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Automobiles

Driverless Cars: Brave(r) New World?

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The Economist is holding forth about the future Brave New World of driverless electric vehicles. This week’s special report contains five articles on the subject, each more effervescent about the future than the last.

That august publication, ever progressive and ever enthusiastic about futuristic improvements to our lives, predicts a fundamental change in the texture of our society once autonomous (self-driving) cars take hold big-time. As the face of Western culture changed with the advent of the automobile, so it will change when cars can drive themselves. Strip malls, for example, will disappear, for stores will “come to you” with automated delivery of your orders. Urban cores, already plenty dense, will grow even denser as the need to provide parking space for commuters and residents disappears.

Suburbs will become “garden cities” once the need to park residents’ vehicles goes away. People will use the streets to walk on, not to drive on. (Uh huh…and these wondrous shared vehicles? They’ll fly?) Garages and driveways will be replaced by gardens.

And (the editors hope) people will no longer feel the need to own a vehicle at all. Everyone will get around on a combination of ride-hailing and public transit. If the light-rail that takes you downtown (elbow-to-elbow with your friendly drug-addicted panhandler) doesn’t go right to your office’s door, you’ll simply hail an Uber to pick you up at the station and take you the rest of the way.

Roads will, they allow, remain congested: crowds of commuters will be replaced by crowds of delivery vehicles. So if you ride from Outer Gardenville to your job in downtown Rabbit Warren City, it will take you just as long to get there in the rosy future as it does now. Well, probably longer. But buck up! You’ll be able to work — or better  yet, sleep — the whole way!

How d’you like them beer and skittles?

Seriously: Are you looking forward to this, or does it sound like Dystopia Redux to you?

As a practical matter, they may be right that when fleets of driverless ride-sharing vehicles become commonplace, a lot of people will want to shed the expense, hassle, and space demands of private cars. And the things probably will be very expensive, indeed. Plus to keep people off roads, legislators may inflict tolls — some would like to do that right now. So the trade-off for convenience, safety, and mobility in old age could be a pretty pricey ride.

And convenience may not be one of the benefits the price purchases. The cars may be so expensive that most people (Economist editorialists hope) will be forced to rely on ride-sharing services.

Consider: if you have to call a cab every time you want to go to work or run to the grocery store or take the kids to soccer, you will have to factor in substantial wait times. And your calculation will be influenced by a whole slew of variables:

  • The day of the week
  • Time of day
  • The season of the year, if you live in a tourist destination
  • Weather conditions
  • Major-league athletic events
  • Whether any civic shindigs are going on
  • What roads are torn up
  • How far a vehicle will have to come to reach you, and from what direction
  • How much it will cost to get from point A to point B

And probably a whole lot of other eventualities I’m not thinking of just now.

Then there’s the question of whether you really want to “share” a ride with everybody and his/her little brother, sister, and long-lost cousin. These vehicles, absent a custodian to ride herd on the Great Unwashed, are likely to be very dirty. The last rider lit up a cigarette: you get a ride that stinks. People will chow down on smelly fast foods and leave the wrappers on the floors. Mothers will change their babies’ diapers and leave the dirties under the seat. Drunks will vomit, leaving you a mess to enjoy on your way to the baseball game. Drug addicts will leave needles for your kids to play with.

Additionally, the companies that operate the vehicles will be able to track your every move, and they will have a centralized set of records available to anyone who can hack it, subpoena it, or pay enough for it. Privacy is already a scarce commodity in our own Brave New World. In the BNW of the endless rent-a-ride, it will be extinct.

Many people may consider true autonomy — owning one’s own vehicle rather than having to rent every ride — to be worth even a pretty exorbitant cost.

So what will happen? The roads will grow far more congested. If every store and restaurant converts to the Amazon model and every purchase you make is delivered to your home in a self-driving truck, then we’ll all be sharing the roads with that many more vehicles. This extra burden of vehicles will crowd roads and slow down traffic enough. Add to that the likelihood that a car that knows what’s best for you will move v-e-r-r-r-y slowly, and voilà! A drive that takes you 20 minutes now will take you 40 minutes or an hour in the balmy future.

