.. whenever I use ebay, I always try "alternative" spellings of words
Mildly humourous, however, I do a lot of searches on eBay and find I often miss items because the offering party couldn't break things up. The search on eBay is pretty primative, but you can do multiple wildcards, i.e. (color*,colour*) in a search query. I've usually got a number of variations on things.
The downside is I often get a very large list of things, where people have loaded their listings with chatter which match these words, but have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. e.g. I'm searching for a 'Teleporter', so I can go to Mars and fix the Rover and find and fix Beagle, I search on "teleport*" and get a listing like this:
Bizaxian Grompfelated Nurbskin Sandals
I need to sell these so I can afford to teleport to the moon for the holidays, blah, blah, blah (for the next 500 words.) Current Bid: $23.71
I really could care less about peoples' live stories, I just want to find a things. Still, it's not as annoying as all that amimated crap and javascript some people cram their listings with, so one downloaded page is 500k+
The zen of Yoda might help you understand more fully: Do, or do not, there is no 'try'.
Seriously, it's a cultural thing, we faced it in the 60's with electronics, the 70's with cars, the 80's with all other manner of manufacturing, it only stands to reason that someone would come along and pluck this plum, too.
It would be interesting to see what you considered spelled incorrectly on their site. 2/3's graduates have left India in the past to start up or take the helm of successful technology companies. There was a good bit on it on 60 Minutes, these grads are movers and shakers. You might look at the tech companies you admire and see who is actually driving them, rather than focusing on Darl and his lawyers.
Produce is a bit of a different situation; you can get produce very cheap from a local merchant, but some types of apples from New Zealand just taste better. Seasons are a factor too.
Actually, local growers where I live charge a lot more than they do elsewhere in the US, because this is an expensive area and they have to live, too, and pay wages to those who do likewise.
Seasons are a reason why they grow where I live. Cherries are coming into blossom right now. Asparagus will be in the markets in a few weeks.
And realize that there are four times as many smart people in India, simply because they have four times as many people.
Do yourself a favor and look up the IIT, Indian Institute of Technology. It's _the_ technical school in the world. MIT, Berkeley, CalTech, CWRU, Carnegie Melon, etc. take those who can't get accepted into this school. Learning is a cultural thing. While many american kids are focused on TV, Britney Spears, video games, etc, these kids start training hard for school at a young age, in the hope of their families to be able to enter IIT years later. Those who don't make the cut are coming to the USA and if you haven't seen them in your university, you probably haven't looked or your uni doesn't have very well regarded tech programs.
Even when I went to highschool, there were probably a couple kids in a graduating class of ~400 I'd consider truly gifted students. Often I'm seeing the gifted students were foreign born, because their parents don't indulge their children with crap culture, but expect them to start preparing themselves to be citizens at a young age. It's usually the second and third generation parents who fall into the typical american lack of concern and discipline.
Thoughtful, but I'm certain back in the 70's, were there an equivalent Slashdot or Wired for those who built Zenith, Magnavox, RCA or the last hold out, Curtis Mathis, you probably would have read something similar about how Akio Morita doesn't mean to steal your job, he just wants to make a living, too.
The cloud over all this is that once these kinds of jobs leave, few return. While I can't help but feel regret for those who believed they were entitled to pool tables and arcade games at work, I've never had it like that. I go to work, and I work, I don't play games or disapper for long breaks. I even put in 16-18 hour days for a while, thanks to the over-eager administration where I once worked (just before they outsourced us), because I felt some commitment to doing a job well. I was paid a pittance for it, while the tech boom fattened a lot of salaries.
It's all come back down to earth, however, when you compare $11K to $50K, it still looks like a bargain. As an employer/customer it's a bit harder for them to attend your meetings, however and you end up with some other logistical issues, but if you can accept them then you're go. Maybe keep a couple local analysts on your clock to work with them.
