Peterson Toscano is in town today, to do a performance of his Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House at Goucher College, and I had a chance to hang out with him for a bit this morning. One of the things we discussed over lunch was fund raising ideas for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary on the Memphis Love In Action protests, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. I’m already in it for several grand, helping out in a way I’m not completely free to discuss, so between that and my new car I don’t have a lot of money to spare for a while and I explained this to Peterson and I guess his imagination is much better then mine because he suggested something that never occurred to me, but which should have because it’s obvious. I can help raise money for the documentary, by auctioning some of my artwork on eBay.
Not that I’m a world renown cartoonist or anything, but some of you may appreciate owning the original artwork to some of my political cartoons, and in particular the cartoons I’ve done about Love In Action. I’m also considering selling some of the original artwork to my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, but there’s a catch to that. The political cartoons really do look pretty much as you see them on the cartoon page. But all I can sell of the work I’ve done for A Coming Out Story is the final inks on Strathmore board. which look somewhat unfinished. All the cross-hatching and the word balloons for that one are done in Photoshop, after I’ve scanned in the inks. The exception to this are the first four or five episodes, plus My First X-Rated Movie which I did with my old dip pens. They’re almost completely finished cartoons, including the word balloons (which are empty because I just cannot hand letter anything).
The Mark and Josh originals are the same, except I do the coloring in Photoshop. What I can do with those is sell the original, along with a high-quality print of the final cartoon, printed to the same size as the original artwork so they can be framed side-by-side. 100 percent of the proceeds would go to Morgan to finish the documentary.
One other thing I could do, is auction off an original political cartoon, on any topic the successful bidder chooses.
I’m just in the thinking stages of this, so don’t send me any requests or bids on artwork just yet. But I wanted to float this out there to see how much interest there might be in this. When I get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted, I’ll ask the folks on my mailing list how interested they might be in owning some of the original artwork for the series.
Via Slog… Another reason not to check myself into an Ex-Gay ministry…
“A Consequence of Misuse of the Internet”
That’s how a New York judge has summed up this tragically effed-up mess, in which a 48-year-old man (who’d been posing as an 18-year-old Marine in online chat rooms) murdered his 22-year-old rival for the virtual affections of a middle-aged West Virginia mother posing online as an 18-year-old student.
The Associated Press untangles it all for you here.
You know…I’ve never lied about myself on the Internet…about my age or my looks or my income or anything. Not on the Internet, not on the few dating sites I’ve tried. I just don’t do it. Believe that or not as you like, but I’ve never even used a pseudonym. I’ve have always gone by my birth name online. It’s not rectitude, it’s vanity.
I’ll not be posting much here over the weekend as I’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to go to with friends in D.C., and then my high school class reunion on Friday. Saturday I’ll be busy trying to get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted (you guys still remember that one?). So unless something comes up that I just Have to vent about here, I’ll be pretty quiet until next week.
Look at this graphic…is the dancer spinning clockwise, or counter-clockwise…?
Actually…she can be spinning in either direction. It depends on how your brain initially puts together the visual cues it finds. This from The NeuroLogica Blog, where Steven Novella debunks the notion that this optical illusion reveals left brain/right brain dominance…
Take a look at the spinning girl below. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, and I had a hard time getting it to switch direction. Give it a try.
These kinds of optical illusions are always fun. What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.
The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
The trick, once you’ve settled on a direction for the dancer’s movement, is changing your mind about it at will. It’s not easy at first…at least it wasn’t for me. Initially I saw her spinning counter-clockwise. It took effort, but after a while I found that if I view the image in my peripheral vision, I can train my eye, while not looking directly at the image, to see her spinning in the opposite direction until it "takes". Then when I look directly at her she’s now spinning in that direction. At first it took a while and a lot of effort, but after some practice I could make her switch pretty quickly.
Thoughts that crossed my mind as I was doing lawn work this morning….
Even if your property consists merely of 1 tenth of 1 percent of 1quarter of 1 acre, nine-tenths of your work around the house will consist of biomass control.
Ivy must come from some other planet. It grows even in a drought. The rest of your lawn could be dead, it could be turning to dust, and the ivy will still be growing. And it always grows in the direction you don’t want it growing toward, and will reliably ignore the territory you are willing to let it have.
