Cab Thoughts 4/28/12

Is it an oxymoron that Pat Summitt would be working on a memoir?

At Bonhams Titanic sale, the unused ticket to the ship's launch proved the top lot, at $56,250. A dinner menu from the ship for the night of 12 April 1912 sold for $31,250.

Ford is about to release an electric vehicle (EV). It is similar to their gas-using Focus. The EV will cost about 40 thousand dollars, less 7.5 thousand taxpayer subsidy. The EV will likely save about 1.2 thousand dollars in gas a year. But the gas-using Focus costs only 16 thousand. So how does that work economically? Or is this one of those uneconomic things like the Buffett Rule or closing coal-fire plants where we get a more spiritual reward?

A British study recently evaluated the length of fractures induced by fracking around the world. The average was 350 meters, the largest was about 500 meters. In the U.S. most fracking is done 3,000 to 10,000 feet below ground water. It will be interesting to see if this new study relieves the fracking opponents. If it does not, one might legitimately wonder if their objection is not to something else. 
http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/oil/8221049

The Gene Tunney-Jack Dempsey heavyweight championship fight in Philadelphia in 1926 for the 150 anniversary of the U.S. drew 126,000 fans. The underdog, Tunney outpointed the powerful Dempsey in ten rounds and told his wife "Honey, I forgot to duck", a line Reagan used after he was shot. 

Housing costs are crashing in Spain. The workforce is 14% in housing construction. They can not devalue because the currency, the Euro, is not theirs . Therefore, an "internal" devaluation is needed, where prices of wages and goods fall in nominal terms.  Cash and work starved.

Thus spake a critic on a recent blog:
"Ugh... more and more politics.... 

Whyyyy?

Of all the things to waste one's time on, why sully your mind (and ours) in the dirtiest profession on earth with disingenuous cut throats who don't actually care about anything other than being pro-winning and anti-losing?"

And the answer? Yes, they are "cutthroats", bums and creeps and pirates..but they are boarding your ship.

A recent study comparing pollution from electric vehicles and internal combustion engines concluded "At present, for the vast majority of the country, neither electric vehicles or comparable gasoline-powered vehicles holds a solid advantage over the other in cleanliness." This is not the result of anything inherent to electric vehicles but rather is the result of the source of the vehicle's electricity (coal fire plants). The battery problem in the electric vehicle compounds the difficulty. They are huge, expensive, heavy and catch fire.

Jane Jacobs, in her book "Dark Ages Ahead," evaluates the American "Life Purpose." It is a reasonable question and many have surmised that nations are not organized so much around tribes or language or geography but purpose. Early, she feels, Liberty and Independence were the "Life Purpose" but, as they became realized, the nation floundered temporarily and groped into social areas like child labor and temperance. This is more difficult to believe as ideals are to be distinguished from purpose. Ideals are pursued, purposes achieved. Her current solution to the question is similarly unrewarding: "From the 1950s on, American culture's gloss on the purpose of life became assurance of full employment: jobs. Arguably, this has remained the American purpose of life, in spite of competition from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and maybe even from the War on Terrorism, in which postwar reconstruction was linked with contracts for American compa­nies and hence jobs for Americans." All of this confuses the immediate with the long term, policies with ideals, social aims with rights, the material with the spiritual. Most importantly, it confuses demands with aspirations; liberty and independence are not life purposes, they are life's aspirations and will never, ever, be "achieved."

A book on Hoffa and Kennedy ( Bobby and J. Edgar by Hersh) gives some account of the resting places of Teamsters' money: "Over the years, Teamster assets went out to underwrite everything from the million dollars Richard Nixon squeezed out of the Central States Fund to defray the costs of the Watergate cover-up to an estimated $300,000,000 [over $2 billion in today's dollars] plowed into Las Vegas by way of the Sunrise Hospital conglomerate and the Paradise Development Company. Having erected the main strip of casinos and hotels with Mormon money, the Mob shrewdly bought up enormous tracts of surrounding land with 6 percent notes from the Teamsters. Clint Murchison tapped Teamster assets to bankroll his more flamboyant wildcatting ventures." It's curious that the public is much more concerned with Hoffa's whereabouts than the location of all this money masquerading as retirement money for hardworking guys.