The bare facts are, every job everyone does in the USA can be done cheaper somewhere else. Heck, I find apples at Costco from NZ or Chile, how can that be? (Actually these probably come back on freighters that would otherwise be dead-heading, so it can be cost effective to transport, but the apple still has to be grown, picked and packed.) At what point are americans not redundant? I mean, besides being fat-cat execs who collect massive compensation before the accounting fraud is finally found out and they've squirreled all the geld away.
The US, like it or not, is actually heading back towards a feudal society. Peasants which pay to rent the appartment or work the land and royalty, which owns everything.
Your rule held true until the last 3 or 4 years, but now the price of a middle-of-the-road PC is falling fast.
One reason I said not to waste your time pointing this out was because the difference in 1984 between top of the line and bottom of the line was a short distance. An IBM PC AT was top of the line. A top of the line is still in it's bracket, unless you're looking at special engineering workstations, for which there were comparable equilvelents then, too, close to the price they are today.
Well I don't think you even had a Fiero. The 2.5L redlines at 6000rpm, They don't "spin out" very easily, and the factory warranty is 36,000 miles not 30,000. There were no "secret recalls". Granted the 1984 did have some minor defects, But if you look at EVERY new designed car, The first year is always the the worst for defects. Look at the Ford Focus as a really good example, 12 Safety recalls within the first 6 months and 123 TSB's for problems. (The Fiero only had 1 and to this date only has 2)
Factory ordered loaded 2M4 SE, $13,792 + tax and fees, built and delivered December 1983.
4,500 RPM readline, engine cut out at 5,000
Spun four times, doing several 360's on two of those occasions, always ended up going ass-end forward.
30,000 mile warranty, when you got one they may have changed it to 36,000.
Secret recalls were well documented. The mechanic who usually serviced my car (the dozen or so times it was in) left the dealership for a job as a trainer at the local Comm. College, where I worked. There were secret recalls, many, the casting defect in the 2.5l block was among them. If you had an engine block crack and had a number in the range, they quietly took care of the cost.
The 1984 was a littered with defects. After 3 mos. I was already trying to get rid of it.
There's no excuse for that many defects, none. Don't be an apologist for their rotten way of doing business.
I still thought of the car as basically a good car, but it should never have had that Cavalier drive train rotated 180 degrees and shoved in there. The original engineers called for an engine and drivetrain designed for that car exclusively, the bean-counters thought otherwise.
The spaceframe was a good design, and with the right motivation, time and money, a Fiero could be a great car, but I needed transportation, not aggrevation. It's replacedment, a 1986 T-Bird Turbo Coupe lasted 16 years, 279K miles and only died because I couldn't get a new motor mount. It went to the boneyard with the orginal turbo charger.
25 miles over waranty (Score:1)
by SomethingOrOther (521702) on Tuesday January 27, @09:05AM (#8101104)
(http://slashdot.org/)
a broken headbolt at 30,025 miles, 25 over warranty
Eh?
And you never thought to detach the speedo cable and attach it to an electric drill on reverse?
Long ago the manufacturers of these devices realised this could be done and modified them, they only go up. However, I could have rolled it, but running enough RPM to do that 99,900 miles in a day probably would have smoked the poor thing.
... always concerned about price, never about value.
Tech manufacturing understands this, "always charge the same price, but improve the product" For the past 20 years you could by an adequate PC for about the same price, the capability simply changed for that price. Notice how a 17" monitor used to cost ~$700 for a top of the line CRT, now ~$700 is top of the line 17" LCD, next it'll probably be a 17" 3D monitor for about the same price. (Granted the price varies and depending upon add-ons or sacrifices, you can do as you like, the rule pretty much holds up. Don't bother to point out a $300 PC can kick the a$$ of a 1984 PC, that wasn't the point.)
Best thing about the Fiero was the SEATS, which besides being comfortable, had two 4" speakers on either side.
