monkeylizard

Start at 7:05. The payoff is at 7:24.

Here's the thing. People who launder money usually only launder a small portion of their illicit gains. The taxes, fees, and kickbacks are the cost of cleaning some of it and they accept that fact. If Tony Montoya is sitting on $500 million in cash from his import business, and wants to buy a $10 million house on the water in Miami, he'll launder $20 million and come out with the clean $10m he needs. The house actually cost him $20 million, but he's still sitting on $480 million, tax free, so no complaints there. The larger the operation, the more opportunity there is to setup a legitimate business to launder even more money. Take the mob for example. They could run that intimidation and stolen cigarette money through their restaurants, freight companies, casinos, etc. where it comes out clean. Remember you only need to clean the money you want to use for legitimate purposes. No need to clean the cash you're using to pay bribes, your henchmen, your supplier, etc. If it's done right, it's not easily investigated. Money is laundered multiple times and through offshore corporations. The paper trail isn't like the movies.

It's the buyer laundering the money through the seller, often in cahoots with one another. Let's say you I and are involved in less-than-legal activities. We each have $20K in cash shoved in shoeboxes but have no official income so eyebrows get raised if either of us go buy a car or a boat. Instead, I can sell you a Cheeto that looks like Elvis for $20K, and you can sell me a one-of-a-kind watercolor painted by your 3 year old nephew. We now each have $20K made through the sale of legitimate items and neither of us are out more than a Cheeto and Arte de Toddler. We can now claim our $20K as income (and pay taxes on it) and use the remainder for high dollar purchases like cars, boats, or houses. Repeating the process gets more money into the system OR hides the same money a second, third, or fourth time. Each time it gets harder to trace back to the original illicit source. More legitimacy (and more money), and less suspicion can be added by using something with actual value instead of my Elvis Cheto and your nephew's painting if a duck but still overpaying. Doing it through a public place like Gunbroker or eBay adds credibility because it's out in public. The buyer and seller can create several dummy accounts to bid up the price to make it look like it was a real auction and the high price is legitimate. Only if someone goes digging real deep into the accounts would they find they all trace back to the same person. Of course the more money you're laundering, and the more people involved, the more pathways there are and the more obfuscated the actual process becomes. In this case, if the buyer and seller were actually cahooting to launder money, there probably never was a rifle to begin with and if there was, it never really changed hands.

BLACK PANTHER!!!!!!

All those spots on the road came from their hair, not the car.

First of all, it's an issue of supply. There simply aren't as many EVs on the road for long enough to be showing up in the junk yards. But they will. When that happens you will be able to pick up the electric motors. I predict a DIY community will spring up for which motors to grab from the latest models and how to retro fit them to our older models to get more power, more range, or both. Basically the EV version of hotrodding. Because of the risk of electric shock the battery will not likely be a "pull it yourself" part. Too much liability, like the airbags they pull and don't sell. Either the yards will pull the battery packs and have them separate like they do with some electronics now, or they'll pull them and ship them to a recycler/rehabber facility and we'll never get our hands on them directly from the pull-a-part.

Yep. We're conflating 4 different issues in this thread: The method of storing energy - ICE mostly wins this one because gasoline refills are fast and available everywhere effectively creating unlimited range. EV gets a bonus because it's easy to start each day with a full "tank". Cost - ICE wins the up front costs and major repair costs. EV wins maintenance/operating costs and is closing the gap on both up front and major repair costs. External control - Tie. This ranges from annoying (subscription to use your seat heaters) to frightening (remote disabling/controlling). Neither is immune from it. Right-To-Repair - ICE wins for now because that horse is out of the barn. EV is the emerging tech the mfg's are trying to fence in. All 4 are mostly independent, but since EVs are generally closer to the cutting edge of technology and are usually loaded up with more of it, they're currently more likely to get caught up in #3 in the near term. In the medium term, all ICE cars will see the same thing. There's likely no significant long term for ICE as far as new production goes. Toss in the government meddling trying to force consumers to EV who don't want to go so it adds to our EV con list and makes it an emotional rather than rational conversation. Nobody likes to be told what to do. That stops critical thinking skills to where we can't see the advantages of EV (performance, always full at the start of each day, lower operating costs, enough range for most needs) and only focus on the negatives (high up front cost, not really green like advertised, limited public charging infrastructure, charging times, and limited heavy-duty availability for those who need it).

