Norway’s Think to Sell Electric Cars in U.S.

swanksalot0 comment

Wonder if these plans have been altered1

DETROIT – Norway’s Think Global AS, with backing from U.S. venture capital investors, plans to produce and sell a small all-electric car in the U.S. that could go as far as 110 miles when fully charged – fresh evidence that the race to woo American consumers with electric cars is heating up and drawing interest from the same investors that helped build Silicon Valley.

Norway’s Think Global plans to launch an electric car, called the Think City, in the U.S. in 2009.
The Oslo-based electric carmaker, which recently set up a U.S. office in Menlo Park, Calif., is trying to determine what geographical areas to focus its sales activities on, with an aim to launch the car – the Think City – in 2009. Think, a Ford Motor Co. unit until the U.S. auto maker sold it to a Norwegian company in 2003, is also searching for a site in the U.S. and Mexico to assemble the car.

Jan-Olaf Willums, Think Global chief executive officer, said Think plans to sell the City, to be priced less than $25,000, in densely populated cities because of the car’s limited range. The car is just hitting the market in Norway, Sweden and Denmark where a typical user drives the vehicle for a relatively short commuting distance and plugs it into an electric outlet in his garage to charge it overnight.

[From Norway’s Think to Produce, Sell Small Electric Cars in U.S. – WSJ.com]

Something to look out for in any case

Footnotes:
  1. since the original article was posted June, 2008 [↩]

Bicycle Accident

Seth Anderson8 Comments

Today, I took a bike ride west on Fulton, enjoying the splendid weather. Made it nearly as far as Damen when a pothole/cavern impeded my progress.

I swerved to avoid the hole (which was as wide as the entire westbound lane), but suddenly noticed a Ford Explorer directly behind me. Slammed on my brakes, and did a stoppie: ie, my front tire stopped first, and I was thrown over my handlebars to the pavement. Luckily was wearing bike gloves, so my hands were not shredded (though my gloves were). The SUV swerved and did not run me nor my bike over.

I sprained my left wrist and elbow, and right wrist, plus various knees and leg parts were scraped. My left elbow seems to be the worst off: I cannot extend my arm past 80• without excruciating pain, nor can I bend my left arm beyond 40• without experiencing excruciating pain, the swelling is impressive. I’ve been icing my joints (including both knees), and am typing this using a home-made sling for my left arm. Of course I did not visit a doctor: the American healthcare system is only slightly more popular than the American airline system.

When I was a boy of around 9, I fell off a bike and broke my right elbow, today’s incident seems somewhat symmetrical in retrospect, even though, as far as I can ascertain, I did not break my elbow today, nor did I have to be driven 35 miles (or however far it was) to see a doctor in Burks Falls, calling a country doctor called away from shearing his sheep, with blood stains all over his shirt. Instead, I watched Charlie Wilson’s War (more on that later), took a lot of vitamins, and drank a few tequilas mixed with fresh fruit juice.

Oh, and the SUV driver was very kind, he stopped to make sure I was alright, and my bike was still serviceable. I was macho, and didn’t let him drive me home, and insisted I was ok. The accident was entirely my own fault, he was only an observer to it. My bike itself only suffered minor injuries: some scuff to the handlebars, and the chain popped off. I rode it home. My camera was ok as well, and I am going to be wearing a helmet next time I can bike (had to drive home using only my right arm: could not hold the handlebars with my left hand).

Speaking of, I should ice my elbow again.

Camping on an Alaskan Glacier with walking wounded

Shadow History of Funk

Seth Anderson0 comment

*Reposted


What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves (1967-1977)
“What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves (1967-1977)” (Various Artists)

Good funk never gets old. Start playing the Meters, or Curtis Mayfield, or Sly and the Family Stone at your next party, and watch the mood change to ebullience. Funk also has the side benefit of being ‘acceptable’ driving music for D and myself.

Various Artists: What It Is!: Pitchfork Record Review
It’s rather nice to have one, well-documented place to go for such a huge range of funk and soul tracks, and Rhino has taken advantage of it, consolidating things even further to compile what amounts to, as Oliver Wang says in his lead-in essay, a “shadow history of funk.” These aren’t the songs that blew up the charts, though you may have heard a few of them– Curtis Mayfield’s “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go” or Wilson Pickett’s “Engine Number 9”, for instance.
…
There are names that pop up throughout the generous track notes, and two of the most common are the twin giants of New Orleans r&b: Allen Toussaint and the Meters, who often worked as Toussaint’s house band. Both are represented with their own tracks, but Toussaint penned a further seven, and at least a couple of Meters turn up on six tracks credited to other artist. The best of these is a full-on Meters romp, Cyrille Neville’s 1970 killer “Gossip”, The song opens with a towering “coral sitar” guitar riff from Leo Nocentelli that injects a heavy does of psychedelia to accent the rock-hard beat.

