Super-Priced Art

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Joseph V. Tirella calls it Super-Priced Art:

But it’s not just comic books and their cinematic adaptations that are big business; the market for comic art — the original pencil-and-ink drawings used to produce comic books — is in the middle of a boom that keeps moving into uncharted territory. “It hits a high point and then another and then an even higher point,” says Albert Moy, a New York-based dealer who has been buying and selling comic art for over two decades. (See a slideshow of works that have sold or are for sale.)

While some insiders estimate the global comic art market to be worth $25 million annually, others say it’s more like $70 million to $100 million. At the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con International in July, Joe Mannarino of All Star Auctions and Comic Art Appraisals in Ridgewood, New Jersey, did $1.2 million worth of business in four days, selling the Neal Adams/Bernie Wrightson artwork for Green Lantern No. 84 for $115,000 — a world record for the artist, he says — and two oil paintings by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta for more than $451,000. Anthony Snyder of Anthony’s Collectibles in New Jersey recently set a personal record when he closed a deal worth $150,000 for a 1964 Spider-Man page drawn by John Romita Sr. And dealers say the economic crisis hasn’t yet put a damper on things.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

So many sentences to ponder

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Tyler Cowen says that these days there are so many sentences to ponder, starting with this one from Felix Salmon:

If you’re running an insolvent bank, and you get a slug of equity from Treasury, your shareholders will thank you if you use that equity to take some very large risks. If they pay off and you make lots of money, then their shares are really worth something; if they fail and you lose even more money, well, there was never really any money for them to begin with anyway.

He also points to this, about the preferred stock the government is buying:

So it in the end, we have what is basically an economic loan, but structured in a way to game bank capital adequacy requirements. What strange times we live in when Treasury and the Fed have to engineer a deal to circumvent their own regulations.

He then comes back to cite more from Felix Salmon:

America’s banks — and the world’s, for that matter — have had de facto unlimited access to very cheap Fed liquidity for many months now. That hasn’t induced them to lend. Will this latest recapitalization do the trick? I’m far from convinced. And what’s more, the demand for loans is drying up fast: do you really feel like buying a bigger house right now, or taking out a car loan? Well, businesses are in the same boat. In a recession, their ROI falls, so they borrow less.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Sub-Prime Education

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Bryan Caplan praises Charles Murray for highlighting the fact that many “investments” in education end in foreclosure — also known as “dropping out”:

[L]abor economists normally estimate the return to completed education. It only takes a small drop-out rate to drastically reduce the expected return of trying to complete a year of school. If the rate of return for a completed year of education is 10%, but 6% of students who start a year don’t finish (and waste a year of their lives plus tuition), the expected rate of return is only 3.4%! If the marginal student is less likely to finish than the average student, the effect is even more drastic.

Posted in Economics, Education | No Comments »

LOLFED

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I just discovered LOLFED — via Mencius Moldbug — where they give the Fed the lolcat treatment.

Posted in Economics, Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

The Political Economy of the Bailout

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Is the bailout (or “bank recapitalization”) going to work? That’s asking the wrong question, Arnold Kling notes:

Whether the economy needs a “plan,” or whether the plan will help the markets, is beside the point. The plan serves to consolidate power. Four weeks ago, the Fed and the Treasury had far more power than anyone can intelligently use. Still, they came to Congress requesting more power. Then, when the bill was passed, Paulson took even more power than what it sounded like the legislation was giving.

Now, there are rumors that the Democrats plan to re-appoint Paulson as Treasury Secretary. This American Mussolini has captivated Washington by demonstrating the exercise of raw power.

What I call the “suits vs. geeks divide” is the discrepancy between knowledge and power. Knowledge today is increasingly dispersed. Power was already too concentrated in the private sector, with CEO’s not understanding their own businesses.

But the knowledge-power discrepancy in the private sector is nothing compared to what exists in the public sector. What do Congressmen understand about the budgets and laws that they are voting on? What do the regulators understand about the consequences of their rulings?

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon’s bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I enjoyed the opening to Paul Graham’s Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy:

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

Posted in Business, Paul Graham | No Comments »

Monkey Business

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

This cute parable is making the rounds:

Once upon a time, in a place overrun with monkeys, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, they became harder to catch, so the villagers stopped their effort.

