In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
I choose to buy a new Jeep two to three weeks before a global economic collapse as the Euro crashes and burns. Fuck. I'm always doing shit like that. My sense of timing is surpassed only by my lust for boy toys. Siiiiiiigh!
-- Badtux the Kicking-himself Penguin
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.
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Tell me about it. I bought an expensive handgun several months before I got laid off. Between it and the extra magazines, it was more than I care to think about.
ReplyDeleteA few months later: Out of a job.
Timing is everything. [/sarcasm]
Oh Goodness! A jeep isn't what I think of first when I hear the phrase "lust for boy toys" ;)
ReplyDeleteMy Veloster may be my undoing. Before that, I had a theory that I could buy ~$1,000 cars and run them until they died. If I got a year out of such a vehicle, I'd be way ahead of the game.
ReplyDeleteTurns out, dealing with the kinds of people that sell such cars, and making such cars legally-driveable is another matter. I lost many, many days of work. I risked losing my job.
Tux -
ReplyDeleteWhat better transportation for riding off into the apocalypse than a new Jeep?
Cheers!
JzB
Are you being sarcastic or ironic here?
ReplyDeleteI think the possibility is real. "Cascading cross-defaults" is the operative term. Same thing as happened with the Lehman Bros. collapse. I don't know if the MOTU have enough rabbit-pulling-out-of-hat tricks to paper over another such episode. Or there might be a period of turmoil when the ATMs did not spit out pieces of paper, and the credit card swipe terminals did not function. More than a weekend of that and people will start breaking windows and burning shit down.
You might be snarking by pointing to that article, but I'm worried enough (and I was that way long before I saw this post) that we booked another trip to Europe. Leaving in less than two weeks. I did not plan on going back there a second time this year. However, I'd rather repatriate some more of that substance you scorn as useless than face the possibility that some ones and zeros with my name on it will simply evaporate. In the worst case, I've had another holiday in lands where the food and scenery is good. In the best case, I have something that I can drop on my foot, instead of being stuck holding an empty bag.
Ya Misfit, it's a continued theme with me. I bought a house in Scottsdale and less than a year later I was laid off and had to relocate to a different city to get a job. I bought a new car after getting a big bonus and a raise, and six months later that company went bankrupt and closed down. And so forth.
ReplyDeleteHopefully my current employer isn't going to undergo that fate though. I'm critical personnel there and they just had a record quarter, and are in an industry that profits if there's lots of rioting and shit (one reason I went with them rather than the Fortune 500 company that also wanted me), so (shrug) we'll see.
Lynne: Yes, the term "boy toy" means something much different if you're a woman :).
Nangleator, the problem with $1K cars is that they're $1K cars. It's not always possible to know what's wrong with them before hand. The real bargains in used cars lie in the 5 to 10 year old cars. They're old enough that they no longer have that shiny new look and feel to them so folks with more money than sense trade them in or sell them on something shiny and new, but they still have a lot of life in them. You'll pay more than $1K for them though. Whatever you do, do *not* buy a used car that's less than 5 years old. It is either a fleet or a lemon. People simply don't pay $20-$40K for a new car just to dump it in less than 5 years, unless they have some good reason to do so that probably isn't in *your* best interests...
JzB: Problem with Jeeps is that they use a lot of gas. Sigh!
Bukko: I'm Badtux the SNARKY Penguin. Of course I'm being ironic here. I do understand the implications of the Euro imploding and they aren't going to be good. Hopefully my little discourse of my previous experiences buying shiny new toys should be enlightening enough there, heh.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
There are a lot of good opportunities to buy 4 yr old cars because that is a common lease term. I bought my current car, a VW Jetta, from my sister last year when her lease was up. It is a really great car and I got it cheap :)
ReplyDeleteLynne, I sort of regard leased cars as one step up from fleet cats. People don't lavish as much care on things that aren't their own. You lease a car, so are you going to care if you drove nine months and 10,000 miles on a single oil change? If you live in the snow belt, are you going to pay for the undercarriage wash now and then?
ReplyDeleteI think BadTux is right: Better to buy a car that was owned by someone.
Oh I know for certain that the person I bought my car from was only changing the oil every 10,000 miles. That is what the owners manual recommends though.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if I agree that owning a car makes someone take care of it more than leasing a car. I mean, if someone buys a car with the intention of selling it after 4 years, why would they take better care of it than they would if the car was leased? Especially if they are the sort to just trade it rather than selling it privately. I mean there is an incentive in that case but dealers don't require maintenance records when you're trading in your car any more than they do when you're turning in a lease.
May have you beat.
ReplyDeleteStarted a small biz in the retail sporting goods industry, early 2006. Do you see where this is going? First yr, crappy but expected. Second yr 400% growth as people found me. Not bad. Third yr started same time as the recession/depression. Been downhill ever since. And you don't know my background otherwise you'd know why my life is a CW song. If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have none at all.
You never know how things will turn out. A few years ago, I worked for a fortune 500 company that grew out of a local institution. I thought it would go on forever. It was the second largest retailer of buggy whips in the whole country. I was very confident that everyone would keep buying those buggy whips because well, buggy whips are really cool and a lot of people really love them.
ReplyDeleteDue to personal reasons, I decided to take a big risk and leave the large buggy whip retailer for a small software company that caters to small independent buggy whip retailers and also buggy whip manufacturers. My only worry was that the little company might not be stable. Turns out that the little company survived what the big company could not. go figure
But none of that changes the fact that I work in the frigging BUGGY WHIP industry. Not sure how it is going to play out but I sure don't want to live my life worrying about such things all of the time. :) I guess if I need to, I'll find something else to do.