Had an offer accepted on a house right before the holiday season, went to the inspection today. If you couldn't guess from the title, it didn't go so good!

To start with, when we saw the place, it had some minor electrical issues. Namely, that the power didn't work in about 60% of the house. So we told them to fix it so we could actually, you know, inspect it, but were fine with the assumption it was probably a bad feed to the subpanel, which knocked out everything on the subpanel.

They went to go and work on it, and it was taking a while. So long we actually had to push the inspection back. OK, no harm, no foul. Well apparently the seller was annoyed at some point that we wanted, you know, working fucking electricity, and proceeded to piss and moan to his agent, who proceeded to piss and moan to my agent every time they were on the phone about how the seller was "really upset because he was already providing a credit to repair the sunroom roof and didn't think he should have been on the hook for $4500 in electrical work". This persisted until my agent basically lost it on him, and said if he hears about the electrician one more fucking time he's never bringing another buyer to one of his properties.

That was before the inspection! It does not get better!

Leaving aside the asbestos shingle siding covering the entire house, which would take easily $15k to abate and conveniently was not disclosed to us, the minor roof leak turned out to be covered by a 20x16 tarp held down by concrete planters installed by goofballs who didn't know how to walk on a roof and ripped off half the ridge cap and a bunch of shingles that we could see. So the roof is shot, which is all the more evident by the standing water inside the sunroom. Oh, standing water which had frozen, because the furnace was apparently out. Which also broke the pipes, and also broke the PEX where they tried to patch out a couple of bad joints. Why they couldn't just solder in new copper is beyond me, but hey it's all leaking anyways so who gives a shit. The furnace is also leaking - did I mention that? All the sheetrock in the semi-finished basement had been floodcut and left in the yard, which I swear I do not remember being like that when I made the offer, but the inspector was the one who noticed it, so what do I know.

So my agent goes to call their agent like "uh, do you know the furnace is out". He calls the seller, and the seller apparently says it must be out of oil, and proceeds to blame the previous tenant for not having it filled. Question 1) What fucking tenant is responsible for filling oil? Question 2) How the fuck does the seller not know what the oil level is? Question 3) Did he not think we would see the previous repairs, which were done so piss fucking poorly they were already leaking again? Question 4) Why would he waste my fucking money to have the place inspected in this condition? And most important, Question 5) since the frozen pipes obviously blew water all over the place, which probably fucked up the electrical to begin with, why the fuck wouldn't he fix the fucking furnace?

As these were the shittiest, laziest excuses we'd ever heard, without as much as an apology and with nothing but a bunch of excuses, We pulled out of the deal. I told my agent if they ask why, tell them it's because they're fucking braindead and clearly have no idea what they're doing, and I'm not letting them waste any more of my time or money. Good fucking riddance.

First of all welcome DT people
I'm worried our new friends don't quite grasp what's acceptable and unacceptable Oppo content, so I wanted to point them in the right direction for future posts. Glad to have you all!

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• I finally build the LEGO statue of liberty that's been in my garage for 5 months
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• Broke another one, need shoelace recommendations
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• Rotis vs BBS on S4??
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• Anyone test drive a Civic Si?
• The Sleepy Sleeper: '88 300ZX sex-turbo build progress
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• Anything related to Craigslist
• Anything related to cars

Congratulations @Spitfire_1600 for being user #1000!!!!!!!!!!!!! We made it oppo fam
praise uppu

@GibbsEmphasis old meme i made for oppo

Things on the V12 front started to get real real when we had an offer accepted on a house, that was well under-budget even inclusive of whatever we could throw at it financially to polish it up and bring it out of the 1960's. I pointed out to my wife that for the first time, now that the last house is sold, and given we had a new one under contract, if the right car came on the market I would be bidding. Like the keeper she is, she basically said she couldn't argue with that. So - hypothetical threshold in the rearview: check.

Well, the house thing went disastrously (details here). So technically I should not be car hunting. But I have been on and off market watching for close to 2 years now waiting for the right 3rd car - occasionally shooting at a moving target based on the strength of the collector car market and the status of my finances. But now that the old house is sold and I did slightly better than I expected, and given that there's this baby that just showed up here one day, I'm pretty much settled on either a 456 or a [redacted] [no i will not tell you what it is].

