I didn’t have time to get accurate statistics, but I’m pretty sure that less than 0.1% of people in the United States race their cars professionally. However, a much larger percentage of Americans believe that the time it takes their car to go from zero to sixty miles per hour is a deciding factor in automobile purchases.

I do not understand why this matters so much. Every car on the market today, be it an SUV, a hybrid, or a sports car, can accelerate at a speed that is more than enough for driving from point A to point B without problems. Every car on the market today also has more than enough top speed, handling, and other features needed to maneuver.

So why do so many people feel like they can’t buy a car that does 0-60 in slower than 4 seconds or doesn’t have a top speed of over 110mph? Why does this matter at all, especially compared to fuel efficiency and reliability?

Glad to see more support for the Gasoline Tax. If you follow gimme-five, you’ll notice I’ve definitely been advocating such a thing for the past two years or so. Walter McManus has recently written an article on whether or not we should raise the gasoline tax.

McManus goes into some light economics, discussing why the demand curve for gasoline is, indeed, price elastic and downward sloping. Because of this, people will change their driving habits and car purchases to limit the damage that high gas prices would do to their budget otherwise.

An article I linked to a while ago by Charles Krauthammer, which McManus also mentions, says that it would have been ideal to just keep raising the gas tax incrementally as the prices of gas fell from $3 per gallon to just keep the price consumers are paying at $3. As I stated in my previous article, I applaud this idea once again.

The interesting thing about McManus’s article is that he makes some predictions on how this will affect the market share of different cars with differing MPG ratings.

Definitely check out this short article.

The first two of these links deal with the sad state of our country’s priorities:

Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
U.S. Rolls Out Nuclear Plan
The administration’s proposal would modernize the nation’s complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs.

Ok.

Take these links as you will. Do you think we’ve mixed up our priorities a little? Even if building nukes weren’t incredibly ridiculous since we have a ton already, is defending our country worth anything if the Earth will be uninhabitable soon? We need to do something, ANYTHING, to attack the global warming problem.  I know they say in the article that the older bombs are become unsafe, but still, do we need to produce 125 new nuclear bombs per year to replace them?  Don’t you just need one… or at most a handful?
And finally, here are some awesome incentives you get from purchasing a hybrid car. See you all next week, folks!

Many people seem to have the idea that just because someone has a certain characteristic, they will be a certain “type” of person. This is not true. I am here to point out some common misconceptions. This list will probably get more controversial as it progresses. A lot of these have to do with college related stuff, so forgive me if you are not in or recently graduated or about to enter undergraduate studies.

Just because you have a high GPA doesn’t mean you’re smart.
The same goes for SAT scores, LSAT scores, MCAT scores, etcetera. Smart doesn’t mean you test well. Smart means you can use your brain to the best of its ability. I know plenty of people who are pretty darned smart yet don’t quite test well so their GPAs don’t necessarily reflect their intelligence. I also know plenty of people who test really well and couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag. In conclusion, smart is a very subjective term.

A recent guest article was posted on gimme-five recently about the new television show “Black. White.” The premise of the show is that makeup artists turn a white family into a black family and a black family into a white family and they go off and see how they are treated in everyday situations. I had not seen the show at the time the guest article came out, but I recently was able to watch the first episode.

My first thought was that they did an excellent job disgusing the black family as white. I was incredibly impressed by all of the makeup work. I was not impressed at all, on the other hand, with the makeup work on the white family as black. Bruno, the alpha male of the white family, looks like he accidentally fell asleep in a tanning salon for about six hours. He looks awful. His wife is marginally better but still really fake looking. Their daughter looks the most realistic in that family.