Big Data gets it wrong

Some may interpret my meager posts over the last week as lack of progress. Well, they pretty much got that right. We are in the final two weeks of the Plan cycle at work. That's where all the offices submit their projections for the next year. It's not as easy as it might sound and my group is right in the middle of it since they use our stuff to report on the projections. Thus, it's been a pretty busy week and, while I've had time to read quite a bit of stuff, I haven't had a solid block of hours to code the comparo.

So, I'm writing completely off topic tonight.

Yaya turns 16 in 21 months. I'm not going to give her my car right away but, as she's a pretty responsible kid, I doubt I'll hold it back for too long. I'll probably change the license plate since there's pretty much no chance she'll ever run 100 miles.

So, like any self-respecting 54-year-old dude, I've been checking out the current crop of sports cars. Note that I said "sports cars" not "grand touring cars". I have nothing against fast luxury vehicles, but they don't seem like a good use of such a large sum of money.

Anyway, as I was browsing web sites looking at pictures of Miatas, 124s, Minis, and such, it occured to me that maybe I could afford a used Lotus Elise, which is pretty much my idea of the perfect car: super light, exceedingly nimble, and sufficiently underpowered that you have to drive it right to appreciate just how great it is. So, I poke around for that.

Now, every site I go to has a banner add for some quarter-million-dollar car. Folks, the Elise only ran $50K new. How does checking out the resale value on that suddenly put you in the market for the likes of Ferrari and Maserati?

Somebody at Google needs to tweak their eigenvectors.