You could have just stopped there. In addition to this case, there was the Professor Gates case (violation of 4th amendment protections - no search without warrant/cause), the unconstitutional searches (and beatings) of citizens' cars within 200 miles of the Mexico border, and on-and-on-and-on.
We have youtube now, and people with handheld cameras. The truth is finally coming out about how cops routinely violate constitutional law.
their way to the local farmer's market called 911 saying that they thought they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47
I've seen people get paralyzed because a black beetle crawled across the kitchen counter. I suspect many people have the same irrational fear of guns, therefore if you carry ANYTHING that even resembles a gun their first instinct is to call for help (aka "call 911"). It's a phobia which is NOT rational, and it's no wonder they irrationally identified a toygun as an AK-47.
>>>officers advised Bungie officials to transport the gun more discretely in the future.
No. Read the Constitution mister cop (you know, that thing you pledged to protect, but apparently never read). Carrying a flag, sign, or other item is considered "symbolic speech" according to the Supreme Court and therefore protected.
>>>The car can then sold to registered salvage dealers who strip the vehicle for parts.
False. My NBC station did a story about this, where they interviewed local dealers/salvagemen, and they were all rather annoyed that the government specifically forbade the practice. QUOTE: "I'd like to sell this car to the local junkyard down the street, but Congress has forbidden that. The car MUST be taken directly to a crusher."
>>>Very few of the cars destroyed were worth more than $4500 (think about it for a few minutes).
The real question is - Can I think of 45 parts that are worth $100 or more? Yes easily. When you take a perfectly-good (but old) car and break it up into pieces, you can get a lot of dollars from each individual piece. In fact that's probably what I should have done with my old car - piece it out on ebay - rather than sell it for a measly $500.
Plus even if the cars were not worth much, Congress still should have allowed junk dealers to label these cars "scrap" and recycle the parts through their networks, rather than outlaw the practice and fillup landfills. What Congress did is the exact-opposite of the "green" philosophy.
>>>the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation.
Apples-and-oranges. Europe is basically one gigantic urban zone, whereas the U.S. (and Canada) are a gigantic rural zone with a few urban zones alone the edges. NATURALLY Europe's going to burn less for transport, simply because everything is closely compacted. In contrast a drive from St. Louis to the next major city (like Kansas City) is almost 5 hours.
Also it's a mistake to think trains are more efficient. Due to frequent stops-and-starts (which waste energy) they get the energy-equivalent of 25 miles per gallon per passenger. That is better than your typical 20mpg SUV, but nowhere near as good as my 2002 hybrid Insight which is 70 mpg per driver, or if I take a friend, goes upto 140 mpg per passenger.
>>And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2.
In other words we grew wealthy-and-powerful on the back of Europe, China, and Japan's ruin (aka "the lost generation"). I think this cartoonist expresses it quite well - http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/IMAGES_LG/Ghosts_of_War.gif - Ironically it appears China is now doing the same thing - loaning tons of money which we must now payback. Do you view the Chinese takeover of your government and your marketplace as a "success"?
I suppose from Beijing's viewpoint the answer is yes. But from OUR viewpoint it sucks, and I bet from the European/Japanese viewpoint the post-WW2 American takeover also sucked. I stick with my original comment about WW2 being a "horror" not a success.
>>>US postal service...by definition "on the verge of bankruptcy" >>>
I see your point. Let me rewrite my previous statement to more accurately reflect the current state: "Railroads were funded privately not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's [several billion in debt]. Ditto the government-run post office."
There. And that's the truth - what was once a profitable passenger-rail industry has gone deep, deep into debt. And while UPS and FedEx post profit year-after-year, the government post office is posting loss-after-loss.
BTW you say "pay" but the two railroad companies didn't receive money. They received free land, which is an important distinction because land didn't cost the 1800s taxpayer anything out of his pocket. If the 1800-era Congress had said "We're going to give-away trillions of dollars to private companies," they would have had another civil war on their hands as the People revolted.
