If there's anything that gets our goat, it's self-congratulating, self-aggrandizing newly green sensationalists pulling stunts to get people to fawn all over how awesome they are. Enter Ryan Mickle, a guy who purchased a 2006 Range Rover Sport, one of the most lavish and wasteful SUVs on the market, while enormous tax incentives for small business were still available and is now planning to destroy it however the internet tells him to. What? You mean, we're supposed to buy the line that after he moved to San Francisco he decided it was wasteful and to destroy it to protect mother Earth? Nope, not buying it, not one bit.
When you buy anything as a business asset, you automatically start using that purchase to offset profits, it's called depreciation and it's a great way to avoid paying too much in corporate taxes. If you're good at it, you never have to pay taxes. The thing is, when you do this, you must declare a useful life for the asset and you can only depreciate it during that useful life. No smart business owner simply destroys an asset at then end of life, normally its taken off the depreciation rolls or sold. By pulling off this stunt, Ryan will be fawned over far and wide, and we suspect, will eventually be plugging whatever company he's running with all that free publicity. Brilliant, but trashing a perfectly good, completely written-off Range Rover and painting yourself green while doing it makes us see red. Of course, we could just be cynics and he's on the ups, but we doubt it. [OneFewer.com]
Original photo from Wired