You know, Bob Barker is The Man. He hosted “The Price Is Right” for many years and was the epitome of cool; his bit in the Adam Sandler movie “Happy Gilmore” only made him more awesome (he knocks Happy out with a mean cross to the jaw while declaring “the price is wrong, bitch!”)

On TPIR one of the coolest things about the show was when the contestant would get up on the stage, wondering what they were going to play for, and the announcer would say “you’re going to play for A NEW CAR!!!!” and they’d sweep the curtain up or the doors open and sure enough, there’s A NEW CAR sitting there. People would go batshit; everyone wanted to play for the car instead of some lame-ass vacuum or whatever. (Of course, getting into the showcase round would be pretty cool, too.)

I bring this up because this past week, I went and bought A NEW CAR!!!

I’ve been kicking around the notion for a while now. My old rig is a 2000 Toyota 4Runner; a great SUV, but a bit bigger than I need and also since I drive 30 miles one way to work, I could use something a little bit more fuel-efficient. Plus, the 4Runner has 160,000 miles on it and you never know what’s going to break next.

Back in February, I’d gone shopping with my then-girlfriend for a car for her. She wasn’t really sure what she wanted and was kind of thinking SUV (she has two dogs), so we went up to the local Toyota dealer and drove a new RAV4, then to the Honda dealer and drove a new CR-V. I was really impressed with the Honda- I thought it was much better looking than the RAV4 and just seemed more finished and refined inside.

(She wound up getting herself a used Toyota MR2 Spyder convertible and an incredibly screaming deal on a used Nissan Pathfinder for hauling the dogs, garden supplies and stuff for the house, etc.)

But driving a 7 year old car had been weighing on my mind for some time. I was kind of thinking about getting a hybrid, but the damn things cost so much that you have to drive them a LONG way to make up the difference in money that you spend on gas over something else. Plus, the models that come in hybrid versions (at least for now) don’t include the smaller SUVs that I was leaning towards (I have a pretty tight garage to get in/out of, the 4Runner just barely makes it.)

Anyway, I finally took the plunge and got myself the Honda CR-V. It’s a great little rig, looks much better (in my opinion) than the older versions, gets 25 to 30 miles per gallon (I have a bit of a heavy foot on the freeway- if I can back off a bit I get 2 to 4 mpg more) and I got myself a pretty good deal on it.

Car buying kind of sucks. You always feel like the dealer is trying to take advantage of you, because they kind of are. Even the good dealers still try and sell you all the add-on crap, like undercoating and paint protectors, that you don’t need and that they mark WAY up to make really high profits on. I read somewhere that many dealers make more money on that kind of add-on crap than they do on the sale of the car itself, at least if you figure it on the invoice price (which doesn’t include the “holdback” money that the manufacturer kicks back to the dealer at the end of the year for each car sold).

I shop at Costco, and they have a decent car-buying program. It amounts to this: You decide what car you want, enter it on the web page, and a local dealer rep calls or emails with their price on that car. It’s usually a pretty solid price, lower than most people would get if they walked into a dealer and negotiated it themselves.

The local dealer they hooked me up with was the downtown Honda of Seattle. The rep emailed me and said their price on CR-Vs was $1,400 over invoice. I said I wanted a 2007, silver, EX-L with nav system. He emailed back and said they were out of 2007s and that I’d have to wait a month or two for some 2008s to come in. (The 2008s are going to have power seats and run about $500 more than the 2007s.)

Well, I’d gone up a day or three before to Klein Honda in Everett to look at some used 2007s that were “certified pre-owned”. I drove one and it was so nice- only 6,000 miles, super warranty (when you add the certified pre-owned program to the standard warranty, it’s actually much better than the new-car version) but their pricing was a bit weird so I passed on it.

I called the Klein salesman, Brad Wonderlich, back up and talked to him about a new one. He wound up getting me one from Lynnwood Honda on a dealer trade and that’s what I bought- for $1,000 over invoice, too.

So basically the Costco program dealer sucked. They wanted more money, weren’t willing to do even a basic dealer search/trade to get me what I wanted, and were telling me I had to wait a month or two. Um, no thanks. It was kind of a surprise, because Honda of Seattle has a reasonably good reputation and has the same owner(s) as Toyota of Seattle, who I’ve used for service on the 4Runner since I moved up here. I’ve been really happy with them and both of them were good when I was out looking several months ago, too.

