From: geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Drug testing and welfare
Followup-To: alt.peeves
Date: 29 Jul 1992 15:44:55 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: purplehaze.corp.sun.com



In article <92210.184525JMS111@psuvm.psu.edu> 
Jenni Sheehey <JMS111@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:

>Peeve: My car is dying.  I thought if I got it to pass inspection, my
>troubles would be over. 


Peeve:  Car inspections.  I first had to deal with these when I lived in
Hawaii.  You have to have a certificate of inspection to get your car
registered een da islands, brah.  But before the gas station will
inspect your car, you have to get a no-fault insurance card.  I'd have
gotten insurance anyway, of course, but the annoyance came from having
to do these things in a particular order, and learning this procedure
through trial and error.  So I had to return to square one and call
around for an insurance agent, then drive into town and brave the
Waikiki traffic and lack of parking to get to the insurance office way 
out on Kuhio Street.  Then, 15 miles back to Makakilo to have the truck
looked at by the local Texaco station, and another five out across the 
cane fields to the branch DMV office in Ewa Beach to dump all this
paperwork and get my little cloverleaf safety inspection sticker. 
An extreme antipeeve was that, instead of paying a hundred-something 
dollars for the mandatory commercial tags I'd needed in California, I 
paid a flat $5.00 fee for Hawaii plates.

Now, thanks to Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, California has these 
silly-assed smog checks.  Their one saving grace is that they're only
required every two years, but that's like only having a slight case of
the clap.  A cottage industry was created overnight to gouge the consumer.
The smog inspections aren't cheap, and if your car doesn't pass, you have
to pay an additional fee -- typically fifty bucks -- to get it adjusted.
(This year, I think I'll ask if they'll give me a discount if I bring my
own KY.)  Then you have to send the smog certificate to the DMV along 
with your annual registration fee.  

I have two cars, and they come up for smog inspection in consecutive
months -- the Honda in August and the truck in Sepetmber.  And naturally,
they're on the same biannual cycle.  So I asked the DMV if I could have
one of them smog inspected two years in a row so that from that point
onward, the cars could be inspected in alternate years.  No dice; that
would've made too much sense.

Another peeve is that both cars are over ten years old, so I sweat a little
every time they're inspected.  Cars over a certain age should be exempted
from smog checks, or at least be subject to looser standards.   The
conventional wisdom is that older cars are more polluting, and in many
cases, that's true.  On the other hand, older cars are far less numerous
than newer, cleaner cars, so I suspect that their overall pollution is
well nigh insignificant in the greater scheme of things. 

I was thinking about this yestreday as I drove home from work, in fact. 
I noticed all these fairly new, small cars around me on the freeway, and
I realized that you hardly even see any full-size cars from the Seventies
and before, and hardly any cars of any size that are more than, say, a 
decade old.  Of course, it wouldn't be politically correct to give we
evil car owners a break.



Geoff


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Geoff Miller                    + + + + + + + +        Sun Microsystems
geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM  + + + + + + + +     Menlo Park, California
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Newsgroups: alt.peeves