I stopped working for state government because I realized more idiocy was offered at the federal level. What fun it is.
My team did more with 6 people with little oversight than we are able to do now with 25, with managers added at every level to crawl up everyone's ass and add VALUE. But hey, the bodies are stacked, as you mention, and cash is flowing, which is what really matters, right? RIGHT?!
I'm just a local boy so it sounds like there's a lot of BS we miss being at the county level. Not that there's NOT BS here, but the amount seems to increase exponentially as you get into higher and higher levels of govt...
I attend my township meetings now. It's restored my faith in the possibilities of government, but it's also taken away a lot of my willingness to accept things the way they are.
I assume there are plenty of similarities between the way property taxes are assessed between Michigan and Ohio. I would absolutely keep my eyes on the record card your local assessor is maintaining of your property. We had a guy up here who, to hit his equalization ratios, would add barrel saunas and boat houses to properties that had neither (and most weren't even in a lake). We've been working on correcting the cards for the past couple of years. I'm not sure how that's not a crime, but he's not been punished for it, so far as I know. If you find an error there ought to be a way to correct it. Michigan will got back a couple of years to allow you to recoup some losses if it comes to that. Of course, the state also allows us the power to go back as far as we can to recoup it's losses, so it doesn't hurt to know your assessor and send him or her a Christmas card every year.
Knowing what I know, when we're finally out of the city I'll be able to have a relationship with the township people since I know most of them anyhow (3 "cities" and 19 townships in my county). They're generally pretty nice, and the others who work at the courthouse have been plenty courteous too. The county commission is a band of dirtbags, though.
I always thought property taxes should be like all the other ones, in that you should get charged on the place's ACTUAL value when you sell it, rather than on some arbitrary government estimate of its worth.
When I lived in Chicago, half the nice cars in my part of town had Florida plates. When you consider that Florida had no car taxes, didn't do yearly inspections AND out-of-state cars weren't required to get a $200 City Sticker (basically a glorified parking permit if your car was registered in the city proper), it made all the sense in the world.
But it had to be a nice car IN NICE CONDITION, so you could make it look like you had enough money to own property in Florida.
Do all cities in Illinois do the glorified parking permit racket? After my church’s music director took a similar position in LaGrange, I happened to peruse the Website for the city and was amazed to see that requirement.
If you were to call my office as the property owner I would send you a PDF for free. It only takes a minute to create the file and send it, and they're generally pretty pleasant phone calls. Most counties offer a GIS map online that will give you access to your record card and an approximation of your property lines. Some counties (like mine) make you pay for the card that way, but like I said I'll send you your own info for free. Your county equalization dept should also have a public computer you can use to view it (and all your neighbors) free of charge. It should not be difficult to obtain.
I think the hierarchy of which office does what is certainly different. The counties do all of the work of valuation, tax assessment and tax collection in Ohio, then distribute the monies back to the various taxation entities--cities, townships, schools, etc. I thought Michigan is more of a hodgepodge, with those duties performed by the municipality or township in which the property is sitused. (My late aunt was a township clerk for a couple decades, while another worked in the city offices of a Detroit suburb.)
After twenty-plus years of my twenty-nine in Ohio County IT working on our tax-assessment software, I still get tripped-up occasionally with the fact that real property is taxed a year in arrears, i.e., the tax this year is assessed based upon the property value of the year just ended yesterday.
Of course you Michiganders have unequal tax collections instead of two equal billings each year, correct, with the larger of the two in January and the so-called “Summer Tax” smaller in order to leave more dollars in the pockets of the taxpayers to spend on tourism, right?
As to your other point, in my experience, the idiocy gets worse the farther up you go..there’s people at the Ohio Department of Tax Equalization that, some at the County level are convinced, couldn’t find their peckers with both hands and a map! And the Feds?! Jeebus!! 🙄
Now if the larger, arguably, of the two college football teams in the state could keep their foot on the throttle until the end of the annual campaign instead of flaming-out with the month off destroying their rhythm, they might actually win a national championship, especially if That Other Team is having an off-year or two! But misery loves company, and that other team played a better game! Would have been one hell of an irony if there would’ve been a rematch of “The Game” for all the marbles! Of course, there’s not even a connection going back years to the halcyon days of Michigan football on the 50,000 watt blowtorch from the “Great Voice Of The Great Lakes” any longer, as I found out yesterday when I tuned in on Sirius/XM to listen to the Michigan play-by-play and..who the fuck are these morons??!! Where are “Brandy” and Dan Dierdorf??!! (::Pulls into a parking lot to consult Google!::) They retired! FUCK!! 😢🙄🏈
Hodgepodge is exactly the right word to describe how taxes are assessed and collected in Michigan. Every county does it its own way. There was a new assessor for one of our townships up here. I saw an anomaly on a deed and alerted him to it and he freaked out, accusing me of not doing my job. But in my county, it was not something we take care of in our department, unlike the downstate county where he is also the equalization director where it would have been part of my duties.
The townships also decide which tax bill their millages fall on. I'm really not sure which one tends to be bigger. There are doubtlessly places that try to minimize the summer bill for tourism, but I'll bet there are other places that try to minimize the winter bill for Xmas spending.
I stopped paying attention to sports a couple of years ago. The whole kneeling thing from these privileged, pampered athletes really turned me off to it and I find myself enjoying life a lot more without the stress of rooting for loser teams (I was sort of a Spartans guy for a while since my study abroad program was run through MSU, and since I was born and grew up in NW Ohio I will always have a soft spot for the Buckeyes, and, well, the Rockets, too, since Toledo is my hometown). Except for sumo. I love sumo, but no American college competes in sumo.
Oh man, you are so right. I hate CoE. Places in the government have a CoE for everything: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/COECI/index.html And who is surprised the first topic on that page is related to minimizing healthcare bias in collaboration with our faultless NIH?
My last 'paid' gig, before I committed 100 percent to being a full-time author was quickly becoming... scratch that HAD become, worthless. Which was why I walked away from a LOT of money.
It came to me when I was doing the project schedule and the work that they were expecting out of me and my team would take over a year - but the deadline was in five months. So I was forced, by my boss, and the boss doing the schedule, to lie about everything, so the schedule would be 'right'. So that upper management wouldn't ask questions.
We were going to fail, and fail big (for the record there were supposed to be 4 people doing my job, but it was just me, and I was responsible for 90 percent of this fortune 500 company's business at this point).
There was no point to my being there. The work would not get done. Excuses would be made. No one would get fired (sadly). And in what was perhaps the most poignant display of how oddly things are 'connected', my father died on the day I walked out the door and left my career of almost 30 years forever.
What I had spent so many years of my life doing just didn't matter anymore. It had become - pointless.
Liking your post because it is meaningful, upsetting, but impressive that you made the leap. Sorry you had two HUGE life changes on the same day. You have large brassy one's my man.
True, but at least in previous eras you had a chance of working with people who cared about the mission or were at least not complete pieces of shit. Now even if you get that, the company will be a piece of shit as a matter of expressed policy.
I'm watching that happen at my current place of employment right now. It is entertaining because it has zero effect on me. I'm my own department so I don't answer to the assholes failing and getting the golden key. I am however privy the the information that is coming in and showing just how big if a fuckup the golden key holders have made this year and am intrigued by what 2023 will bring them once it goes public.
I think I told my boss. I know nobody wanted me to go, but I was just done with it all. I no longer enjoyed the work because it didn't matter what I did. We were going to fail and no one wanted to take corrective action.
They already knew that I didn't care about money. My price would have been the firing of the Indian Gal in charge of my division and me being put in her job. Because all she ever did was lie.
I do wonder if she got replaced when this billion dollar program was late.
When the Judeo-Christian work ethic exited corporate America as a whole and we decided to outsource our entire nation, why in the fuck did we do so to a third world shithole where any spoken English CANNOT be understood by English speakers from the rest of the world??!!
To the engineering side that would get a whiff of what these wasted budgets were on critical products that could have used the money to fix real issues, this always drove me up a wall. I've come close to quitting the industry on multiple occasions for this reason alone, but then again, I don't know another transportation sector industry that comes close. Hey - at least its not Boeing levels of BS.
Something inside me, a tiny part SIMPLY CANNOT abide by this attitude of 'must be spent or will not get it next year' attitude of people, forced upon them by accountants, and its nearly the most asinine thing I've ever come across.
In his autobiography, Brian Rowe, former Chairman Emeritus of GE Aircraft Engines, described working for the government as an utter nightmare. Far from being a license to print money, being a military contractor involved things like allowing an army of bureaucrats into your factory to "keep you honest," having to fight military branches that wanted to change contracts on-the-fly, from fixed-price to actual-cost, based on what was cheaper for them at the moment and requirements to document EVERY LITTLE THING.
But the worst aspect, in his opinion and from the engineer's perspective, was when the military would complain about some problem with the engines in a helicopter or fighter, GE's engineers would come up with a fix and present it to that service branch, the representatives of that branch would accept it and everybody involved KNEW that nothing would ever be done to solve the problem, because the solution was NOT SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN INTO THE CONTRACT.
This happened with the C-5's wing. Look that one up. Utter fuckstickery on the government's part.
Ben Rich said the same thing. In the interest of fighting corruption (see Fat Leonard and Duke Cunningham to find out how well that worked) or just make work programs for otherwise unemployable college grads the government added massive amounts of overhead. We would have been better off with a little patriotic Japanese style corruption and no auditors.
I think it's that corrupt societies have always been corrupt, so everyone that lives there expects that to be how the world works. America, on the other hand, is supposed to be an honest society, so not everyone's on the same page.
What I meant was in certain societies and even the US historically, an entity might bribe a politician to get a contract to build a bridge or something, but at least they would then build the goddamn bridge. In a kleptocracy or whatever the hell we are living in now there is just theft under the color of law and no bridges.
