Hmmm I was writing the other day about good vs crappy companies and realized I may have made my moral of the story a bit unclear. To clarify a bit: my point wasn't supposed to be that people prefer crappy companies. Rather it was that, given the implicit incentive structure, they should prefer crappy companies. And that people who understand money frequently do prefer crappy companies.

Since employees' own actions can make companies crappier, and potentially more lucrative, we've got a significant incentive for a slice of really good people to focus on finding the crappiest companies they can, and make them crappier, through taking outlandish risks and proposing highly lucrative compensation schemes.

By contrast, one of the things "well managed companies" do is manage compensation and stock price volatility. This benefits lifers and those who get to a very high level, but its a throwback to the "jobs for life" days. For most employees, since they have no job security and should have no belief in benefits contracted to be delivered in the future, they're better off taking the money now, and to hell with the company.

(I probably should've been clearer that I'm using "well managed" and "badly managed" here in the MBA/financial management sense. By this measure, IBM is well managed, and, say, Enron is badly managed. On more nebulous grounds, like people management or innovation or new product introduction or whatever, an entirely different list of firms might float to the top)

Again, what's the solution? Until owners get their eye on the ball, we should rationally all follow the bankers: when evaluating corporate alternatives, just take a crap.

Still getting lots of comments on yesterday's fine article - from "Did you really put that headline" to various furtive remarks about the crappy (and great…) companies people have worked for - so I thought I'd switch gears back to innovative stuff whilst those other thoughts simmer.

Speaking of slow simmering, in the spirit of innovation, I thought that I might mention one of the new cooking crazes around: cooking sous vide. This has been something avant guarde-ish chefs do to make their magic potions, but with some level of experiment has been brought into the realm of the home cook.

The concept works like this: rare steak (for example) is supposed to have an internal temperature of about 125F. To get this, we drop the meat on, say, an 800F grill, char the outside to 500F and hope the middle doesn't get about 125F. This creates a tasty experience, but, its not really a rare steak, and much of the meat has, technically, been ruined.

The sous vide cook overcomes this ghastly potentiality through the application of patience and technology. The steak is vacuum sealed in a plastic bag, and dropped in a water bath of about the temperature you want the food to get to - so, in this case, 125F. You then leave it there for as long as it takes for the whole steak to get to 125F.

After the requisite hours (yep, not minutes here), you pull out the flaccid meat, perfectly cooked to your liking, and eat away. Or, if the repulsive appearance overwhelms you, you sear the outside to make it look "right". You then serve to amazed guests, who openly admire your skill and secretly wonder why you were boiling the meat for hours.

I haven't tried this myself, but I've certainly eaten where sous vide is in fashion. For $90, you can get a timer to hook up to your trusty crock pot (you do have a crock pot, right?), allowing you to enjoy steak, poached eggs, steak and eggs, whatever, all sous vide for the holidays.

CookingSousVide.com appears to be a good resource here, with gizmos and cookbooks abounding.

Now I'll sit back and await my first invitation to a sous vide feast.

I wrote about pay a day or so ago (then got caught up in a long day with customers here in London so dropped the ball yesterday, for which I apologize). The comments (direct and offline) got me to thinking a little bit about pay in "well run" vs "badly run" companies. In the following, I'm really talking about medium to large companies, rather than startups or small businesses run for lifestyle or pure cash generation (vs large exits characteristic of the aim of start up companies).

I'll start with an assertion regarding large organizations: in general, people work to make money. Its true that people say things like "I love my job", or "I like what I do" (similar but not identical statements), but, in contrast to, say, leisure, I think few people even in the relatively higher ranks of large corporations are working for sheer joy. They're working for money. "Money, all things considered", perhaps (meaning "I need money and this is the best compromise I can find"), but money.

I know this is a bit heretical to say out loud, particularly in our culture of positivism. But I'm sticking with it.

