The "Four-Square" process - savvy auto buying

Dealerships Rip You Off With The “Four-Square,” Here’s How To Beat It

Excerpt:

Former used car salesman Alan Slone grows a conscience and reveals one of the major strategies dealership use to screw you when buying a new car. At the heart of it all is the “4-square,” a sheet of paper (sample above) divided into four boxes: your trade value, the purchase price, down payment, and monthly payment. This is supposed to help you and the dealership come to an agreement, but as you’ll see, it’s really more akin to three-card monte dealer’s deck of cards. Many, but not all, dealerships use this tool. Here’s 5 tips to get you started, and then a very detailed breakdown of how the dealership manipulates buyers with the four-square.

7 tactics car salesmen hope you don’t know

Excerpt:

1. Playing out the clock
2. Psychological profiling
3. The pressure of the ‘impending event’
4. The ‘porcupine close’
5. The ‘Ben Franklin close’
6. The ‘alternate choice close’
7. The trip to the back office

Comment: Image from the 2nd article. I'm not in "the market" at this time because:

• I'm happy with my 17 year old truck (it needs a new rear bumper - someone ran into it in a parking lot and left without leaving a note
• Our main vehicle is about 3 years old and has a lot of life left in it

My tips:

• Separate "the trade" from the purchase
• Either arrange financing in advance or pay with cash
• Search for the car you want and the price on the Internet
• Control the clock
• Be willing to walk away 

Here's what you need to do when you sell your car online. https://t.co/Lvq5wDG9qi (via @CNBCMakeIt) pic.twitter.com/xpSsyE0wPk

— CNBC (@CNBC) July 23, 2019

On God and Mammon

4 Dangerous Attitudes that Sway Our Hearts Toward the Love of Money

Four Common Pitfalls with Money

1. The first is ingratitude. A grateful heart is a heart at rest. A grateful person is aware that he deserves nothing of all he possesses and enjoys. Because of this, he daily counts his blessings and is thankful for the little things that would otherwise be taken for granted. The unthankful person does just the opposite. He keeps telling himself that he deserves more than he has. Because of this, he is way more aware of what he doesn’t yet have than of all the things he has been graciously given. This causes him to live an entitled and demanding life. Never quite satisfied, he easily justifies a wasteful and selfish use of money.
2. The second ingredient is need. This is one of the most poorly and overused words in human culture. The majority of what we are able to tell ourselves we need, we don’t actually need. We all are very skilled at loading our desires into our need category, and once we have, we think it’s our right to have these things, and therefore it’s appropriate to do what is necessary to posses them. So we waste all kinds of money satisfying needs that aren’t really needs, all the while feeling quite comfortable, because if it’s a need, it seems right to acquire it. So with closets bursting with more clothes than we can wear and refrigerators filled with more than we can eat and houses bigger than we actually occupy, we are still able to tell ourselves that we are needy. And because we have told ourselves that we are needy, we will spend more.
3. The third thing that weakens the defenses of the heart against the love of money: discontentment. Because I am not grateful for all the things I have been given and don’t deserve, and because I have misdiagnosed need, loading many things in my need category that are not needs, I am a constantly discontented person. It is virtually impossible to be satisfied with what I have, so I am on a constant quest for more. Since I am on a constant quest for more, I tend to spend more than I should to satisfy myself, but because my discontentment is rooted in ingratitude and misunderstood need, spending more won’t solve my problem. So, I end up spending more than I have, because what I am trying to do can’t work. Contentment isn’t a money problem, a possession problem, or a location problem; it’s a problem of the heart and therefore is not solved by spending.
4. The final ingredient that works with ingratitude, need, and discontentment to set up your heart to misappropriate money is envy. If you are unthankful and convinced that you deserve more, if you have been able to convince yourself that you need certain things that you do not have, leaving you deeply discontented, you will invariably look over the fence and envy the person who appears to have what you have not yet been able to acquire. Envious people are always taking account. Envious people are always comparing. Envious people are constantly placing things on their “she has, but I don’t” list. Envious people regularly feel that they have been given a bad deal, so it is right for them to use their resources to settle the score. Envy will cause you to be both self-oriented and foolish in your use of money.

It is ingratitude, neediness, discontent, and envy of the heart that cause us to be all too money conscious, all too self-focused in our use of it, and all too liberal in our expenditures. If we persist on that course, our life really will end up being “money, money, money,” no matter how much of it we actually have. We need to continue to remind ourselves that the problem with money is not that it exists. The problem with money is not that we have too little or too much. Money problems are always heart problems; they’re deeper than the size of our paycheck and the specificity of our budget. Money can be a blessing or a curse.

Comment: Image source

AR-15 Whac-A-Mole

Gun Makers Adjust Rifles to Skirt Bans

Excerpt:

“They all shoot the same,” said Norris Sweidan, the owner of Warrior One Guns & Ammo in Riverside, Calif., where the walls are lined with AR- and AK-style rifles modified to be legal in the state. “These people that are passing the laws, how many of them do you think have actually shot a gun?”

