MDchanic
Connoisseur d'Junque
Interesting how much these things can vary.
Over here, there is a Federal component to emissions regulation, so any car of OBD-II age or later has to pass some kind of test.
In NYC, the car has to be driven on rollers with constant monitoring by a camera connected 24 hours a day to the capitol.
In the rest of NY State, they have to connect a computer to your OBD-II that reads a ton of information and decides whether you have reprogrammed it.
In Maine, they have to look and see whether the Check Engine light is on.
In NJ, a state facility plugs into your OBD-II and checks it.
Safety inspections vary by state.
Here, I go to my local garage, say I need an inspection, and he connects the car and puts a sticker on it.
In Maine, my guy always shook the wheels and looked for rust. If he saw rust, I had to go home and make it invisible. In Maine, if you have rust, you fail. In NY, you can drive a car that doesn't exist below the axles, and nobody cares.
In NJ a state facility used to do a full safety inspection, including putting the car on a rack that jiggled it to test the shock absorbers, but now they don't check for safety at all (like many other states).
Yes, I have lived in Europe and I must say that it is fascinating that the actual sound of being in the city has changed. You used to hear loud 2-cycle exhausts from kids on scooters, alone or in groups, all night long. Now you just hear the whirring of delivery trucks, busses, cars, and scooters. It's a bit dislocating.
Yeah, the diesels were very big, both consumer-wise and politically, until Volkswagen got caught, and it was discovered that the phenomenally low diesel emissions weren't real (anyone who's ever spent the day in a bus garage could tell you that).
We're getting to a point over here where nobody is more than one color, no matter how many pieces you cut them into. On the right, you're red all the way through (here Republicans are red, not Communists), and on the left, you're blue all the way through.
Anyone who disagrees with anything on the far-right is a RINO (Republican In Name Only) or a Socialist, and anyone who disagrees with anything on the far-left is... well, a racist, or a fascist, or a —phobe, or something, but nobody will talk to them, so they move to the right.
Since fewer people have been rejected by the right for blasphemy than from the left, we have a right-leaning government now. If the left stops rejecting its own voters, we will swing back toward the left.
If all of the people who think they're both crazy got together and formed a new party, we'd have a sensible country again.
Guilty. When I was a teenager, I protested against nuclear energy.
Now, half a century later, with 50 years more experience managing nuclear power than we had then (right after Three Mile Island and before Chernobyl), it looks like we've figured it out pretty well, and I think we should be building one of those plants on every street corner, and the government should issue "War Bonds" to do it.
Our county outlawed plastic grocery bags, so they're a valuable commodity here, and I'm happy to grab them when I'm in a neighboring county.
– Eric
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