If any of you use the AngelCare monitoring device, there's a cord strangulation related recall.

It's true that car dealers make quantitatively less from new car sales (used car sales are much higher margin), but it's not a bad income stream once you realize that they "own" all their cars via leverage.

When they sell a Camry, they don't really pay the full $25,000 invoice (or whatever it is) to have it sit on the lot. They essentially lease it from the manufacturer. So they may be leveraging $500 of their own money or something like that to have the car sit on the lot for, say, 60 days. When the car is sold, the "loan" is paid back with the proceeds from the sale. Let's say the dealer nets $1000 after paying back the loan and after subtracting all the business overhead, they're making $1000 on a $500 investment. That's a pretty decent return. Even if the dealer only nets $250 from the sale, it's still a 50% return.

Think about this next time you feel sorry about how the dealer's not making money off new car sales.

I've always been a good car buyer and trying to buy "cream puffs" that are about 4-6 years old, so that the hardest hit of the depreciation has already been priced into the car.

However, that's getting harder these days as used car prices are through the roof. When I was shopping for my last car (~$35k), the market price I was seeing for a 3-year-old model with 30k miles was only $2000 less than a new one - even for a private party sale without the dealer markup. So it's making less and less sense to buy used, especially with the aggressive financing deals for new models.

How's that going? They've been talking about rolling that out "next year" since I was first hearing about it at school in the late 90s.

I think people like us would complain less if 1.) the DTA boxes were free for perpetuity, 2.) the DTA boxes did not downconvert the HD signal down to SD, and 3.) if it did not render existing PCTV/DVRs unusable.

But I'm the scum of Comcast subscribers, daring to only pay for the lowest package mandated by the cable franchisee agreement. Why would they care about me?

They just encrypted all the over-the-air channels on my cheapo Comcast limited basic cable package last week.

So I ordered a ChannelMaster antenna and I'm getting everything beautifully. Need to adjust a few more times to the optimum position but everything seems to be working despite the wintry weather.

Just called Comcast today to cut TV. I'm paying $16+tax per month for over-the-air TV right now, and now they'll add $10/month to my Internet bill. Still better than throwing away $6/month.

Not happy that Comcast bought off the FCC to encrypt over-the-air channels.

Same here. The bills bouncing between doctor, hospital, insurance company, lab, x-ray technician, OBGYN are just comical.

It's like my relatives in Asia emailing/phoning to express concern about some weather / storm disaster happening on the east coast when I live on the opposite coast. Or that they refuse to come visit because there's a mall shooting in some state thousands of miles away.

They even sold entire houses.

Yes, if French and Portuguese uses 98%+ identical written grammar and vocabulary.

So, no.

A famous case was Qian Xuesen. He was one of the fathers of the American rocket and space programs and one of the founders of JPL. McCarthyism was responsible for deporting him and enabling Mainland China to develop a nuclear and space program.

Herman Miller (MLHR) is down about 1% today.

Vancouver's real estate market is nuts.

A friend of mine owns a single family home 2 houses from a fire station, on a major 4-lane boulevard, under the Sky Train, and in a neighborhood known for break-ins.

He just sold for $950,000 to a condo developer.

I've got lots of family in Vancouver and Toronto, and their waits are no worse than mine in Seattle. This article says that 46159 Canadians went abroad (notice it doesn't say which country) for medical care. Out of a country with a population of 33.5 million, that's 0.14% of the population. Sounds like their health care system is an undisputed resounding success to me. The people using Canada as a political talk point are just plain sad. In this age of Google there's just no excuse.

True. In my case, my wife was in excruciating pain from an ulcer in an ER and it was a good 2-hour wait. This was in a highly rated hospital 1.5 miles away from the Microsoft campus close to luxury car dealerships.