“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 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.
I spent 12 years working for defense contractors, and it's the same shit with respect to budgets. My employers would prioritize spending ever penny allotted to a contract over anything resembling quality or efficiency of work, because they might get allotted less in the next option year. Similarly, every government office I encountered did the same thing, scrambling to find creative ways to spend out their budget at the end of the fiscal year, because whoever they were accountable to would otherwise give them less next year.
And when it wasn't explicitly about spending money, it was about stacking bodies on contracts, or poaching some alleged SME from somewhere else, or getting somebody's freshly-retired E9 or light colonel buddy to hire on and swing their dick around. Again, none of this increased the quality of work, or even the quantity produced, but it made the leaders of the fiefdom feel more important.
People loved to throw around terms like "tip of the spear" to describe themselves and their organizations. The joke is that everybody thinks they're tip of the spear. Lots of talk of "the mission" and how critical they are to it. Massive portions of the DoD and the national security apparatus could close up shop tomorrow and not be missed.
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?
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.
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.
The $200 dollar sticker and registration isn't the scam. You probably do have to own property in Florida to get Florida plates. And because you got those Florida plates, FL voting card, FL insurance, and FL residence, you save that 5% of IL tax when you're down there for 184 days a year. Now, they look for it but I'm sure (I know) it's still abused.
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.
When I was a homeowner in Ohio, one of the (numerous) things that annoyed me about the property taxes was that state law required reappraisals every six years, but allowed for an arbitrary market value adjustment after three years. Naturally, in my county that three year point hit just as property values started to recover in 2016-17, and my taxes shot up 15%.
The flip side is when taxes were finally adjusted downward to reflect house values that collapsed in 2008, local governments/school districts all cried poor and started pushing emergency levies on the ballot. Of course, when revenue went back up, the levies never went away. Instead they advertise NO NEW TAXES for "replacement levies" that originally weren't supposed to be replaced.
Now I live in Florida where there's a homestead law that caps annual property tax increases somewhere around 3%. The appraisal resets when the house is sold. As you can imagine, the exploding real estate market means that counties are facing a revenue windfall as properties gained 100s of thousands in value almost overnight. As you can also imagine, the counties don't want to give that money back. Here in Hillsborough County, they even had the audacity to put a road levy on November ballot.
I'm generally of the opinion that state/county/municial governments are more corrupt, insidious, and all-around more bastardly than the feds.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not true. Productive people get fired all the time for offending the alphabet people or minorities or some random chick in HR with an axe to grind.
Yes, but it's even worse than that. I think the (justified) fixation on the special status of LGBT, women, and minorities obfuscates the kind of shit that good people get canned or blackballed for.
I just finished watching The Wire for the first time. That show is a master class in institutional disfunction, corruption, and upward failure. Perhaps the most pertinent example is the Baltimore Sun city editor who discovers one of his reporters is fabricating stories, but is ultimately punished with a demotion by his jerkoff bosses who didn't want to miss out on a Pulitzer.
In the real world, I've been threatened with termination more than once because I was an easier scapegoat than one of the other white guys, or because a sociopath customer decided to direct his temper tantrums towards me that week. One of my friends got fired for cause because he made the CTO look incompetent. Jack got fired for pissing off a white male nepotism hire from a different company. Etc, etc.
This is the sort of shit that grinds my gears far more than the DEI nonsense.
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??!!
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 depressing. A fast-growing, late-stage startup I joined last year fired the CTO in my second week and replaced him with... One of these humans you're describing. I keep looking around, expecting to see the Office Space consultants asking "Well, what would you say you _do_ here?" But apparently I'm not in a dream and this company really exists.
So, what to do? Work another 3-4x median household income job where I can escape being one of these nasty leeches who has so little power and authority, he struggles to do anything of value? Or stay at this dead-end business and use the last of its $550M in venture capital to pay my salary while I start a side hustle, or join someone else early stage while working full time?
One thing's for sure: I can't write consistently enough to start a Substack, so there goes a possible future of moving to rural Idaho and using my Substack monies to pay for, uh, lessons in how difficult it is to remove fence posts and build decks.
Treat your work not for it's intrinsic worth or as your "passion" but be a grownup and use it to support your family. In other words, go for the money and choose whatever you think will maximize your income for the longest time.
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.
Thing is, there really aren't any many true (non-EV) pieces of shit left anymore, if any. We're actually at a point where you could make a strong case that in any given category the Toyota is the biggest piece of shit.
Conversely, you could also argue that everything has become a totally disposable piece of shit.
