The main problem with CurrentC is not the QR-codes, though that is kind of ridiculous and old-timey. The main problem is the direct line into your banking account with no credit card intermediary; which strips you of much fraud protections you enjoy with ApplePay, or even just by swiping plastic. That means instead of being on the hook for no more than $50 in the event of fraud (And many cards waive this these days.), your bank account can simply be emptied. Good luck getting that money back. And even if you succeed, it's still gone for the duration, when you may have needed it for other purchases and bills.
CurrentC needs to die. And the retailers trying to push it need to be made to suffer.
I dunno what they would train as. But there's a big city in southern Nevada that's a fine example of how organized crime can't compete against major corporations once a market is legitimized and the real businesses decide that their shareholders would benefit by entering.
I disagree. Rebound congestion doesn't cause people to go out and harm others. And it doesn't really even harm the sufferer, it just makes them miserable. And I'm really annoyed by the trend to deny responsible users of medications, tools, chemicals, whatever; access because a minority are irresponsible.
I take a bottle of Afrin with me whenever I'm going to have to significantly change altitude. I learned that lesson after an especially painful flight, having caught a cold when I was away from home for business. Most of the time, I don't use it. But it would really annoy the crap out of me if I had to run to my doctor before every business trip, vacation, or drive up to Yosemite.
Maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to move it behind the pharmacy counter with the ephedrine*. But I think making it prescription-only would be going too far.
* For that matter, has moving the ephedrine (pseudo, or otherwise) behind the counter really put a significant dent on the availability of amphetamine? Based on what I follow of the topic on the news, it seems like it's just as prevalent as it ever was.
Some people actually have other medical issues that can be triggered or exacerbated by corticosteroids. The solution is not to ban oxymetazoline in favor of mometasone, or vice versa. Just let people have both, as needed, and trust them to use them responsibly. Sure, some people won't. But it's not like a little rebound congestion makes people violent or puts them out on the streets hustling for their next fix.
I think it depends on the government. Sending my money 3000 miles away to Washington to be spent on things like the F-35, the Iraq war, Alaska's bridge to nowhere, Corn subsidies, and bailing out Detroit and Wall Street, seems a lot like sending it out to disappear into a black hole to me.
Sending that same money to Sacramento to be spent on useful things like upgrading the state's water storage & distribution infrastructure or the high-speed rail line between the north and south would be preferable by far. Even better would be to keep more of that money local and use it to expand and upgrade things like BART and MUNI or to start building Singapore-HDB-style developments to ameliorate the the housing affordability issues my we're rrently facing.
> IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and > didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
IBM is actually being pretty stupid here. It's just that everyone else is being stupid in a similar manner. Handing your source code, or any other designs or technology, over to the Chinese government* is, as you say, the same as handing it over to their domestic businesses... your competitors, current and future.
* (Arguably to ANY government, but especially China's.)
But it's a combination of short-term greed, plus a "prisoners' dilemma" situation. If *everyone* were to stand together, refuse to hand over their technology, and tell China to knock off the corruption and IP theft or get stuffed; then *everyone* would be much better off in the long run. But there's a great deal of short-term profit to be made if you let China push you around. And once one company takes their thirty pieces of silver, it's hard for everyone else not to go along too.
The problem is that hardly anyone looks at what will happen past the next quarter anymore. And the few who do plan to use their golden parachutes and be long gone from the company before the loss of all of their IP comes back to bite it in the ass in the long term.
Not everyone blocks ads, or blocks ads for the same reasons, or bypasses paywalls instead of moving on. But then again, you probably knew that and are just being an ass for the sake of being an ass.
On the chance that you are legit; I'll say that I'm not offended by advertising in general, or even by targeted advertising. In fact, (well-)targeted advertising has been genuinely useful to me before. I do use adblock. And I whitelist some sites that I do want to support. But what does offend me is advertising that detracts from my growing experience, takes up excessive bandwidth, uses excessive cpu/battery resources, or acts as a vessel for malware.
So the first time I see any of:
Pop-ups
Pop-unders
Overlays
Interstitials
Automatically-playing audio or video
Various stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks
Flash
Java
... then the site is off the whitelist, without hesitation or reservation. It's about respect. Respect me, my time, my resources, my security; and I'll offer some respect back for your revenue model. Don't care to offer any respect to me? Well, then to hell with your revenue model.