>>>So, what if you don't have the money to put into a private savings account?
Then you sign-up for Welfare when you retire at age 70 or higher. That's what that program is for - to help those without enough money to care for themselves.
>>>The majority of businesses fail over time
If only the government would do that same (or have the balls to layoff not-needed workers to reduce expenses, rather than have them just sitting-around doing nothing). Government is a MONOPOLY and therefore no better than if Microsoft had a monopoly, or Comcast had a monopoly, or Ford had a monopoly.
>>>I can tell you've never been on welfare or food stamps
I'm on welfare right now, you insensitive clod! (Look at that: I made my point AND used a meme at the same time. Woo-hoo!) So yes I know what it's like. Comfortable. As it should be because that's what safety nets are for - to catch citizens if they fall off the highwire of life and need assistance to survive.
Getting back to my main point:
The SS program is redundant and not necessary. Plus it's been used/abused by the government to fund other projects as if it was just an ordinary tax meant to be spent. SS == Epic fail. Obama and Clinton and others say that the healthcare industry is broken, but NOTHING is as broken as the Social Security program and needs to be fixed NOW. Evolve the SSI into a needs-based system (i.e. for those who run out of money), or else it will collapse faster than Madoff's ponzi scheme collapsed
>>>The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years.
That's true, but what have we done since then? Virtually nothing. Had the project been done privately, you're right it probably would have been slower (it took about 30 years to gradually build America's first national railroad system), but we'd have a thriving industry on the moon, and probably Mars too, that would be continued to the present day. Instead what we got was a government boondoggle that led to a dead end. Lots of pomp-and-circumstance but no foundation.
If you're still not comprehending what I mean, just read Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" which presents an alternate history of how private industry could have accomplished, not just landing on the moon, but also creating a thriving space-based marketplace.
>>>to create commercial integrated circuits.
True. As I said before in regards to ARPAnet, government can often serve as a good genesis, but then it needs to get out of the way. Can you imagine where we'd be if PCs were created by Government? Well we don't have to imagine because the French dabbled in the idea in the 80s, and what was produced was a slow text-only online computer, whereas the commercial computers had already moved into music and video.
Government (and monopoly in general) == stagnation. Competition == Innovation to try to beat the other guy.
I was not making assumptions. I was talking about paying-off your loans AFTER you have your degree. Therefore your comment about working before you have a degree is non-sequitor.
>>>I'm fully aware of the *legal* distinction. Nevertheless, I used the term "stealing" deliberately. This is not akin to singing "Happy Birthday" without putting a royalty cheque in the mail. This is knowingly helping yourself to products that cost hundreds of dollars to obtain legally. >>>
And since I had no intention of buying either "Happy Birthday" or a Teaching Company course, the amount of property lost == $0.00. Kinda similar to how I have no intention of going to SUNY or a Miley Cyrus concert, therefore they have lost no property by my not going there.
>>>Don't mistake lectures by The Teaching Company for real university courses....3x as many instruction hours
3 hours a week times 14 weeks == 42 hours. Most of those classes are filled-with time-wasting bullshit, so cut that in half to about 25 hours. Most of the TC's courses are that long or longer, such that buying a course like "The History of English" is equivalent to a full semester course.
>>>6x as much time where you spend reading
In my college experience that was a waste of time. Yes sometimes I found a great book, but for the most part, I skipped the reading entirely, and now that I have a job I find myself never referring back to those readings (I got rid of my textbooks long ago). Second - the teaching company provides plenty of recommended reading materials if you really *want* to dive deeper, just like a college syllabus includes optional recommendations for reading.
>>> then a bunch of assignments on which you get feedback...
This is the main thing lacking. But that's okay because the math-oriented courses DO include workbooks for practice, and eventually you'll have to go to college anyway so you can get that B.S. sheepskin. That will be your feedback.