In response to mass shootings, Democratic presidential candidates including former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris say they want to renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004. Governors from Rhode Island and Virginia are pushing them too.

But the proliferation of guns sold legally that operate nearly identically to banned models shows how difficult it can be to make firearm restrictions effective.

Comment: The lesson from the Wheellock

In 1517 and 1518, the first gun control laws banning the wheellock were proclaimed by the Emperor Maximilian I, initially in Austria and later throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

For an honest debate on mass shootings, start by admitting the limits to federal solutions, writes @wjmcgurn https://t.co/bglBayI1BO via @WSJ

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) August 13, 2019

Address Plaque project

Address Plaque 14" x 9" Scalloped- Cast Bronze

Replacing:

Comment: On order. The current one is 15 ½ x 5 ½

pic.twitter.com/pvvBWvhCW8

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) June 26, 2019

How I get things done :) pic.twitter.com/DQUGPcizyN

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) July 10, 2019

New address plaque.

Installed by David Crosby's doppelgänger pic.twitter.com/9RKh3immRQ

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) July 12, 2019

New versus old.

25 years of sun, wind, rain, snow and temperature extremes (minus 30 to 100 degrees) took a toll on the old. The wood was cracked pic.twitter.com/2kn3ssVihy

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) July 12, 2019

On that "content of one's character"

MLK quote

The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King

Excerpt:

At the Willard Hotel, King and his friends’ activities resumed the following evening as approximately 12 individuals “participated in a sex orgy” which the prudish Sullivan felt included “acts of degeneracy and depravity . . . When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul’.” Sometime later, in language that would reflect just how narrow Sullivan’s mindset was, “King announced that he preferred to perform unnatural acts on women and that he had started the ‘International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters’.” Anyone familiar with King’s often-bawdy sense of humour would not doubt that quotation.

Comment: No comment needed

Worth mentioning: NYTimes: OCT. 11, 1991Boston U. Panel Finds Plagiarism by Dr. King

A committee of scholars appointed by Boston University concluded today that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized passages in his dissertation for a doctoral degree at the university 36 years ago.

"There is no question," the committee said in a report to the university's provost, "but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation."

Despite its finding, the committee said that "no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree," an action that the panel said would serve no purpose.

But the committee did recommend that a letter stating its finding be placed with the official copy of Dr. King's dissertation in the university's library.

The four-member committee was appointed by the university a year ago to determine whether plagiarism charges against Dr. King that had recently surfaced were in fact true. Today the university's provost, Jon Westling, accepted the committee's recommendations and said its members had "conducted the investigation with scholarly thoroughness, scrupulous attention to detail and a determination not to be influenced by non-scholarly consideration."

The dissertation at issue is "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." Dr. King wrote it in 1955 as part of his requirements for a doctor of philosophy degree, which he subsequently received from the university's Division of Religious and Theological Studies.

G-Kids fascinated with magnets - where to buy

Magcraft

KJ Magnetics 

Comment:Grandpa likes them too

Magnets pic.twitter.com/iPjvpTmZAB

— 𝓙𝓲𝓶 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓽 (@jrpeet) July 10, 2019

Farewell Dionn

December 18, 2017

June 14, 2019

Dear Dionn,

I remember the first day I saw you in the radiation waiting area – such a warm inviting smile! You made me feel comfortable, although inside me was fear and apprehension. I was a bit afraid to reach out to you. Would it be appropriate? Would it be welcome? Of course, you were so kind! And day by day, I would see your welcoming face that started my day! I did not know how ill you were. I did not know the rigors of treatments and surgery that lay ahead for you.

Now we find ourselves nearly a year and a half later. Thank you for inviting me to your “Peace Out Farewell.”

I’m a bit nervous even as I write this: what should I say? How might I encourage my brother? I trust this helps! Kathee and I had a little McDonald’s picnic at Medicine Lake park at lunch today. We read John chapter 3 and these verses are always an encouragement to me: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

Not to be morbid, but of course having cancer I think of death daily. I wish I did not. I think about gravestones, my funeral, my burial location, and more.

A common Roman era military grave epitaph is: “fui quod es, eris quod sum”. Translated is: “I once was what you are, you will be what I am”. This is even on some modern graves:

Of course, it speaks of our common destiny – I will die!

40 years ago, a close friend John D died of Leukemia. Soon I will join him. But what awaits the Christian? I know you know! John 11:25, “Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live’”. Our Lord is the God of the living: Jesus: “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” (Luke 20:37-38)

My friend, John D, though long dead (he was 26) and buried, has been alive with Jesus these 40 years! I look forward to seeing him again! What will that be like?

The Scriptures inform us in at least four passages:

There was Paul “caught up into paradise” (2 Corinthians 12) who saw “surpassing great[] …revelations” and “heard things that cannot be told” (12:1-ff)

Isaiah saw:

Ezekiel (chapter 1)saw:

John saw (Revelation 1):

Dear Dionn, I must tell your that I love this life so much that I do not want to leave. But my day will come. And I am convinced, that I will see the Lord as Paul, Isaiah, Ezekiel and John have. This is the glorious future that awaits the Christian!

With much love! Jim