Gota love those program directors who play the most popular stuff in rotation multiple times a day... Yea, they are idiots..
They are not really idiots, but hey, the way radio is done today is a stupid (but cheap) process and program directors are just one cog in the huge machine. It used to be that the local DJ would pick the records he/she played. Some DJ's where pretty good, so of course somebody analyzed what they played when and came up with a "formula for success" which boils down to playing the most popular material more often. They watch the billboard charts and you can bet the #1 song will get played multiple times a day. They then realized that it's easy to just automate the play lists, playing #1 once an hour, #2 every 2 hours and so forth. This leaves the personal touch at home because you fire the old PD with the grey hair, put a computer program in his place because it's cheaper and stupidity ensues as always happens when the MBA's face a shrinking profit..
But I gave up on music radio because they never played what I liked. I have an iPod full of stuff I like and it was easy to hook it up to my car radio.. I do listen to News/Talk some on the radio in the car, but I find that pretty repetitive myself.
You do realize that the majority of people are not like you and me right? They live paycheck to paycheck and buy stuff on time.
My "rules" are for folks who live on credit, who make the minimum payments because they cannot make ends meet if they pay more, who are one or two paychecks away from not being able to pay their bills. MOST people live this way.
I was once one of them, living paycheck to paycheck. My rules are how I fixed the problem. I don't have money because I inherited it, I have it because I SAVED it, because I paid off my debt and refused to add more when I could help it. I realized one important truth: You don't borrow your way to financial stability, you SAVE your way into financial stability. It takes discipline, but most people can do what I did, get out of debt and live better by not paying interest anymore.
If not, then my first priority was the well being of my children / Family first was fulfilled and the money I'd be using for travel will be my kids' to use to enrich their lives.
I'm NOT going into debt to travel now. Right now I'm paying tuition. That will be over in about 4 years and the kids will be out of the nest. Then, once my retirement is well funded, I can start taking all the vacations I've been putting off so I had money for higher priority things.
Shsh... What part of "it's a joke" do you not get? Like I'm going to brandish a firearm even in my front yard, to make somebody leave, but I can/will call the police if somebody refuses to leave when asked.
Actually, it's a fine line in Texas. You have the right to protect life and property with force, even in your front yard. No, you cannot shoot solicitors who ring your doorbell, but you *could* shoot someone who was in your fenced back yard uninvited, or in your front yard if you had a reasonable fear there was risk to life or property. Of course, being criminally charged is up to the DA, and finding yourself in Civil court is up to the person targeted (or their family should your target practice pay off). Normally DA's don't charge for this if there is any possible justification. The Civil court part is anybody's guess, but in Texas, most people understand the self defense part of this really well.
I'm not interested GEEK! This is Texas, we can shoot trespassers here if we want too...
Now take that pitiful Volkswagen bug and get OFF my lawn!
I don't buy at Best Buy if I can help it. (Yes, I have my reasons, given they damaged two appliances while delivering them, hid the damage and then refused to fix them when I found out.)
It's been my experience that those who's priorities are out of whack, end up miserable, regardless of if they overspend or underspend.
The trick is to think about what's most important to you and how to maximize the important things and minimize the rest. Financially this requires some thought and planning. Few people think beyond the monthly payment trap and sacrifice their long term standard of living for a bit of heaven today.
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to fund my kids' college educations and be ready to retire comfortably and travel some with my wife some day.
You and I travel the same roads.... Except for the few that got totaled out from underneath me by other idiots on the road, I've driven my cars well into 10 years and 150K miles or more without exception. I've purchased a couple of new cars over time and took the depreciation hit, but I applaud your process as a way to save scads of money on transportation.
Your choice.... I too have a car loan on a new car.... Only I put half down and am in the process of paying it off early to avoid paying interest. At no time will I owe more on the car than it will be worth over the life of the loan. In my case, interest isn't an issue as I took one of the low interest incentives, but the principle is the same.
If I suddenly become unemployed, there will be no issues or tax implications for raiding my retirement accounts for me. I could trade this car in on a used one and do away with my monthly car payment. You? Not so much.. But hey, at my age, I'm into low risks and don't want to raid the 401k to survive if I can avoid it.
You are misreading what I'm saying... The principle is, borrow as little as you can and ONLY on real property so you pay the least amount of interest as possible. Have a spending plan that reflects YOUR true priorities in life, not just your whims. AND Live at a level that allows you to save.
