and the importance of obeying it.Is it really necessary to point out the obvious — that people pick and choose the laws they wish to obey, and come up with all sorts of reasons why it’s ok that they break that particular law — but other laws, those are important.

I’m not arguing that traffic laws should be obeyed to the letter, or breaking them is unsafe — rather, I would like to point out that we already break traffic laws when we think it is safe — and bicycles, who are different from cars (slower, nimbler, better able to see and hear) might be able to do some things safely that cars cannot.

11:34:09

11:34:14

11:34:25

11:35:26

11:36:04

11:37:49

But perhaps stop signs are different. Or maybe they aren’t.

Changed jobs twice over the years while the family had a “pre-existing condition”, i.e., pregnancy. COBRA, which incorporated Kennedy’s “fairly small step” to extend health insurance coverage, saved our butt, both times.

It’s expensive, but it beats the alternative. Also, anyone doing this, be aware of the following details:

• You have to keep the old insurance running till the OB/GYN gives the ok at a follow-up appointment;
• The new baby is NOT a pre-existing condition, and emerges, covered by whatever new insurance you might have, poof!
• The hospital may get the billing wrong on this last detail, which can result in a telephone call after you arrive home with the baby, claiming that (s)he is not on the insurance. Tell them to bill it to the new insurance.

Thanks again, Senator Kennedy.

I mean, it’s been weeks.
It’s worth remembering, when you hear anti-universal-care propaganda, that they are lying. We pay more than anyone by a large margin, measured either in absolute dollars, or as percentage of our GDP, and among “modern” countries (OECD, more or less) we die sooner, we live sicker, and more of our babies die in infancy.

If you hear it would be expensive, remember that what we have now, is already expensive — it’s just, instead of “taxes”, you pay “insurance premiums” (or your employer pays “insurance premiums”), or you do without because you cannot afford it, (and/)or you go bankrupt. Wheher it is “premiums” or “taxes”, it is money out of my pocket.

The people advertising against this do not have your interests in mind; they have their own financial interests in mind. It takes a lot of parasites in the system for us to spend as much as we do, yet deliver such incredibly inferior results. The parasites fund propaganda.

There are a few people who have this crazy idea that market healthcare solutions would work better. They are airy-fairy theoreticians who ignore the experimental data — 20+ countries with cheaper, better, universal, health care.

What we spend, what we get. Small words, for small brains. We’re not best in the world. Clear?

All data from nationmaster.com, who in turn got it from reputable sources. Add to this, the economic inefficiency of having insurance tied to your job, of all the small businessmen that never got the chance because they could not hack the lack of health insurance, of the tremendous penalty paid by mature industries with mature workers that they insure.

Last I heard, everyone in the OECD except the US, Turkey, and Mexico, has universal health care. Nobody spends more. Most countries have (much) healthier citizes. To suppose that if we tried universal care, we would spend even more than we do now, and be unable to match any of our 20+ peers, is difficult to believe.

And yes, of course lots of people in nice suits will very nicely explain how none of this could ever work, and why we cannot change the system we have now. Those people in nice suits are well paid to say that — all that extra money that we spend ends up in someone’s pocket, and that someone would very much prefer that we do not economize them out of existence.

	y2000 OECD per capita spending (OECD)
United States:  	$4,631.00
Switzerland: 	$3,222.00
Germany: 	$2,748.00
Iceland: 	$2,608.00
Canada: 	$2,535.00
Denmark: 	$2,420.00
France: 	$2,349.00
Belgium: 	$2,268.00
Norway: 	$2,268.00
Netherlands: 	$2,246.00
Australia: 	$2,211.00
Austria: 	$2,162.00
Italy: 	$2,032.00
Japan: 	$2,011.00
Ireland: 	$1,953.00
United Kingdom: 	$1,764.00
Finland: 	$1,664.00
New Zealand: 	$1,623.00
Spain: 	$1,556.00
Portugal: 	$1,439.00
Greece: 	$1,399.00
Czech Republic: 	$1,031.00
Hungary: 	$842.00
Slovakia: 	$690.00
Mexico: 	$491.00

