Toronto in 1986, Avery became a thief to provide for her sick mother. One night, she broke into a prestigious science lab in the heart of town, hoping that she'd be able to find something expensive there she could steal and sell for a profit. But instead of finding anything fancy, she instead wandered in on a secret lab experiment being conducted that night.

The scientist in charge of the lab was testing a theory of his involving being able to heat electricity enough so that it broke the speed of light and became invisible to the naked eye. To prove this, he'd rigged up a giant tube filled with electricity, being powered by a giant furnace. When Avery breaks into his lab to steal some of his equipment, they end up tripping his burglar alarm instead. Panicking, they try to make a break for the exit. But while running, they trip on a stray power cord and fall right into his electricity chamber.

Bombarded with someone close to 50 million volts of supercharged electricity, Avery experienced intense pain. With a scream and sonic boom, they vanished into thin air. The scientist considered his experiment a failure, and then eventually had to tell avery's family what happened. A week later, there's a funeral for her. But then, exactly one month after avery vanished, they reappear! Right in the middle of catching a mobster, too! So now the question is: exactly what happened to them?

Now, to answer that one: after avery fell into the chamber with all the electricity, her body's molecular structure began to change and adapt to the lightning now coursing through her veins. Her began became so fast that for a full month she was invisible to the naked eye. She could see and hear everyone around her, but she was moving so fast that she became virtually invisible. Eventually realizing this meant she could steal as much money as she wanted, avery went on a thieving spree. For a week, toronto was terrorized by an invisible avery stealing from their biggest banks.

But after about a week, avery became depressed and miserable. She just wanted to be able to see her family again, but she was moving too fast for them to ever notice her. She ended up severely depressed, and the time began to pass super slowly and agonizingly. But then, after two weeks of agony, avery found a purpose again. More specifically, she stumbled upon a crime cartel's mad scheme to blackmail the mayor of toronto.

Realizing that these mobsters wanted to drag toronto back to the old days of protection rackets and thievery, avery knew she had to stop them. And that's when she realized her newfound invisibility could help her catch these crooks red handed. So she uses her gift of superspeed to humiliate them at every possible opportunity, angering them into irrationality and paranoia. When they finally try to pull their raid on the mayor's office, they're so distrustful that they all end up turning on each other.

From there, it was simple for avery to mop the floor with these punks and drag them to justice. But just as she's watching them get taken into the police cars, avery's molecules finally slow down enough for people to see her again. Realizing that she's not invisible anymore, she speeds to her family home and gives her family the biggest hug ever!

Now that the scientist who was conducting his science experiments knows that avery isn't dead, he's ecstatic! Because her newfound superspeed proves his theory that electricity can be forced into breaking the sound barrier and the light barrier. It's just that the electricity used her body like a conduit. She's now permanently got superspeed, and she needs to learn to control it.

So with the aid of this scientist, avery learns to control her powers and use them to their fullest potential. And in the meantime, she designs a costume for herself and she begins operating under the name The Flash! Saving the innocents of Toronto with her superspeed! And thus is born a hero! From youthful thief to savior of the innocent, that's the story of avery ho.

[sellurcar]

Sell My Car Toronto

Ready to sell your car in Toronto? Sellurcar is here to help! We make selling your car a breeze with our seamless process. Simply provide us with the details of your vehicle, and we'll provide a fair and competitive offer. Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to a quick and profitable sale. Contact us now to sell your car with ease.

[batmanshole]

the other day my sister told me id never get a hot boyfriend by acting like myself 😭 girl you date car thieves that sell fentanyl and act like theyre from toronto when they arent. i dont want to date the men youre into

[tieflingkisser]

Efforts to sell ‘Anglo neighborhoods in Israel’ at LA synagogue erupt in protests

Pro-Palestinian protesters accuse companies of trying to sell stolen land in the West Bank, and question legality

Efforts to market homes in Israel and stolen land in West Bank to Jewish Americans are continuing to spark protests across North America, with the latest angry confrontations happening outside a synagogue in one of Los Angeles’s most prominent Jewish neighborhoods.

[...]

The Los Angeles demonstration was the latest in a series of heated demonstrations outside similar Israeli real estate events heldat synagogues across North America this year, including in Toronto, Canada; New Jersey; Baltimore, Maryland; and North Hollywood. Pro-Palestinian protesters have accused some of the companies involved in these events of trying to sell stolen land in the West Bank, and questioned the legality of the marketing efforts. One of the real estate companies named in an advertisement for the Los Angeles event, My Home in Israel, has listed high-end properties for sale in West Bank settlements on its website, including boutique apartments in Ariel and luxury villas in Efrat. Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are widely considered illegal under international law. The US recently restored its position that they are “inconsistent” with international law. Previous US events involving My Home in Israel have prompted calls for law enforcement investigations from Palestinian American and pro-Palestine groups, and denunciations from some local Jewish residents.

[...]

Protesters on both sides of the conflict described an out-of-control situation where people were targeted with bear spray and scuffling in the streets, and criticized police for failing to stop the violence. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators shared video of pro-Israel counter-protesters yelling racial slurs, and said that the counter-protesters had punched them, kicked them, chased them, ripped hijabs from the heads of Muslim women, made rape threats and followed some demonstrators back to their cars in an attempt to photograph their license plates. A pro-Palestine protester who lives in the area said the intensity of the harassment and violence from the pro-Israel counter-protesters was frightening, with “people who came up to me screaming, telling me to get out of their neighborhood”.

[...]