Be worth something, mange your money, don't let it manage you...
Not exactly, I'm saying that you ALWAYS have a down payment that is enough to cover the depreciation that happens when you drive it off the lot. Of course, letting somebody else pay that depreciation and getting a late model used car is even better if you don't mind a used car.
Worth in what sense? The resale value on my car is doubtless less than what I owe on it (I'm not paying a 0% loan off faster than I have to), but this is a short-lived condition compared to the expected life of the car. In the meantime, it works just fine, and I have no intention of reselling it any time soon. The only problem is the low probability that the car will be totaled, and I can cover the gap between replacement and insurance.
In the meantime, I get the features I want, which don't exist on older cars.
Ah, but what happens if you suddenly lost your paycheck and you are upside down in a car? You cannot trade it in and you cannot make the payments? You just hitched yourself to a wagon heading to bankruptcy faster. Also, understand that paying interest lowers your standard of living. Take a look at how much you pay in interest for that shiny new car of yours and ask yourself two questions. 1. How much am I REALLY paying for this car when I include interest? and 2. What could I spend that interest money on if it wasn't going towards that car loan?
By the way, I'm not advocating you don't buy a new car or that you only pay cash for them, only that you ALWAYS put enough down on it to never owe more than it's resale value throughout the life of the loan. I also advocate that you drive that car as long as you possibly can because it's really only transportation and the cost per mile only goes down the longer you drive. There are a whole lot more important things for my money to get spent on than cars and interest on loans, and I would suspect that you are the same if you stopped to think about it some.
I didn't say the rules always worked or could never be broken under any circumstances... In fact I'd not call them rules but, more suggestions, or goals to aspire to follow when you can.
I can tell you that when you violate one of these rules, financial pain is usually the result. Trust me, I've broken these rules and paid for it. Sometimes it cannot be helped, like in emergencies when unforeseen events conspire to cost you money you don't have, however, the goal here is to live within your means and have an ever increasing buffer between you and bankruptcy so you can borrow less, pay less interest and live better as a result.
I think we are going to disagree about the hot standby, but in truth it boils down to what your response time to a drive failure is. I've had systems that I was responsible for that I couldn't lay hands on for at least 24 hours or more (They where in other countries). Granted it wasn't an ideal situation and we did have limited onsite support, I found that having a hot spare (as well as one or more on the shelf) to be useful to the MTBF of the system. My biggest problem was getting the replacement drive properly inserted into the correct slot, w/o causing a outage, not the hot standby recovery. Having the array already back into redundant condition before I tried to swap drives saved my bacon more than once. Pulling the wrong drive is way to easy. Of course we where shooting for Telco level reliability (99.999 or better) which basically means zero downtime, planned or not.
If you are a 20 min drive away and have the spare sitting on the shelf, adding 20 min to the start of the recovery is not that much. Also, most of us really don't have fine nines as a real requirement, but something a bit less demanding. In my case, the uptime numbers where helped by the hot spare... Your mileage may vary.
If it's cheaper to buy over the life of the item you use than to rent, BUY. Appreciating Asset or not.
I would think better advice is thus:
1. Don't ever borrow to secure items that cannot secure the loan used to buy them. (I.E. Only buy real property on time.)
2. Never owe more on an item than it's worth.
Followed up by:
NEVER charge to unsecured debt if you cannot pay it off at the end of the month (i.e. pay cash).. And, if you don't want to live in fear all your life, always put aside money for saving every month so you can deal with the unexpected when it comes, because it will.
Hot spare drives DO help, as long as you don't leave them spinning when they are in standby. It allows you to restore redundancy on a detectable failure and return your system to a "dual failure required for data loss" condition.
Your point about not using drives from the same manufacturing run in a RAID array is somewhat valid, in that it can increase the possibility of having multiple drives fail at similar times, but if you *monitor* your drives, many failures are evident before they become catastrophic and you can usually be ready for recovery.
However, the real issue with drive failures, in a RAID or alone, is having a backup strategy to recover from data loss events, which in my experience is *rarely* due to a drive failure, and usually due to user errors and environmental issues like power or cooling failures.
