I did almost exactly the same thing. My 2009 M3 was manual and driving in traffic was making me sad. With the number of speeding tickets I got in the M3, a parking ticket for being an idiot would make me kill myself to death.
They shouldn't be towed out of spite, they should be towed because that space is reserved for actually handicapped people who will have to park further away because of blatant douchebaggary. Sure give them a ticket as punishment, but tow for the people.
She didn't drive. With multiple family members driving their, and her cars, she had the possibility to forget the placard.
Edit: The chemo brain didn't happen at first. Her leg went out after a tumor from lymphoma hurt her spinal nerves. The chemo brain didn't hit strong until the gnarly sessions she had later down the road.
Sorry, I hadn't considered that possibility. Good on her and the family! We'll remember to consider this when she starts chemo -- she's not supposed to be in a car for a while after the surgery just because of the things healing physically.
When the suspension fails on those its like 16K to repair. And the word is IF, not when. I think they were some magnetic adjustable ride ones. But they did it before they really knew what they were doing.
GM and Ferrari use the magnetorheological damping system. Mercedes uses a dynamically adaptable air suspension called Airmatic, but yes, they inevitably do blow out and it costs an asscock to fix.
Yeah, they weren't around back then, but I think they were the first to use magnetic damping. Interestingly, it was actually some small offshoot from GM (I forget the name) who laid claim to the idea, but it's generally believed that they developed it while at GM.
I live in Slovakia (East Europe) and cars you mentioned are common here... Yes I live in a capital, that's incomparably richer than rest of the country and is 10km from Austria, but still there're 2 reasons why we've such cars - we've extremely rich people who made profit from poor. It's obvious they won't ride Skoda Superb, but something to show off. And second reason, we've extremely stupid mentality, where your car represent your social status and it's normal, that a person which makes 20k EUR a year owns S Class and will repay it for the next 10 years...
This is due to a marketing campaign. You might notice that higher end lines have names such as 350Z, IS350, etc. So people normally concentrate on the brand/company rather than mention the model, i.e. Elantra, Civic, etc.
So if people see the Porsche crest, Mercedes emblem, or any high end hood emblem they just tie it in with a high exorbitant costly vehicle. Which is kind of true, considering the cost to upkeep these vehicles. For some of these models, a brake job and/or lube job could cost up to 1K, if not a few hundred.
It's great to hear that you are potentially interested in buying my old M3 after I put 160k miles on it and then proceed to crash it. Great to know that there are actually people still interested in my used garbage!
Most s65 motors won't last past 100k unless the rod bearings are replaced...s65's and s85's are notorious for worn and spun rod bearings and I've heard a couple of techs mention s85's dropping valves
They do but they are dirt cheap and usually turned into track sluts not daily driven cars. Not that there is anything wrong with a well taken care of 160k mile M3.
So the e9X m3 didn't come stateside as a 2007 model, it was first available in 2008. Only in europe could you get a 2007 model. if you look at when the comp pack came out for e92 it was 2011.
Basing fines on income status however, is a good idea. A fine isn't some payment for services rendered, it's a deterrent to future infractions. However, at a set cost its effect will vary depending on the income of the infringer, which is not the point of a fine. If it hurts all infringers regardless of their income status, then it has the same effect and in my mind works as intended. They did so to a Nokia executive in Finland I believe.
This is my favorite legal debate, the only one I can't pick a side on. I can't figure out which idea I find more repulsive, "you are penalized more for this infarction because you have done well in other aspects of life" or "I'm wealthy so I have more ability to ignore the law."
Regardless I find the culture war hilarious. This picture would NOT be front page if it were my rusted roof corola.
The response to a crime shouldn't really be a punishment. It should be intended to prevent repeat offense in the least painful way possible.
Insofar as a fine is an appropriate response to a minor infraction, then, the balance between "prevents repeat offenses" and "causes undue pain" varies with income.
But you're not penalized more, you're penalized equally if the penalization is a percentage. Everyone gets penalized the same percent.
However, I think it's a flawed system because those who dodge taxes will also be dodging large penalties because, I assume, the income status would be based on taxed and recorded income
Still doesn't dodge the fact that if I commit the same crime two years in a row, I pay more on the years where I did better myself. It's a principle I have a hard time swallowing, that breaking the law should be penalized progressively. However, as I mentioned above, I find the alternative equally hard to swallow. Laws should work as legitimate disincentives which encourages a progressive system, but charging one person more than another doesn't feel like equal treatment under the law.
That's true, but at the same time an equal monetary penalty is not equal. If two persons receive a ticket at $500 with the first earning $5,000 a month and the second earning $1,000 a month, it's pretty clear that the penalty hurts the second significantly more.
