Antique Car

In the United States, an antique car is generally defined as a car over 20 years of age, this being the definition used by the Antique Automobile Club of America. However, the legal definition for the purpose of antique vehicle registration varies widely.

The term classic car is often used synonymously with antique car, but (in the United States) the formal definition^{[citation needed]} of that term has it as applying only to certain specific high-quality vehicles from the pre-World War II era. In the UK, the term is not used: antique often refers to an item over 100 years old and cars of this age are termed veteran.

20 years is about double the design life of modern cars and an even greater increment on those cars now 20 years old; therefore, a car that's reached 25 is a rare survivor, and often not economical to maintain as regular transportation.

Owning, restoring and collecting antique or classic cars is a popular hobby worldwide.

Considered as investments

Some consider such collectibles be a form of investment. Buying a particular antique car is then done primarily in view of profit in a future sale and not of enjoying a drive or taking pleasure in restoration work. As with art collecting, antique car collecting is another form of gambling. The market for antique cars fluctuates wildly over the years. There have been periods, like the 1980s, which have seen strong and continued increase in price, but other periods (e.g. the early 1990s) which saw precipitous declines.

Experts in antique cars such as Jay Leno give the same advice as serious art dealers and professionals in the antiques trade: Collect what you can enjoy above all because the future monetary value of any craft or art object is completely unpredictable. Still, the other opinion and plan exists: People who live in naturally dry areas, such the South Western Desert region of the United States, can approach this as a potential long term investment, due to the lesser chance of destruction of the bodies by rusting. One strategy requires that you buy a car that is in good condition, with original paint and chrome in good order. It should be purchased for less than $500 in good running condition, with no broken glass and low mileage. The car should be at least 20 years old. This seems to be the time when the value of the car "bottoms out". A person needs to have at least 20 of these $500 cars, parked on blocks, with the glass masked to prevent wind/sand damage. No more than $100 per car per year should go to provide the outdoor storage in the first year. The cars should be started up once every 3 months. Twenty cars would cost $2000 the first year in storage. By waiting 20 years, the cars might be worth in adjusted dollars, 20 times or more than when parked. Constant dollar $500 cars might become constant dollar $10,000 cars after 20 years, if long term trends continue... as 99.9% of the same models will be junked, under all normal uses. Rarity and demand are key bases of value, and the rest is about the innate charm of the car, and its reflection of the era it represents.

Value

As with all collectible antiques, current value has everything to do with current supply vs. demand, and very little else; certainly little to do with the car's price when new or any objective standard. Thus, rare cars that are highly desired are highly expensive, while vehicles that are not fashionable to collect can be very cheap. Condition, of course, influences value. At the present time, the variation in purchase price between a poor condition and good condition vehicle is generally much less than the cost of restoring a poor condition car; thus it is cheaper in the long run to buy the better vehicle.

In some instances, professional restorers can, through economy of scale and performing the work in-house, realise a profit from buying an unrestored car and performing a restoration. This is normally only possible when the car is in high demand and either very rare (e.g. old Ferraris) or quite common (e.g. classic Ford Mustangs). Amateur restorers who are highly skilled may find it cheaper to restore than buy in good condition, but this is through considering their labor as enjoyment rather than as a cost.

Realising much long-term profit in owning an antique car is mostly about attempting to anticipate future changes in taste, which is highly speculative. Most cars go through a period of being considered merely old and undesirable before becoming valuable, and a car bought then might drastically increase in value. However, a car is a large object that is expensive to store and must be maintained, which cuts into such profits.

Source : wikipedia.org

Juvenile Delinquency

Urban Culture Of Traumatized Youths Creating Havoc

by Phyllis Reid

in Social Issues (submitted 2007-11-22)

The level of violence among youths has risen to alarming proportions over the last few decades. The inner cities have become breeding grounds for youths committing felony crimes and grave yards for those being killed.

The conditions that contribute to the delinquency among our youths are widely studied, documented and reported. Our juvenile systems are now bulging and growing as rapidly as adult jails. Speaking with inner city youths, they know that "Juvenile Hall" is jail for kids and they report having many friends and peers who have gone there, or are still there. As a psychotherapist trained in trauma resolution, I have worked with children ages three through eighteen, resolving trauma triggered by many types of occurrences. These include death of parents through illness, sudden and traumatic death of parents, relatives and friends, rape and sexual molestation and through separation from their parents and family.

Great empathy is extended to the young child who cannot understand the absence of a mother due to untimely death. Most family members are not appropriately trained to handle trauma in their children. Youths, age seven to twelve, may be left alone to grieve, or ignored and avoided by the adults in the family, school and community. Children thirteen through eighteen normally isolate themselves in sadness, loneliness and depression. Some youths act-out in defiance and aggression, secretly yearning for help and understanding to cope with their loss, pain and sadness.

