Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Fine, I'll do it myself

At the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the post-credit scene shows the villain Thanos putting on the Infinity Gauntlet, exclaiming, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

Thanos understands that if you want something done correctly, you indeed do it yourself. I would also add that it’s the same if you want something done timely. Those of us on the control-freak side of the spectrum can’t bear the uncertainty of waiting for someone else to perform what you want done.

It’s no big deal of course if the stakes are low. The horse I’m on isn’t high enough for me to look down upon the Starbucks barista making me a cappuccino. There’s no worry whatsoever the job won’t be done quickly and correctly. Unless I’ve pissed off said barista during the initial interaction. Then I should expect something unsavory added to the mix.

When the stakes are higher, so is anxiety that stems from the uncertainty. I recently purchased a used car. It comes with a limited 100 day warranty, so of course I took it to the dealership service to check things over. The inspection report returned some items that need addressing. No big deal, right? Surely the dealership can coordinate with the warranty company to get it all sorted.

Except it’s been an entire work week, and there’s yet to be any movement since the inspection. I’m not placing blame on either party here. It’s taking a long time, nothing I can do about it. Except - to do the work myself. The warranty items were cheap enough and easy enough to DIY that I went ahead and ordered the replacement parts. Over this very weekend I swapped them in. Now I can rest easy knowing the problem is fixed, and I can move on to the next.

Railing against the world.

Endless anxiety

Back in the olden days when I used to build by own PCs, I can kiss my sleep goodbye if anything inevitably goes wrong. I simply cannot soundly sleep until a problem is fixed. The graphic card is giving out errors? It’s got to be remedied, even though it’s currently 2:00 AM in the morning, and the end is still not in sight. This is why I exclusively use Apple Macintosh computers now: reliable, with a warranty.

Imagine me owning a home, and the washer goes out. It’s too bad there isn’t a 24-hours Home Depot!

This inability to calm down until a problem is solved can’t just be idiosyncratic to me, right? I don’t know how to explain it. Impatience is the wrong word for it. It’s definitely anxiety, but for what purpose? Life is but an endless stream of problems - good or bad - for us to solve. The fallacy is that I seem to think there is a some happy equilibrium to reach, that once reached, everything will be okay forevermore. That’s of course not how it works.

It’s the wrecking my sleep that I find alarming. No amount of Buddhist breathing methods can calm my mind down for slumber. (Medical options, perhaps?) It doesn’t like open-ended questions. I recently sold my BMW for another car - a very simple and easy transaction. Even that, I had difficultly sleeping over the two days when the transaction was ongoing. I cannot relax until the thing is finished.

The new-to-me car arrived with some minor things to be fixed. (That’s typical when you buy a used car.) Cue up another bout of anxiety and sleeplessness! I fully understand that parts and shop time literally cannot happen overnight, and yet the anxiety over an “unfinished” car remains ever present. I just want to get it done and move on - but to what? Like I said earlier, life will only keep throwing problems at you to fix.

Am I then destined to suffer from anxiety continuously? On the flip side, isn’t it good to have things that make you want to get out of bed to solve? Tricky one, this.

All black everything.

Buona fortuna

I was at Costco doing my usual weekend shopping when I noticed the usual five pound bag of whey protein by Optimum Nutrition is now over $67! That is crazy. I’m old enough to remember when the same bag was only $35. Us weightlifters are in shambles when it comes to feeding our protein addiction. Instead of picking up weights ever, I should have joined a monastery…

The annual Monterey car week was only a few weeks ago. It’s always fascinating to me how certain car enthusiasts can drop multiple six figures on a car like it’s nothing. These people spend on vehicles like how I don’t think twice about paying extra for the larger size of fries. There’s a certain level of wealth that I cannot fathom or comprehend when way more than my entire net-worth is concentrated into a single object.

How bad can the overall economy be when hundreds of enthusiast cars are changing hands on a daily basis on sites like Bring a Trailer and Cars And Bids. People are capable of dropping $50,000 - $100,000 on what is most certainly a secondary car (if not tertiary or further). Heck, I don’t even have that. I’ve been contemplating and strategizing on buying a second car to compliment the BMW M2 for over two years now - still can’t financially justify pulling that trigger.

I can certainly relate to those Youtube videos about how seemingly everybody else has more money than me. Granted there’s zero envy involved here. I understand fully my income situation and how much I can spend. It is what it is, and it’s the only thing I can control. But one can always daydream, right? Especially when the PowerBall jackpot is sitting at 1.8 billion dollars.

It would only be due to buona fortuna if I am ever in a position to drop six figures on a car like ordering appetizers at a restaurant.

The perfect setup.

Eat the rich

Someone on Bring a Trailer just paid a hair over $200,000 for an Acura Integra Type R with 4,800 miles. Plus buyer’s premium to BaT, and the relevant taxes and registration. Though surely someone with this much coin to drop on essentially a toy would no doubt have a Montana LLC to register it under. No taxes, baby!

Needless to say, that is a metric ton of money for that car. Even the most shortest of wheel-base early model Porsche 911s do not transact for this much. Caveats, of course: this looks to be the most pristine sample of the Integra Type R outside of the one tucked away in the Honda museum. The high price is also due to a bidding war between two rich guys desperate to own this legendary piece of Japanese automotive history.