Personally, I would very much welcome a self-driving vehicle: it would mean I could stay in my home until I die (with any luck), and hugely improve the odds against my having one day to check myself into a warehouse for old folks. BUT…

  • Only if it were my vehicle.
  • Only if it and the roads were available when I need them, not at some regulator’s behest.
  • Only if the cost were less than the cost of moving into an old-folkerie.
  • Only if it didn’t jack up the cost of my  power bills to unaffordable levels — i.e., more than the $40 to $60 a month I pay for gasoline now.
  • Only if it were as reliable as a Toyota.
  • Only if it were not tracking me and reporting my comings and goings to a central server.
  • Only if…only if…only if….

Communal living has never appealed to me. Communal riding doesn’t look much better. I do not play nice with the other kids and do not want to share…let’s be frank about that. And I’ll bet that most Americans, deep in their hearts, feel the same way. That, after all, would be why we have sprawling suburbs of single-family homes and vast herds of sheeple driving to work over bumper-to-bumper freeways.

It’s a trade-off. And the choices Americans have already made say something about how they’ll receive the scheme to “improve” private transportation with fleets of driverless ride-shares.

How about you? Ready for the brave new driverless world?

 

Side Gigs: Ride-sharing? Does your insurer know?

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So if you have nerves of steel or you live someplace where the traffic isn’t as batsh!t as the Phoenix area’s, the idea of renting out your car’s back seat to Uber or Lyft riders sounds kind of appealing. Presumably you could set your own hours, and for relatively little effort pick up a few bucks to help make your life more tolerable.

Okay, hiring out as a rideshare driver is not everyone’s cuppa. But if the idea appeals to you, think it through carefully.

There’s something you need to know: your auto insurance will not cover you, your riders, or your vehicle if you get in an accident while you’re driving for hire. And while those highly lucrative companies that make their profits by treating you as an employee but claiming you’re not an employee may tell you that they’ll cover damages incurred while working in their hire, it ain’t necessarily so.

Friend of mine recently got into an accident while driving for Lyft. He did not understand that he needed to buy commercial insurance to cover himself, his car, and his passengers, which can cost ten times as much as regular personal insurance. Apparently the ride-share companies now claim, in a vague way, that they offer some degree of coverage, but whether they really do and to what degree is unclear. Not only is your regular personal insurer unlikely to cover your liabilities, when they find out you were driving for Uber or Lyft, they’re likely to cancel your policy. At that point, you will be left seriously up the creek…

Friend reported the accident to Lyft, whose representative told him to try to collect from his own insurance. He had been told (he says) that Lyft would cover accidents that happen while the car is contracted to the company. Supposedly, Uber and Lyft will cover medical expenses and other damages up to $1 million, even if an uninsured or underinsured driver is involved, if you’re on the way to pick up a fare or carrying paying passengers. But since ordinary auto insurance does not cover costs incurred while ride-sharing for pay, what Lyft was quietly asking him to do was to defraud his insurance company by neglecting to mention the circumstances. Unfortunately, he’s the type who cannot tell a lie.

Of course, his own insurer told him to take a flying leap.

So he returned to Lyft: they refuse to answer his calls. He is now stuck for the cost of repairing his own vehicle, for medical and other costs incurred by the customer, and for costs suffered by the other car’s driver and passengers.

And, he notes, the Lyft gig never paid enough even to cover the ordinary depreciation on his vehicle.

In some (but not all) states, you can buy rideshare insurance. These policies generally cost less than full-blown commercial coverage, but…one wonders.

Even if you have rideshare coverage, you must let your regular policy issuer know. If you do not, they’re likely to cancel your insurance.

But think about this: if my friend is right and net profit from gig taxi-driving doesn’t even cover the depreciation on your car, it certainly isn’t going to cover the cost of extra auto insurance. Car insurance isn’t cheap to begin with; it’s sure not going to get cheaper when you’re using your vehicle to drive strangers around through city traffic.

The take-home message? If you’ve got any common sense, look for some other ways to make a few extra bucks. Mowing lawns might be good. Cleaning pools is said to be lucrative. Painting houses? Cleaning? Anything but ride-sharing.

 

Migraine Morning

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 Like I have nothing better to do… Woke up this morning with the needle-stab-in-the-eye of ocular neuritis (or whatever it is: it’s never been diagnosed satisfactorily), swiftly followed by a fine migraine. These amusing headaches can usually be discouraged by a couple mugsful of coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. And yea verily, so it has proven: two hours later the pain has receded to the “mild” level, though otherwise I feel like I’ve been run over by the proverbial truck.

