The Doggerel

When doggerel flowing from my pen,
(disgusting pun,  so lame and terse)
Evokes your snarls and groans again,
Remember friends--it could be verse.

Electric Car Battery Cost

            Electric car battery costs have never been revealed to the public—until now.    According to an April 18 Wall Street Journal article by Mike Ramsey, entitled Ford CEO:  Battery is Third of Electric Car Cost, the CEO of Ford Motor Company, speaking at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference, said that the battery pack for an electric Ford Focus costs between $12,000 and $15,000.   He said, “When you move to an all electric vehicle, the battery size moves up to around 23 kilowatt hours, and it weighs around 600 to 700 pounds.  They’re around $12,000 to $15,000 [per battery] for a type of car that normally sells for about $22,000, [referring to the price of the gas powered Focus] so you can see why the economics are what they are.”

            Since the electric Focus sells for $39,200, the battery cost alone accounts for a third of the cost of the car.  The all electric Nissan Leaf price starts at $35,000, and the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid, sells for about $40,000.   But at these prices, none of these cars will achieve much market penetration. The plug-in hybrid and the full electric car will remain niche products until the price of batteries comes down. That’s both good news and bad news.  It’s bad news because this means it’s unlikely that we will see much action in electric cars in the next year or two.  But it’s good news in that, though the price of batteries has to drop, it does not have to drop by orders of magnitudes.  The present price is about five or six hundred bucks per kilowatt hour of capacity.  If they could just get it down to about a third of that figure, I think we’d be home free.

            The Dept of Energy, which is subsidizing the building of battery factories, hopes to bring the price down to $300 /kwh by next year. They apparently feel that this figure would be a tipping point, and it might be.   Part of the high cost of the electric Focus is that even though they build this car on the same production line that builds the regular Focus, they make so few of them that they have all of the cost disadvantages of a “limited edition, handmade car.”  But if falling battery price were to allow them to drop the price to $32,000, then the radical increase in sales would allow sufficient economies of scale to drop the price by another $10,000, and this would place it in the price range of the cheap family car.  Remember, as rising gas prices create a market demand for non-petroleum cars, it is probably not the Cadillac buyers who really worry about the price of gas.  The natural market for electric cars is with people who feel they can’t afford to pay $4.00/gal for gas.  But if you can’t afford four dollar gas, then you probably can’t afford a $40,000 car.  But if the cost of these high tech batteries follows the same trajectory as other high tech electrical equipment, we may expect, over time, to see sharp decreases in price, once the market expands.

            When we get to the point that the typical new Ford sold is an electric vehicle, we will have traveled full circle to where Henry Ford wanted to go in the first place.  The gasoline powered cars that Henry put on the market were not his first choice in propulsion systems. Since Henry had been a supervisor of a power house before he went into the car business, an electric car would have been his first choice. But at that time, the available batteries were not up to the task. At one point, Ford hired Thomas Edison’s company to develop a better battery, but the best Edison could come up with, an advanced NiCad, could still not store sufficient energy per pound.  But today, we have the right battery.  And soon, we will have it at the right price.

             So; when will the electric car begin to change your life?   It already has.   Or, to be more precise, the “threat” of the electric car has changed your life.   For many decades, Detroit was content to offer us the same old V-8 engines and three speed transmissions. Product development was all about different styles of fins, and a little more chrome. But that was then and this is now. The modern, front-wheel-drive, four cylinder car delivers efficiency beyond anything we imagined 20 years ago.   In WWII, the “holy grail” of engine design was to build an engine that could deliver one horsepower per cubic inch of displacement.  And only the P-51 Mustang ever achieved this standard, and it did it with a supercharged engine with compression so high that it ran on 150 octane fuel.   In 2003, I bought a new Ford Focus with a 100 cubic inch engine which was rated at 120 hp.  This is a small in-line 4-cylinder engine, with no supercharger, that runs on regular gas, and was available in Ford’s cheapest cars.

             And yesterday, I traded in my 1995 Ford Escort for a new Ford Focus. Even with 287,000 miles on it, the Escort still runs fine, and I received a decent trade-in allowance on it. (And since I was trading in a Ford on another Ford, I got a Ford buyers loyalty bonus.)  In all the 17 years I’ve driven the Escort, I’ve done very little to it other than put gas and oil in it. It’s never had the head off, and other than totally rebuilding the brakes at 200,000 miles, no major mechanical work has ever been done. It even has the original exhaust system.  My only complaint was that it had only very modest amounts of acceleration.  (I don’t remember what it would do from zero to 60, but in measuring this, you don’t actually use a stop-watch—you use a calendar.)