It's funny. You answer your own question in your very first sentence. Thousands of people join the military every year and become soldiers, sailors, marines, etc. When they sign on the dotted line and take the oath, they become subject to the UMCJ; which subjects them to a significantly higher standard of discipline than any civilian is required to adhere to.
- Require a car and 100% non-ambiguous non-bullshit charge before an arrest can take place. If someone is not, in fact, guilty of what they're being arrested for, then it's not an arrest, it's a kidnapping. And any resistance is 100% justified and the cop doing the arresting is, himself, arrested and prosecuted.
Police work is not particularly dangerous. It's not even in the top ten, coming in well below professions such as fisherman (>8x as dangerous), logger (6x), garbage collector (2x), roofer (>2x), and airline pilot (>4x); none of whom are so prone to going on 'roid-raging power trips and murdering people as the police are.
This isn't some little project where one or two rogue engineers can throw a commit into github without oversight. We're talking about a major, multi-million dollar engineering project that spans both software and hardware, goes into a production run of many thousands of vehicles, and is regulated by many governmental bodies across multiple countries.
At a minimum, you'd need the involvement of:
The software engineers The hardware engineers The integration engineers The software QA testers The hardware QC testers The integration testers The production engineers The production QC testers Various compliance managers Whoever is submitting the test vehicles to the government testers in each country. The managers and supervisors of all of the above
With that many people involved... and that's probably a conservative list... it's hard to believe that there wasn't some C-level approval or direction. Massive fraud in a major engineering project doesn't bubble up from one rogue employee or two. It's rolled from the top down.
My point is that I believe that spending money to bring about his goal... a goal that harmed my community and some of my friends and could have harmed me... goes beyond "having an opinion". In my own opinion, spending the money was an escalation into "taking action". If you disagree, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And the particular point is, as you say, somewhat moot in the here and now anyway, since prop 8 was struck down by the Supreme Court. (And, for that matter, SCOTUS is with you, not me, on the "spending money is speech, not action" thing.)
His spending is part of the public record; as is required by law for campaign contributions in California. The LA Times has an easily-searchable database of contributors showing his spending:
I can't provide a direct link to Eich's money on the Secretary of State website. It's not exactly a user-friendly design and doesn't support permalink to specific contributions. But it's easy enough to search for his data there as well.
> I said if I personally witnessed him being a white supremacist. If I actually saw > him randomly physically attacking a black or jewish person because they were > black or jewish. That's policing actions, not thoughts.
An attack doesn't need to consist of physical assault to be an "action" though. Eich didn't just think he hated gay people. He didn't just say he hated gay people. He actively took action by donating money to a campaign to strip gay people of their civil rights and equal protection under the law.
Good on you. People seem to forget that we're just talking about an easily-replaceable website. And that's the thing that irks me about this so-called controversy...
Facebook has always required real names. It was their policy from day one when it was still just "The Facebook" and only open to Harvard students. Whether it's based on advertising dollars or Zuckerberg's whim or something else; that's the kind of community they wanted to create, just like Slashdot's creators wanted pseudonyms plus the option to be anonymous, and Moot wanted total anonymity for 4chan.
And not only was "real names" the policy at Facebook from day one, they've never hidden it. It's right there, in black and white, when you create your account. And for a while, they were actively promoting it as a feature; in order, as I recall, to distinguish themselves from the cesspool of trolling that Myspace had degenerated into.
Out of all the sites on the internet, there's probably one somewhere that suits anybody's particular tastes. So join the site / service / community / whatever that suits you. Don't barge in somewhere else, knowing full well what you're getting into, and demand that they make changes.
As you say, your case has flaws. The glaring one is:
> Also, assume the cops have a reputation for being > professionals who act professionally
That's a pretty massive assumption. And I don't see how anybody paying attention to the news could miss the rampant police abuse and misconduct. Perhaps twenty years ago, before cellphone cameras, dash cameras, and body cams; you might be able to make that assumption, simply out of ignorance. But now? You'd be pretty daft to do so. And in your example, I'd operate under the assumption that any questioning of me is an attempt to railroad me into a false charge of drunk & disorderly or disturbing the peace or some such. It's just safer that way. My employer gives paid time off for jury duty or to bear witness in court; so doing so would be no inconvenience to me. And being arrested on a fabricated charge, even if it is minor and quickly dismissed, would be a bigger problem than missing out on a couple hours of sleep.