Regardless, whatever the fuck C/D has to say is irrelevant.
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've pretty much lost all interest car magazines/ blogs at this point, can't really see the point in them. I stopped caring about supercars around the time I was leaving highschool and became bored with obsessing over the unobtainable. Now all cars are cars are unobtainable unless you have connections or are willing to overpay by a ludicrous amount. Having done the latter with a house purchase in 2021, not really into repeating the mistake. So wtf do I care about some puff piece for 1 of the 400 identical crossovers for sale today? Gee I sure hope it comes with unnecessary and fragile electronics, maybe even an 80k mile cvt! Maybe they'll have a piece about how it's perfectly normal for your 70k dollar electric car to have the range of a fucking power wheels when it's cold, or how it's a good thing that it has a non-zero potential to burst into a multi day fire. The whole industry can get fucked, won't be sad when sales fall and the money men realize there's a whole department that spent the last 3 years contributing no value.
My friends wife who has a very nice tahoe “i cant wait to get the electric one” you want an electric car when its -20 in chicago? The brainwash runs deep
Women have always been the primary market for electric cars, even more than a century ago. They didn't have the upper body strength to crank start a car (the Model T had a 2.9L four cylinder - a lot of metal to spin) and ICE (called "explosion engines" by steam and electric advocates) powered cars were noisy and smelly. Electric cars also didn't need conventional manual transmissions. Period advertisements for EVs heavily featured women (see the link below). Clara Ford had a Detroit Electic and so did Helen Newberry Joy, wife of Henry Joy, who ran Packard. When the Tesla Model S was relatively new, it was part of a display of EVs at either Eyes on Design or the Detroit concours. I spoke to the female half of the couple that was displaying and I'd say that she was almost sexually aroused by the car.
Electric cars are like androgynous metrosexual men - male, but without all the smelly, hairy, icky masculinity women find so officially unacceptable but secretly arousing.
Electric cars are smooth and clean and thoughtful and sensitive and want to talk about her feelings - but just can't seem to shag her rotten the way she really wants.
A gal in one of my tennis groups couldn't play the other night because she needed her Tesla's battery replaced. It's never really cold in Southeast Michigan.
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/
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?
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.
Some canyons just need shouted into, even if it feels pointless. At least you may feel better. It seems that you've mostly exorcised your demons and can move on now. In the meantime, money will change hands and copy will be created, but mostly by any one of the capable AI bots that write better than Jony, Jason and the rest of the marginalized "journalists."
The rest of us can continue to smile and nod when visiting with our neighbors about their new Tesla or Mousetang Mach-E and how they are so happy to be helping the environment and blah-blah-blah. But, we'll know the truth.
My grandfather frequently said "Don't try and teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
And so it goes with canyon shouting. It never affects those in the canyon.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The past few years made me think of the former Soviet Union also. I remember my father telling me of being on a three year wait list for an entry level car. It could have been five.
I remember the day after the first COVID case was reported here. My dad and I went to the grocery store at 6AM to fill in some minor gaps and “beat the rush.” The shelves were halfway bare and people were not far from reinsuring Lord of the Flies.
In High School, I remember hearing a lot about Soviet life from some of the old timers (Polish Catholic school). Never did I think I’d witness anything like what they described.
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.
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.
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 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.
After graduation I bought a 2001 prelude SH based solely on car and driver articles. Drove it for 16 months and never missed it.
Could have bought the last new ITR in Chicagoland for the same price but hated the Phoenix yellow. Comparing sales prices of both models on bring a trailer shows what an idiot I am
As I said after Jack peeled a few layers off the autojourno onion after this started, theoretically, a 1977 LTD handles better than any modern car, right? 😂
“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).
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.
I spent 12 years working for defense contractors, and it's the same shit with respect to budgets. My employers would prioritize spending ever penny allotted to a contract over anything resembling quality or efficiency of work, because they might get allotted less in the next option year. Similarly, every government office I encountered did the same thing, scrambling to find creative ways to spend out their budget at the end of the fiscal year, because whoever they were accountable to would otherwise give them less next year.
And when it wasn't explicitly about spending money, it was about stacking bodies on contracts, or poaching some alleged SME from somewhere else, or getting somebody's freshly-retired E9 or light colonel buddy to hire on and swing their dick around. Again, none of this increased the quality of work, or even the quantity produced, but it made the leaders of the fiefdom feel more important.
People loved to throw around terms like "tip of the spear" to describe themselves and their organizations. The joke is that everybody thinks they're tip of the spear. Lots of talk of "the mission" and how critical they are to it. Massive portions of the DoD and the national security apparatus could close up shop tomorrow and not be missed.
