{Editor’s warning: the topic of discussion here is in regard to the “third rail” and the popularity, and possible implications thereof, for Joel Osteen and other new-agey type preachers. Despite the particular rail in question being homosexuality, in keeping with Hit Coffee’s continuing guidelines, please do not feel this is an excuse to write anything that is heavily derogatory towards homosexuals, heterosexuals, or persons on either side of the argument concerning the moral or ethical status thereof.

Our friend Wesley occasionally sends in some tip stories; today’s brings up a nationally famous pastor whose congregation lives in his city, a televangelist-type by the name of Joel Osteen. The last time he made big national news, his wife was having a few issues regarding her enormous ego.

Part of the discussion of what makes Osteen so popular is that, until this point, he’s basically stayed well under the radar when it comes to anything controversial. Rather than being a hellfire-and-brimstone hardcore Baptist-type, a “follow the rules” Catholic type, Osteen is very much a new-agey, “do what feels good”, “peace love dope=god”, welcome to the Bible TV Hour type pastor, the kind of man who wouldn’t be out of place making a cameo on quite possibly the worst TV show that has ever been made.

That being said, apparently Osteen has had a change of heart, or else he’s decided he has a big enough flock to take the risk of going into some third-rail topics, and so he is openly switching away from his previous “I don’t talk about sin” stance into beginning to say, on the air, that certain things are in fact sinful. On the other hand, apparently this stems at least partially from a lower-profile altercation back in November in which Osteen got into it with Joy Behar; then again, Behar seems to have an ongoing need to generate “controversy” to keep View viewership up, and she definitely isn’t above engineering a segment where she’s trying to put words in someone’s mouth while not letting them get in a word of their own edgewise.

Popularity is a hard thing to follow. Someone can be very popular, and then do something incredibly stupid, and turn most of their fanbase against them in one fell swoop. Osteen’s carefully crafted public image is about avoiding that if at all possible; certainly, he tried to sweep his wife’s temper tantrum under the rug, and he’s been very circumspect about discussing other “third rail” issues – divorce (then again his own father had been divorced, politics, or many other controversial topics. Even in the Behar transcript, he seems to be trying to get to a “well we believe homosexuality is a sin but we don’t condemn people for it or kick them out of church for it” stance, while Behar’s very hung up on berating him for using “homosexuality” and “sin” in the same sentence.

At the end of the day, it’s going to be interesting to see where this one goes. Osteen may very well go quickly into the new-agey, self-help-book writing, “Stuart Smalley“-style preacher he’s been to this point, or maybe he’ll start getting a little more into “well this is what the book says, we would love to help you stop sinning” territory. Only time will tell.

I don’t know what it says about me that…

Alabama law firm Beasley Allen has filed a class action lawsuit against Taco Bell that claims the chain is falsely calling its taco filling “seasoned beef” and “seasoned ground beef” when allegedly the mixture, which would be more properly called “Taco Meat Filling,” only contains 36% beef. The firm is not asking for money, but is instead asking the chain to make changes to their menu to reflect the food they are serving.

… makes me hanker for some processed taco beef product.

One of the things I used to get a kick out of with Anime what whenever they would portray America and Americans. Here is a video of their portrayal of our legal system. The first thirty seconds are a bit hard to bear if you’re a cat-lover, but I nonetheless found it amusing. Particularly with the National Anthem playing at the end.

One of the most outrageous series was something called Mad Bull 34, which takes place in New York City and follows the adventures of John Estes and Daizaburo Ban (the latter an “American Born Japanese”). It’s ridiculously over the top in a number of respects, but it’s portrayal of NYC as an utterly lawless culture is absolutely hilarious. It’s easy to chalk it up to being a cartoon, but I don’t think I ever saw the Japanese police portrayed in quite this manner. Anyway, below is a condensed version of the first episode of the series. {Note: Pretty graphic imagery, both violent and sexual}

There are a few other shows I’ve seen that take place in the US, including Gunsmith Cats and Riding Bean. Both take place in Chicago with the latter being something of a spin-off of the former. The portrayal there was fairly staid as apparently they made a real effort to portray the US accurately. Boooo-ring. It’s actually a fair, if somewhat-by-the-numbers productions. However, it’s worth pointing out that they did something I don’t think that an American TV show would ever do: they made a politician who strongly advocates gun control the villain. If they ever made a US version of it, I’m sure they would turn it around and make the gun manufacturers the bad guys.

