Tesla & Hertz

Blaine's Morning Porridge comments on Tesla and Hertz stock prices. Apparently Tesla is now worth a zillion dollars, and Hertz is making big gains by riding on their coattails.

Tesla will only continue to be a worth a zillion dollars as long there are fools to buy the stock. At some point a large holder will cash out and price will collapse and the stock price will go through the floor. The only question is when. It might be this week, it might not happen for 20 years.

I suspect the trading volume is miniscule. If there are only a few shares for sale, it doesn't take a very many crazy people to drive the price into the stratosphere.

I suspect a lot of this is due to torrent of money flowing out of Washington D.C.

Catching a Lyft to Hawaii

First time taking Lyft on our own today. We took Uber when we were in San Francisco a few years ago, but one of our kids arranged that. SWMBO installed the Lyft App a couple of days ago and arranged for a ride to the airport. $50 more or less. Last time I checked parking at the Economy lot at PDX was $10 a day, so it’s going to cost us a few bucks more, but no schlepping bags onto the shuttle bus, nor driving for miles to the back of beyond to find a parking space, plus I don’t have to remember where the heck I parked the car.

The Lyft driver was entertaining. Born and raised in St. Johns, he’s lived in Seattle and Las Vegas and now lives in Cornelius with his brother and two yappy dogs. He trained as a chef and a front-end software developer, but he makes more money driving for Lyft than he can make in either of those two occupations. He rents his car ( a Mazda 3) from Hertz for $209 a week, but Lyft gives him a rebate of $180 if he gives 105 rides a week. Lyft takes 25% off the top of the fare plus $2.50 per ride. He puts 50,000 miles on his car every year.

When he was a kid, it was a popular sport with street racers to go up on the Fremont bridge in the middle of the night, like 3 or 4 in morning, block off all lanes while one guy would do donuts in the middle of the bridge. Eventually thiis activity made the national news.

Lombard is popular with street racers because it is a long straight section with no traffic lights and, so far, no cameras. Street racing has dropped off recently, possibly because the police take a dim view of it.

I sometimes wonder why it took Uber and Lyft so long to get going, but now that I think about it, I realize thay depend on their customers having smart phones, so they had to wait until a sizable percentage of the population had them.

Taxis are really a criminal racket. Don’t know if all cities follow New York’s model, but New York is (was?) a real mess. To operate a taxi, you needed a medallion, and medallions cost $70K. The vig on that is going to be a couple hundred bucks a week, which really cuts into the amount a driver can earn. So I am glad taxis are going the way of the coffee cartels.

Our flight left PDX around sunset, so there was absolutely nothing to see, not that there would have been anthing but water anyway. There were two babies on the flight. One was pretty quiet, the other screamed and cried about half the time. Some of his rants sounded like ‘I bite you’. There was a child sitting behind us who sneezed a few times and whenever she did, it sounded like a shreik.

Where does all the noise come from? We’re cruising along at 500 knots and the noise level in the cabin is a dull roar. You can’t understand someone speaking quietly unless they are right next to you. Yes, jet engines are very loud, but is all the noise coming from the engines? Or is some of it coming just from the air rushing over the fuselage at 500 MPH?

They distribute tablets to people who want to watch movies. The seats have USB outlets on the back for charging your phones. The pocket on the back of the seat in front of you is now made of coarse netting instead of solid fabric.There is also a second pocket near the top that holds the magazine, menu, air sickness bag and safety card. This pocket has a single support strap to hold the materials, so it isn’t really a pocket either. The seats only recline about two inches. Not hardly worth bothering with. The headphones they distribute with the tablets are disposable. Can’t be bothered with cleaning and sanitizing them I guess. One overhead luggage bin appears to be dedicated to small oxygen cylinders.

How did Captain Cook discover the Hawaiian islands? The big mountain is 3 miles tall, so from the top of the mast of a sailing ship you should be able to see it from 150 miles away, which means there would be a 300 mile wide window where they would have been able to see it. But what are the odds? A few miles north or south and they would have missed it completely. Weird, man.

Space Car

2017 Hyundai Sonata

On our recent expedition to Iowa I rented a Hyundai Sonata from Hertz. I needed to carry four adults from Omaha to Sioux City and back. We flew into Omaha because it's a P.I.T.A. to fly into Sioux City from Portland, Oregon.

Hyundai Sonata Dashboard

The dashboard looks like something out of Buck Rogers. Buttons and dials and glowing instruments. As all of the controls for actually operating the vehicle were conventional enough, I was able to get in and drive away. But getting any of the creature comforts to operate was another matter.

Notice the small control panel on the right spoke of the steering wheel. And the red triangle in the 'center stack'.

