Yes, best-selling statistics are cut up and made up by the manufacturers to make them look good. The truck sales figures do mean exactly as little as I imply. Ford can claim best-selling all they want, but if GM is selling more, then yes, GM is selling more. The powers that be you speak of are marketing departments.

The only relevant statistic is the two cars combined...they’re marketing distributions between Subaru and Toyota. That said, the only car that may outsell the two this year in the category is the Miata, and that’s comparing a brand new car against a four year old one.

Half of them are just fawning...the R-package and the color cars weren’t limited production.

Laugh if you must, but the thing with all these limited editions is that Subaru (and Scion, who set the precedent) sells every single one. If you need a reminder that enthusiasts don’t dictate the market, it’s that Subaru will make hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit on yellow contrast stitching.

It happened with 90s Toyotas, too. I was getting my Celica in high school inspected, and after I gave him the key, he ran back to me and asked “is yours the Celica, or the Camry? They’re both 91s...and the key starts both of them.” I don’t know whether this was key codes or lock cylinder wear, the car was at least 13…

Zero evidence? Type “Florida” into Youtube.

Western Sky pretty much was illegal due to usury laws in most states. They skirted these laws by being incorporated on tribal land.

Especially considering this story is about a contractor, does Angie’s List work any better? Same basic principle as Yelp, with a paywall to enforce identity and honesty.

Laugh all you want, but a 5hp difference (or more likely the 5 ft-lb difference) is likely accompanied by engine tuning that will eliminate or at least moderate the dreaded “torque dip” and likely make the new car feel a lot more lively. For those who want a lightweight sports car, all this improvement, bigger numbers…

Yeah, I replied elsewhere, but in short, I’m a researcher and “day traders” will pull loads of facts out to support their already-made purchase that I now don’t have to go find myself. I follow energy and automotive, and the energy flamewars are just as interesting as the auto ones.

To be fair, the only reason I brought up Seeking Alpha is that they will post things from contributors on both sides of an issue. I get updates in my inbox and the TSLA updates are like flame war smoke signals visible from miles and miles away. Investors are very good at collecting data to support their purchases ex…

Also worth noting the core authors at Zero Hedge are little more than self-interested capitalists, and mostly gin up the “conspiracy” edge of their posts for clickbait rather than any actual belief in what they’re saying.

Dear Toyota,

On one hand, COBOL’s most recent codebase is only two years old (COBOL 2014). On the other hand, COBOL was a major contributor to the existence of the Y2K bug.

Old-school programming is big business. A fraternity brother of mine is in the process of getting his Physics PhD, but while he was in undergrad he was coding in FORTRAN to do modeling on the school’s supercomputing bank. There were a few summers where he found out how badly some employers needed FORTRAN programmers...

And then the turbo blows, your tuner seduces you into another $2000 of mods, all of a sudden you need a racing clutch and the ride, noise and clutch effort are all intolerable.

Ugh...at least banks still have IBM to bleed them dry support them.

I followed up with the posting (from last October), and it’s been filled internally by someone at JPL. Still, all of their developers are getting older, and they anticipated that there may be another vacancy in a year or two.

2 MPG among the AWD models is a 10% improvement in fuel economy. That same range in midsize sedans brings you from number one (32 mpg) to number fifteen (29 mpg). It also saves you 50% more money in fuel than the aforementioned midsize sedan jump.

My experience in healthcare IT was consulting for a firm that made a big chunk of money still selling and maintaining machines running very old codebases, and they weren’t the only ones- Meditech made their last major codebase revision in 1982, as an example.