	y2004 % of GDP spending
United States:  	15.40%
Marshall Islands: 	15.20%
Kiribati: 	13.70%
Malawi: 	12.90%
Lebanon: 	11.60%
São Tomé and Príncipe: 	11.50%
Switzerland: 	11.50%
East Timor: 	11.20%
Germany: 	10.60%
France: 	10.50%
Austria: 	10.28%
Serbia and Montenegro: 	10.10%
Iceland: 	9.90%
Monaco: 	9.90%
Canada: 	9.80%
Jordan: 	9.80%
Portugal: 	9.80%
Palau: 	9.70%
Norway: 	9.70%
Belgium: 	9.70%
Argentina: 	9.60%
Australia: 	9.60%
Malta: 	9.20%
Netherlands: 	9.20%
Sweden: 	9.10%
Brazil: 	8.80%
Italy: 	8.70%
Israel: 	8.70%
Slovenia: 	8.70%
South Africa: 	8.60%
Denmark: 	8.60%
New Zealand: 	8.40%
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 	8.30%
Uruguay: 	8.20%
Nicaragua: 	8.20%
United Kingdom: 	8.10%
Spain: 	8.10%
Croatia: 	8.00%
Luxembourg: 	8.00%
Macedonia, Republic of: 	8.00%
Bulgaria: 	8.00%
Hungary: 	7.90%
Greece: 	7.90%
El Salvador: 	7.90%
Colombia: 	7.80%
Japan: 	7.80%
Suriname: 	7.80%
Turkey: 	7.72%

	y2008 life expectancy (years) at birth
Macau:  	84.33
Andorra: 	82.67
Japan: 	82.07
Singapore: 	81.89
San Marino: 	81.88
Hong Kong: 	81.77
Australia: 	81.53
Canada: 	81.16
France: 	80.87
Switzerland: 	80.74
Sweden: 	80.74
Guernsey: 	80.65
Israel: 	80.61
Iceland: 	80.55
Anguilla: 	80.53
Cayman Islands: 	80.32
New Zealand: 	80.24
Italy: 	80.07
Gibraltar: 	80.06
Monaco: 	79.96
Liechtenstein: 	79.95
Spain: 	79.92
Norway: 	79.81
Jersey: 	79.65
Greece: 	79.52
Austria: 	79.36
Malta: 	79.3
Faroe Islands: 	79.29
Netherlands: 	79.25
Luxembourg: 	79.18
Martinique: 	79.18
Germany: 	79.1
Belgium: 	79.07
Guam: 	78.93
Virgin Islands: 	78.92
Saint Pierre and Miquelon: 	78.91
United Kingdom: 	78.85
Finland: 	78.82
Man, Isle of: 	78.8
Jordan: 	78.71
Korea, South: 	78.64
Puerto Rico: 	78.58
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 	78.33
Bermuda: 	78.3
Saint Helena: 	78.27
Cyprus: 	78.15
United States: 	78.14
Denmark: 	78.13
Ireland: 	78.07
Guadeloupe: 	78.06
Portugal: 	78.04
Albania: 	77.78

	y2001 expected healthy years (OECD)
Japan:  	73.6
Switzerland: 	72.8
Sweden: 	71.8
Australia: 	71.6
France: 	71.3
Iceland: 	71.1
Austria: 	71
Italy: 	71
Spain: 	70.9
Norway: 	70.8
Luxembourg: 	70.6
Greece: 	70.4
New Zealand: 	70.3
Germany: 	70.2
Finland: 	70.1
Denmark: 	70.1
Canada: 	69.9
Netherlands: 	69.9
Belgium: 	69.7
United Kingdom: 	69.6
Ireland: 	69
United States: 	67.6
Portugal: 	66.8
Czech Republic: 	66.6
Poland: 	64.3
Slovakia: 	64.1
Mexico: 	63.8
Hungary: 	61.8
Turkey: 	59.8

	infant deaths per 1000 live births
Singapore: 	2.3
Sweden: 	2.75
Japan: 	2.8
Hong Kong: 	2.93
Macau: 	3.23
Iceland: 	3.25
France: 	3.36
Finland: 	3.5
Anguilla: 	3.54
Norway: 	3.61
Andorra: 	3.68
Malta: 	3.79
Czech Republic: 	3.83
Germany: 	4.03
Switzerland: 	4.23
Spain: 	4.26
Israel: 	4.28
Korea, South: 	4.29
Slovenia: 	4.3
Denmark: 	4.4
Austria: 	4.48
Belgium: 	4.5
Liechtenstein: 	4.52
Guernsey: 	4.53
Luxembourg: 	4.62
Netherlands: 	4.81
Australia: 	4.82
Portugal: 	4.85
Gibraltar: 	4.91
United Kingdom: 	4.93
New Zealand: 	4.99
Jersey: 	5.01
Canada: 	5.08
Ireland: 	5.14
Monaco: 	5.18
Greece: 	5.25
San Marino: 	5.44
Taiwan: 	5.45
Italy: 	5.61
Man, Isle of: 	5.62
Cuba: 	5.93
United States: 	6.3
Faroe Islands: 	6.46
Croatia: 	6.49
Belarus: 	6.53
Guam: 	6.55
Lithuania: 	6.57
Northern Mariana Islands: 	6.72
Cyprus: 	6.75
Poland:  	6.93

