- Loremo - a car that gets 157 miles per gallon of diesel. It could drive from Denver to L.A. (1000 miles) on around 7 gallons of diesel. That would take about 42 gallons of unleaded gasoline in my car. Unbelievable. The core idea here is that there is no point in driving a 150 lb human around in a 1.5 ton vehicle that is specifically designed in a way to be resistant to the wind. There is no need for the vehicle to be that big. So, make the vehicle as light as possible (while maintaining sturdiness) and make it as aerodynamic as possible. Great idea. Could be a bit scary driving it around with all the SUV's out on the road, but you have to start somewhere. It's planned to go into mass production in 2009 for around $20k USD.
- Tweel - a wheel that combines the tire and the wheel, using just a tread with polyurethane spokes connecting it to the actual wheel. The design uses far less material than the traditional tire.
So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...
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