Congresswoman Gifford from Tucson, along with other victims, has been shot by what appears to be a lone loony. Our thoughts and prayers to those who were shot and their families.

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Ford is coming out with a new electric Focus, which they claim will be competitive with the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf in both range and cost.  So we’re looking at $32k+ for a compact car that can go 50 to 100 miles before requiring charging.  Add to that the $1500 cost of having a 240 volt charging station at your home, and we’re looking at about $34k for what most people consider a starter or commuter car.

There are places and people for whom I can see that this technology will work.  These are primarily young people or couples without kids, as long as they don’t live in an apartment where there isn’t a place to put the charging station.  Having raised a kid with a small car, I can tell you that putting a backwards facing car seat in a car as small as a Focus is less than fun.   My expectation is that small families will not tend to buy small electric Focuses, and that demographic is a huge portion of the American auto market.

In addition, paying almost twice the price of a conventional Focus for an electric model doesn’t make economic sense.  The cost of the vehicle is not made up by savings on fuel. Let’s assume that the owner will drive the car enough that it requires at least some recharging every day.  Let’s say that it costs $2 a day on average to charge the car.  That’s $14 a week, or about $580 a year for electricity.  Let’s assume $200 a year in maintenance after the first year, which is a complete SWAG for that cost.  I have no real idea how much it will cost to maintain and repair this new battery technology at a dealership.  If a consumer drives the car for 5 years, that comes to $2900 for electricity, and $800 for maintenance.  So, in 5 years, the driver of an electric Focus will spend  $3700 above and beyond the initial cost of $34000 for his Focus, for a grand total of about $38000 for the privilege of driving an electric starter car.

Now let’s look at someone one who purchases a conventional Focus.  The MSRP for such a vehicle is between $16,600 and $19,600, so we’ll split the difference and say our consumer spends $18,100 for his brand spanking new 2011 Ford Focus.  The Ford Focus has a 13 gallon gas tank, which for the sake of the argument we’ll say the owner runs almost dry before filling once per week.  If gas averages $3 a gallon for regular gas, that’s $39 a week for fuel, or $2028 a year for fuel.  Over the course of our 5 year ownership, that comes to $10,140 for fuel.  We’ll average $200 a year for maintenance on our vehicle, for an additional $1000 in costs over the life of the vehicle.  We include it in the first year because the consumer is going to have to change oil and filters and such during the first year, while I expect that the electric model won’t require much maintenance in the first year.  So we pay $18,1000 for the car to begin with, $10,140 for fuel, and $1000 for upkeep, for a grand total of $29,240 for a conventional Focus.

The difference in our back of the hand calculations, which don’t take into account licensing and depreciation, is $8760.  It costs almost $9000 dollars above and beyond the cost of a conventional Focus to drive an electric Focus.

What our electric Focus driving consumer is paying for is for being an early adaptor.  Early adaptors always pay through the nose for their designation of being ahead of the power curve.  Be it people who bought Pentiums when 486 was all the rage, had cell phones in 1993, or buy electric vehicles before the technology is mature and can be produced as cheaply as internal combustion vehicles, they’re going to pay and pay handsomely.

Eventually, when enough early adopters have bought their electric vehicles, enough manufacturers may begin cranking out electric vehicles in enough numbers that prices will begin coming down due to competition and economy of scale.  But that time is still to come, and may be a way off.  There are several competing technologies, all of which are less than a decade old at best.  There is much revolution to come in electric vehicles before the demographic of small families can afford to own one as easily as they can afford to own a conventionally powered vehicle.

As someone who would like nothing more than to cut the automotive market out of the imported petroleum equation so we can tell the 3rd world pushers who sell us our black smack to kiss off, and someone who realizes that no matter how many doodads the EPA has us bolt onto our exhaust systems, our cars are a significant creator of air pollution, I look forward to a time when electric vehicles are economically viable and are as common as internal combustion cars.  But that time is not now, and until the technology matures and becomes much cheaper, it won’t be for a while.

If you’ve got little kids, good luck getting this one out of your head:

What wine goes with Captain Crunch? – George Carlin

The FDA has as part of its mission a responsibility to promote U.S. agriculture
The FAA has a similar responsibility to  promote the U.S. aerospace industry.

Why doesn’t the ATF have a responsibility to promote the U.S. booze, tobacco, and guns industries?

There is a direct inverse relationship between the temperature and amount of ambient outdoor light and the chance of an electrical problem in my home.

Ah, the joys of living in a 65 year old house.  You never know what’s going to break, and there are so many things that can go wrong that troubleshooting can be an endless chain of trial and error.

Last night, about an hour after dark and as the temperature was headed south of freezing, most of the lights in the house flickered, died, and then came back on very dimly.  Checking and flipping circuit breakers did nothing to alleviate the situation.  Based on a hunch, I switched out each of the breakers in the box (yes, I have a lot of spares), but nothing seemed to work.  After a  while, we noticed that the house was getting chilly.  The gas fire in the furnace was coming up due to the thermocouple, but the blower motor wasn’t getting enough juice to run.

After a few hours of fruitless effort, I figured out that if I pulled several of the circuit breakers, the circuits that ran the lights in the main part of the house and the refrigerators would come up at 100%.  After that we decided to wait until morning and call an electrician.   We built a fire, made sure the kids were in their warmest pajamas, and broke out the extra blankets.  Over the night it got quite chilly but the fire kept the the house livable.   Irish Woman and I took turns staying awake as a fire watch.