I've been reading car magazines since I could read. Dad always had C&D and MT subscriptions. I used to be excited each month and read them cover to cover. As I got older I started to pick up on the one dimensional articles and the blatant BS. Its hard to take someone seriously when they complain about the piano black interior trim on a Chevy but then go an gush over the piano black interior trim in a Porsche. I still subscribe to one "new car" magazine, but its difficult to get excited about it when my favorite brands are dead and there are only possibly a single digit number of cars I'd bother spending my own money on. As is typical, those cars tend to get ragged on by the experts (never have bought anything that was outright recommended by the experts). I now get some excitement from the two "classic car" based magazines I subscribe to. It has become a lot more fun to read about the cars that came before me, or were part of my youth and some of the history that revolved around them. I can still pick out blatant bias and snarky BS, but it really doesn't matter anyway.
I can see why you're disgusted with the entire charade.
What drove me away from Hot Rod, Car Craft and Super Street was what I call "The Great Myth of the Car Magazine." This is the idea that one can build a car worthy of a magazine feature with the money one makes working some shit job, like McDonald's or Home Depot.
Assuming this ISN'T just smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, what the articles almost never alluded to were the 80-hour work weeks at two full-time jobs, the exclusive devotion of every dollar not spent on food, rent and gasoline to the vehicle or the fact that to pull off such results requires one to know every machine shop owner, paint booth operator and mechanic in town.
This later showed up when I'd read websites like Speedhunters, particularly when they'd do articles on some Tokyo hot rod shop. You can picture it: The shop owner, who's into his second consecutive day awake and his second pack of Marlboros that day, and who hasn't had a haircut or new clothes since the second Obama administration, is standing in his cobbled together, corrugated warehouse shop somewhere in a rundown industrial part of Tokyo.
In the back corner, he has a dozen cracked-and-broken $2,500 carbon fiber hoods leaning against, and stacked on top of, a Countach or 348, which is itself underneath a quarter-inch of dust and overspray. To his left, a few dozen Nissan RBs, Toyota JZs and the odd GM LS in various states of assembly. To his right, a forest of wheels, transmissions and titanium mufflers doing their best impression of a scale model of Chicago. Scattered throughout the place is a million bucks worth of Skyline GT-R, Supra, NSX and maybe a JZX100, each resplendent in a hundred grand worth of GReddy, HKS and A'PEXi. To say nothing of his comprehensive assortment of Mitutoyo instrumentation worth more than my house.
One is given to wonder where all the necessary cash came from...
This type of writing continues in glossy magazines directed to us Porsche owners. As a member of PCA (I get a nice discount on track days and 10% off from some vendors for my used Cayman and Boxster) I receive "Panorama" every month. There is/are always one, sometimes two features each month on some owner who, due entirely to his love of all things Porsche (or sometimes one particular thing Porsche) has built the perfect paean 911/356/914 by through untold connections who are able to source, rebuild, prototype, paint, shine, and procure the one vehicle that satisfies the owner's exquisite taste. The last month brought the heartwarming story of a patent lawyer in California who helps kids through his foundation, who had the time, with is adult son, to build a perfect 911. The interior guy, who had done "6 or 7" cars for the owner previously, dropped his other work to sew seat covers from virgin minks; the engine guy dropped his other work to build an engine from rare earth minerals; the painter dropped his other work to provide the world's shiniest black paint, all for the simple brotherhood pleasure of creating the one-off 911 for the man who helps kids. We learned that the lawyer does not actually drive the car (uncomfortably, he looks a bit over the ideal weight to sit on virgin mink) but it is the journey-- remember, his adult son helped in the creation-- not the result that matters.
At least Jack never worked directly for one of these outfits.
Letting my PCA membership lapse when I sold my last Porsche was a subtle and slightly dirty pleasure on par with popping a particularly strident pimple.
Do you know the people who wrote for and edit Panorama? The photography is usually first rate, and the writing is passable, but the content is so vile.
Pete Stout used to run it; he now has 000 magazine, which is a high end quarterly (~$250 / year) coffee table style magazine. I have every issue extant, but more in appreciation of the craft and effort going into the magazine than in fealty to Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG.
I don't know if this is a metaphor or not, and as a fair-skinned redhead I'm hardly the world's expert on acne, but the trick is to pop them at the blackhead stage before they get infected into an actual pimple. Speaking of which, did you know that there are entire YouTube channels devoted to stuff like popping pimples and boils? Humans are strange.
Reminds me of an episode of "Night Court" where Christine answered the phone and it was a wrong number. Then she goes, "Wait, you want to do WHAT with my shoe?" there's a pause, she gets this horrified, disgusted look on her face, says "HOW DID YOU EVEN THINK OF THAT???!!!" and hangs up.
"...due entirely to his love of all things Porsche..."
Exactly, thank you. There's never a budget attached to one of these projects, or a realistic timeline, either. Just a passion for the car (or brand, more usually) that drove the project.
Uh huh.
This must be the demographic car companies aim for with those "Got the wife a new Lexus for Christmas" commercials.
Most people who have a passion for a particular brand are completely dead inside in direct proportion to that brand's marketplace position. Someone who loves AMC Concords is probably a great dude. Obsessed with Paganis? There are probably a hundred people who would give their left nut to see you executed.
We had a brown one of those when I was a kid. Called it The Brown Car. Real creative, I know. I think it was cars like this that made my dad hate all those jobs he had that requred him to travel.
That's an interesting take. Certainly true for Ferraris. Not so true for Porsches, I find that a number of people I've met at my local PCA club, almost always at track weekends, simply like the cars. It's mostly Caymans, Boxsters and beater 911s there.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but the BMW people seem worse.
I don't know anyone who drives a McLaren who doesn't seem like a pyramid schemer.
And you can't drive a Lambo and not have a sense of humor.
That's one reason why I like Ken Lingenfelter's collection. In addition to all the marquee vehicles, he's got some oddballs like a Bricklin, a Caballero (neo-classic Vette), and a Chevy SSR 'sport truck'. His supercars include a Vector and a Saleen S7, not exactly the kind of cars to impress folks who have to have the latest Lambo.
aw c'mon--they're just envious fpr pete's sake...you're not giving them ethical cred, are you? i think i misinterpreted your position so i'll just go away!
Where does that leave a Honda fanboi, though NOT an apologist?! (If this yank-the-mo’-powah-from-the-top-trims (re: Accord, which from 1996 or 1997 had such an option—until NOW) shit continues, they’ll be back in the same boat they were in ca. 2012 or so!)
If some 💩-for-brains runs a red light and totals-out my one-generation-wonder Accord K20C3/10AT (which I thought would be a disaster after Honda dumped the V6, until I drove one), I only hope I will have enough “fail-safes” in my grey matter, or will be hurt enough myself, to NOT inflict harm to that idiot such that I end up incarcerated!
Hopefully the hybrid-only option will be as decent, at least given all externalities, as the previous transition! But at 204hp versus 190 in the base models with the L15/CVT combo? I doubt it!
Mustangs too, but you see it with everything. Money's no object and just appears out of thin air, and if you care what it costs, you're not a Real ________ Guy.
I usually only got to BaT when I want pictures of some vehicle, but is it the usual car-guy business of the asking price being the sum total of every dollar the seller's spent on the thing since HE bought it?
There was a video with his crew talking about getting the DSR record or whatever and their attitude and their descriptions of the attitudes of the other drivers towards him are hilarious. Who cares that he's stealing millions of dollars from poor people and ruining their lives while defrauding the government? He's winning (apparently without even cheating) at a sport that does not matter at all to anyone other than the participants. It would be like complaining about Bernie Madoff using an unfair (but legal) squash racket.
I was trying to think of a wisecrack that would actually be a backhanded compliment about where your concerns would lie should you discover that a more successful competitor was funding his club racing success with orphan blood but the fact is that many, if not the majority, of your competitors are funding their endeavors with orphan blood at various layers of abstraction.
I sound like Lisa Simpson this morning, sorry, paint black and hit the track.
That's less true in the Midwest. You get a lot of dingy collar sole proprietors and skilled trades in some classes. On the coasts however it's almost exclusively a lizard person occupation with a sprinkling of first-generation IT people.
Don’t forget the tools. At 17, my minimum wage job as a bicycle mechanic couldn’t even buy me the tools to manual swap my Neon. All I had was a Craftsman socket set the size of a hotel bible, some acetate screwdrivers, and a few pliers that were rusted from plumbing work. That was enough to keep the car on the road and not much more.
The best thing that ever happened was my Jeep getting broken into and having my tools stolen. For Christmas, everyone pitched in and got me some decent stuff.
Sadly, no. The Neon was a $900 non-runner with a botched engine replacement. I did an entire engine gasket set, timing belt job, and rear main in my driveway with basically a set of hand tools. It was one hell of a learning experience.
A few years later, I had enough money saved to buy an XJ. Even then, I still didn’t have enough to build the mythical 400 HP SBC as seen in Car Craft, let alone sometning to put it in.
Car crafts greatest project was Steve Magnantes $2500 Cadillac 500 powered gremlin that could run 10s. The engine was set back like a foot into the cabin and he drove from the back seat. Frieburger put the kibosh on it because he was writing about street racing. There was also a rumor that advertisers hated it.
After the publisher’s wife told a person critical of their donation to Southern Poverty Center on their forum to die in a fire I let my subscription lapse. The SPLC donation came a few months after GRM was looking for donations to keep the doors open due to covid. Wonder if they got a ppp “loan”.
Yeah, fuck GRM's behavior there. What a great way to make a completely apolitical subject RABIDLY political. A direct donation to the DNC would have raised fewer eyebrows.
Jason Cammisa and Larry Webster are the same person, it's just that neither of them can bear to admit it. And they are both cursed with the unpleasant combination of an unquenchable need to be liked and a total inability to behave in a manner that could bring that desire to fruition. The primary difference between them is that one of them is a gay man who carries himself and looks like a Jersey rat, while the other is the opposite.
