Geeto67

This is a bullshit statement and you know it. You're an intelligent guy, why do say things that aren't intelligent? are you genuinely trolling with this or do you really believe it? serious question.

I get where you are coming from, and mostly agree that the future for collector cars is unknown, but for a lot of different reasons. I don't think we are the last car enthusiast generation, I think there are always going to be people who like cars and driving - it just may not be the same. What worries me is will there be affordable gasoline. There is a lot of focus right now on alt fuels, as well as alt drive technologies. Lack of demand for gasoline may reduce it to cheap short term but as the infrastructure switches over then gas will become a boutique item and expensive. This means it could be very expensive 30-40 years from now. No fuel means either conversions or no classic cars. One of the other reasons older cars had such staying power is that there were a lot of 1-3 year only designs up until the 1980's, so there is a lot of variety for a short period of time and all are highly stylized. Also some of those cars, like muscle cars, were considered good because the rest of the new car world in the late 1970's and early 1980's was just so different and terrible at the time. Pop culture seized this and put lots of old cars in movies and made it cool. I don't know that I am seeing a lot of miatas in movies so I don't think pop culture is driving the market anymore - at least not with aging cars, which is ok because it means the special stuff gets saved and the real garbage isn't. It's ok if a civic 4-door gets crushed or parted, as long as they save the integra GSR. Think about the old cars that got saved just because they are old (cought...ford fairmount...cough) and how a lot less of that will happen.

I am often surprised that for a group that often promotes "personal responsibility", how little a lot of those same people are interested in taking personal responsibility for their participation in conversations. Forget party position for a second, assholes attract other assholes. If your experience with enough "progressives", to generalize all of them, is one of aggression...maybe it's not them. You set the tone of the conversation that you want to have as much as the other participants - if you are saying offensive things and are expecting people to not get upset at them then you might as well end every point you try to make with "Fight me, bro". From my personal experience it is a common tactic for those with conservative opinions to phrase or say some pretty offensive things followed up by this completely unrealistic expectation that people should not get offended lest they be considered weak, a pussy, a faggot, or some other pejorative term for those of lesser masculinity. And then they walk around saying things like "progressives always want to fight"...well no shit...they want to fight, because the ones who don't are smart enough to avoid you and the ones who aren't are answering your subtextual "fight me, bro" position. I'm not saying you do this in particular Cmart, but I have seen it here and in real life. If all the "progressives" you are running into want to argue with you, then you should probably take a look at your approach however. Also it is my personal opinion and observation that conservatives don't really have much use or regard for facts. Fight me, bro!

By the way Gerald Ford was the first modern former president to charge for speaking engagements and every president has done it since except Reagan who didn't give speeches. The only president that has ever directly profited off of the secret service is Donald trump.

I can see where you are confused. Let me see if this clears it up: When she holds no office and isn't running for anything, she gives speeches. This is completely allowed, not illegal, not profiteering, and not hurting the American public. The money comes from private organizations like businesses and charities. It does not come from the taxpayers directly. Since she is not employed by the government she is completely free and clear to do so and pocket the money. When she is actively campaigning for a position she may charge to give speeches as part of fundraising activities. Again the money comes from the private sector and it goes to the campaign, which may pay her a small salary. Again no money from taxpayers, and she doesn't get to keep all of it, the lions share goes to the campaign. Politicians cannot do campaign activities and pocket the whole sum. When she holds office and isn't campaigning, she gives speeches as part of her role. The government pays her travel expenses but she does not get a speaking fee. As far as I know neither her nor bill have charged for speeches in officer related to their job, and not connected to campaigning. If you are alleging otherwise I ask you to prove it. There is another type of paid speeches politicians can give for money in office but it is exceedingly rare. That is the paid speech not related to their political position. For example, say you are the elected dog catcher of Dublin Ohio, but in your spare time to are an astronomer. The local astronomy club asks you to give a speech about the Orion constellation and pays you $150 for you to do it. You can take that money because it isn't related to your job, as long as you don't use other government resources to travel there (local politicians get into this trouble all the time by using state air travel resources for personal use). If the speech were on new dog catching methods you couldn't take the money, but since it isn't you are in the clear. I don't think the clintons have done this either, but it exists and other politicians have done this in the past. The clintons are worth about $110 million, most of which was amassed from Hilliary's time as an Atty, investments, her board positions, and bills speaking engagements post president when he was neither holding office nor campaigning. Her and Bills current source of income comes from giving speeches but neither are actively campaigning or holding office. None of this is corruption. The only example that fits your analogy is the one they didn't do. So again, if you think that is what happened, prove it.

