The point of the hybrid tax breaks, I think we can all agree, is to reduce American dependence on oil. For this reason the tax breaks should try to give Americans an economic incentive to purchase a more fuel efficient vehicle when they are in the market for a car.

That’s why it doesn’t make sense that we are going to limit the tax breaks for a particular manufacturer, or allow any hybrid vehicle - even ones that are hybrid without the goal of reducing fuel consumption - to receive these tax breaks. The goal of these tax breaks is not to encourage people to buy hybrids just for the sake of buying hybrids - it’s to encourage people to reduce their fuel consumption while driving.

I believe that we need to do the following:

• Remove the caps per individual manufacturer.
• Require that the hybrid vehicle have a certain additional miles per gallon versus the original model before it qualifies for a tax break.
• Give tax breaks to ANY car that receives a high MPG rating
• For larger cars - focus on hydraulic hybrid technology (this is a really exciting technology) instead of gas-electric hybrid technology.

Boy do I want an electric bike! I just visited The Electric Cyclery and I’ve decided I really want to buy an electric bike at some point in life. These things are REALLY cool!

My favorite bike is the Optibike. Supposedly it can travel up to 30 miles per hour for up to two hours. Granted, it costs a lot, $5500, but maybe in the future the price might go down. They also sell cool converter kits that you can put on your current bike, and they have lots of cheaper bikes too.

I think having an electric bike would be awesome if I lived in a city or a suburb that were somewhat close to my job. Currently my summer job is about an hour commute driving and taking the Metro into Washington, DC, so having an electric bike wouldn’t be very practical. However, if I lived within 10 miles of my job, this would be fantastic!

When I pick up a newspaper, I usually end up setting aside a lot of it, often sections at a time, that simply don’t have stories that interest me on their front pages. It’s not that these stories are bad - it’s simply that they don’t interest me. Of course I like knowing what’s important in the world, and for the most part The Washington Post does a good job of informing me of this. However, beyond the must-read stories for everyone, the post is a mixed bag in terms of keeping me interested.

But what if the newspaper delivered to your house were customized to your personality? Of course, you would still get stories that were very important in terms of world events, but the “other stuff” would be stories customized to what you want to hear about. Unfortunately that’s not very cost effective for newspapers, but it IS very possible on the internet. You can create your very own personalized newspaper that delivers headlines to you from tons of different news sources (Washington Post, New York Times, and even blogs if you want) based on the articles you like to read. Customizable News Sites are going to be all the rage pretty soon. In this article I will review two: Findory (http://www.findory.com) and Spotback (http://www.spotback.com).

I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone tonight, and for some reason we were talking about commuting to work and the time it would take for different commutes.  Well, since the commute to my summer/winter job is pretty far (1 hr, 15 minutes each way), I decided to figure out how much time I would end up wasting in a given year.

Since the commute is 2.5 hrs round trip, or 150 minutes per day, and assuming I work 260 days out of the year (a high estimate), I will spend 39,000 minutes, or 650 hours, or 27.08 days commuting every year.  That is enough time to go on a very, very long vacation, or do many other things.

It would be really great if I could cut my commute in half.  If it only took 1.25 hours each way, I would save over 13 days per year in wasted time!