The stokedness...

I can't recall when I've been this stoked in a while.

Max Attack has got a worth 2WD competition going on for Oregon Trails. There are a few guys that aren't millionaires that have a good chance of challenging SRT USA for overall win. The field is huge!

My car is getting closer to done. My friend's cars are getting closer to done. Two cars that I have built the cages in recently are both going to compete in 3 weeks at the first hill climb of the CHCA season. I'm getting married in just over 2 months. I did well on a midterm in school. I did extremely well in my opinion on my pre employment exam with the UN for a fairly well paying job with the UN in Vienna. Maybe I'm just stoked on rally to offset the unhappiness from my fiance being gone and unreachable for the next 7 days as she's out in the AZ desert using super tech lazers to create digital maps of archeological sites. Maybe it's the thought of the ridiculously sick JVAB square rear beam that is in development. Maybe it's all the beer I've been drinking tonigh. Maybe brake fluid and shitty flaring tools. Or maybe I should just go to bed. I think I will. I have to be to work in less than 6 hours. Of course, I'm just going to leave after a few hours and go to the junkyard to pull a Subaru clutch LSD and a whole hoard of Merkur bits.

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Grant Hughes

And here we were all worried you were gonna go end it all by driving off of !!! exposure, what with your "for sale: everything" thread...

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Jay Woodward
Snohomish, WA
'90 Mazdog Frankenprotege
Chronologically, 46...

Oh, all my stuff is still for sale.

I may be flying out to Vienna next month to meet with the division of the UN. It's a pretty cool sounding job. I'd be working and compiling/collecting and publishing statistics related to the illicit drug trade. Pay is over 50K Euro's and it's a two year appointment.

Got the passenger side a-pillar bars in yesterday. Have an entire front suspension at the junkyard mostly removed, just need a BFH to get the struts out of the hubs and that comes home. Going to finish the cage tonight, finish the passenger seat mounts, paint the interior, drop off some parts to the machine shop for rear brake kit, and finish the bondo work this weekend. Then it'll be time to start running brake lines, flip the car around and start putting in all the stuff under the hood. Have a Volvo to start on the cage on soon so that will give some money to buy some parts but subtract out some time that I'd be working on my car.

Two more cages = dogbox!

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Grant Hughes

Job sound nice Grant. Working fo rthe UN (or in my case a UN chartered Org) is pretty nice. Sounds like we are in the same line of work---you doing stats on illicit drug trade, me doing stats on informal trade/business, corruption and bribes...

maybe we should start a consulting business :-)

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One. Class -- 2WD

www.quantumrallysport.com

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Quantum-Rally-Sport/281129179600?ref=nf

I have to ask.. how exactly do you come up with numbers that are reliable?

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Andrew M
Onterrible
30ish

hudson Wrote:
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> I have to ask.. how exactly do you come up with
> numbers that are reliable?

Well, its not easy and will always be debated... Yesterday I went to a forum on just this topic where Charles Oman, Brian Levy, and a grad student were attacking Dani Kaufmann and Aart Kraay over issues like this and then in the same breath complimenting K&K for putting out what are widely considered the most useful, most reliable, and most transparent data available (considered as good as Transparency International's dataset)....

As for how to get reliable numbers. The most effective way to get reliable numbers on corruption and governance is to aggregate data from multiple sources (i.e. don't just trust the OECD panel of experts opinion, also include ratings from other international agencies, Freedom House, Tranparency International, Household survey data, firm survey data, etc etc in order to paint a fuller picture). The aggregate data give a reliable view on the __level__ of corruption at the cost of losing specificity---we know that corruption is "high" "low" or "Moderate" but we don't know what __kind__ of corruption is going on. To answer that question, we have to use the less reliable (but more specific) data from individual data sources.

When we get specific, it is difficult to make cross-country comparisons so we aggregates. But if we want to know how bribes affect a specific country or a specific type of business, we can go to one of our household surveys or firm surveys to make comparisons. And, of course we have to be very careful when stating our conclusions because the only apply directly to the groups represented in our dataset. Generalizations of the conclusions need be made with extreme caution.

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____________________________________________________________-

One. Class -- 2WD

www.quantumrallysport.com

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Quantum-Rally-Sport/281129179600?ref=nf

Josh Wimpey Wrote:
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> Generalizations of the conclusions need be made with extreme caution.

One of the most commonly done practices. Dealing with it now on a liver disease related project actually.

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Grant Hughes

Thanks for that.. pretty interesting. I think it was the Economist that put out some sort of report/theory on levels of corruption in a country and number of parking infractions by the countries delagates at the UN in NY.

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Andrew M
Onterrible
30ish