>>>an important step in the process is to NOTIFY the timber company
By that logic Bin Laden is not a terrorist because he NOTIFIED us that we should leave the Arabian Peninsula alone, or else. In fact he notified us before he bombed the NYC trade center's basement. He notified us before he destroyed the OKC federal building (suspected but not proven), and before the USS Cole bombing. It's not his fault we did not listen./end sarcasm
What the ELF is doing with tree-spiking sounds dangerous to people, even if they do notify the companies. If I'm 100 feet in the area and suddenly my saw hits a spike and the chain snaps, if I don't get hurt it will be pure luck. I will blame the ELF.
A person that believe in a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, such that government runs private corporations like GM or Amtrak or Microsoft? AKA "corporatism". (ponder) Nope that's definitely not me.
>>>"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
False. 99.9% of the world is moral and upstanding people who respect their neighbors, and therefore would never do anything worthy of blinding. Only that small 0.1% of criminals would be blinded.
>>>Equating deaths with tangible object destruction is pretty overzealous.
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT> I never said anything about killing any ELF members - only destroying their property the same way they destroyed that private family's radio tower.
I like the story you have linked in your sig: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org] - "Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory."
"There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger."
It's fine to say, "This is a web browser and that's all it should do," but even the first browser written by CERN did more than that. It had back and forwards buttons. It had a dropdown menu. A place to type your next destination.
These Uzbi people are just being anal, and the result is inconvenience and mucking-up the works. Like making a car that you steer with horse commands ("Giddyup!" "Trot!" "Gallop!" "Woah Nelly!" and so on).
When California was surveyed by the U.S. in the 1800s, it was labeled a "desert" (along with virtually everything else west of the rockies). and they estimated it could only sustain one family every 10,000 acres. Now California has a density of about 1 family every 10 acres, and people wonder why it's running dry of water. (duh)
>>>we now use democracy, essentially rule by the majority, which is only better because it is somewhat less violent. And if enough people think freaky sex is bad for society, well it will be outlawed. >>>
That is incorrect thinking.
The proper thing is to ask, "Does freak sex involuntarily harm other human beings?" If the answer is "no" then there's no justification to outlaw it. Thomas Jefferson used that argument to promote freedom of religion, saying that it did not matter if his neighbor worshiped one god or many gods - his neighbors' actions do not harm my property, my body, nor my rights. The same reasoning can be applied to "freaky sex" where it doesn't matter if my neighbor has one partner or many partners - what he does won't harm me.
Democracy == tyranny of the majority. I prefer a government that protects the minority's or the individual's rights, even if the majority thinks "those people" are weird.
"Two wrongs don't make a right" is a false statement. We routinely commit a second wrong when we deprive criminals of their liberty, or force a vandal to open his wallet and hand-over money to cover damages caused - it's called justice.
>>>SUVs..... their mere existence is also a pointless "destruction of property" in most cases
False.
The person who owns the mine which holds the metal (or rubber or petroleum) sells that property to the carmaker who reshapes it into a vehicle which is then sold to a private citizen. At no point has property been destroyed, but instead transferred, some labor mixed-in with the property, and then transferred again.
If you're trying to say that SUVs emit harmful pollutants, well that's true, but so too does the car you drive. So before you go set fire to someone else's SUV, you should first set fire to your own car. Demonstrate through sacrifice what you truly believe.
And last-but-certainly not least, as "dirty" as an SUV may be, it's minimum LEV qualification means it's emitting about 1/10000th as much as a pre-regulation 1970 van. Even the catalyst-equipped 80s cars were rather dirty. One of today's 2009 SUVs is cleaner than my 1987 Dodge sedan. So while you may look at your SUV neighbor and think "irresponsible" you should be congratulating him for buying a newer, cleaner vehicle rather than driving an old clunker.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>The police are morons
You could have just stopped there. In addition to this case, there was the Professor Gates case (violation of 4th amendment protections - no search without warrant/cause), the unconstitutional searches (and beatings) of citizens' cars within 200 miles of the Mexico border, and on-and-on-and-on.
