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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • I flipped cars for a few years. Im a pretty good diy mechanic.

    The amount of people who cant be bothered scraping off stickers, and giving a car a good detail astounds me. Take the car home, wash it thoroughly, detail the engine bay and interior, and if you have the skills change the oil, air filter and coolant. Those were usually good for a few hundred per flip but the bar to entry is low, anyone can do that.

    Also buying cars with 4 steel wheels with bald tyres and finding a set of cheap alloy wheels with good tyres that someone was flogging off were also a good flip if you could find the wheels and tyres cheap and negotiate the car down. “Mate a set of tyres is $600” when you can find a legal set on nicer wheels for $200.

    The best ones were nice cars with 1 big problem, “needs a new clutch” or “blown head gasket” made a few grand off those usually because I could spend as long as I needed to to do the job on the cheap by myself.



  • Damn near every aftermarket automotive part I have ever bought contains some variation of the “This is not intended for use on street vehicles, offroad and race use only” somewhere in the description.

    I can cut out my cat and weld in a piece of 2 inch pipe and I just created an emissions defeat device… I can fit an oil catch can, if I plug the breather tube back into the intake its legal, if I vent to atmosphere its not.

    I mean, people who “roll coal” have no sympathy from me but this case is nowhere near as cut and dried as a lot of people think.





  • I honestly believe that Linus is a well intentioned dumbass. He likes his people and believes that everyone can just get along and that nobody would harass another employee seriously. He knows that the mistakes are just honest mistakes which is why he gets so defensive, take the whole “trust me bro” thing… I think it never occurred to him to fuck his customers over which is why he didnt handle it well.

    He doesnt believe his employees need a union because I dont know about you but if I owned a company Id hope that my people felt looked after well enough that they didnt feel like they needed one either.

    But that kind of attitude just doesnt work with so damn many people, he should have hired a full time HR manager YEARS ago, as well as the company lawyer on staff. He SHOULD NOT be doing the WAN show, or if he does it should be on a 5 minute tape delay with someone from legal and hr present.

    The reason why so much bullshit corporate structure exists is to largely protect the company from itself.



  • Its unlikely, but not impossible and when you’re dealing with preproduction prototypes you are holding someone elses valuable proprietary information, which in the case of this waterblock is unlikely to be something thats worth copying as its a high cost low margin niche product. But someone could.

    Its not like it was just expensive or just someone elses property. It was someone elses one of a kind proprietary design prototype, they knew this and they STILL couldnt show the proper care and responsibility. Thats why this admittedly unlikely edge case is a big deal.


  • I didnt see anywhere that it was the “only” prototype. I believe it was their most complete or their pre-production prototype.

    So likely a hand machined and finished item as opposed to something made with production tooling or in batches to reduce manufacturing cost. Something that could also be sent to reviewers as its essentially what the finished product will be. So not only are they out their best prototype, but the opportunity cost and the potential that someone like EK could have bought it and reverse engineered it to release a competing product with little to no R&D cost.