I HATED the seats. I bought the SE fully loaded, suede seats and everything. On a 300 mile trip I had to stop every 100 miles to get some feeling back into my bum. It was dead material with hardly any padding. They looked nice, but that was it.
The T-Bird I gave up last year had the best seats I ever sat in, great for 600 mile hauls.
The one thing that was truly exceptional was the air conditioning. At low it was more than enough (put frost on the windshield), in the middle of summer in downtown Chicago (proablyt 95 degrees) it kept me comfy. I experimented with the med. and high settings, but they were massive overkill for such a tiny cockpit.
Was there some other defect (other than shitty tires) in the Fiero that contributed to this?
There was a turn in Midland, MI I used to take in a controled lateral slide every day. At just the right speed it would slide sideways and lose just enough momentum to fairly straighten out in the middle of the lane I wanted to be in. With practice I was pretty good at it. Problem was, getting used to taking _all_ turns in wet, snow or ice, at a crawl, otherwise it was ass-end forward. I had three major spin-outs in two years; one in rain, narrowly missing a big rig; one in snow, very exciting, just sat back and watched the world go by 'cause I couldn't do a damn thing about it, burying it in 3 feet of snow in the median; the last during rush hour on a two lane road, I recovered and proceded to a nearby parking lot to wait for the shaking to subside.
But GM was worried about cannibalizing sales of the Corvette, so they never put that combination in production. Such a shame...
That was one of the rumors circulating, that the Corvette division was worried about competition. They never needed to, but in Michigan, rumors like that were often true.
My understanding of the Fiero being lame, as put to me by an engineer, was the bean-counters desire to keep it under $10K. The basic model was listed $9,999 in 1984.
A friend worked as and intern at Saginaw Steering Gear, later to be known as Delphi, and did research on power steering pumps. I found that with a few small mods the pumps could withstand pushing use and heat for what would amount to over 300,000 miles. The old guy told him GM only wanted them to last 100,000 miles, even if the cost to improve them was only cents, because of built in obsolecence. Small wonder there's thousands of VW beetles still cruising California, they were built to last and be simple to repair -- anathema to american car makers.
They even came in a slightly sportier model with better suspension. 2 liter engine
2300cc or 2.3l to be exact. The same engine the SVO group turbo-charged and slapped into SVO Mustangs and T-Bird turbo-coupes, heck of a good engine.
The gas tank wasn't the problem, it was a suspension part which could puncture it. The installation of a metal plate was all that was necessary. Same applied to some Mustangs which were constructed similarly. People were more forgiving of the Mustang. Go figure.
My MR2 now has 330,000 miles and runs like a champ
The thing is, both Pontiac and Toyota announced about the same time that they would be introducing 2-seater mid-engine cars. I didn't really respect Toyota (after sing a Corolla get accordianed in a low-speed crash) and went with Pontiac. I rarely see Fieros these days, but I'll probably pass a dozen MR-2 on the way home tonight.
Now it's still on the road, on it second engine, 3rd transmission, 4th starter motor, 3rd alternator, 2nd fuel pump, etc...The last original part to go was the muffler:).
As the joke went when I was keeping my T-Bird going into it's senior years...
with the possible exception of Cadillacs and Corvettes
The 1984 Corvette, major redesign, was the first year the car ever had a recall. It had many problems, and is generally looked down upon by vette owners. They can usually be found fairly inexpensive.
I'm thinking about buying a Lada Niva. I've been in love with this car for a few years and now...
When I was in Europe, 92-94, the running joke was the Skoda. Yet, in the UK there was an Skoda owners club, that built these cheap cars from Prague into serious rally cars. With little enough down to get a durable car that just needs some love and attention, almost anything is possible. The Chevy Nova taught most of us in Michigan that, back in the 70's
I saw the Pontiac Fiero at an autoshow and immediately fell in love with it.