A few tracks later, you get a real sitar, courtesy of Ananda Shankar’s cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. Shankar was nephew to Ravi, and sold a truckload of LPs grafting virtuoso sitar playing onto psychedelic pop; “Metamorphosis” is the funkiest track from his self-titled LP, but “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is more immediate. On the less frivolous end of things is “Headless Heroes” by Eugene McDaniels, from his political funk opus Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, a record Spiro Agnew personally requested be withdrawn in spite of the fact that almost nobody heard it. When McDaniels refers to us all as “racial pawns in the master game” and asserts that “the player who controls the board sees them all as the same/ Basically cannon fodder,” you know he means it.

Paranoia rears its head on the dark funk of Baby Huey & the Babysitters’ “Hard Times”, an icy ghetto soul track with a chilling, guitar-soaked intro and lyrics about being held up by someone you thought you trusted. Baby Huey is one of many artists here worth investigating further– including the Meters, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett, Harlem River Drive, Mongo Santamaria, Fred Wesley, King Curtis, and Bobby Byrd. There are, however, a number of artists for whom further investigation is damn near impossible. More than a quarter of the bands included here never released a full-length album, so the Houseguests’ “What So Never the Dance” is pretty much it. This is where the value of a set like this really comes into sharp relief– Tony Alvon & the Belairs’ groover “Sexy Coffee Pot” has never been easier to come by than it is with this on the shelves.

and from the Amazon listing:

Too many reissue compilations are content to merely slice ‘n’ dice familiar catalog choices in not particularly original ways. But this four-disc, 91-track trove of obscure ’70s R&B and funk from Warner-distributed labels great and small argues there’s still treasure to be gleaned from studio vaults–a five-hour groove-fest that’s as interested in shaking booty as in opening ears. Even the genre’s groundbreaking usual suspects (Wilson Pickett, the Bar-Kays, Curtis Mayfield, Earth, Wind & Fire, et al) are represented by selections that aren’t immediately familiar, while Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin serves up a radically different, previously unreleased take of “Rock Steady.” Still other stars contribute their sonic touches to some of the lesser-known cuts, as witnessed by the patent trippiness of Sly Stone alter-egos 6ix and Stanga on “I’m Just Like You” and “Little Sister,” respectively; the stark, party-not-so-hearty contrast of the Mayfield-written-and-produced “Hard Times” by Baby Huey & Baby Sisters; and the Meters’ version of “Tampin’,” released under the moniker of the Rhine Oaks.

Sequenced in rough chronological order, it’s a savvy window into a musical evolution as well, with the rhythmic guitars, organ swells, and horn flourishes of traditional ’60s R&B giving way to sinewy synths and increasingly chunky bass lines as the decade grooves on. While savvy hip-hoppers will note that many of the rarities here have already been repurposed by shrewd mixers, it’s a revelation to hear them in their original form. A compelling deconstruction of an often clichéd and too-narrowly-defined genre, this is an anthology that showcases music that has influenced such contemporary artists as Tupac, the Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West, annotated by many of the original musicians who set the dance floor in motion.

Air Travel Sucks

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Flight 1053

Survey says…

Nearly half of American air travelers would fly more if it were easier, and more than one-fourth said they skipped at least one air trip in the past 12 months because of the hassles involved, according to an industry survey.

The Travel Industry Association, which commissioned the survey released Thursday, estimated that the 41 million forgone trips cost the travel industry $18.1 billion — including $9.4 billion to airlines, $5.6 billion to hotels and $3.1 billion — and it cost federal, state and local authorities $4.2 billion in taxes in the past 12 months.

When 28 percent of air travelers avoided an average of 1.3 trips each, that resulted in 29 million leisure trips and 12 million business trips not being taken, the researchers estimated.

[From Survey: Americans make 41M fewer air trips — Lifestyle and Leisure, Delta Air Lines — chicagotribune.com]

I travel a lot less than I used to. Just too much of a hassle. Investigated taking trains (haven’t done that yet, but still thinking about a trip out west, or to Austin), investigated investing/subscribing to web conference software to avoid business travel, and just avoid vacations that involve air travel. Everything about the experience is miserable, TSA terrorism theater, surly airline employees, worries about airline mechanics skimping on proper maintenance, constant delays due to decades old software, yadda yadda. Flying on The Starship it ain’t.

