SW03ES

Riiiight...

Huh?!? Are you talking about my avatar picture? There's no bird *BLEEP* in that picture... Which is perfectly fine, I would be more than happy to discuss the nature of the car selling relationship with you. However, to have a discussion you have to be respectful of the other party's point of view. As soon as I put something forth that was contrary to your point of view you "accused" me of being a car salesman and accused me of being ignorant and not knowing the value of a dollar. You weren't looking for a discussion, you were looking for people to kiss your posterior and tell you how right you are and we could all bash horrible slimy car dealers together. You mean...time and time again over the last 2 days you've been a member here? Please. Anyways, nobody bashed you. All I did was suggest that perhaps your attitude may have also played a role in what happened between you and the Orlando dealer and attempt to explain to you why some car dealers can sell cars for certain prices while other dealers can't. The only one doing any bashing here is you.

The MXM4 is a more handling biased tire, with less treadwear rating and less treadwear warranty. I wouldn't put the MXM4 on my car over the Primacy. Its the only tire I'd ever consider putting on the car IMHO...worth the wait.

Right...so you post on a discussion forum...not interested in a discussion... If you only want to read your viewpoint, then I suggest you post it in a blog or write it in a diary or something and just read that. Discussion forums are about discussion. Nothing "dickish" about my original response. My dickishness was in reply to your own. And thanks for telling us what our forum should be about...what with your owning a Lexus for 4 days and joining here 2 days ago.

Yeah don't get yourself thrown out! lol

Better or not, you can't legislate values or culture.

Way too radically christian for me... One thing about W, as devout as he is he never prosthelytized his faith. Something you can't say for Perry... anyways you can't legislate culture. The country is culturally different than it was in the 80s. I just finished reading W's book actually. Have you read it? Interesting read.

I bet they just quoted for what she had on there...that surprises me too!

Fo sho!

But a fun waste of time!

Can't do it, once you let one manufacturer buy their way around the law all of them will be doing it, going to court to force the government to allow them to do it, etc. Unfortunately its not that simple. The law isn't for sale.

Take pictures!

LOL...I knew that was coming. I think we're seeing now that the "d-baggery" didn't just come from Lexus of Orlando in this exchange... No, I am not a car salesman...but I spent several years consulting with car dealerships and salesmen so I know a good bit about how dealerships work. Anyways, why would it be a problem if I were a car salesman? Of course a car dealership is in business to make money. Thats why all businesses are in business. Do you not go to work to make money? If they stopped paying you...would you go? Good car dealerships realize that making money goes beyond one sale and that building good relationships with customers is what really makes them money. They used to pay me a lot of money to come into the dealership and teach their salespeople how to do that. There are good dealers, and there are bad dealers. I'm not saying Lexus of Orlando is a good dealer, I have no experience with them. However, I don't think the sales manager of a Lexus dealership (a fairly experienced and highly paid person) would scream insults at you and get up in your personal space for trying to get them to match another dealer's price. Frankly...my guess is that you acted the way you are acting here...little entitled...little dickish. Maybe worse. By the way, the term "client" implies a fiduciary relationship which doesn't exist in this situation. You are not their "client", you are just their customer). There are good dealers, and there are bad dealers. But, believe it or not the car business is a very tough business. I certainly know the value of a dollar, not sure what your point was about that. I never said that you should have paid more to buy the car from Orlando, I was just trying to make you understand that Massapequa was able to sell you the car for the price you wanted and still make the profit they needed to make, for whatever reason Orlando wasn't able to do that. Maybe Orlando's dealership has higher operating costs, or maybe Massapequa had the car on their lot for 5 months and Orlando had not. Who knows. My point was you are not entitled to have a dealer sell you a car for what you want to pay just because another dealer will. You have the right to do just what you did, buy it from whoever you want. I drove 50 miles to buy mine because they could do it for $1,000 less than the dealers by my home. Doesn't mean the dealers by my home are crooks, it just means their marketplace allows them to sell for a higher price. Good for them...but $1,000 was worth 50 miles to me. I'm the one keeping it real here "bud".