This is not needed in the midst of the various ongoing hassles.

The painter is still holding forth, and of course with furniture & plants moved around and outdoor watering systems derailed, that creates some background chaos.

My son is headed off for a long-planned road trip through Colorado. But with one change of plans: the dog. Since he no longer can take Charley in a car, he’s bringing the hound over here for me to babysit over the next ten or 12 days.

So…yes. Our doughty painter will have to navigate around not one, not two, but three dogs, one of whom weighs 90 pounds and two of whom are given to heading for Yuma at a dead run if a gate is left open.

I’ve pretty well got him trained to shut the gate behind himself when feasible and me trained to check to be sure the gates are shut before letting the corgis out.

But…. Among other things, Charley is given to the doggywobbles. He really needs to have the dog door open — normally I leave it locked shut because Cassie won’t use it and the burglars will. So this is going to present some difficulties over the next few days.

Our beading friends are having a beading party at my house on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it, because it’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. However…

Having to clean the house to the standards of half-a-dozen nice Catholic wymmen around an active painting job and three dog-dune shedders is not going to be an easy trick.

Meanwhile, yesterday I bought some delicious-looking hummus at Costco while I was running errands for myself and my aging friends — one of our beaders is genuinely hypersensitive to gluten (not in the faddish sense, either). Great snack for her and everyone else. But…heh…while purchasing this little find I failed to think…ohhhhh….hummus! Must have something to dip in it!

So now I’ll have to go back out — around the dogs and the painter — to pick up some tortilla chips and some veggies. Ugh.

§ § §

Kid in, Dog in, Kid out. Half an hour of busy flapping, conveniently coinciding with Painter Guy’s arrival. I forgot to put down a second giant bowl of dog water…momentarily must get up and do that…but will wait until the sweat I’ve worked up subsides.

Dog seems more or less OK, though he definitely was hyperventilating from the car ride. If he has the collywobbles (as we’re told he does), it didn’t stop him from laying a fine coherent pile in the backyard. Oh well…I hadn’t picked up the corgi mounds yet.

Son showed up in a gigantic very-late-model red SUV marked “JEEP.”

I say, you’re planning to drive to Colorado in a freaking Jeep?????

He says he borrowed it from his father because his car, a reliable Toyota, isn’t big enough to hold all three guys and their camping gear.

I say, “Your father bought a freaking Jeep? I thought he was smarter than that.”

He says, “It’s been recalled four times and has broken down twice.”

Oh dear God. I hope one of those guys has a cell phone carrier that covers Monument Valley and the Navajo.

Holy, holy, holy sh!t.

What on earth could have possessed DXH to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee? For cryin’ out loud, the damn things are unsafe at any speed. WHAT could he have been thinking?

Is it too early to break out the bourbon? Surely the sun must be over the yardarm in Shanghai by now…

§ § §

In smarter climes, the painter is doing an awesome job on the Funny Farm. And he made an amazing discovery. At some point along the line — probably six or eight years ago — I had the out-of-favor Bila the Bosnian Painter repaint the house’s west wall, the same color as the rest of the shack. This is a desert-dust brown dubbed “Baked Potato” down at Dunn Edwards.

So Painter Guy, for whom Dunn Edwards paints are presently out of favor, took the stuff over to HD and had five gallons of matching Behr exterior flat whipped up. “Baked Potato,” as it develops, is very popular in these parts — we could call it “HOA Greige,” and so the HD guys are experienced at concocting it.

He hauls this massive amount of paint back here and applies it to the west wall.

And hot damn! IT’S NOT THE COLOR! It does not match the HOA brown on that west wall.

He of course assumes HD screwed up, so he loads the tankard of paint back in his truck and flies back to the HD at 67th and Bell, in a state of high dudgeon.

While this is going on, I’m out running around the city buying groceries for myself and my aged friends, and then toting their share of the haul to their house. So the poor guy is pretty much on his own here.

At HD the paint department guys inform him that it IS “Baked Potato,” and there must be some mistake on this end.

He is beside himself. He now thinks he’s ordered five expensive gallons of high-test exterior paint…in the wrong color. The cost of which, he figures, is coming out of his pay. Worse, he’s convinced himself that I am going to HATE it.

