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for) a shitload of problems the day he assumes office. Can't help but wonder why anybody would want to follow in W's footsteps. :(
by phrogge prince on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:25:27 AM PDT
Can't help but wonder why anybody would want to follow in W's footsteps. :(
Blind ambition and/or naivete, mixed with an inability to imagine just how bad it's going to be.
by limpidglass on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:29:22 AM PDT
[ Parent ]
In this case, it seems a lot more like "okay, the kids have fucked this up; if no other adult is going to get in here and fix it, I guess it's up to me."
"The Crunch? How dare you speak to me of the Crunch! You know nothing of the Crunch! You've never even been to the Crunch!" -Saboo on The Mighty Boosh
by PomperaFirpa on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:36:15 AM PDT
nominee, much less the president.
by elmo on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:30:16 AM PDT
like a new CEO does and take all his discounts, charges, and losses in the first few quarters and blame them firmly on the previous management.
by ek hornbeck on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:29:57 AM PDT
... arrest those who got away with murder, demote those who could have stopped them but looked the other way, throw wide open the blinds darkening the court house, and dust off his US Constitution.
Two war crimes make 'the right', not 'a right'. Defeat the liar John McCain.
by Yellow Canary on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:51:57 AM PDT
He's going to focus on putting out the flames before he tries to catch and prosecute the arsonists. It's the right thing to do.
by elmo on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:31:10 AM PDT
... and carry guns.
But I get your draught.
by Yellow Canary on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:39:50 AM PDT
...it is up to the Democrats to clean up the messes created by the Republicans.
-8.88, -7.77 THERE IS DEFINITELY NO THREAT WORTH SUSPENSION OF CIVIL LIBERTIES.
by wordene on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:39:29 AM PDT
it is the mess left by fifty years of postwar transportation, development, energy, and military policy, coupled with a hundred and fifty years of growth and industrialization, resource depletion, and environmental destruction. The bill for all these things and more are coming due.
by Justin Lee on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:45:02 AM PDT
... (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex) has eaten everything is sight, and, rampant and insatiable, turned on its maker, whom it has firmly clamped in its jaws, and already half-way down its gullet.
by Yellow Canary on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:55:58 AM PDT
offer an alternative? Be an optimist. Jerome offers some good advice in his post. Invest in infrastructure, give incentives to improve energy efficiency at every level among other things.
The world is not collapsing. The paradigm is changing. Most people have a hard time with change.
by basquebob on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:40:22 AM PDT
CNBC just had a segment about hybrids, and talked about how they were a bad buy because you had to wait four years to pay off the difference in price.
Four Years? That's an incredible payoff period; you'd have to be borrowing from a loan shark to not have an investment that pays back in four years be a bad choice. At "normal" interest and inflation rates, somewhere between 12 and 18 years is the cutoff point for when an annuity (which is basically what paying the extra price for a hybrid works out to) ceases to be a sound investment choice.
As one person on the ApteraForum kindly pointed out, almost nobody pays cash for cars in this price range. They're almost always done on payment plans. And the numbers?
$20,895 + taxes & fees (not including tax credit)
42 mpg avg
$429 payment for 60 months $143 fuel costs per month (1500 miles) ------------------------------------- $572.00 total per month
Honda Civic Ex automatic
$18,500 + taxes & fees
28mpg avg
$381 payment for 60 months $214 fuel costs per month -------------------------------------- $595.00 total per month
That means lower monthly payments on the hybrid, and this assumes no tax credits -- federal, state, or local. It also ignores depreciation -- non-hybrids depreciate much faster than hybrids.
Many people, however, have trouble looking past the now. They look for any excuse they can come up with to avoid change, and then immediately rule out the change. It is an uphill battle indeed.
by Rei on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:12:36 AM PDT
payoff, but lots of people see cars as 2-year leases or change vehicles so often, it's almost like they are renting them for 6-months. For them, a 4-year payoff is just crazy talk because their long range time frame is the next few months, not years. A large segment of this country leads an very short-term existance and has an incredibly short-term outlook on almost everything.
And it feels like I'm livin'in the wasteland of the free ~ Iris DeMent, 1996
by MrJersey on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:32:13 AM PDT
change. Cars will have to be kept and used for a much longer time. We will have to view them as tools, not status symbols. The manufacture and recycling metal and plastic so quickly is death to the environment and any energy conservation program.
Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but religion is assuredly the first.
by StrayCat on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:31:13 PM PDT
How 'bout this one, Rei:
1999 Toyota Corolla, paid up
$10,000 in Dec. 2000
32 mpg in mixed driving (I keep track)
$ 0 monthly payment until car disintegrates $188 monthly fuel cost --------------------------------------------
= drive it til you drop, folks. ANOTHER car, even a hybrid, isn't the answer for anyone in a compact (or smaller) vehicle.
And drive less, fer chrissakes! I have a 42 mile round-trip daily commute and I don't come anywhere near 1,500 miles a month!
How much is that 'lectric costing you while I pay zero stoitinko to drive my old Corolla? :)
by HobbyWizard on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:56:53 AM PDT
Used Honda Civic Hybrid
$8000 + taxes & fees, no tax credit $220 payment for 48 months
48 mpg avg (1800 mi/mo) ------------------------- $457 total/mo for one less year
Dump Steny Hoyer
by mataliandy on Fri May 09, 2008 at 11:11:34 AM PDT
I always say I will NEVER buy a brand new vehicle. I've got better things to do with my money, like buy cheese and ice cream. :)
Good call on picking up a used Civic hybrid as opposed to a used Prius, since the latter has a higher resale value based on cache, Larry David driving one, etc. etc.
by HobbyWizard on Fri May 09, 2008 at 11:19:26 AM PDT
results embedded in it for 4 different cities, with a specified maximum, then just checked a couple of times a day, every day, for months. The second the car appeared, I was on the phone. The poor guy selling it was apparently inundated. It was total luck. We got it for $5k under blue book.
I would have taken either Toyota or Honda, as long as it was in the price range. ;-) I'd prefer an out of warranty Toyota, so I could hack it to run as a plug-in, but the Honda came first, and dumping the repair-man's special was critically important.
by mataliandy on Fri May 09, 2008 at 11:55:03 AM PDT
Interesting. Congrats again. I did see a Prius in the Boston CL a couple of weeks ago for under $10k, but it was coming up on 150k mileage, and given the unknowns of the battery life, I'd pass on that if I were in the market.
Anyway, about your search: I have been using the advanced google search function to look for CL listings of businesses for sale in a number of cities/states, and have had mixed results. Google pulls in a lot, but I still find that it seems to flat out miss quite a number of results too. So unless I'm willing to search within every geographical area, I'm bound to miss some interesting opportunities.
What were the particulars of your search? Did you use google to mine for hybrids?
by HobbyWizard on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:25:20 PM PDT
I just put a bunch of iframes into a text file (like below, but with more cities and cars, replace square [ ] brackets with angle brackets < >).
For the src="" portion of each, I had run a search until I got the results I wanted, then copied the URL from the results page into the src string.
Then for each one, I put a little header above it so it would be easy to quickly determine what I was looking at (between the H1 tags).
[html] [head] [style type="text/css"] hr {color: sienna; height: 2px;} body {background-color: lightblue;} [/style] [/head]
[body] [span class="lightblue"]
[h1]TDI in Boston[/h1] [iframe src="http://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=TDI&minAsk=min&maxAsk=4000" width="900" Height="300"] [/iframe]
[/body][/html]
by mataliandy on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:47:36 PM PDT
The search I ran was on Craigslist. You only have to do the search in one city, as long as you know the craislist urls for the other cities. Then you canjust copy and paste once for each city you're interested in and change the URL, for example:
src="http://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=TDI ..."
Becomes
src="http://nh.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=TDI..." src="http://burlington.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=TDI..." src="http://providence.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=TDI..."
etc.
by mataliandy on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:57:08 PM PDT
that I've already paid off the differnce in pricing for my Prius. Plus I bought when there was still a full Federal tax credit. So for me now, its gravy.
Democrats give you the Bill of Rights; Republicans sell you a bill of goods!
by barbwires on Fri May 09, 2008 at 01:40:51 PM PDT
He has a whole ****load of workable ideas and a willingness to see them through. I only wish I could kick my desire to see the prosecutions handed down, too. Call me old-fashioned.
The only way to change this country is if money follows politics, not the other way around.
by jcrit on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:19:38 PM PDT
He said so himself. He feels it's his duty to try to help fix this place for the sake of his children and generations to come. I realize this is a site about politics, and that's political, but I think it's the truth.
McCain is a Chode.
by dnamj on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:57:42 PM PDT
wide narrow
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