"Car Talk" always saw a responsibility to bring out the best in car ownership. Their specialty was 'the old beater.'

Sorry, this was suppose to go up last night.

June 1, 2008

Dear Tom and Ray,

While on my evening walk, (click here) I went past a small SUV with the engine running. On the return leg of my walk, the engine was still running. At the completion of my walk, I went back to check the vehicle. It was still running, so I went up to the house and asked the owner if she knew her engine was running. She was charging her cell phone! Question: How long can a modern passenger car be left idling? How much does it cost in gas? Can a cell phone be charged by using just the battery? Would it be cheaper to get an emergency cell-phone charger battery? And safer? What is the wear and tear on the engine? -- Mike

TOM: Well, we can do the math, Mike. An average car burns about 0.15 gallons of gas an hour while idling. That's 45 cents' worth of gas at $3 a gallon. Plus, in an hour you create three pounds of carbon dioxide and who knows how much nitrous oxide emissions? But we don't need to do all of the math to conclude that this is a wasteful way to charge a cell phone.

RAY: It's like air-conditioning your house down to 30 degrees to keep the ice-cream cold, instead of just putting it back into the freezer.

TOM: I assume the cell-phone owner had lost her home plug-in charger, and was using the car adapter because that was the only way she could charge her phone.

RAY: But what she didn't know was that she didn't have to run the engine. If she had simply plugged the adapter into the power point (formerly called the cigarette lighter) and then turned the key to the appropriate position (on some cars, the power point will work without the key in at all, and on other cars the key needs to be in one of the "on" positions), she could have charged her cell phone using only the car's battery.

TOM: No harm would have come to the battery. Charging a cell phone takes so little energy that it's virtually impossible to run down a healthy car battery by doing that. And the battery would have completely recharged itself the next time she used the car.

RAY: Plus, the added advantage of using the car's battery instead of the engine to recharge your cell phone is that you're less likely to attract the unwanted attention of potential car thieves. Or nosy evening walkers.

November 3, 2014

Tom Magliozzi's laugh boomed in NPR listeners' ears every week as he and his brother, Ray, bantered on Car Talk.

Tom Magliozzi, (click here) one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old.
Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.
If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious....

Ray Magliozzi (click here) was born in 1950. He is an actor and writer, known for Cars (2006), Cars 3 (2017) and Divided Highways: The Interstates and the Transformation of American Life (1997).




Below is a phone charging system that is portable to anywhere including and especially the beach. On second thought, be sure it doesn't get wet.

Union membership leads to a vibrant Middle Class. A vibrant Middle Class equates to economic growth!

To quote most regressive Republicans, "California drank the Kool-Aide." Yep. They sure did and it shows! 

California is not an experiment, it is proof!

February 1, 2017

By Jonathan Lansner

...A new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (click here) shows union influence in the entire California workplace grew slightly last year, a stark contrast to declining union rolls nationwide.

Here are six things worth knowing:

1. Big numbers: California is a comparative union town, with 2.55 million members statewide in 2016, highest in the nation. Those unionized workplaces roughly equal all the jobs in Minnesota. New York was second last year at 1.9 million; Illinois third, at 812,000.

2. Growing rolls: California union membership grew with the state job market, up 65,000, or 2.6 percent, in a year. Nationally, it’s a different story: Unions had 14.6 million members in 2016, down 237,000, or a dip of 1.6 percent....

What happened to Democrats? They lost the Middle Class supported by a good quality of life and union membership. The Middle Class has been replaced by the Working Poor facilitated by the god awful Gingrich Welfare Class and a lost generation of "Occupy Wall Street."

...6. Trump voters? Forget exit polls. My trusty spreadsheet translated this union data into curious presidential political insight. The 30 states that Trump won had a total of 5.5 million union members last year (7 percent of their workforce) vs. 9.1 million in the other 20 states and D.C. (15 percent of all jobs.) But in Trump states, union rolls were down 244,000 and up 7,000 elsewhere. Did Trump draw well from the recently unemployed? Look at key swing states like Florida (down 90,000 union jobs in 2016) or Pennsylvania (off 62,000), both won by the new president....                    