We have youtube now, and people with handheld cameras. The truth is finally coming out about how cops routinely violate constitutional law.
their way to the local farmer's market called 911 saying that they thought they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47
I've seen people get paralyzed because a black beetle crawled across the kitchen counter. I suspect many people have the same irrational fear of guns, therefore if you carry ANYTHING that even resembles a gun their first instinct is to call for help (aka "call 911"). It's a phobia which is NOT rational, and it's no wonder they irrationally identified a toygun as an AK-47.
>>>officers advised Bungie officials to transport the gun more discretely in the future.
No. Read the Constitution mister cop (you know, that thing you pledged to protect, but apparently never read). Carrying a flag, sign, or other item is considered "symbolic speech" according to the Supreme Court and therefore protected.
>>>The car can then sold to registered salvage dealers who strip the vehicle for parts.
False. My NBC station did a story about this, where they interviewed local dealers/salvagemen, and they were all rather annoyed that the government specifically forbade the practice. QUOTE: "I'd like to sell this car to the local junkyard down the street, but Congress has forbidden that. The car MUST be taken directly to a crusher."
>>>Very few of the cars destroyed were worth more than $4500 (think about it for a few minutes).
The real question is - Can I think of 45 parts that are worth $100 or more? Yes easily. When you take a perfectly-good (but old) car and break it up into pieces, you can get a lot of dollars from each individual piece. In fact that's probably what I should have done with my old car - piece it out on ebay - rather than sell it for a measly $500.
Plus even if the cars were not worth much, Congress still should have allowed junk dealers to label these cars "scrap" and recycle the parts through their networks, rather than outlaw the practice and fillup landfills. What Congress did is the exact-opposite of the "green" philosophy.
>>>the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation.
Apples-and-oranges. Europe is basically one gigantic urban zone, whereas the U.S. (and Canada) are a gigantic rural zone with a few urban zones alone the edges. NATURALLY Europe's going to burn less for transport, simply because everything is closely compacted. In contrast a drive from St. Louis to the next major city (like Kansas City) is almost 5 hours.
Also it's a mistake to think trains are more efficient. Due to frequent stops-and-starts (which waste energy) they get the energy-equivalent of 25 miles per gallon per passenger. That is better than your typical 20mpg SUV, but nowhere near as good as my 2002 hybrid Insight which is 70 mpg per driver, or if I take a friend, goes upto 140 mpg per passenger.
>>>>> WW2 was a horror not a success
>>And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2.
In other words we grew wealthy-and-powerful on the back of Europe, China, and Japan's ruin (aka "the lost generation"). I think this cartoonist expresses it quite well - http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/IMAGES_LG/Ghosts_of_War.gif - Ironically it appears China is now doing the same thing - loaning tons of money which we must now payback. Do you view the Chinese takeover of your government and your marketplace as a "success"?
I suppose from Beijing's viewpoint the answer is yes. But from OUR viewpoint it sucks, and I bet from the European/Japanese viewpoint the post-WW2 American takeover also sucked. I stick with my original comment about WW2 being a "horror" not a success.
>>>US postal service...by definition "on the verge of bankruptcy"
>>>
I see your point. Let me rewrite my previous statement to more accurately reflect the current state: "Railroads were funded privately not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's [several billion in debt]. Ditto the government-run post office."
There. And that's the truth - what was once a profitable passenger-rail industry has gone deep, deep into debt. And while UPS and FedEx post profit year-after-year, the government post office is posting loss-after-loss.
Perfect example of government waste.
BTW you say "pay" but the two railroad companies didn't receive money. They received free land, which is an important distinction because land didn't cost the 1800s taxpayer anything out of his pocket. If the 1800-era Congress had said "We're going to give-away trillions of dollars to private companies," they would have had another civil war on their hands as the People revolted.