Not just a Randy Newman song.The standard joke is that any field that includes “Science” in its name, isn’t. However, sometimes we do run experiments. Here are a few:

There’s about 20 countries with universal health care, all spending less per capita than we do, all with greater life expectancy, more healthy years, and lower infant mortality. If it were just one or two countries, maybe there would be some other reason or explanation, but twenty?

In the US, to promote bicycling and bicycle safety, we’ve mostly been doing something called “Effective Cycling”. We’re supposed to be vehicles, riding with the cars, bike paths are unnecessary and/or bad. In northern Europe, they built a boatload of paths and lanes, and have special treatment for bicycles in various places (2-way for bikes, 1-way for cars). Turns out bike lanes work better, lots better — lots more people ride bikes, and they’re safe, too.

We’ve had a serious test of trickle-down economics during the Bush administration. Turns out it didn’t work; the “boom” we had, did not result in increased real wages to the middle class.

Here in Massachusetts, we’ve been guinea pigs for gay marriage. Thus far, it’s been a total win — nobody has used the gay marriage ruling (it was decided by judges) to try to marry their dog, or their inflatable doll, or more than one partner. No plagues of locusts, either. On the other hand, gay couples got married, and were happy.

And remember, negative results ARE useful. They tell you what not to do again.

David Rees has a new book. Every adult needs to buy it. John Hodgman agrees with me, and he is wearing a nice suit, too.

And please vote for Obama, and NO on Prop 8 in California, and NO on Prop 1 in Massachusetts (voting in Massachusetts or California elections may be prohibited in some jurisdictions, especially those that are not Massachusetts or California, respectively).

In your most recent column, you wrote:

Finally, there will be a health care plan…. In the face of these rising costs, Obama will spend billions more to widen coverage. Obama’s plan has many virtues, but the cost-saving measures are chimerical.

Why do you believe that this will cost us more money? Twenty (roughly) other major countries have universal care (obtained in a variety of ways), they ALL spend much less per capita than we do, and almost all of them live longer and healthier lives. If we could run a universal health care system more efficiently than even ONE of these countries, we would save hundreds of billions of dollars.

I get my information from nationmaster.com — some guy has nothing better to do with his time than collect statistics from reputable sources (CIA fact book, OECD, you name it) and publish them on-line.

For spending (we’re #1): http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_spe_per_per-health-spending-per-person

For life expectancy (we’re #44!): http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_tot_pop-life-expectancy-birth-total-population

And if you follow your nose, you can find more.

And how bad is it? If we attained Spanish levels of efficiency (I do so like saying that), we could take the money we spend now, and provide good health care to every person in the North, Central, and South America, and have a little left over. For everyone except the Canadians, it would be better health care.

Universal health care (in the style of these 20 other countries) should make the economy more efficient, too — people with health problems (like, ahem, pregnancy, widely treated as a “pre-existing condition”, how’s that for family-unfriendly?) get stuck in their jobs because they lose coverage if they change jobs. Companies that cover their employees (most of them, still) are paying a brutal tax compared to their foreign competitors, who at worst only pay their employees’ costs in a more efficient system.

Notice I haven’t said a dad-gum thing about morality or rights yet — I think we can justify universal health care for the good of the country, as well as simple greed — I really like the idea of getting better care for less money. But our present system is also immoral.

They must know that they’re spouting nonsense. I guess we’re all supposed to be gullible.The idea that we can drill our way, this year, out of our oil addiction, by allowing more leases to drill in ANWR and offshore, is insane. It’s not enough oil, it won’t hit the market for a decade, and the oil companies aren’t drilling all the leases that they’ve got already. Follow the money, who really benefits? The American oil companies need to add to their reserves, and know that if they can’t get their hands on the leases now with a Republican president and a price spike, then they’ll probably never get them. That’s all there is to it — and none of this is a secret, so you know that the talking heads on the Mclaughlin Group are just Republican Barbie and Ken Dolls. Pull the string, out comes a talking point.