Problem is, there just haven't been many cars for sale that I was interested in. There have been two [redacted] for sale in a good 6-8 months, neither of which were priced too aggressively or were local to me. Fine. There was a 456 I was close to consummating off-market, but the guy decided to keep it because he realized he couldn't buy anything better with the proceeds. Tough to argue that. The others were either black, which I don't want, or were ultra low mileage, late model 456M's, which are not the same, and for reasons I don't totally understand, vastly more expensive.

And today - lo:
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1995-ferrari-456-gt-23/

We are through to the other side now: I have asked the wife. There is no going back.
Criteria 1: if I am going to test drive it, she is coming too. I said sure. Turns out the travel will be about 14 hours each way, and I do not intend to stay more than a night, so I am gonna go out on a limb and say she's going to reconsider this.
Criteria 2: purchase cannot impact house hunt budget. I told her I would maybe pull back the very top of our "reach" budget, where we're past a max loan and just have to throw in cash. This did not go well.
Criteria 2a: purchase cannot impact house hunt budget.
Criteria 3: I actually told her she needs to sleep on it, because she did not have a criteria 3 at the ready, and I have this sneaking suspicion if there is no criteria 3 for me to agree to, she will give me a criteria 3 after the car is already in the garage that I would otherwise not have agreed to.

Married life, fokls

K I'm going to go back to meditating now and deciding how stupid I really want to be with my money. Can't take it with me, I always say.

Not to make light of the ongoing tragedy in Europe, but I'll admit I lol'ed at this. I particularly like the effort that went into replicating the tissue-paper thin manual where the reverse text bleeds through.

@Demon-Xanth unrelated but I need a favor

After much thought, I have decided not to go to Santa Barbara.
Part 1: I still do not know if I can afford this car (more on that in a second)
Part 2: I still do not know if I can physically fit in this car (more on that in a second)
Part 3: It would be extremely irresponsible of me to fly cross country twice during COVID with a 5-month old baby waiting for me at home, not having the utmost confidence in 1 and 2.

On part 2: as it turns out I have never driven a 456. I've wanted to mind you, but I literally have not seen a single one for sale within driving distance in 2 years. Incredible. As someone 6'5" with size 14 feet, it is not at all a surefire thing. I have fit in and driven some small-ish cars in the past - I have a RX-8 and an Elantra, had a B14 200SX, a Focus SVT, a Protege... I have driven compacts and subcompacts basically forever. Having said that, none of these are $80,000+. I HAVE driven a Maserati Coupe GT (not getting into that shitstorm), and found it "cozy" to be generous. From the limited information that's out there, the Maser seems to be closer in size to the 612, and the 456 is smaller. So that's definitely not promising.
The seller, being a true peach, has taken some representative measurements of the car for me to compare against the RX-8, at which point I'll debate how much I want to make a fool of myself on FChat by offering bottles of Opus or something to literally drive someone local's car around the block. So that's the first problem.

Problem the second: did you know that Ferraris are very expensive to own and operate? When you take it all bit by bit you're like "yeah, I can do this. $1100 a year for fluids? Need the occasional $9k major? It's doable." But then you write it all down in one place, and make a table, and hooooolllyyyyy shit.
Based on my math, all-inclusive, would you like to take a guess at the total operating cost per mile of a Ferrari 456? Like 1500 miles a year, which is enough to drive it without putting it into receivership. And I do mean total, with gas/insurance/all that crap, and in the interest of transparency, paying to have it stored, since I'm not doing a "best case" analysis for this.

Go ahead. Think about it.
Here's another picture of the car before the answer after:

Ten. Dollars.
$10.
Per mile.
Ten American Dollars.
One thousand pennies for each mile.
Ten
Dollars
($10)
Per Mile.
TEN DOLLARS.
Alternately, .2 cents per foot. If you forgot a shirt at the dry cleaners, it's literally cheaper to write it off and buy a new shirt. If you take the 'rarri round trip to work (~50 miles r/t) it cost you more to take that drive than you take home that day in a $100k a year job.