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, a Los Angeles journalist who specializes in protest coverage, captured footage of pro-Palestinian protesters “pleading with officers for help” as they were “being shoved and hit” by pro-Israel demonstrators with the officers standing by. Several journalists covering the protest were also assaulted, Adam Rose, the secretary of the Los Angeles Press Club, tweeted on Monday. Among then was Beckner-Carmitchel, who said he filed a police report after being assaulted by pro-Israel demonstrators. A reporter for CalMatters said that one pro-Israel protester knocked his phone out of his hand as he tried to film, and later another demonstrator told him “you shouldn’t be here” and snatched away his phone.

[turbosmissingtooth]

I posted 168 times in 2022

That's 168 more posts than 2021!

2 posts created (1%)

166 posts reblogged (99%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@schwizzle-schwartz

@soft4hardthings

@jaredmccann

@squidsquadlove

@staalsparkles

I tagged 164 of my posts in 2022

Only 2% of my posts had no tags

#hockey cards - 68 posts

#seattle kraken - 46 posts

#anaheim ducks - 16 posts

#toronto maple leafs - 9 posts

#the individuals are in my queue :) - 9 posts

#dallas stars - 8 posts

#st louis blues - 8 posts

#trevor zegras - 8 posts

#jamie drysdale - 7 posts

#brandon tanev - 6 posts

Longest Tag: 117 characters

#the funniest part of this to me is that op typoed in his tweet. cale didn’t say ‘stuck it ass’ he said ‘stuck my ass’

My Top Posts in 2022:

#2

I’m obsessed with the way Oliver Bjorkstrand looks like he sells car insurance for a living. (Source)

1 note - Posted October 25, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

@crossbackpoke-check’s tags on this post were incredible and had to be created.

169 notes - Posted November 26, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

Not bad for a baby blog

[topcash4scrapcars]

Unlocking Value: The Ultimate Guide to Cash for Cars in Toronto

If you have a car you want to sell in Toronto, you're in luck! There are many ways to get cash for your vehicle, whether running well or needing work. This guide'll explore how to get cash for your car quickly and easily, get the best price, and make the process as smooth as possible.

Why Sell Your Car for Cash?

Selling your car for cash in Toronto can be a great decision. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Quick Cash: Need money fast? Selling your car can give you quick cash.

2. No More Repair Costs: Older cars can cost a lot in repairs. Selling it can save you money.

3. Upgrade Your Ride: Selling your old car gives you money to buy a newer, better one.

4. Help the Environment: If your vehicle doesn't work anymore, recycling it can help reduce waste.

How to Get Started

1. Know Your Car's Value

Before you sell, knowing what your car is worth is essential. You can find this out by:

Checking Online: Use websites like Kelley Blue Book or Edmunds to see what similar cars sell for.

Getting an Appraisal: Many dealerships and car-buying services will give you a free appraisal.

2. Gather Your Documents

Make sure you have the necessary documents ready to sell your car:

Title: This shows that you own the car.

Registration: This proves that your car is registered in your name.

Maintenance Records: These documents show any repairs or services done on the car.

3. Decide Where to Sell

You have several options for selling your car:

Dealerships: They might buy your car as a trade-in if you get a new one.

Private Sales: Selling directly to another person can sometimes get you more money, but it might take longer.

Cash for Cars Services: These companies buy cars in any condition, often giving you cash on the spot.

Online Platforms: Websites like Craigslist or Kijiji can help you reach more buyers directly.

4. Get Your Car Ready to Sell

To make your car more appealing to buyers:

Clean It Up: A clean car looks better and can help you get a higher price.

Fix Minor Issues: If there are small problems, fixing them can increase your car's value.

Take Good Photos: Clear and bright photos attract more buyers if you're selling online.

Tips for Getting the Best Price

1. Be Honest About the Car's Condition

Being upfront about your car's condition builds trust with potential buyers. If there are issues, let them know.

2. Know Your Minimum Price

Decide the lowest amount you're willing to accept before starting negotiations. This keeps you from agreeing to a low offer too quickly.

3. Shop Around for Offers

Don't accept the first offer you get. Find the best deal with multiple dealerships or cash for car services.

4. Be Ready to Negotiate

Be prepared to negotiate whether you sell to a private buyer or a dealership. Knowing your car's market value will help you stand firm.

Cash for Cars Services in Toronto

Why Use Cash for Cars Services?

These services are popular for many reasons:

Convenience: They handle most of the paperwork, making it easy.

Speed: Many services can give you cash on the same day.

Buy Any Condition: They often buy cars that are not running or are in poor shape.

Top Cash for Cars Companies in Toronto

1. Cash for Cars Toronto: They offer quick cash and free towing for any car.

2. We Buy Cars: Known for excellent customer service, they make the selling process simple.

3. Toronto Car Buyers: This service provides same-day cash offers and handles all paperwork.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How fast can I sell my car for cash?

The time it takes depends on how you sell it. Cash for car services usually provides instant cash, while private sales might take longer.

2. Should I clean my car before selling it?

Yes! A clean car can help you attract buyers and potentially get a higher price.

3. Can I sell a car without a title in Ontario?

Selling a car without a title can be tricky, but some cash for car services might still buy it if you have other proof of ownership. Check with the specific company for details.

4. Will I get more money selling privately?

You may get a higher price by selling privately, but it could take more time and effort.

5. What if my car isn't running?

Many cash-for-cars services will buy non-running cars and often provide free towing.

Final Thoughts

Selling your car for cash in Toronto can be simple and rewarding. By knowing your car's value, having the proper documents, and exploring your options, you can make the best choice for your needs. Whether you choose a dealership, a private sale, or a cash-for-cars service, being informed will help you get the most out of your vehicle.

Take your time, do your research, and don't hesitate to ask for help if needed. With the right approach, you can turn your old car into cash quickly and easily!