My advice is to buy the best drives you can afford, back up offline and verify all your data regularly, closely monitor your hardware (power, cooling, drive errors) and take corrective action sooner rather than later. Don't run RAID for redundancy, only for performance if you can help it, and provision spare drives when using redundancy RAID arrays. Finally, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! ALWAYS BACKUP to offline storage...
Spend your time wisely, backup often, don't argue about RAID, disk drive reliability and hot spares or not. Disk drives WILL fail, all of them, you WILL lose the data on them. Make sure you can deal with that problem first..
Tradition. This is the same company that shipped a warehouse full of known bad drives to market, as an accounting trick, back at the dawn of personal computers.
Wow, I worked for a company that boxed and "shipped" a pile of equipment to a host of resellers who hadn't ordered anything. The shipping terms where FOB-Origin so the resellers where responsible for picking up the equipment, which of course they didn't, because they didn't order it. Then, when the resellers got their invoices and complained that they didn't order all this stuff it got "returned" for a refund. Of course the "sell" date was in one quarter and the "returns" happened in the following one. It was just a way to realize a pile of sales and meet the quarter's numbers. The FTC got wind of this and the CFO got spanked and the company got fined, but it took a few years.
"I would not like the journey, and I detest America."
My experience with smart people is that they hate travel, and with stupid people is that they like travel.
Which kinda makes sense to me...
Well, I hate travel, but I've been forced into it by the nature of my technical job. However, I don't "hate" anyplace I've been forced to go, I simply hate the process of travel and being away from familiar places. I like meeting new people, experiencing other cultures, seeing new things and tasting local food. I just don't like the whole packing, standing in lines, squeezing into an airplane seat for hours, sleeping in strange places, struggling to communicate in languages I don't fully understand, dealing in currency that I struggle to remember how to count... It is the process of travel that I hate.
I said "civil court" if you where paying attention. Maybe you don't understand how our courts actually work?
When was anybody EVER tried, convicted and sentenced for murder in a civil court? (That would be Never...)
You don't get sent to jail by a civil court, you get convicted of crimes like murder in a criminal court. Civil courts are only about property, money and stuff, not about punishing crimes.
Again with this "Evil corporations hold all the power" lie? I'm so tired of this...
Seriously, remember the old "corporations are people in the eyes of the law" complaint? Well, I do, and you have to understand that this legal principle really means that you, the individual, have the same standing in the eyes of the court as the huge corporation. You can take them to civil court and win...
So can we stop with the hypocritical conflicting complaints now?
Oh please.. It was an INSIDER who did this and apparently wasn't out downloading mass amounts of data all at once. How do you distinguish between an insider doing their job and this? I'm just amazed that they kept the access logs for 14 years so they could go back and audit this one user.
You want every hospital in the world to put in strict access monitoring and then have a team that does nothing but monitor and verify each and every data access? Talk about expensive and adding to healthcare costs, for what? Certainly this won't have a positive affect on healthcare delivered...
They put up. They said that they don't trust them, and that's all they need do. They'd do the same for any other anti-virus product that they didn't trust.
15 miles on a bicycle when it's 104 out? During Rush hour on a freeway? I don't think so, I'm not interested in a quick and painful death, even at this age.... I did the no AC thing for over a decade in my 65 VW Beetle, back in the days I couldn't afford more than a $600 car and now you suggest I ride a bike?
Perhaps, but Musk is playing a loosing hand on this then... With Oil and Natural Gas prices at bargain basement prices and no real upside in sight, who can afford an EV anyway? The ROI on the investment just isn't there now.
For me (with a 15 min commute one way) an EV would be great, but there is zero chance I'm going to get one anytime soon. I simply cannot afford the extra expense of the purchase when even if I had free electricity to charge it with the cost savings on fuel wouldn't make up the difference in price in nearly a decade. By the time it paid for the extra cost to buy it, I'd be putting new batteries into it to keep it on the road. I'm sorry, my pickup truck is cheaper...
Musk needs to figure this out if he intends to sell his cars in volume. If he cannot get the cars cost competitive with his competition, then he's severely limited his target market and is going to struggle to turn much profit, selling a niche car to a niche market. To make money selling cars, you have to sell lots of them...
Slashdot Mirror
Gota love those program directors who play the most popular stuff in rotation multiple times a day... Yea, they are idiots..
