@catseye3 said in The Car-buying thread on Reddit: @klaus said in The Car-buying thread on Reddit: I bought a few new cars, but I bought them online, with no negotiations about anything. They offer a prize X for a specified car and I pay X or don't buy the car. Very simple and transparent. That's how I want to conduct business. There's no reason why buying a car has to be more complicated than ordering a USB cable on Amazon. Klaus, I love this. Bookmarking it for when I'm ready to go that route. I take it various extras are offered for X extra, so you can build your package? Yes on heater, no on AC and so on? Yes. Germans are quite obsessive when it comes to configuring their cars. I understand that in the US one mostly selects an engine and a color and maybe has a selection of three extra features and that's it. Over here, people want to configure basically every screw. For instance, I read recently that of the millions of E class Mercedes that were sold in Germany, they have never sold the same configuration twice (except for a few mass orders from companies). One peculiar aspect of car buying here is the "EU reimport". It turns out that it is often cheaper to buy a car in another EU country and reimport them (because for reasons I don't understand every country has different prices). I've already bought two "EU reimports" (there are dealers who specialize in these kinds of transactions and it will all be online).

@lufins-dad said in 18th International Chopin Competition: I think Ms. Kobayashi deserved a bit higher of a placement… Have Kirk reprogram it

@jolly said in The Quiet Recession: @axtremus said in The Quiet Recession: Suppose you believe that we are already in a recession, what do you think the government should do about it, if anything? Normally, the government would lower interest rates, trying to kick the economy in gear. But we're almost as low as we can go... OK, sounds reasonable; since the good 'ole interest rate probably cannot go much lower, what else do you think the government should do about it, if anything?

@george-k said in $600 plan is dead, but.....: @jolly said in $600 plan is dead, but.....: I still tip in cash. To the server. I try to. However, what happens to the kitchen staff, the busboys bus-staff, the maitre'd? Depends on the place. Kitchen staff almost always gets bupkis. Busboys get paid out by servers at the end of the night, or the restaurant pulls it from the waiters' tips.

The moon was almost full last night and gorgeous.

@catseye3 said in More bad white people: However, when you live above the game, the game does not exist Similarly, when you live above the pub, the pub does not exist.

The election was stolen! https://twitter.com/mkhammer/status/1450616831547424768?s=20

@jolly said in The death of Sears, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney: @aqua-letifer said in The death of Sears, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney: This doesn't bode well for boomers' desires to call Millennials a bunch of pansy-ass whiners. Millenials aren't all pansy-ass whiners. Only the ones that post on internet forums are... So only the IT professionals?

@lufins-dad said in Who killed the Red delicous?: Honeycrisp is not in the middle row. You're right. I had the chart positioned so part of it was cut off when I wrote that.

@aqua-letifer said in What a rag: No Linux, though. Never Linux. Linux has Autocleaning.

@george-k said in Bachelor's degree: One of the courses under "activism" is an internship. We can guess what that means, however. Unmasking Trotskyists? Denouncing wreckers in the workplace? Volunteering to work on a farm? Learning to play piano works by Tikhon Khrennikov?

@george-k floating around medical twitter

Oak has a little bite, hence the crab apple. It's pecan season right now, which means a couple of things: Hulls are free or dirt cheap. Soaked pecan hulls make good smoke. If the pecans are falling, that means the hickory nuts are falling in the woods. Those are free, of course.

@doctor-phibes ... "Pengwen...." LOL.