So, given that you work for money, you're most likely to compare the job of Senior Vice President, Whiteboard and PowerPoint Productions, at Company A, with the job of Senior Vice President, Optimistic Internal Presentations and Meetings, at Company B, based on the probable return to you.

Company A says to you: "We pay double the industry average. And our stock is up 100% in the last year".

Company B says: "We're very well run. We're a hundred year old company and have never had any scandals or issues. We're cash rich. And we pay in the top quintile of our industry".

Company A's offer is $600K cash and 10000 shares, where the shares have to be held for three years. Company B offers $300K cash and 25000 shares, where the shares have to be held for six years. Both hold out the expectations of additional annual stock grants, on the same long term holding terms.

You research Company A. Its true their stock has doubled in the last year. But their stock is a roller coaster: it goes up 5x, then down 5x. Company B is solid: their stock varies about 10%.

Stories on "Excellence in Compensation" and "Excellence in Management" abound about Company B. Company A stories are all on "Company A: Disaster Again" or "The Reasons behind the recent stunning success of Company A" (depending where they were that day on the stock roller coaster).

The head hunter (you do use a head hunter don't you? Well, not if you're unemployed - see for example "Traditional search firms can take six months or more to fill a sudden vacancy, not least because they only look at people who already have jobs", but thats another story of absurdities) says to you "Company B is very very solid. Thats the play to make in the long run".

I say to you, my friend, "In the long run, we're all dead". You can pocket the cash from Company A today, and play the beta on their stock to make a lot more money. Company B will leave you with half the money, and few share gains.

This relates to my story on banker's pay how? Well, bankers work in the money business. They may be stupid, but they're not stupid about money. Running the company badly today pays them the most. If the company dies, so what? Even if their long term comp has shares at risk tied up, also so what? Some shares will have vested, a clever board room can announce bad news around share grant pricing day and good news around annual share vesting day, and everyone can make lots of money.

The sad story: the poor shareholder (unless the shares are in a bank. Then its "poor citizen", backstopping the losses of companies that are too big to fail).

The moral: until the normal employee (or even upper middle manager/exec as per the example above) is better rewarded at a well-run company than at a badly one run, people will should flock to the crappy ones for the cash.

This is a subject that seems to fascinate many these days, particularly those yearning after a few extra shekels themselves (which is I think everyone, but I don't want to rule out those virtuous monks or aid workers or others who may well have transcended materialism).

I was much swayed by an article (which I can't find…) arguing that buyers' price sensitivity decreases dramatically when they are engaging someone's services for a "rare" event. In other words, you're not looking for the discount i-banker for your IPO (or the discount wedding planner for your wedding, or the discount heart surgeon for your bypass), as you don't do a lot of them and feel the downside risk greatly outweighs to possibility of overpaying.

For these rare events, if they were like normal products, you'd carefully scrutinize Consumer's Reports (or whatever) and pay a premium to avoid failure. But for products like those above, which are difficult to rate and evaluate, we begin to pay a premium for reputation. "Brand" trumps all other elements, and disproportionate prices (and gains) accrue to those with the best brands. See Goldman Sachs

The same phenomenon might explain why individual bankers are paid so much by their companies. One might think that a company making outsized profits would continue to manage expense, including payroll, to drive up profits further and return more to shareholders. But banks seem to prefer to pay half their revenue as compensation, paying star employees a fortune.

In other sectors, like technology for example, businesses have really tended to do this only with long term compensation in the form of stock (biased heavily towards those who took the risk to join early, as well as, through vesting provisions, forcing many to stay longer), and cash compensation, direct as well as deferred like pensions, has been under considerable pressure. IBM, for example, downward revised its pension benefits multiple times over the past decade, citing competitive pressures. If the rules of banking applied, others would have improved their pensions instead, to compete for IBM talent.

So whats the difference? Like I said, perhaps the banks benefiting from brand in earnings are captive to brand in individual payouts. They're worried that customers are attracted to star employees Bob and Sally, not just the overall bank, and that Bob and Sally will take their customers with them to the next bank if they're not paid out enormously.