But Klein was awesome, except for one thing. When I went in to sign all the paperwork, the business manager had to try and sell me all the add-on crap. He started into his usual spiel about how the standard 36 month, 36,000 mile warranty was great but that’s right when cars start to have stuff go wrong, even the high quality ones like Hondas, and there were these great extended warranties…

Well, I’d already planned on an extended warranty. I had shopped online and knew the prices I could get. I told him I didn’t want the 800 dollar paint protecting crap or the special interior protecting spray (I can spend 10 bucks on a few cans of Scotch-guard at the local Fred Meyer and spray the inside, for crying out loud) but that I was going to buy an extended warranty and wanted his pricing.

He was taken a bit aback but recovered. Their main 7-year, 100K bumper-to-bumper extended warranty was $1,700. I asked how much room he had to move and he said “oh, not very much, that’s a great program, we’ve used them for years, blah blah blah…”

I told him I had one online that was about $1,100 for the same coverage.

He said “How about if I knock five hundred bucks off of that price? Would that get you to buy it?”

Well, now we’re cooking. I said I wanted to think about it, mostly just to see if he’d come down any more. My girlfriend, who’d come with, was giving me the look that said “hey, dummy, take the price”. We talked about a few more things and then the guy said one SO typical salesman-guy thing that always pisses me off:

“This price is only good for today, I can’t guarantee it after this.”

Horseshit, pal. If you’re willing to sell me that for that price today, you’re not in business to lose money- you’re going to make money on it. And if I come back tomorrow, or the next day, and have a bag of money and want to give it to you and you’re STILL going to make money on it, you’d be a moron to pass up the deal just because it’s a day or three later.

Replacement window and siding companies are notorious for this. They put tons of pressure on their salesmen to sell, sell, sell, and they ALWAYS do this- “this price is good for today only”. The real reason is they don’t want you getting any competing bids on something. I noticed this this past summer when I had a few guys give me bids on my heat pump/AC system; one guy (who did NOT have a very good price) really tried to put the screws to me.

It really shut him down when I said “look, you’re not in business to lose money, and I bet if I call you up in a week and say “let’s do it” you’ll still give me this price.”

Anyway, this car dealer business guy pulled that crap. I almost got up and left- that’s how angry that kind of manipulation makes me- but I had him at a pretty good price, one where they’re going to make money and I’m not getting raped, on both the car and the warranty.

So a few minutes later I said “okay, what the heck, I’ll just take the extended warranty”. He had already done some of the paperwork but shredded it and cranked out the new stuff without any complaint at all, so obviously he didn’t mind.

As we were going through and signing everything, he said the other thing that really pisses me off when I hear it. “This is a tremendous price, we’re losing money on it at this price.”

Double horseshit. Either this guy is the worst car dealer business manager in the world who should be fired, or he’s insulting my intelligence and hoping I’ll believe him. I’d already bought the goddamn thing; he didn’t need to stroke my ego and try to manipulate me into feeling like I’m some king stud negotiator or whatever. (I got that feeling in China when I was bargaining over touristy crap last summer, anyway.)

A day or three later, I got a “rate your experience” thing in my email from the dealer. I told them exactly what I thought- that it was a nice dealership, no pressure on the car buying decision (I’ll happily suggest that anyone and everyone ask for Brad Wonderlich at Klein Honda in Everett- super guy) and everything was awesome… EXCEPT for the business manager’s bullshit, which totally sucked.

If you go in with a firm idea of what you want and what it should really cost, and you’re always ready to walk away from the deal, you’ll be fine. If crap like what the guy pulled pisses you off too much, well, I don’t know what to tell you- you’re probably going to get that kind of crap from ANY dealer. That’s why they have a separate guy do that stuff instead of the salesman, so you’ll be like me and won’t associate the BS portion of the deal with the dealership as a whole and your salesman.

Anyway, now I’m driving A NEW CAR!!!