I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here. I've done a lot of business with car dealers, both as a consumer and as a consultant. While I have been treated rudely by dealership personnel before, I find it hard to believe that it would have escalated to the level where it did without you playing some part in that escalation. Did you truly just present him with the quote and he flipped out on you to the extent you describe here? I personally find that hard to believe. I think you likely had plenty of that "rudeness" to throw right back at him. As for the deal, its a supply and demand issue. The dealership has to make money too, and you can't expect a dealer to honor or beat a price from a dealer thats out of town. A separate town is a separate marketplace, and if one is willing to travel to another town for a better deal then great, but you can't blame a local dealer for pricing their products according to what the local marketplace will bear. Being told something by the sales team and it being a published advertisement are two different things. Which was it? Actually, yes. Making a sale has no value if there's no profit in it, and if he can't make a deal with you that works for you and for him, and someone else can then he did the right thing in suggesting you take his competition up on their offer. Some dealerships are happy to sell a car and make $100, some dealers can't do that depending on their volume, etc. I've found plenty of dealers who can do deals for cars $1k or more less than other dealers. You seem to feel that you were entitled to a certain deal from this guy, since you got your deal I don't see what your problem is...

The US has some of the strictest safety standards there are, and its because of those standards that we have cars that are as safe as they are today. That safety has saved countless lives, and has saved US drivers a LOT of money in the form os insurance claims, etc. True, every once and a while it makes a funny headline like this when some boutique car doesn't conform, but we're far better off because of those regulations.

One thread is enough, I'm going to close this and respond to your thread in the General Lexus Discussions forum...

You couldn't pay me enough to run for office LOL!

There is a cap in every state, but they vary. The highest unemployment payment is in Mass and its like $900 a week, but the next highest is like $600. But there is no state in the country where they can get a check from unemployment for more than $50k. Even in Mass, its only $3,600 a month...$43,200 a year. I don't know what kind of income you have to make to qualify for that...I'm sure its a lot. There is an issue there, I know when my wife was drawing her Unemployment, she would have gone and gotten a part time job or something, a temp job or something just to make a little money and have something to do. BUT, the way the unemployment program is structured, if she did that she would have lost her benefits, and had she become unemployed again she would not have been able to pick her benefits back up. We've paid a LOT of money over our careers for those benefits. I mean...a person has to make a smart business decision. If I have $1,400 a month coming in from unemployment, and I can take a job and make $2,000 a month...and cancel any chance of being able to collect my $1400 a month in the future if I loose that job, AND take away from time I could be spending networking and interviewing for a job commensurate with my skills and experience...that may not be a smart thing to do. Its not always about being lazy, its about making a smart business decision. Maybe what they should do is allow you to suspend your benefits if you take temporary work and restart them when that temporary work runs out. Or allow you to do that if you take a job a certain percentage below what you were previously earning and if you get laid off again pick back up your remaining benefits from the previous job.

You need to read the whole thing. In several places within the document S&P discusses the need to increase revenues (raise taxes). Had the senate passed and the President signed the House bill we may have avoided a Downgrade, but there would have been huge cuts to Medicare and Social Security, huge cuts in Government programs that put lower and middle income Americans to work and are propping up the economy. So...we might have been AAA rated...but back in a recession. Had the House agreed to proposals from the Dems and Obama...we would have avoided a downgrade, but their Millionaire buddies would have had to pay more taxes. See...it goes both ways. Its the inability of BOTH sides to COMPROMISE that is at issue here. I don't know what Media you were watching, but the Democrats certainly had solutions that included $4T in deficit reduction, they just included rolling back tax cuts for the rich and closing loopholes for corporations. The Republican bill was JUST cuts, no revenue increases and the Dem proposal was a mixture of both. Of course there was no Dem bill, bills originate in the house...and the GOP controls the house. To say that you never saw any solutions from the Democrats proves you are just working off what you're fed from the Right. I also assume that you do in fact accept your Social Security entitlement payments. Talk the talk...but won't walk the walk. Really this isn't true. Yes the benefit is calculated on the $120k, but there is a cap. For instance when my wife was laid off in 2008, she was making about $60k and qualified for the maximum unemployment in MD. So...she got the same check as someone who made $120k....$250k....$500k. That check was $350 a week. So the argument that $350 a week is "so much money" that she wouldn't have taken a $50k job doesn't really hold water. She's applied for well over 1,000 jobs since then, including jobs well below her qualifications and pay level, and has been on maybe 4 interviews...and has no job. Luckily she doesn't have to work. Not everybody's so fortunate.

