Drove to work this AM, top down. Don't remember the A/C being on, but I didn't intentionally turn it on. I dunno. Daughter insisted we take "Red car" to preschool instead of normal "black car." (Preschool at the end of the block, I understand I'm putting her life in grave danger driving 200yds at 17mph without a car seat and near the airbag, I accept it, blah blah).
No skin in this game, but since you seem unable to see it Chris, I will outline why this sounds like trolling, given the forum we are on.
1) driving to the end of the block. (Yes you may have been on your way elsewhere, but driving such distances is generally frowned upon here. Sounds like the very height of clown-car driving).
Yes. I drive to the end of the block. Drop my kid off. Then get in the car and go to work. I drop my kid off at about 8:15 with the goal of being at work as close to 8:30 as possible (the unofficial "should be in the office" time.) Yes, I could walk to school, walk back to the house, and then drive past the school I just walked to. Alternately, I could ride my bike to drop my daughter off, then ride about 45 minutes to work, and to make it at the same time I'd pay $5/hr for childcare (school starts at 8:15, you pay for extended hours prior to that time) instead of about $1/day for gas. Great call. The knee-jerk "clown car" bullshit is just that.
2) allowing a child to 'insist' on which car you took. Who's the adult here? Pandering to kids and spoiling them with material excess is again, your right, but contrary to the general consensus on these boards.
Uh, she insisted the same way a friend might insist he buy your next beer. Real tough sell to get me to drive my sports car on a beautiful sunny day. How that's pandering and spoiling to allow my kid to pick which car we already own to ride in is beyond me. Who gives a shit?
3) having a choice of cars in the first place. Again, multiple car ownership, whilst totally up to you, stands out on a board about frugality that has a heavy emphasis on reducing car use.
I know, I'm terrible, I keep a 13y/o long-paid-for 4cyl convertible in the garage because it makes me happy and helps me enjoy life. Given that I can't drive two cars at once, it doesn't increase the amount I drive one iota. It just makes me happier while I do it.
Look, I originally came on this board with interest, because it DIDN'T seem like the same old "drive every dime out of your life and live like a pauper forever" site. Increasingly, I'm seeing that it is. I try to OPTIMIZE (that's what we're here for, right?) my life, and reduce waste in areas I don't care about to spend in areas I do. That apparently isn't the point. The point seems to be to live in a prescripted way and congratulate each other on how close you can get to matching thy Holy Diety MMM, who is generally bad at math and demonstrably makes incredibly poor leaps in logic and pulls numbers out of his ass to try and make a point*. I never intended to post, but got drawn in discussing things related to cars, because that's my passion, and the group here seems incredibly ill-informed when it comes to them (ie, running A/C is a punch-you-in-the-balls offense, when in reality modern systems are very efficient with minimal mileage penalty). I see now that trying to provide another viewpoint and further, corrective information is considered "trolling" here (In most of the rest of the internet, sincere disagreement is not trolling, dunno why it is here) and is unwelcome. Got it. After this post, I'm going to lock my account and wander off. You guys want an
circlejerk echo chamber where you can congratulate each other on who can sweat the most to avoid paying a dime, fine. I'll leave you to it. Just don't pretend you're having anything close to a "discussion".
*See things like converting miles driven to time on road to make bikes safer than cars, a clearly idiotic way to look at it given no one says "let me take 1 hour to get to work no matter the distance" instead of "I live 10 miles away, that's 20 minutes by car and 40 by bike". See also "a small apartment is cheaper than a suburban house and those are good comparables" or "an SUV by default must always be the dumber choice no matter the actual costs in question."