Why are we allowing these kinds of contracts to be "gotcha" opportunities for companies? A standard cell phone contract is not an opportunity for a company to sling hidden fees on random unsuspecting consumers. This is not a lottery that rewards companies whenever a random person fails to read a 50 page document and negotiate the exact best plan for themselves.
Instead, we should require the cellphone companies to calculate what you would pay under every available plan they offer, and charge the lowest amount of any of those numbers. That way companies can have minimum service levels and charge for usage and bill everyone fairly.
Yes, but why should this be a burden on the consumer? Why should it be the consumer's responsibility to learn everything about the billing practices about each company they use, in order to get treated fairly?
Think about it this way: right now, a company can make their terms as complex as they like. In some industries, this means things are simple: groceries don't charge you on complex sliding scales. But in other industries, like mobile phone service, the companies can design plans as complex as they like. The goal of these complex plans is to hide charges so you wind up having to pay more than you might pay otherwise. Why should companies be allowed to do this? Think of all the human potential that is wasted because people have to spend their time figuring out their cellphone billing plans and cable TV and Internet contracts.
The solution to this is standardization. A consumer should know that they are not getting screwed by doing business with a big cellphone company like these.
Would be to require carriers who offer more than one plan to do this work for the consumers. There's no justification for playing "gotcha" every month with every consumer. Why is it your responsibility to figure out someone else's convoluted sales system? Why do we allow companies to design contracts to trip up, confuse, and overcharge consumers?
Write a law that requires all carriers, who offer more than one plan or option for phone service, to calculate your bill as it would be under each of those plans, and bill each consumer the lowest amount among those plans.
I keep hearing this but I have a hard time understanding it. The 2nd amendment gives you a right to a weapon. That weapon can be used to threaten, hurt, or kill someone.
How does threatening, hurting, or killing someone "balance" anything? How does the ability to threaten, hurt, or kill someone grant you or guarantee you your rights?
If you're put in a situation where you feel you have to threaten, hurt, or kill someone to protect your rights, do you actually have any rights at all or is it just anarchy?
I guess the real question is, was he the idiot that came up with the "' in it? Oh, too bad, my entire system fails on those three characters. I just assumed nobody would ever want to use those three characters together."
Anyone who's designed encoding systems would know that, by the mere fact of selecting a token, you make that token text that people will need to embed.:) A proper language would take into account the fact that you will someday have to nest that ending token inside another element. HTML encoding, for example, works. CDATA doesn't. In fact, there's no reason why CDATA should ever have existed - you could simply have specified that complex characters would be represented by html encoding, which can nest infinitely deeply. But instead, now we have to program special rules for CDATA conditions that are unreliable at best and wrong at worst.
The only CPU measurement that matters is SPEC. That's an actual calculation of the most complex algorithms people have been able to devise and an explanation of how they work on each CPU. If you want to know which CPU is worth more, check its SPECint or SPECfp numbers.
Also, remember that all the time you spend researching plans, puzzling over them, applying, waiting, and receiving rejections should be counted as wasted time when you could have been doing something productive. I've wasted hours trying to read and comprehend one of those health insurance choice packets that Blue Cross / Anthem gave me before I realized there was no way whatsoever I could pick between them in a meaningful way. I suppose if I was already sick and I knew exactly what I would be spending, maybe I could have figured out my costs by counting doctors' visits and treatment coverage, but since I'm healthy at the moment I have no idea what disease or injury might befall me.
Maybe there's a reason to have choice in the health insurance market, but I've honestly never seen one.
I'm a developer. I install and configure Windows, Mac, and Linux applications and networks. I have wholeheartedly enjoyed having one device, my iPhone, that just works and doesn't permit me to have full administrative control. Why? Because I like not having to worry about administrating one of these devices.
Why am I willing to put up with lack of control? Because I have a limited amount of attention I'm willing to devote to my devices. I spend tons of time worrying about my linux fileserver, my windows gaming desktops, my office network. I like to have a device that I can just pick up and use for a few minutes. I know it has limitations; I have other devices that can do the things that it can't. Not wanting control isn't a bad thing; it just means that I choose to spend my time and attention elsewhere.
I can certainly see myself owning one of these things, whenever the economy picks up and my finances aren't so dire. It's just not different enough yet that I'm begging for one.
