> Ford "Probe"

c'mon, now.

Those didn't sell domestically.

We exported them all to the Lizard People, of course.

(but the *real* oddity of that vehicle was that they somehow thought they were developing the new Mustang. After the previews got laughed off the stage, it was repurposed).

hawk

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you want that, be prepared to cough up a five digit minimum retainer.

"the" ?

No, it's plural.

War powers is a good start.

The Fifth Amendment is another.

Then there's things like tariff powers and such.

There is no reasonable argument that it can't be barred from import, and similarly for its content.

The question is what, if any, compensation would have to be paid.

And the Vth would allow outright seizing it and paying just value, even if nothing else applied. With multiple eager bidders, the auction price would be a pretty good gauge of value.

"obviously unconstitutional" is just plain nonsense, and comes from the "the law *is* what I want it to be, because I am a priori correct on all matters" school of thought.

hawk, esq.

That one worked well for me, and it wasn't even my idea! My mother *suggested* that I leave my laundry when I came home for dinner that first weekend . . .

Of course, when I went south for law school, I was on my own, and my girlfriend (now wife) would actually break in to my apartment if I didn't hand the laundry over--apparently she was horrified by my wrinkles!

and now I reminisce about those lazy days of college, hanging around the laundry room . . . wait, what??? just what is *wrong* with these kids?

hawk, retired having fixed more washers than he's run loads of laundry

yeah.

unlicensed particle accelerators, or go home!

EM is for wimps . . .

Walmart coming to town was/is a double-edged sword.

It's indisputable that small businesses couldn't compete on price and got wiped out.

It seems clear (though not to the same level) that their wages were less than the jobs they displaced (though not nearly to the levels the unions claimed).

*However* . . . a while back, someone did a study about how much the *savings* to the public were.

It came out that the savings to a hypothetical worker who ended up with a wage loss of the levels claimed by the unions saved *significantly* more than that with lower prices, not just from walmart, but from the lower prices in town.

Whether this is *worth* the costs is a judgment call, for which opinions will vary (normative, rather than positive, economics).

doc hawk

There are still Walmarts where pickup is in store???

Parking lot pickup took over hear I don't know how long ago.

And then we got the walmart++ (or whatever it's called); untippable home delivery.

On the rare occasion that I'm inside it these days, it's generally because it's the closest grocery store (by a couple of miles; my neighborhood is so bad these days that it would qualify as a "food desert" without walmart) and we need something quick.

Delivery has been faster than amazon at least since 2020, and prices the same or lower than amazon.

>not least filtering in traffic so they're not going away anytime soon.

when two wheel vehicles get "filtered" from traffic, they tend to "go away" for extended periods, if not permanently . . .

word 5.1 and excel 4, Mac, were the last products out of Redmond that I saw any reason to buy (and I did).

At the time, Word on the Mac and Word for dos had *nothing* in common other than the name.

Well, they could *kind of* read one another's files--but you lost things like inserted charts in the process!

The Mac Word was the best available at the time (unless you needed certain things like WP), while the DOS/Windows version was a distance third, propped up only by the lack of a viable fourth.

Word 6, though, tossed the Mac version and imposed the second rate dos version on everyone. It was reported that a researcher found timing slugs in the Mac version so as to make it slower than the windows version.

Anyway, many things that worked and were useful in 5.1 (usable equations, anyone? plain text mail merge?) were gone in 6, replaced with glitz. And to add insult to injury, when word 6 opened a 5.1 file, it would rewrite it in 6 format *on opening*, and without seeking permission! I think it was even overriding RO status, as I recall having to use physical write protection on diskettes.

I am a lawyer. In fact, I'm a bankruptcy lawyer. Nonetheless, this isn't legal advice, but a comment on procedure.

This wasn't a class action. There aren't big contingency fees.

The way a bankruptcy distribution of x% works is that each unsecured claimant gets a check for x% of the claim.

The attorneys get paid separately from the estate as an "administrative expense".

The unsecured creditors usually don't *have* attorneys, although in larger cases such as this, a creditor's committee is generally appointed, and it gets a lawyer paid from the estate as well.

the sheer *frequency* of robberies required to make 2% sound good suggests not entering that neighborhood, whether for business or any other purpose (save bounty hunting, I suppose . . .).

(of course, that's with static analysis; knowing that the neighborhood is cashless would drop the frequency, etc.)

>In particular, the Subaru will sometimes slam on the brakes when I try
>to drive through the garage doorway.

open the garage door first . . . .

[ducks]

When Arizona reversed course and banned red light cameras, it wasn't the "speeding community" (?) that drove it, but the sheriff's.

The damned things *increased* accidents, largely from the rear end collisions with the suddenly stopping cars!

Sure, both drivers were behaving in ways that they shouldn't, but we need to deal with *actual* human behavior, not what we want it to be.

Here in las vegas, when a light turns yellow, I have to pause and check my rear view mirror before even considering slowing--to make sure that I don't have something *accelerating* behind me!

>Because insurance companies will keep their rates high to pad their bottom line.

those that tried that would be fairly quickly out of business.

There are many "mutual insurance" companies out there. These are owned by the policy holders, who receive an annual check of what would have been "profits".

In the past when I was using Amica, there was an estimated 20% future payment back for "participating members, who paid about 10% more than non-participating members. (but there is *no* guarantee of that dividend; in a bad year, it might be reduced, or not come at all, while in a good year it could be more.)

They were less expensive than the other options I considered at the time. But if a company tried keeping rates up when costs plummeted, they would be "somewhat" more expensive than mutual insurance, but "drastically" more.

And Plato in turn was Socrates pupil.

A scroll of Socrates' last minutes might reveal his last words to have been, "Say, just what kind of tea did you say this was?" :)

hawk

I've certainly noticed my tolerance for thrill rides drop by the decade, from dashing from the exit back to the entrance as a teen, to being queasy over one ride at a fair with my kid at 40, to . . .

anyway, could anything that a 75 year old could handle seriously be called a "dogfight"?