It's not a long drive from Omaha to Sioux City, maybe an hour and a half or so, but it would nice to have some tunes. so I set my wife to seeing if she can find something on the radio. Does this car even have a radio? There is nothing in the dash that looks like a radio, but it's got to have one, doesn't it? I mean radios are traditional. OK, no radio as such, but there is a tablet-sized touch screen and with poking and prodding she is able to tune in some kind of rock and roll and we're good.

We're good until the song ends and then an endless litany of commercials commences. We can put up with this for a while, but eventually we reach our limit and sweetie starts looking for a new station and then, all of a sudden, the emergency flashers start flashing. Flash (Gordon), being on a mission from God, would have charged on regardless, but mild-mannered Chucky, worried about causing the Highway Patrol undue stress took the next exit and pulled over to try and figure out what happened. Well, where the heck is the emergency flasher control? We look in all the normal locations but eventually we spy the red triangle in the middle of the dashboard. Oh, that's it, obviously. We turn off the flashers and go on our merry way.

Since we are on an Interstate highway, I would like to engage the cruise control. I don't want to have to keep watching the speedometer and adjusting my speed to accommodate every little change in the road's incline. Yes, we are in Iowa, and Iowa is very flat, but even the slightest grade can affect the cars speed. I am pushing the envelope on what the cops will tolerate and I don't want push it too far. It would be easy to do. The road is flat and straight and the speedometer goes to 160 MPH.

There is a little mini-control-panel on the right spoke of the steering wheel and the top right button is labeled CRUISE. I push it and little green CRUISE word appears on the instrument panel. I try pushing several of the other buttons to see if I can set the speed, but nothing happens.

The upper left button appears to be a stack of paper (pages?) and pushing it causes the center display between the speedometer and the tachometer to change. I think there are four pages. Pushing this button allows you to cycle through these pages. Eventually I figure out that you can get the cruise control to engage only if you are on the correct page. I don't know whether this is a feature or a bug.

The instrument panel is black with white numbers and other markings. The white is very bright. It wasn't until we got to Sioux City and I specifically stopped and looked for the instrument panel brightness control that I located it. It has it's own little switch on the lower left portion of the dashboard.

I'm thinking that playing with buttons and switches on our increasing complex electronic gee-gaws is America's new past time. It's not just cars. Watch someone trying to find a photo on their smart phone. The tapping and swiping can go on for hours, and it's no good trying to remember the sequence you used to get there, because the next time you will be starting in a different place (in your smart-phone's interface), looking for a different picture using an app that works a little differently than the last time you used it because your smart-phone vendor has pushed an update down the 'wire'. Cars, at least for the moment, are not getting automatic updates. At least I don't think they are.

Eugene

Anne & I drove down to Eugene last weekend for parental orientation. Ross went with us to register for classes. We originally planned to drive down Saturday afternoon, but with one thing and another, we decided to go early Sunday morning instead. We had to get up at some unholy hour, but it was worthwhile because traffic was non-existent, which was nice. Weather was nice, sunny, even a bit warm. Got to walk around the campus, see some of the buildings and explore the student union, which was quite the conglomeration. I think it may be the biggest building on campus. There are two parts to it, and if you didn't know about it you might think they were two different buildings. There is the old, original brick building with the terrazzo floors, and new modern addition made of poured concrete, glass, and really large, laminated (rotten) wood beams for railings. The old part is composed of rectangular rooms, the new is composed of spaces, triangles, and ramps going every which way. Hmmph. Stayed at a motel across the main drag from the campus. Closer to the union than the designated parking area. Stopped in Salem on the way back for lunch and to look at cars. Hertz has a big used car lot there and I had seen some ad's for 2005 Lincoln LS for $25,000 that I thought might be a good deal. We stopped at Shari's for lunch. As we were leaving, I asked the cashier if she new where this car lot was. Normally this would be a good example of why men don't ask for directions. I have asked for directions in the past, but the last few times this happened the person I asked had no idea what I was talking about, much less how to get there. So I had pretty much given it up. But I asked the cashier here, and, lo and behold! She not only knew what I was talking about, but was able to give me clear directions to get there. On top of that, they worked! It's a miracle! The car lot had good variety of late model luxury cars, and most of them had correspondingly luxurious prices. We want to get a new car for Anne, but figuring what car to get is the problem. A car? A van? An SUV? My pick hit last week was a year old Lincoln LS. This week it's the new Mazda SUV (CX-7). One neighbor has a Passat, the other has a Volvo S-40. One of Johnny's friend's mom's has a Subaru Forester. One of daughter's friend's mom's has a Mercedes sedan of some sort. Her co-workers drive Lexus's (Lexii?). An Acura SUV might be nice, but my-o-my they want a lot of money for them. We shall see.