            But the new Focus I just bought, with its little 2 liter engine, delivers 160 hp.   And with a six-speed automatic transmission, it has acceleration adequate for anyone except a maniac. I pulled onto the freeway entrance ramp from a dead stop, and was doing 70 when I got off the ramp and merged into the traffic.)  For me, that’s good enough.  And yet this thing has an EPA fuel rating of 37 mpg average, and maximum highway mileage up to 44mpg.  And this is a comfortable, four-door family car.  What I’m trying to say--is that American cars have gotten better—radically better.  That means that Detroit has actually spent serious money improving engine efficiency.   Why did they finally do this?  They looked in their rear view mirror, and what they saw creeping up behind them was the electric car.  And it scared the hell out of them. 

Are Business Grads Hirable?

            First, a bit of background material:  Here in Iowa, as in most of the United States, public employees and public services are under attack by organized business interests and by their lackeys in government.  The scope of this attack is so broad as to include all forms of public services--even police and fire fighters.  But nowhere is this antisocial wrath focused more strongly than on public education. For the forces of “organized money,” the teachers’ union and the tenured professor are now the poster children for all that they see wrong with the world.

              Their enmity toward public education has many roots, not all of which are economic, and their desire to pay lower taxes may be but one part of a complex mosaic of motivational factors.  Educators, if they perform their function well, have a responsibility to disseminate the truth, including all those inconvenient truths which established interests would prefer to ignore or perhaps deliberately conceal.  And of course, there are cultural wars which can entrap educators no matter how strongly they attempt distance themselves from this kind of controversy.  Explaining to students how the photo decay of uranium inside a cubic zirconium crystal can tell us that the earth is about four and a half billion years old would not, to most of us,  seems like a very controversial thing to do. But to the sanctimonious lunatics who teach their children that God created the world in seven days, any teacher who would dare to say such things is clearly a servant of Satan. Yet it is the actual tax expenditure for education where these smoldering hostilities to the tellers of truth boil over into the political sphere and begin to have real world consequences.

             Education has always been expensive. But a generation ago, if anyone seriously suggested that it would be possible to maintain a modern, industrial state without continuing to make these expenditures, he would have been laughed out of any political party in the U.S. or any other Western country.  And till the end of the cold war, the most influential conservatives would still advocate increased educational expenditures--because education was one area where the Soviets were leaving us behind. But that was then, and this is now.

            The University of Northern Iowa has just suffered radical funding cuts, imposed by the GOP controlled state legislature.  About a third of all major programs have been discontinued, and the Malcolm Price Lab School, (at one time the premier pedagogical research facility in the country) will be closed. The faculty has returned to the administration a vote of no confidence, and the local debate is bitter and spirited.   As part of this ongoing debate, Jim Offner, the business columnist for the Waterloo Courier, wrote a March 25 column which said, basically, that while the goals of a well rounded education were valid goals, the employers’ demand for highly specialized workers makes the liberal arts degree impractical in today’s business environment. On April 1, a guest article, Liberal Arts Majors Are Very Hirable,  by Professor Martha Reineke of the UNI religion department and Professor Margaret Holland of the philosophy dept, appeared in the same paper in reply to Mr. Offner’s remarks. They offer evidence that if you look at mid-career salaries, liberal arts grads actually do much better in the job market than business grads.   They cite data from Pay Scale’s annual survey of salaries, which lists salaries of graduates according to major. This survey shows that at mid-career, philosophy majors have higher salaries than business management majors.  Reineke & Holland also show that liberal arts majors do better on all tests required for admission to advanced graduate programs, including law, management, and medicine. They wrote:

            “*Philosophy majors are No 1 on the LSAT; business majors are No 24.

            *Philosophy majors outperform business majors by a margin of 15% on the GMAT.

            *Philosophy majors, on average, do better than all other majors on the GRE, LSAT,             GMAT, and MCAT.”

Also, they quote the president of Babson College, (a business school) who claims that, due to the pace of change, business skills acquired in the classroom expire in about five years.  By contrast, he claims that skills learned in liberal arts disciplines such as history and philosophy are long lasting—and indispensable to business.  And they also quote Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president who studied philosophy and psychology at Stanford.  Mayer says that of the 6,000 people Google hires every year, 4,500 are liberal arts or humanities majors.