I here I was thinking I was a bad person for always leaving the pull-a-part with a pocket full of fuses . . .

People used to to swap the engines out of the old Hertz Shelby Cobra Mustangs.

Since when did we have "normal" members?

If that comes to pass, it would apply to ICE just as much as EVs.

. . . any job that requires road travel (including construction and landscaping), all retail, government offices/services, gymnasiums, churches, hospitals, corporate office buildings, basically every job . . .

Yeah . . . because the owner of an ICE car would never be told "Your car needs a new engine" or "Your car needs a new transmission". Batteries are more now than a new engine/trans but battery costs are continuing to fall. Five to ten years from now I expect they'll reach parity cost with an ICE replacement. And with battery packs expected to still retain 90% of their charge after 200,000 miles, their replacement cycle will likely be as good or better than an ICE engine or trans.

Do you mean school teachers? Or warehouse workers at the Smile Direct Club? Or office workers at Lockheed Martin? Or Postal workers? Or Wal-Mart employees? Or grocery store cashiers and stockers? Or food court workers in an Indiana shopping mall? Or literally nearly any other place on the planet where violence is not expected but still happens? Yeah, those people (literally everyone who doesn't have armed security inside a fully secured facility) should change jobs to another one equally likely to experience violence instead of being prepared to defend themselves.

Smells like laundry up in here.

All you have to change is the head unit. No speaker change required. Just be sure to get one with a built-in AM/FM radio. I would expect they all would, but these days I wouldn't bet on it.

I think everyone agrees with that. The real issue is getting caught for some reason when you DIDN'T have to use it. Then you're still getting fired.

It's basically the same as sleeping with the owner's wife. Not illegal, but you're getting fired if you get caught.

We'll never unsee it if ya'll don't quit quoting it!

Or a drop of peppermint oil. They HATE peppermint.

Ugggggh . . . Kind of reminds me of Kentucky Conan! I'm pretty sure David will give someone 2 weeks of shore leave to "think about your actions" if that ever gets posted again.

I'd say it's a fair bet it's pretty much the same thing. And we see how that turned out. Like it or not, we will move to non-gasoline engines. The only real unknown is how quickly. China is investing heavily in EV infrastructure and their HUGE upwardly mobile middle class is driving the entire world market. China has already passed the US to become the world's largest car market. EVs are still fairly new and are more expensive up front than similar ICE cars and a battery replacement is more expensive than a comparable engine replacement in an ICE car. But a $15K battery pack today cost what, $25K 10 years ago? What happens when a battery pack lasts about as long on average as an ICE and costs about the same as a new engine replacement? And charge times are down to under 10 minutes or rapid battery pack swaps are available? That day is coming. I know we're not there yet. I don't have an EV and wouldn't yet have one as my only vehicle. The cost structure and the infrastructure isn't ready yet and I'm not in the "early adopter" segment but I'm glad that some people are. They're helping make the EVs better and drive down the costs for the rest of us who will have to switch sooner or later. I don't plan to buy another car for around 5 more years, and I'll definitely be looking at EV.

Why? How does it benefit you for someone else to be stranded? On the EV forums they could post a similar photo of an ICE car stranded out of gas and say "I hope this happens a lot more". Sure it's more convenient to quickly refuel an empty ICE with a gas can than to tow it, but the same basic principal can happen to either type of energy. You gotta watch your fuel/battery gauge. One advantage an EV has that few people with ICE cars have is that you can almost always start your day with a full charge. Plug in at home each night and you always start on Full. Someone brought up a mass evacuation like a hurricane. That's definitely a challenge, but it's also a challenge for ICE cars. Lots of people never make it all the way because they run out of gas and the one gas station for 20 miles ran out hours ago. Last winter there was a big snowstorm somewhere that stranded a bunch of people for a day or two. Gas cars were running out of fuel overnight, mostly because few were on full tanks when the day began. But there was at least one guy in a Tesla who stayed warm all night and was able to drive home after the road reopened because he started the day on a full charge. Another byproduct of the ICE cars in that situation was breathing in toxic fumes. When a car is moving, you don't get that effect, but packed together on a closed roadway and everyone idling, lots of those toxic fumes pool around the car and cars are not airtight.

I don't know Indiana law, but in TN if a shooting is judged (by an actual judge) to be self-defense, no civil suits can be brought against the shooter.