Saturday, June 21, 2008

Wondering why this blog is called this?

I named this blog during a fit of frustration with most of the rest of the world. I can't remember what the problem was at the time but it seemed like one in a long line of "You've got to be kidding me!??" moments.

And then just when I was starting to think I was crazy and everyone else was normal you get stuff like this

Are

they

serious?

This is Reuters right? I didn't type the name wrong did I? Is Reuters not who I remember them being? I remember a Reuters that occasionally approached responsible journalism.

But surely this is just some sucker rookie reporter at one news outlet who managed to slip something past their fact checker right?

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong


In case you are wondering

1) It is possible to get significant power out of water. Just ask these guys. Sure maybe they have a mini-tokamak reactor in there even though the best fusion researchers in the world need a 6 meter radius to get net power output. Of course if you believe Bussard you can do it in 1 or 2.

2) Supposedly this car runs a 300 watt engine. Problems with this anyone? My car runs a 150000 watt engine. Granted my car is reasonably fast but I don't actually think it is 500 times more powerful than the engine in the car you see in the video.

3) I'm not saying this is impossible. Lots of things that seem impossible are real. But lets let at least a touch of peer review or actual demonstration take place before we go off 1/64th of the way cocked.

I'm not asking for much, just a ten hour test drive with a five gallon bucket of water. Or however much I need to keep me going for that long. What's that you say, you have to stop and replace the very battery-esque filters every five hours? Oh well then, I can see how that would eliminate the need for any real validation of you claims.

Carry on.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Obesity and Imigration, Two Birds, One Stone?

So you've probably heard alot about the immigration issue in the news lately. Lots of people making a big huff about people taking jobs, drivers licenses, potential terrorist entry points, blah blah blah.

You've also probably heard a lot of people talking about how Americans are getting heavier and how a higher and higher percentage of people are obese or morbidly obese and are going to drive up our health care costs blah blah blah.

I think I have a silver bullet answer to both problems.

We need a commodity manual labor market place. Some system so I can go find 1, 5, 15, or whatever number of hours of manual labor I can do for free.

When someone needs their lawn re-sodded or house repainted or whatever, they post it on some craigslist style service and I'll show up and work for free for however long I want. That way I get my exercise in for the week without paying gym memberships and on my terms.

Since I'm working for free there aren't any messy tax issues or ID issues. And since you aren't charging me I save on gym membership and I can pick and choose when and where. If you have something that needs doing that happens to be on my way home from work, bingo. I get a free workout and you get free labor.

Since most immigrants come and do unskilled or low skill manual labor it shouldn't be hard for most Americans to pick up the skills they need to specialize in some particular kind of labor. If you don't want to do that there would be a fair number of jobs that wouldn't require any skill at all, like moving shingles or pulling rocks out of someones lawn so they can plant a tree. That would lower the demand for foreign labor and solve our immigration problem since even Hispanics can't compete with free.

We all get healthier, we lower the incentive for people to sneak into our country and surreptitiously hang our drywall and fry our food, and we do it relatively free of red tape.

Of course this won't work because the liability issues surrounding letting someone come on by and pull rocks out of your lawn or work with "hazerdous" chemicals like latex paint are astronomical by American standards.

Oh yeah, and Americans are too lazy to actually get out and do any work.

But still, a guy can dream can't he?

Saturday, June 14, 2008

DIY Car Repair... The Power of the Internet

I know everyone is super excited about how the internet is bringing cultures together and improving business but you've probably already gathered how I'm a bit of an odd duck who doesn't care about the things most sane people care about.

When I think of the power of the internet I think of things like do-it-yourself car repair.

I've had this problem with my Volkswagen (thanks AZ for the spelling correction) for a couple of months. Whenever I really step on the gas I hear this loud hissing noise. G also notices that their really isn't as much boost from the turbo as there used to be. Obvious problem - there is an air leak somewhere.

But where?

It's not like I don't take a gander at my hoses when I change my oil so if there were big chunks missing or clamps coming off I would know about it. It has to be a slit in a hose or some component like the wastegate or diverter valve has an internal failure.