Is re-regulation an answer? Nobody mentions it, and maybe it was just coincidence, but when the airlines were regulated, pre-Regan, flying sure seemed a lot more fun, and smooth. The airlines would be better served if competition wasn’t so cut-throat (and CEO compensation wasn’t so enormous, but that’s a different topic), they obviously are in trouble as matters stand.

Roger Dow, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based association, said the research “should be a wake-up call to America’s policy leaders that the time for meaningful air system reform is now.”

“The air travel crisis has hit a tipping point — more than 100,000 travelers each day are voting with their wallets by choosing to avoid trips,” Dow said in a statement.

That’s a big blow to airlines, many of which are losing money as the industry struggles with soaring fuel costs. Carriers have raised fares, added fees, cut capacity and scaled back expansion plans, and some small airlines have declared bankruptcy, while Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp. announced plans to combine in an effort to reduce costs.

Disney Borders on the Insane

Seth Anderson0 comment

propaganda

Disney’s lackeys in the Congress are trying to build a different kind of wall: a wall that doesn’t allow copyrighted material to permeate. Good luck with that, or should I say more precisely, bad luck with that, hope you fail thoroughly and completely.

Living close to the Canada/US border used to be a lot less stressful. You could head across to either side for a simple lunch date and head back with little more ceremony than a few questions to ensure you didn’t fit some dubious profile. New international copyright regulation could make that border trip with your iPod, cell phone or laptop a hazardous exercise in your right to private property.

Secretive meetings are taking place now between the governments of the US, Canada and the EU that could clamp down on you if you cross the border with any data-storage device. Journalists in Canada have received leaked notes about the secret international negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

If passed, border guards who you’d think have enough to worry about, would become copyright police for the RIAA and Hollywood studios. They’d be granted sweeping powers to conduct searches of any storage device you try to take across the border. They’d have the authority to act against infringers, meaning you could be subject to fines, seizure or even destruction of your equipment.

The agreement will essentially assume that anyone in possession of copyrighted material is guilty of infringement unless they can prove otherwise. It will be necessary to prove that you own the CD or DVDs you have backed up on your laptop or MP3 player. Unless you still have receipts for all that ripped media you could be in for a long future border crossing.

The draconian policies proposed by ACTA require Americans to toss away their constitution and its guarantee of private property and mandate for the burden of proof upon an accuser. Existing copyright laws in Canada and the US require rights holders to present evidence of infringement. Much to the pleasure of groups like the RIAA and MPAA the policy on fair use would be another casualty as a result of ACTA. Mandated by the 1984 Supreme Court’s Sony vs. Universal, it was established that it’s fair use for an owner to duplicate copyrighted materials for personal use. This has protected VCR, PVR and MP3 player owners ever since.

[From Check That MP3 Player at the Border: ACTA Could Bring Tough New Copyright Laws]

Craziness. When will it end? WHen you have to pay a fee to listen to your neighbor’s stereo?

The Magic Kingdom of Disney
(click to embiggen Paul Krasner’s satiric take on the Disney World you might not know)

Drugs Dollars and Doctors

Seth Anderson0 comment

Got to pay for that house in Aspen somehow….

Benjamins

Suit Details How J&J Pushed Sales of Procrit – WSJ.com

Documents in a lawsuit filed against Johnson & Johnson by two former salesmen show how the pharmaceutical giant sought to boost sales of its blockbuster anti-anemia drug Procrit by offering contracts that fattened doctors’ profits and urging its salespeople to push higher-than-approved doses.
…
Some of Mr. [Dean] McClellan’s documents [a drug salesman for 12 years] reviewed by The Wall Street Journal indicate that Ortho Biotech created complex purchasing programs offering doctors discounts and cash rebates on Procrit, which would increase the doctors’ profits.

Procrit is an infused drug, which is administered by a doctor. Unlike pills sold by pharmacies, infused drugs offer profit opportunities for doctors, who can buy the drugs, administer the infusions in their offices, and collect the payments from insurers or the government. Drug companies can fatten the doctor’s margin using discounts and rebates to lower the price.

How are these doctors any different than a street corner drug dealer? Why doesn’t the DEA spend some time investigating these pushers too? Reminds me of Glenn Greenwald’s question as to why doctors can over-rule patients.