They are not really idiots, but hey, the way radio is done today is a stupid (but cheap) process and program directors are just one cog in the huge machine. It used to be that the local DJ would pick the records he/she played. Some DJ's where pretty good, so of course somebody analyzed what they played when and came up with a "formula for success" which boils down to playing the most popular material more often. They watch the billboard charts and you can bet the #1 song will get played multiple times a day. They then realized that it's easy to just automate the play lists, playing #1 once an hour, #2 every 2 hours and so forth. This leaves the personal touch at home because you fire the old PD with the grey hair, put a computer program in his place because it's cheaper and stupidity ensues as always happens when the MBA's face a shrinking profit..
But I gave up on music radio because they never played what I liked. I have an iPod full of stuff I like and it was easy to hook it up to my car radio.. I do listen to News/Talk some on the radio in the car, but I find that pretty repetitive myself.
Maybe they should go back to original programming like back in the day where radio dramas were all over the place as well as live music.
They have... Talk Radio is pretty much a daily dose of drama and is one of the few parts of radio that's doing OK these days.
(Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek here)
You do realize that the majority of people are not like you and me right? They live paycheck to paycheck and buy stuff on time.
My "rules" are for folks who live on credit, who make the minimum payments because they cannot make ends meet if they pay more, who are one or two paychecks away from not being able to pay their bills. MOST people live this way.
I was once one of them, living paycheck to paycheck. My rules are how I fixed the problem. I don't have money because I inherited it, I have it because I SAVED it, because I paid off my debt and refused to add more when I could help it. I realized one important truth: You don't borrow your way to financial stability, you SAVE your way into financial stability. It takes discipline, but most people can do what I did, get out of debt and live better by not paying interest anymore.
Little Kim is a big ball of burring gas...
Pumba, with you everything is gas...
If not, then my first priority was the well being of my children / Family first was fulfilled and the money I'd be using for travel will be my kids' to use to enrich their lives.
I'm NOT going into debt to travel now. Right now I'm paying tuition. That will be over in about 4 years and the kids will be out of the nest. Then, once my retirement is well funded, I can start taking all the vacations I've been putting off so I had money for higher priority things.
Shsh... What part of "it's a joke" do you not get? Like I'm going to brandish a firearm even in my front yard, to make somebody leave, but I can/will call the police if somebody refuses to leave when asked.
Actually, it's a fine line in Texas. You have the right to protect life and property with force, even in your front yard. No, you cannot shoot solicitors who ring your doorbell, but you *could* shoot someone who was in your fenced back yard uninvited, or in your front yard if you had a reasonable fear there was risk to life or property. Of course, being criminally charged is up to the DA, and finding yourself in Civil court is up to the person targeted (or their family should your target practice pay off). Normally DA's don't charge for this if there is any possible justification. The Civil court part is anybody's guess, but in Texas, most people understand the self defense part of this really well.
I'm not interested GEEK! This is Texas, we can shoot trespassers here if we want too...
Now take that pitiful Volkswagen bug and get OFF my lawn!
I don't buy at Best Buy if I can help it. (Yes, I have my reasons, given they damaged two appliances while delivering them, hid the damage and then refused to fix them when I found out.)
It's been my experience that those who's priorities are out of whack, end up miserable, regardless of if they overspend or underspend.
The trick is to think about what's most important to you and how to maximize the important things and minimize the rest. Financially this requires some thought and planning. Few people think beyond the monthly payment trap and sacrifice their long term standard of living for a bit of heaven today.
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to fund my kids' college educations and be ready to retire comfortably and travel some with my wife some day.
You and I travel the same roads.... Except for the few that got totaled out from underneath me by other idiots on the road, I've driven my cars well into 10 years and 150K miles or more without exception. I've purchased a couple of new cars over time and took the depreciation hit, but I applaud your process as a way to save scads of money on transportation.
Your choice.... I too have a car loan on a new car.... Only I put half down and am in the process of paying it off early to avoid paying interest. At no time will I owe more on the car than it will be worth over the life of the loan. In my case, interest isn't an issue as I took one of the low interest incentives, but the principle is the same.
If I suddenly become unemployed, there will be no issues or tax implications for raiding my retirement accounts for me. I could trade this car in on a used one and do away with my monthly car payment. You? Not so much.. But hey, at my age, I'm into low risks and don't want to raid the 401k to survive if I can avoid it.
