GCrites

Battery station. Battery station. Battery station. No battery stations and no quickly swappable batteries totally ruin the entire notion of the automobile and truck with mandatory extended downtime. Any trip that's not a simple daily commute is destroyed by downtime.

But the years 2000 to 2006 were still big SUV and truck years. They didn't start trailing off until 2007.

I'd say that's about right.

Ah, if only my posession fantasies were as simple as a bag of sugar.

With a few years of experience those salespeople know how to screen people pretty well, though. And how to manage those tire-kicker's time with the salesperson for them.

Here's a graph that proves something my roommate and I started suspecting about 3 years ago as we looked through some '90s car magazines -- the mid to late '90s was an especially expensive time to buy a car when inflation is figured in. Basically the cars cost the same then in raw dollars that they do today, despite 15-20 years of inflation taking place. By the '90s, some of the sheen had worn off of the automobile already for young people due to bland daily drivers, computerized engine controls and reduced sexual promiscuity. But the wretchedly high car prices of the '90s probably planted the seeds of the automobile hobby as being only for rich people as it is perceived today. No longer is the car hobby seen as a dirtbag thing to do; instead with all the roadcourses (new ones are "Motorsports Country Clubs" for 1%ers) opening up, small town dirt tracks and drag strips closing and NASCAR attendance in the crapper the perception is that only the rich and teams funded by university engineering departments seem to be left. On the other hand, buying a car today costs the same as it did in the still-car-mad '80s. The article and graph are a little old, but I have seen newer data that say things are still about the same today as they were in '06 relative to inflation. This does take the wind out of the bellows from deniers that the price of new cars is too high as compared to the past. We often see contextless numbers used to try and prove a point. "$31,000!" they say, even though $31,000 was what a decent car cost in 1998. So the price of the cars is actually not a factor when compared with anything made after 1985. But look at that big run-up going into 1985. Look at the second graph in the article and see what the price of gas has done though. The gas price graph would actually be lower today than it was there in 2008 but VMTs continue to drop. Cars have inflated in cost much less than the rest of the CPI. Dramatically less so, really. http://seekingalpha.com/article/81546-real-prices-for-new-cars-keep-going-down

The number listed on the auditors site is the RMV. The taxes are based on 35% of that number. It is a huge benefit, actually, to the owner if your property is undervalued. Usually if it is undervalued and is sold for a higher amount, the auditor is quick to adjust their value to get additional tax. I don't see the auditor undervaluing a property because of a political agenda. There's nothing to gain, really, and ultimately you're helping your enemy by giving them a tax break. Well, if your goal is to "shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", one way to accomplish that is to undervalue properties and reduce the amount of income that the city and county get. That lowers rents and would cause the population to increase, though. If you overvalue the 'burbs and undervalue the city more people and businesses will move into the city. That will eventually bringing rents (and property values) back to equilibrium.

The number listed on the auditors site is the RMV. The taxes are based on 35% of that number. It is a huge benefit, actually, to the owner if your property is undervalued. Usually if it is undervalued and is sold for a higher amount, the auditor is quick to adjust their value to get additional tax. I don't see the auditor undervaluing a property because of a political agenda. There's nothing to gain, really, and ultimately you're helping your enemy by giving them a tax break. When property taxes were reassessed up here in Franklin County 2 years ago, nobody was happy. If someone's property lost value, they complained that their property was being written off as valueless and it even made some people go upside down on their mortgage. But people who saw their property increase in value lost their minds because their taxes went up. There's no way to win!

I remember one day my buddies, a hot girl and I were just walking down the hall in high school and somebody from the local paper took a picture of us. We wound up in the paper for doing absolutely nothing.

I bet that's important in Portland with all of the iron buildings there.

Now, now, we got rid of Tressel but we don't do anything like throw people onto train tracks.

Does this mean Red States are full of Juggalos?

Don't forget that a lot of them are fake.

Or they just don't know anything about that sort of thing and got upsold. Maybe somebody accidentally made things in cubic feet instead of yards like on Spinal Tap.

Production doesn't have to come with a bunch of pointless driving and sprawl.

The problem with China (for themselves at least) is that each time they institute quality-of-living improvements such as wage increases, first-world environmental protection laws and other regulations it decreases interest by Western nations and even Japan to some degree in continuing production there.

How many cubic feet is each dumpster? Also, what is the recycling status of the complex? When curbside recycling happened late last year our trash volume dropped by like 75%.

Wouldn't defending against that just be an opportunity for BOAST lawyers to pay themselves more?

That was Mom's weapon of choice.

cut yourself down a switch!

One thing that's different about soccer vs. football and basketball is that the soccer coaches don't seem to rage out as much on kids. Kids today don't like to be raged out upon.

Will the Enquirer produce a stripped-down giveaway paper for streetcar passengers like the Washington Post does for Metro riders?

bored teenagers

Also one of the biggest pushers of soccer here is FOX.

Perhaps people like the game of soccer. Soccer isn't any more un-American than football. 100 years ago, there was baseball and there was everything else. We had a real cornucopia of sports back then, but of course a lot of people make it try to sound like the USA was founded in 1950.