Adjusting the anti-squirrel defenses on your bird feeders only raises the intelligence level of the neighborhood squirrels. You are not keeping them away from your feeders, you are training them to solve complex problems.
[Update…]
Bird spit is amazing stuff. That’s Spit, not Shit. Bird SPIT. Ever wonder how those tiny little nests made of nothing but small sticks and twigs manage to stay intact during a thunder storm? It’s the damn spit they use to hold everything together. The barn swallow nests in the parking garage at the Institute are amazing things…tacked literally on the concrete walls by nothing more then dirt and swallow spit. Never mind bird droppings, try cleaning a bunch of old seeds all stuck together by bird spit off the bottom of your bird feeders. It’s Work! If humans could spit glue like birds, we’d probably never have invented nails.
So I’m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges. Bear in mind that for years, decades, I’ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics. Also, that I’ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even remotely be called a high performance engine.
I’ve finally encountered the issue people are complaining about out there, with the new seven speed automatic down shifting too aggressively. But I’ve been taking Traveler slowly up and down the speedometer and tach and learning how it behaves and I think I know what the problem is. Most American drivers, especially drivers of my generation, learned on automatics that made you stomp down on the accelerator in order to down shift. You do that in this car and it will behave like it thinks you’re doing some kind of emergency maneuver and race down the gears when that’s not what you want. In this car, in normal driving, when you just want to rapidly pass someone or accelerate out of a situation, you don’t stomp down on the gas pedal. You have to back off your old habits a tad, learn to just firmly press the accelerator forward. The car will figure out what you want and down shift in a more normal manner. And then…trust me…that speedometer needle will climb like you won’t believe. The car won’t slam you back in your seat…it’s a luxury sedan not a Lamborghini…but the effect of the smooth urgency with which it takes you into loose-your-license territory is…amazing. At least to me. I guess that’s what high compression, plus variable valve timing does. Which is why it only drinks expensive premium gas. I’ve driven big V-8s that had less authority then this six. But they were 1970s V-8s. I can’t imagine what the engines Mercedes puts in its S class cars nowadays must feel like. Anyway…the transmission will behave itself, but you need a calm foot on the pedal. You don’t stomp the pedal down. Just ask it politely. It’ll deliver.
I’ve never owned a car before, that was actually and seriously designed to be driven at speeds above 100 miles per hour, and taking Traveler up the speedometer makes me feel like I’m suddenly in a completely different world now. The car is way too comfortable for my own good at speeds well in excess of anything you’re legally allowed to drive on any highway in the lower 48. You know you’re going fast, it just doesn’t feel like you’re driving beyond the limits of the car, or even close. Road noise is minimal, the car doesn’t feel squirrelly, but tight on the road and perfectly, happily content. If anything, it feels like it’s waiting for me to ask it for more. That’s scary. I feel like I really need to take a course in high speed driving. There are places that offer it. Not that you’re supposed to be doing that on the highways, or that I plan on doing that. Even if it were legal, American driving habits would make an Autobahn here much, much too dangerous. But like Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility. The tires may be rated for those speeds, but the driver isn’t. That’s a whole different kind of driving. I need to learn it.
I’m getting a tad over 25 miles per gallon average. It’s not awful, but not great either. I’m used to getting in the low thirties, and that’s on regular. Now I have to buy premium and while my bill hasn’t skyrocketed, it’s something I have to pay attention to more now. Figure my total gasoline expenses have about doubled. But as work is just a mile down the road, even if I drove it all the time, which I don’t, my gas bill was never all that much to start with. Right now my usage is high because I’m still in new car love and I’m busy driving Traveler here and there after work just about every day, just for the shear pleasure of driving it as well as the practical matter of getting to know it. At some point that’ll taper off and then the big cost will be when I take it on road trips. This year my drive to Memphis, Topeka, Portland and Oceano and back cost me about $725 in gas. Double that isn’t an easy figure to swallow all in one go. So I have to make a point to save up for it. I put a hundred bucks or so every month into a road trip kitty and I can still do them. But I just can’t petty cash my gasoline anymore like I used to be able to. Now I have to pay attention to it. I have three savings accounts scattered here and there that I’ve just been putting random spare cash into. I’ll make one of these my road trip kitty and then just use it for road trip gas and miscellaneous expenses.
