Just some FYI background info for ya...the last Ice Age came along when our ancestors were hunting woolly mammoths with stone-tipped spears*. Hardly a shove on the ol' pendulum.
The one before that was when the ancestors of the mammoth-hunters were still living in trees and flinging shit at one another as a way of saying "you're pissing me off"
* Okay, so maybe mammoth-hunting wasn't exactly common. Probably a group of hunters killed one once and spent the rest of their lives talking about it. They were probably hunting smaller game, like whatever rough equivalent to deer was around at the time.
That's the job of Congress, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution; to wit:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States"
Generally speaking, if you're using power tools, gloves are a bad idea anyway, as I'll illustrate in the following two examples:
1. You're using a table saw, not wearing gloves, and your finger hits the blade. You reflexively jerk your hand back and suffer a nasty little cut.
2. You're using a table saw, wearing heavy work gloves, and your finger hits the blade. Before you realize it, the blade - spinning at 3500 rpm - pulls the glove into the saw, along with the hand inside the glove. If you're lucky you only lose one finger, not the whole hand.
The wood shop teacher at the high school I attended seemed to think that the "no gloves" safety rule was as important as the "wear safety glasses" rule. Any student caught wearing gloves while using a power tool lost his shop privileges for a week.
In my shop I have an old K6-500 system with 128MB RAM, 4.3GB hard drive, and an old left-over 24x CD-ROM in a standard AT mini-tower case. It has a cheapie keyboard, cheap mechanical mouse, and an old 17" monitor that developed an aversion to any resolution above 1024x768 and was therefore relegated to toolshed duty. The system runs Slackware Linux. When I do anything that will throw dust, I just cover it all with plastic sheeting. Granted, I do very little woodworking - my main interest is electronics.
Cat5e UTP buried in plastic conduit from house to workshop provides the network connection. I added limited, low-frequency oscilloscope functionality to the system with a sound card, xoscope, and a buffer circuit I built using a schematic thoughtfully provided by xoscope's author. This doesn't replace the 10mhz oscilloscope I got for $34 including shipping on ebay, but it does occasionally come in handy. Mostly, the machine is used for looking up part specifications and circuit schematics, and for chatting with fellow electronics hobbyists.
IMHO, it's not worth it to spend much cash on the fancy stuff proposed by folks here, for a machine that'll see maybe 8 hours of use per week at most. I just dug through the old parts bins (lovingly referred to by my better half as "that pile of junk") and found enough stuff to build a system, then spent about $10 extra on the xoscope buffer circuit parts I didn't already have in my electronic parts collection (lovingly referred to by my better half as "that crap scattered all over your workbench").
Funny, I just did a search of the Chattanooga Times Free Press classifieds, going back a week, for all ads in the "Computer Personnel" section. A total of 0 ads for all days were returned. Go to http://www.timesfreepress.com/Classifieds/all_frm. html and do an ad browse for Employment - Computer Personnel and see for yourself.
That newspaper is the major regional newspaper for southeastern TN and northwestern GA. Last time I worked tech support and was laid off, I spent a year out of work; 9 months of that was after I'd expanded my search to include unskilled labor (think "using a shovel"). Nobody would hire me for technical work because there was none to be had; nobody would hire me for manual labor because I went to college and am trained for technical work. I'm now working through a temp agency and getting by on whatever they can find for me - currently I'm cutting pipe on a bandsaw at a boiler tube manufacturer.
So when you say "Unskilled (tech support) work is easily found" please forgive me when I reply with "bullshit."
I personally drive 23 miles to work and 23 miles home. I count myself lucky to have a job at all, and am in no position to demand that my workplace be any nearer to my house. I'm also afraid that I don't have the money to move closer to work, as real estate on that side of town is ridiculously expensive.
A diesel car-hauler truck, fully loaded, gets about 7 miles per gallon and delivers about 8 cars to the dealership. That's about as efficient as driving the cars to the dealership individually, assuming those cars all get 56 miles per gallon. However, those cars are transported most of the way from factory to dealer by train, which is even more efficient.