            (By the way, if you imagine that philosophy majors are students who spend most of their college years studying the writings of philosophers, or that they expect to be hired upon graduation to perform philosophy, let me correct your misimpression. The beauty of a philosophy major is that it is the one major which allows you to study almost any subject and still apply it towards your major.  Why?  Because almost any field of study can be considered a branch of philosophy.  Those who declare a philosophy major are simply those students who wish to acquire the broadest possible range of knowledge. )

            While Reineke and Holland did their homework well, and made a very convincing case for the continued value of the liberal arts, this is precisely what I would expect them to do, because their own department is one of those under assault. What did surprise me is that a few days later, I saw an article in the April 5 issue of the Wall Street Journal , Wealth or Waste?  Rethinking The Value of a Business Major, which said exactly the same thing. In fact, The WSJ piece makes the point even more strongly than Reineke & Holland do.  The article begins by saying:  “Undergraduate business majors are a dime a dozen on many college campuses.  But according to some, they may be worth even less.”            They say that more than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business majors.  But faculty, school administrators, and corporate recruiters are beginning to question the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.  The biggest complaint is that business majors focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and fail to develop the critical thinking and problem solving skills that are the hallmark of liberal arts courses.

            Top business schools are taking the hint.  The business schools at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and several others are now tweaking their undergraduate business curricula to integrate history, ethics, and writing--into courses about finance and marketing. At George Washington U., they are planning to use the expertise of their philosophy and psychology depts to teach business ethics.  And they plan to use the engineering dept to help teach sustainability. So, just as pro-business lackeys within the state legislature are trying to reduce or eliminate the liberal arts in favor of the study of business, (believing that this will be doing a favor to business interests) the top business schools and corporate recruiters are beginning to embrace the liberal arts as the only cure for what’s wrong with American business. Ahh, the irony of it all!  I will provide a link to both the Courier article and the WSJ piece, but you may hit a pay wall on WSJ.

             

Jobs Picture Better Than it Looks.

    In the Monday, April 2, 2012 issue of The Wall Street Journal, there was an article by Justin Lahart entitled U.S. Jobs Rebound Still Leaves Work for Ben Bernanke.  (I'd provide a link, but you'd just hit a pay wall.) In the U.S.,  recently published statistics on total jobs have showed significant improvement over the last year.  The Labor Department payroll survey says that  the U.S. has added an average of 245,000 jobs in each of the last three months.  That same survey says that we have added 2,000,000 jobs, over the last year.  The payroll survey is a survey of 6% of U.S. employers.   But this survey only questions those employers who are well established--it overlooks start-ups that are often an important part of any recovery.  A lesser known, but probably more accurate survey is the Household Survey.   In this poll, they simply ask a small number (60,000) of householders to tell them who in that house is working.   According to the household survey, there have been not 2 million, but 3.2 million jobs added in the last year.   And in any previous recovery, the Household Survey has turned out to be closer to the real picture. So while the official job picture is finally starting to look good, the real picture is probably even better.   And remember, we have 4 years of pent up demand.

An Optimist Looks at His Future

            The other day I was coming home from having my taxes done.  It was way past noon, and I was starting to get a little hungry, so I thought I might just have a sandwich in town.   I decided on The Village Inn.  They have decent sandwiches, they aren’t too expensive, and on Wednesday, you get a free slice of pie with any lunch.    Since I was by myself, I agreed to sit at a small table, rather than take up a whole booth. I was escorted to a table next to the kitchen, and this table was just slightly blocking the aisle used by tray-wielding wait staff.   I chose to sit in the chair opposite the kitchen, so that as I looked across the table I would be staring into the kitchen, except that they had deliberately placed a blank wall there to prevent customers from staring into the kitchen.  This meant that the wait staff, as they exit the kitchen, must make a sharp turn around a blind corner and then head straight into the path of where my chair would be setting if I pulled it out far enough from the table to actually sit on that side of the table. This would be an accident waiting to happen. My chair would be a titanic looking for an iceberg. 

