economics: Germany

I see. You're a schizophrenic.

Be careful with Google Translate. I am surprised it hasn't started a war yet.

Try this: Place a German sentence into it and translate to English. Take that English translation and translate it to Spanish. Do that for five or six languages, in a row.

The result that comes out at the far end does NOT look like what you put in. The process is far from perfect.

mike

A politically manufactured hemophiliac is more like it.

I'm sick of generations of leeches living off my earnings. Leeches, both Foreign and Domestic.

I'm also sick those 'public servants' giving my money away as it were their own.

mike

I don't need no steeenkin' help...

mike

I'm aware that it is far from perfect and therefore use it only as a dictionary and for translating short phrases, just to get an idea. I don't trust it blindly and check if the translations make sense.

But thanks anyway for the advice.

A German

uck with

rced to

bent

n or

=A0;-) =A0

Yes, I love my little Ford ranger 3.0 liter 6 cylinder, gets about

-Bill

with

Mine is a 4.0L Ranger with all the gizmos, including auto (SWMBO wouldn't let me buy a stick), air, power windows, door locks, and 4WD Off-road. I needed the 4WD in Vermont and need the AC here. ;-)

Anybody that wants to sell it at the right price.

Actually, they could buy other stuff besides gold. US real estate, silver, commodities, toilet paper, rice, etc.

So why do they keep buying worthless US bonds?

Is there some other country that has a better credit rating?

-Bill

Different reasons for different investors. One is that our bonds are less worthless than other countries' bonds. ("Full faith and credit" means the US government promises to tax and seize whatever they have to from its citizens to pay the debt.) Some people find that reassuring.

China might see it as a cheap way to buy Tibet and Taiwan. Much easier than a war, and not nearly as messy.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

They have Tibet. I'd guess they actually don't want Taiwan; it's more profitable if they just have a lot of influence. Making money is slowly becoming more important than saving face.

John

with

Darwin in action. :(

No joke: In Italy I have seen an elderly guy hauling a sawed-off telephone pole on a Vespa. He held it balanced by steering, had it between his legs. On a highway no less!

Then, in the region of Reggio di Calabria (way south in Italy) a guy was hauling huge boulder that looked like fine marble. On top of a Fiat 500. The roof was crushed inwards and made a "nest" for this rock. The whole car was almost scraping the road surface. Imagine what would have happened if he'd overlooked a speed bump ...

Sounds like natural engineers to me.

Might have been me with a 1.80 m 19" rack on the loading area of the Touring :-)

Gerhard

Diesel Biturbo rulez!

Well, back when I drove Rim of the World Drive everyday (San Bernardino to Lake Arrowhead) it was always the Porsches with a ski rack, usually black. Everyone, including the 4WD crowd, would be going about 25-30 in the snow and ice, and then this black Porshe with a ski rack would blow by you at about 60! I always kept looking for the black metal SPLAT around all the turns...

Charlie

How fast is that car? My Audi topped out at around 195km/h or 115mph. You could push it a wee bit higher by not using the overdrive gear but then it would develop a voracious appetite for gasoline. It's a big station wagon with the smallest possible engine, runs very lean. In fact it's still going at almost 24 years old. A former neighbor bought it and a few months later he called me and was all enthused about this car. Because he does very long trips and it uses 40% less gasoline than the BMW he had before. I still miss that Audi.

Porsche's don't do too well drag racing a '67 Mercury Cougar.

One of my employees, in his Porsche, tried me one time, on McDowell, uphill over the Papago Buttes heading toward Motorola SPD at 52nd St ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Porsches are notorious for unexpected oversteer. They stick and stick and make newbies think they are Mario Andretti. Then they let go and spin out and make them dead. They're better than they used to be, but still nothing to sling around in snow.

Around Tahoe, they don't plow the snow off the roads as much as they just pack it down. On a couple of inches of packed snow and ice, I'll take my Quattro and give a Carerra a big head start. It's like cat, with 4-wheel claws.

Most cars understeer these days; the average driver can handle that better.

John

I outran a BMW 3-series in my Citroen 2CV. On a country road to Aachen, Germany. It had snowed profusely and I could hear the stuff scraping the bottom of the Citroen. However, that Citroen had very smooth panels underneath and frontwheel drive. So it was gracefully gliding over snow humps. Of course my smoothing the snow surface didn't help the BMW guy because he had much less road clearance. BMW tried to keep up with me until in one curve he must have lost control .. phseeee ... whoosh .. thud. Huh? Where's the headlights behind me? There was no turn-off anywhere, oh-oh ... Drove back, found same headlights sticking out of an embankment, asked whether I could help him get it out. "NO!"

This was before cell phones so he couldn't possibly have called a road service from that lone stretch of road but he absolutely positively did not want my help. I guess he then flagged down the next car that was not a Citroen. At least not a 2CV.