Rarely does someone buy a new car and immediately scrap the old one. If the car is ready for the scrap heap, it's nowhere near nice enough to be owned by someone who can afford a new car. Usually the old cars are traded in at the dealership, which sells them off to used car dealers at auction or puts them into its own inventory to be resold through its used car ("pre-titled" is the currently popular term I believe) department.
Eventually the old car is wrecked or worn out beyond repair, and ends up in a junkyard. There, the useable parts are removed and sold for the purpose of repairing other cars. Finally, whatever is left over and unuseable ends up being melted down to make new cars (or toaster ovens or shelf brackets or computer cases or wrenches...)
There's plenty of validity in both your and Jack's arguments, but I doubt that making an effort to use less oil can be a bad thing overall. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's just too damned expensive for most of us to go out and buy a hybrid car, and not everyone has the option of moving or getting a job closer to home.
Absolutely nothing, though I'd argue that the first recount would probably be more accurate than the original count for the simple reason that the people doing the counting are likely to be a little more careful at that point. Anything after that and you run a higher risk of people getting tired and bored and just going through the motions on autopilot, IMHO.
Your feelings towards those cars are caused by your apparent total ignorance of the difference between American and European driving habits.
Actually, if you'll read up a bit, you'll see where I said that those tiny cars are "inappropriate for ~95% of the driving we do in the US." I'm well aware of the differences in distances, road widths, and availability of public transport that exist.
You put an emphasis on power and straightline speeds (too much. Gotta be compensating).
You're arguing against your own argument now. Highways in the US tend to be straight or have gentle curves. Onramps are short, and speeds are high. Power and straightline speeds are important in those situations, far more so than cornering ability. My personal vehicles both have the smallest engines available for their models and years. One of them I chose specifically because it had the smaller engine (1996 F-150 longbed with 4.9L inline-6, chosen for longevity and low-end torque for pulling heavy loads up the mountains of southeastern TN and northwestern GA).
It is true that my view of force-fed engines is affected by the failures of the past, including the turbocharged V6 that Pontiac put in the Firebird for a few years in the 70s and some early Volvo turbocharging efforts, among others. It's also affected by the fact that any time you increase cylinder pressure, you increase the stress on the connecting rods, crankshaft, main bearings, wrist pins, and valves. You can beef these components up a bit to compensate, but you end up with a heavier rotating mass, which will erase some of the power benefits gained by turbocharging or supercharging. Turbocharging increases the temperature of the fuel-air mixture, thus also increasing cylinder temperatures, if all else remains equal. Forced induction also introduces more moving parts, increasing the chances for mechanical failure. And finally, there's the phenomenon known as turbo lag, wherein the engine lacks power for the time it takes for the exhaust to spin up the turbine. Component quality and tighter manufacturing tolerances can help address some of these issues, but not all.
I believe I covered the points you attempted to make in other posts in this thread. See the "penis extension" portion of one of my other posts, for example. The S2000 gets roughly 1/2 of the MPG that his Smart Roadster-Coupe does - not exactly a ULEV, but not bad for a car that does 0-60 in 5.5 seconds and has a top speed of 150mph. Your assumptions about what I care about and don't care about are false. I could have had a pretty nice late-60's Chevelle with a big block for what I paid for my Sentra, but I actually give a shit.
But don't let the facts get in the way of a good half-informed screed against someone whose tastes differ from your own.
My great uncle smoked a pack of filterless Lucky Strikes a day and lived to be 92 years old, but my grandfather died at 54. By your logic, we can assume that smoking is good for you.
Where the heck am I gonna do more that 120mph anyway?
I've done 150mph on the freeways here in the US...not that I'd want to be caught doing that, or that I'd do it again. Ah, the improprieties of youth...
And horsepower doesn't matter when you weigh about 800kg.
