This customer owns a Carbon X Thinkpad, was thinking of adding a Carbon X Yoga to the team, but now will not. There are some reasons I might go for a slight increase in weight and thickness - maybe longer battery life, the ability to cram in more RAM, a better camera, better cooling - but just a switch to a cheaper…

I am an old guy. I had a choice between Angela Merkel and Sophia Loren. I chose Sophia.I loved and miss that leather smell, wish it was available as a touchup spray. I didn’t like the redesign that made the back seats more roomy, especially for the Chinese market. Mine is afflicted with the Italian “stick plastic”…

I regularly changed my Silverado HD Duramax every two years, but then paused. Now I am back in the market, but I can’t bring myself to purchase one of these new ones. I don’t care so much about the looks. I find the new Silverado and Sierra 1500s to be like dungeons inside, with poor visibility, poor use of the…

I don’t mind too big and too ugly. What I mind is that no manufacturer, especially Toyota and Nissan, is willing to take the gamble and come out with a competent truck that does not mimic the best sellers in looks.  How many trucks do you need to sell before the line becomes profitable?  I just read an old article…

I thought, at least predictions seemed to say, that in the future manufacturing will be much more flexible and computerized, allowing more individual and personal design of products. We are far from that with pickup trucks. The Big Three are stumbling over themselves seeking how to make the biggest trucks with the…

It really is unpleasant when you get displaced because a road is going to be built, but that is life. Getting displaced, forced to sell, when a government decides that the private property you own should be in the hands of another private part, that is unacceptable. Another example of the evils of all powerful…

That is too pessimistic. I am sure there will be room for a Starbucks or two.

Most of those same technologies could have been applied to a small V6 and the result would be smoother and less stressed, would it not? Electric water pump, for example.

I have a newer QP with the ZF transmission, with about the same mileage. I have had great luck with reliability, but yes, maintenance costs more for just about any issue you pick.  A fair price would be about half the asking price.  Or maybe I should say the wholesale price would be about half the asking price, that…

I once owned a Saab, the first car I bought on my own. It was horrible. “Designed for Swedish winters” but a failure for conditions in New Jersey. Full of “safety features”, one of which was a strong spring on the gas pedal that made it difficult to keep it floored, which is what one had to do on a long trip.…

Teens should not be allowed to buy guns, that is supposed to save lives, and we see demonstrations by young people supporting that idea. Far more lives would be saved if teens were not allowed to own or drive cars of any power. You don’t see too many demos by young people promoting that idea.

You see plants eaten all the time, and you just stand back and do nothing to stop the practice?

Vegetables don’t want to be eaten, and their defense is to poison the attacker. That means that if we want to be healthy we should only eat fruit. Fruits want to be eaten, so that the eaters throw out or excrete the seeds and help spread the plants.  There should be laws against the eating of vegetables, or at the…

How does a country become wealthy? Wealthy enough to do all the fine things you want a government to do? It is not from resources - Russia, Brazil, countries in Africa are resource rich but do not have the wealth of the US or Northern European countries. Some of those “wealthy” European countries that are so proud of…

You can be forced to donate through taxation, but if that happens the individual taxpayer misses the reward, the sense of doing good, the self respect, the peace that comes from voluntarily giving money away. It is a good feeling to donate. Try it. It is not a good feeling to pay taxes - very few people pay more taxes…

Yet billions more people in the world are living better lives than at any time before in the history of the world with humans in it.

I once read a story by a once homeless guy who said that there are small steps one could take to help many. His example was “hot showers”, and if I recall he set up free hot showers, with soap and shampoo.  For him, he claimed a great psychological boost in having a hot shower, he felt more like a human being.

The problem with giving money to someone and letting them decide how to spend it is that if they spend it foolishly and end up in the same circumstances they were in before they had it, they once again need the charity. We don’t have the will or inclination to say “Okay you piddled away what I gave you on drugs and…

One of the problems is that the main stream people have in their minds how people ought to live, while the typical homeless person is quite willing to put up with less. In one town I lived in the city decided to crack down on substandard housing and forced a lot housing to close up. So instead of sleeping in what to…

Nonsense.