The delight of blogging is when you find someone smart, really smart, whose mind just likes to roam here and there. Saw this today on Brad DeLong’s blog…
Abraham Lincoln at the 1859 Wisconsin State Fair:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm: A few men own capital; and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital, hire, or buy, another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others, nor have others working for them. Even in all our slave States, except South Carolina, a majority of the whole people of all colors, are neither slaves nor masters. In these Free States, a large majority are neither hirers or hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons and daughters — work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, labor with their own hands, and also buy slaves or hire freemen to labor for them; but this is only a mixed, and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class. Again, as has already been said, the opponents of the "mud-sill" theory insist that there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. There is demonstration for saying this. Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost if not quite the general rule.
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. I have said this much about the elements of labor generally, as introductory to the consideration of a new phase which that element is in process of assuming. The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated — quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small per centage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive. From these premises the problem springs, "How can labor and education be the most satisfactory combined?"
By the "mud-sill" theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be — all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. Those same heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them. A Yankee who could invent strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the "mud-sill" advocates.
But Free Labor says "no!" Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands. As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth — that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education…
Thus the first republican president makes a slam-dunk case for universal education. Stand this man beside the entire republican lineup of presidential hopefuls and you see how far the republican party has declined. But most of that decline has come about since their moses, Ronald Reagan. They’d ride Lincoln out of the party on a rail if he was running today. Re-read that second to last paragraph and tell me that’s not precisely the attitude and policy of the republican party today.
It probably wouldn’t take Lincoln very long to determine the root cause of the republican decline either. Again, from DeLong’s blog…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
That pretty much hits it on the head. There is no abandonment of the democratic party by white males now and never was, except in the south, and Lyndon Johnson saw that coming the day he signed the voting rights act. When you look at the history of nearly all the right wing moral crusaders, from Jerry Falwell on, it becomes even more clear. They’re nearly all southerners, and nearly all of them started out as passionate segregationists. It was loosing their school’s tax except status over racial discrimination, that drove the religious right into politics. They only picked up on the abortion issue and the homosexual menace when they saw that those issues motivated the rubes and drove wedges into the democrat’s grassroots. But it wasn’t about those issues. It was never about those issues. It was always about race.
Lincoln would probably understand right away what has happened to his party, if not why it happened. And he’d probably weep for it, and for America.
Good Initial Reports On The C300 – Cars I’ve Owned
So far, everything I’m seeing on the reliability of the new C class is good. This owner’s review on the Mercedes Benz Club of America C-class forum was especially heartening, since the man seems to have done the kind of long distance road trip loop I love doing…
We left Vancouver WA…went first to San Francisco for a week…then Las Vegas, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, then Monument Valley, Albuquerque, picked up the old Route 66 road through Kingman AZ, to San Diego…back to SF, then Sacramento…then home on 9/24.
Stats: 4750 miles covered [the car now has exactly 5000 miles on it], 26-28 mpg at freeway speeds, temps ranged from 40-115F, altitudes to 9000 feet.
Roads: Everything from Interstates with 75 mph limits [and actual speeds of 85], to back roads with pitted surfaces and extreme twists for miles at a time. Really smooth pavement was rare; back roads in AZ and NM were sometimes very rough. These observations are important to the next point…
The Car: Absolutely fantastic. The best part about the new car is the ride / handling compromise – very absorbent ride over every kind of surface, but handling that is noticeably better in every way over the W203. Another improvement is the larger trunk…we got everything we needed inside, and it is more useable than the previous generation in this respect. Great seats [nothing new here], very quiet, and the quickest car we’ve ever owned – passing is easy, and speed changes are mostly a matter of just thinking about it. AC was really tested during the SW part of the trip – we saw 115F in Vegas, and never less than 95F for nearly two weeks. Coolant temps never budged over 90C, the cabin was always cooled instantly after a hot sun soak, and so far the car has used no oil at all. And it’s tight – no noises inside, no squeaks or annoyances.
Issues: None. That’s right, everything works. Our car was built in Bremen in June, and carries a serial number in the 17xxx range. I knew we were running a risk – so far, so good.
Other misc observations:
-Didn’t think I’d care about the satellite radio, but now we’re hooked.
