Let's Get Your Information

There was originally something yesterday, but then I found out after I posted it that I'd already written about that topic. So that was embarrassing a bit.

Anyway. Last night, on the way home from work, I went and filled up my gas tank. This was immediately- and I mean immediately- followed by my right front tire going blooey. I happened to pull over right across the street from a guy who actually knew a damn thing about cars, and right as he was pulling into his driveway too. (As it turned out, my rims had some sort of antitheft thingie on the lugnuts and the key for that was in the trunk, but nobody present knew that, so we ended up having to tow it. We tried five or six times to pay the guy for his trouble and he absolutely refused to accept any money.)

So that was a fun dead of night in a cold and windy Wisconsin January.

At least I'm not a Russian driver. In Russia, you have some very, very bad drivers. You also have a lot of insurance fraud going on- the kind of guys who fling themselves into traffic and then go claim pain and suffering to the judge that can only be healed with lots of money. To defend themselves against this kind of fraud, Russian drivers have taken it upon themselves to install the same kind of dash cams you see in police cars in America (which is good because the less-than-honest Russian cops might have oh-so-conveniently turned theirs off). It's one of those things you just need to have in the car, like a, well, spare tire. After all, raw video is a pretty solid solution to a he-said-she-said situation.

At the same time, Russia has notoriously bad roads, and if the insurance companies happen to be skeptical as to how your car got smashed up- and given all the fraud, they've become understandably jittery- with a dash cam you're able to show them the exact size of the pothole you found yourself in.

And so the insurance companies end up with videos like this on their desk...



Or this:



Or this:


I don't hear you complaining your local drivers are worse. At least I shouldn't be.