Mind you, again, this was inclusive of everything, including year round storage in what I used as the "75% worst case". Storage, insurance, minor annual, major every 5 years, cost of gas, cost of consumables/unplanned repairs (at $2/mi in a "upper bound" scenario), and - now this is important here - depreciation, which I took as a mileage expense because it was easier to analyze on a break-even.

In my "75% best case" I took lower numbers on the servicing and consumables, winter storage only, but otherwise same gist. Still like $7.50 a mile. I could go to 4,000 miles a year, which gets me to jusssst about $4 a mile in the best case, but then it's still $16,000 to run the car for a year, or $25,000 a year in the worst.

Yeah, you can nitpick and say "hrrmwell its actually a flat cost price with a supplemental mileage charge that you should be using as the basis for your trip cost analysis heh" but you know what FUCK THAT. TEN DOLLARS. It would still have been like $3-4 an incremental mile anyways, which is enough that my eyes are still bleeding after writing this entire interblag.

I made this chart, which I am too tired to explain right now. OK, fine, I'll half ass it. The red lines are sale prices after appreciation if the car was not driven. Basically put the car in a garage and sell it after that many years. Very lame. The blue and green lines are total expenses incurred through that year, using those expenses above. This is where "driving the car" hits. Yes, a car with more miles sells for less money than a car with less miles, but I am taking $1-1.50/mi as a depreciation expense, and counting that the same as an out-of-pocket expense. So the net sale would be the same (e.g., $150k sale price after adding miles, less $175k in expenses is -$25k... or alternately, $175k sales price with no miles added, less $200k in expenses and mileage is still -$25k). Some accountant can probably explain that better than me, but the only accounting I have left in my brain right now is
TEN DOLLARS.

@shop-teacher usually differential ground settlement wouldn’t cause a full, unpredictable collapse. Plus there’s a good chance the building is on piles (note: I don’t know this, but right on the water line the shoe fits). This looks like a flat plate concrete building, it’s right on the ocean, rusting of rebar has to be a concern (which could happen to an old building) or questionable construction (which could happen to a new building). I would immediately suspect either a column blow-out or what’s called a two-way or “punching shear” failure. Basically the slab is overloaded, rips a hole and slides right down one of the columns. Like if you have a piece of jello on a toothpick, if the piece of jello is big enough, eventually the friction between the jello and toothpick will give way.

Those sorts of failures are super dangerous in concrete buildings because the slab typically falls onto the one below it, which is then overloaded, which falls on the one below it, etc. it’s called pancaking. They happen extremely rapidly and with very little warning. How often do you think the put holes in the ceilings to inspect the slab-column joints at every column and every floor? Would “never” be a good guess? It only takes one bad spot. Everyone knows this so the connections are typically very over designed, but with that sea air... like I said it only takes one.

@MUSASHI66 I would rather have a top notch fresh steak than a very good dry age steak, but if you go apples to apples on quality I’ll take dry age

@t0ast beauty!!! Wish I knew we had a KS/MO Oppo, there was a car at omega in Wichita I might have asked you to look at. I know it’s not around the corner, but I promise it would have been worth the trip. Though it was also green, so really I might have had to guard it from you.

@frinesi2 @COTD

@Future-Next-Gen-S2000-Owner god F1 cars going over the hill to the corkscrew would land on the moon. So we must see it

@Wobbles-the-Mind i told someone last year or maybe 2020 the best bargain in all of cars was the carrera GT because you could get a car that competed with enzos but only came in a manual for $500k. Now that they’re worth $1.5-2m all I can say is I wish I had $500k in 2020.

So you are not alone in thinking it’s sort of blah, people thought the same thing for a while, but the last year has proven it’s possible for all of you to be wrong at the same time.

@jminer i HATE wearing down angle grinder blades more than like a half inch. They get so dull and lose so much cutting speed.... ugh just throw it out. they're like $.99! I've had small stuff let go, it's not worth getting decapitated because I was too lazy to go back inside and get a new one to swap out

@Taylor-Martin cheater

@CB R8 V10 might be the one for me. I hope they drop a little, because they’re more than I can afford, but not so much more I wouldn’t consider spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger jusssssst this once. What can go wrong

@ranwhenparked ooooh yeah with absolutely no limits I’d probably get a 275 GTB/4

@Nauraushaun modified isn’t sold tho