-The cruise control has a feature that I’ve never encountered on an MB before – if you speed up temporarily using the pedal, when you ease off, it doesn’t just coast back to the set speed [like every other car we’ve ever owned], but will actually apply the brakes gently to resume the old speed. Disconcerting at first, just something to get used to.
-The grade logic in the transmission is superb – whether going up hill or down, it was always doing the right thing – no hunting, and providing just the right gear to minimize brake use on down slopes. Very impressive.
Summary: The BEST CAR EVER in our household, and I’ve owned 54 cars total since 1962. DB has its act together again.
("W203" is a Mercedes chassis ID. Apparently Mercedes folk like to identify the cars by chassis number over model designation. I reckon that’s because Mercedes will make these not-so-minor changes in a model designation from time to time. The new c300 is chassis W204.)
This is the kind of driving I intend to do with this car myself, and a few of his observations match with mine so far:
The 7 speed transmission always seems to be right on the mark, regardless of the road grade. I’ve read complaints about it downshifting too much, but I’ll just bet those are coming from folks who have theirs set on the "Sport" program and not "Comfort" The "Sport" shifting program should be more aggressive. I’m still in the break-in period, and Mercedes says to only use "Comfort" for now, but "Comfort" is fine. The shifts are so smoothly done I have to watch the tach to know they’re even happening, and they happen at exactly the right moments. I’ve not felt the car straining to accelerate even once, and the downshifts are barely felt if at all. Acceleration just happens.
Road handling is way beyond any car I’ve ever owned. The ride is smooth, and yet you never loose the feel of the road, or what the car is doing. I’m not in a position to be pushing it yet, but it seems to take corners really nicely. I’ve driven it down a few windy Maryland Piedmont backroads and never once have I lost that solid Mercedes sedan feel in a corner or turn, no matter how much the road is undulating. It is a pure joy to drive. But then…it was made for the Autobahn after all…
I encountered the same cruse control behavior he did, when I accidentally turned it on while trying to signal a lane change. That’s all too easy on a Mercedes because the cruse control lives on a stick on the steering wheel close to the turn signal stick. They’re easy to confuse at first. I didn’t realize I had the cruse control on until I started down a hill and felt the car start breaking a tad to maintain speed.
And I know about how wonderful Satellite Radio is while long distance driving. For local driving it probably wouldn’t make much difference to most drivers. But when you’re crossing large swaths of countryside, its nice, really nice, to have a constant signal on a station you like. Plus, unlike Clearcut Clearchannel damaged broadcast radio, satellite radio has a variety of music that’s always there. You like bluegrass? There is a bluegrass channel. You like Techno-Trance? There’s that too. Classical? Yup…several different flavors of it. And so forth. Plus…Sirius has a gay channel. You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to have a gay channel to listen to, while you’re deep in red state territory, and the only thing on the broadcast dial is hate, hate, and more hate.
I’m taking a trip to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Saturday to visit an old friend. I’ll get a chance to let the Nav system direct me somewhere and give the car its first little road trip weekend. I’m halfway through the first thousand mile break-in period, and by the time I get back the car should be ready for its complementary thousand mile check-up.
A little history…
My first car was a blue 1973 Ford Pinto. It had no name in my mind, other then just Pinto because the model name seemed just right for that car. It was small, it was cute, and I loved driving it. I was fresh out of high school and working various fresh out of high school kid jobs. At $1997.48, the Pinto was barely affordable. At the time, one of my uncles owned a Mercedes diesel sedan and it was a marvel. Solid in a way none of the U.S. made cars of the 1970s could even come close to being, and yet agile on the road. It boasted safety features the U.S. automakers kept insisting would kill their business if they had to put them on their own products. I was a little teenage geek: where the other guys were all about Corvettes and GTOs, I was about my uncle’s Mercedes-Benz. Everything about that car made sense to me. But the pricetag for even the least expensive ones was well beyond what a teenage stock boy could afford. So I just dreamed…
I ran the the Pinto for 135 thousand miles and took fanatical care of the engine to get it there. But after ten years of driving it, everything but the engine was starting to come apart. By 1983 it was ready for the junk yard. A friend offered me his mom’s old 1974 Chrysler Imperial for 500 bucks and I snapped it up because in 1983 a 500 dollar car was about all I could afford. It had a 400 cubic inch V8 and was so damn huge the dash had two ashtrays in it. It could hold four in the front and four in the back bench seats easily, and maybe another six in the trunk. It also had a big ass hole in the floor under the driver’s seat that I could look down at and see the asphalt going by. I named it The Blue Whale.