Damn, that's one fat dude....oh, you meant the car *grin* You're right, though. I look at torque a lot harder than at horsepower when I'm choosing a vehicle. Not just the max torque, but at what RPM the peak torque occurs. That's why I like my 1996 F-150 pickup with 4.9L inline-6 engine. Yeah, it's the smallest engine available that year, but under 2000RPM it has more torque than the 5.0L V8 engine, and about the same as the 5.8L V8. And for me, that low-end torque is the important part.
I think part of the antipathy I feel towards those tiny "beer can" cars is related to what I use my vehicles for. I use my truck for my daily transportation to and from work, and also to haul large heavy things for the work I do on the side. I do some home repair work and some landscaping on occasion, and find the need to haul stuff like a ton and a half (~1360kg) of cinder blocks, or a ton (2000 pounds/~900kg) or so of mulch or gravel, or lumber, or whatever. Do you realize that my pickup truck is rated to haul more weight in the bed than the weight of your car? My Nissan gets driven by my better half mostly, and is used for hauling around her grandkids, grocery shopping, that sort of thing. It handles all the curves around here, including the mountain roadss of northwest Georgia, just fine at the speed limit.
My dream car, though, is a 1965 Pontiac GTO convertible with 389ci (6.3L I think) engine and Tri-Power - three 2-barrel carburetors, which brings the engine's specs up to 360 horsepower and 424 foot-pounds of torque (~574 newton-meters) and a 4-speed manual transmission. Who cares if it can't turn fast? It'll just out-accelerate anything between the curves!:-P
Back to reality though. If I were shopping for a sports roadster and had $32,000 or so to spend, I'd probably go with the Honda S2000. Yes, it only gets about 25mpg, but it corners like nothing else I've ever driven, and I'd be willing to wager money on it against your car in a slalom. And it'll go from 0-60mph in 5.5 seconds, with a top speed of 150mph. Awwwwww yeah!
The turbocharger means the engine is being force-fed, which decreases its life expectancy due to higher cylinder pressures - and you get turbo lag too. With traction control, you can't "steer with the accelerator" (traction control is standard equipment on many American sports cars - and I still hate it). Six speed transmissions are quite common also, though more than 5 gears is probably overkill unless the engine has to rev to the redline to produce any power. Cruise control has been common for decades - even my dad's 1977 Oldsmobile 98 sedan had it.
The page you linked to talked about the car like it was the be-all end-all of performance roadsters. In reality, it barely qualifies as a sporty roadster. To get performance, you have to burn fuel. That car may be quite an achievement given its fuel consumption, but it's no world class sports car. Generally, vehicles either do one thing fairly well or do two things somewhat acceptably. Good vehicles either do one thing fairly well and something else acceptably, or just do one thing exceptionally well. Great vehicles might do two things exceptionally well. Your car apparently does one thing pretty well, and that one thing is to burn a small amount of fuel per mile travelled. I still maintain that it wouldn't be appropriate for most US drivers.
Look, my original reply probably came across as ragging on your wheels - I'm just saying that it's totally inappropriate for ~95% of the driving we do in the US, and that it's way overpriced for what it is. Drop the price by about half, and they might sell a few of these in the US market to someone other than the daddy-buy-me-a-car crowd at the local private schools.
And yes, we like to turn corners too - almost a third of the United States is covered by mountains, and mountain roads have curves:-P
Here's a hint: what's the fuel consumption like on the cars you proposed?
Who cares what the gas mileage is like on a car that's marketed as a sports car? You buy one because you need a penis extension, not because you want to save the environment. Look at the page for that coupe-roadster thing. It's called "the ultimate roadster driving experience." And yet the parent poster proudly proclaims its top speed to be less than a 14 year old econobox with a quarter million miles.