When Econoholic sent me this Near York Times article on law school, I wondered if Half Sigma had already commented on it:

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And with corporations scrutinizing their legal expenses as never before, more entry-level legal work is now outsourced to contract temporary employees, both in the United States and in countries like India. It’s common to hear lawyers fret about the sort of tectonic shift that crushed the domestic steel industry decades ago.

But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

He had. To his credit, he was sounding off this warning years ago. Not just about law school being a scam for anybody that doesn’t get into the Top-14 schools (an argument I think he takes a few steps too far), but about the statistics the law schools put out more generally.

Slate has a similar article from last year:

The students might be litigious—no surprise there—and overwrought. But they’ve got a point. The demand for lawyers has fallen off a cliff, both due to the short-term crisis of the recession and long-term changes to the industry, and is only starting to rebound. The lawyers that do have jobs are making less than they used to. At the same time, universities seeking revenue have tacked on law schools, minting more lawyers every year.

That has caused some concern among lawyers who think the accrediting organization, the American Bar Association, is doing the profession a disservice by approving so many new schools. (Contrast that with medical schools. They come with much higher startup costs and tend not to be money-makers. Relatively few students get medical degrees every year, and demand far outstrips supply.)

The job market for lawyers is terrible, full stop—and that hits young lawyers, without professional track records and in need of training, worst. Though the National Association for Law Placement, an industry nonprofit group, reports that employment for the class of 2009 was 88.3 percent, about a quarter of those jobs were temporary gigs, without the salaries needed by most new lawyers to pay off crushing debts. Another 10 percent were part-time. And thousands of jobs were actually fellowships or grants provided by the new lawyers’ law schools.

Relatedly, we have this:

Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.

What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.

If Griffin can’t pass C&F, Ohio might as well say that half of the recent graduates in the state don’t have the “character and fitness” to be a lawyer…

There’s something ironic about making the choice of representing those that cannot afford their own representation as causing someone to fail a “character and fitness test”.

Whole Foods they are not, but some interesting maneuvering regardless:

Of the “key elements” Walmart announced, several are ones I reported on last March: shorten travel distances between farm and distribution centers, support smaller farmers than it had previously bought from, bring back staple crops to areas where they had vanished because of competition from California and Florida, and bring fresh food into “food deserts” both in cities and, importantly, rural areas without supermarkets. {…}

But the company did give a timeline for the main news: reformulating its private-label “Great Value” foods over the next five years to reduce sodium by 25 percent, added sugars by 10 percent, and removing “all industrially produced trans fats.” This is what the nutrition community will be parsing for months, and where Walmart can preempt, and even help, industry initiatives like ConAgra’s announcement that it will reduce sodium in its foods by 20 percent over the same period, or the New York City health department’s National Salt Reduction Initiative, which is building public awareness of hidden sodium and trying to coordinate industry to reduce it voluntarily. The long timelines for sodium reduction are a recognition of how hard it can be to make lower-sodium foods taste “good” to people used to high sodium: unlike trans fats and sugars, where there are easy or easyish substitutes, lowering sodium really does change familiar packaged-food flavors. {…}

The announced target for added sugars will disappoint many who would like sodas and soft drinks abolished, and the soft-drink question came up immediately (okay, I was the first question on the first conference call, and I brought it up). Sodas are turning into a third rail, and her reply deftly avoided it. Consumers already know they can buy diet soda, she said. When they buy candy or cake (she didn’t mention soda—that came under “choices” they know are already available), they want to have an occasional indulgence. “Our focus,” she told me, “is where the customer doesn’t expect added sugar: flavored milks and puddings, fruit juice and canned fruit, breakfast items like muffins, granola, and French toast.” In a second conference call she ticked off more items, and added that breakfast pastries, breads, crackers, cottage cheese, and yogurts are often sources of hidden sodium and sugars. Dr. John Agwunobi, the company’s vice president of health and wellness added that another of the company’s promises this morning is to eliminate the price difference in reduced-fat, reduced-sugar, and whole-grain items, so that these will not cost more more than ones with higher fat and sodium, as is often the case now. (This equaling of price does not mean, as some have hopefully thought, that Walmart will make healthier options less expensive than less-healthy ones. Dream on!)

