gonewest

drift.jpg, originally uploaded by lordjoe.

A repost of some of my desert pix to flickr. Click the picture to go to the photo set.

Still testing flickr. Here is a link to a quick photo set I made of a visit to the San Diego Zoo last year.

Looking for a good way to deal with photos on this blog and am trying out flickr.

Seems like a reasonable option so far…

Do you know how long you work each day just to keep gas in your car? You can find out with this equation:

gastime = (price * distance) / (rate * mpg)

Where:

price is the price per gallon of gas.
distance is the total length of your daily commute.
rate is either your hourly wage or effective wage if you are salaried.
mpg is the miles per gallon that you can expect on the daily commute.
gastime is the number of hours each day you are working for your gas.

Lets say you make $40,000 per year (effective wage of $19.2/hour) and you drive 20 miles to work (40 miles round trip). Here are some sample gas times:

My guess is that our economy will break before we reach $10 gas without a large scale shift away from the auto-centric suburban culture that we have enjoyed for the past 2-3 generations and return to the well defined urban/rural divide that dominates most of American history.

Being a pedestrian oriented city slicker at heart, that is fine with me; but I think most Americans will have to be dragged away from Suburbia kicking and screaming — and the transition that we need to make soon will be more painful because of it.