If you're wanting to save money on gasoline, you'd be spending an extra $15,000 up front for the Smart Roadster Coupe Brabus over the cost of a Honda Civic EX, to save maybe $3500 over the course of driving 100,000 miles (assuming an average fuel price of $3.00 a gallon during that time, though current prices are under $2.00 per gallon). And the Honda Civic LX has more horsepower, more torque, and twice the seating. And it has a trunk that'll hold more than 2 sacks of groceries.
You paid the equivalent of $32,000 for what amounts to a beer can on wheels, with an engine that would be considered undersized on a motorcycle and generates less power than the lowest-horsepower non-hybrid car available in the US?
Do you realize that for that kind of money, we in the US can get a Honda S2000 - a two-seater with well over twice the horsepower, nearly twice the torque, actually looks like a car, and doesn't have a turbocharger to decrease engine life?
Or, for $2000 less, we can get a brand new Mustang GT with all the options, three times the horsepower, over three times the torque, and twice the seating.
Either of these will run circles around the "Smart Roadster-Coupe Brabus." Hell, even my "other car", a 1991 Nissan Sentra, with baseline 1.6L engine and automatic transmission, will do 120mph - with 250,000 miles on the odometer. Yes, I've verified this; the rev limiter kicks in at about 122mph. And its book value is somewhere around $1500. 120mph ability may be something to brag about elsewhere, but at least in this part of the US it's generally considered a bare minimum, though acceleration is more important. Get on I-285 in Atlanta sometime - you have about 100 meters of ramp, and then you'd better be doing at least 70mph or you're a greasy spot on the guardrail.
Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
Simple solution:
Go to your local bank. Open a savings account. Deposit a portion of each paycheck into it. When it reaches a certain amount ($1000 is a good round number), use that money to buy savings bonds, treasury bills, certificates of deposit (CDs) or the like - something that can only really lose money if the government goes bankrupt before you plan to redeem your investment. If that happens, you'll probably be more worried about something other than your retirement funds anyway.
Slightly more elaborate, possibly more efficient option:
Talk to a financial advisor. Talk to another financial advisor. Talk to a third financial advisor. Take their recommendations and weigh them against one another. Strike a balance of risk versus ROI that you're comfortable with. Do not invest in anything that's "hot" - that's how some of us *cough* lost $37,000 one year when the dotcoms went bust.
Your option 3 deprives us humans of thick, juicy steaks and tons of other great main dishes. That's more cruel and inhumane than either of the two options I listed:-P
Given the choice of death or a life without ever again tasting the delicious flesh of animals, I'd probably choose death.
What about the "thrill of the hunt?" The pleasure is derived more from the process leading up to the killing of Bambi than from the actual killing.
Me, I'm more of a fowl hunter - there's just something about getting up at 4:00am, sitting in a duck blind for a few hours in freezing temperatures while making ridiculous sounds that approximate the call of a duck, then trying to hit a fast-moving duck on the wing with a shotgun...too bad I haven't had any time to actually go hunting in a couple of years...
Or, to take a different tact, which of the following is more cruel?
1. Keeping an animal from birth in a cage so small it cannot turn around, with tag stuck through its ear, in a building with thousands of other animals in the same predicament, then, on the day it reaches a certain body weight, hitting it in the head with a hammer to stun it so you can slit its throat and let it bleed to death
or
2. Allowing an animal to run free in the wild, doing whatever it is that wild animals do, then at some point in their adult life, putting a bullet in its heart to kill it within a few seconds
The first describes the life of the cattle whose flesh is neatly packaged and sold in your local supermarket. The second describes the life of a deer which is hunted for food.
Isn't that beautiful? I know, let's blow it's fucking brains out.
You forgot the part about cooking and eating the meat. Not to mention stuffing and mounting its head on a wall, then adorning it with a ball cap and sunglasses.
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You must be new here...
Just some FYI background info for ya...the last Ice Age came along when our ancestors were hunting woolly mammoths with stone-tipped spears*. Hardly a shove on the ol' pendulum.