The man then announced that he would now pay $20 for each one. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. But soon the supply diminished even further and they were ever harder to catch, so people started going back to their farms and forgot about monkey catching.

The man increased his price to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so sparse that it was an effort to even see a monkey, much less catch one.

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys for $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.

While the man was away the assistant told the villagers, ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has bought. I will sell them to you at $35 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.’

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys. They never saw the man nor his assistant again, and once again there were monkeys everywhere.

Welcome to Wall Street.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Posted in Business, Economics | No Comments »

The Term Paper Artist

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels — described as the science fiction satire Under My Roof and the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground — but he has also earned the title of The Term Paper Artist, for cranking out hundreds of papers on short notice for a fee:

I don’t have the academic credentials of composition experts, but I doubt many experts spent most of a decade writing between one and five term papers a day on virtually every subject. I know something they don’t know; I know why students don’t understand thesis statements, argumentative writing, or proper citations.

It’s because students have never read term papers.

Imagine trying to write a novel, for a grade, under a tight deadline, without ever having read a novel. Instead, you meet once or twice a week with someone who is an expert in describing what novels are like. Novels are long stories, you see, that depict a “slice of life” featuring a middle-class protagonist. Psychological realism is prized in novels. Moral instruction was once fairly common in novels, but is now considered gauche. Novels end when the protagonist has an epiphany, such as “I am not happy. Also, neither is anybody else.” Further, many long fictions are called novels even though they are really adventures, and these ersatz novels may take place in a fantastical setting and often depict wild criminal behaviors and simplified versions of international intrigues instead of middle-class quandaries. Sometimes there are pirates, but only so that a female character may swoon at their well-developed abdominal muscles. That’s a novel. What are you waiting for? Start writing! Underline your epiphany.

He makes a good point: students have never read term papers.

An amusing corollary: If you ever find yourself a grad student grading undergrad papers for the first time, you suddenly realize why not everyone goes on to grad school. You probably had no idea just how bad everyone else’s work was.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Not dead, just resting

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

The Economist notes that many discredited technologies are not dead, just resting:

It became a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy gone awry. The notion of the “paperless office”, which dates back to the 1960s, sounded plausible enough. As computers began to spread and display technology improved, it seemed obvious that more and more documents would be written, distributed and read in electronic form, rather than on paper. Filing cabinets would give way to hard disks, memos and reports would be distributed electronically and paper invoices and purchase orders would be replaced by electronic messages whizzing between accounts departments.
What actually happened was that global consumption of office paper more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century, as digital technology made printing cheaper and easier than ever before. Not even the rise of the internet stemmed the tide. The web’s billions of pages provided a vast new source of fodder for the world’s humming printers. Although e-mail did away with much paper-based correspondence, some older, technophobic bosses insisted on having their e-mails printed out so they could scribble their responses in pen for their secretaries to type in and send off.

Yet the prediction seems to be coming true at last. American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did. Offices are still far from paperless, but the trend is clear. So does this mean that other apparently discredited technological prophecies might also benefit from a similar reversal of fortune?

Note the amusing units on that graph: pounds per white-collar worker.

The article suggest three ways for a discredited technology to make a comeback:

  1. The aforementioned sociological shift, where the technology may not change much, but its users change.
  2. Straightforward technological improvement, like the wide availability of broadband Internet connections, which weren’t available as quickly as Web 1.0 companies hoped.
  3. An external shock, like the recent spike in oil prices, which has pushed hybrids and electric cars into the lime light.

The conclusion:

Make an electronic note to yourself: remember the paperless office and never say never.

Posted in Economics, Technology | No Comments »

The 25 Most Commonly Used English Words

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

The 25 Most Commonly Used English Words make up about one-third of the words in all printed material in English:

  1. the
  2. of
  3. and
  4. a
  5. to
  6. in
  7. is
  8. you
  9. that
  10. it
  11. he
  12. was
  13. for
  14. on
  15. are
  16. as
  17. with
  18. his
  19. they
  20. I
  21. at
  22. be
  23. this
  24. have
  25. from

Word frequencies follow a power law (like Pareto’s famous 80-20 rule) — Zipf’s Law, in this case, named after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf who first proposed it:

Zipf’s law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus “the” is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf’s Law, the second-place word “of” accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36411 occurrences), followed by “and” (28852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

Posted in Linguistics, Science | No Comments »

Guineans mark ’50 years of poverty’

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

As Guineans celebrate 50 years of independence from France, the also “celebrate” 50 years of poverty:

Nowhere illustrates Guinea’s recent demise better than the train station in Conakry.