You are misreading what I'm saying... The principle is, borrow as little as you can and ONLY on real property so you pay the least amount of interest as possible. Have a spending plan that reflects YOUR true priorities in life, not just your whims. AND Live at a level that allows you to save.
Be worth something, mange your money, don't let it manage you...
Not exactly, I'm saying that you ALWAYS have a down payment that is enough to cover the depreciation that happens when you drive it off the lot. Of course, letting somebody else pay that depreciation and getting a late model used car is even better if you don't mind a used car.
Worth in what sense? The resale value on my car is doubtless less than what I owe on it (I'm not paying a 0% loan off faster than I have to), but this is a short-lived condition compared to the expected life of the car. In the meantime, it works just fine, and I have no intention of reselling it any time soon. The only problem is the low probability that the car will be totaled, and I can cover the gap between replacement and insurance.
In the meantime, I get the features I want, which don't exist on older cars.
Ah, but what happens if you suddenly lost your paycheck and you are upside down in a car? You cannot trade it in and you cannot make the payments? You just hitched yourself to a wagon heading to bankruptcy faster. Also, understand that paying interest lowers your standard of living. Take a look at how much you pay in interest for that shiny new car of yours and ask yourself two questions. 1. How much am I REALLY paying for this car when I include interest? and 2. What could I spend that interest money on if it wasn't going towards that car loan?
By the way, I'm not advocating you don't buy a new car or that you only pay cash for them, only that you ALWAYS put enough down on it to never owe more than it's resale value throughout the life of the loan. I also advocate that you drive that car as long as you possibly can because it's really only transportation and the cost per mile only goes down the longer you drive. There are a whole lot more important things for my money to get spent on than cars and interest on loans, and I would suspect that you are the same if you stopped to think about it some.
I didn't say the rules always worked or could never be broken under any circumstances... In fact I'd not call them rules but, more suggestions, or goals to aspire to follow when you can.
I can tell you that when you violate one of these rules, financial pain is usually the result. Trust me, I've broken these rules and paid for it. Sometimes it cannot be helped, like in emergencies when unforeseen events conspire to cost you money you don't have, however, the goal here is to live within your means and have an ever increasing buffer between you and bankruptcy so you can borrow less, pay less interest and live better as a result.
I think we are going to disagree about the hot standby, but in truth it boils down to what your response time to a drive failure is. I've had systems that I was responsible for that I couldn't lay hands on for at least 24 hours or more (They where in other countries). Granted it wasn't an ideal situation and we did have limited onsite support, I found that having a hot spare (as well as one or more on the shelf) to be useful to the MTBF of the system. My biggest problem was getting the replacement drive properly inserted into the correct slot, w/o causing a outage, not the hot standby recovery. Having the array already back into redundant condition before I tried to swap drives saved my bacon more than once. Pulling the wrong drive is way to easy. Of course we where shooting for Telco level reliability (99.999 or better) which basically means zero downtime, planned or not.
If you are a 20 min drive away and have the spare sitting on the shelf, adding 20 min to the start of the recovery is not that much. Also, most of us really don't have fine nines as a real requirement, but something a bit less demanding. In my case, the uptime numbers where helped by the hot spare... Your mileage may vary.
Seriously?
If it's cheaper to buy over the life of the item you use than to rent, BUY. Appreciating Asset or not.
I would think better advice is thus:
1. Don't ever borrow to secure items that cannot secure the loan used to buy them. (I.E. Only buy real property on time.)
2. Never owe more on an item than it's worth.
Followed up by:
NEVER charge to unsecured debt if you cannot pay it off at the end of the month (i.e. pay cash).. And, if you don't want to live in fear all your life, always put aside money for saving every month so you can deal with the unexpected when it comes, because it will.
Hot spare drives DO help, as long as you don't leave them spinning when they are in standby. It allows you to restore redundancy on a detectable failure and return your system to a "dual failure required for data loss" condition.
Your point about not using drives from the same manufacturing run in a RAID array is somewhat valid, in that it can increase the possibility of having multiple drives fail at similar times, but if you *monitor* your drives, many failures are evident before they become catastrophic and you can usually be ready for recovery.
However, the real issue with drive failures, in a RAID or alone, is having a backup strategy to recover from data loss events, which in my experience is *rarely* due to a drive failure, and usually due to user errors and environmental issues like power or cooling failures.
