My car is a diesel. I believe catalytic converters are the usual fare for gasoline engines.

and I like how you're trying to steer the conversation in exactly the same way but in a different direction.

I mean seriously, you call the hypothetical person in some low level clerical/administrative role a fascist because they won't quit because it's simply not that easy to do so, yet in the same breath you say "I totally have so much power as an individual to drive the piss ass politics in a country of 330 million" -- hypocrite much?

It's just like the DEF tanks on 18 wheelers. I buy a 10L jug of it from Walmart for something like $10. In my trunk there's a panel you remove and under it there's a small cap very similar to the gas cap. Remove that, hook up the DEF bottle hose (the bottles come with a 12-15" corrugated hose) and very slowly pour it in. You don't want to spill that stuff, it's nasty not because it's urea, but because when it dries it kind of crystallizes and makes a real bloody awful mess.

Replace the cap, replace the panel cover, close the trunk and you're done for another 9-15mos.

It's my understanding that the cheat was in all TDI models, but the smaller Jetta was particularly bad because it didn't have a urea system and the fix for that model was to retrofit one. My Passat may have needed a more robust urea injector and not just software, but I can't remember now. Either way on my year/model the fix was barely noticeable.

I just drain the gas and run it until it stalls. Been doing this with the lawnmower, weed trimmer and snowblower for over a decade, never any carburetor issues.

Thank you, that was brilliant.

Now I have to explain to the people in my vicinity what “dull men’s club” is because I involuntarily let out a great belly laugh after reading your comment.

The dumbest part is that after I got my car updated (the Passat only needed a firmware update) the fuel economy was not even one MPG worse. It’s been a decade and I’m still regularly getting slightly better than 50MPG on the highway and low-30s in the city. There was no reason to cheat.

I'm currently driving that VW TDI -- best car I've ever owned in 35 years. Next vehicle wasn't going to be a Tesla, but perhaps an F150 Lightning if they ever get their head out their asses and offer a regular old e-pickup -- I don't want quad cab and a short bed, just two doors and a regular full size bed would be great. Alas, that's hard to find in ICE, let alone electric.

nowhere near the trunk of the car, thankfully. :-)

I guess the closest I've gotten to that is to have a cow lick the "T" off of the "Passat" lettering on my trunk a couple years ago.

it's amazing how I could immediately identify which loops you are referring to and have repaired a few of my own for similar reasons.

Had you known how to sew, you could have mended that rip!

those appear to be physical clones, not electronic equivalent clones. How is this specific company any different than the dozens of other earbud clones out there?

Between (old) reddit, phpbb and smf... the old reddit model wins by a landslide in my opinion. I've used all of these over the years and absofuckinglutely HATE phpBB and SMF, with SMF earning slightly less hatred than phpBB.

I'm also old enough to have downloaded .QWK files for offline BBS forum reading/replying and even connecting to the internet over a FidoNet-internet bridge. Lemmy did the exact right thing in copying reddit's format.

ah, so you're the jerk who caused the sudden snowstorm/cold weather here. :-)

I... I'm actually kind of surprised that American cigarettes are an export item. Surely to expats and pro-American Europeans who have lost all sense of taste and smell?

I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won’t work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don’t need to be exported.

If you work where I work, their solution is to just #include "the_file.c" so they have access to all the functions/variables I painstakingly marked static specifically to prevent them from trying to unit test the internals.

It’s called the asshole tax. Don’t be an asshole and you won’t be charged.

Slack is my modern go-to, but I still also use IRC. Slack has great support for technical chat, doesn’t slow my i7 with 32GB RAM to a crawl, has great multiple account support and even voice chat if you are into that. I prefer zoom for video when I need it, but slack’s isn’t nearly as shit as teams.

Maybe businesses will stop forcing “free” Teams on their workforces now. What a pile of shit.