McCain’s “plans” to balance the budget don’t make any sense, either. Forget waste and mismanagement, everyone’s promised to get rid of that, I’m sure that either it’s gone already, or McCain will do no better than anyone else. It’s Bush’s tax cuts (for the rich) that have blown a hole in the budget, and continuing those cuts will blow the hole bigger. Claiming that “Obama will raise your taxes” is 95% false, because for 95% of the population, there’s no tax increase, and the last time we had taxes similar to what Obama proposes, we had a lovely booming economy. Again, no secret, they say it anyhow. One unusual feature of the lower-taxes-on-the-rich Bush “recovery”, is that nothing trickled down to the middle class or poor; adjusted for inflation, wages are actually down. We’ve done the experiment, and it failed.

And the gay marriage thing. Good grief. We live in Massachusetts, and it has zero negative effect on anyone. I’m sure that if someone filed for divorce and claimed it was a cause, we would hear it on the news. On the plus side, I know of three gay couples that got married, and they’re all apparently glad of it. One couple is a pair of former colleagues who’ve been living together for years, and J says that she didn’t think it would make much difference, but it did, and it’s nice. How can anyone be against this? No church is required to perform weddings they don’t want to, nobody has made any headway marrying multiple spouses, their pet, or their plastic doll — all the good stuff that was predicted, happened, and all of the bad stuff that was predicted, didn’t.

seem not to be used for safety purposes.It occurred to me that the primary uses of auto horns are to indicate

• the light is green, I am in a hurry!
• somebody touched me, I am ALARMED!
• you did something stupid!

By the time the horn is honked, whatever danger there was, is past. I don’t think any of these uses justifies the cost and noise of auto horns.

I did, once, see a horn used for safety. A semi-trailer hauling rocks lost its brakes and was headed towards an intersection. He jake-braked and blew his horn all the way into, through, and past the intersection. So, once in 40-some years, I saw a horn used to avert an accident.

Useful websites for figuring stuff out

State bicycle laws (includes many state vehicle code pointers): http://www.massbike.org/bikelaw/statelaws.htm

Massachusetts Education Reform Laws: http://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/603cmr10.html?section=06

Massachusetts Municpal Actual Revenues and Expenditures

Many statistics comparing countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

and states: http://www.statemaster.com/index.php

Demographic data by zipcode: http://www.zipskinny.com/

MCAS results: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/mcas/

Mass.gov Belmont page: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=mg2localgovccpage&L=1&L0=home&L1=Resident&sid=massgov2&selectCity=Belmont

Educational profiles (Mass): http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/

Inflation data: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm

Income dispersion:
Income Inequality (1947-1998)
Historical Income Inequality Tables

People have studied how much energy it takes to produce food. It’s interesting. You should read about this, too.The definitive book to read seems to be Food, Energy and Society, edited by D. Pimentel and M. Pimentel, published in 1996. They studied the energy cost of obtaining food in many, many different ways. The main result is that high-productivity farming (like the kind we practice in the US) uses a boatload of energy. Converting grain into meat by feeding it to mammals (cattle, pigs, sheep) uses many calories of grain to create one calorie of meat, so meat is even less energy-efficient. There’s a huge amount of information in this book, much of it interesting, some of it depressing. It will make you want to tear your hair out every time you hear someone talking about farming fuels; odds are, it just won’t work. Besides the fertilizer inputs, there’s also water, and the fertility of the soil. (People need to get serious about driving less, and driving much smaller cars, and they need to do this as soon as possible.)

This paper (which is more quickly accessed) builds on this to demonstrate just how much energy this is, and also studies the greenhouse gas effects (which are not 100% correlated with energy). Animals, and their manure, produce both methane and nitrous oxides. The difference in greenhouse gas emissions between a meat-heavy diet (generally, a typical US diet), and either a vegetarian, or poultry-light diet, can be as large as the difference between driving an SUV and driving a Prius.

It’s also interesting, and depressing, to study the behavior of what I can only call energy-gluttony-apologists. If we cannot get more people to understand what is (probably) going on, we are so screwed. Even one meter of sea level rise will do a lot of damage to coastal cities all around the country, never mind other countries. It’ll mess up drainage and mess up water tables, even if it doesn’t directly flood property.