(See a related view here, arguing that banking products are commodities, so exceptional sales people are required. Not sure this convinces me why price competition is low, though)

Do I believe all this? Well, the alternative is a kind of conspiracy theory, where one assumes a sort of cartel meets agency risk type of nefarious collaboration inflating wages. That is, the CEO of Goldman figures his own bonus can be higher if others bonuses are also higher, and implicitly collaborates with other CEOs to do the same, thus failing in his supervisory (and fiduciary) duty to control expenses in the form of compensation.

I like that theory. But if its true, why don't CEOs in other industries do it too? Everywhere else, cutting payroll expense boosts return to shareholders and in turn boosts CEO comp.

As the foreclosed homeowner might ask, reading of record bonuses after banking bailouts and profit subsidies, why are bankers special?

I was thinking today about what people on the "left" and "right" tend to think. Here is my (reductionist and oversimplified) table:

So there is one point of agreement: foreigners are bad people harming America! :)

Leaving that alone and back to my real point: as I thought this through, what amazed me was less the the difference between "left" and "right", and more the way it seems that most people buy an entire column (source: Nigel's perception, no data here…). I wonder if this is because all the points in a particular column are supported by the same root theses (or, worse, axioms), or because people are practising "values tribalism" and clustering around those they agree with?

I flew over to the UK last night. I flew on points, as when I researched ticket prices (a month ago) even economy fares were something like $1500. So I paid 50k points plus $130 fee. I expected a packed plane.

Interestingly enough, the plane was empty!

I was surprised, as it seems to me that the airlines were among the first to employ peak load pricing. That is, they price stuff based on the demand for it at that minute, not some generalized expression of demand.

This is an excellent way for consumers and producers to find the "right" price, particularly if prices are reasonably transparent (as they are on airlines - on delta, for example, you can pull up a grid of prices plus or minutes a few days in the future for departure and arrival, and so look at twenty five or more prices at the same time).

So how did the airline manage to jack up the prices (ie responding to high demand), and get an empty plane?

The only thing I can thing of is the implicit collusion that often seems to accompany pricing in markets with high barriers to entry (cf gas prices, health insurance prices). Somehow these "fierce competitors" manage to price within a few dollars of each other, all the way across the board.

Of course, this is by accident! Anything else would be price fixing… And thats illegal.

Anyway, for this flight at least, it seems consumers responded rationally: they stayed home.

Perhaps we'll see tickets sold on eBay in the future, to get the exact best price for a given seat. But that will only happen in a world where competitors don't manage to come, simultaneously, to the exact same conclusions on how to price for non-existent scarcity to defend perceived value, or some other nebulous intangible thats different than "maximal value for current inventory".

I'll be interested to see the overall holiday flight stats when they're out. If they're down, I'll at least have the beginnings of a theory.

One of the toughest things in coming up with a new product is succinctly describing its benefits. Its simple to say its features ("thirty seven gizmos per button push"), but benefits - the why anyone cares part - its often very different than what the inventor considered.

Early today, I came across a pretty funny example of a benefit statement for Geely Scooters: "They are much quieter than a motorbike, more sedate perhaps, and you are just as likely to be female as male if you are riding one."

Pretty cool! Right now I have a 100% chance of being male, but apparently if I ride a Geely scooter, that'll go to 50%. With those odds, on average I'd get to experience being female every second day!

This is something Tiresias could really appreciate.

A few days ago I posted on the narrow tax base in New York. There was a little commentary on the Gini coefficient, and rather more on how we should bias votes by tax paid, or something like that. My general point was really "Wow we're becoming an unequal society, which is bad for everyone as it seems to exacerbate the booms and busts in the economic cycle".

Anyway, all this led me to offer my point on tax. At some level, one view of tax is that it is a compact between the members of society. In essence the poorest people say to the richest "We won't storm the barricades and kill you if you give us a few crumbs from the cake".