And to make matters worse, it only happens when the turbo boosts above atmospheric pressure so it will be nearly impossible to reproduce without 1) a dyno or 2) strapping someone to the front of the car and driving around under high acceleration with the hood open. For the record if the good ol' 'net hadn't come to the rescue I would be trying option 3 (have someone stand on the brake while they rev the engine) since I'm far too cheap to actually go find a good dyno.

Anyway, before trying either of those I decided I would give my local "overly interested in our particular make/model of car" internet forum a shot.

So I wander over to the B5 garage forum (my car is built on the B5 VW/Audi chassis) and searched for "throttle hiss".

There are five results for that query

One of them is this
Another is this
Another is this

I figure if someone describes pretty much the exact symptoms I'm seeing and gets a response that says:

"No, this is about a 6 inch long hose, about 3/4 of an inch in diameter. Look at the throttle body. Then look at the intake to the rear of the throttle body. Start feeling hoses.

One is going to feel REAL soft and have a 4 inch tear in it."

I ought to at least give it a shot. So even though it's pretty late I grab our flashlight and head out to have a look. Sure enough, right in the inside of the L there is a ~1 inch split.

A little more googling tells me this part will cost ~$20 to purchase + some change for new clamps. I didn't ask but I'm guessing a mechanic would have run me ~$150 for this fix. [rant] And depending on the mechanic they probably would have gotten it wrong and I would have had to haul my now more broken car back their shop so I can let them continue to not fix it because heaven forbid if a repair shop messed up your car they would pay to have someone else fix it[/rant].

Anyway, all I know is since there are 85000000000000 people on the internet if there is a common failure mode for pretty much anything I own, I can probably go online and find a few dozen people who got fed up about it, knew enough about what was going on, and wrote it up compete with the part numbers I need and links to online retailers who will sell me the parts.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Health Care and America (opinion)

You've probably heard people talk about how far behind America's health care system is. You've probably heard them talk about how awesome the health care system is in Europe or Canada or whateverland.

I think all these people are crazy.

Let me explain how I understand our current medical system. There are four major players: you, doctors, health insurance companies, and "other people".

You pay the health insurance company.
"Other people" pay the health insurance company.
The health insurance company pays your doctor.
The health insurance company pays other people's doctors.


The nature of insurance is such that when you pay money to the insurance company it stops being "yours". You have no more right to the money than "other people" and vice versa. That way when someone needs a new kidney they get access to some of "your" money and don't have to foot the bill themselves.

It's fairly obvious that this can be abused. "Oh , Mr. Young, I see you've got another concussion, let us pay to fix that for you". So we invented copays and patient portions and percentage coverage so that we would still feel some economic pain to discourage us from doing things that hurt us, expose us to illness, or seeking treatment that likely won't do any good.

So if we have these checks in place, the natural question to ask now is "Why not get rid of the private companies that are getting rich off health insurance and roll it into the public sector (governement)?"

Here's why. The copays and deductibles aren't the only checks. At a health insurance company when you want to get some insurance money to pay for your [fill in condition here] you go ask them for it and "The Man" looks it over and decides whether or not the refusal of your claim is 1) illegal or 2) so bad for his company's reputation he would take a loss. If it doesn't fall into those 2 categories, you don't get the money. This isn't perfect but the money that used to be "mine" isn't going to be given away to someone who wants to see a doctor who specializes in treatment via sunflowers and unicorns because "The Man" isn't going to be giving out any money he doesn't have to. He's going to use it to lower my rates or line his pockets. Mostly though since 10,000,000 people are lining his pockets it doesn't take much from each of us to keep him turning down the unicornians.

Now let's think about how the government works. The people making the call have no interest in whether or not they dole out money. The lady at the counter doesn't get a cut. The manger on duty doesn't get a cut. The head bossman of the imaginary FFHCA (Federal Free Health Care Administration) doesn't get a cut. So why shouldn't they give out the money? What would ever be the point of ending the year more than $5 in the black? Survey says: let the man see the unicorn.

Throw that in with the horror that is letting the people that wrote our tax code write your insurance plan and I'm opting out.