In part 1, I enumerated the approaches to spam eradication I was aware of, and explained my conclusion that the only approach which will work is an economic approach. In part 2 I discussed various options for tackling spam economically, ending with the one I think would actually be acceptable and useful: attention bonds.
Now I’ll run through (and shoot down) a few of the objections commonly brought up when the possibility of involving actual cash in e-mail sending is raised.
So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.
The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.
So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.
The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.
It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.
Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.
2004′s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.
Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.
Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.
In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.
In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.
Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?
Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?
I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?
And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.
New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.
The story so far: some unknown git cracked the rear drivers-side light assembly on the Prius, scraped the upper surface of the bumper at truck height, and disappeared quietly without leaving any insurance details.
So, the car is in for repairs. While they fix it, the insurance company (GEICO) are paying for a rental car. The temporary car is a Chevrolet Cavalier, the sedan model which starts at $15,175. We’ve got a deluxe one, with the optional CD player and automatic transmission.
Now, I’m no conoisseur of fine vehicles, but I have driven a Toyota Corolla ($13,680). And I have to say, the Chevy is a shitty little excuse for a car. As Edmunds puts it:
Despite various revisions, there’s no hiding the fact that this car was engineered more than a decade ago, leaving it hopelessly outclassed by nearly every other car on the market.
But let’s try for a more detailed review…
The Chevy Cavalier has extra-low “sports style” seating. This provides valuable stretching to the hamstring muscles, and helps toughen them up ready for dealing with the brake pedal. The ergonomic headrests in wipe-clean vinyl nearly match the seats, and are set back far enough that you can easily wear a crash helmet in the car, which might not be a bad idea given its lowest possible rating in crash test results and lack of side impact air bags.
The steering is subtly power assisted, yet still does an excellent job of transmitting the vibration of every road bump to the driver’s hands, providing valuable feedback on road conditions. At parking lot speeds the steering automatically stiffens up to provide you with a complimentary upper body workout.
Touch the accelerator and you’re away. The high torque engine gives you instant extremely rapid acceleration for that vital 0 to 10 mph stretch, then switches into a far more sedate mode for accelerationless cruising. Hills are no problem for the 4 cylinder aluminium engine; just hold the accelerator down, and after a couple of seconds you’ll hear a noise like a lawnmower as the car suddenly shifts into hill-climbing mode.
The braking is smooth and gradual no matter how hard you push the pedal, so go ahead and give it all you’ve got. Dashboard lights bothering you at night? Simply use the steering column adjustment to lower the steering wheel to a comfortable position, and it’ll block your view of the speedometer.
So hurry and buy a Chevy Cavalier now—they’re discontinuing it after 2005, it’s that good.
Our MA car insurance premium, per year: $2,839.
Our TX car insurance premium, per year: $780.
And that’s with less than half as much actual coverage on the MA insurance.
My Prius arrived! Three days ahead of the most optimistic estimate! Now it’s purchased, time to tell the whole story…
I started the search on September 16th. Calling the local Massachusetts Toyota dealers quickly established that they all had ridiculous wait lists; the best wait time I was quoted was a year. However, the situation wasn’t completely hopeless—according to the online forums like priusonline.com and priuschat.com, dealers often get cars that are a color or a package that nobody on their wait list wants, or nobody on the list who wants the car can get financed at that particular moment in time.
Because we wanted the high end package with the GPS navigation system, I had a hunch that the legendary thriftiness of New Hampshire residents would make it a promising place to hunt for unwanted Priuses, not to mention that you can’t fit a gun rack on one. Another point in our favor was that we weren’t too fussy about color—we’d take silver, gold, green, red, maybe even black. So, I started checking every single New Hampshire Toyota dealer that had a web site, searching their inventory, and calling or e-mailing all the ones that actually had a 2004 Prius listed.
Almost the first response was from Autofair Toyota in Manchester, NH. They called me back about half an hour after I sent an e-mail. They said that the 2004 Prius they had on the lot was being shopped to their wait list, and that someone would likely take it even though none of them had said they wanted the BC package. However, they were expecting two more BC package cars in October, and could put my name down for one of them. The incoming cars would be brand new 2005 models, and they expected them to be at the dealership around October 10th-14th. Price would be MSRP—no special markup.
I should explain that unfortunately, a lot of dealers are taking advantage of the constrained supply of vehicles by adding $3,000-$5,000 to the price. Since the MSRP already includes a healthy profit, and the dealers get a bonus from Toyota for selling the cars immediately, people on the Prius forums have been rather scathing about the practice. I have no real ethical problem with pricing up—after all, it’s just supply and demand—but I had already decided I would rather buy a second hand temporary car than pay over MSRP.
The Autofair sales associate told me up front what the total price would be, including their processing and admin charge—a mere $121, whereas I’ve been quoted up to $500 elsewhere.
I explained up front that I wanted to continue to look for a car actually available, and they said all they wanted was a $100 deposit, which would be fully refundable if I managed to get a car somewhere else first. Again, other dealers are asking for $1,000 deposits, and some are even demanding non-refundable deposits. Autofair seemed completely reasonable and up-front about everything, so I agreed.
There then followed a couple of weeks of anxiousness about whether the car would actually turn up in time for our move to Austin, TX. During that time I believe I checked every single Toyota dealer web site for Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, plus I e-mailed and called a few places that didn’t even have web sites.
As of this morning, I still had no lead on an actual Prius available any time before the last week of October. And then Autofair called. My car had arrived.
Of course, it’s not as simple as it ought to be. Massachusetts makes the whole process as difficult as possible, in an apparent attempt to stop people buying cars in New Hampshire and dodging tax, or not getting insurance. Since I didn’t manage to find a description of the process anywhere, even on the RMV web site, here we go…
I have to:
Not that I had any intention of committing any kind of tax fraud; the only question was whether I could wait and register in Texas rather than go through the paperwork twice. In fact, MA is cheaper than TX, so I suppose I’m winning, but…
One added wrinkle is that the certificate of origin is transported separately from the actual car, and hadn’t arrived today, so they’re going to FedEx it to me. In the mean time, I can read the user manual. The car itself had only just been removed from the car carrier; they obviously called the moment it came in. Its audio system hadn’t been connected up and tested yet, it hadn’t been fueled, and there was still plastic film on the wheels. But, I did get to sit in it. Very nice, extremely ergonomic driving position. The sales guy seemed as excited as us.
Once we get to Austin, I have to get new insurance from a non-Massachusetts agency, because the MA agency don’t deal in out-of-state insurance. The new agency has to fax the Massachusetts one to say I’m insured with them, and then my MA policy can be cancelled. Only then can I get my MA license switched for a TX license; apparently if you switch the license before switching the insurance the police computer will flag you as uninsured.
We also went for the Toyota Platinum Warranty: 24/7 roadside assistance to the nearest Prius-trained Toyota dealer, and they’ll pay for a replacement rental car while they fix the Prius. I got the 6 years of extra coverage from Autofair, because the price they quoted me wasn’t much more than the ultra-cheap price I’d seen on the Internet, and I was obviously feeling very well disposed towards them!
So anyway…Prius! Prius! Prius!