The one before that was when the ancestors of the mammoth-hunters were still living in trees and flinging shit at one another as a way of saying "you're pissing me off"
* Okay, so maybe mammoth-hunting wasn't exactly common. Probably a group of hunters killed one once and spent the rest of their lives talking about it. They were probably hunting smaller game, like whatever rough equivalent to deer was around at the time.
That's the job of Congress, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution; to wit:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States"
If you still want a gmail account, email me...I have 6 invites and everybody I know already has a gmail account
Generally speaking, if you're using power tools, gloves are a bad idea anyway, as I'll illustrate in the following two examples:
1. You're using a table saw, not wearing gloves, and your finger hits the blade. You reflexively jerk your hand back and suffer a nasty little cut.
2. You're using a table saw, wearing heavy work gloves, and your finger hits the blade. Before you realize it, the blade - spinning at 3500 rpm - pulls the glove into the saw, along with the hand inside the glove. If you're lucky you only lose one finger, not the whole hand.
The wood shop teacher at the high school I attended seemed to think that the "no gloves" safety rule was as important as the "wear safety glasses" rule. Any student caught wearing gloves while using a power tool lost his shop privileges for a week.
In my shop I have an old K6-500 system with 128MB RAM, 4.3GB hard drive, and an old left-over 24x CD-ROM in a standard AT mini-tower case. It has a cheapie keyboard, cheap mechanical mouse, and an old 17" monitor that developed an aversion to any resolution above 1024x768 and was therefore relegated to toolshed duty. The system runs Slackware Linux. When I do anything that will throw dust, I just cover it all with plastic sheeting. Granted, I do very little woodworking - my main interest is electronics.
Cat5e UTP buried in plastic conduit from house to workshop provides the network connection. I added limited, low-frequency oscilloscope functionality to the system with a sound card, xoscope, and a buffer circuit I built using a schematic thoughtfully provided by xoscope's author. This doesn't replace the 10mhz oscilloscope I got for $34 including shipping on ebay, but it does occasionally come in handy. Mostly, the machine is used for looking up part specifications and circuit schematics, and for chatting with fellow electronics hobbyists.
IMHO, it's not worth it to spend much cash on the fancy stuff proposed by folks here, for a machine that'll see maybe 8 hours of use per week at most. I just dug through the old parts bins (lovingly referred to by my better half as "that pile of junk") and found enough stuff to build a system, then spent about $10 extra on the xoscope buffer circuit parts I didn't already have in my electronic parts collection (lovingly referred to by my better half as "that crap scattered all over your workbench").
Remember the order of operations:
1. Loot
2. Rape
3. Pillage
4. Burn
...of course, in the famous Monty Python movie, after the spankings comes the oral sex.
Funny, I just did a search of the Chattanooga Times Free Press classifieds, going back a week, for all ads in the "Computer Personnel" section. A total of 0 ads for all days were returned. Go to http://www.timesfreepress.com/Classifieds/all_frm. html and do an ad browse for Employment - Computer Personnel and see for yourself.
That newspaper is the major regional newspaper for southeastern TN and northwestern GA. Last time I worked tech support and was laid off, I spent a year out of work; 9 months of that was after I'd expanded my search to include unskilled labor (think "using a shovel"). Nobody would hire me for technical work because there was none to be had; nobody would hire me for manual labor because I went to college and am trained for technical work. I'm now working through a temp agency and getting by on whatever they can find for me - currently I'm cutting pipe on a bandsaw at a boiler tube manufacturer.
So when you say "Unskilled (tech support) work is easily found" please forgive me when I reply with "bullshit."
I personally drive 23 miles to work and 23 miles home. I count myself lucky to have a job at all, and am in no position to demand that my workplace be any nearer to my house. I'm also afraid that I don't have the money to move closer to work, as real estate on that side of town is ridiculously expensive.
A diesel car-hauler truck, fully loaded, gets about 7 miles per gallon and delivers about 8 cars to the dealership. That's about as efficient as driving the cars to the dealership individually, assuming those cars all get 56 miles per gallon. However, those cars are transported most of the way from factory to dealer by train, which is even more efficient.