>>>So, what if you don't have the money to put into a private savings account?
Then you sign-up for Welfare when you retire at age 70 or higher. That's what that program is for - to help those without enough money to care for themselves.
>>>The majority of businesses fail over time
If only the government would do that same (or have the balls to layoff not-needed workers to reduce expenses, rather than have them just sitting-around doing nothing). Government is a MONOPOLY and therefore no better than if Microsoft had a monopoly, or Comcast had a monopoly, or Ford had a monopoly.
>>>I can tell you've never been on welfare or food stamps
I'm on welfare right now, you insensitive clod! (Look at that: I made my point AND used a meme at the same time. Woo-hoo!) So yes I know what it's like. Comfortable. As it should be because that's what safety nets are for - to catch citizens if they fall off the highwire of life and need assistance to survive.
Getting back to my main point:
The SS program is redundant and not necessary. Plus it's been used/abused by the government to fund other projects as if it was just an ordinary tax meant to be spent. SS == Epic fail. Obama and Clinton and others say that the healthcare industry is broken, but NOTHING is as broken as the Social Security program and needs to be fixed NOW. Evolve the SSI into a needs-based system (i.e. for those who run out of money), or else it will collapse faster than Madoff's ponzi scheme collapsed
>>>The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years.
That's true, but what have we done since then? Virtually nothing. Had the project been done privately, you're right it probably would have been slower (it took about 30 years to gradually build America's first national railroad system), but we'd have a thriving industry on the moon, and probably Mars too, that would be continued to the present day. Instead what we got was a government boondoggle that led to a dead end. Lots of pomp-and-circumstance but no foundation.
If you're still not comprehending what I mean, just read Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" which presents an alternate history of how private industry could have accomplished, not just landing on the moon, but also creating a thriving space-based marketplace.
>>>to create commercial integrated circuits.
True. As I said before in regards to ARPAnet, government can often serve as a good genesis, but then it needs to get out of the way. Can you imagine where we'd be if PCs were created by Government? Well we don't have to imagine because the French dabbled in the idea in the 80s, and what was produced was a slow text-only online computer, whereas the commercial computers had already moved into music and video.
Government (and monopoly in general) == stagnation. Competition == Innovation to try to beat the other guy.
I was not making assumptions. I was talking about paying-off your loans AFTER you have your degree. Therefore your comment about working before you have a degree is non-sequitor.
>>>I'm fully aware of the *legal* distinction. Nevertheless, I used the term "stealing" deliberately. This is not akin to singing "Happy Birthday" without putting a royalty cheque in the mail. This is knowingly helping yourself to products that cost hundreds of dollars to obtain legally.
>>>
And since I had no intention of buying either "Happy Birthday" or a Teaching Company course, the amount of property lost == $0.00. Kinda similar to how I have no intention of going to SUNY or a Miley Cyrus concert, therefore they have lost no property by my not going there.
>>>Don't mistake lectures by The Teaching Company for real university courses....3x as many instruction hours
3 hours a week times 14 weeks == 42 hours. Most of those classes are filled-with time-wasting bullshit, so cut that in half to about 25 hours. Most of the TC's courses are that long or longer, such that buying a course like "The History of English" is equivalent to a full semester course.
>>>6x as much time where you spend reading
In my college experience that was a waste of time. Yes sometimes I found a great book, but for the most part, I skipped the reading entirely, and now that I have a job I find myself never referring back to those readings (I got rid of my textbooks long ago). Second - the teaching company provides plenty of recommended reading materials if you really *want* to dive deeper, just like a college syllabus includes optional recommendations for reading.
>>> then a bunch of assignments on which you get feedback...
This is the main thing lacking. But that's okay because the math-oriented courses DO include workbooks for practice, and eventually you'll have to go to college anyway so you can get that B.S. sheepskin. That will be your feedback.
