I understand exactly where he is coming from. One of my fathers cousin decided the farm needed a firetruck and decided to pick up two. It was the first on the scene when one of our barns burnt down. Pumps didn't work so great and did a little spurt by the time the fire department came. Great memories.
I Bought A Firetruck
161–170 of 284 posts
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#162How many people looked up "aircraft carrier" sales on ebay after reading this article?
Aircraft carrier on Ebay you say?
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_warship_HMS_Invincible_...
The British MOD (Ministry of Defence) has an auction site for surplus equipment from shows, clothes and jeeps up to (occasionally) aircraft carriers.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#163Is there some sort of crazy game of one-upmanship in the USA as to who can drive the most impractical gas guzzler? First it was stretch limos, then Hummers, then Hummer stretch limos. I wonder if we're gonna see stretch limo fire trucks… Edit (since I'm being downvoted): The story is cool, I just find the fact that he's driving it daily to work completely retarded. What the hell I consider driving a car to work to be…
The other side of this is that the energy and pollution cost of creating a new car are very significant. You'd have to extend the life of the gas guzzler for quite a while before there's a net increase in pollution vs. a new vehicle.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the boat. I want to buy a 13ft one-man sailboat that weights 130lbs. Any car can tow that. Some people have boats that weight two tons. Good luck towing that in a Fiat 500.
Well, when you win the lottery and are able to actually buy that boat, perhaps you can budget in the cost of a car to pull it? This "aspirational" angle to buying big cars actually explains a lot, like a fat kid drinking Gatorade or out of shape guys wearing tracksuits to the mall, "just in case". After all, if you're driving a big car, no-one will be able to definitively say you don't own a boat..
Yup, it's even a common marketing angle. Ever heard of greenwashing? SUV marketing often depicts a vehicle being driven offroad and/or through rough conditions, when 99% of their buyers will never use the car like that. They are playing on buyer's desire to cultivate a certain image.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
While thezach's comment does come across as being from a jerk, keep in mind too the same reaction applies to "every parent" who expects the rest of society to curtail every possible activity that might hurt their unsupervised child. Does anybody really think it's a rational argument to make, that this guy _shouldn't_ buy and drive his own fire truck because it's a risk to "the children"?
Kids bike and play in neighborhood streets. Surely you recognize that some untrained guy driving a massive firetruck up and down that street just to get groceries is a problem.
If only it had some kind of noise making device that could be used to warn kids.
Like an air horn. ;)
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#166I just bought a warehouse. Similar - I always wanted one. I'm going to turn it into a house and put a roof garden on it and put a sweet garage in to fiddle with cars and set up some office space and generally cause havoc in there. I could drop dead tomorrow. It's nice to tick these ambitions off, although my ambitions always seem to make it more likely that I will drop dead tomorrow. (It's in Manchester, UK if anyone…
Hey Alex, before Christmas you offered me to spend Christmas day at your place, while I turned it down for an offer from a friend I would love to repay your kind offer with some free labor :)
I get paid on Thursday (relevant for bus costs), I live in Darwen and I'm free next Sunday, so if you still want some help I would love to come down!
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#167"A total of $3,600 which also happened to be the hard limit my wife had imposed on this particular invaluable transaction." cough
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a European I don't understand the american fascination with impractically fhuge cars for every day commuting. Okay I get it, you want a big car for that roadtrip or vacation. Understandable, I do too. But for everyday stuff? My hatchback does perfectly fine around town ... hell, it does perfectly well on most vacations and long drives too.
Im a European, well British anyway.... Something occurred to me today regarding Americans and big huge stupid cars... I was watching the NASCAR earlier and there was a throwaway comment about some driver's sponsors being "local". By local they mean 60 miles away. Now to a Brit, maybe other Europeans, 60 miles feels like anything but "local". So, I get the impression that we don't understand the sort of scale of trave…
My wife and I both have a 70-80 mi round trip commute. Between our two cars, we average about 41MPG commuting. Also, we both don't commute everyday, that said, we still manage to have put 50k miles on each of our cars in 3 years. California is not a small/compact place.
Given how little I currently commute (2x/week), I am actually considering trading in my diesel VW for an old vanagon -- to facilitate some camping trips and the like. It will mean less milage efficiency, but 2x/week commuting won't take a huge hit.
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a kid I watched a UPS truck run down my dog on a quiet residential street.
Sorry about your dog. A school bus got my cousins' dog under the same circumstances. The two of them had to helplessly watch the whole thing from the bus.
better keep kids away from school buses, clearly dangerous
/sarcasm
Re: I Bought A Firetruck
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll agree with you that "watch your kids 24/7" is unfeasible. But I did think of something that would get the same results in this case: teach your kids to respect the property of others. It always confused me that, for example, trampoline owners could get in trouble because local children, without the permission of the owner, came over to jump on it and fell off and broke a bone. The kids are at fault, and that ref…
This is long established common law. Just because it is your property, you cannot escape your obligation to mitigate obvious hazards, particularly where children are involved. So hanging a tree swing that is unsafe and snaps, injuring a child playing on it, still creates liability for you even though the child was trespassing.
Parental neglect is a well established law as well.