ESPN signed a huge mega-deal with the University of Texas for $300 million dollars over 20 years. I’m not sure I see the logic behind this, from ESPN’s perspective. They are guaranteed one football game a year, which is likely going to be a game against an FCS opponent that’s not worth televising on ESPN or Fox. Eight basketball games, which may be a little more useful but not much. The rest are going to be reruns of games already played and sports that ordinarily don’t get televised. The other material, such as college lectures and the like, may be interesting but are not exactly in ESPN’s target audience and are unlikely to get subscribers.

The University of Texas is the flagship university of a large state. It’s one of the few schools in the country that could pull something like this off. There are also, I would imagine, a lot of UT alumni spread around the country. But enough to warrant a cable carrier in San Diego or Chicago to pick up the channel? For a football game against East Podunk State, a handful of basketball games, and Longhorn rowing team action? How much do we expect Comcast of Seattle to pay for this? Even Dish Network and DirecTV probably couldn’t justify putting it anywhere except on their cross-regional sports packs (like Fox Sports Wherever) outside of Texas.

And for this ESPN is buying into a 20-year commitment and putting down $300,000,000? That’s what I find most baffling. Giving them a network, like BYU has, makes some sense. You could probably do it with a handful of schools (Florida, UCLA, Notre Dame, …?). But making $15,000,000 a year doing it? BYUtv is primarily about exposure and is non-commercial.

There are really only two explanations I have for this. First, they’re afraid that if Texas does this on their own that they’re going to seriously lose out. But there’s only so much they can lose with one school. Even the Big Ten hands their marquee games to ESPN (instead of running them on the Big Ten Network) because that’s where the money is. They’ve lost Mountain West and Conference USA games, but those aren’t exactly big losses. The SEC is a bigger deal, but they’ve managed to share it with CBS. The second is that perhaps this is part of a larger plan to strike similar deals with the other big name schools so that they can cut their smaller conference-mates (the Iowa States and Arizonas of the world). The problem with that is that UT is in a conference with a special arrangement. The other major conferences have rejected the Big 12 model of unequal revenue-sharing. So not only does it seem unlikely that they would be able to do this, but there is little fear of other big schools like Florida following their lead unless there is a mass exodus of top teams from their conferences. Or a realistic enough threat of that happening that they can leverage it into independent deals like Texas. Texas, though, blackmailed a very vulnerable conference, and it was the existence of unequal revenue-sharing that made the conference vulnerable to begin with.

So anyway, while this sounds like a great deal for the University of Texas, it’s quite a puzzling one by ESPN. At the very least, you would think that they would want to test the waters first before making such a tremendous gamble. This type of thing hasn’t been done before and the ESPN just bet a whole lot of money that it will work. The last time that happened was with NBC and Notre Dame, and that didn’t exactly work out.

Following up on Web’s rant yesterday, a couple of interesting articles.

First, from the Washington Post:

President Obama granted him the full state-dinner treatment that President George W. Bush denied him five years ago – but in return, Hu had to put up with a news conference, which he had refused to do when Obama visited China. For a repressive ruler, facing a free press is about as pleasant a prospect as attending the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.

After the leaders’ standard opening statements full of the blah-blah about bilateral cooperation, the Associated Press’s Ben Feller rose and asked a gutsy, forceful question.

“Can you explain to the American people how the United States can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly, for using censorship and force to repress its people?” he asked Obama. And to Hu: “I’d like to give you a chance to respond to this issue of human rights. How do you justify China’s record, and do you think that’s any of the business of the American people?”
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Obama answered. The translator translated. All eyes turned to Hu – who said nothing.

Instead, he looked to a woman from China Central Television – the state-run network that answers to the Communist Party’s propaganda department – who tossed him a softball about “friendship and mutual understanding.”

Perhaps the most humorous take of the visit in 25 words or less: The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner holds a State Dinner for a man who has the 2010 winner under House Arrest

I value Daniel Drezner’s perspective on all manner of issues, and his take on the limits of China’s rise and Hu Jintao’s power in particular are no different:

Slate carries a column on the aging and senility of the federal judiciary, a topic that could very well be related to the US Supreme Court, where the current average age is 65 (this doesn’t sound so bad till one realizes that it’s the arithmetic mean and that the “I stayed till I was too damn old and finally retired” crowd are often deputized back into courts of appeals).