My apologies. While searching through my email for something else today, I stumbled across an article from July where you talked about Cammisa at some length. Great read!
waaaay outta the past--that seems to be my job--do you remember the major carmag writer who was killed in a highspeed test crash at some banked oval test track in a prototype or suchlike? the magazine made a pretty good subtle reference that it might've been suicide as he'd recently been uncloseted. or something like that
Absolutely NOT suicide. I've spoken at length with people who were there. It was failure to prep the car correctly, mixed with someone driving over his head.
I wonder how much extra money tesla made owning its dealerships. I doubt they fully capturing ADM for themselves to the extent dealers were. I heard flippers were a big business.
I've often wondered if I'm just slow, because I'm not the hyper-perceptive genius all those TV shows and movies that soaked my youth told me was the normal state of being a kid, but when I think about all those bits of wisdom that life reluctantly lets you have when IT'S ready to give them up, like:
"High school graduation is the last time society will drag your ass across a finish line - from here on out nobody cares if you live or die."
"You can do everything right and still lose."
"Nobody will tell you the important stuff - you're expected to figure that out on your own."
"There aren't REALLY any rules - it's What You Can Get Away With."
"The clock's ticking, so what're you gonna do?"
...I wonder if maybe the reason nobody tells you, for example, "Life's largely a survival situation and there's no Right or Wrong in the wilderness, only What Works," when you're 10 is because the world desperately needs almost everyone - and especially YOU - to play by the rules because if you actually understood how life worked when you were 10 or 15, you'd live your live accordingly and mess up somebody's Big Plans.
careful now ... if the curtain is pulled back too early in life, the kids might just skip straight to living in an urban tent city, because society is a farce anyway, why even try ...
Society is a jungle and you are either predator or prey.
The reason to 'bother' is to be a predator so you can live a better life than all the bleating sheep around you. You need to learn the rules of the game if you're going to cheat at it after all.
There's good Sisyphean and bad Sisyphean, I might claim. Donut shops and White Castle are good Sisyphean -- keep making donuts and weird little burgers. Corporate paperwork admin BS is bad Sisyphean.
Or is the difference meaningful? The overall job here is to fuel the locomotive that pulls the family train, right? How much do the details matter?
Spend some serious time in IT and you will realize that the Sisyphus struggle is the nature of the beast. Not always a bad thing. On the back end there are large projects to install / configure / migrate to the new software. Followed by 3-10 years of patching it repeatedly. Followed by another huge project to either replace it or to do a major upgrade requiring new hardware / OS version / database version. Then repeat. The new stuff usually works better in some areas and worse in others, but all the experience you gained supporting the quirks of the old stuff is mostly useless now as the quirks are different. If everybody did their job then each iteration requires a bit less support time and a bit more functionality to the people who actually use it daily.
As far as I can tell the secret to it all is that once you realize you are repeatedly pushing a rock up a hill, is to accept it and focus on what that rock movement has enabled in your life. Accepting it may often be harder than pushing the rock. I don't love what I do like I did in my 20s, but it has enabled me to do things I love.
A former colleague teases me every time I complain about the endless march of "updates" I don't need and never asked for. He'll joke, "Oh, if we could only all be programming a Centipede CD." Darn right: https://lawler.io/scrivings/on-rotting-software/
I'm reminded of 'The Comedian's' reaction just before he was thrown through the window.
Apologies for the capeshit ref.
Edit: Most every industry is riddled with these termites. If you are the type of man that needs to be able to look himself in the mirror, you're going to have a bad time.
Honestly, you could do a lot worse than reference The Watchmen. It's almost literature at this point, and a lot less like doing homework than reading The Dark Knight felt to me...
What you're describing is something I call "Criminal Arrogance." This is where someone, usually someone powerful, believes that anything THEY do is fair game, but it's beyond the pale for anyone else to take those same liberties with their interests. "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable." It's essentially a violation of fair play.
This is where the Mafia can steal from everybody else with impunity, but reacts viciously, almost in an offended manner, if some takes THEIR money. This is where the concepts of Assaulting A Police Officer and Resisting Arrest came from, and live happily to this day. This is also where resides the old, "The company reserves the right to fire you THIS SECOND, but you have to give IT two weeks' notice if you plan to leave."
Probably because sociopaths are like an evil inverse of Born Again Christians: Nothing really bothers them. Nothing truly angers, frightens or discourages them. They just live their lives without all those ugly things that cause normal people so much trouble. It's alluring.
I've run into a number of real sociopaths in real life in my career. I've handled a bunch of fraud cases, and behind virtually all was someone who could not care about the consequences of their actions. It's quite an experience taking a deposition or putting them on a witness stand for a day or two. Luckily they are easy to expose to a jury.
Also see: landlords, bank loans, software license agreements, check cashing stores, and pretty much anywhere else normal people have to do business with corporations or government.
Jack, were you the one who mentioned the book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber in one of your prior recent pieces? Can't remember if I discovered it because of you or stumbled upon it by happenstance. At any rate, how much of anything we do in this country is "bull shit" since we've transitioned to the far superior SeRvIcE EcOnOmY?
The problem with Graeber is that his solution, Universal Basic Income, flies in the face of TANSTAAFL and will likely encourage more indolence than creativity. Hunger is a good teacher (not that Hemmingway ever really went hungry - his first wife had a trust fund and he left her for an heiress). Just because things like the 20/80 rule, Pareto and Price seem to be accurate models of how institutions end up working, do we really have to accept 80% bullshit?
Far from being bad, inequality is actually a great driver of personal, and then societal, improvement. If busting my ass and being dedicated to accomplishing things will make me richer than my fellow man, I'll take that deal.
Let's be honest: Part of the joy of owning an exotic car, or a nice house, or fine clothes, is that most other people DON'T.
Hard to not become jaded and cynical when everything comes down to power and money. If I had a vote, I would want more from you about the auto industry. But, you should do what you want.
From the tone of your writing the last few years it feels like this post is a long time coming. I think a Jack with less focus on the automotive journalism industry, specifically the car reviewing side, will be a better one for all of us. It did feel like punching down, simply because it is hard to think of the people you were criticizing as anything other than irrelevant.
I have been thinking about my relationship with car reviews, including your own, and how regardless of their quality they don't help me make better decisions. It isn't (especially with yours, like classic C/D it isn't about the car its the journey) that the review is bad its that it can't seem to answer my questions when I am looking. To reference a post from a month back, I don't think more rigorous instrumented testing will help.
I am reminded of the Douglas Adam's post from years ago about him buying a pickup truck. I still find myself in the same conundrum. I should have a wealth of knowledge to make that decision. I currently own a 2016 F-150 Platinum Crew Cab 6.5 Bed, 2020 F-350 same, and a 2022 Ram 1500 extended cab 6.5 (some kind of Horn) high XLT equivalent. The last one is more a supervisors truck perk for my key guy, so I only drive it occiasionaly.
Despite all that personal experience with ownership, all the reviews I continuously read, all the headaches of each of them, I have no idea what truck to replace the 2016 with.
1500 Ram with the air ride? At least I can find one. What if I don't like the ride on washboard roads? With my F150 I replaced shocks and put on a steel winch bumper and it rides waaay better than the stock Ram or the Superduty in those cases.
F-250 (if I can find one) with a mildly modded suspension for my on-road and unloaded comfort? No idea what that end result will be without doing it.
Another F150 (if I can find one) and make similar modifications , but I got the F350 because I kept beating the shit out of the 150 doing Super Duty things, but the 150 is a better family hauler.
Of course the answer is it doesn't matter. I can do any of those things and be perfectly happy most of the time, and wishing I did something else some of the time. No matter what reviews I read the answer will still be the same.
The same thing goes for what convertible I drive, or sedan, or minivan. So long as you eliminate the actual pieces of shit in the category, it is just a matter of personal taste and style after that. No one in the automotive journalism industry has very much influence over my personal taste and style, thank god.
I think your stint at Hagerty was the last best chance. Not just the original idea of being independent of manufacturer PR flacks, but the idea of being independent of the entire new car industry. A counter, but not competing, point to BAT. For all that sites flaws it does democratize information more than any other classic/collector/old car resource, but in its own limited way. Hagerty using high editorial standards about a similar subject matter would have been glorious.
Either way, fuck those PR guys, looking forward to everything coming down the pipe as always.
Every segment Hyundai and K-backwards N play in is probably the one where they're the worst option, except B segment crossovers where the Ford EcoSport takes the cake.
The Nissan Titan also still exists, ditto the Mercedes A class. The Infiniti JX60 or whatever. 4 cyl 4 speed dodge journey up until 21.
There's lots of shitty cars out there. Maybe not as shitty as a Ford tempo, certainty not as bad as a post 2010 Mitsubishi Galant, but they're out there.
My boss in the '80s replaced his Pennsylvania-built Rabbit automatic with an early Tempo 2-door, white with bordello red velour. I found it solid but gutless. Next was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser which I liked. I watched an extended video by a broker somewhere in Northern California selling a low mileage example (sans wood panelling) a while back and thought, you know, that would be a pleasant grocery getter! Incidentally, I was driving an '85 VW Scirocco at the time – having bought and sold three BMW 2002s from 1971 through 1984 – but my first car was a factory-ordered 1969 Dodge Dart GTS 340, so my automotive taste was ecumenical and remains so. Here are my Substack thoughts on the Dart:
I was very into the Treknology side of things and loved the universe as a child and you couldn't pay me to watch any of what they're passing off as Trek these days.
If someone at ACF said the Pike show was worth watching that might get me to check out an episode or two.
This makes it sound like I have high standards but I just rewatched Pacific Rim which is one of my favorite movies because giant powered armor suits fight giant monsters and the good guys are self-sacrificing and eager to fight. It's not a deep or complex film and boy does it deliver!