The Calculus Affair. Absolute classic of the comics genre; one of the best graphic novels ever. While it's not serious the way Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen are, it's a masterpiece of cold war skulduggery and Indiana Jones-style hijinks. Clearly as influential as some of the best science fiction stories have been.
I'm sorry you're so upset over energy efficient technology. The good news is that these lights don't just save pennies, they save $50 per month per intersection, as described from the following article:
Those savings can be significant. When St. Charles installed LED traffic lights at First and Illinois avenues in 2005, energy costs dropped more than 80 percent, from $63.30 a month to $9.95.
It's sad that so many people are so angry over new and improved technologies. I was very upset when I bought my first LED christmas lights seven years ago, costing ten or twenty times what regular lights cost, and had them all break on me within a week. I'm upset that all my compact fluorescent lights seem to burn out so frequently compared to incandescents. But I suppose we all forget that regular lighting had tons of problems back when Edison first popularized them, and nowadays we expect everything to be perfect on the first try, every eventuality foreseen for us.
I suppose it's always possible to refuse new technology and stick with the old, wasteful stuff. But I think you're mistaken when you claim that a light that costs $50 more per month is a better solution than fixing the problem with the new LED lights.
Does anyone know what the plugin actually does? Why would.NET need an assistant? Why would that assistant only need to run when I'm using Firefox?
Something completely left aside is that so many programs love to install "assistants", "launch helpers", "watchdogs" and "update managers" nowadays. I'm getting really tired of having every program install something that runs every time windows starts, or whenever I launch my browser.
There is no reason for a.NET assistant that I am aware of.
Competition is good in cases where consumers have the ability and motivation to do comparisons between vendors before selection. It works great for things you buy in stores or pick out of a newspaper ad since you can compare and buy the one that seems best.
This is part of why healthcare competition doesn't work. In healthcare, it's extremely difficult to tell which providers are the best. Sometimes your need for care is so urgent there is no time to do any comparisons while you're on the way to the emergency room in the back of a paramedic's truck. Even in the best of cases, you have to pick a vendor who takes days or weeks to figure out what product or service you need; only when your doctor has already done the expensive diagnostic work can you start comparison shopping. At that point, sure, you can comparison shop for the best kidney dialysis / antibiotic pill / wheelchair.
Capitalism is the best system we've ever discovered for economics, it's just still not some magic panacea that solves all problems. It just solves a lot of them.
In all fairness, Harald's original blog post isn't that rude to them; the Slashdot summary, I believe, is condescending and wrong.
However, I and many other folks are not as concerned about binary modules as Harald is. I view a binary module as a good first step - once a company gets comfortable with part of the code being open source, they'll gradually be receptive to open sourcing other modules. In many cases, yes, this takes a long time; and in some cases it causes companies to get scared and backtrack on open source commitments.
But still I view open source with some binaries as better than no commitments. I encourage people who view themselves as open source advocates to maintain a professional and respectful attitude towards companies who haven't opened up completely.
Surely it's a good idea to harangue a company for not being "sufficiently" open source. What a great way to gently remind them to have a positive attitude towards open source!
A professional might "appease" them by congratulating them on a first step and encouraging them to open up further. Hah! We ideologues know that only 100% compliance to our definition of open source can ever be correct. Anything else should be ridiculed openly.
After all, we would prefer a company be completely 100% closed source rather than have some features be open. Death to all infidels!
Please, don't crash the FBI with a stack fault. Recursion isn't nice in a bureaucracy, and our government has enough problems as it is.
Re:Great! Another language to learn!
on
Perl 5.11.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Every so often when I think that Perl might be worth considering again, I come across some truly baffling example of misguided intentions like this.
I'm sure someone thought it was a brilliant idea to save keystrokes - why type "list.GetRange(0,3)" when you can create syntax using random unused symbols on your keyboard like @states[0..3]? After all, the metric we use to judge programmer productivity is the number of keystrokes they use writing code, not the maintainability of their code.
Oh yeah! And let's pick a totally random set of characters and use it to tell the code syntax parser to change modes! How brilliant! We can just use "qw" to mean "list of strings operator". Sure, why not, nobody would ever write a function called qw on their own, so there will never be a conflict. And now our code has random text in it which is hard to scan for and isn't surrounded by quotes and doesn't obey the same logic that any other text does.
