"Foreign" cars get vandalized in detroit area

MacGuffin said:
I can confirm that Texas in the summer is something.

I mean I have been to the South of Spain and it was very hot there - but at least it cooled down over night. Doesn't happen in Texas. At 3 am you still have 35? C outside and the air is so thick you can cut it with a knife. One has to admire the people who do roadworks there.
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Quasi-related trivia: There are over one hundred lakes in Texas, most of which are very, very large. Only one is natural. The rest we built ourselves, because wished to have lakes. (Both for drinking water and to have some place to go swimming and escape the heat in the summer.)

Don't wanna know about the energy costs, though, since inside you always hat 18? C, no matter if you were in a motel, a supermarket or in a factory building made of 1/2 inch thick corrugated sheet iron, with the sun shining through at the bottom...
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This is why Texas is a big supporter of nuclear power. Our nuclear power plants kept the price of that climate control down for a *very* long time until the demand caused by the growing population exceeded their supply abilities. We've been wanting to build more for years, but the idiot Feds kept saying no.

We also have giant wind farms going up all over the place in West Texas. It's not like we care what it looks like out there (the surface of the Moon looks more hospitable than West Texas) and we weren't going to do anything else with it anyway.

GRtak said:
That is in Detroit, I am much closer to Flint, Michigan where my thermometer reads 12.1 degrees fahrneheit and I am still down south in Michigan.
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I was going city to city, but the Amarillo airport is reporting 10 degrees this morning, as is McLean, TX.

Dogbert said:
I can't be optimistic about the "AMERICUH! FUCK YEA!" people who will buy anything so long as it has an American flag on it, but the current situation with GM symbolizes that it's management has finally broken down and the Unions have finally broken down, but more importantly, the enabling has finally broken down. People are starting to expect more out of cars than <anything describing that Impala SS> for their money, and GM has no answer for them.
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The sad part is that they completely missed the point about how to save money while building a car that doesn't look, feel, or sound cheap. Jaguar was a past master of this - they were a great bargain back in the day for the class, and (in terms of the interior) they did it by not skimping on anything you could touch, see, or hear. However, everything *under* those surfaces was a different story. You know how GM paints all their stuff under the dashboard (such as the dash supports) and then radiuses everything so they have a nicely rounded edge? Jaguar didn't bother. They just deburred the parts, took just enough off the edges to keep them from being injurious to mechanics, and often just had them industrial cadmium plated, then threw them in the car. They cost half as much to make as the GM dash supports, nobody's *ever* going to see them, so why should you care what they look like?

IIRC, Jaguar made *more* profit, per car, than Cadillac did back in the early to mid 80s.

On top of that, Jaguar *may* have been responsible for some of the cheeseparing that went on at BMC/BL after they got bought. When the BMC execs came to Jaguar to see what they were paying for parts, they got a nasty surprise. Jaguar had been paying less for the exact same bolts, nuts, etc., that the other BMC brands were using; sometimes as little as 1/3rd the price. Sir William was a sharp negotiator; he'd managed to knock down all his suppliers as far as they could go on the price, and then brought it down more by promising multiyear contracts for the parts and thereby cranking the volumes purchased way up, as opposed to the piecemeal buys of BMC. Apparently, BMC and later BL took this as a personal affront and spent the next 20-some years trying to chop prices down.
 
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nouseferaname90 said:
How the hell did everyone manage to diverge from the topic this much?
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Because there's very little you can talk about when the topic is "assholes keying cars". You get a page of everyone going "what a dickbag" and then talking about related, more interesting things.
 
Spectre said:
This is why Texas is a big supporter of nuclear power. Our nuclear power plants kept the price of that climate control down for a *very* long time until the demand caused by the growing population exceeded their supply abilities. We've been wanting to build more for years, but the idiot Feds kept saying no.

We also have giant wind farms going up all over the place in West Texas. It's not like we care what it looks like out there (the surface of the Moon looks more hospitable than West Texas) and we weren't going to do anything else with it anyway.
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Has it ever occured to you, that saving energy might also be a way, for example by better isolation of houses and buildings?

But maybe I am unfair now, and in the 16 years since I have been there, air conditions do only work for the inside now and not also for the outside? :)

By the way: Which lake is natural?
 
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MacGuffin said:
Has it ever occured to you, that saving energy might also be a way, for example by better isolation of houses and buildings?
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Well they can't really build down into the ground, the water table is too high. That would help at least. But have you seen how we build most houses here? It's amazing the suburbs don't collapse, forget wasting AC. :lol:


... What was the topic again? Oh yeah. Damned UAW. Etc, etc.
 
I never liked the way many people around here (Michigan) dislike or distrust imports. The thing is that there has to be 10s, maybe even 100s of good reasons to drive Detroit metal when in and around Detroit, but none of it has to do with any of the politics or moral highs that people have been making it into since the Japanese started taking over.
 
I've always found it weird how Detriotians (pronounced Deh-troy-shuns :p) have a "home team hardon" when it comes to domestic autos, too. This would be like if I only drank milk with rBGH and only bought drinks with aspartame because Monsanto's headquarters is 2 miles from my apartment and I want to "buy local and support America".
 
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MacGuffin said:
Has it ever occured to you, that saving energy might also be a way, for example by better isolation of houses and buildings?

But maybe I am unfair now, and in the 16 years since I have been there, air conditions do only work for the inside now and not also for the outside? :)

By the way: Which lake is natural?
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Well, when energy prices started rising, people paid more attention to insulation. That said, there are some situations where you can't insulate the building economically and yeah, people still aircondition the outside in that case. That's getting more and more rare though.

The one natural lake in Texas is Caddo Lake.
 
Spectre said:
Well, when energy prices started rising, people paid more attention to insulation. That said, there are some situations where you can't insulate the building economically and yeah, people still aircondition the outside in that case. That's getting more and more rare though.
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Wait, wait.

You can air-condition the outside?

What is this miracle?
 
teeb said:
Wait, wait.

You can air-condition the outside?

What is this miracle?
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They do it a lot in Tokyo etc, actually; open-front businesses will just turbocharge cool air into the walkway. Spectre was actually talking about poorly insulated buildings, e.g. my apartment building, where my HVAC has to run constantly to try and maintain a 900ft? apt at 70? when it's 15? outside (like yesterday, until I caved and turned it down to 67?). I'm pretty sure I'm just melting all the snow on my patio outside my giant ventsliding door. </rant>


I hate that the morans guy is wearing a Cardinals shirt... :wall:
 
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