I want my entertainment to be escapism. I LOVE Michael Bay movies. I LOVE big, loud, kinetic, awesome summer blockbusters. I want movies with beautiful people and starships and machine guns and giant robots and car chases and space battles and explosions and smartass one-liners and spine-tingling instrumentals and inspirational speeches and Big Damn Heroes.
I watched every bit of Trek (I choked down voyager eventually, but truly enjoyed Enterprise) up until the reboot movie timeline. I watched the first one of those but didn't care for it.
Can't bring myself to watch any of the new shows.
Surprisingly I found myself enjoying The Orville non-ironically. Sure there are some not good parts, but it is the best option out there. The run is mostly likely over.
My father once pointed out that many Asian women don't retain the cute, childlike features that pretty women have. Upon reflection, you could probably say that about any ethnicity, after all, beautiful people are in the minority.
It's the only place in the world where I have slept with women whose name I didn't really know. I'm not one for casual encounters because I like to over-complicate everything, but Malaysia overcame my resistance.
The problem for me is that I'm literally 2.5 times the weight of the average Chinese Malaysian girl so it didn't always strike me as totally consensual.
I wanted to stand and cheer at the accord pun. Thank you for that.
Perhaps the only good thing about working at the granite shop was that I could easily explain what I did to anyone who asked. I had a hand in the entire process, from the template to the install (at least until I fell down our front stairs and seriously injured myself, I'm all better now though). And now my job at the county? How do you explain titles and deeds and legal descriptions and property taxes to a 3rd grader? I suppose I could mutter some bullshit about getting money for roads, policemen, and fire fighters, but that's still bullshit, isn't it? So after deeds are done I write while I'm there and that keeps me looking busy while simultaneously being subversive because nobody there would approve of the things I like to write. The bonus is that the union, for all it's foibles and failures, keeps me unfirable. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.
When we moved to Japan the first time we had three vehicles helping us move accumulated shit from our apartment in Toledo to storage at my parents' house just across the border in Michigan: a 1989 Camry, a 1997 Hyundai Accent, and a late 90s Windstar. We piled the last load into the Windstar which promptly shredded the transmission cable and my dad came over in my old Hyundai, successfully shoved everything from the Windstar into the Accent, and took it all away with him. They were able to reattach the transmission cable and drive the van away, but it did not survive much longer.
After seeing what the 86 Taurus (well, an 87, but still) did to our summer vacation plans one year, I'm not surprised at all. I see your point, though. How in the world did the K-car platform end up more durable?? (Our 91-ish Plymouth Grand Voyager was far more reliable than my Dad's unlamented and unmissed Taurus, and also had classy fake wood siding and bitching aftermarket 5-spoke alloy rims).
Personally, I always liked the K-Tonas, particularly the early fixed-headlight models. There was something very "We're still getting used to the idea of FWD performance" about them.
The red-over-silver one Tommy Lee Jones drove in "Black Moon Rising" is the one I'm talking about.
I remember as a kid when Front Wheel Drive was marketed as All Wheel Drive is today. The reality of both is that automakers *had* to push this stuff in order to meet regulatory requirements, and thus had to sell it hard.
Maybe because Ford was selling bunches of Tauri and the Windstar was a side project while Chrysler had a lot more on the line, relatively speaking, with their minivans. For what it's worth, in terms of reliability we had a '91 AWD Caravan that went through 3 1/2 transmissions. The A604 was not a particularly robust gearbox.
Interestingly, my parents owned a 1g Taurus and 2g Grand Caravan from new until 12 to 14 years old and 200k miles respectively, without major failure in either. The Taurus even served me in high school whenever my Monte Carlo SS was broken or being upgraded (often).
My early mechanic mentor and ex-uncle Kenny attributed it to my dad's adherence to aircraft like maintenance standards, but at the end of the day most cars fall within a standard deviation of reliability if given reasonable care. Though, the deviation A604 and AX4N were particularly skewed.
What you're talking about was one of those Cracked articles where they made an interesting point rather than being funny. It was called something like, "9 Types of Jobs That Destroy Your Soul," or something like that, and one of them was "The Assistant Cromulationist."
This was the guy who can't describe his job to ANYONE, not even people he works with, and just to make it more fun, it's one of those jobs where people only notice if you fuck it up.
On my financial services job with hedge funds, when I would describe it and someone would say “that sounds interesting”, I would just reply, “it really wasn’t, I was just the first guy they would call to yell at”.
Completely different vehicle. The Aerostar was a Ranger under the skin, with an available AWD that nobody bought but which ended up doing yeoman service under 1996 V8 Explorers. The Windstar was a bulbous Taurus.
“some drooling moron who just got his first M&A bonus buys a 911 instead of a BMW”
It’s a good thing I don’t drool, otherwise I’d assume you were talking about me; as you will recall, I did purchase a 911 instead of an M3 with MY first M&A bonus based on some words written about a 993 on TTAC!
I read his capsule review of the 993 at TTAC and still obey the hierarchy of the wave when I'm out and about in my 993. I make a particular point of waving to 944 drivers. Cayenne and Q5... er, I mean Macan drivers can suck it.
I stopped working for state government because I realized more idiocy was offered at the federal level. What fun it is.
My team did more with 6 people with little oversight than we are able to do now with 25, with managers added at every level to crawl up everyone's ass and add VALUE. But hey, the bodies are stacked, as you mention, and cash is flowing, which is what really matters, right? RIGHT?!
I'm just a local boy so it sounds like there's a lot of BS we miss being at the county level. Not that there's NOT BS here, but the amount seems to increase exponentially as you get into higher and higher levels of govt...
I'm a Maker, not a Manager, and I thank GOD for that.
Know why? Because it means that, theoretically, I can make it to the top of my world with clean hands.
I attend my township meetings now. It's restored my faith in the possibilities of government, but it's also taken away a lot of my willingness to accept things the way they are.
I assume there are plenty of similarities between the way property taxes are assessed between Michigan and Ohio. I would absolutely keep my eyes on the record card your local assessor is maintaining of your property. We had a guy up here who, to hit his equalization ratios, would add barrel saunas and boat houses to properties that had neither (and most weren't even in a lake). We've been working on correcting the cards for the past couple of years. I'm not sure how that's not a crime, but he's not been punished for it, so far as I know. If you find an error there ought to be a way to correct it. Michigan will got back a couple of years to allow you to recoup some losses if it comes to that. Of course, the state also allows us the power to go back as far as we can to recoup it's losses, so it doesn't hurt to know your assessor and send him or her a Christmas card every year.
Knowing what I know, when we're finally out of the city I'll be able to have a relationship with the township people since I know most of them anyhow (3 "cities" and 19 townships in my county). They're generally pretty nice, and the others who work at the courthouse have been plenty courteous too. The county commission is a band of dirtbags, though.
I always thought property taxes should be like all the other ones, in that you should get charged on the place's ACTUAL value when you sell it, rather than on some arbitrary government estimate of its worth.
When I lived in Chicago, half the nice cars in my part of town had Florida plates. When you consider that Florida had no car taxes, didn't do yearly inspections AND out-of-state cars weren't required to get a $200 City Sticker (basically a glorified parking permit if your car was registered in the city proper), it made all the sense in the world.
But it had to be a nice car IN NICE CONDITION, so you could make it look like you had enough money to own property in Florida.
Do all cities in Illinois do the glorified parking permit racket? After my church’s music director took a similar position in LaGrange, I happened to peruse the Website for the city and was amazed to see that requirement.
Forgive me for being totally ignorant, but is this card something that I can get via the Clerk/Assessor at city hall with relative ease?
If you were to call my office as the property owner I would send you a PDF for free. It only takes a minute to create the file and send it, and they're generally pretty pleasant phone calls. Most counties offer a GIS map online that will give you access to your record card and an approximation of your property lines. Some counties (like mine) make you pay for the card that way, but like I said I'll send you your own info for free. Your county equalization dept should also have a public computer you can use to view it (and all your neighbors) free of charge. It should not be difficult to obtain.
I think the hierarchy of which office does what is certainly different. The counties do all of the work of valuation, tax assessment and tax collection in Ohio, then distribute the monies back to the various taxation entities--cities, townships, schools, etc. I thought Michigan is more of a hodgepodge, with those duties performed by the municipality or township in which the property is sitused. (My late aunt was a township clerk for a couple decades, while another worked in the city offices of a Detroit suburb.)
After twenty-plus years of my twenty-nine in Ohio County IT working on our tax-assessment software, I still get tripped-up occasionally with the fact that real property is taxed a year in arrears, i.e., the tax this year is assessed based upon the property value of the year just ended yesterday.
Of course you Michiganders have unequal tax collections instead of two equal billings each year, correct, with the larger of the two in January and the so-called “Summer Tax” smaller in order to leave more dollars in the pockets of the taxpayers to spend on tourism, right?
As to your other point, in my experience, the idiocy gets worse the farther up you go..there’s people at the Ohio Department of Tax Equalization that, some at the County level are convinced, couldn’t find their peckers with both hands and a map! And the Feds?! Jeebus!! 🙄
Now if the larger, arguably, of the two college football teams in the state could keep their foot on the throttle until the end of the annual campaign instead of flaming-out with the month off destroying their rhythm, they might actually win a national championship, especially if That Other Team is having an off-year or two! But misery loves company, and that other team played a better game! Would have been one hell of an irony if there would’ve been a rematch of “The Game” for all the marbles! Of course, there’s not even a connection going back years to the halcyon days of Michigan football on the 50,000 watt blowtorch from the “Great Voice Of The Great Lakes” any longer, as I found out yesterday when I tuned in on Sirius/XM to listen to the Michigan play-by-play and..who the fuck are these morons??!! Where are “Brandy” and Dan Dierdorf??!! (::Pulls into a parking lot to consult Google!::) They retired! FUCK!! 😢🙄🏈
Hodgepodge is exactly the right word to describe how taxes are assessed and collected in Michigan. Every county does it its own way. There was a new assessor for one of our townships up here. I saw an anomaly on a deed and alerted him to it and he freaked out, accusing me of not doing my job. But in my county, it was not something we take care of in our department, unlike the downstate county where he is also the equalization director where it would have been part of my duties.