What I find most incredible is the notion that we simply cannot cut back; that no car can have fewer than 100 horsepower (I learned to drive in a 45 HP car, a Saab 96 with a filthy 2-stroke engine); that our cars must be gigantic; that bicycling is not an option; that every meal must have meat. The stories that people construct in their head to justify not changing their behavior are ludicrous — somehow, amoral, profit-seeking corporations (the oil industry, the coal industry, the big ag business, and the auto industry) are giving us the straight talk, but people who spent years in school learning how to study experiments, data, and phenomena to figure out what’s going on — we’re all Bond villains, or something, intent on imposing our diabolical will on the world. Is it perhaps possible that these profit-seeking corporations are being every bit as deceptive and mendacious as the tobacco industry was? It sure seems that way to me. Seems to me that the Bond villains were on the good side of that issue, at least all the ones that weren’t in the employ of the tobacco industry.

And sure, energy gluttony is fun, but given how we produce energy now, it’s got costs. We’ve got to move our asses, right now, and cut back on some of our most-ridiculous overconsumption. Freezing in the dark is no fun, but driving a Civic instead of a HumVee, that is not much of a sacrifice. Chicken, instead of beef, is not much of a sacrifice. Cutting meat portions in half, is not much of a sacrifice. If you can afford to replace your old crappy leaky windows with new ones, that’s costly, but new windows are actually nicer. LED under-cabinet lighting is expensive, but you get a good light, it takes up no space, lasts a dozen or so years in ordinary use (7+ years if run continuously) you get your choice of (and can mix and match) color temperatures, and it doesn’t get fire-starting hot like halogens and incandescents. That’s not a sacrifice. Places where there’s lots of sun and not much freezing weather, should move to install solar hot water heaters, right now. In southern states that is low-hanging fruit.

Riding your bike a few dozen miles per week may sound like a sacrifice to people who have never done it, but it will help you live longer, and live healthier. I’ve tried dieting to keep weight off, and THAT is a sacrifice. Biking, I lost 20 pounds, and it stayed off. If I don’t bike, something goes wrong with one of my knees, and the doctors I discussed this with suggested that if I didn’t like surgery, perhaps I should keep on biking. Surgery, that’s a sacrifice.

More on this.

And from the National Corn Growers Association.

Two more from Pimental, including the alarming/surprising estimate that we consume more energy than plants create from sunlight.

I read that Verizon is looking into enhancing P2P, not fighting it. Smart guys.

Verizon wins for at least three reasons. By embracing P2P, and promoting services that use it, they will create a demand for a product that Comcast cannot match without spending a bit of money to upgrade their last miles. As long as cable users share coax and bandwidth, there are limits to how many P2P users Comcast can support before they run into (local) bottlenecks. This is one reason they’ve been throttling P2P file sharing.

Reason number two is probably a little less popular with the propellerhead crowd. Cable internet providers who throttle P2P bandwidth have driven the P2P users to deploy encryption to make their connections harder to recognize. This cannot make the spooks happy; back when I ran filesharing, I uploaded a terabyte of data, and about a third of that was (RC160, I think) encrypted. The NSA has many computers, but there are limits, and if everyone is making encrypted connections, that is going to obfuscate traffic analysis of encrypted connections. (It is my assumption that the NSA and FBI do have a legitimate need for some wiretaps, and that there are Bad Guys out there that I do want them listening to. Once they’ve got their warrant, I’d prefer that they be able to do their job.) By embracing P2P, Verizon reduces the urge to encrypt. There’s other caching tricks that providers like Verizon can use, if connections are not encrypted, that are somewhat better for everyone.

Reason number three is their trick for tending to localize connections and to provide bandwidth incentives to their customers. Again, this has got to make the spooks happier. When I uploaded my terabyte, I sent bits (often encrypted) all over the world. The more traffic is localized, the less likely I am to ship bits internationally, the smaller the haystack within which the NSA must search for its needles.

Just for example, the driver of this car is clearly a dog person.

Ralph is on the BBC, whinging about how none of the Democratic candidates is talking about the issues that matter to him. I wonder why?