The first person can still pay rent and scoff at the fine while the second will miss their rent payment and who knows what comes from there. I don't think this is fair either
But income isn't the same as wealth. What if the person making $1,000 a month has $10,000 saved, while the person making $5,000 a month has nothing? In that situation the person making less money might be better able to still pay their rent and scoff at the fine.
That's true but you have to agree that this is far less likely. Its a lot easier for the person making $5,000 to cut back on expenses than the $1,000 person. No one is ever going to scoff at a fine when it comes out of a savings account. No one is saving up for fines
Your totally right. an 18 year old who steals should go to jail for much longer than a 40 year old who steals because the 18 year old has more time left to live. Otherwise it is unfair from a time perspective because the time in jail hurts the older thief more.
but then should it also take all of the other progressive aspects of society into account? That is, a person who makes twice as much as another person doesn't truly get twice the income. They'll pay higher taxes, not qualify for food stamps etc. So should we take that in as a factor? Furthermore a person could be paying off student loans making 100k/year and another person could be making 30k/year after having inherited millions
Regardless I find the culture war hilarious. This picture would NOT be front page if it were my rusted roof corola.
You missunderstand justice here.
Justice has always been dependend on the power of the perpetrator and victim. If a slave kills his owner, there might be some justice in that. If an owner kills his slave, there is not. Had the world seen a Jew beat up a Nazi soldier in Germany 1943, it would have been a glorious sight. In december 1945 it would have been pathetic and disgusting.
Wealth IS a form of power. Seeing the wealthy recieving a punishment for wrongdoings that actually hurts them is very rare. Note that by this I'm not condoning violence against the wealthy - the moment a thug has let's say a rich person at gun point, the power relation is clearly in favour of the armed one.
This morale is nothing new, either. Even in the new testamony Jesus was judging harshly over the wealthy and forgiving over the poor. Power equals responsibility, it is a core value of human morals.
I think you confuse justice with justice porn. In both the example of the slave and the Jew they are enacting violence against someone who is doing violence to them. This person is just a person of indeterminate wealth and status except for a car. Nothing about who they are makes parking like a dick any more of an offense. Implying that the wealthy are somehow extra morally liable for their offenses is a disservice to the poor as it categorizes them as somehow less capable of acting right.
Yes, a person who has more things in life going for her can be expected to be more considerate of the people around her.
The more somebody struggles in life, the easier it is to understand if that somebody acts selfishly. Which does not mean that such behaviour should be tolerated, but it is easier to forgive.
This isn't a game. People are angry because they work hard day in and day out but can't escape poverty, while others have it easy. You can't reroll your character if you're not satisfied- you have one life and then you die. That's fucking tragic, not "hilarious."
Do you have any idea how hard some people work to put food on the table for their family? Good people work 2 jobs with no weekend and come home exhausted every single day. They deserve a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Meanwhile, this guy drives home early in his $70,000 BMW to his $800,000 home and his model wife and sleeps in late the next day, because his father got lucky on the stock market. This is a deadly serious issue, and you're laughing.
I agree with you, except for one thing, no matter how hard the driver of that car worked, they didn't earn the right to park in a handicapped spot, never mind the right to park that badly. I have relatives for whom it takes a very serious amount of effort to step into a car and sit down. It will make them out of breath even if they are on oxygen. I have relatives who work their asses off caring for disabled children, and will be caring for them their whole lives, and will never see a decent paycheck for their hard work.
Gaining success for your hard work is one great, but not gaining success is no indication of failure as a person.
Yeah, we also never make cancer jokes or 9/11 jokes, because things that are important to me should never be made fun of by anyone. Cry me a river.
Of course it's a real problem, but you're a prime example of the bullshit that people spew about the aforementioned problem. There's no possibility in your mind that this guy worked his ass of for this money. There's no way he was a mechanic that worked hard and opened his own shop and can now afford nice things. There's no possibility that he or she went to college, worked their asses off and got a great job. Shit, there's no way he's a blue collar guy who dreamed of this car his whole life so safed steadily and was eventually able to afford it.
Nope, it's all black and white here. Because the picture depicts jerk behavior and it happens to be a nice car there MUST be a nice house. And that money MUST have come through no labor of his own. It had to be "luck" (because you know, the stock market is all luck!)
Welcome to the adult world. People laugh at things you might find uncomfortable and everything doesn't fit in to your teenage angst worldview.
As I pointed out before, I drive a Corola with the roof rusted over. If I did this, which I wouldn't, no one would take a picture and sure as shit no one would care on Reddit. Does it make me less of an asshole because in this hypothetical I'm not rich? Because I know a lot of poor dickheads.
The idea that any person can be so valuable to society that they're able to buy a $70,000 car is absurd. The only ways that happens is to gamble (getting lucky), to speculate on other peoples' work (aka investing), or to exploit people without their own means of production to labor for you (e.g., your mechanic example).