As America gets more unequal, the view here seems to be shifting to thinking that tax is a gift, where the rich people condescend to throw some charity to the poorest out of the goodness of their hearts. So stats on how few people are paying tax, rather than leading people to wonder "WOW why are so many people under the taxation income threshhold?", seem to lead people to wonder, "WOW why can't I have even more?"

To illustrate my point more thoroughly: imagine a society with a Gini coefficient of 1.0. That is, one person has everything and the rest have nothing. In our imaginary society, the ruler lives in a castle on a hill, surrounded by serfs farming his land, raising pigs. The ninety nine serfs own nothing, and the ruler lives in luxury off their efforts. Each serf raises a pig on behalf of the king, meaning there are ninety nine pigs in the land. The wealth of the nation is basically "Ninety nine pigs + one castle and belongings + ninety nine serfs and their huts".

Imagine the ruler at a dinner party, entertaining a visiting king, sipping champagne from the golden slipper of a dancing (serf) girl. The visitor proposes that he'd buy more of the pigs, if the king could get them there faster. The king then thinks "I'll build a new road. Then I can sell more!"

Swiftly, though, he becomes embittered. He already pays for everything in the society - he buys the pigs, he feeds the serfs, he pays for the banquets for visitors. Why shouldn't everyone pay their fair share of the road? There are one hundred people in the kingdom, so he proposes each person pay 1%.

To raise his 1%, the king has one less glass of champagne at one meal. The serfs each sell their prettiest daughter into slavery in neighboring kingdoms. The road gets built, and society is twice as rich from the resulting trade: there are now two hundred more pigs - one hundred and one equal to the value of the castle and huts (well, I made that up. Hey - I made the whole thing up!), and ninety nine pigs on top of the initial ninety-nine pigs. Our ruler is a happy guy, with his 299 pigs.

Of course, it being a society of perfect inequality, the richness benefit flows 100% to the king, and 0% to everyone else. The impact of the "tax" on him was hardly noticeable, whereas it caused extreme duress to his subjects, and they benefited in no way. He congratulates himself on his business acumen, and marvels at how fair taxation has unleashed growth.

Perhaps the beleaguered peasants, bereaved from the heavy price they've paid, revolt and slay our despot. Perhaps instead they propose, "Why don't you pay 70%, give us each one pig, and we'll pay the other 30% next year, at tax return time?"

On this basis, the king would only get 200 pigs right away, and another 33 the next year. He also had to forgo 70 glasses of champage, as he paid 70% rather than 1%.

What does the king do? Obviously, he joins the Heritage Foundation, and argues how unfair taxation has harmed growth, impacted his business results by 23%, and decimated his champagne inventory.

What do the peasants do? Rejoicing in their new pigs - almost 0.7 pigs per person by the end of the year, vs 0.0 pigs the previous year - they send that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin guy packing, telling him to check in next year.

Periodically, I'm going to take a look a different new ideas that are great, funny, bizarre, stupid, crazy or otherwise stand out. I'll let it be an exercise left for the reader which of the above categories the following falls into.

Recently in Fortune Small Busines (no link as they are apparently out of business… Is this a sign?), I read about a few different entrepreneurs and their successes and challenges. Try as I might, the one that I cannot get out of my memory is Batter Blaster, the spray-on pancake.

Yep. Spray on pancake.

The batter comes in a container like whipped cream, and you spray it into the pan and make your pancakes. Its $3.99 and Fortune Small Business reported their last full year revenue as $15M.

Not sure I want to comment on what selling millions of cans of sprayable pancakes during a recession means about society. (Remember, this product saves you the onerous task of mixing and egg and milk into some pancake batter). But it is an interesting example of a kind of innovation: repackaging something pre-existing in a way that makes it more accessible, convenient, fun, whatever is appealing to consumers.

Many high tech innovations follow this same curve. Usenet begat Compuserve begat Geocities, which begat Friendster, then Myspace, then Facebook. Functionally, these communities aren't that different from one another, but they're different enough in form (as well as, to be fair, the time and intent around their roll outs) to get dramatically different results.

