I've just taken to applying Cosmoline to the underside of my truck each summer.

I don’t understand why your comment did so badly, I found it interesting.

Does it cost much? I live next to the ocean and had just accepted that rust was part of my life now.

I mean a gallon can is $90 plus shipping. It's not too bad.

Absolutely! I just bought some of this stuff and plan on applying it to the to under body of the car itself also.

Used oil apparently also makes good undercoating.

I have environmental and health concerns about used motor oil. Cosmoline is specifically formulated for rust prevention and forms a waxy coating, and doesn't have the additives and pollutants motor oil does after being in an engine.

They're not, really, though. US freight rail is remarkably efficient and cheap.

The US freight rail gets way to credit. The have been letting the waste majority of infrastructure decay. They continue to have a smaller and smaller share of the total transport market. They derail trains at an astonishing rate.

They are very profitable doing a small number of things. But an increase amount of actual transport needs has been moving to trucks (on federal subsided highways).

Given that those railroads have almost no competition from personal transit and that the US as a country is perfect for railroading, the overall market share the railroads have is astonishing small.

And the borders between the 4 monopolies causes lots of problems.

If a central authority took control and stopped with the attitude of cut everything out that isn't highly profitable, the US could leverage its rail road infrastructure far better. And would save money from fewer truck on the road (and the inherent green house effect).

The railroads profits alone could finance a nation wide rail electrification program.

Fascism is very specifically about about the subordination of all competing spheres to the State. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

That’s definitely the best price you’re going to find for a serviceable Garand.

Which is just as much a pipe dream

Meanwhile my son is almost 3 and already approaching a size where he legally only needs a booster seat.

Well, fix government oversight of public bureaucracies and then we can have a discussion. As it is now, it's pretty clear that elected officials have little control and oversight into the bureaucracies that they nominally control and direct. Make bureaucrats firable. End Chevron deference. Bring back political appointments from the top to the bottom of the bureaucracy.

> Bring back political appointments from the top to the bottom of the bureaucracy.

Good heavens no.

Turn over the bureaucracy every few years, bringing in political sycophants to replace people who actually understand the system (and, by and large, follow the law instead of kowtowing to the current demagogue-in-charge)?

this is exactly true in nearby large counties, US West

There's always the Post-9/11 GI Bill. 36 months of tuition at the most expensive in-state rate in whatever state you attend school in plus Basic Allowance for Housing equal to an E5 with dependents is quite good.

I mean if you start licking it or chewing it you might, but normal usage just wash your hands afterward and you're fine.

You'd have to eat a lot of solder. Metallic lead reacts with fuck all, basically, which is why it's such a good material for things like roof flashing. It doesn't even react particularly with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach, producing only lead chloride (which will make its way out of your body fairly quickly) and hydrogen gas (not enough to do anything fun if you burp while smoking a cigarette, but let's not take chances eh). Metallic lead is about as bioavailable as sand.

No no, if you want to get lead into your system you've got to really try quite hard. Taking some lead and mixing it with tin won't get the job done, oh no, not even a little bit. You're going to want to make it into an organic salt, maybe by welding on a lovely big acetate and then getting that into your stomach.

Now why would you want to do a thing like that?

Well, you might be an ancient Roman, with a fondness for "defrutum", a sweet sticky confection made by boiling soured wine and grapes in a lead pot until all the water is driven off. The acetic acid rips lead out like nobody's business and gets well and truly stuck together. Oh, and it tastes really sweet too, this lead acetate, which is just the thing to liven up any Roman party if the wine's gone a bit funny in the sun.

Now you've got a lovely big sugar that your digestive system will happily squish into your sensitive tissues, where it'll break up and be on its way leaving a big fat lead atom right there with nothing to bind to, until it finds something. Oh hey, you know that sugars - even with a great big lead atom weighing them down - cross the blood-brain barrier just fine, right? You couldn't design a better way to get lead poisoning.

Now toss in some ergot mould because you won't eat the local wheat because everyone is going mad from something and it must be those wily locals poisoning you so you only eat rye shipped over from Rome in mouldy sacks, and pretty soon - between the brain damage from lead acetate and the hallucinogenic mould - you're ready to turn horses into senators, and tell your soldiers to blunder into midgie-infested marshes in the North of Scotland where they sink out of sight never to be seen again.

Lovely.