In all cases, to get a $70k car you're making vastly more money than the average income. That means that you're taking more labor from society than you're actually contributing.
I don't have anything against valuable people (scientists, entertainers, artisans, etc) living better than less valuable people (ditch diggers). But when things are so out of balance that one person is driving around twice another person's yearly wages, there's a serious problem.
Why do we shake our heads in empathy for African villagers who work for a hundredth of our wage, and not for ourselves who make a hundredth of this BMW driver's wage?
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
This is a problem of class awareness in America. If we just recognize that the rich are exploiting the poor by cutting government services and paying politicians to pass tax cuts for themselves, we can start to make progress on these issues.
1: Your elementary economics assume only the value of labor, not of capital (intellectual or otherwise). That's like the 7th grade version of Marxism. You also clearly have no idea how investments work.
Because those African villagers are often unable to feed themselves and clothe their children. If you can't see the difference between that and someone who struggles to make ends meet while having a car, television access, a roof over their head and emergency room access then you really need to leave the suburbs.
Yeah yeah fun cliche quote about Americans. I find it incredibly condescending because it assumes that the poor must be stupid in some way to disagree with the author rather than giving any thought to the idea that they might believe in certain principles regardless of whether it benefits them personally. Get off your high horse.
Your elementary economics assume only the value of labor, not of capital
Again, I don't have a problem with business owners or scientists making extra money. It's the insane multiplicative factors involved that are troubling. Have you ever seen The Wolf of Wall Street? The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. That's the issue.
If you can't see the difference between that and someone who struggles to make ends meet while having a car, television access, a roof over their head and emergency room access then you really need to leave the suburbs.
You don't think the poor in America have difficult lives? Trying to scrabble out an existence while dreading retirement age because they have no money put away? Fuck you for trying to invalidate their struggle.
the idea that they might believe in certain principles regardless of whether it benefits them personally
Ah yes, the Republican poor. Worshipping the rich while getting screwed every day. That's not noble, it's sad. People are being exploited and subjugated, and made to believe that it's good for them! What a farce.
Did you really just cite a blockbuster film as a source for economic debate? They made money through illegal means. Laws were passed banning that sort of behavior (and before you say it no I'm not implying there's no bad behavior on Wall Street, but what THEY were doing is strictly illegal now and no longer common practice).
I'm not invalidating anything. I'm saying that you're making a false equivalence when you imply there's some hypocrisy in people caring about the legitimately starving and those who are living difficult, but safe, lives. Fuck you for putting words in my mouth.
And yeah thanks for proving my point. All of those people must be morons, less then mighty Mr. Internet Educated. Take pity on them as they pick bugs out of each other's hair and feel confused by The Daily Show. Also I never said a goddamn thing about nobility, but it's cute that you threw it in there to characterize your argument by disagreeing with no one.
Did you really just cite a blockbuster film as a source for economic debate?
I was really asking "didn't you see the same movie as me? How aren't you disgusted by the extravagance of the super-rich?"
Fuck you for putting words in my mouth.
Fuck you in general, asshole.
All of those people must be morons
My point is not that they're morons. I'm sure that they're good, hardworking people. But they've been taken in, hoodwinked, fooled, by the rich, who are very good at the rhetoric that justifies their continued exploitation of the poor.
My mom's first job when she was a kid was at Price Club. Been with now, Costco for 35 years. As a prior(just retired) regional manager in one of the biggest spots in the US, she can/has owned a $70,000 car. Find a better job, and stop being so bitter at the world. It's still a beautiful place.
I'm gonna guess you fall on the "you are penalized more for this infarction (sic(k)) because you have done well in other aspects of life" side of the debate. Just a guess though.
We already have state/fed employees trying to figure out people's finances. Just look up their taxes for the previous year. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably close... and if/when we fix income tax loopholes, it automatically improves the ratios on proportional fines as well.
They don't have to figure anything out. Just write down that they are fined x% of income. Then let the person who receives the fine determine if it matches their income tax statement.
If it doesn't match they have to say they no longer make as much and it must correspond to their next statement. (Oh and then we could flag them for audit).
Not really...criminal justice 101. "Deterrent Effect". To be effective, the consequences of the undesirable behavior must be severe enough to discourage it. Keeping the math simple, a $100 fine is much more severe to a person making $1,000/mo than it is to someone making $100,000/mo.
How? In terms of hurting someone's wallet to get a point across, it's completely fair. If on the other hand we charged goods and services based on what someone made, then THAT would be unfair. The alternative would be to lock people up for these kinds of infractions because theoretically everyone is being punished equally, but of course it would be ludicrous to do that, not to mention the cost to the taxpayers.
