The Future of Transportation, Milage

Volkswagen has poured a bunch of money into developing a rolling spaceship that delivers some 285 mpg of diesel with no help from batteries at all. Agin, My complaint is that they put too many wheels under it, which makes me ask what kind of mileage it gets sitting idling in the non-carpool lane with the rest of the peasants. With one less wheel in the back, I'd be down at the dealership, pushing money under their door until they opened.
Spiffy, no. Still, if you dig a bit you find someone has already been there. Here's a report of a car entered in a Shell Oil fuel economy contest in 1973 that got 276 MPG.
Not as spiff, but arguably capable of seating 4 adults.

I saw an ad, produced during the 1974 gas crisis, by Volkswagen, showing a VW Beetle that had been modified by the factory to get some outrageous number of miles per gallon using only the parts and pieces from a 74 Beetle. Admittedly not much was left of it, but I did appreciate the thinking that went into it. The finished car retained the outlines of the Beetle, and ran on a stock engine with 2 of the cylinders removed. Also removed was everything not absolutely necessary to hold the 4 wheels together, and support the jockey driving it.

Saving Lives

Virginia Postrel has a piece up that's near and dear to what's left of my head: Bicycle helmets.

It seems that while helmets do save lives, they aren't very efficient at it.

A new helmet law reduces bicycle deaths among the affected age group by about 19%. It doesn't affect older riders. Since serious bicycle accidents are rare, however, the absolute numbers are still small, about eight fewer deaths a year among kids 5 to 15 than would otherwise occur in the states with helmet laws. "It's not a ton of lives when you compare it to something like wearing your seat belt," says Prof. Stehr.

The affected age group is kids under 15. She also doesn't say if the reduction is overall or per state. Either way it's not a very big number. In any case helmets reduce death and injury in another, probably unintended way: They take a big bite out of the numbers of kids who actually ride bikes.

One reason for the drop is, of course, that more kids wear helmets when they get into accidents. But another is that many give up cycling altogether. Using surveys of parents, the professors find that about 650,000 fewer children ride bikes each year after helmet laws go into effect. That's about 81,000 fewer riders for every life saved. Helmets may save lives, but the dork factor also takes its toll.

People conduct their lives to a perceived level of risk. Get into a car, for example, with a full suite of crash protective devices, plus a 4-point seat belt and a mandatory helmet, and you'll be as safe at 100 mph as you used to be at 60. So you drive 100. It also helps that at 100 mph, fewer people see you swaddled in a rolling rubber room. If you think a mandatory helmet law would somehow benefit you by making cyclists wear them, think how much less likely you'll be to hit one if all the helmets were required to be bright pink.

Tax Time

Found this over at Theo Spark. I haven't done any checking on the provenience of this, but I seem to remember it's been proposed before. Got shot down the last time after too many congressmen began receiving death threats.

Starting in 2011 ”next year ”the W-2 tax form sent by your employer will be increased to show the value of whatever health insurance you are provided. It doesn't matter if you're retired. Your gross income WILL go up by the amount of insurance your employer paid for. So you'll be required to pay taxes on a larger sum of money that you actually received. Take the tax form you just finished for 2009 and see what $15,000.00 or $20,000.00 additional gross income does to your tax debt. That's what you'll pay next year. For many it puts you into a much higher bracket. This is how the government is going to buy insurance for
fifteen (15) percent that don't have insurance and it's only part of the tax increases, but it's not really a "tax increase" as such, it a redefinition of your taxable income.

Health insurance was originally provided to workers when FDRs wage controls held wages down to nonviable levels. It was not considered part of the wage because the benefits were pretty much the same across the board. If this actually happens, and your original insurer doesn't go out of business, your employer would be doing you a favor by dropping your insurance altogether, and throwing you to Obamacare.

Of course since unemployment insurance payments are taxable as income, I see no reason why federally provided health care should fare any differently.

The Wit and Wisdom Of Harry Reid

In an interview, featuring strictly softball questions, Harry Reid sets some records.

When asked who the greatest living Americans might be, he unhesitatingly selects Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd. You're too modest, Harry. I was sort of hoping you'd be right up there with them. Or down there with them, depending on your theological bent.

The consummate politician, when he needs dirty work done, rather than dirtying his hands, he farms it out. Wouldn't pay a dime to see a cage match between Chuck Schumer, age 60, and John McCain, age 72 and unable to raise his arms over his shoulders, but figures McCain might be the winner. I'd go with McCain too, but only if we spotted him a .45.

Reid is currently 4 points behind among likely voters in his re-election bid, which is not too bad after you factor in the 3-5 points vote fraud can get you.

Control

California got caught cooking the books in order to strengthen their air pollution bureaucracy.

The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with researching and adopting air quality standards. The estimate was a key part in the creation of a regulation adopted by the Air Resources Board in 2007, a rule that forces businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.

If the overstatement has any basis in fact, construction must be about 1/3.4 or 29% of what it was projected to be.

I suppose if you choke an economy sufficiently, fuel usage will go down, as no one will be going to work any more, and the air will magically get cleaner. Just like in Zimbabwe.

Polls 2

Gallup has a poll out that suggests that both unemployment and underemployment are about a point each higher than the official government figures.
The nice thing about polls like this is that it doesn't matter if you're an adult, a registered voter, or a likely voter when the question is asked, you're either working or you aren't. Gallup is also influenced by part-time workers who say they are not looking for full-time work. These folks would likely take a full-time job, but why bother looking if there aren't any?

Gallup says the U-3 is now 10.1%, and the U-6 is up to 18.1%. Government figures are due out tomorrow. Any early bets on the "official" rates?