The townships also decide which tax bill their millages fall on. I'm really not sure which one tends to be bigger. There are doubtlessly places that try to minimize the summer bill for tourism, but I'll bet there are other places that try to minimize the winter bill for Xmas spending.
I stopped paying attention to sports a couple of years ago. The whole kneeling thing from these privileged, pampered athletes really turned me off to it and I find myself enjoying life a lot more without the stress of rooting for loser teams (I was sort of a Spartans guy for a while since my study abroad program was run through MSU, and since I was born and grew up in NW Ohio I will always have a soft spot for the Buckeyes, and, well, the Rockets, too, since Toledo is my hometown). Except for sumo. I love sumo, but no American college competes in sumo.
Hearing cliches like "Touch base" or "Game changer" makes me wanna choke a bitch.
I'd like to add these to the list:
1. value-added
2. using "amplify" as a synonym for "emphasize" or "disseminate" or "repeat"
3. related to No. 2: using "center" as a synonym for "emphasize" or "focus on"
4. using "partner" as a verb
Center of Excellence. If you have to call yourself one, you aren’t.
Oh man, you are so right. I hate CoE. Places in the government have a CoE for everything: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/COECI/index.html And who is surprised the first topic on that page is related to minimizing healthcare bias in collaboration with our faultless NIH?
Huddle up and circle back…
Execs at my company use "double-click" to mean "emphasize".
It makes me want to `scream`.
5. Action-item
Yeah that’s cringey
“Pivot”
1) "Run to ground"
2) "Circle back around"
3) "In the loop"
4) "FYSA" (this one drives me to drink)
5) "Your mom!" (Just kidding, that was a text I sent to my boss.)
I hear you.
My last 'paid' gig, before I committed 100 percent to being a full-time author was quickly becoming... scratch that HAD become, worthless. Which was why I walked away from a LOT of money.
It came to me when I was doing the project schedule and the work that they were expecting out of me and my team would take over a year - but the deadline was in five months. So I was forced, by my boss, and the boss doing the schedule, to lie about everything, so the schedule would be 'right'. So that upper management wouldn't ask questions.
We were going to fail, and fail big (for the record there were supposed to be 4 people doing my job, but it was just me, and I was responsible for 90 percent of this fortune 500 company's business at this point).
There was no point to my being there. The work would not get done. Excuses would be made. No one would get fired (sadly). And in what was perhaps the most poignant display of how oddly things are 'connected', my father died on the day I walked out the door and left my career of almost 30 years forever.
What I had spent so many years of my life doing just didn't matter anymore. It had become - pointless.
Liking your post because it is meaningful, upsetting, but impressive that you made the leap. Sorry you had two HUGE life changes on the same day. You have large brassy one's my man.
This is another pet peeve of mine. Nobody ever gets fired, and people fail upwards.
True, but at least in previous eras you had a chance of working with people who cared about the mission or were at least not complete pieces of shit. Now even if you get that, the company will be a piece of shit as a matter of expressed policy.
Let me guess—any company with “synergies” or other such bullshit anywhere in their governance documents is to be avoided!
Oh, wait…!
I'm watching that happen at my current place of employment right now. It is entertaining because it has zero effect on me. I'm my own department so I don't answer to the assholes failing and getting the golden key. I am however privy the the information that is coming in and showing just how big if a fuckup the golden key holders have made this year and am intrigued by what 2023 will bring them once it goes public.
At my last employer, one of the senior managers and his underlings botched a huge deployment that was basically “2.0” of our entire portfolio system.
The senior manager became CIO because he came up with a “fix” (to a problem he created) and brought his buddy along as his EA.
And in corporate life, unlike government, there’s no unions running interference! But the “Peter Principle” is pretty much gone regardless!
And likely, the people whose decisions drove you to leave were utterly mystified as to why you walked - unless they did it to you deliberately.
I think I told my boss. I know nobody wanted me to go, but I was just done with it all. I no longer enjoyed the work because it didn't matter what I did. We were going to fail and no one wanted to take corrective action.
Maybe nobody wanted you to go, but I'm guessing nobody was asking you to name your price to stay, either.
They already knew that I didn't care about money. My price would have been the firing of the Indian Gal in charge of my division and me being put in her job. Because all she ever did was lie.
I do wonder if she got replaced when this billion dollar program was late.
I'm not incorruptible, but no one is willing to pay my price.
Ditto. It's just my price isn't cash. I can always get money - I'm not worried about that.
There are other things however that I just might be interested in! :-)
"SHE" got replaced for failure? What do you think?
When the Judeo-Christian work ethic exited corporate America as a whole and we decided to outsource our entire nation, why in the fuck did we do so to a third world shithole where any spoken English CANNOT be understood by English speakers from the rest of the world??!!
Very similar to my career. I played chicken at the end with them; and they threw me out— with a nice package.
To the engineering side that would get a whiff of what these wasted budgets were on critical products that could have used the money to fix real issues, this always drove me up a wall. I've come close to quitting the industry on multiple occasions for this reason alone, but then again, I don't know another transportation sector industry that comes close. Hey - at least its not Boeing levels of BS.
Something inside me, a tiny part SIMPLY CANNOT abide by this attitude of 'must be spent or will not get it next year' attitude of people, forced upon them by accountants, and its nearly the most asinine thing I've ever come across.
In his autobiography, Brian Rowe, former Chairman Emeritus of GE Aircraft Engines, described working for the government as an utter nightmare. Far from being a license to print money, being a military contractor involved things like allowing an army of bureaucrats into your factory to "keep you honest," having to fight military branches that wanted to change contracts on-the-fly, from fixed-price to actual-cost, based on what was cheaper for them at the moment and requirements to document EVERY LITTLE THING.
But the worst aspect, in his opinion and from the engineer's perspective, was when the military would complain about some problem with the engines in a helicopter or fighter, GE's engineers would come up with a fix and present it to that service branch, the representatives of that branch would accept it and everybody involved KNEW that nothing would ever be done to solve the problem, because the solution was NOT SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN INTO THE CONTRACT.
This happened with the C-5's wing. Look that one up. Utter fuckstickery on the government's part.
Ben Rich said the same thing. In the interest of fighting corruption (see Fat Leonard and Duke Cunningham to find out how well that worked) or just make work programs for otherwise unemployable college grads the government added massive amounts of overhead. We would have been better off with a little patriotic Japanese style corruption and no auditors.
I think you're right. Openly corrupt societies are often, in the aggregate, more functional than "honest" ones.
How does that explain Chicago or Washington D.C.? 😁
I think it's that corrupt societies have always been corrupt, so everyone that lives there expects that to be how the world works. America, on the other hand, is supposed to be an honest society, so not everyone's on the same page.
What I meant was in certain societies and even the US historically, an entity might bribe a politician to get a contract to build a bridge or something, but at least they would then build the goddamn bridge. In a kleptocracy or whatever the hell we are living in now there is just theft under the color of law and no bridges.
I've been reading car magazines since I could read. Dad always had C&D and MT subscriptions. I used to be excited each month and read them cover to cover. As I got older I started to pick up on the one dimensional articles and the blatant BS. Its hard to take someone seriously when they complain about the piano black interior trim on a Chevy but then go an gush over the piano black interior trim in a Porsche. I still subscribe to one "new car" magazine, but its difficult to get excited about it when my favorite brands are dead and there are only possibly a single digit number of cars I'd bother spending my own money on. As is typical, those cars tend to get ragged on by the experts (never have bought anything that was outright recommended by the experts). I now get some excitement from the two "classic car" based magazines I subscribe to. It has become a lot more fun to read about the cars that came before me, or were part of my youth and some of the history that revolved around them. I can still pick out blatant bias and snarky BS, but it really doesn't matter anyway.
I can see why you're disgusted with the entire charade.
What drove me away from Hot Rod, Car Craft and Super Street was what I call "The Great Myth of the Car Magazine." This is the idea that one can build a car worthy of a magazine feature with the money one makes working some shit job, like McDonald's or Home Depot.
Assuming this ISN'T just smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, what the articles almost never alluded to were the 80-hour work weeks at two full-time jobs, the exclusive devotion of every dollar not spent on food, rent and gasoline to the vehicle or the fact that to pull off such results requires one to know every machine shop owner, paint booth operator and mechanic in town.
This later showed up when I'd read websites like Speedhunters, particularly when they'd do articles on some Tokyo hot rod shop. You can picture it: The shop owner, who's into his second consecutive day awake and his second pack of Marlboros that day, and who hasn't had a haircut or new clothes since the second Obama administration, is standing in his cobbled together, corrugated warehouse shop somewhere in a rundown industrial part of Tokyo.
In the back corner, he has a dozen cracked-and-broken $2,500 carbon fiber hoods leaning against, and stacked on top of, a Countach or 348, which is itself underneath a quarter-inch of dust and overspray. To his left, a few dozen Nissan RBs, Toyota JZs and the odd GM LS in various states of assembly. To his right, a forest of wheels, transmissions and titanium mufflers doing their best impression of a scale model of Chicago. Scattered throughout the place is a million bucks worth of Skyline GT-R, Supra, NSX and maybe a JZX100, each resplendent in a hundred grand worth of GReddy, HKS and A'PEXi. To say nothing of his comprehensive assortment of Mitutoyo instrumentation worth more than my house.
One is given to wonder where all the necessary cash came from...