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?
Execs at my company use "double-click" to mean "emphasize".
It makes me want to `scream`.
5. Action-item
Yeah that’s cringey
Huddle up and circle back…
“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 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.
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.
The $200 dollar sticker and registration isn't the scam. You probably do have to own property in Florida to get Florida plates. And because you got those Florida plates, FL voting card, FL insurance, and FL residence, you save that 5% of IL tax when you're down there for 184 days a year. Now, they look for it but I'm sure (I know) it's still abused.
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.
When I was a homeowner in Ohio, one of the (numerous) things that annoyed me about the property taxes was that state law required reappraisals every six years, but allowed for an arbitrary market value adjustment after three years. Naturally, in my county that three year point hit just as property values started to recover in 2016-17, and my taxes shot up 15%.
The flip side is when taxes were finally adjusted downward to reflect house values that collapsed in 2008, local governments/school districts all cried poor and started pushing emergency levies on the ballot. Of course, when revenue went back up, the levies never went away. Instead they advertise NO NEW TAXES for "replacement levies" that originally weren't supposed to be replaced.
Now I live in Florida where there's a homestead law that caps annual property tax increases somewhere around 3%. The appraisal resets when the house is sold. As you can imagine, the exploding real estate market means that counties are facing a revenue windfall as properties gained 100s of thousands in value almost overnight. As you can also imagine, the counties don't want to give that money back. Here in Hillsborough County, they even had the audacity to put a road levy on November ballot.
I'm generally of the opinion that state/county/municial governments are more corrupt, insidious, and all-around more bastardly than the feds.
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.
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'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.
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."
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.
Sounds like a current war going on
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.
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.
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 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.
This is another pet peeve of mine. Nobody ever gets fired, and people fail upwards.
That's not true. Productive people get fired all the time for offending the alphabet people or minorities or some random chick in HR with an axe to grind.
Yes, but it's even worse than that. I think the (justified) fixation on the special status of LGBT, women, and minorities obfuscates the kind of shit that good people get canned or blackballed for.
I just finished watching The Wire for the first time. That show is a master class in institutional disfunction, corruption, and upward failure. Perhaps the most pertinent example is the Baltimore Sun city editor who discovers one of his reporters is fabricating stories, but is ultimately punished with a demotion by his jerkoff bosses who didn't want to miss out on a Pulitzer.
In the real world, I've been threatened with termination more than once because I was an easier scapegoat than one of the other white guys, or because a sociopath customer decided to direct his temper tantrums towards me that week. One of my friends got fired for cause because he made the CTO look incompetent. Jack got fired for pissing off a white male nepotism hire from a different company. Etc, etc.
This is the sort of shit that grinds my gears far more than the DEI nonsense.
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…!
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.
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.
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.
"SHE" got replaced for failure? What do you think?
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! :-)
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??!!
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.
Very similar to my career. I played chicken at the end with them; and they threw me out— with a nice package.
This is depressing. A fast-growing, late-stage startup I joined last year fired the CTO in my second week and replaced him with... One of these humans you're describing. I keep looking around, expecting to see the Office Space consultants asking "Well, what would you say you _do_ here?" But apparently I'm not in a dream and this company really exists.
So, what to do? Work another 3-4x median household income job where I can escape being one of these nasty leeches who has so little power and authority, he struggles to do anything of value? Or stay at this dead-end business and use the last of its $550M in venture capital to pay my salary while I start a side hustle, or join someone else early stage while working full time?
One thing's for sure: I can't write consistently enough to start a Substack, so there goes a possible future of moving to rural Idaho and using my Substack monies to pay for, uh, lessons in how difficult it is to remove fence posts and build decks.
I feel vaguely but fairly attacked here!
Nah, we all know you've got a nice side hustle here. You'd be putting these essays up on your blog otherwise and getting a bill for your efforts.
Treat your work not for it's intrinsic worth or as your "passion" but be a grownup and use it to support your family. In other words, go for the money and choose whatever you think will maximize your income for the longest time.
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.
Thing is, there really aren't any many true (non-EV) pieces of shit left anymore, if any. We're actually at a point where you could make a strong case that in any given category the Toyota is the biggest piece of shit.
Conversely, you could also argue that everything has become a totally disposable piece of shit.
Regardless, whatever the fuck C/D has to say is irrelevant.
I believe it was bark who wrote something along the lines of "You have to spend a lot of money to get a shitty car"
It was :)
"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.