A large percent of the violence among our youths stems from unresolved trauma. Youths today are very familiar with death, they are witnesses to violent and traumatic incidences. Most of the deaths of their peers are from violence and the rest from suicide, illness and accidents. Particularly in the inner cities, children are confronted with deaths at an early age, especially traumatic death of family members, friends and peers. These children are highly exposed to shootings and killings in their neighborhoods attributed to drugs and the drug related culture. They are traumatized by incestuous relations by fathers, sexual molestation at the hands of family members, friends of the family and frequently from the boyfriends of their drug using mothers.

Our systems are ill equipped to address the needs of children in trauma. The census of traumatized children in our communities will be greatly under assessed, as many of the crimes go unreported. Many school systems are oblivious to the problem of trauma among the children. Principals and teachers report as defiant and bad behavior the 'acting out' children engage in as defense mechanisms to mask the pain, shame and confusion of traumatic events. On many occasions, I have arrived at a school to counsel a child reported to be bad, fighting and defying authority, only to uncover a traumatized child camouflaging the impact of the loss of a parent, relative, friend or peer.

When assessing changes in behavior patterns and academic performance in children, I observed that in most cases a traumatic event preceded the onset of the problems. Consequently, our jails, foster homes, schools and communities are filled with children with unresolved trauma. Consider the young child who, after loosing a parent or relative, is suddenly placed in foster care. As this child struggles to adjust and cope, he or she is labeled "bad" and is shuffled from one foster home to the next. Pain, frustration and anger are piled on each time that child is removed. As the trauma is compounded and goes unresolved, the child is labeled and rejected as a bad child, gets lost in the system, or ends up in the juvenile system or dead.

The problem of the millions of traumatized youths in our communities must be addressed. While we linger in ignorance and confusion as a society, our young people are being criminalized and killed by the thousands. We have seen the blank stares and frightened responses of adults in trauma. Children in trauma act differently, they might laugh or act-out to cover their emotions. Some turn to anger, defiance and maybe drugs; still others engage in truancy in the home and school, drop out of school and run away from home. Always their defense mechanisms are focused upon as the problems while the underlying cause of the problem goes untreated.

The shootings, death and trauma in our inner cities grow daily. If our traumatized youths are not given urgent attention, the headlines and news casts will continue to report increased violence and deaths. Social and educational systems, especially in states with large urban communities, must allocate budgets to provide treatment for our traumatized youths. This group of children has gone unnoticed and unattended for far too long. The time is now to address the problem. Yesterday is a terrible memory and tomorrow a dreaded reality. Let us not forget that today's youths are the adults of tomorrow, future parents and heads of families, leaders of our communities, governments and our world.

***

So, it is our responsible to pay attention to our own children. Love and teach them how to love everybody. Don't become an egoistic parents, we have to listen to what our children's opinion and straighten their opinion to the right answer and way. We must remember that parents are representation of God in the world. Good parents will make good children.

2012....The Doom's day ?

As we know nowadays, the world that we live distracted with the event that scare us. The Doom's Day or we can call it as Judgment Day.

Based on Mayan calendar prophecy, the doom’s day will happen on December 21, 2012. Volcanoes’ eruptions, typhoons, glaciers, asteroid’s fall and so on will become a scariest and terrible events that all creatures should face.

Most all the opinions disagree that the doom’s day will happen at that day. NASA is one of the example that disagree with it. According to them the turnaround of earth’s rotation is not possible. The turnaround of earth’s magnetic field will not be happened in next several millennium.

Comets and asteroids were often happened but a huge collision was seldom happened. Last collision was happened about 65 million years ago which probably caused the extinction of dinosaurs. NASA convince that there will be no asteroids like 65 million years ago.

Meanwhile, as the information we got from articlecity.com (2012 - 7 Reasons Why The World Ends On December 21, 2012 by: Gerard Le Flamand)

Scientists around the globe agree and are unanimously predicting that “life on Earth as we know it” could end on or around December 21st, 2012. Amongst them, several believe that it will be invoked by humans, but the majority is convinced that nature in a universal way will be the cause of the dramatic changes. Several religious leaders worldwide however are stating that it will be an act of God and that Judgment Day will come upon us at that time. Whichever theory you tend to follow, it is remarkable for once that all visions are on the same wavelength as to the impact on mother Earth. These are seven reasons why scientists and non-fiction predictors are convinced that the world as we know it will end on December 21st, 2012:

Reason #1 – The End of the Mayan Calendar:

The oldest and most researched source of the end was derived from the Mayan Calendar that indicates that times end on this day. The Mayans are considered a highly intelligent race who must have possessed far developed technologies which to date nobody alive can even start to comprehend. They were also a bloodthirsty race and some of their key characteristics involved building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone and sacrificing virgins.