One major problem is that the federal judiciary is where much of the law concerning new technology is being made, and as Slate’s article makes plain, the elderly/senile judiciary is chock-full of people who have major issues understanding, much less ruling on, technology. To wit:

Some of the lawyers figured that Owen, whose chambers came with a mimeograph machine when he became a judge in 1973, was just behind the times. Others wondered if the judge’s memory was failing him. After all, the most famous case in his long career—the back-to-back trials of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone—had revolved around a single e-mail. Yet he now acted as though this was the first he was hearing about it. “He didn’t understand what was happening in his own courtroom,” said one lawyer present that day.

The implications of a senile judiciary are staggering. For instance, some lawyers have taken to sticking a boilerplate “copyright phrase” in the signature for each of their emails, and there’s surprising debate on whether you can, legally, do things like publish the Cease-and-Desist letter some shyster snake just sent you claiming a blog entry ‘s fake name is too close to his non-trademarked, imaginary trucking company’s name; imagine the chilling effects on public discourse should some 85-year-old fool actually decide that someone letting the world know when, say, The National Pork Board do something stupid constituted a “criminal act.”

It goes beyond that, however. Consumer rights are constantly eroded thanks to overbroad “copyright laws” that forbid going around “Digital Rights Management” and shrinkwrap-licenses, the net effect of which is to put pretty much nothing but a speedbump in the way of those who will copy various things (the term “Piracy” being not quite apt, and perhaps the term “Jesusing” after the parable of the fishes and the loaves being a better choice for creating multiple copies out of nothing), but offers all layers of annoyance and nuisance for people who want to do very legitimate things like load an alternate operating system into a computer-system such as the Sony Playstation 3.

If the federal judiciary were not so ancient, senile, and easily bamboozled, consumer rights might not vanish quite so rapidly. As it stands, though, the senile fools on the US Supreme Court could not even be convinced that the US Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws would block things such as Bill Clinton’s retroactive tax increases or Congresses repeated, retroactive “copyright term extensions.”

Hu Jintao, the President of the illegitimate Chinese mainland “government”, is visiting the US today.

At these meetings, US corporations are supposed to be talking with Jintao about “access problems” of getting their products into the Chinese markets. Meanwhile, nothing is going to be mentioned of China’s human rights abuses, spying, and constant theft of just about anything they can get their hands on.

I’m pretty sure there will also be no mention of the myriad crappily made, dangerous, poisonous (also here and here products that constantly flood into the US, as well as the various knock-offs and product fakes that flood our shores every year.

In an era when the US still had some trade barriers to work with, we lauded the “opening” of Chinese trade paved by on Richard Milhouse Nixon. Since then, however, the rush of “global free trade” has shown what a mockery “free trade” really is; completely unfair trade in which dangerous products regularly are sent around, in which products can be made in factories where workers are driven to suicide with shocking regularity, paid slave wages, have no safety, no protections, and no environmental protection whatsoever.

By all rights, we should be sticking up tariffs on Chinese goods until they learn to behave themselves like civilized people as far as worker protections and environmental protections go. This is doubly so when considering they are a communist nation which pays lip service to the “worker” constantly. Instead, for the past couple decades our government have been committing the error of handing a despotic communist dictatorship economic trade incentives in exchange for their turning around and dropping trou at us in UN security council meetings, and this week they’re going to compount the mistake by kissing the ass of a despotic criminal named Hu Jintao. Yeah, I’m a little sickened.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, we bought a new car! An actual new car, as it turned out, and not just a new-to-us car. More on that later. As longtime readers of Hit Coffee know, I have been considering purchasing a new-to-us car for quite some time. Crayola, the late-90’s Ford Escort I typically drive, has been struggling over the last couple of years. Also, moving to Arapaho with an eye towards staying means that we want something with all wheel drive. Lastly, we’ve been limping along without a cargo vehicle for some time. We don’t need something that’s going to carry large furniture, but it would be nice to have something more than the Camry when it came to moving stuff and having a more towing-capable vehicle for those bigger things (the Camry has a hitch, which we’ve used, but it’s not the most comfortable arrangement).

Anyhow, we finally hit the Magic Number – the desired amount in our savings account before we were comfortable buying a car – in October. Despite having talked to Wells Fargo last year about a loan*, we really wanted to buy a car outright. Which we sort of** did. So from there it was a matter of picking a car. That wasn’t hard because all of the legwork I had done previously pointed in a particular direction: Subaru Forester***. The “where” was a little more uncertain and I figured it would come down to who made the best offer or had the best used car.