You really should read this Lenore: http://www.standardandpoors.com/servlet/BlobServer?blobheadername3=MDT-Type&blobcol=urldata&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobheadervalue2=inline%3B+filename%3DUS_Downgraded_AA%2B.pdf&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobheadername1=content-type&blobwhere=1243942957443&blobheadervalue3=UTF-8 This is the official package released by S&P discussing the rationale and reasoning behind the downgrade. This are some excerpts: So...there is no doubt that raising the statutory debt ceiling was a requirement in any scenario that saw the US keeping its AAA rating. Regardless of what the right may say out on the stump, raising the debt ceiling did NOT cause this downgrade, refusal to agree to revenue enhancements really is what caused it.

This whole idea of "if Government was a Business" is equally meaningless...Government is not a business...its Government. So I assume you have refused Social Security and Medicare right? Banks and Financials have done nothing to help Americans? Thats a pretty bold claim. Much of the wealth in America would not exist without banks and financials. How would a family buy a home? How would someone start a business? Banks and financials are the bedrock of our economy and our way of life. Have they lost their way? Are they run for profit? Sure...but to say they have done "nothing to help Americans" is not reality. Sitting on our tax money? You do know that most of the big banks have repaid the bailout money, right? Anyways, what you're saying makes no sense...on one hand Banks and Financials are evil and have done nothing to help anyone...but then regulating them is the problem? Huh?!? As for it being better if the institutions you mention had failed, again...I don't know a lot of economists that would agree with you. Whether you believe it or not...these economists know more about this subject than you or I do. Had that occurred, we would have seen another Great Depression. Would the country ultimately be better for having been through that? Impossible to say...but it would have hurt a LOT of people and there is no doubt in my mind that we would be worse off today than we are now. You wanna see welfare spending go up? Wow... I assume you mean that I am not correct that there is no correlation between home economics and US economics... I think you need a lesson in how the economy works. In order for the economy to grow, consumers have to spend money. If consumers don't buy things, consumer items, homes, cars, travel, etc, then the economy doesn't grow...it shrinks. This is called a recession. In order to turn a recession around...somebody needs to spend. The government stimulates consumer and private sector spending by providing incentives to spend. When that doesn't work...the Government spends. This is how every recession in our history has been combatted successfully...by administrations of both political parties. Its how we got out of the Great Depression. If you have a situation where the private sector and consumer is not spending, and the Government sharply pulls back their spending on social programs, infrastructure improvements, etc BEFORE the private sector and consumer recovers and begins spending again...then nobody's spending...and the economy slips back into recession...or worse. This is not fear mongering, this is economic principle and fact. This is why you can't draw a correlation between how a household is run, or a company is run, and the way the Government is run from a financial perspective. The Government has a bigger overall responsibility and their actions have a far greater impact. The decision between a family choosing whether or not they can afford to go to Disney World or go out to dinner is a little less consequential to the bigger picture. Yes we have racked up huge deficits, a lot of that is these long protracted multi-theatre wars we've been fighting, a lot of it is due to actions the Government took to stop the slide into economic ruin. What we have to make sure of though is that we don't cause more harm trying to reign that in. When the economy is growing again, and the outlook is strong, these deficits won't be as big a deal...

But reducing the deficit was only part of what S&P needed to see to avoid a downgrade. If we saw 4.3T in cuts, but we still didn't raise the debt ceiling and defaulted on our debt...we would still see a downgrade obviously. Default=downgrade...bottom line. The government is not a household. You won't find a lot of economists that say massively reducing government spending in a weak and recovering economy with reduced consumer spending is going to get us out of a crisis. Like I said before, we're still trying to get the economy growing on its own...debt is not the primary concern right now. Thats simplistic thinking that the right wing uses out on the stump, but in reality comparing the activities of the federal government to a household is about as ridiculous as it gets. Apples and oranges.

How so?

Yeah...this will keep me from looking to him as well. To be clear, I don't feel the Republicans being in it to win it at all costs is a good thing. We need someone who wants to do what is right for the country, not themselves or their party politically. IMHO the Republicans have shown over the last 3 years that its them first, destroying the Democrats second, and the country's interests third. I don't see that as being a platform to be proud of. Say what you will about the Democrats and Obama, they are attempting at least to move their agenda forward, which is what theoretically the American people hired them to do. The Republicans have been running opposition...not leading. We need leadership. I think we have ideological leadership in Obama...they just can't get it going on the ground. As for the market...its going to get killed tomorrow...but it'll come back. I'm going to buy some stuff I think...

Could very well be. Lexus wouldn't quote a size change, my guess is you probably couldn't even get them to mount a different size if you tried!