Seriously, consistency helps reduce the burden on a programmer. There is no excuse for a language that attempts to remove readability and consistency for the sake of reducing the number of keystrokes required to type a task. You can only save yourself typing time once, whereas readable code saves you time every day for years.
This is a really excellent post. It describes exactly the wonder of trading. So if there are two market makers, A and B, and if a real person tries to sell a share at $4.50, the guy with the bid at $4.55 will win instead of the guy with the bid at $4.45. Great!
However, imagine for a moment that market maker A pays the stock exchange money in return for 30 millisecods of trade previews. Market maker A can then set his bid to $1 and his ask to $10 and not worry about bidding/asking fairly.
Market maker B thinks, "Great! I'll set my bid to $1.05 and my ask to $9.95 and I'll win all the trades!" Liquidity is destroyed.
Market maker A says, "Hah! I've got you. When someone comes in and tries to sell at $4.50, I'll jump my bid to $1.10 in that 30 millisecond gap and win, and there's nothing you can do!" And market maker B, who behaved fairly, is shut out.
It's clear that the 30 millisecond gap should be illegal.
It's backwards from the perspective of a human being. If for some reason you are a little metal box stuck in a rack closet somewhere with no lights and powerful A/C, maybe you could make the argument that the remote faraway desktop might be a "server" and you're a "client". But in real language terms, you need to accept the fact that humanity has decided to call big boxes in server rooms "servers" and desktop computers on peoples' desktops "clients".
But no human being has ever thought that way, except when a bunch of guys throwing together the X protocol said "Oh, wow, man! You know, like, what? It's so cool! It's totally reversed! The client is the server and the server is the client! Why don't we force everyone who is already calling this big enterprise hardware device a server to also call it a client? Then we can force everyone who already calls their desktop computer a client to call them servers! Won't that be wild!"
Get over yourself. Once you start using language the way the rest of the world does, you will have a lot fewer snarky arguments that wind up with you feeling clever while the other person walks away shaking his or her head sadly.
He said he was asked to "develop a new solution" - which most likely means he gets to pick and choose what to implement, whether parts of it are custom developed or off the shelf. I would imagine a good solution would be a core product plus custom built extensions for the features he needs that the product doesn't implement itself.
The best part is, they did the whole job for $16,000 without making the finished product even somewhat appealing. The case is hideous. They didn't even try to make the gigantic fan on the side look like anything other than a calloused tumor.
Maybe my "sarcasm" authoring switch wasn't set properly. Let me re-read what I wrote.... Ooo, typo in the post title!...
Hmm. No, it's still pretty much a fake post intended to remind readers that consumers purchase cars mostly by their desires, not for the absolute out-of-pocket total-cost-of-ownership.
I mean, does nobody realize that the Chevy Corvette is much more expensive than a Chevy Aveo, yet customers still buy it anyways? Is there a reason why people buy it even when it costs more than the alternative? Maybe because cost is only part of the purchasing decision?
It's fine for CMU to run a report like this; but when people point to this report and accuse GM of living in fantasyland, they ignore the fact that there are other reasons to buy a car beyond its absolute cost.
Clearly, economical cost is the only reason to select a car for purchase. When I bought my last car, I took no consideration whatsoever of comfort, capabilities, personal preference, and desired features. I do not personally know anyone who has ever purchased a car other than a used car in the $1000-$2000 price range. Certainly a good portion of these used cars break down, require maintenance, and get poor gas mileage. But the cost savings alone are tremendous. Even when the car gets 17-20 MPG, saving $15,000 upfront buys a lot of gas.
I've never been tempted to buy a car because it looks cool, drives well, is comfortable, or suits my personal philosophy of life. I simply walk up to the dealership and say "I need to drive between 12,019 and 16,302 miles per year; I presume any car I buy will between 2.14 and 5.86 years; and I expect that the price of gasoline will be between $1.86 and $3.72. Please provide me with a calculator so that I can select the correct vehicle to purchase."
I have heard rumors that some consumers make stupid decisions based upon non-cash factors. In fact, some deluded souls have even been known to value a car that is less polluting over one that is more polluting. I even was told that an acquaintance once purchased a car because he liked its looks and its "road feel", whatever that is. I'm glad there aren't any magazines devoted to those kinds of people who care about automobiles for anything other than practical cost effectiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we allowing these kinds of contracts to be "gotcha" opportunities for companies? A standard cell phone contract is not an opportunity for a company to sling hidden fees on random unsuspecting consumers. This is not a lottery that rewards companies whenever a random person fails to read a 50 page document and negotiate the exact best plan for themselves.