Could it be, Ralph Bleeping Nader, that perhaps they have more important things to worry about, like a bleeping war, and a bleeping debt to the rest of the world? And how, Ralph Bleeping Nader, might we have ended up in this bleeping war? Perhaps it’s because Ralph Bleeping Egomaniac Nader ran against Gore in 2000 and took enough votes that we ended up electing George W. Bleeping Bush. And do you think, Ralph Bleeping Egomanianc Nader, that we’re going to care any more about your issues if we elect John “I think we can keep troops in Iraq for 100 years, I’m against waterboarding except when it gets in the way of party loyalty” McCain, because you run again and perhaps tip the election? Dammit to hell, we know we’ve got problems left right and center, we know that our healthcare is shot, that big oil and your old friends the car companies are spewing propaganda and disinformation about global warming, that the phone company will cheerfully let the government listen to our conversations without any warrant, we know that our tax code is insufficiently progressive — but we’ve got to get out of this damn war, we’ve got to quit spending borrowed money to line the pockets of Halliburton and Blackwater to do whatever the hell it is they’re doing in Iraq. Our president, by pre-9/11 standards, is a war criminal, and all the members of his party are still supporting him. Doesn’t that alarm you an itty-bitty bit? The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they are incompetent and/or corrupt and/or insane, let’s first get them the hell out before they do any more damage. Yes, the Democrats aren’t perfect, but I think that George Bush and his bizarre cult of loyal Republicans have demonstrated that yes, in fact, there is a difference between the two parties.

What an idiot.

I know we buy most of our oil from other places. The more we can lower demand, however, the more we lower the price.

From the Guardian

“Drop the bribe prosecution, or we cut off your anti-terrorism intelligence” — from Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 9/11 terrorists.

I learned about this here. Maybe I should just subscribe to the Guardian, now that Bill Kristol is writing at the NY Times.

Don’t like the results of an Iraq mortality study? Lie, discredit, invent bogus connections where none exist, just make stuff up. What else would you expect from the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the Murdoch press?

Read this. (Summarized here.) I read this as a God-help-us-what-have-we-done kick in the gut.

Read this. Since we’re good and pure by definition, any contrary message is clearly the fault of a corrupt and unpatriotic messenger. Since we’re good and pure by definition, we could not possibly have killed half a million people (and if we did, they surely deserved it). That’s your right-wing media, in a nutshell, emphasis on the nut, of course. Head in the sand, pay no attention to all the blood, we don’t see it, we won’t see it.

We’ve got to get out of this damn war. It is ruining us, economically, militarily, and morally. The right-wing is now so desperate to save face, that they will tell lies and slander to discredit this study. Bizarrely, Republican senators and representatives are voting as a block to protect our President, who has probably committed war crimes (water boarding is torture; has been since the Spanish Inquisition. The president’s lawyers did not write memos justifying/excusing/redefining torture on a whim; someone asked for those opinions, and who do those lawyers work for? It goes straight to the top.) Most of these Republicans talk as if they believe in an afterlife, complete with heaven and hell, but they sure don’t act like it.

And are things getting any better now, post-”surge”? Says who? Whoever that is, what’s their track record on self-serving lies? Why would you believe Bush? He was wrong. Hell, he didn’t know Shiite from Sunni till just before we attacked. Cheney? He was wrong. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyone on Fox News? Wrong. Wall Street Journal? Rabid, and wrong. Bush’s pet general? Not likely. The people who were right, people like Scott Ritter, or Eric Shinseki, lost their jobs. Don’t bother listening to the people who lied you into this war, they are still lying, trying to save face and deflect blame. In a just world we’d have impeachment and war crimes trials, but for now, I am just waiting for an election. McCain used to be against torture, but now he’s not any more.

It’d be nice if more people knew what they don’t need a car for.

On the way home from work, I picked up a small grocery load, taking the unpaved path home between Alewide and Belmont. Once the snow/slush freezes, it’s easy enough to ride, though the frozen slush sculptures make it very rough.

A few days later, we had a big snow storm, and I had to fetch my son’s bike from the school. Traffic was a disaster (90 minutes to travel 4 miles from the dentist earlier that day); no way was I going to try to drive in it (again). So I took my bike.

Two days later, I went grocery shopping. There’s a storm due tonight, people are stocking, and piles of snow from the previous storm filling parking spaces, so parking is a disaster. So I took my bike. Couldn’t hack the trail, it has nine inches of chopped-up snow, took Concord Avenue (yuck) instead. I ended up with quite a load.

From the rear. Someone really needs to make some fatty snow tires, because I am pretty well near the official load limit back there.

Unloaded.

What a useless waste of steel and gasoline.