Mr. McClellan’s documents on the marketing of Procrit show that in 2004 — after Amgen Inc.’s competing drug Aranesp came on the market — J&J made offers that would allow buyers of Procrit to receive discounts off an already-reduced price as well as rebates. For example, an internal company memo calculates that a physician who bought nearly $1 million of Procrit over 15 months would get a check for $237,885 back, or 24%.

Another J&J program offered hospitals an incentive to buy Procrit and shun Aranesp: discounts on purchases from across Johnson & Johnson’s product line — including some huge-selling drugs and medical devices sold by different subsidiaries — if the hospital used Procrit at least 75% of the time when prescribing anti-anemia drugs.

In addition, J&J created a “Right of First Refusal” contract for doctors, requiring them to allow Ortho Biotech to make a counteroffer if Amgen’s Aranesp price undercut Procrit.

Mr. McClellan also alleges the company pushed doctors to prescribe a higher dose years before it was approved as safe and effective by the FDA. For years, the company focused on educating health care providers on Procrit’s medical benefits, he says. But in the mid-1990s at a national sales force meeting, an Ortho executive announced that the division was moving to promote what it called “QW dosing,” switching patients from three, 10,000-unit doses a week to a single, 40,000-unit dose in cancer patients, Mr. McClellan says.

Food, Fuel, Famine

Seth Anderson1 Comment

vegetables

Tax dollars for Monsanto, GMO food for you, courtesy of the Bush-ites.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, who travels to a world food security conference in Rome next week, laid out the Bush administration’s strategy today for meeting the current worldwide crisis of rising food costs and shortages.

[snip]

Some aid groups have argued that, worldwide, the increased production of biofuels has contributed to increasing crop demand and food prices.

Higher food prices have made it difficult for those living on the edge of poverty to afford food. The UN estimates that more than 850 million people worldwide face daily food emergencies.

The Bush administration has tailored its food aid to include the use of genetically modified organisms, or GMO, crops, which are made by a number of U.S. companies. The White House argues that development aid that emphasizes GMO crops will help countries feed their own populations. It contends that those crops are more resistant to drought and pests, and will work well in countries where farming is difficult.

The organic farming community opposes the use of such crops, which they argue require sophisticated and expensive fertilizers and other pesticides.

[snip]

The use of GMO crops, though, will probably meet with opposition from European countries at the conference. Many won’t allow GMO seed, or the import of foods made from GMO crops. They argue that the health effects of such crops are not clear.

That ban even caused several African nations in 2002 to consider forgoing U.S. aid that included GMO crops because they feared important European export markets would be lost. Eventually the U.S. grain aid was crushed into flour to prevent its use as seed.

[From The Swamp: Food, Fuel, Famine]

Once Monsanto and ADM control the patents on all seeds, the Rapture will soon follow (or so Bush seems to believe).

links for 2008-05-30

swanksalot0 comment

River City Condos

Seth Anderson0 comment

South Loop

River City Condos

River City Condos, originally uploaded by swanksalot. A building one could recognize anywhere.

www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/1054/River_City.php

Republished:
www.chicagoist.com/2007/09/18/more_housing_ma.php

Clean Coal is not cheap

Seth Anderson0 comment

Failure of leadership means money for desert wars, not for reducing carbon emissions.

For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.

President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.

But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

[From The Energy Challenge – Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal – Series – NYTimes.com]

Lets hope Obama’s friendship with energy companies like Exelon won’t impede research funds into cleaner coal when he wins in 2009.

But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.

The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades.

The highest-profile failure involved a project known as FutureGen, which President Bush himself announced in 2003: a utility consortium, with subsidies from the government, was going to build a plant in Mattoon, Ill., testing the most advanced techniques for converting coal to a gas, capturing pollutants, and burning the gas for power.

Seems like besides a failure of political leadership, energy companies are milking taxpayer funds for their own purposes.

Alleys are life, embodied

swanksalot0 comment

Alleys are life, embodied

Alleys are life, embodied, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Alley, West Loop. Maybe Randolph St., not sure yet. Slightly Photoshopped.
emotional response here
www.b12partners.net/mt/archives/2005/06/alleys_are_life.html

—

www.building-cincinnati.com/2008/05/cincinnati-will-consi…

Speaking of post-traumatic stress disorder

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Wild Flowers 2

Can’t help but laugh at this karmic retribution

A Fox News employee who says she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after being bitten by bedbugs at work filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the owner of the Manhattan office tower where she worked.

Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between October 2007 and April 2008. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months.

[From Fox News worker sues over bedbugs in NY office – Yahoo! News]

I’m sure Fox News, the entity, has fulminated a few times about needless lawsuits.