This type of writing continues in glossy magazines directed to us Porsche owners. As a member of PCA (I get a nice discount on track days and 10% off from some vendors for my used Cayman and Boxster) I receive "Panorama" every month. There is/are always one, sometimes two features each month on some owner who, due entirely to his love of all things Porsche (or sometimes one particular thing Porsche) has built the perfect paean 911/356/914 by through untold connections who are able to source, rebuild, prototype, paint, shine, and procure the one vehicle that satisfies the owner's exquisite taste. The last month brought the heartwarming story of a patent lawyer in California who helps kids through his foundation, who had the time, with is adult son, to build a perfect 911. The interior guy, who had done "6 or 7" cars for the owner previously, dropped his other work to sew seat covers from virgin minks; the engine guy dropped his other work to build an engine from rare earth minerals; the painter dropped his other work to provide the world's shiniest black paint, all for the simple brotherhood pleasure of creating the one-off 911 for the man who helps kids. We learned that the lawyer does not actually drive the car (uncomfortably, he looks a bit over the ideal weight to sit on virgin mink) but it is the journey-- remember, his adult son helped in the creation-- not the result that matters.
At least Jack never worked directly for one of these outfits.
Letting my PCA membership lapse when I sold my last Porsche was a subtle and slightly dirty pleasure on par with popping a particularly strident pimple.
Do you know the people who wrote for and edit Panorama? The photography is usually first rate, and the writing is passable, but the content is so vile.
They actually reached out to me years ago but someone at PCNA pulled a string to make sure I didn't get any work.
Well, I doubt if they would have published anything you wrote. Their readers tend to like their Porsches.
have i asked you already if you're familiar with 'ramp' magazine from germany?
Pete Stout used to run it; he now has 000 magazine, which is a high end quarterly (~$250 / year) coffee table style magazine. I have every issue extant, but more in appreciation of the craft and effort going into the magazine than in fealty to Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG.
So another look at me object to display to the guests?
I don't know if this is a metaphor or not, and as a fair-skinned redhead I'm hardly the world's expert on acne, but the trick is to pop them at the blackhead stage before they get infected into an actual pimple. Speaking of which, did you know that there are entire YouTube channels devoted to stuff like popping pimples and boils? Humans are strange.
Reminds me of an episode of "Night Court" where Christine answered the phone and it was a wrong number. Then she goes, "Wait, you want to do WHAT with my shoe?" there's a pause, she gets this horrified, disgusted look on her face, says "HOW DID YOU EVEN THINK OF THAT???!!!" and hangs up.
"...due entirely to his love of all things Porsche..."
Exactly, thank you. There's never a budget attached to one of these projects, or a realistic timeline, either. Just a passion for the car (or brand, more usually) that drove the project.
Uh huh.
This must be the demographic car companies aim for with those "Got the wife a new Lexus for Christmas" commercials.
Most people who have a passion for a particular brand are completely dead inside in direct proportion to that brand's marketplace position. Someone who loves AMC Concords is probably a great dude. Obsessed with Paganis? There are probably a hundred people who would give their left nut to see you executed.
Sort of like, "A woman who likes me for my car is no good for me. A woman who likes me for MY car is my soulmate."
Just so you realize what kind of psycho I'm talking about, this is the car I had in mind:
http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_23620-Ford-Thunderbird-1991.html
That's a cool car!
My first car was a '77 Hornet Sportabout wagon with a 3-speed. It was a great car while it lasted (before it rusted).
We had a brown one of those when I was a kid. Called it The Brown Car. Real creative, I know. I think it was cars like this that made my dad hate all those jobs he had that requred him to travel.
That's an interesting take. Certainly true for Ferraris. Not so true for Porsches, I find that a number of people I've met at my local PCA club, almost always at track weekends, simply like the cars. It's mostly Caymans, Boxsters and beater 911s there.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but the BMW people seem worse.
I don't know anyone who drives a McLaren who doesn't seem like a pyramid schemer.
And you can't drive a Lambo and not have a sense of humor.
That's one reason why I like Ken Lingenfelter's collection. In addition to all the marquee vehicles, he's got some oddballs like a Bricklin, a Caballero (neo-classic Vette), and a Chevy SSR 'sport truck'. His supercars include a Vector and a Saleen S7, not exactly the kind of cars to impress folks who have to have the latest Lambo.
aw c'mon--they're just envious fpr pete's sake...you're not giving them ethical cred, are you? i think i misinterpreted your position so i'll just go away!
I'm not kidding about thinking that anyone who can muster serious enthusiasm for the AMC Concord would be worth knowing
Where does that leave a Honda fanboi, though NOT an apologist?! (If this yank-the-mo’-powah-from-the-top-trims (re: Accord, which from 1996 or 1997 had such an option—until NOW) shit continues, they’ll be back in the same boat they were in ca. 2012 or so!)
If some 💩-for-brains runs a red light and totals-out my one-generation-wonder Accord K20C3/10AT (which I thought would be a disaster after Honda dumped the V6, until I drove one), I only hope I will have enough “fail-safes” in my grey matter, or will be hurt enough myself, to NOT inflict harm to that idiot such that I end up incarcerated!
Hopefully the hybrid-only option will be as decent, at least given all externalities, as the previous transition! But at 204hp versus 190 in the base models with the L15/CVT combo? I doubt it!
The Mustang club magazine is just the same.
Mustangs too, but you see it with everything. Money's no object and just appears out of thin air, and if you care what it costs, you're not a Real ________ Guy.
I get what you're saying.
You get the real price tag when the creation hits BAT.
I usually only got to BaT when I want pictures of some vehicle, but is it the usual car-guy business of the asking price being the sum total of every dollar the seller's spent on the thing since HE bought it?
Don't get me started on club and "pro" racing, where a nightmare sociopath like Scott Tucker is so completely normal that nobody noticed him.
Michael Avenatti "raced" Ferraris.
There was a video with his crew talking about getting the DSR record or whatever and their attitude and their descriptions of the attitudes of the other drivers towards him are hilarious. Who cares that he's stealing millions of dollars from poor people and ruining their lives while defrauding the government? He's winning (apparently without even cheating) at a sport that does not matter at all to anyone other than the participants. It would be like complaining about Bernie Madoff using an unfair (but legal) squash racket.
"a sport that does not matter at all to anyone other than the participants."
Club racing in a nutshell. Plus you can die.
Personally, I live for it.
I was trying to think of a wisecrack that would actually be a backhanded compliment about where your concerns would lie should you discover that a more successful competitor was funding his club racing success with orphan blood but the fact is that many, if not the majority, of your competitors are funding their endeavors with orphan blood at various layers of abstraction.
I sound like Lisa Simpson this morning, sorry, paint black and hit the track.
That's less true in the Midwest. You get a lot of dingy collar sole proprietors and skilled trades in some classes. On the coasts however it's almost exclusively a lizard person occupation with a sprinkling of first-generation IT people.
"sport that does matter at all to anyone other than the participants". Also describes off-road racing - my passion.
"Who cares that he's stealing millions of dollars from poor people and ruining their lives..."
But that just means he's winning at life!
Don’t forget the tools. At 17, my minimum wage job as a bicycle mechanic couldn’t even buy me the tools to manual swap my Neon. All I had was a Craftsman socket set the size of a hotel bible, some acetate screwdrivers, and a few pliers that were rusted from plumbing work. That was enough to keep the car on the road and not much more.
The best thing that ever happened was my Jeep getting broken into and having my tools stolen. For Christmas, everyone pitched in and got me some decent stuff.
So then ;
At 17 you had two vehicles are are crying poor mouth ? .
Pawn shops, tag sales and flea markets exist for a reason .
-Nate
Sadly, no. The Neon was a $900 non-runner with a botched engine replacement. I did an entire engine gasket set, timing belt job, and rear main in my driveway with basically a set of hand tools. It was one hell of a learning experience.
A few years later, I had enough money saved to buy an XJ. Even then, I still didn’t have enough to build the mythical 400 HP SBC as seen in Car Craft, let alone sometning to put it in.
Hopefully you were young then and it was a learning experience .
Trying to work with insufficient tools sux .
I'll never quite grasp the need for stupid horsepower .
I know if's fun but rarely if ever a good path if you take the long view .
-Nate
Car crafts greatest project was Steve Magnantes $2500 Cadillac 500 powered gremlin that could run 10s. The engine was set back like a foot into the cabin and he drove from the back seat. Frieburger put the kibosh on it because he was writing about street racing. There was also a rumor that advertisers hated it.
There's only one car mag any more, Grassroots Motorsports
After the publisher’s wife told a person critical of their donation to Southern Poverty Center on their forum to die in a fire I let my subscription lapse. The SPLC donation came a few months after GRM was looking for donations to keep the doors open due to covid. Wonder if they got a ppp “loan”.
Yeah, fuck GRM's behavior there. What a great way to make a completely apolitical subject RABIDLY political. A direct donation to the DNC would have raised fewer eyebrows.
A few thoughts....
You've been generally quiet about Camissa. Enquiring minds and all that...
Captain Lust (1977) was a porn of quality. Shot on film. Actual music. Location photography.
Jason Cammisa and Larry Webster are the same person, it's just that neither of them can bear to admit it. And they are both cursed with the unpleasant combination of an unquenchable need to be liked and a total inability to behave in a manner that could bring that desire to fruition. The primary difference between them is that one of them is a gay man who carries himself and looks like a Jersey rat, while the other is the opposite.
My apologies. While searching through my email for something else today, I stumbled across an article from July where you talked about Cammisa at some length. Great read!
waaaay outta the past--that seems to be my job--do you remember the major carmag writer who was killed in a highspeed test crash at some banked oval test track in a prototype or suchlike? the magazine made a pretty good subtle reference that it might've been suicide as he'd recently been uncloseted. or something like that
I think you're talking about Don Schroeder, of Car and Driver. Jack has talked about him in one of his articles here - or in the comments thereof.
According to the obituaries, Schroeder was openly gay so if it was suicide it wasn't because he'd been outed.