Completed in 1914, the construction of the 700km (435 miles) track to Kankan was a French project partly to aid with the export of fruit.

But the trains ground to a final halt in May 1995.

They may have stopped 13 years ago but several of the workers still sit around the station, which now hosts a variety of businesses from tailoring to welding.

“When we left school the railway was in good condition and it was a great way to get around the country,” recalls Fode Bangoura, who still runs the defunct depot.

“My father worked on the railway and it was a good job and that’s why I also joined, but as it fell into disrepair it became more and more difficult to keep it going.”

Despite this setback, Mr Bangoura is still proud of the country’s history.

“We are very proud of the 50th anniversary. I was seven years old at independence. Our parents danced all night and so we joined in.”

However, 89-year-old Mohamed Bashir Toure was not dancing or singing at the time.

“I was very happy with the French,” he said with some frustration.

“Life was good then. We had all we needed and I voted to stay with the French.

“Now we lack electricity — everything is ruined.”

Mr Toure would even welcome the return of the French — a comment that brings giggles and cries of “colonialist” from his relatives.

It seems he is not alone.

“I would welcome them back with open arms,” says Fanta Kande who runs a food canteen in Conakry.

“I think independence was a huge mistake. If the French came back and worked with us and ran things in order to help us then why not?”

Guineans are by and large extremely proud of their independence history but people are sick and tired of bad governance and the problems that brings.

“We have no electricity or safe water,” says medical student Oscar Loua Tokpagnan.

“We are in a difficult situation because when the students complete it’s almost impossible for them to get a job.”

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Ford Announces Family-Friendly Safety Features

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Ford Announces Family-Friendly Safety Features — like Collision Warning with Brake Support:

With the Collision Warning system, the car’s radar compares closing distance and speed with objects in the car’s path.

If specific criteria relating to distance and speed are met, the car’s computer thinks you are headed for an accident. The vehicle will warn the driver with both an audible warning and a visual warning (red lights projected on the windshield). If your vehicle continues on its path without adjustment, the car will pre-charge the brakes in anticipation of an emergency stop. The Collision Warning system was developed after learning from the NHTSA that just an additional second of warning could prevent nearly 90% of all rear-end crashes. Ford’s Collision Warning system gives drivers an extra 1.5 to 2.5 seconds to avoid a crash.

Ford is also placing similar radar modules behind the rear quarter panels, to detect cars driving in blind spots on either side of the vehicle as it back up — the Blind Spot Information System, or BLIS, for short.

Parents will like the MyKey option, where some keys can be assigned safety features:

  • Persistent Ford Beltminder — The reminder chime will continue to sound until the seat belt is fastened — it won’t time out. Additionally, the stereo will remain muted until the seat belt is fastened.
  • Low fuel warning — The standard 50 miles to empty warning will be increased to 75 miles to empty.
  • Traction control cannot be deactivated.
  • Audio is limited to 44% of maximum volume.
  • Top speed is limited to 80 mph.
  • Speed alert will chime at 45, 55 & 65 mph.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Hippie apes make war as well as love

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Hippie apes make war as well as love:

Despite their reputation as lovers not fighters of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and eat other great apes, German researchers said Monday.

Their findings, the first direct evidence of hunting by the so-called “hippie” apes, show that such behavior is not linked to male dominance as females rule bonobo society and also go on hunts.
[...]
Scientists had thought bonobos, found in the lowland forest south of the river Congo, only ate small animals such as squirrels, forest antelopes and rodents they encountered.

But over five years of observing a group of bonobos the researchers recorded about 10 instances when a group of the apes set out on hunting trips in search of chimpanzees.

Each time the bonobos silently crept through the woods on the ground, trying to get underneath a group of chimps before clambering up a tree in a sudden attack, the researchers said.

The bonobo hunts were successful on fewer than half the excursions and in some cases shared the meat, evidence they were willing to share to encourage group hunting, Hohmann and colleagues said.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Why Can’t We Build an Affordable House?