Three-Party Elections

I've talked about this before here, how three party elections most usually elect the least popular candidate, barring allowances being made, such as runoffs. Here in Colorado, we have one of those for Governor, as the Republicans have picked a really weak candidate, Dan Maes, and the Dems have a fairly popular one. The odd man in is Tom Tancredo, Constitution party candidate, who is within 6 points of beating the Democrat, with the Republican getting 15%.

A Republican who had the peoples best interests in mind would drop out, and throw the election to the Constitution party candidate.

As I understand it, if Maes drops out or otherwise polls less than 10% of the vote, it reduces the Republican Party to the status of a minor party, and reduces some sources of funding.

You would think that if the Republicans take back the Colo house, maybe the Senate, and Tancredo takes the Governors seat, that some kind of arrangement could be worked out.

On the other hand, perhaps that would be the first step in the disappearance of the Republican party from the political scene, and the rise of either the Constitution Party, or the establishment of the Tea Party as a bonna fide political party for the 2012 elections.

Make history, Danny Boy. Drop out.

Quote of the Day

"Folks, people are angry with good reason," he said recently in California. "Through no fault of their own, over 8 million people essentially woke up to find out that they don't have jobs."
Joe "Plugs" Biden

The other 9,021,976 have only themselves to blame for helping to elect the root cause of their current problems.

Quote of the Day

From Ace:

I had an astronomy prof way back in college who described the size of the Earth in this way: "The solar system is composed of our Star and the gas-giant planet Jupiter. The remaining 1% of the mass is miscellaneous leftover crap."

Gotta keep things in perspective, now.

Civics Test

These things are amusing if only to see if you outscore the average college professor. Professor of what, I wonder.

Some of the questions are painfully ambiguous:

30) Which of the following fiscal policy combinations would a government most likely follow to stimulate economic activity when the economy is in a severe recession?

A. increasing both taxes and spending

B. increasing taxes and decreasing spending

C. decreasing taxes and increasing spending

D. decreasing both taxes and spending

The obvious answer is A, which is what they do regardless of what else is going on. The word in the question, "would" is wrong, and should be "should", in which case the correct answer is D. The test preparers think the answer should be C, although how running up a big deficit helps the economy is beyond me. It was tried in the 30's and didn't work then either.

Results:

You answered 27 out of 33 correctly — 81.82 %

Average score for this quiz during October: 76.8%

I'll admit to one brain fart, 2 cases of not having studied Greek philosophy, and am willing to argue the remaining 3. See above.

Take the quiz here.

Product Endorsement

My truck is getting pretty old, and losing performance. Part of that is due to the transmission. In the morning I put it in gear and step on the gas and the engine roars and the truck moves foreward slowly until things get warmer.

After that, out on the road,if I want to speed up, I step on the gas a bit, and the engine revs up a bit, but speed remains the same. Give it more gas, and the tranny shifts out of overdrive, but still no increase in speed. More gas yet, and the engine revs finally get to the point the tranny can no longer ignore, and speed begins to increase.

Add 2/3 of a bottle of Lucas Transmission Fix, and all this goes away. The stuff's like magic. Also like tar. I had to microwave my bottle for 2 minutes to get it to the point it would come out of the bottle and run down the filler tube, and even at that it was still slow, which accounts for the 2/3 bottle. I ran out of patience.

It's worth the wait, though. LTF is available at auto parts stores, and they are not paying me to say nice things about their product.

Polls

Early on polls are conducted at the behest of interest groups and candidates for the primary purpose of generating enthusiasm for the candidate or cause in question. These are recognizable by the phrase "adults" used to describe respondents.

Later the polling companies, in an effort to not look like complete idiots, adjust their methodology to edge closer to the actual state of things. Here you see words like "registered voters", although Mickey Mouse and Do-Wop Diddy are registered in more than one district. If these results show your lead shrinking, it's time to panic.

Last stage polls are of "likely voters", myself, for example, which gives the polls significant weight. If I tell a pollster that I will vote for X and against Y, you can count on levers being pulled and/or boxes being checked to that effect. When a pollster begins to use words like "historic", somebody's goose is likely well and truly cooked.

Personally, I'm hoping to see the word "biblical" come into more common use when projecting the upcoming elections, as in "political devastation of biblical proportions".

Sex Makes Women Happier

O.K. so you probably already knew that, but did you ever wonder about the actual mechanism of this? There's an article in Scientific American, no less that delves into the actual chemistry of sex, and discovers that men are walking dispensers of psychoactive drugs:

In fact, semen has a very complicated chemical profile, containing over 50 different compounds (including hormones, neurotransmitters, endorphins and immunosupressants) each with a special function and occurring in different concentrations within the seminal plasma. Perhaps the most striking of these compounds is the bundle of mood-enhancing chemicals in semen. There is good in this goo. Such anxiolytic chemicals include, but are by no means limited to, cortisol (known to increase affection), estrone (which elevates mood), prolactin (a natural antidepressant), oxytocin (also elevates mood), thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent) and even serotonin (perhaps the most well-known antidepressant neurotransmitter).

Sex has a leveling effect on the male mind too, although the authors don't offer any suggestions regarding this.

Manufacturing Tanks In August

It's a positive sign indeed that after the Summer of Recovery put so many people back to work that the defense industry is now benefiting from Obama's embrace of the Bush doctrine that delivered a win in Iraq.

Oh wait! Did I misread that?

The Future of Transportation, For Sure

Here is a picture of a prototype from Lotus, which they call the City Car:
Snappy. Does anyone notice a vague resemblance to this:
Or is it just me.

More car pix from the Paris Auto Show here. Stormtroopers everywhere.