And I have a pretty nice used 2000 Toyota 4Runner for sale. Make a great college kid car, or boat/toy hauler for someone with a couple of jetskis or something- it tows up to 5,000 pounds and runs strong. Give me a shout if you’re interested- I just had it in to the Toyota dealer and they checked it all out and it’s in pretty good shape.

Something that interests me, for some nerdly reason, is the links between cognitive dissonance and selective perception (which is a cognitive bias).

Sometimes, these things can be life or death.

What it boils down to is this: We tend to get into patterns of thought, and what we think about things influences how we see the world. We’ll actually actively ignore plain-as-day evidence of things that conflicts with our preconceived notions. We’ll also believe totally unbelievable things simply because they fit into our scheme of notions.

An example of the latter is if I told you that I was out fishing with my dad and he fell out of the boat, but didn’t go into the water- instead he just fell onto it, got up, walked back over to the boat, and got in, you wouldn’t believe me. But there are a ton of people who honestly believe (or at least SAY they honestly believe) that 2,000 years ago, Jesus walked on water.

An example of the former unfortunately happened here in the Seattle area the other day. I spent most of my life living in Enumclaw, which is at the end of what’s known as “the Maple Valley highway”. State Highway 169 is a two-lane road that runs from Renton to Enumclaw through Maple Valley. It’s narrow in spots; much of the way it’s only two lanes (one in each direction) and not a divided highway.

SR169 runs along the Cedar River in its northern section and winds through a lot of hills. The eastern portion of populated King County is up against the Cascade Foothills and there’s some spots along 169 where the road is above some pretty deep dropoffs and ravines.

A Maple Valley woman named Tanya Rider was driving home from work on September 19th, and for some reason her car veered off the road and smashed down one of those ravines. She laid there for over a week, trapped in her car and unable to call for help although her cell phone was on and had contact with the cell network. She had no water, no food.

When rescuers found her on September 27th, and she was rushed to the hospital, she was in kidney failure and had sores (I’m assuming like bedsores) among her injuries. They are afraid that as they rehydrate her, her sores will actually get much worse.

What I want to draw attention to is what I noticed while reading between the lines in this article from the Seattle Times about this story. Here’s the main bits that raised my antenna:

Tanya Rider disappeared Sept. 19 on her way home from work and wasn’t heard from until about 2 p.m. Thursday, when King County sheriff’s detectives traced her cellphone signal to a tower on Highway 169 near Renton.

…

Rider, 33, was on her way home from work at a Fred Meyer in Bellevue when she apparently drove off the highway and into the ravine.

…

Tom Rider, her husband, was at the Sheriff’s Office taking a polygraph test when he heard the news that his wife had been found…

…

Initially detectives in the Sheriff’s Office suspected Rider had run off or was the victim of a crime, Merrill said. After she was reported missing, detectives noticed activity on one of Rider’s bank accounts and assumed she was still alive.

Later detectives discovered that the activity was from one of her husband’s credit cards. When they realized Rider hadn’t been using the account, they looked for her cellphone signal, Merrill said.

When you take those snippets of information, you see the influence of the police’s preconceived notions. The majority of the time, if someone goes missing in the middle of the day, they either ran away… or they were victims of foul play. And the vast majority of the time, if there’s a crime, it was someone that the victim knew. In fact, a large percentage of the time, it’s the spouse.

The reason this all jumps out at me is you can imagine this poor guy. His wife doesn’t show up at home from work. He first wonders, then worries, then gets really scared. He calls the cops. They probably tell him he’s got to wait until she’s been gone 24 or 48 hours; the first times I noticed this story in the media was when she’d been gone for 5 days and the cops asked for help finding her, mentioning the color and model of her car.

Then he’s in the grinder. The cops see him as a suspect rather than an innocent victim. He’s voluntarily taking a polygraph test; he’s probably frantic, trying to get the cops to help him find his wife.

And the entire time- the ENTIRE time- she’s lying trapped, in her car, at the bottom of a ravine. And she’s easily findable through the cell phone. For a week.

The cops’ preconceived notions, though, have them thinking that he’s a suspect. Her bank account was used, so she must be okay or someone must have been using it, right? Only when they get around to doing the work, they discover that it’s normal use- he’s just using his own cards on the same account.