Sure....I thought you were going to ask me a tough question. Just because a politician gets wealthy in office doesn't mean they got wealthy because of the office. The clintons are both graduates of Yale law school and worked for white shoe firms out of law school. This equates to a six figure salary (inflation adjusted) right out of school for both of them who are best described as hard chargers being top of their class. By the early 1980s their investments and her high salary as a partner in a prestigious AK law firm had netted them a small fortune. By the time bill was staging to be president their collective small fortune was no longer small and Hilary was at one point on the board of directors at Walmart (a 7 figure salary). The funny thing about wealth is when you have it it generates more wealth. Even though the clintons divested themselves of their business holdings during clintons presidency the money didn't just hangout static - it grew managed by the people managing the trust. By the time they left the whitehouse they were wealthier than before but not because of their position, because of those they designated to manage their money. Once they are no longer in office, every president makes money off their appearances and speaking engagements, as any celebrity would. But they are no longer in office so they aren't profiting at the expense of the taxpayers. Nearly Everyone who has held high office in the country is rich before they start, and taking public office doesn't slow that at all. As long as they are not profiteering personally while in office it is perfectly acceptable. In office they are accountable to the people, out of office they are not and can make money in the private sector.

bullshit. probably because it isn't true. you have no idea what you are talking about, do you? let's start with the basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_corporation by saying the government is a for profit enterprise you are saying it has no public interest and serves only to make the president, congress, and the judiciary richer. If that were really the case we wouldn't have lawsuits being filed regarding our current president and the emoluments clause. what you are is just cynical. cynicism isn't fact. Agree. One of the biggest problems with education right now is the quality of it is tied to the wealth of the people paying into the tax pool. If you have money, you live in a nice area, you pay higher taxes, you get better education. Eisenhower proved that the quality of education responds to money when he instituted federal programs to drive education in the sciences and engineering in this country and catapulted the US to the number 1 country in education in the 1960's. Reagan also proved this by cutting federal educational funding by record amounts and crippling skilled labor and vocational training as a result in the 1980's (lingering until the 2000s). There is a lot of misconception and false equivalency surrounding this because of the way education responds. If you cut funding the effect is immediate. People just instantly stop learning what they were being taught. But if you spend to institute programs it can take 4-8 years to start to see the full tangible effect. That's a lot of time because knowledge takes time and work to acquire. A lot of people think that the results of more money in education should be instant because the results of cutting funding is, but it just doesn't work that way. Also it takes a lot of money to reduce the influence of state and local funding on the quality of the education, and it's sometimes hard to see the returns on each dollar.

You understand that there are multiple governments acting mostly independently in furtherance of these goals, right? or do you just advocate abolishing the state governments and letting the federal government take over? Also the last one is nonsense. The constitution is the framework for the government - any government action that runs against it is invalid (based upon a historical and shared jurisprudence through enforcement, policy, and legislation and not any one person's interpretation). The bad behavior of those who have had control of those things in the past (see medieval system of road tolls for an example). Remember, the majority of roads used to cross private land - without the government system of easements and access we wouldn't have a public system of roads. These days the majority of the highways and major infrastructure is under the stewardship and the responsibility of the local and state government, but it wasn't always that way and it needed a government taking control of the public interest to travel unrestricted and building out the infrastructure. You cannot rely on all people being altruistic. Car Companies grew out of public access to roads in this country, if we adhered to the old European concepts of road tolls and restricted passage and access the car companies would not have become as big as they are now, but they would be very profitable in controlling both the vehicle and the access to the road. You know the Porsche business model of high profit margins and low volume? yeah no imagine everybody in the market is Porsche. They could eliminate the second hand car market because it isn't profitable to them and dilutes their product further pushing their products upmarket. Generally you want the government to oversee things that are the greater public interest as a whole where a for profit approach would cause harm to the general public. If you really think about it, that's a lot of services. A great example of the conflict between profit and non-profit motivations is when General Motors was allowed to buy up all the public transportation trolley services and then phased them out to sell buses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy).

