The Thousand Dollar Car Theory

Even though I do want a new car at this point, I have nevertheless always been a great fan of the Thousand Dollar Car theory. Here it is in a nutshell:

Cars cost money to buy and run. The more expensive a car you buy, the more money you will lose on it, by depreciation alone if nothing else. A good way to save money on a car is to buy an old beater for a meager sum, usually not exceeding the equivalent of USD1,000. If it is still capable of moving under its own power, it is statistically likely to stay mobile for more months than it would usually take you to spend $1k on payments for a new car. Once it requires anything more than a trivial sledgehammer-and-WD40 fix, you scrap it and get something new.

The assumption is that $1000 is just short of non-money, so the car will actually have some life left in it. You don't need to spend money on maintaining it, and you don't need comprehensive insurance. Plus, at that point the price of a car has very little to do with its class or prestige; you can buy a Mercedes W123 for the same money as a same-year Corolla. True, the Merc will use more gas, but other than third-party insurance it really is your only cost.

The obvious downside is reliability, but it's really not that bad. Unless you really don't pay attention when you buy the car, you'll probably get a fairly decent example - the ones that had major issues wouldn't have lasted this long. You don't need to worry about squeaks and bumps and grinds; get a RWD car and you'll eliminate one major source of trouble (front CV joints). Get a car with chain-driven cams instead of a belt, and you're rid of another.

I'm on my third car right now, and all of them have cost appreciably less than $1000. The first was a Volvo 245; a lovely machine by all accounts. It's something you fall in love with, and while some car nuts may ridicule it, anyone who's owned one will know just how special a Volvo 200 is. Mine was a 1977 estate, dull blue with the round headlamps. The tailgate wouldn't close, it just kind of hung there; the driver's door was opened and closed with a pocket knife instead of a key. The engine, a scrapped 2.3 injection unit from a later car (a 700, I believe) was retrofitted with a vertical carburettor; and the gearbox was a four-speed manual with electric overdrive. You simply pushed a button on the gearlever to swith from 5th to 4th, which was immensely useful when overtaking. Repairs for it were limited to 10 Euro for resetting the ignition tolerances; it also had an oil change and some new coolant, but that was it. Alas, I drove it into the back a panel van one morning.

The second was a 1982 Mazda 323 three-door. It had a 60bhp 1.3 engine with a carburettor that kept getting clogged up. I spent a bunch of money getting it cleaned, although the eventual fix was as simple as a fuel filter replacement. It also got a new battery, and a set of winter tires. It kept getting broken into, the rear hatch lock was torn out, so I just filled it with that hardening mass stuff - the one where you mix together two components, and it eventually becomes tough as stone. The carb thing was a proper pain, but otherwise it did a good job. At one point it got loaded up with five crates of spare parts for inflatable dildos! (Long story.) Oh, and it was nigh-on impossible to find windscreen wipers that would fit - it had this useless 80s Japanese attachment system with a pin that connected the blade to the arm. Anyway, the first proper snow day, I was driving it from Capital City to Campustown, saw a dog in a turn, swerved, lost control, slid down the Armco on the outside of the bend, and crashed head-on into a Mondeo. Thanks to seatbelts and the fact that the impact was on the passenger's side, I had no permanent injuries other than a bit of a recurring neck ache that limits my headbanging abilities somewhat. The Mondeo's driver, an older lady, had to spend over two months in the hospital, despite both seatbalts and airbags!

And now I have my third, a 1988 Honda Accord EX. Costs to date include welding the exhaust back together (it fell out twice, once on the highway), plus a new battery. Other than that, an oil change, new air filter and new brake pads. The oilpan has a leak in it (gasket, apparently) and it smokes a lot when cold, but hey - as long as it runs...

The Internet as an occult phenomenon

Can't be bothered writing a new article today. Here's an interesting little essay I wrote for a class on esoterics. Some points are rather corny, but hey - take it as an excercise in adjusting reality to a provided model.

Magic and supernatural phenomena in general are often believed to rely upon a greater force connecting every living and sometimes inanimate object in the universe. The Chinese call it chi; George Lucas calls it “the Force”. Proof of the existence of either is traditionally scarce, but we cannot deny that something so ubiquitous must certainly be supernatural.

The Western civilization, a technical civilization which denies the occult with great vigor, has in the meantime created an entity that strives to connect every single known sentient being in our world, and has had remarkable success in that mission. As the notion expressed in the prelude to Alistair Crowley's “Moonchild”, (the book we read for that class - FT) and other sources including the very modern and Western science of semantics, tells us that specific meaning can be uncovered in any object if one only knows how to look, we are able to trace influences of the supernatural in the very essence of the global network.

