I'm back baby

So I'm back from my vacation to London. I visit the most newsworthy site on the net, you're reading it, and find that in the two weeks that I was gone...nothing happened. I fully expected Stalin to make his mark on the blog since I was gone and unable to fully reject his points like I do his little girly shots on the court. But no, like the NeoGOP, he is unable to generate his own points and can only bash the creativity of others. As far as M3K, well, I'm scared of M3K so...well...hey buddy, good to see you again. Well Stalin, get your feet ready to tromp on the sandcastles of my creativity.

Before I get into current events, let me give a quick shout out to London. Great city, probably my favorite world-wide, you know, as far as foreign cities go. We all know that our most sludgefilled cesspool of a town (I'm looking at you Buffalo) is better than the best that any other nation can offer up.

A few things they do right.

One, dollar coin (they call them "pounds" how cute is that?). Always a big fan of this, saves a ton of money. We just need to stop producing dollar bills, and stop making dollar coins that look like quarters. Make them bigger, thicker, look like doughnuts, even square, I don't care, but just please stop making dollar coins look like quarters. (As a side note I also favor getting rid of pennies. If something has so little value that people won't bend down to pick them up off the ground (meaning they're worth less than "free," we should get rid of them. England misses here, they have one cent and two cent coins. Just waisted all that money they saved with dollar coins.)

They speak english. I sure wish all the other foreign countries would follow suit. Much easier to get around.

They use metric, sort of. I'm also a big fan of the metric system, just makes more sense. But they also use miles. Very bizzare. You'll be driving down the road reading everything in k's, and a sign will pop up out of nowhere saying to please drive 15 mph, or that a new exit is in 5 miles. They also use a weight system called "stones." I have no idea what the hell that is.

The underground rules. It got me thinking. The big belief in the US is that mass transit doesn't work. But what I don't hear is how that failure is measured. Its not use, because you could just make it free to increase usership. So it must be cost. Some sort of subsidy hurdle must be used to determine success and failure. But compared to what? Cars? Here's where it gets interesting. I'm curious about the all in cost of cars v. subways. Oil is subsidized, as are the cars themselves, and most importantly the roads are massively subsidized (I'm just focusing on direct costs and ignoring things like health issues due to particulate emmissions, injuries, fatalities, crime, etc). If we're just looking at all-in costs, then cars in Alaska, for example, are a massive failure. Should we abandon them? I think that the car subsidy is so entrenched that it gets ignored. So much so that when people talk of FDR's role in creating big government, they never, ever talk of Ike creating the federal highway system. Talk about a massive increase in govt spending. Even if you still buy the hype that we need an internal network to move troops around the nation in event of an attack, surely we can all agree that we don't need more that two lanes to serve that purpose. If Atlanta needs 12 lanes, that feels like an Atlanta problem, not a Palm Harbor, FL problem, so why are those people paying for it? My gut says that on a per person, per mile base, subways are much cheaper than cars. Its just that the costs associated with cars are so spread out, that they become invisible. Now before Stalin freaks out on me, my point isn't to build more subways, rather that in a free market with no subsidies, my bet is that trains are cheaper, and are/would be more "successful" than currently assumed.

Finally, all prices include tax. If something says 25.45, you pay 25.45. I'm not smart enough to figure taxes so I need this.

That's enough for now. The pound is already killing the dollar, I don't want them to get too heady.