Best to treat them like poisonous snakes: Avoid them when possible. Keep any interaction as brief and minimal as possible. And don't try to handle them yourself... leave it to the trained professionals (ie. your lawyer).
If they had probable cause that he was working with or spying for China, they should have arrested and charged him openly; not detained him without telling him what he is suspected of and denying him access to legal council. If they didn't have probable cause, they should fuck off and leave him alone.
That goes for everyone, not just mayors of third-tier cities.
The funny thing is that I'd actually LOVE to be able to give up my car. The problem is that, ironically for a city that claims to have a "transit first" policy, MUNI is just terrible. I mean, appallingly bad... a disgrace and an embarrassment. It's pretty much useless for anything besides commuting into downtown for work. And even then, if you live in certain neighborhoods (Basically the entire northwest quadrant of the city except for a small strip along Lonbard.) then lords of Kobol help you.
If MUNI could be counted on simply to meet the schedule they publish... without adding any more service... they would be vastly better and maybe a realistic option for going shopping or having a nightlife. But the operators treat the published schedule as something between a mere suggestion and a outright joke. And their union is so strong, they effectively can't be punished for it. So trips that you could do in your car in 10 minutes, that should take 20 minutes according to the timetables, take 45 minutes if you're lucky. It's a damn disgrace, ant it keep driving, even on trips where I honestly really would prefer to leave the car behind.
France is McDonald's 2nd biggest market, and the French eat at McDonald's about as often as Americans do.
Well, at least it's the French eating there. The notion of traveling internationally, only to eat at an American fat-food chain, could drive me to faceplate myself into a concussion.
I've seen TV shows... I think one of Anthony Bourdain's actually... that show what kids in France eat for their school lunch. And yeah... the meals looked like food I'd still be happy to eat as an adult.
The meals served in the schools here? Not so much. How about this for a way to get kids to eat their vegetables: Cook and season them in a way such as they are palatable. You don't need to stack them up against bad-tasting food or keep the kids hungry enough that they'd eat anything. Just prepare them well enough to stand on their own merit. When I was in public schools un the US; unless they were the toppings on a hamburger or taco salad, the vegetable portion of the meals were pretty much always boiled or steamed into a tasteless, nearly-indifferentiated, mush. Who *would* want to eat that garbage? But once I was out of school and had to learn how to cook... basically the only vegetable I don't like now is okra. (I'm sorry, but "food" that has the consistency of mucus is an abomination before god and man.)
I guess I could also suggest using higher-quality produce in the first place. But I suspect that since that would require actually spending more money on the students, the schools would be completely unwilling to do so under any circumstance. But changing the recipes & preparation ought to be doable.
I'm not sure about the precise legal definition of racketeering, but the Wikipedia definition of a racket is:
A racket is a service that is fraudulently offered to solve a problem, such as for a problem that does not actually exist, that will not be put into effect, or that would not otherwise exist if the racket did not exist. Conducting a racket is racketeering.[1] Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it, although that fact may be concealed, with the specific intent to engender continual patronage for this party.
That sounds a lot like what Volkswagen did to me. And RICO is often used to go after organizations that weasel out of responsibility for their misdeeds through loopholes. And, of course, there's the second part: Corrupt Organizations. And that fits Volkswagen to the tee... corrupt as hell and rotten to the core.
I've owned a total of four cars. First a Chrysler, then a Ford, then a Subaru, and now I'm on a Mazda. I do take care of my stuff. All four were maintained exactly to the schedule in the manual. And the Subaru still outlasted my chrysler and my ford combined, twice over, and then some (Fourteen years). Plus, aside from a bit of body work after a fender-bender, it never required any maintenance that *wasn't* in the routine schedule, which can't be said of the american cars. Hell, I could probably have gotten a few more years out of it; but it was due for a new timing belt and the replacement would have come more than the value of the car. Now, I've never owned a GM, but given their "worse than ford, not as bad as chrysler" reputation, and given how awful the ford was, I don't see a good reason to take the chance.
