Thursday, April 24, 2008

CARPE DIEM: Gas Prices As Percent of Income Are Still Affordable

CARPE DIEM: Gas Prices As Percent of Income Are Still Affordable
Excellent chart to help understand exactly what the prices mean over time.
Here is another one.
Yes gas prices are high. But they STILL are not as high as several other recent periods of oil crisis in our history. Markets correct themselves when they get out of bounds - although sometimes the boundaries are expanded by fear and hype - especially with a geopolitically sensitive commodity like oil.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Roadside America

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php?tip_AttractionNo==7158
roadside america .. interesting
It is fun to look at other states too.

Artillery Locating Radar

Well, I guess Praising Allah was not enough for this mortar team. This video is made by the bad guys and was captured by our troops. The mortar launcher's friend is praising Allah as he is launching mortar shots at American troops. Our troops have "Mortar Tracking Technology which can track the trajectory of a hostile round and fire a retaliatory shot to precisely the spot from which the hostile shell is fired. It requires only that the bad guy fires a couple of rounds, then it zeros in on him. Count the number of mortar rounds the masked terrorist fires.

Best Places to Live in USA

http://www.statestats.com/sr06mlrnk.htm
Another example of poor use of statistics to present information.
Soon to be found in Vic's new book ... (2009 Publication date) "STUPIDOMICS (Stupid in = Stupid out)"

This site is selling a book to people who are looking for a better place to live. The site ranks NJ as Number FIVE !!! It ranks Louisiana as number 50. I have been in both and have lived in NJ and I am confident that parts of LA are far more livable than many parts of NJ. Note in the ranking method they AVERAGE a series of criteria about each state to arrive at a conclusion. I have not read the book, but I can imagine the list includes things like "mean household income" and "percent of population under the US poverty level" - both of which are HIGHLY relative to the geography. A better score on these would be "percent of income spent on housing" and "percent of people spending more than 40 percent of income on food". Also - depending on your own preferences you would apply greater or less weight to the many "livability factors". So, a retiree would rank "highly available geriatric care" with more weight than would a young family. A young family would rank "percent of high school graduates that attend college" with more weight than "percent of population in service sector jobs". Statistics do not "LIE" - they just provide data slices that, while real, are (more often than not) biased to the publisher of the data.
Want some interesting data on states, counties and towns? See THIS LINK from census data.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Global Warmng - Another


I think there is some excellent material here. My own analysis of the Global Warming Hysteria is that it will lead to trillions of dollars of misplaced funding leading to millions of deaths worldwide - mostly in third world nations. It is my own suspicion that the "Earth Religion" has decided that about half the world population must go away in order to save our planet - and this kind of approach is politically useful and expedient for those who will reign after the downsizing.