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Witold Rybczynski describes some of the innovative features of the first modern housing developments, the Levittowns, that made the homes so popular yet affordable:

Many of the design innovations of the Levittowner were Alfred’s own ideas. A folding basswood screen that slid on a metal track separated a so-called study-bedroom from the living room, allowing the space to be open or closed. Thermopane (insulated glass) covered a large section of the living-room wall overlooking the garden. The kitchen had a large window facing the street — an early example of a “picture window.” High window sills in the bedrooms provided privacy — and reduced cost. Locating the bathroom and the kitchen on the street side reduced the length of piping to the street mains. There was no mechanical room; instead, a specially designed furnace fit under the kitchen counter, its warm top doubling as a hot plate. The Levitts were careful to give penny-pinching buyers of the Levittowner touches of luxury: the purchase price included a kitchen exhaust fan, an electric range, a GE refrigerator, and a Bendix washing machine. The Country Clubber added a clothes dryer.

A two-way fireplace was located between the kitchen and the living room. Two-way fireplaces were a standard Usonian feature, but while the Levittowner had a low, spreading roof and clean lines, no one would mistake it for a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Yet, although Alfred Levitt’s design looks unremarkable today, in fact this early example of the so-called ranch house represented a revolution in domestic design. One-story living was new to most Americans, as was the open plan combining kitchen, eating space, and living room. The undecorated exterior was unabashedly modern. Picture windows had no precedents in traditional homes; neither did carports. Instead of brick or wood, the exterior walls of the Levittowner were covered with striated sheets of Colorbestos (asbestos cement), which had been developed especially for the Levitts by the Johns Manville Corporation. With integral color that didn’t require painting, this was an early example of low-maintenance siding.

We don’t use asbestos cement anymore, and some of the other novelties, such as under-floor heating, proved troublesome (as they did in the Usonians), but the Levitt brothers’ achievement remains impressive. They introduced the American public to modern production building and proved that standardization, mass production, and technical innovation could be successfully — and profitably — used by commercial builders to produce houses for a large market.

The standardization, mass production, and technical innovation of the Levittowns didn’t go away, so why can’t we build an affordable house?

Would it be possible to build a modern version of the affordable Levittowner? It would probably be a small house, closer to the 1,000 square feet of Alfred Levitt’s design than the 2,469 square feet that is today’s national average for new houses.
[...]
What would such a house sell for? In 1951, the price of the original Levittowner ($9,900) was three times the national average annual wage ($3,300). In 2008, with an estimated national average wage of $40,500, a similarly affordable house should have a sticker price of $121,500. Yet according to the Census Bureau, even in the current declining market the median price for a new single-family house in the first quarter of 2008 approached twice that: $234,100. So, the price of a modern Levittowner would have to be nearly 50 percent cheaper than that of today’s average new house. Easy, you say, just make the house 50 percent smaller, about 1,200 instead of 2,469 square feet. But it’s not that simple. In most metropolitan areas, the selling price of such a house would still be more than $200,000, considerably more than $121,500.

So what’s keeping housing prices high? It’s not the size, and it’s not the construction costs, either. The Levittowner cost $4–$5 per square foot to build in 1951, equivalent to $30–$40 per square foot in 2008. That is approximately what an efficient, large-scale production builder spends today.
[...]
What’s driving the high cost of houses today is not increased construction costs or higher profits (the Levitts made $1,000 on the sale of each house), but the cost of serviced land, which is much greater than in 1951. There are two reasons for this increase. The first is Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that required local governments to reduce property taxes and limit future increases, and sparked similar taxpayer-driven initiatives in other states. Henceforth, municipalities were unable to finance the up-front costs of infrastructure in new communities, as they had previously done, and instead required developers to pay for roads and sewers, and often for parks and other public amenities as well. These costs were passed on to home buyers, drastically increasing the selling price of a house.