Well. No. When I get  back and see the actual “Baked Potato,” I say, “There’s nothing wrong with that. I dunno why this doesn’t match, because Bila gave me the can of paint he used and that’s what we schlepped to HD for matching. Don’t worry about it. Paint the house with this.”

Now he proceeds for awhile, and then he resurfaces. “Take a look at this,” says he.

When he applies the paint to the other paintable wall, on the east side, it matches perfectly.

WTF?

I have no idea what hijinks Bila got up to, but when he painted the west wall, he used a different color from the paint that was on the rest of the house.

Bila was fast and cheap, but one gets what one pays for: he really did a half-assed job. This guy has climbed up and filled the siding where it’s split and cracked, and, far more to the point, he’s gotten down on hands and knees and scraped and filled the cracked footing around the slab! Both of those are marvelous fun jobs…and it’s 105 out there.

How glad are we that we’re NOT doing this job?

And speaking of WTF???…

Charley and Cassie go freaking batsh!t when Painter Guy climbs up on the roof. So persistently batsh!t are they that I set aside the effort to make WordPress insert those images there the way I want, not the way it wants, walk out to the living room, and peer out the front window.

Migawd, there’s a cop parked in front of the teacher’s house. I know the family — Dad, Wife (who works at his school as a teacher’s aide), and four kids — left at the usual hour this morning because I heard them climbing into their cars and driving away.

Never a dull moment around the Funny Farm.

Back to Personal Finance: The 2018 Budget

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So it’s time for the annual Required Minimum Withdrawal (RMD) from the big IRA, which resides with Fidelity. Actually, I had to accelerate the drawdown by a few weeks, because I’m running out of money…waiting for the scheduled drawdown date in mid-September risked bouncing utility and car loan payments.

The car loan is the problem. Last fall when I bought the car, I put $4,000 down on it, which I could afford. What I couldn’t afford is the $400-a-month payments over the next five years.

Net 2018 annual income, based on the RMD and Social Security, will be $35,657. Net 2018 expenses, if they remain the same as they have been over the past 12 months, will be $36,899: a fine shortfall.

Payments are $194 twice a month: almost $400 a month, except…they’re set up to go out biweekly, meaning there are two extra payments a year, for a total of almost $5,044 a year.

I could probably cut the amount I spend by a couple hundred bucks a month: lay off Gerardo; buy cheaper dog food (or adopt out one of the dogs); eat more beans, rice, and pasta; grow some vegetables; stay out of Costco and cancel the Costco membership; cancel the Amazon Prime membership. That still wouldn’t make up the shortfall.

And…y’know…for reasons unknown, no substantial extraordinary costs have happened this year.

So even if I could cut $400 a month from the budget, it still wouldn’t cover surprise medical bills, dental bills, house repairs, car repairs, clothing, vet bills, and God only knows what else.

Somehow, then, I’ve got to get rid of that shortfall…and that somehow would be by getting rid of the auto loan.

One is not limited to the legally mandated RMD…one could (after all) draw down more than that.

Wonder-Accountant, however, pointed out that The Copyeditor’s Desk, an S-corporation, owes me money from a series of loans to it. If I drew a fair amount of it, I’d have to draw down that much left from investments. And the boss man at Stellar Financial pointed out that I could take the remaining cash out of an old Roth IRA. It would mean that much less would be earning tax-free…but the two strategies taken together would raise enough to get rid of the burdensome loan without incurring much tax liability.

Several expensive upkeep items are simmering on the burner…

• The house needs to be painted: got an estimate of $3,000, which is probably about right.
• A tooth hurts mysteriously. Whenever we figure out what’s causing the pain, that’s likely to rack up a stiff bill: $1,000+++
• The pool still needs to be replastered and the pump replaced: $4,000 to $6,000

Holy mackerel. Maybe I should draw down an extra three grand for the painter now, while shares are still worth something; then pay off the car, thereby leaving enough to pay for one other major expense this year.

If you have to sell stocks to unload a damn debt, this is the time to do it. The stock market isn’t going to stay up forever. Even under the best of circumstances, what goes up must come down. And we are decidedly not in the best of circumstances. Sooner or later, having elected a mentally unbalanced bully to the highest office in the land is going to come back to bite us all…

 

How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?

