Cab Thoughts 5/5/12

Pete Stark, the scourge of American physicians and a moral leader, thought Solyndra, a company in his district, made electric cars. Why do we take these things so seriously when our leaders who are responsible for them do not?

Clean Energy hopes to build a network of 150 LNG (liquid natural gas) truck fueling stations along major truck routes that will allow LNG trucks to travel coast to coast. Obama, although I have read only rumors, promises a 50% tax credit for dedicated LNG engines but it in addition to his electric plan. Hydrogen too, which does sound goofy but Toyota is working on one.

Gov. Christy's travels and speeches looks like an audition for V.P. to me. I doubt if Romney can beat Obama if he allows the hard core right a reason to boycott or, worse, defect to a third party candidate, though.

Junior Seau is the eighth member of the Chargers 1994 Super Bowl team to die. It is hard to believe that football and hockey can continue to be played at their current violent, damaging level.

The 3.1 million additional people are essentially living rent-free by not paying their monthly $1,721 mortgage payments, (assuming they're still living in those houses and that their skipped payments are the same as the national average.) Since refusing to pay their mortgages and diverting their mortgage payments into other outlets, they have increased their purchasing power by $64 billion at annual rates, or the equivalent of 5.4% of after-tax income. A new way of tapping the house for money.

I guess Afghans can vote. Maybe an absentee ballot?

In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Four million lived alone, and they accounted for 9 percent of all households. Living alone in the expanding country was common among farmers, migrant workers, miners and the like and it was usually a short-lived stage on the road to a more conventional domestic life. Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million--roughly one out of every seven adults--live alone. That is 28% of American households.

The number of people who are actually employed dropped by 31,000 but the unemployment rate fell because the number of people looking for a job dropped by 164,000. So if you aren't looking for a job, you are not considered unemployed. That makes sense to someone.

In "You are What You Speak" by Robert Greene, several interesting observations on English grammar rules. "The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism's greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English" So, also, the preposition at the end of the sentence rule. Apparently it arose from the poet Dryden who was a classics scholar and translator. Such a sentence structure is impossible in Latin so he decided it should be impossible in English.

Tomatoes have always been grown in hot, dry climates but, in the last years, hot and humid Florida produces a billion pounds of the fruit. The reason? It is hot when the northeast is not. The point of production is shipping so the fruit has become quite different from the usual home grown tomato. To get a successful crop, they pump the soil full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. The tomato is consequently hard with noticeable decrease in nutrition and taste, but it has been bred to travel.

And a Golden Oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/10/subprime-morality.html