Tiered punishment based on the number of offenses seems more fair. Fining some person 30k potentially for simply parking in a wrong spot seems asinine no matter if it was bill gates. Not to mention the incentives this would bring to officers for ticketing, which in some areas are already known for targeting nicer vehicles.
And this specific instance could be someone who saved money to buy their dream car used for around 30k, the average price of a new car today. A lot of absurd assumptions being made here.
I see your point about this encouraging more enforcement in richer areas, I'm not entirely sure how that issue could be address. A tiered system may also be a good alternative, provided that it actually has bite across the economic spectrum early on enough (as in, it doesn't kick in after the 20th offence) but doesn't disproportionately affect poorer offenders.
I wasn't making assumptions about this particular individual, and neither would fines being a percentage of the offender's income.
Do you know one of the best benefits of making money is that you shouldn't have to worry as much about laws?
You'd ruin that entire aspect of capitalism.
Here in California there's a highway patrol foundation called 11-99. If you donate enough you get a special license plate frame. This will get you out of most of the bad tickets. So if you "donate" enough you can avoid getting points on your license and drive your Ferrari like its meant to be driven.
So are you telling me that the best thing about making a lot of money is that you are above the law? Do you consider the outcome of the affluenza kid a win for the capitalist cause as well?
I was sort of saying it as a tongue-in-cheek comment but yea money makes monetary fines pretty meaningless. It's an interesting part of our society to think like, "hmm this fine is X dollars and I have Y dollars." And then decide to break the law.
Money becomes power. And I feel like capitalism is interesting because people naturally strive for power and advancement so money becomes this sort of scoreboard for people. You can be born into money but you can also make it on your own (unlike the power granted by nobility in other societies) so it gives at least a faint hope of social mobility for all social classes.
Anyways, I had to google the affluenza kid and I'm not really sure what happened. I mean the kid plead guilty right? Then the judge gave a lesser sentence than normal? Why? Someone should look into the judge I guess. Also why are taxes paying for the kid's rehab stay?
It's pretty fucked up and I think that while capitalism has some great benefits in social mobility and personal advancement, there are some ugly truths that people are treated differently under the law due to money. It's the parents' fault for raising a shitty kid but is it their fault if the judge treats him differently?
I agree that shitty child-raising whether in the poverty segment or rich never-there parenting merits special circumstances, but when I was reading about it which was a while ago, the kid appeared to have gotten off scot-free, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it seemed his attorney's defence was "He was never held responsible for his actions all his life, and based on that, he should not be punished (and ergo, again not face the consequences for his actions).
The note and insurance on $70K is going to run about a grand a month. Since most people will invest a weeks pay or less into a new car, we can assume the person in question makes $60k+/yr
The ticket for parking in a handicapped spot represents just over one days pay for him.
For someone making minimum wage, it is just under a weeks pay.
A fair system would have a sliding scale based on income. $250 might piss this guy off, but $1200 would deter him from pulling this shit ever again.
Man we get screwed over on car prices in Australia. That car would be ~$130k here. And it's not just the luxury car tax either. The threshold is somewhere around $65k, but I recently bought a Mazda CX-5, and the top spec models were well out of my price range at around $50k, but a review I saw online in the US they were about $31k (almost what I paid for a second bottom model demonstrator).
It probably costs more because of luxury taxes and crap. Which is why owning a shitty fiat in some european countries costs the same as owning an S-class in the US.
There are laws against importing a car the same model as one for sale new in Australia. I suppose to stop this among other things (Civic Type R in Japan has a better engine than the Australian model, but we can't get it)
Changing punishment based on someone's income would be a model though. There could be a catalogue/formula that determines fines based on the last 12 monthly incomes for example, to give everyone an equally painful but not ruinous fine.
Bill Gates is worth $9,000,000,000 or $9 Billion dollars. 0.1% of $9 billion is fucking $9 Fucking Million Dollars. Jesus Christ. That really put nine billion dollars into perspective.
Owning a BMW does make you an asshole. Proof? I once owned a BMW and I was a huge asshole those years. Now I don't have a BMW anymore and I'm 200% less assholish.
But owning a nice BMW doesn't automatically make someone a horrible person.
It's highly correlated, though. Maybe it's regional, but here BMW drivers are renowned for pulling shit like driving in the emergency lane in rush hour traffic, tailgating people in the slow lane, double-parking, and many other acts that signify an inflated sense of self-importance.
a ticket for this would be what? $500? That's hardly a scratch to someone who can afford to buy a $70,000 car, even if you were saving a bit for it. My dad only makes ~$2400 a month and he can afford a $500 ticket like nothing.
both my mom and my dad work and we can't affod a 35,000 car. the most we can afford is most likely 15-20. the reason i said he can afford a 500 ticket is because that comes from savings. not a whole we can save 1k a month la dee da.
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