TheGrobe's waffles burned; please tell me how awesome I am (maybe donate to him)

This image is pertinent to this thread because it is almost as awesome as Theoreticalboy:

sport vehicle!  well that settles it.  chess is, in, fact, a sport.

Theoreticalboy's even more modern than tomorrow.  He's the man of the future, I say.

Seeing that picture makes me all misty for the fifties. What a great time.

I bet $5,795 was a chunk of change back then. How much did a new car cost?

Where's my flying car already?

Forget the Flying Car: Here Comes the Flying Motorcycle

This one is supposed to be available in late 2011:

http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-06/flying-car-gets-faa-approval-goes-sale-soon

A quick search reveals that they ran from about $1500 to $2000 as of 1955. A bit higher than I would have guessed. I thought the figure was about $800. But that higher figure puts your sport vehicle of tomorrow at about 3x the cost of the new state of the art Chevrolet. I guess a hefty hunk of change. And I bet it operated for about 3 minutes....max.

I'm in.  There's something appealing about both figuratively and literally looking down on all of those terrestrial traffic goers.

So, about those donations....

how much was a house?  $10,000?

in 1965 my old man bought a 4 door 1956 buick special off a car lot in pomona california for $300.  he had to finance it at $24 a month.  (he still has it by the way.)  it's probably "worth' $10,000 now.  maybe more.

At the risk of upsetting a Knighted person I will re-enter this fun thread ( of course one must watch the Knights in Chess as well  lol ). I once purchased a running car for all of $35 Dollars. It was a 1957 Borgward Sationwagon that I got in 1969 and it ran quite well for 6 months ( and would have run longer with better care  lol ). Then in 1971 I had the chance to buy a brand new VW Beetle right off the lot for the then princely sum of $2175 Dollars. By the way, the US Dollar is often at par to ours up here,sometimes a bit higher other times slightly lower. In regards to transportation one should not forget those flying carpets of yore, a few choice magical words and you are off !  

I've actually charted USD vs CAD and Canadian unit sales as % of total sales as part of a work project.

According to the inflation calculator at dollartimes.com, which uses the individual CPI for each year within an interval in question, $5,795 in 1955 had the same buying power as $47,570.87 today.  Average annual inflation during that 56 year span was 3.83% .

The sound in my brain right now: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

By the by, that $47,570 is within a couple thousand or so of the median annual household income for the U.S., so basically that device would take the average household a year to earn if they didn't waste any of their money on things like food, shelter, clothing . . . 

Corrijean mentioned doing a project Re US Dollars and our loonie bucks up here. Due to the effect of oil prices our Dollar has been up a bit recently as we have a lot of oil that we export. This has created problems for our small manufacturing sector and as we only have a total population simillar to the state of California so our home-market here is quite small. Mind you over-population is not that much of a problem up here  lol. To keep with the theme of this thread: Hurray for Theoreticalboy and long live the Waffle !!!    

Thanks for all the kind words, people; I mean, I haven't read them, because I've been visiting my multiple girlfriends and bringing light into the lives of starving African children (Bono stole his act from me), but I'm sure they're all entirely complementary.

ahhh, i'm on floor laughing.