Not only did they live in an era immediately before the previous major global event, about 11,500 years ago, they were able to calculate the lunar moon as 329.53020days, only 34 seconds off.

The Mayan calendar has set the end of the Earth on December 21, 2012. Their prediction is to be taken serious as at that time, the accuracy of calculating the lunar moon so close, the likelihood of their calculation being accurate yet again is extremely high.

Reason #2 - Sun Storms:

The media in general does not like to cover topics that are hard to explain, except for some of the supernatural channels that are rarely visited by the self-claimed “realistic” viewers. However scientists are on the ball when it comes to observing the sun and its activities with the relatively high-tech equipment we know today. And they have made a mesmerizing discovery when it comes to its activities lately. Few years ago, the sun dramatically increased its radiation energy to levels much higher than registered in a long time. Its behavior definitively is cyclic and there is a clear 11+ year recurring cycle. Now, a couple of years after the last serious activity increase, 2012 announces the height of the 11+ years cycle announcing much higher activity than already measured in recent years.

Since the recent storms already accounted for knocking out power grids and destroying satellites, there is a very clear indication that the next round in 2012 will be of previously unseen magnitude impacting our planet and the technology in orbit of it. Calculations suggest it will reach its deadly peak sometime late in 2012.

Reason #3 - The European Atom Smasher:

European Scientists are finalizing the construction of the world’s largest particle accelerator ever conceived. To describe it in simplified terms, it consists of a 27 kilometers tunnel designed to smash atoms together in the anticipation of finding out what makes the Universe tick.

With reason, this mega-project has already caused serious concerns where several renowned scientists have expressed their deep concerns about flipping the ON-switch. Amongst their predictions of all kinds of lethal events, mini black holes are probable to be created. Chances are that the first mega-experiment with this latest invention may turn the globe into a matter no bigger than the size of a basketball.

Oh…that first experiment is scheduled for…2012.

Reason #4 – According to Religion

Several religions are giving us similar indications and predictions based on, amongst others, interpretations of the Bible, the I Ching (also known as the Chinese Book of Changes), as well as various sections within the Hindu teachings. All of them indicate the 21st of December 2012 as the end of the world. The Bible reveals this as the date of the Armageddon or the final battle between good and evil as well as Judgment Day.

It is expected that in the coming time as we approach D-Day, that more religious figures will speak up and lift the secrecy well kept by institutes such as the Vatican.

Reason #5 – Most Powerful Volcano on Earth

The largest volcano on earth is located underneath the Yellowstone National Park in the United States which is famous for its thermal springs and Old Faithful geyser. This fact has gotten geological experts very nervous and the reason for sleepless nights ever since it was linked to the upcoming events in 2012. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting approximately every 650,000. Currently we are many years past the due date for a new major eruption, which in itself is rather bizarre since the cyclic events of the planet are usually pretty accurate and thus predictable. An new explosion will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the Earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. Such a new Ice Age is due when looking at the usual cycles of Earth. And what is most alarming is that the pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.

Reason #6 - Thes Phyicists

Physicists at Berkeley University in the United States who use super computers to complete their highly complex formulas and calculations have been crunching the numbers and they’ve concluded as well that the Earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Their calculations prove beyond any doubt that if and when this catastrophe happens, it will impact every living being on Earth and basically wipe away entire species as we know them today. What is really scary about their calculations is the fact that they are pretty much convinced, with a certainty of 99% that all of this will come down very soon and that the best guess date is…2012.

Reason #7 – Polar Shift

The magnetic field surrounding Earth shields us from most of the sun’s radiation. This is generally know, yet what is less known is that the magnetic poles we call north and south have a habit of swapping places approximately every 750,000 years. Right the cycle is overdue by about 30,000 years.

Furthermore, scientific research has shown that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20 to 30 kilometers every year, which is much faster than ever before, and which points to a pole-shift being very nearby. During the process of a pole shift, the magnetic field is disrupted until it disappears. Sometimes it is absent for up to 100 years. As a result, there is sufficient UV radiation in the air to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.

According to my opinion if we review from the Bible, Lord Jesus says that no one knows that day. Only Father knows (See Matthew 24: 36; Mark 13: 32). Indeed all things may not be interpreted by ourselves. We must straighten our mind and action with the Bible as Lord Jesus says. What happen in 2012 is not important. The most important thing that we should do is how do we live our life. Follow God and focus to His plan to us or……..distracted by this Mayan’s prophecy. It’s your choice.