A reckless driver in a little Ford Capri hit me head on while I was waiting to turn at an intersection, and while I was grateful that I had that massive car around me when it happened, that was the end of The Blue Whale. I was into hard times then, and could not afford to replace it. I did public transportation to and from whatever work I could find for another four years or so.
Then in 1991 I got some work as a software developer. The only problem was the job was in Baltimore and I was in Rockville. The agency I contracted through rented me a car for a couple of weeks until I got my first paycheck. From a friend of a friend I bought a huge white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon, another $500 junker. It had 240 thousand miles on it, having been owned by a lady who drove it all over West Virginia for her gumball business. I named it The Great White because Moby Dick just seemed obvious. It had another big ass V8 engine with a collapsed lifter in it somewhere that rattled loudly. The fabric on the inside roof was hanging down partially blocking my view out the back window, and eventually I just pulled it all off. Thereafter the layer of foam between it and the roof started flaking off and I’d have a hair full of it by the time I got to work. For about two years The Great White got me to Baltimore and back from the basement room I was renting in Wheaton.
Then in 1993, more confident that I could keep earning a living doing what I was now doing, I moved to Baltimore, into my first apartment ever (I was 38 years old). I was feeling so confident in my income as a software developer that I bought my first new car since 1973: a little green Geo Prism. I named it Aya. Aya was a champ, took me to California three times and carried me over two-hundred thousand miles and never once left me stranded anywhere.
By 2005 I was ready to step up a tad, and decided to go for a slightly bigger car, and more bells and whistles. I bought a black 2005 Honda Accord sedan with all the trimmings and named it Beauty, because it was so damn beautiful. Beauty carried me to California twice, and was, before now, the best highway car I’d ever owned. I could drive that car for hours on end and never feel tired. Just last July I put over eight thousand miles on it, driving first to Memphis, then to Topeka, then to Portland, then to Oceano California, and back through the southwest to Baltimore.
I fully intended when I bought Beauty, to own it as long as I’ve owned every other new car I’ve ever bought, which is to say until it had absolutely no trade-in value whatsoever. But a friend of mine bought himself a very lovely Acura TL, and it got me to asking myself if I was ever going to get around to going for the car I always wanted or not.
All these years I would occasionally peek into a Mercedes dealership and steal a look at the cars…particularly the low end sedans that were at least theoretically affordable. Someday. Maybe. I would get a brochure and take it home and spend hours looking at it. Two weeks ago, my Honda paid off, I peeked into a Mercedes dealership again, sat down in one of the new c300s, and thought…I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You don’t want to be going right back into debt again over a new car so soon after you’ve paid the one you already have off.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
Your car only has 47 thousand miles on it. Buying a new one now would be a total waste of money.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You could get ten more years out of the car you have. Easy.
But by then I might be too old to enjoy driving a Mercedes. I’m 54. In ten years I’ll be 64. And then the argument will be, can I afford to be borrowing money on a luxury car when I’m that close to retiring.
You don’t need it. Put it away for retirement. Put it into the house. You just don’t need a new car.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
I stressed over it for two weeks. Then I did it. I’ve named it Traveler. One ‘l’…so as not to be confused with Lee’s horse. I am no admirer of Mr. Lee and his Lost Cause. The name just came to me as I was sitting in it and thinking about all the places we would go. In German its Reisender.
I realize I’m going to be spending more on gasoline now that I own a car that runs on premium, and what is more get’s almost ten miles per gallon less. But…geeze…
LONDON: Concern that Turkey may attack Kurdish militants in Iraq and disrupt petroleum shipments pushed crude oil to a record price Tuesday, nudging $88 a barrel and extending a rally that has added $8 in a week.
Crude oil for November delivery rose as much as $1.84, or 2.1 percent, to $87.97 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest level since the futures were introduced in 1983.
In early London trade, the contract was at $87.45.
Oil is closing in on the inflation-adjusted high of $90.46 seen in 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution and at the start of the Iran-Iraq war. Prices this year have averaged $67.
