But the Car Is Only Worth $300!

By -
You must have heard this argument when someone is contemplating repairs to an old auto. "It's nuts to put $400 into it when it's only worth $300."

This argument seems to me to be entirely beside the point, unless one is repairing the car in order to sell it. If you intend to drive it, the relevant question is, "Will I get more satisfactory car service from my present car after $400 of repairs or from a $400 slice of another car?"

If, say, $400 of repairs are likely to keep the old car running fine for a year, they are almost certainly the cheapest way to get a year of decent automobile use. Why would the book value of the car make any difference to a person in this situation?

Comments

  1. Wabulon4:23 PM

    Perhaps you believe that your car's worth of $300 means that you can buy a similar one that runs for less than $400; if you are extremely parsimonious, it may rightly seem nuts to buy the repairs.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more