It appeared a sound design with potential. The bitter reality was it was well
engineered, then passed through the hands of bean-counters who shopped around
GM for cheap parts to build this car with, to keep it under $10K. Result, 2.5l
4cyl with a red-line of 4,500 RPM, spun out easily, parking brake froze on a
regular basis (I often drove to work burning the brakes until they freed up)
and shifted (4 spd) like a transmission designed by
space devils.
The last straw was a broken headbolt at 30,025 miles, 25 over warranty. The company
response, not to be unexpected, i.e. our cars are only good for warranty mileage, after
that they could completely collapse and we don't sweat it. With an engine that redlined
at a mere 4,500 RPM, and had a shut off, too boot, a broken headbolt sounded like a defect. That they left it to me to pay for was the height of comtempt for the customer. Not for the product, but for the way the company failed
to stand behind it, I could never trust them with my $$,$$$ again. Too bad, I still
think the car wasn't really all that bad in concept and could have been saved by a company
that didn't run away from their products.
I never did have to contend with the broken engine block or engine fires or "secret recalls"* which were common with these same cars, I dumped it 2 years after buying it.
* Secret recall: when the customer brings it in for any other service, sneakily check to see if it needs anything on this list fix and take care of it without ever letting them know
you did it.
...has declared unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
Memo to the PHB: We need to downsize, again. If the fire sprinklers go off in the cube farm, how many staff will be electocuted?
You've got token ring around the collar!
Mildly humourous, however, I do a lot of searches on eBay and find I often miss items because the offering party couldn't break things up. The search on eBay is pretty primative, but you can do multiple wildcards, i.e. (color*,colour*) in a search query. I've usually got a number of variations on things.
The downside is I often get a very large list of things, where people have loaded their listings with chatter which match these words, but have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. e.g. I'm searching for a 'Teleporter', so I can go to Mars and fix the Rover and find and fix Beagle, I search on "teleport*" and get a listing like this:
I really could care less about peoples' live stories, I just want to find a things. Still, it's not as annoying as all that amimated crap and javascript some people cram their listings with, so one downloaded page is 500k+
The zen of Yoda might help you understand more fully: Do, or do not, there is no 'try'.
Seriously, it's a cultural thing, we faced it in the 60's with electronics, the 70's with cars, the 80's with all other manner of manufacturing, it only stands to reason that someone would come along and pluck this plum, too.
It would be interesting to see what you considered spelled incorrectly on their site. 2/3's graduates have left India in the past to start up or take the helm of successful technology companies. There was a good bit on it on 60 Minutes, these grads are movers and shakers. You might look at the tech companies you admire and see who is actually driving them, rather than focusing on Darl and his lawyers.
Actually, local growers where I live charge a lot more than they do elsewhere in the US, because this is an expensive area and they have to live, too, and pay wages to those who do likewise.
Seasons are a reason why they grow where I live. Cherries are coming into blossom right now. Asparagus will be in the markets in a few weeks.
Do yourself a favor and look up the IIT, Indian Institute of Technology. It's _the_ technical school in the world. MIT, Berkeley, CalTech, CWRU, Carnegie Melon, etc. take those who can't get accepted into this school. Learning is a cultural thing. While many american kids are focused on TV, Britney Spears, video games, etc, these kids start training hard for school at a young age, in the hope of their families to be able to enter IIT years later. Those who don't make the cut are coming to the USA and if you haven't seen them in your university, you probably haven't looked or your uni doesn't have very well regarded tech programs.
Even when I went to highschool, there were probably a couple kids in a graduating class of ~400 I'd consider truly gifted students. Often I'm seeing the gifted students were foreign born, because their parents don't indulge their children with crap culture, but expect them to start preparing themselves to be citizens at a young age. It's usually the second and third generation parents who fall into the typical american lack of concern and discipline.