The latest surge in oil prices came after Turkey talked over the weekend of invading northern Iraq to pursue rebel fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
You want to get people’s attention here in America? Instead of issuing terrorist threat alerts on a color scale, they should issue them on a cost of a gallon of gas scale. The Homeland Security Administration rose the terrorist threat level to $4 a gallon today…
I knew I was in for it when I bought a car that runs on premium instead of regular. I accepted that as part of the joy of owning a Mercedes (The Mercedes Experience…as my friend Dan puts it…). But still I had visions of all the gas station signs I saw while on the road last July, particularly in Nevada for some reason, advertising premium gasoline for over four dollars a gallon. We were having a gasoline price peak back then, right as I was taking my annual road trip vacation. I was driving the Accord, and counting my blessings that I had a car that was doing about 33 miles per gallon. I’m still in the break-in period on the Mercedes, but it looks like I’ll be getting at best around 25 mpg in it.
What I didn’t expect was how widely the price of premium varies. At least around here. The price of regular only varies by a few cents locally. Last night as I was looking to fill up, I noticed the price of premium here in the Baltimore area running between $3.10 and $2.80. I saw stations right down the street from each other, having the same exact price for regular, differing by as much as 20 cents a gallon on the price of premium. I’ve no idea why that might be.
According to global marketing information firm J.D. Power and Associates, 42 percent of all car buyers … won’t even look at a vehicle built by a U.S. company.
Dave Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of auto research, said [that is] a mistake.
"Many consumers still have a view of the Detroit automakers that the products are not as reliable as the imports, but what our studies show is that that is simply not true," he said.
Detroit has been closing the quality gap in recent years, Sargent said. In a study this summer of three-year-old vehicles, J.D. Power said Buick tied Lexus as the most dependable brand. In another J.D. Power study on quality, Ford won in five categories — more than any other company.
But Sargent said when it comes to cars, it takes years for perception to catch up to reality.
I appreciate the dynamic J.D. Powerman is describing. My own experience with cars designed by the Big Three is an unbroken string of hoopdies. My Honda Civic has run for more years and more miles than my Dodge Colt, Ford Escort, Chevy Cavalier and Chevette combined. Those earlier cars all broke down so often, stranding me at so many key moments, that I can still feel the anxiety of those strandings in my muscle memory. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn. I can’t imagine easily coming around to feeling secure about relying on another Ford or Chevy to get me from point A to point B if I need to get there.
I have no problem with buying an American-made car — my Civic was built by the UAW in Ohio, my Escort was built in Korea — but it will be a long while before I overcome my hard-earned, visceral distrust of Detroit engineering.
That’s me. My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto and I loved it, and got 135k miles out of it (by taking care of the motor fanatically…changing the oil every two-thousand miles and so forth…) and still it broke down on me repeatedly. But it was 1973 and that was just what you expected of cars back then. Except for the Mercedes, which back then was legendary for its bombproof reliability. My mom’s first car was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant slant six (we were carless for most of my childhood), which just ran and ran and ran. But after she traded that one in, she endured a string of just awful Chryslers and I swear I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it.
I endured a string of really marginal used cars myself after the Pinto…but that was mostly because I was flat broke more often then not, and couldn’t afford more then a couple hundred buck junker. Then I started getting work as a software developer, and could actually afford a new car, and bought a 1993 Geo Prism on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. I got over 200k miles out of that car, and it never once left me stranded. Under the skin, that car was a Toyota Corolla.
My next car was the Honda Accord I just traded in. I drove that thing across the Imperial Valley and the wastelands of Western Wyoming and Idaho and eastern Oregon and never once worried that it would break down on me in the middle of nowhere. Thing is, that Accord, and that Geo Prism, were both made in America, by American labor.
American labor can build solid, reliable cars. But for ages it seems to me, Detroit just doesn’t want to design cars that way.
So I understand that aspect of what the J.D. Power guy is talking about. But he fails to notice another equally significant reason that the Big Three automakers have a lousy reputation: They’ve spent millions of dollars over the past several decades on a PR campaign designed to persuade us that they don’t know what they’re doing.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.
Consider, for example, CAFE standards — targets for corporate average fuel economy. Every time that Congress or Al Gore or the Sierra Club has suggested these standards should be higher, Detroit shrieks that they can’t take the pressure, that it couldn’t possibly be done, that they don’t have the skill, the know-how or the basic competence to pull it off. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen, on the other hand, just said, "More fuel-efficient vehicles? Hai. Ja. We can do that. We’re good at making cars."