The other reason that serviced lots cost more is that there are fewer of them than the market demands. This is a result of widespread resistance to growth, the infamous not-in-my-backyard phenomenon, which is strongest in the Northeast, California, and the Northwest. Communities in growing metropolitan areas contend with increased urbanization, encroachment on open space, more neighbors, more traffic, and more school-age children. Roads have to be widened, traffic lights added, and schools expanded, all of which lead to higher taxes. Voters commonly respond to these ill effects of growth by demanding restrictions on the number of new houses that can be built. Usually this is achieved by tightening zoning, invoking environmental constraints, and generally drawing out and complicating the permit process. It is no coincidence that house prices are highest in the Northeast, California, and the Northwest. According to the research of economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the Wharton School, since 1970 the difficulty of getting regulatory approval to build new homes is the chief cause of increases in new house prices. In other words, while demand for new houses has been growing, the number of new houses that can actually be built has been shrinking.

The most common tactic communities use to restrict development is to zone for large lots. In many parts of the country, the median size of new lots now exceeds one acre; by contrast, the 70-by-100-foot Levittowner lot covered less than one-sixth of an acre. For the neighbors, requiring large lots has two advantages: It limits the numbers of houses that can be built and, since large lots are more expensive, it ensures that new houses will cost more, which drives up surrounding property values. But reducing development has another, less happy effect: It pushes growth even farther out, thus increasing sprawl. While large-lot zoning is often done in the name of preserving open space and fighting sprawl, in fact it has the opposite effect.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Thoughts on Urban Survival

Monday, October 13th, 2008

A few years ago, an Argentinean fellow going by the name of FerFAL composed his Thoughts on Urban Survival, based on what he experienced as the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001.

One of his main points is that a collapse does not lead to a Road Warrior scenario so much as a Taxi Driver scenario — no roving bands of bikers coming over the horizon, just common criminals coming out of the woodwork:

Forget about shooting those that mean you harm from 300 yards away with your MBR. Leave that notion to armchair commandos and 12 year old kids that pretend to be grown ups on the internet.

Some facts:

1) Those that want to harm you/steal from you don’t come with a pirate flag waving over their heads.

2) Neither do they start shooting at you 200 yards away.

3) They won’t come riding loud bikes or dressed with their orange, convict just escaped from prison jump suits, so that you can identify them the better. Nor do they all wear chains around their necks and leather jackets. If I had a dollar for each time a person that got robbed told me “They looked like NORMAL people, dressed better than we are”, honestly, I would have enough money for a nice gun. There are exceptions, but don’t expect them to dress like in the movies.

4) A man with a wife and two or three kids can’t set up a watch. I don’t care if you are SEAL, SWAT or John Freaking Rambo, no 6th sense is going to tell you that there is a guy pointing a gun at your back when you are trying to fix the water pump that just broke, or carrying a big heavy bag of dried beans you bought that morning.

The best alarm system anyone can have in a farm are dogs. But dogs can get killed and poisoned. A friend of mine had all four dogs poisoned on his farm one night, they all died. After all these years I learned that even though the person that lives out in the country is safer when it comes to small time robberies, that same person is more exposed to extremely violent home robberies. Criminals know that they are isolated and their feeling of invulnerability is boosted. When they assault a country home or farm, they will usually stay there for hours or days torturing the owners. I heard it all: women and children getting raped, people tied to the beds and tortured with electricity, beatings, burned with acetylene torches. Big cities aren’t much safer for the survivalist that decides to stay in the city. He will have to face express kidnappings, robberies, and pretty much risking getting shot for what’s in his pockets or even his clothes.

So, where to go? The concrete jungle is dangerous and so is living away from it all, on your own. The solution is to stay away from the cities but in groups, either by living in a small town-community or sub division, or if you have friends or family that think as you do, form your own small community. Some may think that having neighbors within “shouting” distance means loosing your privacy and freedom, but it’s a price that you have to pay if you want to have someone to help you if you ever need it. To those that believe that they will never need help from anyone because they will always have their rifle at hand, checking the horizon with their scope every five minutes and a first aid kit on their back packs at all times…. Grow up.

In a SHTF scenario, expect basic services to become unreliable — like water:

No one can last too long without water. The urban survivalist may find that the water is of poor quality, in which case he can make good use of a water filter, or that there is no water available at all. When this happens, a large city were millions live will run out of bottled water within minutes. In my case, tap water isn’t very good. I can see black little particles and some other stuff that looks like dead algae. Taste isn’t that bad. Not good but I know that there are parts of the country where it is much worse. To be honest, a high percentage of the country has no potable water at all.