What really bugs me about this is that if they’d done the cell phone thing right in the beginning, this woman could have been found days earlier. Her kidneys wouldn’t have shut down, she wouldn’t be nearly as dehydrated, and her husband wouldn’t have been put through the wringer with worry and not-so-veiled accusations that he had done away with her.

If she dies, or if she has serious medical problems from this, I’d say that she and her husband have a pretty damn good lawsuit against the county police. The thing is that all they had to do to find her was look for the cellphone signal- and there was no reason they couldn’t have done this on the first day, immediately after she was reported missing.

Now, to some extent, I don’t blame the cops. I mean, I blame them; they screwed up. But they fell victim to preconceived notions. They saw what they are used to seeing, what they’ve been conditioned to see from multiple times in the past.

This is why we need to actively work to keep ourselves open to the possibilities. Way too often, we fall into the trap of assuming that things are like they were the last time. When things like this happen, though, they illustrate that maybe we need to set up new procedures.

In this instance, it’s obvious- the cops should continue to look at the spouse as possible suspects… but at the same time, early in the investigation, they should begin the cell phone search process. They shouldn’t wait until after they’ve investigated the husband and set him up on a polygraph test; they should be doing the processes in parallel. They must work to keep their eyes open to the possibility that their preconceived notions- the wife either ran away or was harmed by someone (likely the husband)- might be wrong.

Where the cops screwed up, I believe, isn’t in falling prey to their notions of what probably happened. That’s natural; it’s human behavior. What I think is a mistake is that we KNOW that we humans fall into those kinds of traps, and so we need to build in some kind of safety check into the system to try and catch when we’re falling into the known trap. For example, perhaps in these kinds of cases, while one cop or set of cops investigates the husband as a possible suspect, another cop or set of cops can investigate as though he’s telling the truth- and initiate the cellphone search immediately, so in those exceptions when the husband isn’t a bad guy, the woman isn’t stuck in the car for a friggin week.

I wrote about cognitive bias on another blog that I contribute to, about how it’s important in air traffic control to always re-examine the traffic situation. You might find it an interesting read. Then again, you might not.

I know that, in theory, once you become “saved” as a Christian and realize that since Jesus is paying for your sins, you wouldn’t want to sin again. If you do, well, you’re just adding to his misery, and unless you’re a really big jerk you wouldn’t want to do that, right?

(Of course, that begs the question- since he already died on the cross can the amount he suffered be changed retroactively based on how much we sin today?)

But that didn’t always make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I was that kid that probably bugs the heck out of the Sunday School teacher who asks things like “if Jesus forgives us for all our sins, then if we sin and just say we’re sorry, is it all better?”

I recently read a pretty terrific quote that sums this up. It’s attributed to Emo Phillips. I don’t know if it’s for real or not, but it goes something like this:

“When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in His wisdom, doesn’t work that way, so I went out and stole one and then asked Him to forgive me.”

Now, I know this is meant to be a funny, but it does point out the seeming contradiction that Christians exhibit sometimes. Go out and sin, and all you gotta do is feel bad and want to repent, and God forgives you. (Most of the Protestant churches don’t even require you to “pay off” your sins with varying levels of penence when you’re doing reconciliation. At least the Catholics have to do a lot more stuff the worse their sins are!)

A Buddhist take on it, on the other hand, would be that there is no sin; there’s only cause and effect, and you have to decide what kind of effects that you want to have in the future. Yeah, when you steal the bike, you might wind up having a “good” effect- you have a bike to ride. Of course, you’ve caused some misery in someone’s life, and that “bad” karma is in your karmic account books no matter what.

You might live to suffer the effects of that action in this life; you could be riding down the street on your shiny new stolen bike, and the owner could see you and run you over with his truck. Or the cops might catch you, and you’d have to answer to the law. Or it might be that nothing happens in THIS lifetime, other than you have to live with a guilty conscience bugging you at night. (Of course, this isn’t much of a threat to some people; they seem to be quite untroubled by their consciences.)

The point here is that when you compare the Christian viewpoint to the Buddhist one, after stealing the bike your “soul” (for lack of a better word) is in some bit of jeopardy. The Christian God is going to be pretty ticked off for your sin; there’s nobody running the show in Buddhism other than the natural law of the universe, but that law will come around to bite you in the ass sooner or later, via karma.