            The young waitress asked, “Wouldn’t you rather sit facing the dining room?  Since you are by yourself, you don’t have to sit facing that kitchen wall. Are you sure you don’t want to move?”   I replied:

“Young woman, I hadn’t intended to unburden myself to this degree, but this is the problem: I know what will happen if I sit there. Waitresses will bump into my chair.  In fact, there will be a very tall waitress, and she will have just rinsed her contact lenses and put them back in, and her eyes will still be watering so that she is nearly blind.  And because she is very tall, she will be carrying a tray slightly above the level of my head—and she will trip on my chair and spill things on me.  And the tray will be carrying a double order of Spaghetti Alfredo, with a bowl of New England clam chowder, and hot coffee. And it will all be spilled on me--all over the front of my newly cleaned sport coat, and all down my neck.  But the impact will cause the waitress to lose her contact lenses, which will end up somewhere in the Alfredo sauce.  Then she will have to ask me to remain very still while she attempts to recover them, which will take a long time, because she is nearly blind without them.  But the sustained contact with this hot sauce on my skin will cause an allergic reaction, (possibly from the shellfish in the clam chowder) and I will go into anaphylactic shock.  They will call an ambulance, and as they haul me to the emergency room, the waitress will want to ride along because she is still trying to get her contacts back.  As the ambulance swerves to turn into the emergency entrance, it will probably narrowly miss a semi-truck, which will careen into the path of another semi and force the ambulance off the road so that it overturns, along with both semi-trailers.  One of the semis will be hauling live hogs, and as they wander about the road, they will surely cause other accidents, so that when other ambulances arrive, they will be used to evacuate the other casualties—not me. My ambulance will be on its side and I’ll be lying there with the waitress on top of me, still picking through the Alfredo sauce, hoping to find her contacts. But the pigs, being attracted to the scent of the Alfredo sauce, will come around and start licking me. The waitress will try to shove them away but will be bitten, and I know she will have to have rabies shots, which will ruin her life and cost $4,000, for which I will be billed. But then things start to go wrong. 

             As I lie there, half dazed, I will look into the lens-free, pure blue eyes of this young woman who is still lying on top of me, and I will decide that I am in love with her—that she is the one true love of my life---and I will tell her so.  This, of course, will ruin my marriage.   It is quite out of character for me to behave that way---I’ve been married for forty years and I’ve never seriously looked at another woman.  But until now, I’ve never had a comely young woman lying on top of me, squirming about with both of us covered with warm Alfredo sauce, and two pigs licking my earlobes with their warm, wet tongues.  You see, a guy never really knows how he would act in such a situation until he actually finds himself there.  And of course, in some cultures, this would be considered a highly erotic kind of encounter.  Which cultures?   Well, in Wisconsin.  They do a lot of that in Wisconsin. It’s the cheese—there’s a lot of cheese in Alfredo sauce.  But as I lie there, seeing how my life has become a complete shambles, I would naturally have to ask, “How could I let this happen?  Why couldn’t I see it coming? Wouldn’t anyone see that this is exactly what would happen if I let that young woman put me in that chair?””

            “So you see, lady,” I explained, “I can’t sit on that side. It’s just too high a price to pay.”   The waitress just stood there a moment, with her teeth clenched tightly.  (I’ve never understood what it means when people clench their teeth like that.)    Speaking through her clenched teeth, she said, “You may sit where you choose,” and she disappeared into the kitchen. There were some loud sounds coming from the kitchen, but I couldn’t tell what was going on. Was it cursing--or laughing--or perhaps one of those mysterious vocalizations that we males don’t quite understand.  I reflected a moment, and then concluded that what I heard was some kind of exclamation of the pure joy that comes whenever people realize that someone has taken the time to explain to them how all our futures are revealed, if we would but take the time to look.

   

Are Bar Flies Just Sex Starved Males?

     They very well could be, if these bar flies are also fruit flies.   An article in the March 18 issue of the Des Moines Register, (I'd provide a link but you'd just hit a pay wall)   entitled  Sex Starved Fruit Flies Turn to Alcohol,  describes an interesting study.  Male fruit flies were put into cages with females who had already mated, and would therefore have no interest in sex.   The males attempted to approach the females but were driven away,  even kicked or bitten.  They were very definitely rejected.  The males kept trying, but eventually gave up. Then these males were placed in separate cages, and offered a choice of two kinds of food, one of which contained alcohol.  They preferred the alcoholic stuff, and ate a lot of it. They got very drunk.   Other males, the ones who had actually mated, were offered the same choice.  They tasted the alcohol, but didn't care for it.
       The authors said that there is a brain chemical in fruit flies which is affected by sex, but if sex is lacking, the same effect can be achieved with alcohol.   But guess what?   This same brain chemical is present in humans.  The author suggests that there may be lessons for humans here.