Facebook: The Spray On Pancake of Our Time

Thats my story, and, presumably unlike non-stick spray-on pancakes, I'm sticking to it.

In the few years I've been running liketribe and now Nigel Beck LLC, I've been compelled to work more closely with banks than one does as a "mere" employee. This is nothing fancy, not even something as mundane as the (apt) discussions about credit squeezing small businesses. My primary issue today is simply how inefficient US banks are.

Its amazing to me that cheques (thats Canadian for "checks") are held for so long before they're cleared. Looking at the Federal reserve regulations, "non-local" cheques (the slowest ones to clear) must be available by the fifth business day after deposit, and "exceptional circumstances" (defined by Regulation 229.13) allow a non-local cheque to be held for another six business days, for a total of eleven business days.

Now, that same Regulation 229.13 allows the bank to extend clearing past eleven business days for "emergency conditions". A war or a catastrophic power failure is an example of an emergency condition.

So I looked back at my experience depositing cheques over the past year or so. Depositing a Canadian cheque into my US bank account has taken as long as thirty three business days to clear. Thirty three days! Clearly, a cheque from a Canadian bank (rated #1 in the world for soundness, compared to the US banks at #40) counts on the level of an emergency, like war.

Interesting. In 2008, Canada-US bilateral trade was almost $600B. Thats as much trade as US trade with China and Japan combined, and 25% more than the combined trade of the top six nations of the EU with the US.

So can clearing a cheque from Canada be as unusual and dramatic as a war, requiring more than a month for a modern, highly electronic institution like a bank, where trades are routinely made electronically in subsecond timeframes?

Consider another, more common kind of cheque - a non-local cheque being held for five to eleven business days. Eleven business days means a cheque deposited on a Tuesday, the 1st of December, will clear on December 16th.

Thats exactly one pay period for businesses paying people on a normal semi-monthly basis. In fact, its one day AFTER a normal business would have to pay salary. Its so slow that you could board a cruise ship, stopping in London, Invergordon, Lerwick, Reykjavik, Nuuk, Halifax, and Boston, and still arrive before the cheque clears.

No wonder credit availability constrains small businesses. I wonder what percentage of operating loans exist to cover business operations while waiting for cheques to clear (as opposed to waiting for them to arrive)?

If Brazilians have experienced clearing all cheques in twenty four hours for more than a decade, surely the US, with the most advanced economy in the world, the greatest inventors of IT, the most widespread users of IT, could manage the same? Well, in fact, it gets better: it turns out the US banks have invested in this, in the form of the Check 21 system that accelerates clearing cheques. Note the definition:

Because of Check 21 and other check-system improvements, your checks may be processed faster–which means money may be deducted from your checking account faster

The investment in "faster", it seems, means "taken out of your account faster". For "faster" as in "put into your account faster", the consumer shall, I suppose, continue to wait.

Or move to Brazil.

I've been using twitter (or more actually, a member of twitter) since the early days when it seemed nobody used it. I was certainly one of the "nobodies" - I didn't really get it, and was especially irked by how popular something so stupid seemed to be getting, at least among insiders, especially when it didn't even work very well.

A few years on, I must say I'm a convert. I like the way its asymmetrical (unlike, eg, Facebook), so we don't have to both be friends for one of us to follow what the other says. More than that, I like the way they've opened up the API so that I can access my stuff however I like, even if its differently that how you get yours. I prefer tweet.im, for example, as I'm an IM kinda guy. When I want noise, I can turn on IM and get a stream of twitter updates in real time, as well as other messages. Turn off IM = no noise. I don't need to consciously go to twitter and see whats up, I just get it.

Perhaps thats the summary. Maybe I'm a little slow, a little jealous. But, slowly, finally, I'm starting to get it…

The Copenhagen summit starts tomorrow, the virtuous Danes are powering their nation with wind and converting to electric cars, the Danish prostitutes have graciously consented to extend their hospitality free of charge… and many in mainstream American politics are debating whether America should take part in any deal whatsoever. How could such rudeness be extended to nice people like the Danes?