Rarely does someone buy a new car and immediately scrap the old one. If the car is ready for the scrap heap, it's nowhere near nice enough to be owned by someone who can afford a new car. Usually the old cars are traded in at the dealership, which sells them off to used car dealers at auction or puts them into its own inventory to be resold through its used car ("pre-titled" is the currently popular term I believe) department.
Eventually the old car is wrecked or worn out beyond repair, and ends up in a junkyard. There, the useable parts are removed and sold for the purpose of repairing other cars. Finally, whatever is left over and unuseable ends up being melted down to make new cars (or toaster ovens or shelf brackets or computer cases or wrenches...)
There's plenty of validity in both your and Jack's arguments, but I doubt that making an effort to use less oil can be a bad thing overall. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's just too damned expensive for most of us to go out and buy a hybrid car, and not everyone has the option of moving or getting a job closer to home.
Absolutely nothing, though I'd argue that the first recount would probably be more accurate than the original count for the simple reason that the people doing the counting are likely to be a little more careful at that point. Anything after that and you run a higher risk of people getting tired and bored and just going through the motions on autopilot, IMHO.
You might want to get that knee checked out. It seems to be jerking uncontrollably.
Your feelings towards those cars are caused by your apparent total ignorance of the difference between American and European driving habits.
Actually, if you'll read up a bit, you'll see where I said that those tiny cars are "inappropriate for ~95% of the driving we do in the US." I'm well aware of the differences in distances, road widths, and availability of public transport that exist.
You put an emphasis on power and straightline speeds (too much. Gotta be compensating).
You're arguing against your own argument now. Highways in the US tend to be straight or have gentle curves. Onramps are short, and speeds are high. Power and straightline speeds are important in those situations, far more so than cornering ability. My personal vehicles both have the smallest engines available for their models and years. One of them I chose specifically because it had the smaller engine (1996 F-150 longbed with 4.9L inline-6, chosen for longevity and low-end torque for pulling heavy loads up the mountains of southeastern TN and northwestern GA).
It is true that my view of force-fed engines is affected by the failures of the past, including the turbocharged V6 that Pontiac put in the Firebird for a few years in the 70s and some early Volvo turbocharging efforts, among others. It's also affected by the fact that any time you increase cylinder pressure, you increase the stress on the connecting rods, crankshaft, main bearings, wrist pins, and valves. You can beef these components up a bit to compensate, but you end up with a heavier rotating mass, which will erase some of the power benefits gained by turbocharging or supercharging. Turbocharging increases the temperature of the fuel-air mixture, thus also increasing cylinder temperatures, if all else remains equal. Forced induction also introduces more moving parts, increasing the chances for mechanical failure. And finally, there's the phenomenon known as turbo lag, wherein the engine lacks power for the time it takes for the exhaust to spin up the turbine. Component quality and tighter manufacturing tolerances can help address some of these issues, but not all.
I believe I covered the points you attempted to make in other posts in this thread. See the "penis extension" portion of one of my other posts, for example. The S2000 gets roughly 1/2 of the MPG that his Smart Roadster-Coupe does - not exactly a ULEV, but not bad for a car that does 0-60 in 5.5 seconds and has a top speed of 150mph. Your assumptions about what I care about and don't care about are false. I could have had a pretty nice late-60's Chevelle with a big block for what I paid for my Sentra, but I actually give a shit.
But don't let the facts get in the way of a good half-informed screed against someone whose tastes differ from your own.
My great uncle smoked a pack of filterless Lucky Strikes a day and lived to be 92 years old, but my grandfather died at 54. By your logic, we can assume that smoking is good for you.
Where the heck am I gonna do more that 120mph anyway?
:-P
I've done 150mph on the freeways here in the US...not that I'd want to be caught doing that, or that I'd do it again. Ah, the improprieties of youth...
