economics: Germany

NeoCon, actually.

mike

How's this for MLC?

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/A3a.jpg

It's only 250 HP, but it's light, so if the surface is anything like wet or snowy or gritty, pretty much everybody else gets left in, literally, my dust.

John

Looks like a fairy car to me ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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By which you mean that he shares you superficial and ill-founded opinions.

I couldn't comment, not having seen any of his electronic designs. You haven't seen much of my electronic design work, and do seem to have formed a less positive opinion than any of my former employers, not that your judgement looks to be all that dispassionate.

By which you mean that he shares your delusions, and I don't.

One out of three isn't all that impressive.

I've always seen skiing as an expensive way of breaking your leg. Playing field hockey did put a fracture-line in my jaw, but at least I didn't have to pay through the nose for the privilege.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Oh, it's cool alright. But a bit too uptown and it doesn't quite have that "dude with the tattoos" appeal :-)

Out here the ultimate cat's meouw would be an all tricked-out truck with a huge engine, and where you need a ladder to get in.

The rack on top lends a bit of macho flavor, especially if you bungee a bunch of wood and pipe to it. It has an interesting 6-speed automatic tranny, two paralleled 3-speed gear sets, two clutches, no torque converter. It upshifts in 80 milliseconds.

On Sunday I let The Brat drive it up to a waterfall near Sierraville, a beautiful twisty-turney up-and-down run with no traffic at all. She drives a Jeep Rubicon and was amazed at how low the Audi is... reminds me of my old Austin-Healey Sprite. Only more reliable and a zillion times more power.

She liked it. German cars don't feel anything like Jeeps.

John

Life is an expensive way of dying. I think most people live life backwards, taking great risks while they are young, and getting timid and idle when they are older. As you have fewer probable years left, it makes sense to wait til then to do the really risky stuff. I'd rather slam into a tree at 45 MPH than die in some nursing home.

We have season passes at Sugar Bowl, the resort Walt Disney built, for this upcoming year, a pretty good deal. The views are incredible. And I can ski on impulse at Tahoe Donner, $8 for a senior half-day pass. If I push it, I can get that cost down to about 75 cents a run. A good beer and some peanuts at the bar will cost more than the lift ticket.

The sheer physics of skiing makes it worthwhile. Some people have a liking for violent kinetics, like skiing and roller coasters and hard driving cars and motorcycles, and some don't.

Those "terrain feature" gadgets are fun.

John

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Apparently the brain chemistry varies between individuals. I don't think that anybody has a testing kit for separating suicidal thrill seekers from people who'd prefer to die in a nursing home at a much later date, but they do seem to be working on it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I make it a point to drive fast enough every day to ensure maximum heart rate ;-)

Right now that's around 105MPH in traffic. Used to be 130MPH, but HEY! I'm 70 now :-) ...Jim Thompson

Nah, gotta be a surfboard. For those who have their midlife crisis around age 50 a kayak would also be appropriate but it's got to sport some nasty scrapes :-)

Is that the one that is shifted motorcycle-style?

They do behave sportier than other cars. But by now I feel a bit uneasy in Germany, when in a small car where the driver goes down a fairly crowded autobahn at breakneck speed.

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They do have tests for toxoplasmosis, which seems to strongly encourage risk-taking in human males. I don't enjoy risk as such, quite the contrary, but I enjoy the speed and motion. I think the same kinephilia makes me sympathetic to the way circuits work; I look at a circuit and *feel* it move, independent of any analytical considerations. It's fun occasionally to catch the big-equations boys when their math leads them to obviously absurd conclusions.

John

I once shot the rapids on the Cheat River (northern WV), without the aid of a canoe :-)

I've driven an Opel on the autobahn at 210km/h ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Decals? Like the bullet holes you see on PT Cruisers.

Yes, incremental. You can do that yourself if you want, with the shift lever or paddles. Lately I just set it to "sport shift" for snow or mountain driving, and let it do all the busy up-down engine braking stuff for me. Getting lazy, I guess.

The A3 is spec'd for 163 MPH or something insane like that. I'm sure not going to try that with snow tires.

John

Do you mean I've graduated from "old hen" to "big-equations" boy ?:-)

Newbie alert: Note that Larkin NEVER posts a detailed schematic (with component values) for any topic he posts... vague hen scratching or none at all. This is his "hide behind mommy's skirts" protection mechanism whenever he's cornered. Then he invents some monolog that (sometimes) fits his arguments. ...Jim Thompson

Not quite fast enough if one of these shows up in the rearview:

No joke. While living there I used to cruise down to a client in Southern Germany on Sunday afternoons (everyone watching soccer) at

Certainly a place to send young bucks to learn courteous driving.

I quickly learned to get over NOW, when BLINK-BLINK appeared in my mirror ;-)

I was very impressed by Mercedes 600D's, with 6 adult passengers, passing me like I was standing still... and I was doing 210km/h :-) ...Jim Thompson

Bikes are fun, but your 'violent kinetics' are normally limited to a 'to and fro' dimension. Anytime I've had anything resembling a 'sideways kinetic experience' on bike meant I was in deep trouble.

mike

Skiing allows big sideways forces to be applied. I'm sure that hockey-style stops hit a few Gs of deceleration; I'll check that next year, should be interesting. You can also get some impressive air, and if you crash you're far better off landing on snow then landing on pavement. I tend to crash violently at speed (I feel bad if I don't at least once a day) and seldom get hurt.

We used to play "tag" on motorcycles in a bowl-shaped gravel pit, and got some good lateral forces going.

John

I actually think those aren't so hard to cure, the worker-guy jobs. However advanced automation gets, the start-ups, the mom-'n'-pops always start with humans. That's the most versatile, natural labor source, and the one of first resort.

Perversely, labor "advocates" have made labor unaffordable.

James