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Ironically, on the very day our bat-brained Congress negates recently established rules to (nominally) protect our privacy on the Internet, along comes this proposal from my insurance broker:

If I would like to cut this year’s $1,200+ tab for auto insurance, Safeco proposes that I should allow them to attach a “Right Track” device to my car. For 90 days, this thing tracks my driving habits: every time I start the car, every time I touch the gas pedal, every time I hit the brakes: how fast I go, when I go, and how long it takes me to get there.

It does not, he insists, distinguish whether I’m on a freeway or a surface street or a dirt road, nor does it (says he) know where I’m going. Apparently that’s true for Safeco’s device, but not necessarily for all such tracking devices used by the many U.S. insurors: some evidently do use GPS to track your every mile.

But here’s what: You start out with the promise that you could get a discount of as much as 30% on this year’s premium. That would put my premium back to what I was paying two years ago for a fifteen-year-old junker. Sounds grand, eh?

Not so much. You get dinged for every infraction of every driving characteristic they’re spying on. You get dinged for “hard acceleration.” One commenter at a forum I came across yesterday did the math and discovered that going from 0 to 7.5 mph in 10 seconds amounts to “hard acceleration.” You get dinged if you have to step on the brakes because a cat — or a kid — runs out in front of you. You get dinged if you drive your car between certain prohibited hours. It goes on and on. Every ding cuts your discount. At the end of the 90 days, you’re likely to end up with only the 5% offered if you would please just agree to our bald-faced intrusion into your private comings and goings.

More to the point, possibly, this kind of black-box data can be used against you. If you get in an accident — let’s say you do run down that granny and her three grandchildren in that darned crosswalk — the police or granny’s survivors’ lawyers can subpoena the data and use it to build a fine, expensive case against you. Maybe even put you in jail. In other words, effectively, you can be forced to testify against yourself.

As one of Get Rich Slowly’s readers commented a year ago,

1: If I brake hard to avoid a child running into the street, or avoid an inattentive driver pulling out in front of me, I get penalized for hard braking, while the inattentive driver – even WITH a monitor, if they pull out in front of me smoothly – will not be penalized for being a bad driver.

2: If I drive home responsibly during rush hour, because I have a job, I get penalized for driving at peak times, but the person driving home drunk after stopping at the bar for “a few” doesn’t get penalized.

3: If the device’s accelerometer settings are also calibrated to identify harder acceleration, I will get penalized for accelerating and merging properly on very short freeway entrance ramps, but the little old lady cruising down the freeway at 30mph with her left-turn signal on, will be rewarded.

On the other hand, 30% of something over $1200 is something over $360. Nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re trying to live mostly on Social Security.

So I thought about this. Discussed it with my son, who happens to work in the insurance industry. Slept on it. And this morning sent a message to the Honored Insurance Broker:

In the first place, my driving record should speak for itself. I’ve been on the road for over 50 years, and in all those years I’ve had two minor fender-benders — not counting inflicting a scratch the side of my co-religionist’s car in the church parking lot. One of those fender-benders was arguably not my fault, since the other driver ran a red light.

In the second place, it’s an unconscionable invasion of privacy. I realize Big Brother is watching us everyplace we go, and I realize that a 2014 Toyota is already equipped with gear that tracks every breath I take. But that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make me like it, and it certainly doesn’t incline me to go along willingly with it. There’s something especially distasteful about being asked to compromise my principles for a few bucks.

And in the third place, when you look into this, you find it’s likely to be exactly that: very few bucks. Companies promise a discount of from 5% to 30%, but the amount depends on how they adjudge your driving skills. Drivers report being dinged for accelerating from zero to 7.5 mph in 10 seconds: that’s hardly a drag-race speed. They also say you’re dinged if you stop normally at a stoplight, rather than taking your foot off the gas when you see a red signal way off in the distance. They report being flicked off by other drivers for blocking traffic with blue-haired driving techniques.

In the Phoenix area, blue-hair driving is unsafe: when you hold up traffic by not getting off the dime or by hypermiling toward stop signs and signals, you can cause accidents by enraging other drivers, and you put yourself at risk of a great deal worse than an occasional finger flicked in your direction. Aggressive brake-checking, harassment, and even shots fired are likely consequences.