Until I can afford a Tesla, or maybe an iCar or whatever they wind up calling it, I'll be sticking to my "the VIN has to start with the letter J" rule. Detroit burned me two times too many.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem with CurrentC is not the QR-codes, though that is kind of ridiculous and old-timey. The main problem is the direct line into your banking account with no credit card intermediary; which strips you of much fraud protections you enjoy with ApplePay, or even just by swiping plastic. That means instead of being on the hook for no more than $50 in the event of fraud (And many cards waive this these days.), your bank account can simply be emptied. Good luck getting that money back. And even if you succeed, it's still gone for the duration, when you may have needed it for other purchases and bills.
CurrentC needs to die. And the retailers trying to push it need to be made to suffer.
I dunno what they would train as. But there's a big city in southern Nevada that's a fine example of how organized crime can't compete against major corporations once a market is legitimized and the real businesses decide that their shareholders would benefit by entering.
I disagree. Rebound congestion doesn't cause people to go out and harm others. And it doesn't really even harm the sufferer, it just makes them miserable. And I'm really annoyed by the trend to deny responsible users of medications, tools, chemicals, whatever; access because a minority are irresponsible.
I take a bottle of Afrin with me whenever I'm going to have to significantly change altitude. I learned that lesson after an especially painful flight, having caught a cold when I was away from home for business. Most of the time, I don't use it. But it would really annoy the crap out of me if I had to run to my doctor before every business trip, vacation, or drive up to Yosemite.
Maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to move it behind the pharmacy counter with the ephedrine*. But I think making it prescription-only would be going too far.
* For that matter, has moving the ephedrine (pseudo, or otherwise) behind the counter really put a significant dent on the availability of amphetamine? Based on what I follow of the topic on the news, it seems like it's just as prevalent as it ever was.
Some people actually have other medical issues that can be triggered or exacerbated by corticosteroids. The solution is not to ban oxymetazoline in favor of mometasone, or vice versa. Just let people have both, as needed, and trust them to use them responsibly. Sure, some people won't. But it's not like a little rebound congestion makes people violent or puts them out on the streets hustling for their next fix.
Most drip coffee makers don't hear the water to a sufficient temperature to make coffee, either.
Bialetti or french press or GTFO.
I think it depends on the government. Sending my money 3000 miles away to Washington to be spent on things like the F-35, the Iraq war, Alaska's bridge to nowhere, Corn subsidies, and bailing out Detroit and Wall Street, seems a lot like sending it out to disappear into a black hole to me.
Sending that same money to Sacramento to be spent on useful things like upgrading the state's water storage & distribution infrastructure or the high-speed rail line between the north and south would be preferable by far. Even better would be to keep more of that money local and use it to expand and upgrade things like BART and MUNI or to start building Singapore-HDB-style developments to ameliorate the the housing affordability issues my we're rrently facing.
> IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and
> didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
IBM is actually being pretty stupid here. It's just that everyone else is being stupid in a similar manner. Handing your source code, or any other designs or technology, over to the Chinese government* is, as you say, the same as handing it over to their domestic businesses... your competitors, current and future.
* (Arguably to ANY government, but especially China's.)
But it's a combination of short-term greed, plus a "prisoners' dilemma" situation. If *everyone* were to stand together, refuse to hand over their technology, and tell China to knock off the corruption and IP theft or get stuffed; then *everyone* would be much better off in the long run. But there's a great deal of short-term profit to be made if you let China push you around. And once one company takes their thirty pieces of silver, it's hard for everyone else not to go along too.
The problem is that hardly anyone looks at what will happen past the next quarter anymore. And the few who do plan to use their golden parachutes and be long gone from the company before the loss of all of their IP comes back to bite it in the ass in the long term.
Not everyone blocks ads, or blocks ads for the same reasons, or bypasses paywalls instead of moving on. But then again, you probably knew that and are just being an ass for the sake of being an ass.
On the chance that you are legit; I'll say that I'm not offended by advertising in general, or even by targeted advertising. In fact, (well-)targeted advertising has been genuinely useful to me before. I do use adblock. And I whitelist some sites that I do want to support. But what does offend me is advertising that detracts from my growing experience, takes up excessive bandwidth, uses excessive cpu/battery resources, or acts as a vessel for malware.
So the first time I see any of:
Pop-ups
Pop-unders
Overlays
Interstitials
Automatically-playing audio or video
Various stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks
Flash
Java
If walking 1000 feet is really an issue for you, then maybe you really should be walking that 1000 feet.