200,000 people die in the USA of air pollution....(as Governor of California) we passed the strictest environmental rules in the country...

...And our economy is now booming. Today, we are number one in protecting our environment and we are number one in economic growth.

That is a Grizzly Bear not a Russian bear (Brown Bear).

November 16, 2017
By Niall McCarthy

...According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, (click here) California is the 6th largest economy in the world. In 2015, its economic output reached $2.46 trillion, surpassing France. Only the United States, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are able to boast a higher GDP than the Golden State....

California is making America great again!

June 6, 2016
By Matthew Winkler

...California last year created the most jobs of any state, 483,000, more than the second- and third-most-populous states Florida and Texas combined (they added 257,900 and 175,700) and at a faster rate than any of the world's developed economies. The pace of employment growth was almost triple the rate of job creation for the 19 countries that make up the euro zone and more than 3.5 times that of Japan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The high taxes and ubiquitous regulation critics cite when assailing Golden State government are proving no impediment to business and investment. They may even be a benefit, as public policy and people's preferences converge. Four of the world's 10 largest companies are based in California. Two of them -- Alphabet and Facebook -- were conceived in the past 18 years. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, the world's largest bank by market capitalization, routinely outperforms any of its peers from Wall Street.

California produces almost all of the country's almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwifruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes and walnuts among dozens of crops that make it No. 1 in the U.S., with an equivalent GDP from agriculture, forestry and hunting totaling more than $37.7 billion, dwarfing No. 2 Iowa's $12.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No state comes close to California in manufacturing totaling $255.6 billion. Texas is next with $239.1 billion. The trailing 12-month revenue from California technology companies totaled $732 billion, or 53 percent of all tech revenues in the U.S. ...

...The 482 companies in the Russell 3000, which are based in California, produced a total return of 144 percent during the past five years, easily beating the 114 percent return for non-California companies during the same period....

With a population approaching 40 million, California is known for its diversity. But it's not just the people; the industries are diverse as well....In contrast, more than 60 percent of the largest publicly traded Texas firms are tied to oil and gas....

...No state comes close to California in recognizing the peril of global warming and addressing it with policies that expand the opportunity to develop clean or alternative energy. Among the 127 North American companies in the Bloomberg Americas Clean Energy Index, 26 are based in California, with average revenue growth of 11 percent -- 2 percent more than the average for the rest of the sector across the continent. Texas has three companies in the group, with revenue growth of 2 percent. During the past 12 months, the clean energy companies based in California spent an average 25 percent of their revenue on research and development and a median of 16 percent. Non-California firms spent an average of 13 percent and a median of 1 percent.

The payoff for investors owning the shares of California clean energy companies is huge compared with returns from similar firms outside the state: An average gross margin of 42 percent, turning $100 of sales into $42 gross profit compared to a gross margin of 31 percent for non-California clean energy during the past 12 months. Analysts also say the shares of the California clean energy companies will gain 40 percent during the next 12 months compared with a predicted 23 percent for the non-California firms.

California's outstanding performance across so many metrics isn't a fluke -- if you ask Jerry Brown, the longest-serving governor of the state, now in his fourth term....

The California is not simply about governing Democratic principles and morals, it is about GETTING IT RIGHT.

Real Median Household Income in California (click here)

	2015	1 Year Change	3 Year Change
US	$55,775	+3.83%	+5.17%
California	$64,500	+4.02%	+7.12%

"Getting It Right" equates to a sustainable income. With the petroleum industry being 60 percent of Texas' publicly traded businesses, it is unsustainable and will fail far more often than succeeds.

Techys are nerds, they aren't died in the wool oppressors as Christian Conservatives are. Techys are from the culture that respects diversity while being respected as well. They 'live the life' and not just talk about it.

It all works. All of it.