Tagged: cars

Brilliant Transportation Idea

Scott Adams of the Dilbert comic strip has a great blog where he often shares very insightful ideas.  Here's an excerpt from a recent post.

And this got me thinking about why we have so many cars in the first
place. Excess cars cause traffic, pollution, and dependence on foreign
sources of oil. And who benefits most by this situation? Answer: car
makers.

Suppose the government enacted laws that made it legal
for anyone to be a taxi driver in his own car without a special taxi
license. And suppose the income was non-taxable. The result would be
cheap taxis and high availability. Every time you wanted to run an
errand, and had an extra minute, you could choose to pick up a rider
and cut your own driving expense in half. Technology will make it easy
to match amateur taxi drivers with riders. And the market would keep
prices low.

Now obviously there are lots of problems with this
scheme, in terms of security, liability, and people puking in the back
of your Hyundai. But compare that to our current problems: car
expenses, traffic, pollution, global warming, and excess energy use. I
think the universal taxi scheme comes out ahead.

source: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/taxi_please/

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How about some better cars?

I’d love to buy a great U.S. car that would actually compete against German and Japanese models.  While they gorged themselves on the profit margins from inefficient, dangerous SUVs this past decade, the rest of the modern world was innovating and working on producing fuel-efficient engines that don’t require us to send billions to Middle East dictators.

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Cars & Guns, Germs & Steel

We watched Pixar's animated movie "Cars" last night and loved it.  We thought it started off a little slow (ironic for a movie about car racing) but then the story and characters really came together and cracked us up big-time.  We especially liked the dopey towtruck character, the hippie VW and the hummer who owned the army surplus store.

I'm making my way through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and the best way I can sum it up so far is that it is truly transforming my view of the world.  The author (a professor at UCLA–go Bruins) has spent over three decades examining why certain people groups flourished and were able to conquer the others.  The topic is complex but there are remarkably clear explanations for why Europeans became dominant over the last thousand years in particular.  Here's a few things I found very interesting:

- there are not many plants in the world that people can eat and all of the major ones were already identified and being regularly harvested over 2000 years ago:  wheat, corn, rice and a couple others.  There aren't many animals that can be domesticated either and almost all of them were domesticated thousands of years ago as well and this hasn't changed over the centuries (cows, pigs, goats, chickens and dogs are about it.  People have tried to domesticate zebras, for example, but it's simply not feasible.)

- why do many plants have juicy, sweet fruit with seeds in them?  To entice animals–and people–to eat them and cause the seeds to be distributed all over.

- Why did the key domesticated crops spread quickly throughout Europe and Eurasia–but not through Africa and North America?  Because crops can grow well in land that has the same latitude and climate.  Eurasia stretches from East to West–while Africa and North America have a long "y-axis" North to South–and so crops were easily transferred between China and Western Europe, for example, but not between Egypt and South Africa.

Finally, the author includes a disturbing first-hand account of how Pizzaro's 168 Spanish soldiers killed 7000 Incan warriors in one day without losing a single man.  They did it mainly through their cavalry and steel swords which the Incas were helpless to defend against.  The book is sobering because it shows how humans–throughout our entire history–are unceasingly driven to conquer and annihilate other groups of people to gain land and resources.

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Week in Bay Area

The past week went by very fast.

Monday through Friday, I spent all day training my replacement and it was enjoyable being the authority on various topics and being able to teach and give input on how best to do things.  The young woman who is the new in-house lawyer admitted to being a perfectionist and this explained why she was somewhat dissatisfied when I explained that many questions she had didn’t have a clear answer.  She then asked, “but how will I know I’m doing a good job unless I know which way is correct?…”  Of course, a lot of things simply come down to using your best judgment and experience.  But I believe perfectionists make great lawyers and I think she will go on to have a great career because she demands excellence in her work product, just as a doctor or accountant–or any “professional/expert”–should.  One of the good points I pulled out of the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book is that most good professionals are the type of people that business owners want to hire!

I had a fabulous time meeting up with a number of great friends for lunch and dinner and I enjoyed some things that aren’t in Hungary:  boba tea with pearls and starbucks and peets coffee (Budapest has excellent coffee houses, but I haven’t seen them do a caramel macchiato Starbucks-style yet.)  I also had to laugh when I went to pick up my rental car the company provided through Hertz and it turned out to be a Hot Orange convertible mustang!…  I had my dad take some pictures of it before I dropped it off on Saturday up here near El Dorado Hills where my parents live.  I had fun cruising in it–top down of course–with my younger brother Matthew on Saturday and I could tell we got all kinds of envious looks as we drove around…

I’ll be heading back on Tuesday from SFO and arriving Wed morning in Budapest (via Paris–too bad I won’t see anything but their smoky airport while I’m there!…)   We also recently closed on our new condo and Agi picked up the keys just last week.  We’ll start moving in within a couple weeks and it will be fun to pick out some furniture.  We want to keep things minimalistic and spacious and we have a big Ikea store nearby to browse in-depth.

 

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Rental Cars

Since we sold our much-loved '98 Audi A4 a few weeks ago, we've been getting rental cars here and there as needed. Ivy and I have had some interesting impressions on what we've driven:

- Chevy Malibu:  Ivy aptly said it feels like she's "driving a la-z-boy chair" (due to bulky size, overpadded seats and ample plastic interior);

- Kia Rio:  Felt like a cross between a go-cart and a motorized wheelbarrow–but our favorite so far of the three because it wasn't bulky;

- Currently, the Chevy Caliber:  I can't get it out of my head that I feel like I'm driving a flying hotdog (and red color doesn't hurt either).

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