Book Of Norm

According to population estimates, today is the day that the 7 billionth person (currently alive) will be born. It is a staggering number.

The US auto industry is known for big cars, and big car companies. Unlike the UK (where the big car companies went under due to unions and excessive government interference.... sound familiar?), the US has never had much of a tradition of niche car manufacturing. While we have long had volume tuners (Saleen, Shelby etc), they take cars which are already registered and tune them to within an inch of the law. We have never had the little production companies which characterize the nature of the UK car industry.  Until now: (from autoblog) "Low volume vehicle manufacturers may soon find it easier to have their products approved by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Congressman John Campbell (R-Calif.) has introduced the "Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturer's Act," which aims to introduce a regulatory system specifically designed for companies that build fewer than 1,000 vehicles per year. Currently, it's difficult for boutique carmakers to...

Bad kitty The new Fisker Karma has been rated a... subcompact by the EPA. This, despite the fact that it is 16.5ft long and weighs 5,300lbs... for comparison, that is a foot LONGER and almost the same weight as my '96 Chevy Tahoe... The hilarious part is, that this govt. funded savior of the environment only gets... 20mpg, when it is running on gas. It can go about 40 miles on electric power - which means like all these range extended vehicles - real world mileage will vary. If you commute 10 miles to work... great. If you take this thing on the highway... you would have been better off getting a Corvette, because that gets 26mpg highway. Oh yeah, and it's actually a sports car, not an something which can get beat by an old Buick (the Karma only has 175hp to move that ton of mass around). Called it

Read this (if you haven't yet) then get pissed off, then come back here. From the start: "I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched." My answer? Fuck you. If you and your "mega-rich friends" wanted to pay more taxes, do you know what you could do? Any ideas genius? You could PAY MORE TAXES. The IRS has been accepting checks since 1965. You could give them everything you have, if you think you really should be taxed more. Nothing is holding you back asshole, put your money where your mouth is. But no, this is the reality: He says he pays a 17% effective tax rate. First of all, fuck you, because I pay higher taxes than that, so it is not a matter with the tax code, the problem is that you are spending millions on lawyers to HIDE YOUR INCOME FROM THE IRS. If you really believed you should be taxed more, maybe you should not hide your income? Dipshit. Secondly, a lot of his income actually ...

The Amazon Kindle Fire and new line of cheap Kindles have been a huge success (this is not really surprising, considering they cost about 30-40% less than the competition, and they are really nice products). The company said that sales have from by 44%, and that last month it had its "biggest order day ever for Kindle, even bigger than previous holiday peak days." In other words, Amazon is kicking ass, taking names, and making other players in "the space" a wee be anxious . And because of that, Amazon's shares are... down 12% Analysts are idiots is the short answer as to why this happened. Because Amazon is selling the hardware at a loss, they saw only one number - Amazon missed its quarterly earnings target. And because of that, they hammered the stock. This is so amazingly stupid, I can barely believe it. Amazon is clearly going after an install base, using price as a hammer to knock Apple's overpriced iPad off its pedestal -- something Motorola,...

As I reported a long time ago, the US govt should never have been in the business of making large and risky loans to companies based purely on the sunshine coming out of their ass. The failure of Solyndra finally has people talking about one of the other terrible loans we made to appease Obama's whims: namely the totally stupid loan we gave to Fisker so that they could develop and build a wildly overpriced hybrids sports car. We gave over $500MM to a company with no history, no proven management, no factory, and not even a terribly innovative product. Why did we do this??? Well, now it has all of a sudden become a big thing to talk about how the Karma is not even being built in this country..... but actually, that was in the business plan when we loaned them the money. The truth is that the amount of money to start a real mass market car company these days is more or less obscene, as brand, dealerships and govt regulations all play their part. The most recent estimate I heard ...

Scary article from The Atlantic on how the TSA is now moving into patrolling our streets (because clearly - they have done such a good job with the airports)... What scares me the most is the attitude of those currently in postitions of power in this country - everything that we do is seen as a privilege, not a right, and they believe the government has the right to "inform" the people as to what their opinions should be. Mission Creep: This Tennessee Highway Is Now Patrolled by TSA OCT 24 2011, 9:25 AM ET   9 Despite billions spent on airport security, federal bureaucrats have escaped the terminal. Is your 4th Amendment safe? Most air travelers now endure naked scans or genital pat-downs by gloved agents of the government without surprise or complaint. But before invasive security became normal, there was a backlash. And at its height, Transportation Security Administration boss John Pistole said something revealing. "I see flying as a privilege that is ...

Yes - what this is saying is that people are licensing FROM Microsoft so that they can continue producing Android devices. Turns out that the big 'ol boy has a few patents on this little thing called "an operating system" and they are none to please about the Android model of open source copying/duplication. 

