Dave Matthis has a great article about sports cars over at the Truth About Cars that is spot on. He sums up the reasons why I find a lot of modern luxury/sport cars to be quite bland. For all the same reasons, I find the Mazda Miata to be one of the few true sportscars still in production.
In related news, I am suddenly lusting after a very early Datsun 240Z, very much like this one. What an unfortunate color, though.
Autoblog has an interesting article about Chrysler's new two-mode hybrid system.
Also, spy shots of a rather interesting looking Jaguar XK. Do I detect a hint of actual angles?! Could it be that a car manufacturer is not going to continue the downward spiral of bubble-itude?
And, BMW and Peugeot are working together on a new engine that, among other things, will eventually replace the suypercharged engine in the mini cooper S.
I think the BMW I loved is slowly dying.
From autoblog, pictures of the new BMW M6. Still boring as ever. Saaay, that's a nice .. mercury cougar? Yes it's a marvel of engineering, but it's boring.
And this reviewer is not impressed with BMW's new 1-series:
Park one of these on your drive and the neighbours will not think, “Hmm, that’s an expensive car. He must be doing well.” They’ll think, “Hmm, that’s an expensive car. He must be off his rocker.” You can have a Golf GTI for less, and that, in almost every single way, is a better car.
So if you want a hatchback, buy a Focus. If you want a hatchback with some go, buy the VW. If you just want some action and you don’t care about space in the back, or a hard ride, or the price, buy a sports car. A Honda S2000 would be fine.
I have been accused, in recent years, of having it in for BMW. There was even some talk, after my recent review of the dreadful X3, that I would not be allowed any more press demonstrators. And this is why I’ve devoted the entire column this week to a test of the 1-series rather than tagging it on to the end of a rant about cheese.
And it’s why I’m choosing the words for my conclusion with even more care than usual. So here goes. The 1-series is crap.
Ouch.
The CBPP has a good comprehensive tour of the lies being told about social security's solvency. But this is all you really need to know:
As noted, the deficit in Social Security over the next 75 years equals 0.7 percent of GDP according to the Social Security actuaries and 0.4 percent of GDP according to CBO. By comparison, the cost over 75 years of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, if the tax cuts are made permanent and not eroded over time by the Alternative Minimum Tax, is roughly two percent of GDP.
In other words, if the tax cuts are made permanent, their cost will be three to five times larger over the next 75 years than the size of the Social Security shortfall. Furthermore, just the cost of the tax cuts for the top one percent of the population — a group whose annual incomes average about $1 million — is roughly the same size as the Social Security shortfall (0.6 percent of GDP).
Even if one uses “infinite horizon” estimates, the cost of the tax cut still exceeds the size of the Social Security shortfall. The projected cost of the tax cuts, if made permanent, is $18 trillion under this measure, as compared to the $10 trillion projection for the Social Security imbalance.
Can anyone tell me why Maureen Dowd is still not fired?
Seriously, why?
So I decided to switch from tin to slrn recently (irrelevant) and i was searching on google for "slrn dotfiles" and I find this guy's page. Hm. "Looks familiar", I think.
Then I realize it's really familiar. Maybe because it's exactly the same as my own dotfiles page! Dude ripped off the code for this and used it for his entire site. Not that I care, naturally. It is a brilliantly smashing design, if I do say so myself.
The funny part is he has all these W3C/CSS valid images plastered all over it. Yeah, way to go dude. The HTML/CSS I wrote in like 5 minutes that you stole validates. Congratulations. The best part is his "about this site" section:
In any event.. this appallingly piece of HTML code was created with VIM under Slackware and OpenBSD. The clean design this requires also means that text only browsers such as Lynx cope very well with this site. It really is best viewed with any browser., because this page (like almost all other) are W3C conformable. For more informations about me, send beer, pizza, money and willed sluts!!!11!
Coincidentally, he's right. I did write it in vim, but not in OpenBSD or Slackware. It was in Debian. Maybe I should tell him to update that.
