Michael Alan Miller

Stock, the manual GTO gets better highway gas mileage than a V-6 Honda Accord.

That is, a much-heavier car (the GTO) at 400HP gets better gas mileage than a 240HP car that is lighter.

Honda is known for their great engines, and I have no doubt they are reliable, but that is pretty amazing.

Driving my automatic GTO to work this morning (No interest in driving sticks any more — I did it for nearly 15 years, and the automatic GTO is actually quicker than the manual), in stop and go traffic, I got 17 MPG.

Not too fucking bad for a car with 470HP or so.

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I just realized that since I have a car that I don’t care about all that much and that is worth about $500, I can now slam on my brakes with alacrity when someone tailgates me — which here in Florida is basically everywhere you drive.

This state has worse drivers, and more of them, than anywhere except for perhaps East Texas.

But with a $500 car, I can afford not to care. I hope they have good insurance. They are going to need it to treat my numerous (fake) medical problems that develop after they plow into me as a result of following half a foot behind.

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Another species of bigotry is gradually disappearing from the public skein.

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Having not yet seen Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, I’d hoped that Moore would’ve addressed the most salient fact about American “capitalism:” that it is not, in fact, capitalism. Too bad that it appears not to do so.

The reality that Moore doesn’t address is that the current economic system in the US is not really capitalist. In many ways, it is eerily similar to the Soviet economy. In the Soviet Union, huge amounts of government money would go to bail out companies that could not survive on their own. If there were a real capitalism in the US, Goldman Sachs would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. The way capitalism works is that if you are inept enough to bankrupt your company, you are pushed off the market by more capable competitors. Goldman Sachs has long been completely incapable of an honest win over anybody else. They are kept in place by a complex system of Soviet-style handouts. This is as contrary to capitalism as anything can possibly be.

In a real capitalist democracy, all the top execs of Goldman Sachs would be in jail for securities fraud and for theft, rather than occupying top government positions and getting millions of dollars of bonuses. They aren’t capitalists or geniuses, just thugs in expensive suits.

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To me, it’s a good thing that publishers are choosing to shoot themselves in the foot.

It’ll hasten their fall.

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A lot of people — including many “experts” — seem to think that the fall in housing prices is over. They continue to be wrong.

Everything that the government has done so far, with a few minor detours, has been almost exclusively focused on maintaining home prices high, by tweaking either the supply or the demand side of the housing equation. As the bulk of consumer net wealth is concentrated in the housing sector, and a wealthy and confident consumer, much more so than the banking system, is critical to the recovery of America’s economy, the Administration will do everything in its power to achieve its goal of artificially manipulating the housing market, thereby not causing an incremental loss of wealth to those still stuck with overpriced houses, while the real intersection of actual supply and demand curves would indicate a materially lower equilibrium price. This is ironic, as proper price discovery is critical for a true recovery, since Americans realize all too well that buying a house at prevailing levels in advance of the second down-leg in housing is senseless, the continued pursuit of such flawed policies by the Fed and President Obama merely pulls the market ever further away from its equilibrium, thereby making the anticipated second dip so much more likely and not that far off in the distant future.

I foresee at least another 20-30% down.

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I’ve sat in a lot of cars in my life, always having a soft spot for the engineering it takes to make a decent automobile.

I’ve sat in BMWs, Nissans, Toyotas, Hyundais, Porsches, even a Ferrari once — well, you get the picture. A lot of fucking cars.

By far the most comfortable seats of any car I’ve sat in are the ones that come stock with the GTO. The GTO seats make the so-called “luxury” seats you get in the BMWs and all the rest seem like metal folding chairs in comparison — and that’s not an exaggeration.

I’ve ridden about 400 miles in a high-end BMW, and driven about 400 miles in a GTO. The GTO seats are far more comfortable.* My butt ached after the BMW ride. No such problem in the goat.

Whatever Holden (the Australian sub-company that actually built the GTO) knows about making damn fine seats, I wish they’d share it with the rest of the world.

*I think this is because GTO seats are deliberately modeled after pilot seats in high-end planes, except without the arm-rests — which are the most comfortable seats in the world. Luxury car makers really could do much better, and it certainly wouldn’t even cost very much.

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I don’t have anything against turbo-charged V6s (used to run a 400HP twin-turbo V6 myself), but there is nothing at all that sounds as good as a well-tuned V8 rumbling.

It doesn’t have to be loud. My car isn’t very loud unless I floor it — which I rarely do, as I don’t like dying or buying $250 worth of tires every month — but it sure does sound sweet at any volume level.

I’ve even got Rose loving big V8s now. Not hard to do, once you drive one.

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Apropos of nothing, just some random thought.

Though it is certainly true that men are more likely to be child molesters, but because far, far more children are in the care of women it is almost certainly true that the higher absolute number (and probably by a long shot, too) of molestations of kids around the world are perpetrated by women.

Also, there’s the fact that at least in the US (not sure how it is in other countries), actions that would get a man in trouble would often not be looked at twice (or even reported) if done by a woman.

Anyone who molests a child — not that I think children are precious snowflakes — obviously has mental issues, but I always enjoy poking holes in people’s sacred notions because they lead to sloppy thinking. Just statistically speaking, the fact is that most abuse of children in absolute terms is probably done by women is extremely hard to argue against considering that worldwide upwards of 90% of child-care is done by women.

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This has been known for a long, long time in the black hat hacking community as well as by Cisco admins.

On the older routers and switches, there used to be a way to turn it off. The newer ones, I don’t think so.

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Why I hate almost all the posters on Hacker News.

The top-voted comment on that story is why.

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The past two cars I’ve owned — including the GTO — the oil dipstick is basically useless for reading the oil level.

No matter if the engine is hot, cold or in between, on my Maxima and now on the GTO, either the dipstick looks like the oil level is either way, way, overfilled or completely empty. Never anything in between, like, say, how much oil is actually in the car.

I haven’t had this problem with other cars I’ve owned. Not on the 300ZX TT, not the Corolla, not the Altima and, well, not any other car.

Just annoying, more than anything, but is it so hard to make an oil dipstick that reads accurately, or in this case at all?*

*And yeah, I do clean it off, do try withdrawing it without touching the sides, etc. I tried to read the oil on my GTO 20+ times (just as I’ve done on the Maxima), and it’s useless.

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At least this isn’t Firefox (yet), but lots of open source developers really do want to take away tabs.

That interface looks so awful and unusable that I’d even use IE6 to get away from it.

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Just found a 2006 GTO on Ebay with only 1,181 miles on it.

How did that happen? Mine had only 6,000 on it when I bought it, and I thought that was ridiculously low for a 2006.

Too bad it’s red. Don’t care for that color at all on that car.

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Not surprised about this:

Studies show that anti-depressants are no more effective — and often worse — than placebos.

The thing is, the placebo effect is real, and does improve people’s lives. So in an ideal world, the patients would get prescribed sugar pills, unbeknownst to them, while not having to endure the side effects of some fairly harmful substances.

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