Category: Uncategorized

I put my foot into something without explaining myself.

BLUFF: Improved fuel efficiency is good, all other things being equal. All other things are never equal.

On the subject of fuel efficiency, let’s arbitrarily confine ourselves to three areas.
1. User fuel consumption and emissions
2. Manufacturing fuel consumption and emissions
3. Whole life fuel consumption and emissions

You can do this a million different ways, but these are convenient.

1 is what I was talking about in the previous post, and it’s what most manufacturers advertise. It’s less significant than it appears. The ur-example is fuel consumption for a hybrid vs a pure ICE vehicle. The hybrid may get better gas mileage for the owner, but various parts need to be shipped, batteries produced, other components manufactured, etc. The hybrid may have better (lower) user fuel consumption/emissions (1) but worse (higher) manufacturing fuel consumption/emissions (2). In situations wherein much of the user level emissions are not controlled by the user, ie the power-generation mix of the power company, the advantages from an emissions perspective can be very complicated.

1 is fairly easy to measure.
2 is hard to measure and often kept secret.
3 suffers all of the problems of 2.

We can model 2 with the purchase price, but that’s not a great model.

From an environmental perspective, we want to minimize 3. From a personal financial perspective, we want to minimize (1 + cost of purchase). The government tends to increase costs on 1 to reduce total emissions, regulate 2, and completely ignore 3.

The point here isn’t that improved fuel efficiency is bad. It’s that one should be careful to be sure what one is evaluating is indeed what one thinks it is. See the tag line.

I kinda want to get some fish.

People tend to think in terms of engine power/efficiency or connectivity when they discuss car improvement with time. They tend to forget immense strides in brakes, suspension, and reliability.

We also get solutions in search of a problem, like back-up cameras on cars with decent rear visibility, but also problems with immediate solutions, like better headlights.

Fuel efficiency is a red herring. While direct mpg efficiency improves, we don’t know the increased energy cost of assembling the ostensibly more efficient car. How much CO2 is released shipping exhaust components around the world? Battery components have huge energy costs, both in assembly and use. By example, my local power utility is Xcel Energy, which is almost entirely coal powered. What’s the CO2 cost per mile for coal-powered electricity vs gasoline? All things being equal, better fuel efficiency is good, but all things aren’t equal. It’s more complicated than it sounds.

It is useful to shift more of the costs onto centralized users like manufacturers or utilities. The upside of economies of scale is such that those users would have the most ability and motivation to seek out increased efficiencies. Xcel is in a better situation to reduce their CO2 footprint than I am, and they’re in a much better situation than a thousand people like me.

Electric cars, as the technology currently stands, are a non-issue for me. I live in an apartment and park in a parking lot. The building is sixty years old, and car charging in the parking lot isn’t going to happen. It isn’t in the cards. But I’m not going to take a vehicle to a charge station and leave it there for four to eight hours a week.

There are a lot of Marie Antoinette environmentalists who think I should just take my $50,000 new electric car and plug it in to the charging station in my $600,000 house with the enclosed garage. These environmentalists are the ones who use the term ‘range anxiety.’

The metaphor won’t pull a story along if the plain meaning of the words doesn’t make sense.

The Titanic’s ‘Never Let Go’ speech was all well and good, but Rose let Jack go. Literally. That’s always going to be a problem.

The Killers’ song ‘All These Things I’ve Done’, the I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier one, honestly has a fairly interesting backstory. But it doesn’t make any sense, and Bailey’s ‘I’ve Got Ham but I’m not a Hamster’ spoof is dead on.

This is very difficult for me.

A prospective roomie/landlord asked me how I voted.

It’s a couple that owns a residence and is looking to rent out a room. The room is fine, but the location would be excellent. Rent is reasonable.

But they want to know how I vote.

About eighty red flags just went up.

10 year treasury yields are back over 1.3%

A) That is still shockingly low.

B) If you’re not a frog in gently boiling water, it is worrying.

C) But it’s higher than it was. 1.3% isn’t nothing, and the S&P is paying about 1.48% in dividends. In capital maintenance mode, the yields are close to being even.

So, is there an alternative to equities?

For most equity market participants, probably not. A little slosh might shift over to equities, but probably not enough to really move the needle yet. Not with the only driver being a mild rise in yields from shockling lower to shockingly low, and that’s probably overstating the movement. But it’s not nothing.

It makes no sense for a strike slip fault to cause the RMT.

I’ve been going back and watching some old favorite movies.

Some don’t hold up. Those I try to leave alone.

Some hold up in parts. Those are often special effects heavy movies with some good parts, some bad parts, and some parts that only work if other parts work. The Lord of the Rings movies are like that. The epic “You Shall Not Pass” scene doesn’t work anymore. I can see the cut and paste. The special effects aren’t persuasive. Yet the One Ring is awesome, and Sauron is the man.

Some are absolute trash, and I love them. I’m rewatching the Underworld series. It’s bad. So bad. I love every minute.

There are also good movies but pfft.

As someone who was scared of a lot of monsters when I was a kid, it’s hard to put what was so fearful into words.

The problem…a problem with the Hobbit movies is they keep breaking their own lore. Can goblins and orcs move during daylight or not?