Ideas for a Green World

More Bikes

More bike trails particularly in metro areas.
Encourage people to ride bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles
Government subsidies and/or tax credits for people using bikes as a primary mode of transportation.
Add more safety features to motorcycles.

Lighter and More Aerodynamic and Less Powerful Cars

An average sedan weighs 3000+ lbs.
An average person weighs ~160 lbs.
An average horse weighs ~1000 lbs.
Why do people need a 3000lbs machine to carry their 160lbs bod? It's time to reduce the car:person ratio. It is time for cars to lose some of that weight.

Build cars out of lighter material w/o compromising safety.
Encourage people to remove unnecessary weight.
Build cars with smaller gas tanks. As cars' fuel mileage improves, the need for giant gas tanks should diminish.
More two-seaters for the average Joe, not just sports car enthusiasts.
More aerodynamic designs.
Thinner tires with higher pressure to reduce impact of friction as well as air drag.

Comments

LaTeX Greeting Cards

No, no, not that kind of latex. You are pretty sick for thinking that. I am talking about LaTeX, the typesetting program. Back to greeting cards. Anybody else hate greeting cards? The type that you buy at the store, sign and deliver even though the message is very impersonal and superficial? Yeah, those kind. I hate them very much. Not only do I hate spending time trying to find something that's mildly personal, but I hate paying for them too. $3-5 on that garbage is a travesty. Jerry Seinfeld captures my feelings towards Hallmark cards perfectly in this clip: or this one http://www.youtube.com/v/7tq-RE_6yVo This problem has become significant enough for me to start working on solutions. I am going to make my own cards using LaTeX. So, I googled "LaTeX greeting cards" and came across the the gcards package. It requires that you also install the textpos and graphicx packages, if you don't have them installed already. I am working with a Linux system

Economic Aid to Developing Countries - The Stats

World economics has been an interest of mine for a long time and I will start blogging about it here. Questions like how and if the US can continue its dominance and prosperity, what role China and India will play in the world and what the future holds for the likes of Ethiopia and Eritrea fascinate and worry me quite a bit. To the best of my non-economist abilities, I will address these questions in the future. My first entry derives some general conclusions from statistics on economic aid from developed countries to developing and third-world countries that I found on BBC . It is no surprise the US leads in this category and a better measure of generosity would be one where the amount of aid is given as a percentage of the country's GDP or revenues. Considering this aid is coming from governments as opposed to NGO's, it would be more informative to calculate this aid as a percentage of a government's revenue. Unfortunately, what BBC reports is the amount of aid as a

Victim of Asylum Roulette

Not too many stories resonate with me as much as the plight of legitimate asylum seekers whose desperate plea to find refuge in the US is ultimately decided by the questionable preference, judgment and mood of a single asylum officer (with some oversight from a regional asylum director) on one fateful day. That decision, according to numerous credible and through studies, depends largely on the location of the regional asylum center, the legal representation of the the applicant, the gender of the asylum officer just as much as the merit of the asylum case, while in fact the legitimacy of the asylum case should be the only relevant factor. This phenomenon has become so real that researchers at the Georgetown University law school have dubbed it the Refugee Roulette . Why am I so sensitive about this subject? My most devastating tragedy of late has been the denial of my legitimate and honest application for political asylum at the Chicago Asylum Office. When I applied believing the

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