FinanceDude
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2006
- Messages
- 12,483
Unless your car or SUV has bad cylinder rings, you should be able to bring them into the shop and get a tune-up (or a tune up and a head job) that should restore your vehicle's gas mileage and performance. With today's gas prices it's a good way to save gas money and reduce your emissions. (If the rings are bad . . . you can get a full engine overhaul, but the economics of an engine overhaul might suggest buying a new car instead.)
As a society we've decided there are lots of things you must do or can't do. Drive a car, the law requires that you have a license, insurance, follow certain conventions (traffic laws) and wear a seat belt, and you're not legally allowed to drive drunk . . . even though you enjoy the buzz. You're also not legally allowed to smoke in many public places, take up pig farming in a residential neighborhood, or run over to the pharmacist or corner drug dealer and pick up any number of things even if you can afford it and enjoy the idea of being a heroine-addicted pig farmer who smokes.
We restrict people from doing many things because it harms the people around them. Shipping money by the barrel full to other countries isn't a good economic policy and is against the interests of national security. Burning the stuff is responsible for causing the air in southern California to become so polluted that it very literally makes me (and tens of thousands of other people) sick. (Air quality problems forced me to move from California to Washington State.) And there is a broad scientific and political consensus that the greenhouse gases produced by burning the stuff is putting the entire planet at risk.
You may not like it, but there's more than adequate reason to send gas-guzzling cars the way of heroine-addicted pig farmers who smoke.
Are you working for Al Gore??