The same thing happened earlier with air bags and emissions standards. When California passed strict new emission standards in the 1990s, GM and Ford shipped their top lobbyists to Washington and Sacramento to argue that the new rules were technologically impossible. Toyota and Honda didn’t send lobbyists — they sent cars that met the new standard. The same dynamic occurred even earlier with seat belts. With GM’s lobbyists arguing that the company wasn’t capable of meeting the technological challenge of the seat belt why should consumers trust them to build reliable engines?
You know…I hadn’t thought of this before, but it fits. I can appreciate the big three arguing against government dictating auto design…I don’t agree with it on the basis of safety and emissions standards…but I can see them making that argument. But that’s not the argument that emphasized. Instead, like Fred says there, they cried doom and gloom and said repeatedly, over every friggin’ safety or emissions requirement, that it couldn’t be done. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan just kept..well…doing it.
It’s not that Americans can’t build good cars. It’s not that Americans can’t engineer good cars. It’s that corporate management didn’t want to. The mindset was, good enough to roll out of the factory is good enough. If there are problems, fix them after the fact, until the warranty runs out.
It’s not that they just didn’t design them to be maintained or repaired either…I remember one car, I think it was the AMC Pacer, which needed to have the engine jacked up to replace one of the spark plugs…a routine operation, something you did with every tune-up back in those days…but they didn’t design them to be Assembled either. I remember looking under the hood of the Toyota a friend bought in the late 1970s, when Japan was starting to actually worry Detroit. It was a marvel. Not only where there all sorts of little things they did in there to protect vulnerable hoses and electrical cables from the engine compartment environment, and thus decrease the likelihood of a breakdown, but there was all kinds of little things they did, that you could see, to the individual components to help the assembly line workers put it together right the first time. Little tick marks, or fittings on the individual parts that at a glance told you, attach this part to this other part Here…This way. You didn’t have to even think about it. The pieces Told You how to put them together. That kind of thinking did not penetrate Detroit management for decades. I’m not sure it has even now.
You go to a Toyota or Honda showroom now, and you’ll see some of the finest cars American labor can build. Absolutely world class stuff. They’re just not Detroit designs. And that’s not the fault of American engineering either. I recall reading a few years ago, about a guy who’d been put in charge of GM’s Cadillac devision, who was proposing to build an American supercar, something to compete, not merely with the top of the line Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs, but with Rolls and Bentley. Right On, I thought. It doesn’t matter if the market for something like that is small…Build It dammit! Let’s produce one America sedan that’s made as well as a car can be made, not just at the state of the art, but defining it, and cost be dammed. Go ahead and make it for the fabulously rich…and maybe…hopefully…the techniques learned will trickle down to the rest of the GM line. You think what Toyota learns while making Lexus doesn’t find its way eventually to the Camry? That’s why they’re so damn good…they have a line where they just go for it. Every car maker should have one of those.
But no…it was never done. And I don’t think that guy’s with Cadillac anymore. The new styling in the line since the 1990s is his, and maybe some engineering improvements. But Cadillac still has the worst reliability record of any luxury model. That’s not the fault of the people who build them. American workers can build a great car, if they’re given a great car to build.
My love of driving, of the simple, singular act of driving a car down the road, never mind where I’m going, or if I’m going anywhere in particular, believe it or not actually makes me an oddity in this country. That’s right. In a country where they say the automobile is god, a nation of car worshipers, when I tell people I regularly take cross-country drives to visit family out in California, that I’d Much rather drive it then fly because for me the road is the vacation, people look at me like I’m crazy. You drove all the way to California…???
Oh yes…we love our cars. More precisely I think, we love the independence they give us. We don’t have to construct our lives around bus or a train schedules. We can go where we want, when we want, live where we want, shop where we want, play where we want. The car made the suburbs possible. The car is an integral part of our economy. And we make our own cars into statements about ourselves. They are our status symbols, our tricked out souped up air conditioned chrome and burled walnut accented inner child. We love our cars. It’s driving we hate. Mostly.
