If I saw this being executed I would want to grab onto to the back of the boat to see if I could get the Taurus’s drive wheels off the ground… That would probably surprise the hell out of the driver.
Picture was taken in Kentucky…
Color me surprised.
It isn’t uncommon for me to hear people rave about the British TV show Top Gear, the “award winning car show.” But in the few times I have watched clips, I have failed to see what the fuss is about. What I have typically seen is a show where they go out of their way to be unimportantly correct. For example, this clip [thanks Fark]where it’s claimed that “Prius More Enviromentally Damaging Than BMW M3.”
In the clip, they compare fuel economy of a Prius driven at top speed with that of an M3 that followed it around. The test isn’t remotely fair and leaves false impressions. But eventually they get to the bottom line that “[i]t isn’t what you drive that matters, it’s how you drive it.” They cleared up false impressions by lying. The real bottom line, of course, is that it’s both what you drive and how you drive it that matters. Smart as dipsticks those Top Gear hosts.
Interesting
More than half of patients on Benlysta in the double-blind randomized trials showed significant improvement in symptoms in a year, compared with 44 percent of those on a placebo, according to the company that developed the drug, Human Genome Sciences. HGS is sharing development and marketing rights to the drug with GlaxoSmithKline.
…
Experts caution the reported results haven’t been published or reviewed by independent researchers.
What does it say about a disease and its treatment when the placebo is 44% effective?
[Source: Tulsa World]
Sucks for Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President [My comments in italics]:
The “Cash for Clunker” program… has boosted month-to-month auto sales nationally by 2.4%, emptying lots at Dallas car dealerships [Two percent. Really? REALLY? All this hoopla over a 2% increase?], and prompting Ford factories in Detroit to do something they haven’t done in years: scramble to raise production to catch up with demand [A scramble for a 2% increase. Riiiight.].
But even with this welcomed jump in auto sales, the story told by July’s retail sales numbers was that not even Cash for Clunkers has been enough to keep retail sales in the black. After making gains in May and June, national retail sales trends reversed in July and fell 0.1% [Maybe those people buying cars weren't able to buy other things because, ya know, they had to buy cars NOW NOW NOW while Uncle Sugar was waiting to help pay the bill.].
Earlier this week, I called on Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu to create a Cash for Clunkers program for urban America, one that transforms the Department’s appliance rebate program into a mirror-image of the successful program for cars.
About that “successful” thing:
Hundreds of auto dealers in the New York area have withdrawn from the government’s Cash for Clunkers program, citing delays in getting reimbursed by the government, a dealership group said Wednesday.
The Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, which represents dealerships in the New York metro area, said about half its 425 members have left the program because they cannot afford to offer more rebates. They’re also worried about getting repaid.
“(The government) needs to move the system forward and they need to start paying these dealers,” said Mark Schienberg, the group’s president. “This is a cash-dependent business.”
[...]
Schienberg said the group’s dealers have been repaid for only about 2 percent of the clunkers deals they’ve made so far.
I’d like to thank my GM dealer, Alexandria Buick Pontiac GMC for the following:
Don’t worry Alexandria Buick Pontiac GMC, I will never come back again so long as I live.
My first thought is whether it might be fair to compare some of the proposed reforms to the No Child Left Behind Program. I’m not expert in the ways of NCLB, and I’m not bothering to look things up here, I’m just thinking out loud, but the summary is that it:
I think the first three bullets (or at least the first half of the first one and the next two) align with health reform proposals. It then seems to reason that there’s a good chance that we’d end up with the bottom two points. Oh, and of course many already agree that the whole program is in need of “revision.”
My second thought revolves around the tiresome argument that we ought to enact reforms merely because other countries do it. The bottom line is that we are not other countries. As others have pointed out, we have individual states with GDPs in excess of these other countries to which we are being compared. I think that Japan is the largest country with the everyone-insured/more-socialized health care model. The US is at least 2X Japan in population and I don’t even know how many times more diverse we are. The US is nearly 4X bigger than Germany, and nearly 5X bigger than France or Great Britain. The point here, and my belief, is that as the population its diversity increase, it becomes more difficult to find a workable solution. Maybe I would be more impressed if Europe were forced to pick on single model to apply to their entire citizenry. But they don’t. They keep things relatively local, as I believe it should be done. There, that’s my “here’s what other people do and we should do it too” argument.