Was reading Autoblog, and interestingly, these two came up one below another (see below). The interesting part to me is that, yes, the McLaren is an amazing car... but it's only 20 seconds faster round the 'ring than... a Camaro... I mean, the Corvette has long been a giant slayer, especially the Z06 and then ZR1. But the Camaro? Welcome to the big leagues. I am genuinely impressed with what the latest crop of American muscle cars gets you. From the 300hp, 30mpg $25,000 mustang up to this ($65,000???) beast, you get one hell of a lot for your money. On a related note - my hat goes off to GM for understanding - finally - that "driving excitement" means handling well, as well as horsepower. 2012 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 specs divulged By  Zach Bowman RSS feed Posted Oct 24th 2011 1:01PM 7 1 Comments 22 General Motors  has been noticeably tight-lipped about the specifications for its  2012 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 , leaving enthusiasts to s...

It's a funny thing, car design. Over the past few years, if you looked at the work of many top students, you would see a recurring theme of amazing (or atrocious) looking concepts all made possible by having their electric motors built right into the wheels. Turns out that Audi have been playing around with that design, and... it sucks. First of all, even just in terms of design, there is too much unsprung weight. It's like trying to walk in ski boots. Or dance in ski boots for that matter (not recommended) . But then the real world also kicks in. Turns out that having the motor in the hub is not a good thing when it cones to durability... basically, every little bump gets pounded right into your motive force. And if you get low profile tires... Score one for front and mid engined cars. Internal combustion may be doomed, but it'll put up a hell of a fight.

Deal structure should always be tied to financing structure and strategy. Don't buy a getaway car with your credit card.

What happened in Ohio wasckearly very sad. I am not going to say the police did anything wrong on this one, it was a tough situation. However, this is what really gets me: they now estimate there are 50,000 tigers living in the Us. WTF??? Where the hell are these 50,000? And who is keeping them? Surely we only have 1000-2000 drug lords, a couple hundred Russian mobsters, a handful of athletes dumb enough to do this, and one Mike Tyson... but where the hell are the other 48,000 coming from? Are there regular people out there keeping these things as pets? They say the problem is that they are given as pets when they are "small" but then they grow up to be... well.. freaking lions (I know, who could've seen that one coming?). That 50,000 is far more than there are in the wild (thought to be about 32k). Which means if you want to see a lion, forget Africa, head to Georgia.

Foambot Creates Itself Out of Sprayable Foam, Becoming Whatever Robot You Need - http://pulse.me/s/2qxI0

From an interview with Juan Enriquez, a writer, investor, and managing director of Excel Venture Management: One concern about human enhancement is that only some people will have access, creating an even greater economic divide. Do you think this will be the case? In the industrial revolution, it took a lifetime to build enough industry to double the wealth of a country. In the knowledge revolution, you can build billion-dollar companies with 20 people very quickly. The implication is that you can double the wealth of a country very quickly. In Korea in 1975, people had one-fifth of the income of Mexicans, and today they have five times more. Even the poorest places can generate wealth quickly. You see this in Bangalore, China. On the flip side, you can also become irrelevant very quickly. Scientists are on the verge of sequencing 10,000 human genomes. You point out this might highlight significant variation among our species, and that this requires some ethical considerati...

Nope, not talking about "fog of war" or "I can't think of any damn thing because I have no idea which way up is" or even "I can't see right now because of this freaking sun in my window" I am talking about water, in space. A lot of water. Enlarge Close Astronomers have found a massive water vapor cloud, floating around a black hole in the universe, marking the largest discovery of water -- anywhere.The reservoir is gigantic, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth's oceans, residing 10 billion light years away. 140 trillion times. You are going to need some really good windshield wipers on that space shuttle of yours. The amazing thing to me is that this is still water in space. It makes no sense. Everything we know about space says... there is no water floating around.. some ice, sure, but no water. Water is meant to be special, rare, uncommon. There's water vapor in the Milky Way, alt...

Turns out, yet again, that genetics is more complicated than we once thought. According to new research... well, read on:  The findings, published online today in  Nature , present a modern-day version of  Lamarckian inheritance , in which acquired characteristics can be passed to offspring without changes to the genetic code. Marks of Methuselah:  Glowing regions show chemical marks on the genome of C. elegans  identical to those in ancestors with life-span-increasing mutations—even though this descendant lacks the mutation. Travis J. Maures BIOMEDICINE Worm Offspring Inherit Longevity Even without the Genes Worms given life-span-enhancing mutations produce offspring that lack the responsible genes but live longer anyway. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2011 BY SHARON BEGLEY Audio » Although much more research remains to be done, the new study raises the tantalizing possibility that if Grandma practiced caloric restriction—which affects the express...