To get out of this situation, Christians need merely repent, say they’re sorry, and be cleaned by the grace of God or Jesus’s sacrifice or however you want to term it.

So how, exactly, does a Buddhist “repent” or clean up their karmic permanent record, so to speak? There’s no “God” that we appeal to for mercy.

In fact, this is where some people get hung up in Buddhism. Annoying little kids in Dharma Class (yes, there is such a thing in some Buddhist organizations) probably say “well, since the stolen bike is on my karma now anyway, there’s no sense in feeling sorry for it- I’ll pay the price, right?”

Well, not exactly. See, the thing about being Buddhist is that we think that at every moment in life- every split-second- we each have a chance to elevate our life condition into the state of Buddhahood. We can attain the enlightenment that Shakyamuni knew, and indeed that’s what we encourage ourselves and others to strive for.

So if we’ve got that stolen bike messing things up, what can we do to improve our karma? Well, the obvious thing is to try and make things right. We can return the bike, for starters. It would also be a good karmic cause to apologize for it (not to mention good manners, although as budding bike thieves we probably don’t give too big a rip about manners.)

Then the person would get their bike back and we would have added to the happiness in the world. Of course, we might not have totally fixed our karma; their happiness is likely not quite enough to make up for the sorrow and misery they had while we had stolen their bike. But we’ve gone a long way to repairing our karma, which is nice.

Now, this brings up a bunch of other questions. Can we leave a note anonymously, or do we make a “better cause” if we also turn ourselves in to the cops after returning the bike? What if the person never noticed the bike was gone, did our karma take a hit at all? You could make an argument that in that case, stealing the bike was a net good; we got to ride somewhere we wanted or needed to go, and the victim of our crime never knew it so there was no suffering involved.

You can see how Buddhism has its own set of questions and things to ponder!

I don’t think I really have a point here; I’m just kind of meandering along the page.

I guess if I do, it’s this: People sometimes think that if you don’t believe in God and some kind of ultimate punishment or reward for doing good things or bad things, you would go out and do all kinds of bad stuff all the time.

The right-wing fundies sometimes say this straight up, claiming that all morality comes from God and therefore anyone who doesn’t believe in God (or at least believe in God the way that THEY do) is an immoral scumbag.

Yet we can see that there’s plenty of ways that Buddhists, or at least some, struggle with the effects of bad causes (or “sin”) and wind up wanting to do the right thing.

The difference, for me, is that as a Christian I often wanted to do the right thing because of the big threat- make God happy, or you’re going to hell. (Talk about extortion!) Even if you’re motivated from a relatively positive point of view- not wanting Jesus to suffer more than he should- it’s still motivating you via guilt and manipulation.

As a Buddhist, on the other hand, there’s no mystical thinking involved (at least if you ignore the notion of reincarnation and karmic retribution/rewards via that process). You want to do the right thing because you want to minimize people’s suffering, and that directly includes your own. Even if you set karma aside, many Buddhists would say that the scientific law of cause and effect is at play, and the odds are that being a bike thief is going to have a bad result for you at some point.

To me, while the Buddhist system can be more weird and frustrating, overall it makes more sense. Yet another reason I wound up as a wacky Buddhist instead of a very lapsed Christian like I was!

…a little change to my site. No, I’m not going to be doing banner ads; I just added the thing up top because I thought it was pretty interesting.

Mark Ecko is a designer. His company, Mark Ecko Enterprises, did a billion bucks’ worth of business in 2004, so he’s no small potatoes.

He bought the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his 756th home run, which put him ahead of Hank Aaron for all-time home runs hit, and that banner ad takes you to a site where you can vote on what to do with the ball. The three options:

• Donate it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown
• Stamp an asterisk into the ball and THEN donate it to the Hall
• Shoot it into space on a rocket

Me, I voted for asterisk. I’m positive that Bonds was doing steroids and while he wasn’t the only one (there were probably a significant number of pitchers doing them too, which would have worked against Bonds and other hitters) to permanently stamp the ball with an asterisk would really make a point- and provide a talking/learning point for generations of baseball fans to come.

Anyway, as long as the voting is going, I’ll have the banner up top there.