>>>an important step in the process is to NOTIFY the timber company
By that logic Bin Laden is not a terrorist because he NOTIFIED us that we should leave the Arabian Peninsula alone, or else. In fact he notified us before he bombed the NYC trade center's basement. He notified us before he destroyed the OKC federal building (suspected but not proven), and before the USS Cole bombing. It's not his fault we did not listen. /end sarcasm
What the ELF is doing with tree-spiking sounds dangerous to people, even if they do notify the companies. If I'm 100 feet in the area and suddenly my saw hits a spike and the chain snaps, if I don't get hurt it will be pure luck. I will blame the ELF.
>>>Fascist.
A person that believe in a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, such that government runs private corporations like GM or Amtrak or Microsoft? AKA "corporatism". (ponder) Nope that's definitely not me.
>>>"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
False. 99.9% of the world is moral and upstanding people who respect their neighbors, and therefore would never do anything worthy of blinding. Only that small 0.1% of criminals would be blinded.
>>>Equating deaths with tangible object destruction is pretty overzealous.
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT> I never said anything about killing any ELF members - only destroying their property the same way they destroyed that private family's radio tower.
P.S.
I like the story you have linked in your sig: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org] - "Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory."
"There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger."
That's exactly where we're headed.
It's fine to say, "This is a web browser and that's all it should do," but even the first browser written by CERN did more than that. It had back and forwards buttons. It had a dropdown menu. A place to type your next destination.
These Uzbi people are just being anal, and the result is inconvenience and mucking-up the works. Like making a car that you steer with horse commands ("Giddyup!" "Trot!" "Gallop!" "Woah Nelly!" and so on).
And what would the ELF have to do to make their actions qualify "terrorism"? Kill people? Knock-over the Seattle World Trade Center?
When California was surveyed by the U.S. in the 1800s, it was labeled a "desert" (along with virtually everything else west of the rockies). and they estimated it could only sustain one family every 10,000 acres. Now California has a density of about 1 family every 10 acres, and people wonder why it's running dry of water. (duh)
It's called overpopulation folks.
>>>we now use democracy, essentially rule by the majority, which is only better because it is somewhat less violent. And if enough people think freaky sex is bad for society, well it will be outlawed.
>>>
That is incorrect thinking.
The proper thing is to ask, "Does freak sex involuntarily harm other human beings?" If the answer is "no" then there's no justification to outlaw it. Thomas Jefferson used that argument to promote freedom of religion, saying that it did not matter if his neighbor worshiped one god or many gods - his neighbors' actions do not harm my property, my body, nor my rights. The same reasoning can be applied to "freaky sex" where it doesn't matter if my neighbor has one partner or many partners - what he does won't harm me.
Democracy == tyranny of the majority. I prefer a government that protects the minority's or the individual's rights, even if the majority thinks "those people" are weird.
"Two wrongs don't make a right" is a false statement. We routinely commit a second wrong when we deprive criminals of their liberty, or force a vandal to open his wallet and hand-over money to cover damages caused - it's called justice.
>>>SUVs..... their mere existence is also a pointless "destruction of property" in most cases
False.
The person who owns the mine which holds the metal (or rubber or petroleum) sells that property to the carmaker who reshapes it into a vehicle which is then sold to a private citizen. At no point has property been destroyed, but instead transferred, some labor mixed-in with the property, and then transferred again.
If you're trying to say that SUVs emit harmful pollutants, well that's true, but so too does the car you drive. So before you go set fire to someone else's SUV, you should first set fire to your own car. Demonstrate through sacrifice what you truly believe.
And last-but-certainly not least, as "dirty" as an SUV may be, it's minimum LEV qualification means it's emitting about 1/10000th as much as a pre-regulation 1970 van. Even the catalyst-equipped 80s cars were rather dirty. One of today's 2009 SUVs is cleaner than my 1987 Dodge sedan. So while you may look at your SUV neighbor and think "irresponsible" you should be congratulating him for buying a newer, cleaner vehicle rather than driving an old clunker.