Thoughts Cubed™

What a great time to be driving an American automobile. And your thinking… you got to be nuts, with the price of gas these days and low MPG ratings. Every fill up is $50.00 bucks plus.

My thoughts are baised on a trend that we have not seen in 40 years. Just look at the horsepower race that is going on. We have not seen cars being built with this much horsepower since the muscle cars of the 60’s and early 70’s. Detroit is building cars with 4 hundred, 5 hundred and even some with over 6 hundred horsepower.

The current top dogs being the Dodge Viper with 600 horsepower and Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 supercar with 630 horsepower. Ok their sports cars. So, you ask, what about the mid-size sedan 2009 Cadillac CTS-V with 550 horsepower, it is over the top! All of these cars have horsepower that years ago would have been considered exotic and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Just look at the Porsche 911 GT2, with 501 horsepower at almost 200 grand. You can buy the Corvette ZR1 for a little more than half of the Porsche and you get over 600 horsepower not the measly 501 the Porsche has. Or get your hands on the CTS-V, that will do a sub 4 second 0-60, for under $70,000.

Who knows what will happen in the next few years? With all the government regulations hitting for higher Mile Per Gallon ratings hitting. We might be seeing the auto manufactures dropping all these great horsepower numbers to achieve the average fleet MPG rates being regulated by the government. So you better run out and drive one of these power house now.

So even though Gas prices are high, and I mean sky high, it is still great to be driving an American car with all this horsepower.

May 25, 2005 a senate panel votes, unanimously, to encourage ethanol production. The Panel was lead by Senator Jim Talent (r-Mo) in a response to higher gasoline prices. The oil industry opposed the plan clamming that the wide use of such a policy would lead to higher food prices.

Then that same year, 2005, Congress instructed the Environmental Protection agency to enforce the Renewable Standards Act. Which required at least 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels be added too and blended into our existing fossil fuel by the year 2012. And so starts the process that is giving us higher food prices today.

Now jump forward to 2008 looking at two staple we all need, back in Feb 2006 corn was $2.28 per bushel just a few months ago Feb 2008 the price per bushel rose to $5.46. This is almost double the cost in just 24 months. Wheat another staple food item was $3.48 per bushel in Feb 2006; now in Feb 2008 it is $11.21/bushel.

Why is the price of basic food elements climbing so fast? Because we are burning our food crops to fuel our cars, trucks and lawn mowers. So we cause a shift in the food paradigm. We create an entirely new use and market for crops that are scarce in the world today. Maybe the crops are not scarce today in America but large parts of the world are starving. People are dying every day because they do not have any food.

Then here in America, not only do we waist food, but now we burn our food crops for transportation. The rest of the world is watching and now trying to import more food crops. They just want to protect their own countries food supply. The result is again, more pressure on the food supply that results in higher prices. We are truly dumb americans.

We need to stop the push for ethanol as a renewable fuel before we all starve to death. I would rather have the option of not filling up my car at $9.00 a gallon for gasoline opposed to not being able to eat.

Sony looks like the big winner of the next generation video format war. At Januarys CES 2008 in Las Vegas Warner Bros. took sides and announced they would no longer support both formats. This appears to be the last straw for HD-DVD. With Warner Bros. announcement the majorly of the major movie studios now support ONLY Blu-ray.

It appears that Warner Bros looked at next gen disk sales in December 2007 and notices the Bul-Ray was out selling HD-DVD. So to help encourage the adoption of a single next generation video format, Warner Bros decided to support only Bul-Ray.

Does this really make sense for the consumer? If you look at both formats Blu-Ray and HD-dvd they have similar specks. Blu-ray does have a greater storage capacity. On the other hand Sony Blu-Ray is an evolving standard. To get in the market Sony Blu-Ray decided to do a phase in of the standard. Kind of developing the product as they go. This means that when you buy a Blu-Ray disk and get it home, then pop it into the player it might work and it might not.

Surprise, you see a screen with big letters saying that YOUR Blu-Ray player does not support THIS Blu-Ray disk. Great now you just spent $30 plus on a disk and it will not play. So now what do you do? Will there is this convoluted firmware upgrade procedure you need to do before the disk will work. And oh by the way it requires a PC, with a DVD burner and an internet connection (on the LG BH-100). Great, so now I need to spend an hour or so to find, download and burn a DVD that will play in a DVD player.

I never had the upgrade problem with a HD-DVD disk. The HD-DVD standard was complete when the product was released. I have never had a problem playing an HD-DVD disk. All my problems have been with Blu-Ray. And the problem are not limited to the disk will not play. Other problems I encountered with Blu-ray are audio track drop out and audio and lip sync problems.