On a serious note,its seems American reluctance stems from many fronts, but one oft repeated question is the "is it really getting warmer" one. I like the position noted in this week's Economist. The range of climate change this century is unknown and much debatable, but is likely somewhere from 1.1C to 6.4C. At 1.1C, we all get a little more sun. At 6.4C, c'est la déluge.

So, as Lenin said once, what is to be done? It seems about 1% of global GDP would mitigate the risk, be it sun burn or Apocalypse. Compared to 5% of global GDP to rein in the havoc caused by the bankers, this seems like a pretty good deal to me.

And what if all the scientists are wrong? Well, first, it seems unlikely that 6.5 billion people burning stuff all day and night to generate warmth and electricity and drive their cars isn't doing anything, given that the odd volcanic eruption (like Krakatoa) managed to cool the earth for a year or so. In 1800, there were a billion people on earth, no cars, ships sailed instead of burning diesel, and yet the coal burning in London was enough to create a state of continual fog. Probably, my layman's common sense thinks, our vastly greater consumption of energy, across the globe, by a population already more the six times as big, and headed to ten times as big, is warming things up at least a bit.

Second, this looks to me like simple risk management. Your neighbor probably won't smoke in bed and burn your house down, but, in case he or she does, you maintain fire insurance and contribute to the existence of a local fire department.

So, even if the nice photos of the melting ice caps and stranded polar bears, viewed from the cool mid-century modern Jacobsen furniture in Copenhagen, didn't win me over, I guess I'd have to think of it as prudent risk management: cut emissions, make the world a little less gross, hedge against The End, and make the Danes feel cool.

Skål!

I was looking around at some statistics today in connection with something else (in fact, in connection with a blog entry I was writing about people not siting the facts, which I then couldn't find!), and came across some interesting stuff in the Pew Global Attitudes Project Pulse On Europe report.

Its interesting to look at what people say they believe on a couple of questions and compare them. Of course, people have no obligation to be internally consistent, but I thought a comparison of answers on "Was life better under communism?" and "Are you satisfied with life?" to be kind of interesting.

To be fair, the periods under comparison - 1991 and 2009 - are both after the end of communism. One could argue that 1991 though at least reflected some of the infrastructure, social mores, lifestyle, etc that had been built up in the communist era, and so is a passable proxy for how people might have felt at least within a few years of the end of communism.

Picking Russia as an example, 7% of people said they were satisfied with life in 1991, vs 35% now. Yet 60% think life now is worse or the same as under communism! So they're much more satisfied now, although life is much worse….

Hungary is another interesting example. Only 8% of Hungarians were satisfied with life in 1991, and only 15% now. (Gloomy place, this Hungary…). Unsurprisingly then, 88% say that life now is worse or the same as under communism. Even though they're twice as satisfied, since they're generally downbeat, I suppose thinking some other condition was better kind of makes sense. Interestingly, though, 42% of them think Russia's influence on Hungary was negative, and only 15% think it was positive.

But 72% of people say they're worse off than under communism. Which came from Russia. Which was a negative influence.

People's views don't always make sense. Certainly these ones, at least as asked and as I've summarized them, don't make sense at first view. Perhaps the most telling fact is this: 54% of Hungarians and 60% of Russians think success in life is determined by factors outside our control (compared to 29% of Americans). Certainly that perspective would make one view other periods in history as better than today, and outsiders as being the problem.

Today I noticed this (courtesty @fredwilson): "Mayor Bloomberg at the NYSE this morning: 5,000 of the 8mm NYers pay 30pcnt of NYC taxes"

This is a stunning statistic. Its probably what the tax base would have looked like in the Gilded Age, if they'd had taxes (or at least income taxes).