Indeed even a passing glance reveals exciting similarities. Information technology in itself is so incredible because it allows amazingly complex constructs to be created with the repetition of two basic characters. The central processing unit of a computer is in fact nothing more than a massive collection of transistors – mechanical devices which can exist in two juxtaposed states. We must not consider it accidental that these states have been dubbed “on” and “off”, 1 and 0. Herein lies proof that even the most artificial of man’s creations is based on the ultimate law of the universe – the duality of all things. Existence and nothingness, life and death, good and evil, God and Satan – the eternal struggle and alteration between these two provide the basis for the world as we know it.

A network that engulfs almost literally everything also provides its disciple with nearly limitless power – including the power to destroy the unwary zealot himself. Knowledge is power, and the Internet is the largest repository of data ever created; and the tools that come with the concept of a network connecting the administration systems of an entire civilization’s infrastructure allow a skillful artisan to find any information they may desire. Strip off our beliefs and prejudices, and how different is a power user from a shaman?

People have turned to the Occult for many reasons, but most of them grow out of the desire to improve their condition – physical, financial, social, etc. While there has been a lucky few that crafted obscene wealth from the Net, a great many more have been given an opportunity to create a virtual personality, a homunculus if you will, a representation of what they would like themselves to be. And if the falseness of these alter egos is apparent to any veteran, that doesn’t change the nature of the humanity that spawns them.

More peculiar similarities can be found when comparing the Internet to religious works, and particularly the Talmud, the book of teachings in Judaism – the oldest and beyond doubt the most occult of all major religions. In his book “The Talmud and the Internet”, rabbi Jonathan Rosen writes:

A page of Talmud bears an uncanny resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross referenced texts and conversations. The promise of the Talmud is that it isn’t a book. It’s a sort of drift net for catching God, stretching out through time and space in ever-widening spools… We became the people of the book because we had no place else to live. The Talmud came along and offered a virtual world for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. (Quoted via http://www.vetssweatshop.net/kalal6.htm)

Is this not what is happening to the world today – when technology and globalizm bring people closer than ever, thus destroying their connection to their homeland? And here is the Internet, a way for cultural groups to stay in touch, wherever they are physically.

All this, however, is much too vague. Significantly more entertaining is the analogy between the Internet and generally accepted supernatural symbols, even if it can be a little silly and far-fetched. For example, the peculiar connection between IT components and the Number of the Beast. While the Internet as a network has been developed by the US military’s research arm and the concept of the World Wide Web belongs to the mind of the recently knighted Brit, sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Net could not exist were it not for Bill Gates and Microsoft’s campaign to put a personal computer on every desk. The richest man in the world possesses the full title of William Henry Gates III. Since computers work with numbers, any alphanumeric character corresponds to an integer. The most widely used table of these relations is ASCII – the American Standard Code for Information Exchange. If we use this table to convert the letters in the name Bill Gates to numbers, and finally add the number 3 (as in Bill Gates the Third), we arrive at 666. This fact is made all the more entertaining by the wording connected to the Number of the Beast – that it shall be imprinted on the forehead and the right hand of the sinners; their minds and their mouse hand, perhaps? There is further proof that Microsoft is in fact the spawn of Satan: the Windows logo forms a swastika in the center of the four jigsaw pieces; and the company’s world headquarters are located in the very beginning of a street called Microsoft Way. Thus the address of the building is in fact “One Microsoft Way”! (Incidentally Microsoft’s nemesis, Apple Computers, is located at “One Infinite Loop”.)

So there is a supernatural influence in the nature of the Internet. How could there not be? Something so fascinating and culturally important will certainly be associated with a higher power, a power people call upon when they feel unable to control their own destiny. Still, in my opinion the Net is only paranormal to the extent that anything so vast and impalpable will be – supernatural, but very human.

Yet Another Formula One Rescue Plan

It seems that everybody these days is coming up with suggestions to make Formula 1 more interesting (despite the 2005 season being an enormous improvement). Now, I'm every bit as opinionated and vocal as the next guy, as I'm sure the regular AnTyx readers - both of you - are well aware. So there is no reason why I can't come up with my own fool-proof plant to save the Grand Prix circuit from boredom.

The ultimate reason why F1 is no fun to watch any more is because there is no overtaking. The little bit that is there, is under braking into a turn, which is certainly the most efficient way, but nowhere near the most scenic one. I haven't been driven to jump out of my chair and yell at the screen since Hakkinen, Schumacher and Zonta went three-wide into a reverse uphill hairpin two laps before the checkered flag, and that was years ago.

There are several factors why this is so, and there are a few things that can be done about it.

