Month: September 2008

Categories
economics

used car prices

I’ve posted before about the Revenue’s Open Market Selling Price (OMSP) which I and many others feel is complete nonsense. With the economy faltering, many dealers are selling used cars for cost or little margin. As the time to clear a lot for new stock and, hopefully, profit increases with every passing month a strange situation has been created. The OMSP’s for larger-engined used cars are in many cases substantially above the estimates of the finance companies. My personal experience is that a well known finance company has refused to offer finance on 2 cars priced 20% (and more) less than the OMSP as they felt “the prices were way too high based on their adjusted forecourt valuations”. I’d rather not give the details of each car but suffice to say they hadn’t been crashed or clocked according to cartell.ie
My experience has been backed up by anecdotal comments by the country’s best known car salesman, Bill Cullen who has acknowledged that finance companies are now very concerned that the luxury cars on their books will be nearly worthless after a few years.
So why, in the face of this undeniable recession, have the Revenue Commissioners not adjusted their OMSP’s? Also, the “forecourt valuations” used by the finance companies to decide the maximum permissible HP or lease on a vehicle should be published. How is the consumer supposed to magically figure this out when there’s such a spread of second hand prices, few sales and official revenue OMSP’s which are lies misleading.
As it stands, it’s a waste of the consumer’s time and money.

Categories
technology

region-free hack for Yamaha s540

I’ve a big fan of Yamaha DVD and sound projector equipment. Generally I find Yamaha gear performs as well as much more expensive systems. Most hifi-mags agree. A while back I purchased the Yamaha s540 DVD player as it had some nice features and was supposedly easily hackable to be region free. Well it is but the instructions on many hack sites simply don’t cut it, as I found out last night. You need to follow these steps.

  1. Switch on the player
  2. Open the disk tray by pressing stop on the yamaha remote control
  3. Press on-screen which should show the current region setting of the player
  4. Press 99990 on the remote control. Repeat this until your TV shows the player has shown to region 0. (I had to repeat this 5 times before it worked. It took quite a while to figure out I had to repeat the code multiple times :))
  5. Hit enter/ok on the remote. This will close the tray
  6. Open the tray again and insert the DVD you wish to play

I’ve posted this as it was bloody painful finding this out and it took a few hours of digging to find out entering the code generally requires multiple attempts.

Categories
politics

Funniest joke in America

Is clearly Sarah Palin. It’s difficult to know where to start. She’s against “pork barrel” spending but signed off on the very funding applications she’s now saying are ridiculous. Perhaps, she’s misunderstood and just doesn’t want to buy barrels full of pork. Maybe that “lipstick on a pig” comment was too close to the bone. When Hilary Clinton was running for the democrat nomination she made the following statement in relation to Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that some of the media were sexist in their attacks.

Fair or unfair—and I do think that it’s a more concentrated criticism that Hillary gets on so many fronts; I think that’s unfortunate. But fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it, really. You have to plow through that and know what you’re getting into.


Yep, that’s the same Sarah Palin that’s been shying away from the media interviews. What happened to “plow through that”. I suspect she’s worried that her lack of experience will embarrass her party. Well, Bush has been abusing the English language, invading foreign countries and generally running the white house with all the dignity of a college fraternity.
It’s taken him 7 years to shame the republicans so how bad can Palin be?
The answer lies in her comprehensive lack of experience. McCain chided Obama for being too young and green to be president. That didn’t work so he’s found an obviously telegenic governor of a huge if sparsely populated area to be his running mate. Before her 2006 promotion Mrs. Palin had done nothing more significant than the major of a town the size of Tramore. Her rhetoric against what she views as wasteful government spending is hypocritical. Her stated fiscal conservatism is undermined by her raising the debt of the TINY town of Wasilla Alaska from almost nothing to around 4 million dollars in her short term of office.
So what about her politics? Well she believes creationism should be discussed in public schools and advocates the teaching of intelligent design. She supports capital punishment and the right to bear arms. She’s also got a grudge against Polar bears as their listing as an endangered species gets in the way of oil exploration. I’ll be that gives the GOPs a tingle down their spine (at the least) She believes in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes against potential aggressors even if she didn’t know it was called the “Bush Doctrine”. She needs to watch more Fox news obviously. So basically, Palin fits right in with the republican party. She’s the neo-con poster child.
I used to have some respect for McCain. He was obviously more intelligent and measured than Bush. I didn’t realise he was morally bankrupt though. I could be kind and suggest it’s dementia that led him to chose Palin as his running mate but it has the cold calculated feel of moral bankruptcy. The “I’ll do anything to get into power” feeling you only get from giving the horde (aka the republican party) a denominator common and low enough to get excited about.
The unfunny side of this is that the rest of the world has little faith in the American electorate following 2 terms of Dubya.

Categories
art

The only fury is my own

I was surprised to read in the Sunday Times today that “Fury has greeted Gottfried Helnwein’s art installation” in Waterford. Just to be completely clear about this Gerry McCarthy’s article stretches the truth til you hear it snap. The article alleges that a piece depicting a young girl has been vandalised. This is entirely correct and the installation has been badly damaged. However, this is where context is conveniently forgotten to portray the mindless vandalism as some act of artistic outrage or social commentary. Obviously, I don’t know what was going through the mind of the person(s) who damaged the painting but two points are salient. The piece was at ground level in a pedestrian area which is frequented by drunken revelers after a night on the sauce. More importantly, the only other piece in the installation at ground level is a canvas of the Nire valley. This clearly provocative piece of photorealistic landscapery has also been slashed, if not destroyed.
I’ve long been a fan of Gottfried Helnwein’s work but Waterford isn’t the hotbed of anarchism Gerry seems to want us to think it is. I suppose it’s a step up from the Lonely Planet’s “seedy port town” moniker. It’s a reimagining of an event with a Yeatsian pretence. …If only we had courage equal to desire… I suspect art was less important than impressing friends with a bit of vandalism.