Since leaving Cascadia, it became apparent that we were likely to buy a new car. This blew both of us away because it was something we were told, since we were kids, is simply something you never do. Buying new cars was for chumps. Until relatively recently, it’s been pretty deeply ingrained in my mind. But something odd has happened since the downturn. Incentives are making new cars cheaper. A variety of factors are making used cars more expensive. The price difference between the two has collapsed to virtually nothing. In fact, depending on how you look at it, buying used can actually cost more (higher interest rates if you’re getting a loan, shorter life per dollar spent otherwise). I made a spreadsheet a while back assuming the life of a car to be 100k, 150k, and 200k miles. New cars were, if not at the top of the list (as far as price-desirability goes), competitive. The more economical pricing (on the 200k column) was on cars just over that 100k, but that doesn’t factor in the hassle and headaches of a non-reliable car. You might save money, but only if you don’t mind being left on the side of the road sometimes. Being left on the side of the road in Arapaho is more problematic than other places because you can be outside of cell phone range and outside of walking distance from anywhere.

So we’d accepted that we might have to do that thing we were taught never to do. One look at the used car market in Arapaho told us that this would assuredly be the case. Arapahoans hold on to their cars, so there are none of those low-mileage used car deals you can get where you benefit from some other chump losing the $3,000 off the lot. Instead, you’re just getting an old car. Even that might have had its perks in the name of cash liquidity (see ** below), but the scarcity of supply pushes the price up to the point that my spreadsheet told me that they were all pretty much bad deals. So it was a done deal: new car.

There were other factors to consider, like whether to get a 2010 or 2011. Only one dealership, in Alexandria, had any 2010s left. We’d decided on the medium trim, called “Premium” (“Limited” is the top trim) because it was the one that had the option for traditional roof rails (for cargo) and towing (for more cargo), as well as the all-weather package. So for an entire week I was investigating which dealerships had what available on that trim and which had the best starting price (ie the fewest unnecessary features larding up the MSRP). The nearest dealership, in Redstone, was a no-haggle dealership. So I had to somehow try to factor in what I would be able to negotiate down in Alexandria (for instance) compared to the no-haggle price in Redstone.

I’m not sure if any of you read it, but Edmunds had a great piece many years back entitled Confessions of a Car Salesman, where a reporter went undercover as a car salesman and reports back the nature of the trade and the tricks that they use. Having read all about the sales techniques, there wasn’t much news there. But one of the things that really jumped out at me was that the difference in business culture from the traditional dealership (unnamed, but leading me to believe it was either Lexus or Acura) and a no-haggle dealership (almost certainly Saturn). I came away with it thinking that between the two, I really wanted to give my business to the latter.

I had a few questions about the Forester that I hadn’t seen the answers to anywhere, so I stopped by the dealership in Redstone to ask. The Redstone dealership swore up and down in all of its literature that it was a “no-haggle” and “no-pressure” sort of place, so I figured that I could ask the questions without having to fight off attempts for a test drive and whatnot. Turns out, they lived up to their name. The salesman was extremely helpful and that was that. I decided that I wanted to do business with them if it was at all possible.

It’s easy to decry the state of car sales, but if you’re walking straight past those dealerships that are trying to buck that mentality in search of a better deal, you’re part of the problem. Even if you get a better deal for yourself, you’re still patronizing them. Of course, I wasn’t going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars on the basis of that principle. If the difference is that large, the no-haggle places aren’t just going with consistent pricing, they’re going with exorbitant pricing. So I set a price-point. If the Redstone dealership came within $x, I would give them my business.

What it looked like it was going to come down to was the 2011 vs 2010. The difference in list prices alone was over $1000 at the Alexandria dealership and there was a good chance that I was going to be able to talk them down well beyond the margin because Redstone had already sold all of their 2010s. The last piece of the puzzle came from Fighting Chance, which is a resource on all manner of relevant things for negotiating a good price. What actually jumped out at me was the complete listing of features and pricing. I discovered that, if I was willing to forgo the all-weather package, I could actually get the towing kid and traditional roof rails on the base trim. That was thousands of dollars and I had previously been lead to believe that you couldn’t get either on the base trim. So I looked back at all of the Arapaho dealerships and discovered that only one offered the base trim: Redstone.