I think a very vocal minority but that's neither here nor there. Even traditional republicans embrace some pretty onerous bureaucracy, esp those around military spending when it suits their needs. I don't even think it is the highest it has been history when you adjust the past for inflation. Plus financing is cheap at the moment, we are making less interest payments that we have in the past, and the debt isn't growing but shrinking - albeit it slowly. The sky isn't falling, it isn't "out of control", and while the recovery from the financial crisis is responsible from doubling the debt which was already high following Bush's wars - some minor course corrections would get it on track even more than it already is. If you want to talk about out of control, it's defense spending which is America's single most expensive expenditure and actually eclipses the national debt. There is no sign of decreasing defense spending under the current administration, FYI. I don't even think minimal, or rather what you probably think is minimal is far less than the actual minimal that is needed to maintain a controls environment. Where the government can really benefit from bureaucracy reduction isn't in reducing the number of layers things that pass through but rather eliminating processes that have outlived their usefulness or have solved their problem to the point where it is a diminished return and another process to maintain could take it's place. Socialization and oversight are essential to regulatory interpretation and enforcement, but enforcing new laws written on top of old antiquated laws (very little is ever removed, they mostly just add new to the old till it sorta makes sense) isn't efficient. The other thing that could stand to be eliminated is siloing among agencies. Sometimes enforcement happens over two agencies and they don't talk to each other as well as they should so sometimes you end up with an enforcement arm, like the DOJ, trying to enforce a regulation without any interpretation or guidance because another department in the same agency, like the DOJ policy arm, isn't finished interpreting the law yet. It's more complex than you give it credit, and def more than the average American realizes. You are kidding yourself if you think it is "simple" because it's built complex for a reason. What it isn't is beyond human comprehension because humans created it. But it takes time to study it and learn the details and they don't teach it to people in high school at all and barely graze the surface in college or most grad schools (including law school). And each department operated differently within the shared framework. There is no way to make it simple without losing years of problem solving and exceptions. you are just alarmist. It's the same as it always was, and it's actually been getting slightly better over time in some areas. Stop listening to bozo's like Alex Jones and other nut job pundits whose only job is to work you into a chicken little like froth and exploit your lack of knowledge and anger about it. The knowledge problem is most Americans are ignorant about how their government works in practice and has no desire to learn. Ignorant isn't a lack of intelligence, just a lack of knowledge, most Americans could probably grasp some of the more complex finer points if they put the time in to learn. There also isn't great access to the knowledge because while most of what you need is publicly available you have to have a pretty good education (top portion of your high school) to understand a lot of it. and it takes a ton of time. This statement about hide and play with money is conspiracy nonsense. There are so many eyes on things that corruption based on hiding money is difficult to hide and usually spotted pretty easily when it happens. A lot of that is based on the modern financial technologies of the last 30 years that makes accounting clearer and more accessible. In the days before electronic spreadsheets maybe there was some truth, but not now - and mostly because of bureaucracy. It doesn't mean people don't try to beat the system, just very few get away with it. Even departments that operate covert operations have to submit expense reports. The corruption you have to worry about is the influence of private sector money on politicians. That isn't government money, that's lobbyists spending to buy political position post election. That's right out in the open too...if you are looking for it. as far as how messy it is? yes it is this messy because people are messy. We are not homogeneous, what works for you doesn't work for everyone. It evolved this way over time through problem solving, to regress to a "simpler" model just basically fucks over everyone whose problems were partially solved through policy adjustment. It's always going to evolve this way. People are held accountable in government all the time. you just may not see it because it involves non-partisan employees and day to day operations. If you mean politicians to campaign promises, well that's a tiny part of accountability and honestly you're never going to get that - it's a fools dream and the only reason integrity is still important in politics. As far as reports and research - history has proven that not only is it necessary, but it works well in how the government makes decisions. We evolved to this point out of a need to make informed decisions in the public's best interest. things are not always what they seem but it's harder to argue with empirical data. Shooting from the hip usually means you shoot yourself in the foot.