My advice is to buy the best drives you can afford, back up offline and verify all your data regularly, closely monitor your hardware (power, cooling, drive errors) and take corrective action sooner rather than later. Don't run RAID for redundancy, only for performance if you can help it, and provision spare drives when using redundancy RAID arrays. Finally, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! ALWAYS BACKUP to offline storage...
Spend your time wisely, backup often, don't argue about RAID, disk drive reliability and hot spares or not. Disk drives WILL fail, all of them, you WILL lose the data on them. Make sure you can deal with that problem first..
Tradition. This is the same company that shipped a warehouse full of known bad drives to market, as an accounting trick, back at the dawn of personal computers.
Wow, I worked for a company that boxed and "shipped" a pile of equipment to a host of resellers who hadn't ordered anything. The shipping terms where FOB-Origin so the resellers where responsible for picking up the equipment, which of course they didn't, because they didn't order it. Then, when the resellers got their invoices and complained that they didn't order all this stuff it got "returned" for a refund. Of course the "sell" date was in one quarter and the "returns" happened in the following one. It was just a way to realize a pile of sales and meet the quarter's numbers. The FTC got wind of this and the CFO got spanked and the company got fined, but it took a few years.
I didn't think it was a common practice....
"I would not like the journey, and I detest America."
My experience with smart people is that they hate travel, and with stupid people is that they like travel.
Which kinda makes sense to me...
Well, I hate travel, but I've been forced into it by the nature of my technical job. However, I don't "hate" anyplace I've been forced to go, I simply hate the process of travel and being away from familiar places. I like meeting new people, experiencing other cultures, seeing new things and tasting local food. I just don't like the whole packing, standing in lines, squeezing into an airplane seat for hours, sleeping in strange places, struggling to communicate in languages I don't fully understand, dealing in currency that I struggle to remember how to count... It is the process of travel that I hate.
I guess that makes me average intelligence...
I said "civil court" if you where paying attention. Maybe you don't understand how our courts actually work?
When was anybody EVER tried, convicted and sentenced for murder in a civil court? (That would be Never...)
You don't get sent to jail by a civil court, you get convicted of crimes like murder in a criminal court. Civil courts are only about property, money and stuff, not about punishing crimes.
Again with this "Evil corporations hold all the power" lie? I'm so tired of this...
Seriously, remember the old "corporations are people in the eyes of the law" complaint? Well, I do, and you have to understand that this legal principle really means that you, the individual, have the same standing in the eyes of the court as the huge corporation. You can take them to civil court and win...
So can we stop with the hypocritical conflicting complaints now?
Oh please.. It was an INSIDER who did this and apparently wasn't out downloading mass amounts of data all at once. How do you distinguish between an insider doing their job and this? I'm just amazed that they kept the access logs for 14 years so they could go back and audit this one user.
You want every hospital in the world to put in strict access monitoring and then have a team that does nothing but monitor and verify each and every data access? Talk about expensive and adding to healthcare costs, for what? Certainly this won't have a positive affect on healthcare delivered...
They put up. They said that they don't trust them, and that's all they need do. They'd do the same for any other anti-virus product that they didn't trust.
End of Report, end of discussion.
15 miles on a bicycle when it's 104 out? During Rush hour on a freeway? I don't think so, I'm not interested in a quick and painful death, even at this age.... I did the no AC thing for over a decade in my 65 VW Beetle, back in the days I couldn't afford more than a $600 car and now you suggest I ride a bike?
Get off my lawn! {-smile-}
Perhaps, but Musk is playing a loosing hand on this then... With Oil and Natural Gas prices at bargain basement prices and no real upside in sight, who can afford an EV anyway? The ROI on the investment just isn't there now.
For me (with a 15 min commute one way) an EV would be great, but there is zero chance I'm going to get one anytime soon. I simply cannot afford the extra expense of the purchase when even if I had free electricity to charge it with the cost savings on fuel wouldn't make up the difference in price in nearly a decade. By the time it paid for the extra cost to buy it, I'd be putting new batteries into it to keep it on the road. I'm sorry, my pickup truck is cheaper...
Musk needs to figure this out if he intends to sell his cars in volume. If he cannot get the cars cost competitive with his competition, then he's severely limited his target market and is going to struggle to turn much profit, selling a niche car to a niche market. To make money selling cars, you have to sell lots of them...