The cloud over all this is that once these kinds of jobs leave, few return. While I can't help but feel regret for those who believed they were entitled to pool tables and arcade games at work, I've never had it like that. I go to work, and I work, I don't play games or disapper for long breaks. I even put in 16-18 hour days for a while, thanks to the over-eager administration where I once worked (just before they outsourced us), because I felt some commitment to doing a job well. I was paid a pittance for it, while the tech boom fattened a lot of salaries.
It's all come back down to earth, however, when you compare $11K to $50K, it still looks like a bargain. As an employer/customer it's a bit harder for them to attend your meetings, however and you end up with some other logistical issues, but if you can accept them then you're go. Maybe keep a couple local analysts on your clock to work with them.
The bare facts are, every job everyone does in the USA can be done cheaper somewhere else. Heck, I find apples at Costco from NZ or Chile, how can that be? (Actually these probably come back on freighters that would otherwise be dead-heading, so it can be cost effective to transport, but the apple still has to be grown, picked and packed.) At what point are americans not redundant? I mean, besides being fat-cat execs who collect massive compensation before the accounting fraud is finally found out and they've squirreled all the geld away.
The US, like it or not, is actually heading back towards a feudal society. Peasants which pay to rent the appartment or work the land and royalty, which owns everything.
One reason I said not to waste your time pointing this out was because the difference in 1984 between top of the line and bottom of the line was a short distance. An IBM PC AT was top of the line. A top of the line is still in it's bracket, unless you're looking at special engineering workstations, for which there were comparable equilvelents then, too, close to the price they are today.
Factory ordered loaded 2M4 SE, $13,792 + tax and fees, built and delivered December 1983.
4,500 RPM readline, engine cut out at 5,000
Spun four times, doing several 360's on two of those occasions, always ended up going ass-end forward.
30,000 mile warranty, when you got one they may have changed it to 36,000.
Secret recalls were well documented. The mechanic who usually serviced my car (the dozen or so times it was in) left the dealership for a job as a trainer at the local Comm. College, where I worked. There were secret recalls, many, the casting defect in the 2.5l block was among them. If you had an engine block crack and had a number in the range, they quietly took care of the cost.
The 1984 was a littered with defects. After 3 mos. I was already trying to get rid of it.
There's no excuse for that many defects, none. Don't be an apologist for their rotten way of doing business.
I still thought of the car as basically a good car, but it should never have had that Cavalier drive train rotated 180 degrees and shoved in there. The original engineers called for an engine and drivetrain designed for that car exclusively, the bean-counters thought otherwise.
The spaceframe was a good design, and with the right motivation, time and money, a Fiero could be a great car, but I needed transportation, not aggrevation. It's replacedment, a 1986 T-Bird Turbo Coupe lasted 16 years, 279K miles and only died because I couldn't get a new motor mount. It went to the boneyard with the orginal turbo charger.
Long ago the manufacturers of these devices realised this could be done and modified them, they only go up. However, I could have rolled it, but running enough RPM to do that 99,900 miles in a day probably would have smoked the poor thing.
Tech manufacturing understands this, "always charge the same price, but improve the product" For the past 20 years you could by an adequate PC for about the same price, the capability simply changed for that price. Notice how a 17" monitor used to cost ~$700 for a top of the line CRT, now ~$700 is top of the line 17" LCD, next it'll probably be a 17" 3D monitor for about the same price. (Granted the price varies and depending upon add-ons or sacrifices, you can do as you like, the rule pretty much holds up. Don't bother to point out a $300 PC can kick the a$$ of a 1984 PC, that wasn't the point.)
I HATED the seats. I bought the SE fully loaded, suede seats and everything. On a 300 mile trip I had to stop every 100 miles to get some feeling back into my bum. It was dead material with hardly any padding. They looked nice, but that was it.
The T-Bird I gave up last year had the best seats I ever sat in, great for 600 mile hauls.
The one thing that was truly exceptional was the air conditioning. At low it was more than enough (put frost on the windshield), in the middle of summer in downtown Chicago (proablyt 95 degrees) it kept me comfy. I experimented with the med. and high settings, but they were massive overkill for such a tiny cockpit.