Oh and by the way The HD-DVD standard includes a migration plan for the consumer. The HD-DVD speck includes the option for the studio to put the HD-DVD format in different layers of the disk and the older DVD in a another layer( kind of like having side A & B). That way you can play the movie in your bedroom on your old DVD only player. OR you had the option to buy the new movie on a combo disk in the anticipation that you were going to by a new Generation HD-DVD player in a few months, but wanted to watch the movie on a standard definition DVD player now.

So Toshiba was offering the consumer a reasonable migration plan to the next generation high definition format. A completely formulated software standard, that works. Plus Toshiba also offered HD-DVD player for a reasonable price, at times under a hundred bucks. True the player did not have every gee whiz feature, but you could still afford a next generation player.

Now, Sony, on the other hand wants you to pay for the movie for each and every format. That would be DVD, Blu-Ray, PSP etc…. And the price of the Blu-Ray players is three to four times that of the HD-DVD entry players.

Sony also paid studios hundreds of millions of dollars to get the movie studios to back the Blu-ray format. Sony was not going to lose another format war. Sony lost the video tape format war when Betamax lost out to VHS. Sony’s MiniDisc audio format never caught on in the shadow of the infamous Compact Disk (CD). Sony did not hold back on next generation video the format war.

So who pays? You and Me we pay. We all pay through higher prices for Blu-ray players and Blu-ray Disks. After all someone needs to pay all the hundreds of millions of dollars Sony spent winning the format war.

So You (the consumer) lose!

Companies in the telecommunications, cable and satellite dish industry are always advertising their services with a surprising low price. At first glance the price looks good. Then you see the words promotional rate, introductory rate, first three months, or limited time at this rate. Or something along toughs lines. But nowhere, on the ad, is the real cost listed. Sometimes there is the little special symbol that denotes and additional explanation or terms. But good luck finding the fine print, it is buried somewhere in the multi page paper ad or on another web page with in the site.

So this advertising technique must work. The dumb Americans are jump at this low price and do not even think or consider what this service will cost after the low price time period expires. So as dumb Americans consumers we either get hooked on the service or we get lazes and never cancel the service. So the advertiser wins because you keep paying the monthly fee, month after month at the higher rate.

If the company will not display the real cost then it is not worth it singing up. Most likely they are trying to compete with someone else’s rate that is actually lower all the time. The new company is just trying to lure you into their program with a temporary rate that appears to be competitive. In my opinion this is on the edge of being dishonest, I understand the advertisers rational is they are offering a lower rate for new customers to check there service out for a trial period. It is still only a short term rate.

The advertisers should clearly (not is a tiny print that is imposable to find) state what real monthly rate is in addition to the promotional rate.

How dumb are we? We are eating ourselve to death!

We are all eating more. Unless you are living under a rock. If you go to any fast food or takeout place all the portions are bigger. We use to drink an 8 ounce beverage and be satisfied, but thet was 20 years ago. Then it was the 12 ounce can, then the 16 ounce bottle now it is the 32 or 64 ounces big gulp cups. The cups are so big they have a smaller bottoms so they fit in a standard cup holder.

Same story with the American hamburger. The standard 19 cents burger, 20 years ago, with ketchup, muster and a pickle was all we wanted. Then came the double decker burger, followed buy the quarter ponder, quad stacker, the double double and now the one third ponder of angus beef. We are also adding more than just ketchup, muster and a pickle. First it was cheese, then cheese and bacon, now you can get just about anything on you burger including pastrami, chili and who knows what. Take this portion quiz on how portions have changed in the last 20 years.

Look at the names of how we refer to the food products we buy, Super sized, King size, Fat burger, Grandy, Grand, Large, Biggie and the adjectives go on… And the old small and medium are now called sample, kiddie sizes. After all how can a real adult order a kiddie size drink. I order the petite prim rib cut all the time, why not just call it the 8 ounce cut.

The scary thing is we are getting fatter at a faster pace. Check out these CDC trends at the CDC. In 1985 most states had about 10% of their population classified as over weight. In 1990 most states had about 12% of their population classified as over weight. Over weight being an additional 30 pounds for a 5 foot 4 inch person. In 2006 the 12% has climbed to 22% and about half of the states have 27% of there population classified as overweight. Just take a look around the next time you are out for a bite, and you start to notice the number of people that are over weight (myself included, I could loose 30 lb).