I can't get past the session expired message and post this comment to DickDay's Al Franken thread. I was logged in. I tried to logout and was still staring at a message that said Hi Donal. I tried to pretend to Blog Now to get a login screen. My session was still expired. So here it is:

My favorite Franken comment was about his entertaining the troops on USO tours.

Q: You've been accused of all sorts of things by conservatives, chief among them that you're unpatriotic. How do you respond to that?

A: That's just sort of silly. I don't know why they would believe that. I've done six USO tours and entertained the troops in Germany, Italy, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq a few times. My wife doesn't like it when I go to Iraq. She says, "You don't see Bill O'Reilly going on a USO tour." I say, "Honey, that's not fair. He has no talent."

I usually watch a few minutes of NBC's Today Show after local news and before I dash out the door. This morning, Today was broadcast from Neverland. Off went the TV.

That's my new rule - MJ "news" comes on, I change the channel or turn the set off. I don't care whether Prince Michael II was fathered by aliens - I don't want to know.

I liked Michael Jackson as much as the next guy, but enough is enough.

A new book, After the Car, reviewed in the Guardian:

"Significantly, they (authors Dennis and Urry) talk about cars not as discrete objects, or tools for personal use, but as components of a system which has become more entrenched with every decision, or "disruptive innovation", and which has led to private transport almost totally displacing public transport, as is the case, for instance, between the two coasts of the US."

"... The car system gives the illusion of freedom while glueing users into a dependence on traffic management, oil, and money to pay for oil. Meanwhile, the local administrator of the system in question - your government, in other words - is forced to spend most of its own time and money maintaining good relations with suppliers of oil, in order to sustain that illusion in the name of economic growth. Although Dennis and Urry put it more elegantly than this, the car system is absolutely batty."

One does have freedom with a car, freedom of schedule mostly, but increasing responsibilities. And that freedom is of little use when you are in a long line of Fourth of July traffic. I enjoyed driving until the day I noticed there was always a car right in front of me and a car right on my tail.

From the Back Cover

It is difficult to imagine a world without the car, and yet that is exactly what Dennis and Urry set out to do in this provocative new book. They argue that the days of the car are numbered: powerful forces around the world are undermining the car system and will usher in a new transport system sometime in the next few decades. Specifically, the book examines how several major processes are shaping the future of how we travel, including:
• Global warming and its many global consequences
• Peaking of oil supplies
• Increased digitisation of many aspects of economic and social life
• Massive global population increases
The authors look at changes in technology, policy, economy and society, and make a convincing argument for a future where, by necessity, the present car system will be re-designed and re-engineered.

Yet the book also suggests that there are some hugely bleak dilemmas facing the twenty first century. The authors lay out what they consider to be possible 'post-car' future scenarios. These they describe as 'local sustainability', 'regional warlordism' and 'digital networks of control'.

After The Car will be of great interest to planners, policy makers, social scientists, futurologists, those working in industry, as well as general readers.

Some have described the 20th Century as the century of the car. Now that century has come to a close - and things are about to change.

A pair of WSJ articles imply that some McMansions were built fast but poorly during the housing boom.

Cracked Houses: What the Boom Built (subscription)

"... hundreds of thousands of people from California to Georgia say their almost-new homes need costly repairs because of construction defects. The furious pace of home building from the late 1990s through the first half of the 2000s contributed to a surge in defects, experts say. It caused shortages of both skilled construction workers and quality materials. Many municipalities also fell behind inspecting and certifying new homes."

Blue Oaks Estates, in Rancho Murieta

"... was built on clay soil that expands in the rainy season and contracts in the scorching summers, ... This is damaging the homes' foundations and subtly twisting the frames, causing homes to slowly pull apart--as evidenced by cracking floors, walls and ceilings, separating gutters, and jammed windows and doors."

The article notes that other Rancho Murieta homes, "built later with different types of foundations" are holding up better, but that spooked lenders are requiring a "$7,000 engineering study" before refinancing in that area. In my experience, geotechnical reports and structural engineering fees pay for themselves. Even if there is no clay, ground that seems pristine may have been a dumping area decades ago. If so, builders have to remove the loose fill and carefully replace it with controlled fill, or extend foundations deep into original soil, or both. Home builders don't always want to pay for such reports, but because they didn't build for clayey soil, the Blue Oaks builders repurchased 50 homes, installing drainage systems, and underpinning foundations before running out of money.

Chinese Drywall: Pinpointing the Problems (subscription)

"The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in recent months has received more than 550 reports from people in 19 states and the District of Columbia involving odors, health symptoms and corrosion problems they blame on imported Chinese drywall. The complaints involve "rotten egg" smells and corrosion of wiring and other metals in the homes."

...

"Homeowners who believe they have Chinese-made drywall have complained of itchy eyes and skin, runny noses, nosebleeds, headaches and asthma attacks, among other things."

There seems to be too much sulfur in the Chinese wallboard (drywall is a US brand name, that, like kleenex, has become generic in the building trades), which slipped into the market during the housing boom, but no one is sure why just yet. The EPA has even found high concentrations of strontium in the Chinese products.

Along with aging infrastructure, Americans will have to be wary of shoddy construction and suspect materials in the years to come.

The Independent:

Vauban is a southern suburb of Freiburg and home to 5,300 people. Its elegant, weather-boarded, four-storey homes are painted in subtle tones of blue, yellow and red or left as natural wood. They have wide balconies and large French windows that look out on to quiet, park-like gardens. The overall impression is of being stuck in a never-ending IKEA advertisement.

But if the district’s surface texture is eminently middle class, an eco-revolution is bubbling beneath the surface. The windows of all the homes are triple-glazed. An intricate ventilation system fitted with heat exchangers ensures that apartments are kept constantly topped-up with fresh air at room temperature, even when the windows are shut. Most homes are powered by solar panels and smart co-generator engines that run on wood chips which provide domestic heating and electricity for lighting and appliances. One of the consequences is that most of Vauban’s homes generate a surplus of electricity and sell what they don’t need to the power companies that run the national and regional electricity grids.

With their 35cm thick walls, the homes are so well insulated that the temperature inside is directly affected by the number of people in each apartment. “If it gets too cold in the winter, you have the choice of turning up the heating or inviting a couple of friends round to dinner,” Delleske says. He is immensely proud of the fact that his 90sqm, four-roomed “Passive house,” which is almost environmentally perfect, costs a mere €114 a year to heat. “Most people pay that kind of money for heating each month,” he says. The “Passive house” has even managed to dispense with drains for the toilets and showers. The waste is reduced to compost in special biological toilets and shower and washing-up water is filtered and used to water the garden.

and that’s not all:

“If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district,” says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, “but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here.” As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town’s car-sharing schemes.

Is there a downside to this eco-suburb? “… it is difficult to spot anyone who is non-European, old or poor.”

In a separate article, Michael McCarthy puts Vauban in perspective:

Does it prove we can live without the car? Yes and No. It shows it can be done in a tightly-knit, specifically urban community, where personal motor transport can be in effect “designed out”, especially if there is a solid constituency of citizens with a strong commitment to environmental values, as has always been the case in Germany.

On a wider scale, actually doing without motor vehicles is much more problematic, especially in the countryside. For most rural communities in Britain, for example, the car is an absolute essential, not least as so many of them are hard if not impossible to reach by public transport. It is arguable that no greater environmental damage was done to the fabric of life in this country after the War than by the slashing of the national railway network recommended by Richard Beeching, the portly, self-satisfied industrialist whose 1963 report led to the closure of thousands of rural stations and hundreds of branch lines, leaving myriad British villages and small towns ultimately car-dependent.