What Happens When You Skip the Oil Change and 60k Mile Maintenance

Another postcard for preventative maintenance…Or why you shouldn’t let conservatives be in charge of your country.

This “rescue” helicopter in Brazil fell apart on landing.

An Insurance Guy’s Nightmare

Wow… a $500,000 Ferrari…

So what sort of deductible do you get on that?

This one apparently involved eight Ferraris, three Mercedes Benzes,  a Lamborghini Diablo, and a rare Nissan GTR Skyline… And talk about being on the road at the wrong time and place…A Toyota Prius!

Astonishing accident involving eight Ferraris ‘world’s most expensive car crash’

A fleet of high-performance cars, including eight Ferraris, has been involved in one of the most expensive accidents in history after an astonishing multi-car pile-up in Japan.

Police said three Mercedes Benz cars and a Lamborghini Diablo were also involved in the massive crash at the weekend on the Chugoku Expressway, in the country’s south-west.

Witnesses reported hearing a “tremendous noise” just a few moments before the accident on the Yamaguchi prefecture highway amid terrible driving conditions.

While the majority of the 14 vehicles – which also included a Japanese supercar Nissan GT-R Skyline and a Toyota Prius – were travelling along the Osaka Prefecture-bound bended lane at least one Mercedes CL600 was driving in the opposite direction.

Miraculously, none of drivers – the majority of whom are reported to be foreign car enthusiasts – were seriously hurt in the wreckage but the bill is still bound to be painful nonetheless.

Such was the severity of the damage, several of the luxury cars have been written off, leaving their owners with the nightmare scenario of seeing their prized possessions turned into expensive scrap metal.

The total damage bill is expected to hit several million pounds. A new Ferrari 355 retails for several hundred thousand pounds.

The other Ferrari models understood to have been involved in the pile-up include a F512, F355, F430 and a F360.

“A Sugar Coated Satan Sandwich”

Hopefully, they will shoot this bill down today…

Debt Deal Emerging With Rightward Tilt

President Barack Obama’s rightward lurch to reach a $3 trillion deficit reduction deal with no guarantee of additional revenues had liberals fuming and Republicans all but declaring victory Sunday afternoon.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said early reports of the new deal appeared to be “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich.” The Missouri Democrat said the CBC hadn’t yet made a formal declaration that the group would oppose it, “but this is a shady bill.”

“This deal trades people’s livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it,” ripped Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, before House Democrats had even been briefed. “The lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want.”

The President Surrenders

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

 

Talk About Distracted Driving!

You can see some strange sites on the Washington Beltway. Not only folks driving at 75 trying to simultaneously read their email and text but…

On the Beltway, a claim of drunken sex at 85 mph

…in the Fairfax County courthouse, a lawsuit about a crash on the Beltway last year is dropping a few jaws as it makes the rounds and heads toward trial next week. Among the latest allegations in the lawsuit pending in Fairfax County Circuit Court:

Paragraph 10. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was going 85 miles per hour.”

Paragraph 12. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was having sex with a female.”

Paragraph13. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was driving admittedly drunk.”

Paragraph 14. “At the time of the accident, Defendant was partially or totally in the backseat of the car.”

Wait, WHA? 85 miles per hour? The backseat? And what happened to paragraph 11?

Records show the defendant, from Woodbridge, was convicted in Fairfax district court of drunken driving near Telegraph Road in May 2010. But now he denies he was driving. (What?) He was coming from his 21st birthday party in Baltimore, court records state. The woman involved has been dismissed from the case. There was someone ELSE in the car too, and HE denies driving as well.

The defendant’s lawyer, Frank Prior, said there was “no statement by anyone that they were driving on the Beltway having sex” and “no facts on it.” The plaintiff, a 28-year-old cab driver, is seeking $75,000 in damages and is represented by Douglas R. Stevens, who declined to comment beyond his court filings.

But Stevens sought punitive damages against the defendant and the friend, arguing in a pleading that “having sex at 85 miles per hour while drunk on a freeway is willful and wanton negligence.” A Fairfax judge threw out the punitive damages claim.

The case is set for trial next week.

“You see, Your Honor – the reason we had the accident is that I wasn’t really driving…”

 

France Convicts Continental Airlines of Homicide

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger – a French Judge has convicted Continental Airlines of involuntary homicide for a piece of metal falling off one of their airplanes which is believed to contributed to the Air France Concorde crash in 2000. I am not terribly sure how the French Court could assign blame here – much less a criminal penalty.

The only thing I can see Continental guilty of, in my experience… Is losing bags.

France Finds Continental Guilty in Crash of Concorde

A French judge ruled on Monday that Continental Airlines and one of its mechanics were guilty of involuntary homicide for their role in the 2000 crash of an Air France Concorde jet that killed 113 people.

Judge Dominique Andréassier of the court in Pontoise, northwest of Paris, ordered the American carrier to pay a fine of $265,000 and civil damages of more than $1.3 million to Air France. John Taylor, 42, the mechanic, was fined $2,650 and given a suspended 15-month prison sentence.

Henri Perrier, 81, considered the “father” of the iconic supersonic jet and an executive of Aérospatiale, the company that built the Concorde, and two other French officials, Jacques Hérubel, and Claude Frantzen, formerly of the French airline regulator who certified the plane’s airworthiness, were acquitted.

A 2002 report by French air accident investigators concluded that a small strip of metal had fallen off a Continental DC-10 that took off minutes earlier and that the piece punctured a tire of the Concorde as it accelerated down the runway on July 25, 2000. The tire disintegrated in seconds, investigators said, sending shards of rubber into the fuel tanks and causing a catastrophic fire. All 109 passengers and crew members were killed, along with 4 people on the ground.

Olivier Metzner, the French lawyer for Continental in the case, vigorously challenged the investigators’ findings in court, however, and presented a starkly different scenario. Mr. Metzner argued that the investigators disregarded accounts of the accident from more than 20 witnesses who said the plane appeared to have caught fire at a point on the runway several yards before it reached the metal strip.

Continental said it would appeal the “absurd” ruling, which took more than a decade to work its way through the French courts. “To find that any crime was committed in this tragic accident is not supported either by the evidence at trial or by aviation authorities and experts around the world,” Nick Britton, a Continental spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

 

 

Run…Run…Run…

The core issues with the Stock Market haven’t gone away. The problem with the elephants dying is the little guys get crushed in a fall-down. Trust level of Wall Street by small investors is sinking, fast.

Things may well be getting ready to go to Hell in a Handbasket on Wall Street…

In Striking Shift, Small Investors Flee Stock Market

Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to theInvestment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.