So I got to have my cake and eat it, too. I went with the no-haggle dealership and saved a good amount of money simply because they were offering a cheaper product that nobody else was****. This left some money to get an extended warranty, the towing kid (a purchase that I was going to have to put off), and a block heater for under the target price. And I would still be under the target price if I upgraded the speaker system, which I figured I might need to do (and did in pretty short order). And as an added benefit, I even managed to get the color that I wanted. I had resigned myself to getting something I was indifferent two and had accepted that I might end up with one of the two colors I actively did not want.

And not a moment too soon. Within a week of getting the car, for a couple different reasons I am not going to get into, both of the other cars stopped working correctly. So despite having three cars, we were stuck having to share only the Forester. Had I tried to custom-order or put it off, our balancing act would have become impossible.

For future reference, due to its green color and the fact that it has one of those high-falutin’ California engines that is supposed to have cleaner exhausts and thus is supposed to be good for the environment, its name is Nader. I was thinking of going with Ahnold, due to the California roots, but I decided not to since he’s on his way out and I wasn’t going to name the car Jerry.

* – Wells Fargo more than anyone else should have been able to appreciate our financial situation and history: generally a lot of savings (more than enough in savings to buy the car outright, if necessary) with solid income interrupted by periods of unemployment. All that mattered to WF, though, was that we were unemployed right then and there. Even an employment contract in hand and the income potential of Clancy’s medical license were not enough for them consider loaning us any money. We were as sure a bet as you can get, but they have their formulas and their hands were tied. A “savings secured loan” was all they could offer us, which basically meant that they would take the money out of our bank account and then loan it back to us for less interest than a loan that wasn’t coming from money that they just took out of our bank account.

** – I add the “sort of” qualifier because we used money from the sign-on bonus provided by Clancy’s employer. Interest free, but we have to return a pro-rated amount of we leave before her contract was up. This caused a fair amount of kvetching on our part (well, mostly mine) because – even though we have no plans to leave before the contract is up – we didn’t want to be in a position where we couldn’t leave if things became unbearable. So we considered getting a loan anyway (I’m sure Wells Fargo would have been happy to comply) just to keep that money in the bank. Looking over the numbers, it seemed like I was just being paranoid about our finances. I talked it over with Bob Vis, who agreed that I was being paranoid. Mostly just a matter of confirming what I already knew, but I needed to hear from someone else that we weren’t being irresponsible by dipping into the sign-on loan.

*** – Other models I considered were the Mitsubishi Outlander, Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V, Ford Escape, Kia Sportage, and Jeep Patriot. The Patriot caught my eye just because it was so cheap, but it didn’t take me long to decide I would rather have a used auto with some reliability than a new one with none. So it was the first I removed from consideration. The CR-V got some good reliability ratings, but I sat in one while in Cascadia and it just didn’t feel right. Visibility wasn’t really good on it and I decided if I wanted to go with Reputable Japanese, we’d just go with the RAV4. The Escape was recommended to me by a couple of people and I got to drive my mother-in-law’s and liked it and it felt right in the same way that the CR-V felt wrong. But the price-point never got low enough. The RAV4 was considered because my wife is a Toyota person and it got good reliability ratings. While the pricing wasn’t terrible on this one, it started getting really bad when I factored in what would be required for it to be able to tow anything. Really, if I wanted to spend $30k, I’d get a Highlander which has more space and all of the towing things required coming standard. The Sportage was the cheapest option, but like the RAV4 it required getting a higher trim. This put it in the same ballpark as the Forester, price-wise, but with a less reputable AWD. Also, few Kia dealerships in the state (though I discovered, within an hour after buying the Forester, that one is opening up right in Redstone). On the merits, it really came down to the Outlander and the Forester. The Outlander met all of my requirements and came in under the Forester in price (albeit barely). However, there’s one Mitsubishi dealership in Arapaho and it’s not anywhere near our part of the state. Also, unlike Subaru, Mitsubishi doesn’t specialize in AWDs and when I talked to a dealer in Cascadia they made it seem like a bit of an afterthought.

**** – You can custom order a vehicle from Subaru.com and have it sent to virtually any dealership, but since the deal isn’t done since you drive off the lot, they are free to use the fact that you have waited 6-8 weeks for the car’s arrival and that it would take another 6-8 weeks to order it again through somewhere else to reneg on the deal and ask for more money. This sort of thing was also a concern with the farther-flung dealerships across the state. They can use the fact that I have seriously inconvenienced myself by driving across the state in order to try to get another few hundred dollars out of me when I come to pick the car up.