American ingenuity rears its sleepy head

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" Winston Churchill

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Larry Horsley loves that he doesn't buy much gas, even though he drives his '95 Chevy S-10 back and forth to work each day.

Horsley, a self-described do-it-yourselfer, simply plugs his truck into an electric wall outlet in his Douglasville, Georgia, garage and charges it overnight, instead of buying gasoline refined from mostly imported oil.

They're among a growing number of Americans who are refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles, called EVs. Not only have they rebelled against the status quo by ripping out their gas-guzzling engines and replacing them with zero-emission electric motors, they say just about anyone can do it.

Can't sell your hulk of an SUV to replace it with a factory-fresh hybrid? Why not retrofit it? Backwoods American do-it-yourself ingenuity has finally come back out in the face of hardship.

I am against consumption. Why build new vehicles when we've got millions going to the scrap heap every day? Start a vehicle retrofitting business and begin converting the masses to new technology. It takes one person ~$10,000 for one car, but it may take a large organisation much less. Hell, offer financing options less than the equivalent price of fuel and I'm sure people would bite. Or God forbid-- we might have a government-led grant programme towards energy independence.

it would certainly be better than all the other aftermarket shit people do like chrome wheels and shopping-cart spoilers.

Notes from the Right-Wing: City of Los Angeles Sucks

I'm Joeverkill, and this is Notes from the Right-Wing.

Anyone who's read this blog more than once knows how much I absolutely hate the local government of Los Angeles. Well, they just keep doing stupid crap and giving me fodder for my hatred.

On Wednesday the City Council approved something called "inclusionary zoning" regulations. From the L.A. Times:

New condominium and apartment projects in neighborhoods such as Brentwood, Studio City and other affluent parts of Los Angeles could be required to include units for very poor people under a plan approved by the City Council on Wednesday.

There is no better name for this type of crap than nanny state quasi-communism. That's what this is. Imagine you're a doctor or a lawyer or designer of integrated circuits or something, and you got a good education, worked hard, got a good job, and saved your money so you could live in, oh, let's say, Brentwood. You're pretty satisfied there, relatively insulated from the third-world cesspool that the rest of L.A. has become.

And then the City Council passes this thing, and next thing you know you're living next to poor people. Not just poor people: very poor people. The value of your home drops, crime increase, and your kids can't go to sleep at night because the neighbors play reggaeton at 110 decibels into the wee hours.

What would you do? Probably move outside of the bounds of the city. So you do, and your neighbors do, and their neighbors do, and pretty soon property values in Brentwood are the same as they are in Crenshaw, and the whole neighborhood is filled with poor people.

The City's digging its own grave here.

I currently live in a garbage neighborhood. I absolutely hate 90% of my neighbors. One day, god willing, I will move to an area with fewer poor people, at which time I hopefully will not have to deal with gang members, feral dogs, loud reggaeton at inappropriate hours, and old women who threaten to slash my tires if I park in a public parking space in front of their homes.

But the housing plan is not the only communist nanny-state issue that L.A. passed this week. There's also a more minor, but nonetheless irksome, ordinance on day laborers. From the L.A. Times:

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved an ordinance Wednesday requiring certain home improvement stores to develop plans for dealing with day laborers who congregate nearby in search of jobs.
The ordinance mandates that proposed big-box stores obtain conditional-use permits, which could then require them to build day-labor centers with shelter, drinking water, bathrooms and trash cans.

I'm sorry, but isn't loitering a crime? Also, don't these day laborers get paid under the table? Don't most of them avoid paying taxes on their earnings? The City is encouraging people to violate the law and duck taxes.

Beyond that, is this really the type of society we want to build for ourselves? A society where governments not only allow under-the-table, unregulated, undocumented labor, but publicly condone and foster it? Why even have minimum wage laws at all? Why have laws regarding workplace conditions?

By encouraging the use of day laborers, you're discouraging people from hiring labor via proper channels. This is harmful to businesses that actually obey labor laws. It also brings down the average real wage and harms the economy in general.

Man, I hate the City Council.

I'm Joeverkill, and this has been Notes from the Right-Wing.

The Magic Money Machine Goes Poof

According to Reuters, equities in markets with small financial sectors perform better than those with big financial sectors.

This means that someone up there is intelligent enough to realise that the making-money-by-making-money business isn't all it's cracked up to be. If I buy something (imaginary at that [equity]) with the intention of selling it again, the price will go up-- as long as I can sell it at that price. The feedback loop continues for as long as it takes for the players to fold and cash in their chips. Then everyone at the table realises there's not enough chips to go around.

Investment is all good and fine as long as there is some sort of grounding to keep the reaction from going out of control. We've learnt about this since the 1600s from the Netherlands and her lovely tulips, after all. Is this a failing of modern economics, or its design? Certainly many people have become rich-- but even more have lost everything.

The silver lining here is that there are economies out there which are even more volatile: 18% for the US, but 30% for China?

"The irony in that conclusion is that the U.S. equity market might be relatively attractive when compared to many other markets, even though the conventional wisdom is that the credit crisis is a U.S. problem," the analysts wrote.

(This is all coming from a guy who's got £300 tucked away in wind power)