Instead, we should require the cellphone companies to calculate what you would pay under every available plan they offer, and charge the lowest amount of any of those numbers. That way companies can have minimum service levels and charge for usage and bill everyone fairly.
Yes, but why should this be a burden on the consumer? Why should it be the consumer's responsibility to learn everything about the billing practices about each company they use, in order to get treated fairly?
Think about it this way: right now, a company can make their terms as complex as they like. In some industries, this means things are simple: groceries don't charge you on complex sliding scales. But in other industries, like mobile phone service, the companies can design plans as complex as they like. The goal of these complex plans is to hide charges so you wind up having to pay more than you might pay otherwise. Why should companies be allowed to do this? Think of all the human potential that is wasted because people have to spend their time figuring out their cellphone billing plans and cable TV and Internet contracts.
The solution to this is standardization. A consumer should know that they are not getting screwed by doing business with a big cellphone company like these.
Would be to require carriers who offer more than one plan to do this work for the consumers. There's no justification for playing "gotcha" every month with every consumer. Why is it your responsibility to figure out someone else's convoluted sales system? Why do we allow companies to design contracts to trip up, confuse, and overcharge consumers?
Write a law that requires all carriers, who offer more than one plan or option for phone service, to calculate your bill as it would be under each of those plans, and bill each consumer the lowest amount among those plans.
>> I would get fired
I see what you did there.
I can still play as Germans in WW2 games, though? Phew. For a second there I was worried.
That's not Optimus Prime. That's some bastardized, hollywoodized, modern re-imagining of the true Optimus Prime.
The real Optimus Prime died inside Autobot City after handing the Matrix of Leadership to Ultra Magnus.
I keep hearing this but I have a hard time understanding it. The 2nd amendment gives you a right to a weapon. That weapon can be used to threaten, hurt, or kill someone.
How does threatening, hurting, or killing someone "balance" anything? How does the ability to threaten, hurt, or kill someone grant you or guarantee you your rights?
If you're put in a situation where you feel you have to threaten, hurt, or kill someone to protect your rights, do you actually have any rights at all or is it just anarchy?
I guess the real question is, was he the idiot that came up with the "' in it? Oh, too bad, my entire system fails on those three characters. I just assumed nobody would ever want to use those three characters together."
Anyone who's designed encoding systems would know that, by the mere fact of selecting a token, you make that token text that people will need to embed. :) A proper language would take into account the fact that you will someday have to nest that ending token inside another element. HTML encoding, for example, works. CDATA doesn't. In fact, there's no reason why CDATA should ever have existed - you could simply have specified that complex characters would be represented by html encoding, which can nest infinitely deeply. But instead, now we have to program special rules for CDATA conditions that are unreliable at best and wrong at worst.
The only CPU measurement that matters is SPEC. That's an actual calculation of the most complex algorithms people have been able to devise and an explanation of how they work on each CPU. If you want to know which CPU is worth more, check its SPECint or SPECfp numbers.
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/
Also, remember that all the time you spend researching plans, puzzling over them, applying, waiting, and receiving rejections should be counted as wasted time when you could have been doing something productive. I've wasted hours trying to read and comprehend one of those health insurance choice packets that Blue Cross / Anthem gave me before I realized there was no way whatsoever I could pick between them in a meaningful way. I suppose if I was already sick and I knew exactly what I would be spending, maybe I could have figured out my costs by counting doctors' visits and treatment coverage, but since I'm healthy at the moment I have no idea what disease or injury might befall me.
Maybe there's a reason to have choice in the health insurance market, but I've honestly never seen one.
I'm a developer. I install and configure Windows, Mac, and Linux applications and networks. I have wholeheartedly enjoyed having one device, my iPhone, that just works and doesn't permit me to have full administrative control. Why? Because I like not having to worry about administrating one of these devices.
Why am I willing to put up with lack of control? Because I have a limited amount of attention I'm willing to devote to my devices. I spend tons of time worrying about my linux fileserver, my windows gaming desktops, my office network. I like to have a device that I can just pick up and use for a few minutes. I know it has limitations; I have other devices that can do the things that it can't. Not wanting control isn't a bad thing; it just means that I choose to spend my time and attention elsewhere.