Absolutely NOT suicide. I've spoken at length with people who were there. It was failure to prep the car correctly, mixed with someone driving over his head.
was it an oldsmobile racing prototype or something similar?
It was a Renntech Benz as I recall.
Cammisa's videos would be so much more watchable if he did a "Men on Cars" show, where he reviewed vehicles as the world's most flaming homosexual.
I would SO watch that.
We have Charles Phoenix for that.
I wonder how much extra money tesla made owning its dealerships. I doubt they fully capturing ADM for themselves to the extent dealers were. I heard flippers were a big business.
I’m trying to remember the time when I realized I was Sisyphus and my job was rolling the boulder up the hill
I've often wondered if I'm just slow, because I'm not the hyper-perceptive genius all those TV shows and movies that soaked my youth told me was the normal state of being a kid, but when I think about all those bits of wisdom that life reluctantly lets you have when IT'S ready to give them up, like:
"High school graduation is the last time society will drag your ass across a finish line - from here on out nobody cares if you live or die."
"You can do everything right and still lose."
"Nobody will tell you the important stuff - you're expected to figure that out on your own."
"There aren't REALLY any rules - it's What You Can Get Away With."
"The clock's ticking, so what're you gonna do?"
...I wonder if maybe the reason nobody tells you, for example, "Life's largely a survival situation and there's no Right or Wrong in the wilderness, only What Works," when you're 10 is because the world desperately needs almost everyone - and especially YOU - to play by the rules because if you actually understood how life worked when you were 10 or 15, you'd live your live accordingly and mess up somebody's Big Plans.
I'm copying all this and making my kids read it. Oldest is in Jr high...
Sounds good. I certainly wish someone had told ME this stuff when I was that age.
careful now ... if the curtain is pulled back too early in life, the kids might just skip straight to living in an urban tent city, because society is a farce anyway, why even try ...
Society is a jungle and you are either predator or prey.
The reason to 'bother' is to be a predator so you can live a better life than all the bleating sheep around you. You need to learn the rules of the game if you're going to cheat at it after all.
By "better life" you mean being more of a consumer and stealing dwindling resources from mother earth for meaningless, selfish enjoyment?
I don't know man, that tent looks pretty good. The siren call of victimhood is strong. Failure is the new success.
Strawman. (I'm assuming you're being sarcastic here).
As I always tell those people:
The Earth's resources aren't 'dwindling'.
And enjoying my life is 'selfish'? Really?
It's dog eat dog, and there's not enough dog to go around.
Agreed, but I would temper this slightly with Natural Law precepts.
Civilized society must have some sense of order.
"It's not what you know that counts but what you can think of in time."
I like that.
"As long as it's not a zero or a minus!"
I recommend watching the Carlin HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya”. Completely on point.
There's good Sisyphean and bad Sisyphean, I might claim. Donut shops and White Castle are good Sisyphean -- keep making donuts and weird little burgers. Corporate paperwork admin BS is bad Sisyphean.
Or is the difference meaningful? The overall job here is to fuel the locomotive that pulls the family train, right? How much do the details matter?
Spend some serious time in IT and you will realize that the Sisyphus struggle is the nature of the beast. Not always a bad thing. On the back end there are large projects to install / configure / migrate to the new software. Followed by 3-10 years of patching it repeatedly. Followed by another huge project to either replace it or to do a major upgrade requiring new hardware / OS version / database version. Then repeat. The new stuff usually works better in some areas and worse in others, but all the experience you gained supporting the quirks of the old stuff is mostly useless now as the quirks are different. If everybody did their job then each iteration requires a bit less support time and a bit more functionality to the people who actually use it daily.
As far as I can tell the secret to it all is that once you realize you are repeatedly pushing a rock up a hill, is to accept it and focus on what that rock movement has enabled in your life. Accepting it may often be harder than pushing the rock. I don't love what I do like I did in my 20s, but it has enabled me to do things I love.
New for newness' sake is the hype in all things software related. As guy who writes and supports software I have come to hate this paradigm.
A thousand times yes. Source code doesn't rust. Repeatedly trading a set of known problems for a set of unknown problems is exhausting and pointless.
A former colleague teases me every time I complain about the endless march of "updates" I don't need and never asked for. He'll joke, "Oh, if we could only all be programming a Centipede CD." Darn right: https://lawler.io/scrivings/on-rotting-software/
The updates are endless because of Rule[4] - every bug you fix creates 2 more.
Call it The Hydra Rule.
Same deal with being forced by your software vendor to go to an SaaS vs. on-site solution!
It’s like apps for phones.
It! Never! Ends!
Every two weeks, you have to download a new version!
And how in the hell do these apps get to something like 300MB if not more??!! Is the coding THAT sloppy?!
I'm reminded of 'The Comedian's' reaction just before he was thrown through the window.
Apologies for the capeshit ref.
Edit: Most every industry is riddled with these termites. If you are the type of man that needs to be able to look himself in the mirror, you're going to have a bad time.
Agreed on the Comedian's attitude in Watchmen. The older I get, the more I understand his perspective.
And yes, this applies to EVERY industry. Let us realize that, and continue as before, and always.
Honestly, you could do a lot worse than reference The Watchmen. It's almost literature at this point, and a lot less like doing homework than reading The Dark Knight felt to me...
Apropos of nothing, my pal Sammy (of the Rodney stories) once went on at some length to me about "Captain New York."
It took some effort to uncover the fact that he was referring to DOCTOR MANHATTAN, but it was instructive to see how the brain works.
This is hilarious. Love it. Hey, Doc Manhattan is a thinly veiled reference anyway, why not make another alias for the same concept?
That's fantastic!
Captain New York?
Is that like the King of Bayonne?
What you're describing is something I call "Criminal Arrogance." This is where someone, usually someone powerful, believes that anything THEY do is fair game, but it's beyond the pale for anyone else to take those same liberties with their interests. "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable." It's essentially a violation of fair play.
This is where the Mafia can steal from everybody else with impunity, but reacts viciously, almost in an offended manner, if some takes THEIR money. This is where the concepts of Assaulting A Police Officer and Resisting Arrest came from, and live happily to this day. This is also where resides the old, "The company reserves the right to fire you THIS SECOND, but you have to give IT two weeks' notice if you plan to leave."
The rise of the sociopaths
I figure sociopath is even better than love.
Love means never having to say you're sorry. Sociopathy means never even having to feel bad in the first place.
For the sociopath, yes. For everyone else, not so much.
Sociopaths are the bane of civilization. Destructive, powerful; somehow largely unchecked.
Probably because sociopaths are like an evil inverse of Born Again Christians: Nothing really bothers them. Nothing truly angers, frightens or discourages them. They just live their lives without all those ugly things that cause normal people so much trouble. It's alluring.
This is a really interesting comparison to me for this one reason— both are adept at rationalizing anything they do away.
I've run into a number of real sociopaths in real life in my career. I've handled a bunch of fraud cases, and behind virtually all was someone who could not care about the consequences of their actions. It's quite an experience taking a deposition or putting them on a witness stand for a day or two. Luckily they are easy to expose to a jury.
Also see: landlords, bank loans, software license agreements, check cashing stores, and pretty much anywhere else normal people have to do business with corporations or government.
Jack, were you the one who mentioned the book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber in one of your prior recent pieces? Can't remember if I discovered it because of you or stumbled upon it by happenstance. At any rate, how much of anything we do in this country is "bull shit" since we've transitioned to the far superior SeRvIcE EcOnOmY?
I don't remember if he directly referenced the book but he definitely referenced the concept.
That's "Shit Job" vs "Bullshit Job," right?
It was a commenter! But I'll take credit.
I thought you wrote every comment on every article?
That would be a feat indeed -- to capture and reproduce via comments the twisted personalities of all the characters here so distinctly.
All inside a snowglobe.
The closest I came to that was my TTAC Goodyear blimp test.
Someone else remembers the St. Elsewhere finale? wtf.
The problem with Graeber is that his solution, Universal Basic Income, flies in the face of TANSTAAFL and will likely encourage more indolence than creativity. Hunger is a good teacher (not that Hemmingway ever really went hungry - his first wife had a trust fund and he left her for an heiress). Just because things like the 20/80 rule, Pareto and Price seem to be accurate models of how institutions end up working, do we really have to accept 80% bullshit?
Far from being bad, inequality is actually a great driver of personal, and then societal, improvement. If busting my ass and being dedicated to accomplishing things will make me richer than my fellow man, I'll take that deal.
Let's be honest: Part of the joy of owning an exotic car, or a nice house, or fine clothes, is that most other people DON'T.
Definitely don't agree with his solution, but the analysis is interesting.
Hard to not become jaded and cynical when everything comes down to power and money. If I had a vote, I would want more from you about the auto industry. But, you should do what you want.
Oh I'll keep discussing it.
From the tone of your writing the last few years it feels like this post is a long time coming. I think a Jack with less focus on the automotive journalism industry, specifically the car reviewing side, will be a better one for all of us. It did feel like punching down, simply because it is hard to think of the people you were criticizing as anything other than irrelevant.
I have been thinking about my relationship with car reviews, including your own, and how regardless of their quality they don't help me make better decisions. It isn't (especially with yours, like classic C/D it isn't about the car its the journey) that the review is bad its that it can't seem to answer my questions when I am looking. To reference a post from a month back, I don't think more rigorous instrumented testing will help.
I am reminded of the Douglas Adam's post from years ago about him buying a pickup truck. I still find myself in the same conundrum. I should have a wealth of knowledge to make that decision. I currently own a 2016 F-150 Platinum Crew Cab 6.5 Bed, 2020 F-350 same, and a 2022 Ram 1500 extended cab 6.5 (some kind of Horn) high XLT equivalent. The last one is more a supervisors truck perk for my key guy, so I only drive it occiasionaly.
Despite all that personal experience with ownership, all the reviews I continuously read, all the headaches of each of them, I have no idea what truck to replace the 2016 with.