And to tell the truth I hate it myself when it’s heavy commuter or weekend shopper congestion I have to wade through. I hate traffic so much I bought a home within walking distance of work, and two good supermarkets. I could have bought a nicer one elsewhere in the city, but then I’d have to drive to work and I hate commuter traffic. With a passion. I don’t very much care for weekend shopper traffic either.
I’m just pondering all this because of a discussion I came across on another blog I visit often. Brad DeLong writes, "Time to Whomp the Drivers!", riffing on Megan McArdle. riffing on James Joyner…
Megan McArdle: I think James Joyner is absolutely right here:
I’m now commuting into D.C. on a near-weekdaily basis. According to GoogleMaps, the office is 13.5 miles from the house. I can usually drive there in 45-60 minutes during off-peak hours, although it can sometimes take much longer if there’s an accident. I can park in the garage next to my office for the day for $12. Conversely, I can drive 15-20 minutes to a Metro station, pay $4 to park, wait as long as 15 minutes for a train, pay another $2.65 to get two blocks from the office 35-50 minutes later, followed by a 5-10 minute walk to the office.
So, in order to save $2.70 (plus a nominal amount of gasoline), it would cost me 30-75 minutes each day for the round trip, plus the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle. Given that I earn enough that $3 is poor compensation indeed for that much of my time, I drive unless there’s a really good reason not to.
And they’re about to raise the rates for Metro fares and parking, further skewing the calculus in the direction of “drive.”
The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.
I have a suggestion. Why not make cities more livable? In fact…I made this suggestion in the comments, where I said in part…
Driving long distances, for many hours out of your life a year, in stress inducing commuter traffic, already makes driving unattractive. Weekend shopper traffic is equally ugly and stressful. But as long as where people work, where they shop, and where they live are kept in separate corners people will just keep driving, and keep absorbing the cost of it.
My comment was promptly ignored, and a discussion of driving costs verses public transportation costs ensued. It’s not just that I’m a boring conversationalist…I’ve seen this happen before whenever this topic comes up. The obvious solution to traffic congestion, and the national gasoline bill, is to put jobs and basic needs shopping and housing within walking distance of each other. For bonus points, add an enjoyable night life to the walkable mix. Not everyone will want to live in the city, not everyone will want to be that close to work. But as traffic keeps getting worse and worse, and the cost of oil keeps going up and up, people will begin migrating back to the cities, if the cities are made livable. And that’s fewer cars on the roads, and less oil consumed. But they’ll only do that if the cities are made more livable. And this country doesn’t seem to want to have a conversation about doing that.
Even in cities with a thriving economy it’s a problem. My understanding is that D.C. doesn’t want to put housing, never mind affordable housing, near the major office zones. One neighborhood in D.C. that approaches livability very nicely is (surprise, surprise) the little gay neighborhood near DuPont Circle. It’s got housing (if you have to ask you can’t afford it housing, but still housing), shopping, and an active nightlife. It’s streets are walkable and it’s atmosphere is casual and welcoming. Metro is nearby. It’s a nice enclave close enough to some of the major office spaces that you could conceivably work and live there. I’m sure there are other enclaves like it elsewhere in the city, but not enough of them. The big downtown office zone is dead at night, except for a few bars scattered around the fringes. Anytime you see dead zones in a city, that almost certainly happened because some jackass city planners decided to make the area homogenized in some unnatural way.
In an area with as much traffic congestion as D.C. has, there’s probably tons of people who would be interested in living in the city, and within walking distance or a short Metro ride from where they work. But for one reason or another they feel they can’t. The availability and cost of housing. Fear of crime. Nowhere to go and nothing to do evenings and weekends. Streets that aren’t walkable. Schools that are run down. City services that are inadequate. Few safe places for kids to play. They don’t see city life as being viable. That’s the problem.
Suburbanites for some reason though, want to complain about traffic, and greenhouse gases, and carbon usage, and gasoline taxes, and highway construction (pro and con) but they don’t want to talk about making cities livable. Go figure.
A Northerner walks into a bar in the Deep South around Christmas time. A small nativity scene is behind the bar, and the guy says, "That’s a nice nativity scene. But how come the three wise men are all wearing firemen’s hats?" And the bartender says, "Well, it says right there in the Bible–the three wise men came from afar."
More Someone, Some Guys, Some Things walk into a bar jokes Here.
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