Letters to the Editor
Etrigone
Published Letters: 158 Editor's Choice: 31
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A scooter or motorcycle...
[Read the article: Test drive: The Smart car is revolutionary]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... is touted as wonderful until it rains.
Or snows (probably the only legit reason).
Or it's "too cold". Then, all of a sudden, it's in the back of the garage until the weather is perfect and the "I hardly ever use it" guzzler is on the road until perfection returns.
I say this as a fairly rabid biker - motorcycle & bicycle, to disambiguate. I have way more miles to my name with 2 wheels than four. Us rabid bikers note each other during the winter, the storms making us haul out our rainsuits and separating the men from the baby boys (and real women from the little girls).
I don't have or need one, but the Smart isn't a bad idea. It's a good option for those people who could get around by two wheels were they up to the weather or simple can't - my gf cannot do two wheels due to a minor visual & inner ear impairment. If she didn't commute with me via motorcycle or tiny Microcar two-seater (a competitor for the Smart in Europe that has a bit more carrying room), a Smart would be okay. I am somewhat disappointed that the diesel isn't available here, but as I understand it that is due to US emission restrictions on the diesel - something which also holds back diesel hybrids. Still, there is no silver bullet to transportation problems, as there is no one single transportation situation. The niche for this will be be big enough.
Americans aren't the only ones who do this, but we do like to make everything single-issue decisions. In this case it's mileage, something everyone ignored even two years ago and now is the *only* thing we care about (although as a few have demonstrated, their one-item is last year's power/speed requirement).
Good article, Farhad. I wish I'd had the chance to check out the car when you offered, as my one experience was in Vancouver and the diesel variant, but I wasn't in the city at the time it was available and driving up there just for the test seemed silly.
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Mixed emotions on this
[Read the article: The meaning of Starbucks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Starbucks is, in a fairly (very?) limited fashion, the Wal-Mart of coffee houses. In my little 'burg, which already has a number of independent mom&pop coffee shops, I see Starbucks coming up in areas nearby enough to cause the local shops problems. The sales for the Starbucks would be slightly better in different spots, but then they wouldn't impact the local shops as much.
It's a college town with a large tourist trade most of the year, so for the most part we can suck up a lot of them there shops. Plus, locals don't take as kindly to this kind of thing as they do in other parts of the country and tend to still patronize the locals (mostly).
(There's also the 9/11 thing Starbucks did - insisting on selling water to the people around the WTC collapses, sometimes above the normal price, when everyone else was giving it away for free. This tale was corroborated & expounded upon by my sister who lives in the area)
But... if they could chill on the above I wouldn't mind as much, as they're just not *that* harsh. They still beat the crud coffee I've seen in diners throughout my old home in the Midwest, and I like that they seemed to have helped raise the bar. I'd also like to see them, as an American business, succeed. Rampant expansion & crushing of local biz, no, but there is a middle ground I'd like to see them move more towards.
Maybe this restructuring will see that.
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@AnnieW
[Read the article: Bear territory blues]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>Pointing out the obvious is not taking joy in other's suffering.
So, so right. And yet despite this, the accusations abound.
What, people think we *like* other's pain? If we did, wouldn't we just keep our comments to ourselves and then chuckle quietly & evilly later? Why preface warnings with "please, don't do that" if we're looking to hurt people?
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@meganfta
[Read the article: A dream of Russian dandelions]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And keep in mind, our 10 million acres - or most of it - don't just grow stuff without attention. Water, fertilizer, and so on, plus weeding (however done).
Dandelion is, well, a weed; practically no attention & resources are needed to be spent on it. Some local farming folks plant a wall of it as a "dandelion moat" to keep deer and rabbits away from their crops. It works generally well; the critters stuff themselves on it and the dandelion grows so fast it it keeps up.
So fast that, for a few, Bambi & Thumper couldn't keep it mowed down sufficiently. Oops.
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I've been thinking
[Read the article: Triumph of the low-carbon city dweller]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]About how this is all going to turn out. Lots of folks talking about doom & gloom, including me, but regardless of whether or not that's a done deal I tend to be curious about what happens next.
Specifically, let's say just for giggles that peak oil is true (and ignore climate change for a moment since it's an equally tough nut). Thinking about reading in Jared Diamond's "Collapse", I got the idea that we're going to move towards something like Australia... kinda. That is, folks in cities because - as noticed - there is an efficiency there. You don't have to spend as much energy heating your domicile if 2 or more of it's sides are shared with neighbors. Public transport becomes more predictable due to larger numbers. Etc etc etc...
But then you have farmlands, and you need to be able to that food places obviously. You won't have people stacked like cordwood out there.
He semi-suggested Australia as a model, with a lot less emphasis on suburbs than we have. In their case I believe water is more of an cause for this than oil, although undoubtedly that isn't far behind.
Even without people like Kunstler saying so, that model seems a lot more logical.