It’s hard to know where to begin to rant. A Ford Expedition (carrying only its driver), rear-ended my wife’s car, at a stop light, nicely caving in the trunk. That’s a nice benchmark for cluelessness and personal responsibility, stopping neither for the light nor the car stopped at it, while piloting 6000 pounds of steel. Makes me feel real safe on my bicycle (and you wonder why cyclists dress like peacocks on acid?)

Earlier this year, my cousin was killed in a “motorcycle accident”. The cause of the accident was an SUV (large, and opaque) and its driver, who wanted to turn into a parking lot. Because the SUV has a boat-like turning radius, another car exiting the lot made it impossible for the SUV to enter. Because the SUV was large and opaque, the car exiting the lot couldn’t see whether there was any oncoming traffic. The SUV driver glanced in his rear view mirror, didn’t notice my cousin approaching from behind in the second lane, and waved the car on, right into my cousin’s path. His helmet didn’t help enough.

Once upon a time, people used station wagons to move loads of people. They were safer (both for their own passengers, and people in other cars) and got better gas mileage than SUVs, and they didn’t make you feel like you were driving in a canyon, if you chose to instead buy a little car. As near as I can tell, the American auto manufacturers turned to SUVs to exploit loopholes in the fuel economy standards, and marketed them as “safe” vechicles because of their inordinate bulk. “Safe”, in theory, for their drivers, and passengers, but not for other people. So much for personal responsibility. Or, they sell these giant vehicles as somehow being your ticket to the wilderness — but when was the last time you saw such a car with so much as a little mud on it? And the monster trucks — did we just not have contractors (and plumbers, and electricians), back before pickup trucks got all muscle-bound and diesel-y?

And now, we are tearing our hair out, coming up with nutball schemes to keep liquid energy flowing to these bloated, dangerous, heaps. We can’t do it with corn — if we convert all the corn we grow now into ethanol, with none left over to eat or feed cattle, we’d only cover 20% of our oil consumption. Cellulosic ethanol? Where, pray tell, do we grow that much cellulose? There’s only so much land worth growing stuff on. It’s amazing, the snake oil that the oil companies, farm lobby, and auto industry will propose to sell, just so long as they can keep on making money.

It’s not necessarily “the answer”, but getting people out of SUVs and monster trucks would go a long way in reducing our traffic, accident, and energy problems. Getting people to spend a little more time out of cars altogether would be even better.

My letter to the principal, selectmen, and school committee. Not likely to do much good, but saying nothing wasn’t going to work, either.

(to the principal, etc:)

I am sure that my opinion is a minority one, but the time spent on the lockdown drill would more profitably have been devoted to a lesson on safe driving. In the entire history of this nation, terrorists and mentally ill students with guns have killed only about one-tenth the number of people killed in automobile accidents every year, year after year.

Sorry if I sound undiplomatic, but I think, in a time of tight budgets, we should spend our money addressing the actual threats, and not the faddish ones.

Speaking of actual threats, I have heard recently, and found confirming information from reputable sources on the net, that immunizing schoolchildren against the flu is cost-effective and helps blunt the spread of the flu.

(http://www.healthunit.com/article.aspx?ID=10902)
(http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/103/6/e73?ck=nck)
(http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030387&ct=1)
(http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=7D64BBAB81CB986392D23FF61F2C7EE3.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=369947)

The flu kills roughly 90,000 people every year, and we have at least one immune-compromised child at the middle school this year; arranging for immunization of as many students as possible (some parents may object, but herd immunity is what we are after) would be a good use of our time and money.

yours,

David Chase

A variation on lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Ever notice how sometimes politicians/pundits want you to pay attention to “average” numbers, calling no attention whatsoever to the distribution of values, and sometimes they try to make you feel like your case is special, and you are not average at all?

So, for instance, how often do you see “average” incomes or “gross domestic product” reported, and often often do you see income medians and income percentiles reported? They distribution of incomes has actually changed quite a lot in the last few decades, and members of the wealthiest few make hundreds of times more money than members of the many poor. But what gets reported most often, is the “average”. If the average is up, if the gross is up, we’re all doing good, right?