I can certainly see myself owning one of these things, whenever the economy picks up and my finances aren't so dire. It's just not different enough yet that I'm begging for one.
The Calculus Affair. Absolute classic of the comics genre; one of the best graphic novels ever. While it's not serious the way Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen are, it's a masterpiece of cold war skulduggery and Indiana Jones-style hijinks. Clearly as influential as some of the best science fiction stories have been.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calculus_Affair
I'm sorry you're so upset over energy efficient technology. The good news is that these lights don't just save pennies, they save $50 per month per intersection, as described from the following article:
It's sad that so many people are so angry over new and improved technologies. I was very upset when I bought my first LED christmas lights seven years ago, costing ten or twenty times what regular lights cost, and had them all break on me within a week. I'm upset that all my compact fluorescent lights seem to burn out so frequently compared to incandescents. But I suppose we all forget that regular lighting had tons of problems back when Edison first popularized them, and nowadays we expect everything to be perfect on the first try, every eventuality foreseen for us.
I suppose it's always possible to refuse new technology and stick with the old, wasteful stuff. But I think you're mistaken when you claim that a light that costs $50 more per month is a better solution than fixing the problem with the new LED lights.
Does anyone know what the plugin actually does? Why would .NET need an assistant? Why would that assistant only need to run when I'm using Firefox?
Something completely left aside is that so many programs love to install "assistants", "launch helpers", "watchdogs" and "update managers" nowadays. I'm getting really tired of having every program install something that runs every time windows starts, or whenever I launch my browser.
There is no reason for a .NET assistant that I am aware of.
Competition is good in cases where consumers have the ability and motivation to do comparisons between vendors before selection. It works great for things you buy in stores or pick out of a newspaper ad since you can compare and buy the one that seems best.
This is part of why healthcare competition doesn't work. In healthcare, it's extremely difficult to tell which providers are the best. Sometimes your need for care is so urgent there is no time to do any comparisons while you're on the way to the emergency room in the back of a paramedic's truck. Even in the best of cases, you have to pick a vendor who takes days or weeks to figure out what product or service you need; only when your doctor has already done the expensive diagnostic work can you start comparison shopping. At that point, sure, you can comparison shop for the best kidney dialysis / antibiotic pill / wheelchair.
Capitalism is the best system we've ever discovered for economics, it's just still not some magic panacea that solves all problems. It just solves a lot of them.
In all fairness, Harald's original blog post isn't that rude to them; the Slashdot summary, I believe, is condescending and wrong.
However, I and many other folks are not as concerned about binary modules as Harald is. I view a binary module as a good first step - once a company gets comfortable with part of the code being open source, they'll gradually be receptive to open sourcing other modules. In many cases, yes, this takes a long time; and in some cases it causes companies to get scared and backtrack on open source commitments.
But still I view open source with some binaries as better than no commitments. I encourage people who view themselves as open source advocates to maintain a professional and respectful attitude towards companies who haven't opened up completely.
Surely it's a good idea to harangue a company for not being "sufficiently" open source. What a great way to gently remind them to have a positive attitude towards open source!
A professional might "appease" them by congratulating them on a first step and encouraging them to open up further. Hah! We ideologues know that only 100% compliance to our definition of open source can ever be correct. Anything else should be ridiculed openly.
After all, we would prefer a company be completely 100% closed source rather than have some features be open. Death to all infidels!
Please, don't crash the FBI with a stack fault. Recursion isn't nice in a bureaucracy, and our government has enough problems as it is.
Every so often when I think that Perl might be worth considering again, I come across some truly baffling example of misguided intentions like this.
I'm sure someone thought it was a brilliant idea to save keystrokes - why type "list.GetRange(0,3)" when you can create syntax using random unused symbols on your keyboard like @states[0..3]? After all, the metric we use to judge programmer productivity is the number of keystrokes they use writing code, not the maintainability of their code.
Oh yeah! And let's pick a totally random set of characters and use it to tell the code syntax parser to change modes! How brilliant! We can just use "qw" to mean "list of strings operator". Sure, why not, nobody would ever write a function called qw on their own, so there will never be a conflict. And now our code has random text in it which is hard to scan for and isn't surrounded by quotes and doesn't obey the same logic that any other text does.