Some may view this as a point that the wealthy pay too much tax. I view it more that a larger and larger percentage of the wealth is in the hands of the few (especially since the top marginal tax rate has roughly been cut in half since 1980 - the only way the take could have gone up is a vast increase in wealth at the top). In "The Crash of 1929", JK Galbraith (writing in 1955) identified this as one of the five causes of the Great Depression.

Why? Poor people have very little discretionary income, so their spending fluctuates very little. When a large amount of wealth is held by a very small number of people, the majority of the discretionary spending, and hence the spending fluctuations in the economy, comes from the actions of a few. If those few feel lucky, we get thousands of Bulgari outlets soaking up their spending. When those few are hit, they stop spending and the economy as a whole screeches to a halt.

Hopefully today's job loss numbers (downward revised, and "only" 10K jobs lost in November) and Case-Schiller index (3% house price increases) mean we're not going to be riding the rails in search of work. Galbraith's analysis, though, is still worth thinking about as we find our way out of recession and debate various public policies.

Not sure if its high oil prices, consumer pressure, the collapse of the auto industry, or government subsidies, but green car news seems to be inundating me these days. Since I live, car-less, in Manhattan, my interest in these areas for the moment is rather more prurient than practical; however, a number of things caught my eye today.

First is this: a regular Ford Focus getting 62mpg! By "regular", I mean no hybrid technology, not even diesel, just a highly tuned gas engine. It seems there is hope in that old gasoline stuff yet….

Second thing: the green car of the year is the Audi A3 TDI: 40/52 mpg. Not bad and certainly Prius-competitive - and, again, relatively old style technology: a tuned small diesel.

These kinds of cars are great for today's consumer to get to lower consumption without low luxury/high prices (per my friend @dangreenberg's comments). My heart, however, wants to be free from dead dinosaurs and experience the quiet guiltless glide of electricity. Short of shelling out $100k+ for a Tesla, I think the upcoming BlueCar from Pininfarina is the way to go. It has that Euro-metro look, but with some funky features. I can readily imagine zipping around town (or, more likely, around Rhode Island where I spend as much of the summer as I can) in one of these. I think they're Europe only in the forecast 2011 release, but if my fortunes drift me to spending more time in Europe, I want one of these parked somewhere near by!

Of course, the great conundrum remains the sex appeal of the traditional engine. As a motorcyclist, I'm well aware of the role that plays in vehicle marketing strategies. Why else would the exist? When we see Arnie in the BlueCar instead of converting his Hummer to hydrogen, we'll know we're really on the road to change…

I've been thinking a lot about electric vehicles these days. While the Tesla is incredibly exciting, news like this really caught my eye: almost 200 mile range for vehicles in the price range of "normal" people.

While this is still not the vehicle for a road trip, that kind of range obviates the infrastructure problems of charging almost completely for normal use. I spoke with a bunch of Tesla drivers at an event here in New York City, for example, and with their 244 mile range, none of the owners thought that charging or infrastructure was an issue at all. Admittedly a $100K+ sports car is for most a second car with different usage patterns, but most of the owners drove their cars year round, to work, to their country houses, etc and didn't have an issue.

Imagine: driving around in 200 mile range electrics, and taking trips by train (plus rental electric on the other end?). Oh yeah - charging by wind/solar/etc.

Some days I think we'll actually get there.

The Times just published an interesting article (thanks, @thegoodhuman!) on green hypocrisy: those who tell us how we should reduce our emissions while consuming more - even vastly more - than average people do.

The article raises some interesting points and also, I think, concludes well. Its probably difficult to be a global campaigner for something-or-rather without actually traveling the globe, though one could probably usually do it without a private plane. That travel in itself will raise one's emissions to dramatically more than the average. Maybe buying carbon offsets is enough to offset your emissions… but its hardly the message of "painful change" that these spokespeople often preach.

Perhaps we can't all be as virtuous as Woody Harrelson and Ed Begley Jr seem to be. At the very least, celebs might publish a green audit like Prince Charles, showing that they're taking their own emissions in the right direction (and not just because of offsetting them).

Now I'm off to go study my own emissions…. Gulp!