For example, the drivers today are pussies. I'm not questioning their talent, mind you; but racing has become extremely technical, with superiority provided by equipment, not by desire. Nigel Mansell was often said to be excellent when his car was behaving itself, but useless when it wasn't; and Michael Schumacher has proven time and time again that he is faster than anyone else on an open track, but nowhere near as hot when he has an actual battle for position on his hands. His little brother, Ralf, had refused to do the Indianapolis race after a crash in qualifying, because the doctors said that if he crashed in the race the same way he did the year before, he might die. If you're not willing to put your life on the line for glory, what the fuck are you doing in the supreme racing series in the first place?Compare this to David Coulthard, a man with balls of titanium, who survived an airplane crash and went on to win that weekend's Grand Prix!

Not that safety isn't important. I'm very impressed by the HANS device, for example. Unfortunately, the FIA has been going about this the wrong way. Their idea is that to make racing more safe, you reduce speed, and to reduce speed, you make the cars handle worse. So they banned active suspension, cut grooves into the tyres, and messed up the cars' aerodynamics. Technology does evolve, so the cars kept getting faster, but we've ended up with a situation where F1 has very safe new race tracks, but very unsafe cars!

Now they're limiting engine technology, cutting them back to eight cylinders and less capacity, etc. They're saying that as well as making things safer, it makes development cheaper for the little guys, the Jordans and the Minardis of the world.This is ridiculous. Formula One has never been about the Jordans and the Minardis; nobody comes to watch them race! They only get ad space because they get in everybody's way often enough to be picked up by the cameras. I say, if they can't cut it - let them die! There is currently an agreement that there cannot be less than 20 cars competing in a season; if the smaller teams die off, the front-runners are obligated to run third cars so the field is filled out. The powers that be are worried that if this starts happening, we will end up with a football match, 11 on 11, BMW vs Mercedes. There is, however, a solution that has worked before. The big F1 players used to have junior teams in Formula 3000, back when it mattered; and we all remember Sauber running last year's Ferrari. Now, Red Bull has apparently bought Minardi. So let every team have a driver farm on the grid, but only one! Allow team tactics (while leaving the radio channels open); farm cars helping out the varsity only makes the spectacle more exciting.

There are two fundamental reasons why overtaking is not popular in today's F1. The first is that, because of regulations on what you can do with the aerodynamics, a car running behind another car is very unstable. The airflow is completely messed up so you may be slipstreaming, but you have no downforce; and this isn't NASCAR, so you do need it for turning. The second is that it's much easier to use pitstop strategy to pass cars. If your opponent pits first, he's going to come out heavy with a full tank of gas, and these days he won't even have the benefit of new tyres. So if you can put in a few great laps, you'll make up enough time to pit and come out in front of him.

So here is my suggestion. Deregulate everything. Bring back full slicks (and for heaven's sakes, make the wheelrims bigger so you can use large brakes!). Bring back active suspension. Bring back traction control, stability control and fully automatic gearboxes. Let the designers do what they will with the aerodynamics. And bring back powerful engines. 3.0 liters naturally aspirated, or 1.5 liters turbocharged, as many cylinders as you want. As many swaps as necessary.

And then, ban pitstops.

These days cars can refuel, but not change the tires. Back in the 90s, they could change the tires but not refuel. Both are possible. The reason active suspension was so useful, was because it compensated for the way handling changed as the car got lighter. If tyre manufacturers are allowed to make slicks, it will be that much easier to get them to last a whole race.

If cars aren't allowed to go into the pits except to change to rain tyres, the drivers are forced to overtake. If you don't have a good starting position, you'll have to fight tooth and nail for each point. And to make sure that things stay interesting, do away with qualifying sessions. Simply use the finishing positions of the last race, and then reverse the grid. Award points for each position, so the losers still have the insentive to go after 19th place instead of 20th, but put the winner in the back. They'll have all the power and downforce they want - now let them show what they are made of!

Sounds radical? It is. But it would work. It would make the racing infinitely more exciting to watch. It would actually make the pack less diverse in their abilities, because if McLaren or Ferrari are off the pace in terms of engineering, they can always throw vast amounts of cash at the problem, which in this industry does actually work. Perhaps most importantly, it would bring unrestricted innovation back to F1, and make it a force to be reckoned with. As opposed to a farce.

In defense of ready products, Part II

The phenomenon of developing functionality in-house against all logic is sometimes compounded with a trendy company believing its own hype.

The thing that Gawker Media has in common with IGN is killer content. I originally started reading Gizmodo because of a link from Penny Arcade. I've submitted a few tips they used (without crediting me, the wankers), and the guy at Jalopnik, Gawker's car department, offered me a contributing spot. You can see the pattern, can't you?

Anyway, the thing about Gawker blogs is that they all run on the same engine - occasionally they will even assimilate an existing blog - and all have something of an identity crisis. They're emergent, so they say they're a blog, but they aren't. Their format is that of a modified news ticker, a digest, and the idea of editorial commentary has been around forever. And until a few months ago, they did not even have comments. Now they do.