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:
https://bimmerfan739.substack.com/p/mopar-memories
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
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've pretty much lost all interest car magazines/ blogs at this point, can't really see the point in them. I stopped caring about supercars around the time I was leaving highschool and became bored with obsessing over the unobtainable. Now all cars are cars are unobtainable unless you have connections or are willing to overpay by a ludicrous amount. Having done the latter with a house purchase in 2021, not really into repeating the mistake. So wtf do I care about some puff piece for 1 of the 400 identical crossovers for sale today? Gee I sure hope it comes with unnecessary and fragile electronics, maybe even an 80k mile cvt! Maybe they'll have a piece about how it's perfectly normal for your 70k dollar electric car to have the range of a fucking power wheels when it's cold, or how it's a good thing that it has a non-zero potential to burst into a multi day fire. The whole industry can get fucked, won't be sad when sales fall and the money men realize there's a whole department that spent the last 3 years contributing no value.
My friends wife who has a very nice tahoe “i cant wait to get the electric one” you want an electric car when its -20 in chicago? The brainwash runs deep
Women have always been the primary market for electric cars, even more than a century ago. They didn't have the upper body strength to crank start a car (the Model T had a 2.9L four cylinder - a lot of metal to spin) and ICE (called "explosion engines" by steam and electric advocates) powered cars were noisy and smelly. Electric cars also didn't need conventional manual transmissions. Period advertisements for EVs heavily featured women (see the link below). Clara Ford had a Detroit Electic and so did Helen Newberry Joy, wife of Henry Joy, who ran Packard. When the Tesla Model S was relatively new, it was part of a display of EVs at either Eyes on Design or the Detroit concours. I spoke to the female half of the couple that was displaying and I'd say that she was almost sexually aroused by the car.
https://rokemneedlearts.com/images/mercuryarcrectifiercharger.jpg
Where did she put the plug?! 😂😂
Electric cars are like androgynous metrosexual men - male, but without all the smelly, hairy, icky masculinity women find so officially unacceptable but secretly arousing.
Electric cars are smooth and clean and thoughtful and sensitive and want to talk about her feelings - but just can't seem to shag her rotten the way she really wants.
A gal in one of my tennis groups couldn't play the other night because she needed her Tesla's battery replaced. It's never really cold in Southeast Michigan.
I’m trying to remember the time when I realized I was Sisyphus and my job was rolling the boulder up the hill
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?!
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?
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...
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.
Sounds good. I certainly wish someone had told ME this stuff when I was that age.
Agreed, but I would temper this slightly with Natural Law precepts.
Civilized society must have some sense of order.
I recommend watching the Carlin HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya”. Completely on point.
"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!"
Some canyons just need shouted into, even if it feels pointless. At least you may feel better. It seems that you've mostly exorcised your demons and can move on now. In the meantime, money will change hands and copy will be created, but mostly by any one of the capable AI bots that write better than Jony, Jason and the rest of the marginalized "journalists."
The rest of us can continue to smile and nod when visiting with our neighbors about their new Tesla or Mousetang Mach-E and how they are so happy to be helping the environment and blah-blah-blah. But, we'll know the truth.
My grandfather frequently said "Don't try and teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
And so it goes with canyon shouting. It never affects those in the canyon.
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...
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.
"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!
"sport that does matter at all to anyone other than the participants". Also describes off-road racing - my passion.
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.
So another look at me object to display to the guests?
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
The past few years made me think of the former Soviet Union also. I remember my father telling me of being on a three year wait list for an entry level car. It could have been five.
The plumber's coming in the morning.
I remember the day after the first COVID case was reported here. My dad and I went to the grocery store at 6AM to fill in some minor gaps and “beat the rush.” The shelves were halfway bare and people were not far from reinsuring Lord of the Flies.
In High School, I remember hearing a lot about Soviet life from some of the old timers (Polish Catholic school). Never did I think I’d witness anything like what they described.
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.
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.? 😁
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 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.
After graduation I bought a 2001 prelude SH based solely on car and driver articles. Drove it for 16 months and never missed it.
Could have bought the last new ITR in Chicagoland for the same price but hated the Phoenix yellow. Comparing sales prices of both models on bring a trailer shows what an idiot I am
Phoenix yellow in a car is my dream color. Or something obnoxiously orange
As I said after Jack peeled a few layers off the autojourno onion after this started, theoretically, a 1977 LTD handles better than any modern car, right? 😂
I can only stand up and applaud. Most relevant article about today’s auto “journalism” ever written.