And horsepower doesn't matter when you weigh about 800kg.
Damn, that's one fat dude....oh, you meant the car *grin* You're right, though. I look at torque a lot harder than at horsepower when I'm choosing a vehicle. Not just the max torque, but at what RPM the peak torque occurs. That's why I like my 1996 F-150 pickup with 4.9L inline-6 engine. Yeah, it's the smallest engine available that year, but under 2000RPM it has more torque than the 5.0L V8 engine, and about the same as the 5.8L V8. And for me, that low-end torque is the important part.
I think part of the antipathy I feel towards those tiny "beer can" cars is related to what I use my vehicles for. I use my truck for my daily transportation to and from work, and also to haul large heavy things for the work I do on the side. I do some home repair work and some landscaping on occasion, and find the need to haul stuff like a ton and a half (~1360kg) of cinder blocks, or a ton (2000 pounds/~900kg) or so of mulch or gravel, or lumber, or whatever. Do you realize that my pickup truck is rated to haul more weight in the bed than the weight of your car? My Nissan gets driven by my better half mostly, and is used for hauling around her grandkids, grocery shopping, that sort of thing. It handles all the curves around here, including the mountain roadss of northwest Georgia, just fine at the speed limit.
My dream car, though, is a 1965 Pontiac GTO convertible with 389ci (6.3L I think) engine and Tri-Power - three 2-barrel carburetors, which brings the engine's specs up to 360 horsepower and 424 foot-pounds of torque (~574 newton-meters) and a 4-speed manual transmission. Who cares if it can't turn fast? It'll just out-accelerate anything between the curves!
Back to reality though. If I were shopping for a sports roadster and had $32,000 or so to spend, I'd probably go with the Honda S2000. Yes, it only gets about 25mpg, but it corners like nothing else I've ever driven, and I'd be willing to wager money on it against your car in a slalom. And it'll go from 0-60mph in 5.5 seconds, with a top speed of 150mph. Awwwwww yeah!
Your car apparently does one thing pretty well, and that one thing is to burn a small amount of fuel per mile travelled.
;-)
Oops, two things - I forgot about the turning corners thing
The turbocharger means the engine is being force-fed, which decreases its life expectancy due to higher cylinder pressures - and you get turbo lag too. With traction control, you can't "steer with the accelerator" (traction control is standard equipment on many American sports cars - and I still hate it). Six speed transmissions are quite common also, though more than 5 gears is probably overkill unless the engine has to rev to the redline to produce any power. Cruise control has been common for decades - even my dad's 1977 Oldsmobile 98 sedan had it.
:-P
The page you linked to talked about the car like it was the be-all end-all of performance roadsters. In reality, it barely qualifies as a sporty roadster. To get performance, you have to burn fuel. That car may be quite an achievement given its fuel consumption, but it's no world class sports car. Generally, vehicles either do one thing fairly well or do two things somewhat acceptably. Good vehicles either do one thing fairly well and something else acceptably, or just do one thing exceptionally well. Great vehicles might do two things exceptionally well. Your car apparently does one thing pretty well, and that one thing is to burn a small amount of fuel per mile travelled. I still maintain that it wouldn't be appropriate for most US drivers.
Look, my original reply probably came across as ragging on your wheels - I'm just saying that it's totally inappropriate for ~95% of the driving we do in the US, and that it's way overpriced for what it is. Drop the price by about half, and they might sell a few of these in the US market to someone other than the daddy-buy-me-a-car crowd at the local private schools.
And yes, we like to turn corners too - almost a third of the United States is covered by mountains, and mountain roads have curves
Here's a hint: what's the fuel consumption like on the cars you proposed?
Who cares what the gas mileage is like on a car that's marketed as a sports car? You buy one because you need a penis extension, not because you want to save the environment. Look at the page for that coupe-roadster thing. It's called "the ultimate roadster driving experience." And yet the parent poster proudly proclaims its top speed to be less than a 14 year old econobox with a quarter million miles.