Except their comments are an obvious case of Insiderism. (IGN gets to spawn the name because they got there first.) To begin with, you can't just click a button and comment on an article. You can't even sign up for an account. You have to be invited. Now, it was bad enough when Google hyped up their webmail interface by only letting people invite others, but in that case you really did get something different and possibly useful for your effort; plus, invites were always in abundance. These days you can just walk up to any person on the Internet and ask for an invite - chances are they have one to spare. But with Gawker comments, invites are distributed sparingly by the administration. You can pass on your invite if you don't want it, but you aren't given new ones when you sign up. No, Gawker sites are much too precious to let just anyone in!

I got an invite from Jalopnik (although not from the editor himself). It took me a few tries to register, because the central website that Gawker has to maintain comment accounts is unreliable crap. Eventually I completed the process and decided to comment. Except I'd forgot which username I used ('Flasher T' doesn't get parsed well by all registration systems, so I have to use variants). So I clicked the Forgot Password button. Then I clicked it again.

The emails took twenty four fucking hours to arrive, and the Jalopnik guy admitted that it was Gawker's fault. Not to mention the fact that it resets the password instead of just sending it to the user's email.

And then, just to top it off, despite the account website claiming the contrary, my Jalopnik account only works on Jalopnik. Not on Gizmodo or any other Gawker site.

Morons.

In defense of ready products, Part I

Corporate mentality can play cruel tricks on you. Again and again I see Internet projects fall victim to a curious phenomenon - that of developing proprietary functionality where a ready-made solution would be infinitely more appropriate.

Today's Joel article talks about how eBay bought Skype because eBay is a rich company with lots of spare cash but no ability to develop software. He gives credit the eBay MBAs for at least knowing that they're crap at it and buying a ready-made product instead.

Let me tell you a couple of stories where the MBAs didn't get it.

The first is the IGN messageboard system. Now, the thing about IGN is that they have killer content. Their bread and butter is video games, but even when I was introduced to it back in the summer of 2000, they already had sections for all sorts of things. I went to look at Machine, which was in those days run by a chap named Graham Strouse. He was an opinionated bastard, so naturally we hit it off; I commented on his articles a few times, he suggested I try to do a piece for him, and that was my first big journalistic gig that my dad didn't make happen. Strouse eventually quit and I ran IGN Machine for a while until I got pissed off at the guy in charge of it at the company. I'm forever grateful to G. for providing the first outside verification that I was actually good at this stuff (despite all the self-deprication, I am a writer and thus live for approval), but that's not really important right now. What's important is that I found my way to the IGN car board, and hung around.

Back in those days, the board software was weird but acceptable. It did have the feature of showing unread topics in bold and read ones in plain, which was impressive. This was the era of hierarchy-tree discussion groups, the mentality of which was carried over from Usenet directly (you can still this today in LiveJournal comments). Thanks to the killer content - not the Machine stuff, as much as I would like to think so, but the games stuff that brought people to the website - the boards were vibrant. An excellent community developed, and it was a great place to be.

Then, IGN came up with Insider.

Nowadays Insider only gives you an avatar and the ability to use tags. But when they introduced it, Insider was what gave you access to the boards. If you didn't pay, you couldn't go past the one messageboard they left open. This was infuriating. Fortunately, the Car board community got together, and we started our own place. It was called forcarenthusiasts.com, or FCE for short. The guy who ran it went through a few messageboard software packages, eventually settling on Invision.

And you know what? It was awesome. Invision is at this point the default choice forum software. It's a snap to install and set up, and it just works. It has avatars, post uploads, statistics, moderator functionality, basically anything and everything you could want. It's customizable - I've seen a hugely modified board based around Invision - and free.

And the IGN boards? Well, they still show unread topics in bold. Unfortunately, they were thrown together in a hurry some time before Y2K, and the company is unwilling to either overhaul the system or kill it in favor of something like Invision. It doesn't even have emoticon recognition, for god's sake; it will parse the standard smiley face and the winking face, but if you want something more complicated, you need to enter the tag. And it's not a simple tag like :rolleyes:, which is what every InvisionBoard user is familiar with, it's a monstrocity like [face_rolleyes]. Until very recently, you couldn't click on anything to insert a smiley face. No, you had to go to the Help files, find the right page (a non-trivial excercise), look for the smiley you want, and then type in the tag that matched it. This was also true for the simplest text formatting - bold, italic, underline, hyperlinks, image insert (Insider only!) and everything else was tag-based. You couldn't even quote a post - somebody built a special plugin for Firefox, just to be able to quote on the IGN boards!

They've added a formatting bar now, but it is a very obvious and painful hack thrown on top of an antiquated system. And, of course, it doesn't work in Opera.

Morons.

Join me in Part II, where the nice folks from Gawker are the morons.