Today I noticed repeated Hyundai advertisements on TV promising that if you happened to lose your income, you could return your new Hyundai and “walk away.” I’ve got to give them some credit because fear of losing my job is at least part of why I am reluctant to buy a car right now. But what could be more futile than walking away from a car after absorbing the initial depreciation and making a few payments towards interest?

Hyundai’s website calls their vehicle return program Assurance: Certainty in Uncertain Times.

They do promise to cover up to $7,500 in negative equity. But the small print lays out a more complicated transaction than simply returning the car. You must file a benefit request, which must be approved, and you must pay the difference between the dealer’s determination of the car’s value and something called the Assurance benefit. IOW, if you’re having trouble making payments, you’re probably going to get stuck paying more than just one payment to walk away from the car.

The program may be better than being stuck with the car payments, but it isn’t enough to bring me into the showroom.

The word Assurance reminded me of the Monty Python short, The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which you can enjoy here:

Part One

Part Two

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In the late 70s, during one of the gasoline crises, I decided to improve on the three-speed Raleigh I had ridden since Jr High and get at least a ten speed. I shopped and shopped and was torn between a Puch Brigadier and a Raleigh SuperCourse. They had virtually the same components, and this was before I knew the word gruppo, but I obsessed over the frames. One of the bike store managers seemed impressed that I actually seemed to care what I bought. He said with gas prices rising, many men were rushing in, and all they knew was that they wanted a good bike.

That seems to have been happening again this last year:

A Surge in Bicyclists Appears to Be Waiting

Business skyrocketed last summer along with gasoline prices, Mr. Graves said, especially sales of hybrid bikes that can be used for recreation and transportation. So Mr. Graves ordered plenty of cold weather gear for what he believed would be legions of new bike commuters.

“We wished we hadn’t gone in quite as heavy,” Mr. Graves said. “Business is not growing at the rate it was earlier in the year.”

Lower gas prices may have changed the picture, or:

Industry analysts … said even then that bicycle store owners … were misreading the indicators. What owners perceived to be a commuter trend was probably not. The analysts argued that bicycle commuters were generally a fixed group. These riders account for less than 1 percent of commuters in the United States; in isolated pockets like Portland, they might account for about 6 percent.

What I noticed a few years ago in Frederick, a small Maryland city swallowed by DC exurbs, was a lot of hispanic and other working class types riding very stripped down mountain bikes to work. I saw one fellow carrying his drill with the plaster mixing head in one hand. There was also the public employee guy I passed every day. I didn’t count recreational types wearing colorful jerseys and riding expensive road bikes. I figure they had the day off.

Here in Federal Hill, I’m so close that I walk to work, but I see a lot more riders, many without helmets, heading for nearby downtown Baltimore every morning, but I’d have to agree that they are probably part of that fixed group mentioned above.

One view contends that the sluggish coda to the summer bicycling boom is not the end of the refrain.

“I don’t think any of us are fools that $1.89-a-gallon gasoline is really going to be the way it will be from here on out,” said Fred Clements, executive director of the National Bicycle Dealers Association. “I don’t want to appear to be too bullish, but some of the longer term trends — how we get out of an economic recession like this — don’t necessarily put bicycles in a bad spot. Bicycles are part of a solution to the problem.”

I can’t seem to respond to comments, so here’s an update:

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One cat

Crates full of cats

LisB and I were chatting about cat food last night, but this is something else altogether:

At 3:37 on December 10th, the K25 train arrived at Dongguan East Station. About 1,500 cats had been sent on the train from Nanjing. Eight men wearing camouflage got on the train and started to move off the cages crammed with cats. Every time a cage landed on the ground, cats screeched in pain.

The invoice showed that this shipment contained 1,500 cats, and included a sterilization certificate and an animal quarantine certificate issued by official veterinarians.

Following a man who bought some cats, the reporter arrived at a Cantonese food restaurant where cat is priced for 36 yuan per kilo. In the restaurant, customers ordered a dish called “braised cat,” which cost 147 yuan. Describing the dish, the waitress said that cat meat has the medicinal property of “nourishing yin and boosting yang.” The customers said that they wanted to try it because they were curious.

Cats are packed in cages (from Nalan Jingmeng’s blog)The reporter traced the source of the cats to suburban counties of Nanjing, where some people make a living catching cats and selling them for about 10 to 20 yuan each to wholesalers. These cat thieves are called “cat fishermen.” A fisherman can catch about 20 cats in one night. A Nanjing-based organization which is committed to helping stray cats confirmed to the newspaper that there are far fewer stray cats in the city this year than normal.

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Photos and blog

We attended two days of the Solar Decathlon in 2007. Held roughly every two years on the National Mall, twenty university teams attempt to build a small, efficient house that will excel at numerous criteria related to energy efficiency and design. The elegant but expensive entry (shown above) from Technische Universität Darmstadt took first place that year. The angled slats in all those louvered folding doors are actually slim photovoltaic or PV panels. Occupants can adjust them for solar gain by day and privacy by night.

I didn’t realize it then, but as the New York Times explains, Darmstadt is the home of the Passiv Haus:

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

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My only reservation about the typical solar decathlon homes, and indeed most solar homes that I have seen, is that they are freestanding, hence suburban, structures. It would be interesting to address energy efficient design in an urban setting, where warming sunlight may be impeded by or shared between close neighbors.

As in several articles, and his book, Reinventing Collapse, Dmitry Orlov recently looked at his five stages of collapse in light of today’s headlines.

Best quote:

I found it quite funny that the recent clamoring for re-regulating the financial markets was greeted with cries of “Socialists!” Failing at capitalism doesn’t make you a socialist, any more than getting a divorce automatically makes you gay.

General premise:

I am an engineer, and so I naturally tended to look for physical explanations for this process, as opposed to economic, political, or cultural ones. It turns out that one could come up with a very good explanation for the Soviet collapse by following energy flows. What happened in the late 80s is that Russian oil production hit an all-time peak. This coincided with new oil provinces coming on stream in the West - the North Sea in the UK and Norway, and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska - and this suddenly made oil very cheap on the world markets. Soviet revenues plummeted, but their appetite for imported goods remained unchanged, and so they sank deeper and deeper into debt. What doomed them in the end was not even so much the level of debt, but their inability to take on further debt even faster. Once international lenders balked at making further loans, it was game over.

What is happening to the United States now is broadly similar, with certain polarities reversed. The US is an oil importer, burning up 25% of the world’s production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is putting the brakes on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same.

Orlov believes the US is well into Stage 1: Financial Collapse with some evidence of Stages 2: Commercial Collapse and 3: Political Collapse.

On the one hand, there are signs that global shipping is grinding to a halt, and that big box retailers are in for a very bad time, with many stores likely to close following a disastrous Christmas season. On the other hand, states are already experiencing massive budget shortfalls, laying off state workers, cutting back on programs, and are starting to beg the federal government for bail-out money.

What is most unnerving is that instead of relating Russian post-collapse anecdotes, Orlov now can offer the personal observations of a Detroit resident:

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