Bottom line, an item is worth whatever someone is willing to pay. The only way to measure whether or not $200K for an Integra Type R is “worth it” is to have another auction with an almost exact copy of this car. Except you can’t. Honda did not make that many Integra Type Rs to begin with. I bet there isn’t another one of these with this immaculate of provenance.

So we will never know. Us peasants can only dream of dropping $200,000 on a static toy like it’s nothing. You can cut three zeros to that figure and I’d still agonize over whether or not $200 for a pair shoes is worth it. Heck, I’m still teeter-tottering on spending $40,000+ on a second car. $200,000 on something with only artistic value! The new owner won’t ever put miles on this Type R: each additional mile is a hatchet to the car’s value.

(Tongue firmly in cheek) I can understand why a subset of folks want to “eat the rich.” When you see such figures spent on cars like it’s nothing, or paying $100,000 markup on a 992 GT3 that already starts at $250,000, you realize there’s a whole entire separate world of car enthusiasm that you have no access to. Let envy get the best of you, and yeah, you’d want to “eat the rich”, too.

Duck season.

Here's a good reason

I think it’s ridiculous if people are truly not buying a Tesla car just because of Elon Musk’s antics in the Trump administration. The Model 3 and the Model Y remain some of the best electric cars you can buy. If I were in the market, I would not hesitate to buy one, no matter how supposedly toxic the CEO is. Much like you can appreciate the god tier levels of musicality with Kanye’s earlier work, even though the current him has clearly gone off the deep end.

Obviously, car purchase is not a rational decision. Otherwise we’d all be driving Toyota Corollas for multiple decades. America has such a robust car market precisely because so much emotion is tied to the vehicles we drive. We buy a BMW because we detest the usage of turn signals. Guys buy overly large trucks so they can (potentially) run over spandex-wearing wimps on bicycles.

So I can understand (though still ridiculous) why people are souring on the Tesla brand. In this current political climate, the Tesla badge carries a negative connotation. People think that owning a Tesla car is an endorsement of whatever the heck Elon Musk is doing. Though I wouldn’t go too far with that line of thinking; those folks mustn’t look up how Volkswagen was founded…

What should deter people away from buying a Tesla is the enormous cost to insure one. For fun exercise, I hypothetically replaced my expensive to insure BMW M2 with a poverty-spec Tesla Model 3. And there was practically no change to the insurance. Comparatively, if I were to swap the BMW with a Toyota 4Runner, my insurance premium would be cut in half.

I should sell the M2 and get a 4Runner…

A rare long-roof bimmer.

Marketing on Youtube

A pain point for us car guys is finding a trustworthy shop. Now obviously the dealership is the prime option. And if they screw up, you can always complain to the manufacturer. But for those of us not made of money, we’d like something a little less costly. After the initial warranty period is over, of course.

I think a good way for auto shops to advertise their quality is to start a Youtube channel. Putting it on video will show potential customers what to expect. Are the mechanics knowledgeable? Are jobs done in a timely manner? Is there excellent attention to detail? Think of it as marketing cost. Pay an intern minimum wage to produce videos. The cinematography doesn’t matter as much as being able to show what the shop is capable of.

For example: after watching a few videos of Tyrrell’s Classic Workshop, I can judge the quality of their work to be the highest. If in another multiverse I was endowed with the monetary ability to buy expensive classic cars, I would readily commission Iain Tyrrell Classic Cars to perform maintenance work.

With my BMW M2 nearing its end of dealership service plans (first three years were free, then I bought two more years), I will be looking for an independent shop to continue the car’s maintenance sometime next year. In lieu of running into a local BMW shop’s Youtube videos on the algorithm, I will have to troll the BMW forums on where the local owners prefer to take their cars to.

Ideally, I would have the space and do the maintenance myself. However, as we know, none of us live in the ideal world.

Crossing guard.

Gamble to rumble

One of my frequent YouTube channels is Tyrrell's Classic Workshop. The latest video shows the proprietor going over to Paris, France for a car auction. In that very car auction is a Ferrari 250 LM that sold for 28 million euros. An unfathomably large sum - to spend on a single car - for a broke person with meager means like myself.

A tremendous amount of money for a thing that will largely sit in an air-conditioned garage for many years. Until the next supremely rich car guy pays even more for it. Heck, the buyer might not even have to pay taxes if the car is stored in a free port. Vintage Ferrari race cars: the only time a car is an “investment”. Your paint-to-sample Porsche 911, sadly, is not. That money is better thrown into an S&P 500 fund.

The pain from being a broke car guy is that I don’t have the means to sample the variety of cars out there. I can only do so in the virtual world of Gran Turismo (the only way I can “own” and “drive” a Ferrari). A large garage full of automobiles is not in the cards for me, in this life time. I’d have to first afford a garage.

Then there are cars that’s wholly out of my income range. As a former owner of a 2015 Porsche 911 GT3, I currently cannot afford a 2025 Porsche 911 GT3. The starting MSRP has ballooned from $125,000 to $200,000. My incomes has not kept up with that inflation. And that’s before ticking a single option box, and paying extortion money to the selling dealership.

I can see why people gamble their whole money into specific stock options and/or crypto. There are so many nice things out there (it’s not only cars) that if we can just get a huge sum of money very quickly, we’d be able to buy and enjoy them all. They don’t want to wait the many decades in working hard and accumulating wealth slowly. Because a 911 GT3 won’t be brand new on sale for that much longer.

In lieu of getting extremely lucky in a gamble - not that I would in the first place, I hugely temper my expectations.

Watering hole.