maybe, but at what cost? Bureaucracy isn't always a negative, sometimes it is a control against abuse or rash decisions. People don't usually trust bureaucracy because it is difficult to understand, but more often than not it has the effect of keeping people honest than creating an obfuscating environment for corruption because of the sheer number of players involved. As for money we don't have? well....government works on budget/deficit accounting no matter what because the majority of cash intake happens on a rolling basis without enough time to be processed and applied. So the money for the federal operating costs are borrowed as per the federal budget, and that loan is paid off and restarted when taxes are taken in by the government. The "deficit" people worry about is the shortfall of the government's income to cover the loan (a balanced budget), so it gets rolled over and we pay interest on it. The US at one time did pay off the national debt and transitioned to a "spend what you earn" style system and it actually wasn't that great for the country (here is another PM podcast discussing this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/07/158376579/episode-273-when-the-u-s-paid-off-the-entire-national-debt). Debt is a saleable instrument, Debt sometimes is leverage in foreign negotiations, national debt isn't always a bad thing. Having a balanced budget is not always the same thing as having no national debt. Frankly put, it's shortsighted to declare things like bureaucracy and national debt as inherently and always evil and they need to be eliminated. It is equally shortsighted to look at the government as a whole and declare it inefficient or too big without taking it on a case by case basis. The inefficiencies of National Defense are not the inefficiencies of farming subsidies or education spending or social welfare. And the cost of discontinuing the spending in some of these areas is pretty significant and not always seen on it's face. As the podcast with the shrimp points out spending on some things like seem like frivolous research can lead to things that fundamentally change the landscape of the world, and keep the US as an established leader in agriculture, military, and technology. I sometimes feel like this is a knowledge problem. That people that just declare the government needs to get "simpler" on the whole want the knowledge to come to them instead of them seeking out the knowledge and proposing real solutions to inefficiency in a particular area. Nobody is able to know every single thing about the US government, and that's not necessarily a bad thing - it creates experts in specific fields and keeps the damage by those who don't know to a minimum. Even if you don't have faith in the people in the system, you can still have some faith that it's very difficult to get a lot of people to intentionally collude to do something unethical all at once inside of a bureaucratic system.

This is Aldous Huxley speaking in the 1950's about the future of politics and society. It's a fascinating glimpse back about how the concerts of our grandfathers and fathers are our concerns today:

Originals already are, but the superperformance cars will always have the stigma of being a kit car, even though they were an officially licensed product with high quality materials. The thing about that car is it's weighs 2458lbs. At 450 hp that's about 5lbs per hp, which is close to formula 1 car weight/hp ratio and puts it in league with some top tier Sportbikes. Car and driver tested that exact car and said it pulled a 3.4 0-60 while struggling to get traction. http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/superformance-gt40-mkii-specialty-file The thing about those cars though, they are tiny. That guys who owns it on the vid has to be like 5' 6" to fit with a helmet on inside it. GT40 is the car the originated the gurney bubble, because they couldn't close the door with dan gurney's 6' 4" helmeted head in the drivers seat. Even when they added the bubble to clear one of those old 60's super thin 3/4 motorcycle helmets, the helmet still rested against the door panel when he drove. It's a tight fit.

does it have to be an suv? The golf all track wagon is a lifted jetta sport wagon with 4motion AWD. It comes in stick and makes about 175hp which isn't fast but isn't a yugo merging on to the freeway slow. It's only 1 year old in this country so used would only be a 2016/17, but new it's possible to configure one for under $30K. Here is a brand new one for $28K on the lot at MAG: http://www.vw.com/car-profile.2017$BX5CN7$2016-07-03.html#!v=3VWH17AU0HM543509 and a used one for $24K with 3000 miles on it 2 hours away at Fairfield VW near cincy: https://worldautocertified.com/vehicle/3VWH17AU9HM508449-2017-Volkswagen-Golf-Alltrack-TSI-S/ The other one I would look at is an Audi Q3. It's a MK5/6/7 platform based suv so think of it as a lifted and streched GTI or just a fancier VW Tiguan. 200hp, it's nimble, small but not cramped, and uses the 2.0T engine you find in most audi products and the VW GTI and GLI models. Here is a used 2015 one in dayton with 50K on the clock for $24K: https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/detail/695213369/overview/ The BMW x3 is nice also. My mother just picked one up for around $25K with about 20K miles on it. hers is fully loaded but has the smaller turbo four 2 litre engine which still moves the thing out at a decent pace.