Seriously, consistency helps reduce the burden on a programmer. There is no excuse for a language that attempts to remove readability and consistency for the sake of reducing the number of keystrokes required to type a task. You can only save yourself typing time once, whereas readable code saves you time every day for years.
This is a really excellent post. It describes exactly the wonder of trading. So if there are two market makers, A and B, and if a real person tries to sell a share at $4.50, the guy with the bid at $4.55 will win instead of the guy with the bid at $4.45. Great!
However, imagine for a moment that market maker A pays the stock exchange money in return for 30 millisecods of trade previews. Market maker A can then set his bid to $1 and his ask to $10 and not worry about bidding/asking fairly.
Market maker B thinks, "Great! I'll set my bid to $1.05 and my ask to $9.95 and I'll win all the trades!" Liquidity is destroyed.
Market maker A says, "Hah! I've got you. When someone comes in and tries to sell at $4.50, I'll jump my bid to $1.10 in that 30 millisecond gap and win, and there's nothing you can do!" And market maker B, who behaved fairly, is shut out.
It's clear that the 30 millisecond gap should be illegal.
It's backwards from the perspective of a human being. If for some reason you are a little metal box stuck in a rack closet somewhere with no lights and powerful A/C, maybe you could make the argument that the remote faraway desktop might be a "server" and you're a "client". But in real language terms, you need to accept the fact that humanity has decided to call big boxes in server rooms "servers" and desktop computers on peoples' desktops "clients".
But no human being has ever thought that way, except when a bunch of guys throwing together the X protocol said "Oh, wow, man! You know, like, what? It's so cool! It's totally reversed! The client is the server and the server is the client! Why don't we force everyone who is already calling this big enterprise hardware device a server to also call it a client? Then we can force everyone who already calls their desktop computer a client to call them servers! Won't that be wild!"
Get over yourself. Once you start using language the way the rest of the world does, you will have a lot fewer snarky arguments that wind up with you feeling clever while the other person walks away shaking his or her head sadly.
He said he was asked to "develop a new solution" - which most likely means he gets to pick and choose what to implement, whether parts of it are custom developed or off the shelf. I would imagine a good solution would be a core product plus custom built extensions for the features he needs that the product doesn't implement itself.
The best part is, they did the whole job for $16,000 without making the finished product even somewhat appealing. The case is hideous. They didn't even try to make the gigantic fan on the side look like anything other than a calloused tumor.
Maybe my "sarcasm" authoring switch wasn't set properly. Let me re-read what I wrote. ... Ooo, typo in the post title! ...
Hmm. No, it's still pretty much a fake post intended to remind readers that consumers purchase cars mostly by their desires, not for the absolute out-of-pocket total-cost-of-ownership.
I mean, does nobody realize that the Chevy Corvette is much more expensive than a Chevy Aveo, yet customers still buy it anyways? Is there a reason why people buy it even when it costs more than the alternative? Maybe because cost is only part of the purchasing decision?
It's fine for CMU to run a report like this; but when people point to this report and accuse GM of living in fantasyland, they ignore the fact that there are other reasons to buy a car beyond its absolute cost.
Clearly, economical cost is the only reason to select a car for purchase. When I bought my last car, I took no consideration whatsoever of comfort, capabilities, personal preference, and desired features. I do not personally know anyone who has ever purchased a car other than a used car in the $1000-$2000 price range. Certainly a good portion of these used cars break down, require maintenance, and get poor gas mileage. But the cost savings alone are tremendous. Even when the car gets 17-20 MPG, saving $15,000 upfront buys a lot of gas.
I've never been tempted to buy a car because it looks cool, drives well, is comfortable, or suits my personal philosophy of life. I simply walk up to the dealership and say "I need to drive between 12,019 and 16,302 miles per year; I presume any car I buy will between 2.14 and 5.86 years; and I expect that the price of gasoline will be between $1.86 and $3.72. Please provide me with a calculator so that I can select the correct vehicle to purchase."
I have heard rumors that some consumers make stupid decisions based upon non-cash factors. In fact, some deluded souls have even been known to value a car that is less polluting over one that is more polluting. I even was told that an acquaintance once purchased a car because he liked its looks and its "road feel", whatever that is. I'm glad there aren't any magazines devoted to those kinds of people who care about automobiles for anything other than practical cost effectiveness.