Compare that with medical care. On average, compared to other countries, we suck. There’s no polite way to put it. We die early, we’re unhealthier while we live, and our system of allocating medical care kills thousands of infants every year. Plus, we spend more than anyone. But that’s not how it is usually described (at least, not until recently, not until some of the larger businesses realized that medical costs were eating them alive). Instead, the issue is always discussed from the point of view of someone who has insurance — who has a doctor, who has “choice” (oh really?), who doesn’t want to “wait” for medical care. Not the average case, no, the special case. This is not just a con, this is an immoral con. You have great medical care, but the poor…. Of course, you’re not even getting a good price for your soul — what makes you think you are actually getting good medical care, compared to people in places you’ve never been? Who says so, and how much money are they making from the status quo?

If you stop for a moment and consider the two distributions, you realize how backwards these two uses of the average are. There’s a tremendous spread in incomes; very many people make less than $60,000, plus or minus $40,000, and a percent, or a few fractions of a percent, make 10, 100, or even a 1000 times that. On the other hand, if you consider expected lifetime, very many people live 60 years, plus or minus 40, and a very tiny set of people lives to 110. Nobody at all lives 10x the norm. So the statistic with the more normal distribution, where the average would be appropriate, we are encouraged to ignore the average, and the statistic with the funny distribution, we are expected to embrace the average.

40 bushels per metric ton times 256280000 Metric tons per year times 2.8 gallons per bushel equals about 30 billion gallons of ethanol per year.

divided by 385 million gallons per day equals 78 days.

Extra credit: multiply the ethanol production by the ratio between the energy of ethanol and the energy of gasoline.

But

Will we deplete human and animal food supplies by using corn and other grains for fuel production?

No, actually the production of ethanol from corn uses only the starch of the corn kernel, all of the valuable protein, minerals and nutrients remain. One bushel of corn produces about 2.7 gallons of ethanol AND 11.4 pounds of gluten feed (20% protein) AND 3 pounds of gluten meal (60% protein) AND 1.6 pounds of corn oil.

“Lots to do! Beat the Germans! Save the world! Don’t forget the welfare state!”
The Doctor (“The Doctor Dances”, Doctor Who, Season 27, Episode 10)

So, everyone but me and Max are out of town, it’s hot, hot, hot (the high was 97, and we went bike riding in it), we decided to watch another disk of Futurama (Max’s birthday present). Disk was done, I was still feeling useless, so I clicked through the channels, and lo, it was Dr. Who.

And in this episode, set mostly in London(?) in WW2, “everybody lives”, and as Dr. Who is saying goodbye to a bunch of puzzled people, he says “Lots to do! Beat the Germans! Save the world! Don’t forget the welfare state!”

And I thought that was just wonderful.

What’s best, is when I went Googling to see if I had heard right, I got 6 hits, and the first one I chose (with the best-looking excerpt), was a bunch of humorless Ayn Rand Objectivists, dedicated to their bone-headed philosophy. By trying very hard, they didn’t get it. Thanks guys, you made my day, and I think your hero is a loony-bird.

So I was reading articles at cars-suck.org, and they mentioned a study by Mayer Hillman on the (large positive) tradeoff between the health benefits of cycling and the accident risks of cycling.

I thought, why should I trust these guys at car-suck, obviously they are biased, let’s go to the source, Googled for “mayer hillman bike study”, and it turns out he’s a pretty interesting guy. First, we agree on many points, which necessarily means that he’s a right-thinking person (we even agree on the educational value of minor injuries). But better, he even takes the time to check on his nut-ball ideas, to see if they are sound. Big fun.

The big interesting idea, that one that had been floating in my head without a good name, is “safety” versus “danger”. Dangerous places are often safe, if only because we are scared shitless and take extreme care — but being scared, and spending valuable time and effort on precautions, are not good things. Better to remove the scary stuff and the need to be so careful.

And actually, the guys at car-suck.org, I like them too.

Damn, this is wonderful. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet this guy gives a more exciting lecture than Al Gore.

Which is why I hope Barack Obama gets the Democratic nomination.

Obama was against the war before it started, and his reasons for opposing the war were a pretty good prediction of everything that went wrong. I view claims of “foreign policy experience” as being like showing up for class — but it’s the final exam that counts. Most of the allegedly experienced people running for president flunked the final — they supported the war, one way or another.

In addition, I find Hillary Clinton’s reasoning for not talking to North Korea to be just flat stupid: (paraphrasing) “I don’t want to give them something to make propaganda with”. Yeah, the North Koreans never make shit up, so by doing this, we’ll deny them the ability to generate propaganda, that’ll fix their wagon. Good grief. If Clinton gets the nomination, I’m sure I’ll support her, but on foreign policy, Obama is clearly the smarter choice.