I know right....it's like you can almost smell the aquanet and pall malls of the past seeping through the monitor with every glance.

also I had to share this....it's factory salmon with a teal interior. How...bizarre... https://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/cto/6145286143.html

freak in a good way: https://louisville.craigslist.org/cto/6159296079.html

Found this to be a really interesting segment about when politics and government funding for scientific research clash: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/21/533840751/episode-779-shrimp-fight-club It's a podcast, the article is just there as a summary, click the play button in the upper left corner to play. I get the feeling that there are a lot of people on here that think that the government just hands out money without any kind of formal process and this gives a small glimpse into the more complex machine behind science and politics.

I would have figured the automatic transmission would be the one thing people dislike on modern v8 musclecars.....who knew.

Yeah, he's legit. LOL. Alex's content is mostly on the/Drive website now, though he does still do stuff on the youtube channel occasionally. He left them for a while, and basically they just repost the stuff he does on his own website. http://www.thedrive.com/author/alex-roy Personally, if it doesn't cost too much or put you out too much on time I'd do it. It sounds like fun and why shouldn't people see your LS powered M3.

LOL This posted today: http://jalopnik.com/heres-what-you-have-to-sign-when-you-buy-a-dodge-challe-1796304916 It's funny that there are 5 things related to wheels and tires (don't drive on highway, don't drive in 15 degree weather, inspect for cracks, don't drive in the rain, and tighten lug nuts only on the ground) and 2 things related to passenger seats (do not let people ride in the space of the missing seats, do not install seats if seats are missing).

That's a hell of a deal. Congrats.

is his name Matt Farrah? Just kidding, what's his name? /DRIVE is legit enough. They have had trouble keeping content/personalities but the way it works is /DRIVE is the channel that produces the content that is made by the presenters (like Farrah except I think he left). When Youtube was giving out free money for content they had a lot of shows/presenters, but these days the only shows that seem to be updating are /Engineered, Test/Drive, /Going Racing, /Tuned, The/Drive, After/Drive, /Driven, /My Life as a Rallyist, and /Corbin's Hit Show. Updates are slow with some of these shows updating months apart. /Big Muscle became house of muscle on Motor Trend, and some of the other's just went away. Funny story: When "Hell for Leather" still existed I had been working on a youtube version of it with my friend Josh Richards (who directed and EP'ed Love and Hip Hop for MTV). It was going to be similar to petrolicious but for motorcycles. Unfortunately this was right around when my partners (wes and grant) began to bicker and were starting to look for the door. Without telling me they comitted HFL to a video production deal with RideApart, the company that would eventually purchase us, thus ending my project with Josh. Both Wes and Grant appeared in several early episodes of RideApart as part of the /Drive channel and youtube picked up the Tab for production. Unfortunately, working together did not repair their relationship and after the first season of RideApart we sold HFL to them. Not too long after the sale, the youtube money dried up and they didn't make any more episodes. Nothing Josh and I did ever got used which was just as well as it was vintage heavy leveraging my access to Team Obsolete's vast collection of old racing motorcycles at the time. In the end nobody got paid, nobody got credit, only Wes and Grant appear on screen, but we have those 26 beautifully shot slick episodes as proof of what could have been.

saw this on jalopnik: http://jalopnik.com/you-can-now-buy-the-worlds-shittiest-dodge-challenger-h-1796269683 no demon's wrecked yet, but I don't think they have been delivered. Considering the news was quick to report hellcats that were wrecked within hours of purchase (some with as little as 18 miles) I imagine we will hear about it.

sounds like a great deal. What's your lease payment per month look like? I assume it is stick, right? Having driven the camaro, mustang, and challenger as rental cars in the last 2 years - the challenger always struck me as the car easiest to live with on a daily basis.

what happened to under $30K for your car replacement. also didn't you hate the weight on these?