If you're wanting to save money on gasoline, you'd be spending an extra $15,000 up front for the Smart Roadster Coupe Brabus over the cost of a Honda Civic EX, to save maybe $3500 over the course of driving 100,000 miles (assuming an average fuel price of $3.00 a gallon during that time, though current prices are under $2.00 per gallon). And the Honda Civic LX has more horsepower, more torque, and twice the seating. And it has a trunk that'll hold more than 2 sacks of groceries.
You paid the equivalent of $32,000 for what amounts to a beer can on wheels, with an engine that would be considered undersized on a motorcycle and generates less power than the lowest-horsepower non-hybrid car available in the US?
Do you realize that for that kind of money, we in the US can get a Honda S2000 - a two-seater with well over twice the horsepower, nearly twice the torque, actually looks like a car, and doesn't have a turbocharger to decrease engine life?
Or, for $2000 less, we can get a brand new Mustang GT with all the options, three times the horsepower, over three times the torque, and twice the seating.
Either of these will run circles around the "Smart Roadster-Coupe Brabus." Hell, even my "other car", a 1991 Nissan Sentra, with baseline 1.6L engine and automatic transmission, will do 120mph - with 250,000 miles on the odometer. Yes, I've verified this; the rev limiter kicks in at about 122mph. And its book value is somewhere around $1500. 120mph ability may be something to brag about elsewhere, but at least in this part of the US it's generally considered a bare minimum, though acceleration is more important. Get on I-285 in Atlanta sometime - you have about 100 meters of ramp, and then you'd better be doing at least 70mph or you're a greasy spot on the guardrail.
Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
Simple solution:
Go to your local bank. Open a savings account. Deposit a portion of each paycheck into it. When it reaches a certain amount ($1000 is a good round number), use that money to buy savings bonds, treasury bills, certificates of deposit (CDs) or the like - something that can only really lose money if the government goes bankrupt before you plan to redeem your investment. If that happens, you'll probably be more worried about something other than your retirement funds anyway.
Slightly more elaborate, possibly more efficient option:
Talk to a financial advisor. Talk to another financial advisor. Talk to a third financial advisor. Take their recommendations and weigh them against one another. Strike a balance of risk versus ROI that you're comfortable with. Do not invest in anything that's "hot" - that's how some of us *cough* lost $37,000 one year when the dotcoms went bust.
You make a valid point, except for one detail...
:-P
Your option 3 deprives us humans of thick, juicy steaks and tons of other great main dishes. That's more cruel and inhumane than either of the two options I listed
Given the choice of death or a life without ever again tasting the delicious flesh of animals, I'd probably choose death.
What about the "thrill of the hunt?" The pleasure is derived more from the process leading up to the killing of Bambi than from the actual killing.
Me, I'm more of a fowl hunter - there's just something about getting up at 4:00am, sitting in a duck blind for a few hours in freezing temperatures while making ridiculous sounds that approximate the call of a duck, then trying to hit a fast-moving duck on the wing with a shotgun...too bad I haven't had any time to actually go hunting in a couple of years...
Or, to take a different tact, which of the following is more cruel?
1. Keeping an animal from birth in a cage so small it cannot turn around, with tag stuck through its ear, in a building with thousands of other animals in the same predicament, then, on the day it reaches a certain body weight, hitting it in the head with a hammer to stun it so you can slit its throat and let it bleed to death
or
2. Allowing an animal to run free in the wild, doing whatever it is that wild animals do, then at some point in their adult life, putting a bullet in its heart to kill it within a few seconds
The first describes the life of the cattle whose flesh is neatly packaged and sold in your local supermarket. The second describes the life of a deer which is hunted for food.
Isn't that beautiful? I know, let's blow it's fucking brains out.
You forgot the part about cooking and eating the meat. Not to mention stuffing and mounting its head on a wall, then adorning it with a ball cap and sunglasses.