It's funny. You answer your own question in your very first sentence. Thousands of people join the military every year and become soldiers, sailors, marines, etc. When they sign on the dotted line and take the oath, they become subject to the UMCJ; which subjects them to a significantly higher standard of discipline than any civilian is required to adhere to.
Easy solution:
- Require a car and 100% non-ambiguous non-bullshit charge before an arrest can take place. If someone is not, in fact, guilty of what they're being arrested for, then it's not an arrest, it's a kidnapping. And any resistance is 100% justified and the cop doing the arresting is, himself, arrested and prosecuted.
Police work is not particularly dangerous. It's not even in the top ten, coming in well below professions such as fisherman (>8x as dangerous), logger (6x), garbage collector (2x), roofer (>2x), and airline pilot (>4x); none of whom are so prone to going on 'roid-raging power trips and murdering people as the police are.
Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/graph...
http://www.bankrate.com/financ...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
This isn't some little project where one or two rogue engineers can throw a commit into github without oversight. We're talking about a major, multi-million dollar engineering project that spans both software and hardware, goes into a production run of many thousands of vehicles, and is regulated by many governmental bodies across multiple countries.
At a minimum, you'd need the involvement of:
The software engineers
The hardware engineers
The integration engineers
The software QA testers
The hardware QC testers
The integration testers
The production engineers
The production QC testers
Various compliance managers
Whoever is submitting the test vehicles to the government testers in each country.
The managers and supervisors of all of the above
With that many people involved... and that's probably a conservative list... it's hard to believe that there wasn't some C-level approval or direction. Massive fraud in a major engineering project doesn't bubble up from one rogue employee or two. It's rolled from the top down.
My point is that I believe that spending money to bring about his goal... a goal that harmed my community and some of my friends and could have harmed me... goes beyond "having an opinion". In my own opinion, spending the money was an escalation into "taking action". If you disagree, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And the particular point is, as you say, somewhat moot in the here and now anyway, since prop 8 was struck down by the Supreme Court. (And, for that matter, SCOTUS is with you, not me, on the "spending money is speech, not action" thing.)
His spending is part of the public record; as is required by law for campaign contributions in California. The LA Times has an easily-searchable database of contributors showing his spending:
http://projects.latimes.com/pr...
If you prefer to go straight to the source, the government's own database is searchable here:
http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/Cont...
I can't provide a direct link to Eich's money on the Secretary of State website. It's not exactly a user-friendly design and doesn't support permalink to specific contributions. But it's easy enough to search for his data there as well.
> I said if I personally witnessed him being a white supremacist. If I actually saw
> him randomly physically attacking a black or jewish person because they were
> black or jewish. That's policing actions, not thoughts.
An attack doesn't need to consist of physical assault to be an "action" though. Eich didn't just think he hated gay people. He didn't just say he hated gay people. He actively took action by donating money to a campaign to strip gay people of their civil rights and equal protection under the law.
Good on you. People seem to forget that we're just talking about an easily-replaceable website. And that's the thing that irks me about this so-called controversy...
Facebook has always required real names. It was their policy from day one when it was still just "The Facebook" and only open to Harvard students. Whether it's based on advertising dollars or Zuckerberg's whim or something else; that's the kind of community they wanted to create, just like Slashdot's creators wanted pseudonyms plus the option to be anonymous, and Moot wanted total anonymity for 4chan.
And not only was "real names" the policy at Facebook from day one, they've never hidden it. It's right there, in black and white, when you create your account. And for a while, they were actively promoting it as a feature; in order, as I recall, to distinguish themselves from the cesspool of trolling that Myspace had degenerated into.
Out of all the sites on the internet, there's probably one somewhere that suits anybody's particular tastes. So join the site / service / community / whatever that suits you. Don't barge in somewhere else, knowing full well what you're getting into, and demand that they make changes.
As you say, your case has flaws. The glaring one is:
> Also, assume the cops have a reputation for being
> professionals who act professionally
That's a pretty massive assumption. And I don't see how anybody paying attention to the news could miss the rampant police abuse and misconduct. Perhaps twenty years ago, before cellphone cameras, dash cameras, and body cams; you might be able to make that assumption, simply out of ignorance. But now? You'd be pretty daft to do so. And in your example, I'd operate under the assumption that any questioning of me is an attempt to railroad me into a false charge of drunk & disorderly or disturbing the peace or some such. It's just safer that way. My employer gives paid time off for jury duty or to bear witness in court; so doing so would be no inconvenience to me. And being arrested on a fabricated charge, even if it is minor and quickly dismissed, would be a bigger problem than missing out on a couple hours of sleep.