I’m not going to put myself at risk nor am I going to subject myself to even more invasion of privacy for a few bucks.

And you? How do you feel about this matter? Will you sell your privacy for a few bucks? Yes? And how much does your soul go for?

Images: Depositphotos, © ciuciumama

There Must Be Something I Like about This Car…

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What is it?

Yesh. I find myself grousing off and on — not to say incessantly — about the “new” car, a 2014 Toyota Venza, which in my petrified opinion seems to compare poorly to the much-lamented, ancient, 17-year-old Sienna. Why do I hate this hapless car?

  • It won’t safely hold the dogs except in a cubby with no air-conditioning, because when you fold the back seats down they leave a big dog-leg-busting hole in the (admittedly generous) flat space.
  • It suffers from the current bourgeois car design, in which about 90% of cars on the road look the same: like a herd of bloated ticks.
  • Its stupidly designed rear door operates on two “struts” whose life expectancy is about two years and the cost of whose repair is, shall we say, bracing.
  • There is NO place, zero, none, nada, NO place to set a small, loose item that does not entail either a) having to dig around in an inaccessible bin or b) watching it tumble off the top of the annoying console and wedge itself between the driver’s seat and the stupid console, causing a major, major hassle to retrieve it.
  • Its stupidly designed console apparently holds only paper cups — real cups and plastic traveling glasses need not apply.
  • Its stupidly designed console makes it impossible to set anything — like your purse or a bag of purchases — on the passenger-side floor, because you cannot reach the damn floor over the monster useless console.
  • It has a stupid camera on the front of the rear-view mirror that militates against hanging your crip-space placard from the mirror, where you are required by law to hang it if you have the temerity to park in a crip space.
  • Its dashboard is a rattle magnet.
  • There’s  no place to hang, stick, or set a trash bag.
  • The burglar alarm arms if you manually lock the doors while sitting inside, and then it goes off if you turn on the ignition. Extremely, extremely, mind-bogglingly annoying.
  • Speaking of stupid, its designers apparently think the vehicle’s prospective drivers are so dumb — SO DUMB — that they can’t figure out what direction they’re driving without a little light on the rear-view mirror to tell them. What??? All Trump voters, presumably?
  • It has no cladding to protect it from fellow idiot drivers who like to whack their neighbors’ cars in parking lots and run shopping carts up against the white paint.

Arrrghhh!

So…is there anything about this car that’s good? Desirable? Not annoying?

  • I like that the doors lock automatically when you turn on the ignition. It’s not necessary, because I hit “lock” reflexively the instant I get in a car. But it’s nice.
  • You can set the headlights to go on every time you turn the ignition key — which the Sienna did automatically, no choice in the matter — and to stay on about two minutes after you get out of the car. No, the Sienna would not do that. It’s very nice when you park in the garage after dark. My garage does have a motion-sensitive light, but sometimes the car doesn’t trigger it. With the head- and tail-lights on, you can close the garage door, get out, and walk around even if the motion-sensitive lighting hasn’t gone on.
  • It has ultra-dark window tinting. No one can see how many people are in the car or, from the side  and back, whether the driver is a woman alone. And you can’t see any packages sitting on the floor. Now…that tinting is probably illegal. But so far I haven’t gotten a ticket.
  • It does have a six-banger. And it bangs with even more enthusiasm than the Sienna’s awe-inspiring engine. If anything, I’d say it’s over-powered. The body apparently doesn’t weigh as much as a minivan’s, and so you get some instability in the steering if you take off too exuberantly from a standing stop.
  • It’s kewl that you can connect your cell phone — even a piddly little clamshell — to the sound system and hear a conversation in full glowing stereo. This is good, because it’s almost impossible to hear someone speaking to you on the clamshell; run its sound through the radio, and voilà! Intelligible words!
  • The wheels are easy to clean thanks to their sort of skeletonized design.
  • Its air conditioning probably works pretty well. We shall see: we have yet to enjoy a 115-degree day. But the heater gets warm quickly and keeps the driver’s compartment comfortable enough.
  • If you park it in the sun, the cheesy plastic in the dashboard will expand in the heat and silence the rattling. It would be good if it didn’t rattle at all…but you can’t have everything, eh?
  • The radio works. The CD player still works.

 All of which is nice. I guess.