The Origin of Apocalyptic Religion

            We are seeing, at least in the United States, an increase in the fervor of “end times” preaching.   A large and increasing number of otherwise sane citizens accept as an objective fact that the world will end in their lifetimes.  Popular novels about “The Rapture” sell millions of copies. And the segments of our population who believe these things are not always confined to institutions.  They roam freely among us.  We allow them to own guns, drive cars, have children, and teach at our universities.  And the increase in the intensity of belief and practice of extremist, “end times” religion is not confined to Christianity—it is occurring in all of the world’s major religions.  But I do not find that surprising.  Rather, I am surprised that we are not also seeing the rise of a host of entirely new prophets within these established religions.  With world conditions as they are today, we should have apocalyptic prophets and self proclaimed messiahs stacked up like cordwood.

            Apocalyptic philosophy is nothing new, and certainly not new within Christianity.  Jesus of Nazareth himself was an “end times,” preacher, as was John the Baptist.  Jesus continually spoke of the “coming of the kingdom of God,” and his followers expected it to occur in their lifetimes.  These disciples lived out their lives waiting for the “second coming,” and Evangelical Christians are still waiting for it today.  Every few years, some evangelical preacher proclaims that he has calculated the precise moment of doomsday, and gathers his followers on some mountaintop to await their transportation into paradise.  The appointed hour passes without any noticeable event, and I would imagine that they all feel a bit chagrined the next day. Yet in Palestine alone, in Jesus’ generation, there were dozens of apocalyptic preachers, because it was the right time and place for “end times” stories to find a receptive audience.

            Throughout all history, people everywhere have been aware of some kind of ongoing struggle between good and evil.   You don’t have to be a Manichean to accept this. Evil and evildoers are a persistent reality.  But there is at least one time in every generation when evil seems to rear its ugly head more prominently than usual-- when the promoters of various evil agendas admit to those agendas openly—even proudly.  Yet as the agents of evil begin to shove their heels into the face of humanity, well intentioned people always respond to these assaults---they are willing to stand up and be counted.   For instance, in our own time, we have just seen our Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case, rule that corporations are people, and as such have an unlimited constitutional right to spend corporate funds to buy elections, and to do so anonymously.  One can scarcely conceive of a more corrupt or more corrupting act of a government against its people.   Yet people are fighting back.  We will probably see a constitutional amendment fight on this issue, and it will probably win.   We have seen the billionaires, through their puppet regime under Scott Walker, wage war in Wisconsin against public employees and workers in general.   But this too was met with spirited resistance, and may have been the beginning of the Occupy movement.  And this resistance to being enslaved by elite plutocrats is worldwide.  We’ve seen the Arab Spring, the Pro-Democracy protesters in Russia, and uncounted others. 

            The point is this:    When the struggle reaches a fevered pitch and appears to be headed to some final climax, people who believe in a God tend to assume that God is somehow involved in their struggle, and will take a prominent role in that climax.  They assume that if there is a God, and if He is good, then He could not be neutral in any moral struggle.  And since   they are on the side of good, they are on the side of God.  (Of course, no matter where you are in the struggle between good and evil, you probably assume that you are on the side of good—and God is on your side.  No evil doer, no matter how inhuman or depraved, ever failed to believe that he was acting for the greater good, nor that God was on his side.  Even Hitler believed this.)  But if God is on our side, and if God is infinitely powerful, then why does He not just swoop down with a host of angels and smash our enemies?   Why does He allow us to suffer indignities at the hands of our enemies, especially when these enemies are also God’s enemies?  This is a rational question.  In fact, it’s a very, very rational question.  And that explains why believers in “end times” religion are not necessarily irrational. 

            Sooner or later, some “end times” prophet walks onto the stage.  He says, essentially, “Yes, God is aware of your struggle—it is all part of His grand plan.  And He will indeed intervene with all His divine might to resolve this and all other earthly struggles.”    And those who hear this message ask, “But when will He do this? We have been waiting so long.”   The prophet answers:  “Soon; very, very soon.”

            For those who are weary and discouraged, this is a message of hope, and it can be extremely seductive.  And it is not all that irrational.  If you really believe in a God that cares about you and about people like you, then why would He not intervene directly on your behalf?  While such “end times” beliefs may seem strange, for many believers it may be the simplest way to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with belief in an all-good and all-powerful god.  So with the fertile soil we now have for such beliefs, why aren’t we seeing hundreds of new prophets?