1500 Ram with the air ride? At least I can find one. What if I don't like the ride on washboard roads? With my F150 I replaced shocks and put on a steel winch bumper and it rides waaay better than the stock Ram or the Superduty in those cases.
F-250 (if I can find one) with a mildly modded suspension for my on-road and unloaded comfort? No idea what that end result will be without doing it.
Another F150 (if I can find one) and make similar modifications , but I got the F350 because I kept beating the shit out of the 150 doing Super Duty things, but the 150 is a better family hauler.
Of course the answer is it doesn't matter. I can do any of those things and be perfectly happy most of the time, and wishing I did something else some of the time. No matter what reviews I read the answer will still be the same.
The same thing goes for what convertible I drive, or sedan, or minivan. So long as you eliminate the actual pieces of shit in the category, it is just a matter of personal taste and style after that. No one in the automotive journalism industry has very much influence over my personal taste and style, thank god.
I think your stint at Hagerty was the last best chance. Not just the original idea of being independent of manufacturer PR flacks, but the idea of being independent of the entire new car industry. A counter, but not competing, point to BAT. For all that sites flaws it does democratize information more than any other classic/collector/old car resource, but in its own limited way. Hagerty using high editorial standards about a similar subject matter would have been glorious.
Either way, fuck those PR guys, looking forward to everything coming down the pipe as always.
"So long as you eliminate the actual pieces of shit in the category, it is just a matter of personal taste and style after that."
Some true wisdom there.
"If you can't afford it new, you can't afford it used."
This is a big part of why I sold my (used SC, yay, and 996, ugh) PORCHES NOONELVERS when kids came along.
It was :)
Every segment Hyundai and K-backwards N play in is probably the one where they're the worst option, except B segment crossovers where the Ford EcoSport takes the cake.
The Nissan Titan also still exists, ditto the Mercedes A class. The Infiniti JX60 or whatever. 4 cyl 4 speed dodge journey up until 21.
There's lots of shitty cars out there. Maybe not as shitty as a Ford tempo, certainty not as bad as a post 2010 Mitsubishi Galant, but they're out there.
Jackie Stewart called the Tempo a true driver’s car, so the car also had that going for it..
Compared to the Mondeo/contour that replaced it?
Press X to doubt
My boss in the '80s replaced his Pennsylvania-built Rabbit automatic with an early Tempo 2-door, white with bordello red velour. I found it solid but gutless. Next was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser which I liked. I watched an extended video by a broker somewhere in Northern California selling a low mileage example (sans wood panelling) a while back and thought, you know, that would be a pleasant grocery getter! Incidentally, I was driving an '85 VW Scirocco at the time – having bought and sold three BMW 2002s from 1971 through 1984 – but my first car was a factory-ordered 1969 Dodge Dart GTS 340, so my automotive taste was ecumenical and remains so. Here are my Substack thoughts on the Dart:
https://bimmerfan739.substack.com/p/mopar-memories
The Tundra is not on my shortlist. I would be hard pressed to call it a piece of shit though.
It’s all ball bearings
I love me some Ming-Na!
There are very few Chinese women who can raise my eyebrows; it's basically her, (Malaysian-born) Michelle Yeoh, and maybe one other.
Agree about Michelle Yeoh. She's beautiful in a very dignified, eternal, divine sense of the term.
If you’ve not watched Star Trek: Discovery, worth it for Michelle Yeoh with the vamp factor set to 11….
Know what's funny about Star Trek: Discovery?
Other than her, the sum total of what I like about the entire show are the Federation Nimitz- and Cardenas-class starships.
And that's it. There's literally nothing else about the show I like.
I was very into the Treknology side of things and loved the universe as a child and you couldn't pay me to watch any of what they're passing off as Trek these days.
If someone at ACF said the Pike show was worth watching that might get me to check out an episode or two.
This makes it sound like I have high standards but I just rewatched Pacific Rim which is one of my favorite movies because giant powered armor suits fight giant monsters and the good guys are self-sacrificing and eager to fight. It's not a deep or complex film and boy does it deliver!
I want my entertainment to be escapism. I LOVE Michael Bay movies. I LOVE big, loud, kinetic, awesome summer blockbusters. I want movies with beautiful people and starships and machine guns and giant robots and car chases and space battles and explosions and smartass one-liners and spine-tingling instrumentals and inspirational speeches and Big Damn Heroes.
I watched every bit of Trek (I choked down voyager eventually, but truly enjoyed Enterprise) up until the reboot movie timeline. I watched the first one of those but didn't care for it.
Can't bring myself to watch any of the new shows.
Surprisingly I found myself enjoying The Orville non-ironically. Sure there are some not good parts, but it is the best option out there. The run is mostly likely over.
Joan Chen, in her Twin Peaks form.
Michelle Yeoh, the wife of Jean Todt
My father once pointed out that many Asian women don't retain the cute, childlike features that pretty women have. Upon reflection, you could probably say that about any ethnicity, after all, beautiful people are in the minority.
Malaysia easily had the on-average most attractive women of any country I've visited.
It's the only place in the world where I have slept with women whose name I didn't really know. I'm not one for casual encounters because I like to over-complicate everything, but Malaysia overcame my resistance.
The problem for me is that I'm literally 2.5 times the weight of the average Chinese Malaysian girl so it didn't always strike me as totally consensual.
A few things:
I wanted to stand and cheer at the accord pun. Thank you for that.
Perhaps the only good thing about working at the granite shop was that I could easily explain what I did to anyone who asked. I had a hand in the entire process, from the template to the install (at least until I fell down our front stairs and seriously injured myself, I'm all better now though). And now my job at the county? How do you explain titles and deeds and legal descriptions and property taxes to a 3rd grader? I suppose I could mutter some bullshit about getting money for roads, policemen, and fire fighters, but that's still bullshit, isn't it? So after deeds are done I write while I'm there and that keeps me looking busy while simultaneously being subversive because nobody there would approve of the things I like to write. The bonus is that the union, for all it's foibles and failures, keeps me unfirable. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.
When we moved to Japan the first time we had three vehicles helping us move accumulated shit from our apartment in Toledo to storage at my parents' house just across the border in Michigan: a 1989 Camry, a 1997 Hyundai Accent, and a late 90s Windstar. We piled the last load into the Windstar which promptly shredded the transmission cable and my dad came over in my old Hyundai, successfully shoved everything from the Windstar into the Accent, and took it all away with him. They were able to reattach the transmission cable and drive the van away, but it did not survive much longer.
I will go to my grave not quite understanding how the K-car made for a more durable minivan platform than the 1986 Taurus.
After seeing what the 86 Taurus (well, an 87, but still) did to our summer vacation plans one year, I'm not surprised at all. I see your point, though. How in the world did the K-car platform end up more durable?? (Our 91-ish Plymouth Grand Voyager was far more reliable than my Dad's unlamented and unmissed Taurus, and also had classy fake wood siding and bitching aftermarket 5-spoke alloy rims).
Personally, I always liked the K-Tonas, particularly the early fixed-headlight models. There was something very "We're still getting used to the idea of FWD performance" about them.
The red-over-silver one Tommy Lee Jones drove in "Black Moon Rising" is the one I'm talking about.
I remember as a kid when Front Wheel Drive was marketed as All Wheel Drive is today. The reality of both is that automakers *had* to push this stuff in order to meet regulatory requirements, and thus had to sell it hard.
Maybe because Ford was selling bunches of Tauri and the Windstar was a side project while Chrysler had a lot more on the line, relatively speaking, with their minivans. For what it's worth, in terms of reliability we had a '91 AWD Caravan that went through 3 1/2 transmissions. The A604 was not a particularly robust gearbox.
Interestingly, my parents owned a 1g Taurus and 2g Grand Caravan from new until 12 to 14 years old and 200k miles respectively, without major failure in either. The Taurus even served me in high school whenever my Monte Carlo SS was broken or being upgraded (often).
My early mechanic mentor and ex-uncle Kenny attributed it to my dad's adherence to aircraft like maintenance standards, but at the end of the day most cars fall within a standard deviation of reliability if given reasonable care. Though, the deviation A604 and AX4N were particularly skewed.
What you're talking about was one of those Cracked articles where they made an interesting point rather than being funny. It was called something like, "9 Types of Jobs That Destroy Your Soul," or something like that, and one of them was "The Assistant Cromulationist."
This was the guy who can't describe his job to ANYONE, not even people he works with, and just to make it more fun, it's one of those jobs where people only notice if you fuck it up.
I have to use analogies to explain my job.
On my financial services job with hedge funds, when I would describe it and someone would say “that sounds interesting”, I would just reply, “it really wasn’t, I was just the first guy they would call to yell at”.
Ha ha
I have never sat in either, other than as a kid at the dealership, but was the Windstar an upgrade over the Aerostar?
Completely different vehicle. The Aerostar was a Ranger under the skin, with an available AWD that nobody bought but which ended up doing yeoman service under 1996 V8 Explorers. The Windstar was a bulbous Taurus.
“some drooling moron who just got his first M&A bonus buys a 911 instead of a BMW”
It’s a good thing I don’t drool, otherwise I’d assume you were talking about me; as you will recall, I did purchase a 911 instead of an M3 with MY first M&A bonus based on some words written about a 993 on TTAC!
If I needed to describe you in two words, I would set "drooling moron" aside and pick up "blithe assailant"!
Then it was me lol
I read his capsule review of the 993 at TTAC and still obey the hierarchy of the wave when I'm out and about in my 993. I make a particular point of waving to 944 drivers. Cayenne and Q5... er, I mean Macan drivers can suck it.
Whatever, they're all just Volkswagens anyhow.
Umm, that's how they started out, so lame insult (10x VW owner, 5x BMW).
I can only stand up and applaud. Most relevant article about today’s auto “journalism” ever written.