Best to treat them like poisonous snakes: Avoid them when possible. Keep any interaction as brief and minimal as possible. And don't try to handle them yourself... leave it to the trained professionals (ie. your lawyer).
If they had probable cause that he was working with or spying for China, they should have arrested and charged him openly; not detained him without telling him what he is suspected of and denying him access to legal council. If they didn't have probable cause, they should fuck off and leave him alone.
That goes for everyone, not just mayors of third-tier cities.
The funny thing is that I'd actually LOVE to be able to give up my car. The problem is that, ironically for a city that claims to have a "transit first" policy, MUNI is just terrible. I mean, appallingly bad... a disgrace and an embarrassment. It's pretty much useless for anything besides commuting into downtown for work. And even then, if you live in certain neighborhoods (Basically the entire northwest quadrant of the city except for a small strip along Lonbard.) then lords of Kobol help you.
If MUNI could be counted on simply to meet the schedule they publish... without adding any more service... they would be vastly better and maybe a realistic option for going shopping or having a nightlife. But the operators treat the published schedule as something between a mere suggestion and a outright joke. And their union is so strong, they effectively can't be punished for it. So trips that you could do in your car in 10 minutes, that should take 20 minutes according to the timetables, take 45 minutes if you're lucky. It's a damn disgrace, ant it keep driving, even on trips where I honestly really would prefer to leave the car behind.
Well, at least it's the French eating there. The notion of traveling internationally, only to eat at an American fat-food chain, could drive me to faceplate myself into a concussion.
I've seen TV shows... I think one of Anthony Bourdain's actually... that show what kids in France eat for their school lunch. And yeah... the meals looked like food I'd still be happy to eat as an adult.
The meals served in the schools here? Not so much. How about this for a way to get kids to eat their vegetables: Cook and season them in a way such as they are palatable. You don't need to stack them up against bad-tasting food or keep the kids hungry enough that they'd eat anything. Just prepare them well enough to stand on their own merit. When I was in public schools un the US; unless they were the toppings on a hamburger or taco salad, the vegetable portion of the meals were pretty much always boiled or steamed into a tasteless, nearly-indifferentiated, mush. Who *would* want to eat that garbage? But once I was out of school and had to learn how to cook... basically the only vegetable I don't like now is okra. (I'm sorry, but "food" that has the consistency of mucus is an abomination before god and man.)
I guess I could also suggest using higher-quality produce in the first place. But I suspect that since that would require actually spending more money on the students, the schools would be completely unwilling to do so under any circumstance. But changing the recipes & preparation ought to be doable.
I'm not sure about the precise legal definition of racketeering, but the Wikipedia definition of a racket is:
That sounds a lot like what Volkswagen did to me. And RICO is often used to go after organizations that weasel out of responsibility for their misdeeds through loopholes. And, of course, there's the second part: Corrupt Organizations. And that fits Volkswagen to the tee... corrupt as hell and rotten to the core.
Also, towards the end, Saturns were just re-badged Opels and Vauxhalls. So they hadn't actually made any new cars for considerably longer.
A lie???
I've owned a total of four cars. First a Chrysler, then a Ford, then a Subaru, and now I'm on a Mazda. I do take care of my stuff. All four were maintained exactly to the schedule in the manual. And the Subaru still outlasted my chrysler and my ford combined, twice over, and then some (Fourteen years). Plus, aside from a bit of body work after a fender-bender, it never required any maintenance that *wasn't* in the routine schedule, which can't be said of the american cars. Hell, I could probably have gotten a few more years out of it; but it was due for a new timing belt and the replacement would have come more than the value of the car. Now, I've never owned a GM, but given their "worse than ford, not as bad as chrysler" reputation, and given how awful the ford was, I don't see a good reason to take the chance.
Until I can afford a Tesla, or maybe an iCar or whatever they wind up calling it, I'll be sticking to my "the VIN has to start with the letter J" rule. Detroit burned me two times too many.