That was probably the major safety problem with the car, when it spun, it went ass-forward. Pretty damn scary each time it happened to me.
There was a turn in Midland, MI I used to take in a controled lateral slide every day. At just the right speed it would slide sideways and lose just enough momentum to fairly straighten out in the middle of the lane I wanted to be in. With practice I was pretty good at it. Problem was, getting used to taking _all_ turns in wet, snow or ice, at a crawl, otherwise it was ass-end forward. I had three major spin-outs in two years; one in rain, narrowly missing a big rig; one in snow, very exciting, just sat back and watched the world go by 'cause I couldn't do a damn thing about it, burying it in 3 feet of snow in the median; the last during rush hour on a two lane road, I recovered and proceded to a nearby parking lot to wait for the shaking to subside.
That was one of the rumors circulating, that the Corvette division was worried about competition. They never needed to, but in Michigan, rumors like that were often true.
My understanding of the Fiero being lame, as put to me by an engineer, was the bean-counters desire to keep it under $10K. The basic model was listed $9,999 in 1984.
A friend worked as and intern at Saginaw Steering Gear, later to be known as Delphi, and did research on power steering pumps. I found that with a few small mods the pumps could withstand pushing use and heat for what would amount to over 300,000 miles. The old guy told him GM only wanted them to last 100,000 miles, even if the cost to improve them was only cents, because of built in obsolecence. Small wonder there's thousands of VW beetles still cruising California, they were built to last and be simple to repair -- anathema to american car makers.
2300cc or 2.3l to be exact. The same engine the SVO group turbo-charged and slapped into SVO Mustangs and T-Bird turbo-coupes, heck of a good engine.
The gas tank wasn't the problem, it was a suspension part which could puncture it. The installation of a metal plate was all that was necessary. Same applied to some Mustangs which were constructed similarly. People were more forgiving of the Mustang. Go figure.
The thing is, both Pontiac and Toyota announced about the same time that they would be introducing 2-seater mid-engine cars. I didn't really respect Toyota (after sing a Corolla get accordianed in a low-speed crash) and went with Pontiac. I rarely see Fieros these days, but I'll probably pass a dozen MR-2 on the way home tonight.
As the joke went when I was keeping my T-Bird going into it's senior years...
You're buying a new car ... one piece at a time.
I have in the past 5 years, but I traded for an '86 T-Bird turbo coupe and put 279K on it before it's demise.
Now I have a Dodge Dakota (with flaky wiring) to haul my bikes around in.
The 1984 Corvette, major redesign, was the first year the car ever had a recall. It had many problems, and is generally looked down upon by vette owners. They can usually be found fairly inexpensive.
When I was in Europe, 92-94, the running joke was the Skoda. Yet, in the UK there was an Skoda owners club, that built these cheap cars from Prague into serious rally cars. With little enough down to get a durable car that just needs some love and attention, almost anything is possible. The Chevy Nova taught most of us in Michigan that, back in the 70's
Yeah, I know, for the secret agent in all of us, who can resist...
Trabant: The car that comes with it's own built-in smoke-screen generator!
Pinto: Able to vanish in a ball of fire at a moment's notice
Fiero: Able to spin 180 degrees for those surprise evasion manuevers
Bronco II: Able to roll over and play dead, fooling pursuers!
But who can ever forget the arcane Dodge Dart?
a running Pinto
a running Vega
a non-running Maverick, by the side of the highway
Inexplicably, some of these relics still manage to survive.
I never did have to contend with the broken engine block or engine fires or "secret recalls"* which were common with these same cars, I dumped it 2 years after buying it.
* Secret recall: when the customer brings it in for any other service, sneakily check to see if it needs anything on this list fix and take care of it without ever letting them know you did it.
Finally, I'm freed to give this advise!
"Darl, what you are doing is wrong, stop it."
Maybe now he'll listen.