If you can build a well, do so, set it as your top of the list priority as a survivalist.

Water comes before firearms, medicines and even food. Save as much water as you can. Use plastic bottles, refill soda bottles and place them in a cool place, preferably inside a black garbage bag to protect it from sun light. The water will pick some plastic taste after a few months, but water that tastes a little like plastic is far way better than no water at all. What ever the kind of SHTF scenario you are dealing with, water will suffer. In my case the economical crash created problems with the water company, that reduces the maintenance and quality in order to reduce costs and keep their income in spite of the high prices they have to pay for supplies and equipment, most of which comes from abroad, and after the 2001 crash, costs 3 times more. As always, the little guy gets to pay for it.

And power:

I spent way too much time without power for my own taste. Power has always been a problem in my country, even before the 2001 crisis. The real problem starts when you spend more than just a few hours without light. Just after the SHTF in 2001 half the country went without power for 3 days. Buenos Aires was one big dark grave. People got caught on elevators, food rots; hospitals that only had a few hours worth of fuel for their generators ran out of power. Without power, days get to be a lot shorter. Once the sun sets there is not much you can do. I read under candle light and flashlight light and your head starts to hurt after a while. You can work around the house a little bit but only as long as you don’t need power tools. Crime also increases once the lights go out, so whenever you have to go somewhere in a black out, carry the flashlight on one hand and a handgun on the other.

He recommends a generator and a battery charger that has both a solar panel and a small crank.

He notes that gas suffers too:

Gas has decreased in quality as well, there is little gas. Try to have an electric oven in case you have to do without it. If both electricity and gas go down, one of those camping stoves can work as well, if you keep a good supply of gas cans. The ones that work with liquid fuel seem to be better on the long run, since they can use different types of fuel. [...] Anyway, a city that goes without gas and light for more than two weeks is a death trap, get out of there before it’s too late.

If you’ve traveled outside the First World, and you’ve seen Third World traffic under optimal conditions, you can only imagine what SHTF driving is like:

People that live in 1st world countries are used to well kept streets and roads. Let me tell you, after only a few months of no maintenance, street will look as if bombed from an airplane. Rain and temperature difference destroys the pavement very fast.

Right now in Buenos Aires there are holes in the street the size of trucks. There were cases of cars actually falling inside these craters, so you can imagine the conditions streets are in.

A low car, designed for perfect pavement should be avoided as much as possible. That’s why I said that if I could do everything all over again I would get a 4×4 SUV.

This doesn’t mean that you should buy a huge 4×4 truck to drive around the city all day long. That’s not very practical and you do need a fast, easy to maneuver vehicle that can get out of problems fast. A medium size SUV should be the ticket for both agility and 4×4 power. Getting stuck in a roadblock because your truck is to darn big to maneuver around it, then what’s the use of the 4×4?
[...]
Guys, you have to prepare for people throwing objects at your car, standing themselves in front of the vehicle so that you stop or crash against a light/tree/whatever, so that they can rob you. It takes time and determination, but you MUST get to a point where if the windshield blows in you can continue driving as best as you can, if someone puts twisted nails on the road and blows your tires, you keep calm and keep driving, always keep driving no matter what, until you get to a gas station or other place safe. Especially at night, or early morning you have to keep the car moving all the time. Of course this is not always possible. Sometimes there is too much traffic and you have to stop. In this case, slow down before you get to the cars, and keep the car moving slowly until the light changes, in order to always keep the car moving. Never cut away your own escape routes by getting too close to the car in front. Leave at least 5 meters or so in front of you, so that you have enough place to maneuver.

At night, no one stops at red lights in Buenos Aires. That’s why many districts decided to turn the traffic light to a permanent yellow at night, in order to reduce car accidents. There are places in Buenos Aires where you don’t stop at the traffic lights all day long. Today, when I was retuning from the University at 1.30 PM, I passed a red light right in front of a police patrol car. The cop didn’t say a word. He understands that no one stops on the Dark road (the road I take back home) unless it’s inevitable. This won’t happen over night. It will take at least a few months after TSHTF until cops and authorities understand the new reality of the country. Even now, there are those that may stop you from crossing on a red light at night. But most patrol cars will understand, even crossing the red light themselves.

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

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