This morning, a quick call to my brother-in-law to get the name of a good electrician pointed me to calling the power company.  LG&E came out and diagnosed the issue with one look at the connection to the house.  The coupling where the line from the pole attached to the house were corroded, loose, and burned black.   A quick trip up the ladder and the lineman had replaced them.  After putting the breakers back in and and flipping them back on, everything came up, including the furnace.

So we got lucky.  Hopefully our electrical service will be more reliable.  Heaven knows how long those connectors had been up there.  It’s just dumb luck that the problem was fixed before they burned through and a live wire was dancing across my roof.

But all’s well that ends well.  On a plus side, just in case LG&E or an electrician couldn’t fix it today, I spent half the morning splitting firewood, so we have enough for several days all stacked up and ready to go.

The rest of my day is going to be spent in front of a warm fire, watching Netflix movies, drinking cold beer, and watching the cats and dogs snore.

The probability that you will have car trouble when trying to leave for work is directly related to the temperature outside.  This phenomenon is enhanced with a direct relationship between how dirty your engine block is and how nicely you dressed for work.

When the time comes for me to finally get rid of this mini-van, I’m not going to trade it in.  I’m taking it out to the range, filling it with tannerite targets, and shooting at it with my 91/30 until it is a puddle of burning metal.

There are few feelings better than when a bureaucrat admits that you are more stubborn than they are and quits resisting your efforts at efficiency.

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H/T to Merlin on this one:

Lesson 6
Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don’t think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don’t look like that.  Do the following:

1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment.
2. Leave it there.
3. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.
4. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.
5. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Substitute BMW for F-150, and you’ve got my take on it.   Of course, he forgot the mention the twelfth lesson:  Look forward to the day you look in the mirror while shaving and realize you have as much gray hair as you remember your father having.

I’m armed and I’m proud!

Finished listening to the latest BB & Guns podcast.  The lovely Breda and JayG discussed how they approach letting people know that they are gunnies.  The callers added in their own two cents, and I have to say that I agreed with everyone for the most part.

I’m not a gun nut.  I’m certainly not a collector.  I can count the number of guns I own on both hands, barely.  I stack the ammunition deep because I’m a cheap bastard and buy in bulk as much as I can, not because I’m getting ready for the revolution.  I don’t lust after the newest hotness from Ruger, KelTec, or the sundry AR-15 vendors.  I do admire the craftsmanship of a well turned out firearm, especially antiques, but I doubt I’ll ever have enough disposable income to invest in collector grade firearms.

But I am a shooter.  Luckily for me, my work environment has a lot of shooters in it.  One of my shooting buddies is my manager, and there are at least 10 hunters and recreational shooters within a stones throw of my cubicle.  Kentucky in general seems to be pretty OK with people owning and legally carrying guns.  One of the benefits of living in fly-over country, I guess.

Outside of work, Irish Woman’s Indiana family is definitely pro-gun.  At the annual Hoosier Roundup, almost all of the campers and trucks have at least one NRA sticker on them.  We spend the late summer talking about prospects for hunting, and the Christmas party is heavily leavened with hunting stories from the deer season.  One brother-in-law in particular has introduced me to several of the gun stores in Indiana, and when he can make the long drive down he joins us at Knob Creek.

The other side of Irish Woman’s family, on the other hand, is much more mixed when it comes to guns.  With the exception of one brother, the rest of the family is thoroughly steeped in the left-wing doctrine of the “Only Ones,” where only the police and military need access to firearms.  When Irish Woman let slip that I had purchased a shotgun, there were actually members of her family who advised her to get out of our home for her own safety.  Amazingly enough, I’ve never told these relatives that I have, on occasion, come to their homes either with a gun in my pocket, or at least a gun in the glove compartment.  Heaven forfend that they should learn that I am taking my daughter to the range so she can learn to be a responsible gun owner and shooter.

I guess the point of all of this boils down to situational awareness and discretion.  When I’m among friends, we openly talk about guns, including what each of us is carrying if it’s an environment where we can carry.  When I’m not among other gunnies, I try very hard to not be “The Guy with the GUN”.  I’ve heard this called “Don’t scare the white people”.  Even though it’s perfectly legal in Kentucky, I have only open carried a couple of times in Kentucky, and then only when I’m away from Louisville.

If someone asks me my hobbies, I’m honest and list shooting and hunting along with reading.  If I’m carrying and someone I know isn’t very cool with firearms asks me, I’m honest and tell them that that I’m carrying.  I’ve put out a general invitation to my friends to go to the range with me, and a couple have made soft commitments to go once the weather gets better.   I just don’t make it an issue that will cause problems in a social or work environment.

But I don’t hide my hobby.  I don’t lie when asked about it, and if someone wants to honestly discuss guns, hunting, or gun rights with me, even if they are diametrically opposed to it, I engage with them.  I probably won’t convince them, but I will at least give them something to think about.  Who knows, if I keep talking to them, they may take me up on the range trip, and if they enjoy themselves they may become shooters themselves.

So what do y’all do?  I’m especially curious how people in countries that are definitely anti-gun tell people about the hobby, or how people who travel to a lot of different anti-gun areas discuss it with the locals.