This the resonant frequency magnetic field technique. This article quotes a researcher that it is 97% efficient. Personally I am dubious, but I have no first-hand experience with it. The idea of making recharging roads is just plain silly, because we can’t afford to fix our bridges and pavement, let alone add billions in new infrastructure. I suppose one could argue that charging for the service could repay the bonds…

 

A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

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The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers. Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL).

“Our vision is that you’ll be able to drive onto any highway and charge your car,” said Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering. “Large-scale deployment would involve revamping the entire highway system and could even have applications beyond transportation.”

Driving range

A wireless charging system would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. The all-electric Nissan Leaf, for example, gets less than 100 miles on a single charge, and the battery takes several hours to fully recharge.

A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations. “What makes this concept exciting is that you could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to recharge,” said APL study co-author Richard Sassoon, the managing director of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which funded the research. “You could actually have more energy stored in your battery at the end of your trip than you started with.”

read entire article

from:

Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

 

When Wikipedia went dark and Google blacked out its logo on Wednesday, millions of people could not help but notice. For most, it was the first time that they had heard about two antipiracy bills. One puzzled Twitter user wrote: “Isn’t a SOPA some kind of food?”

But that protest grew out of a much wider grass-roots movement — a collective flexing of Internet muscle that started in some of the less mainstream parts of the Web, like the social news site Reddit and the blogging service Tumblr, and in e-mail chains and countless message boards.

It is no coincidence that these social sites were among those that, according to critics of the legislation in question, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act had the most to lose if it passed. And by design they were able to take the message about the threat and make it go viral.

In the resulting groundswell, lawmaker after lawmaker renounced support for the legislation. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protests, said more than 115,000 Web sites participated, and three million people e-mailed Congress to voice their opposition to the bills. “The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley patriarch who has invested in hundreds of start-ups, and runs SV Angel, an investment fund. “We probably wouldn’t prevail here if we weren’t eating our own dog food.”

Supporters of the bills, which include major media and entertainment companies, say their only intention is to go after foreign Web sites that distribute unauthorized copies of software, videos and music. But the tech industry maintains that the language in the bills is too broad, and that they could pose a threat to free speech and stifle innovation. Among other things, they say, the bills could make sites responsible for all content or links posted by their users, a weighty burden for social sites.

Read the whole article at Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

The Oil Drum | Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy.

In the United States, we have been working on scaling up wind energy but not getting very far. In 2010, wind energy supplied only 2.3% of electricity purchased.

Such slow progress seems strange for a product that seems to have such great promise. It can reduce CO2 emissions. It doesn’t require fuel. It is at least partly US made. It seems to have promise for protecting against rising fossil fuel prices……

 

One of the big issues with wind is that hopes have been raised for its widespread use, without really working through feasibility issues. If we are already having trouble with the electrical grid not being able to accept more wind energy in popular wind-generating areas when wind energy constitutes only 2.3% of total electricity supply, then wind energy is going to be difficult to scale up quickly. The issues I point out in this article suggest that the cost problem is still large, and the fixes needed to add long-distance transmission are likely to make the cost problem even worse.

read the whole article and check the comments, which are often quite good at The Oil Drum.

Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement

I read EULAs so you don’t have to. I’ve spent years reading end user license agreements, EULAs, looking for little gotchas or just trying to figure out what the agreement allows and doesn’t allow.

I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program.

… Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

I’ve downloaded the software and had a chance to skim the EULA. Much of it is boilerplate, but I’ve read and re-read Section 2B, and it does indeed go far beyond any license agreement I’ve ever seen….

read entire article
from Ars Technica:

Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to “reinvent textbooks”.

(edited) lots more from Tidbits:
Examining iBooks Author from the Publisher Perspective

previously from Tidbits:
Apple Goes Back to School with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U

Immediately this strikes me as both potentially wonderful, and potentially Stalinist in the way that only Apple can be.

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’  from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Could be wonderful:

The textbook system in K-12 and college is just plain awful. Other than the content, there is nothing right about it. School districts and students pay far too much, can’t get partial sections of giant books, can’t exercise Fair Use as intended, and are stuck with heavy, frequently out-of-date, and fragile paper. Authors have to indenture to a very small number of publishers, and don’t make enough money. Good graphics and audio and linking and full-text search are impossible. Textbooks stink.

Apple is famously good at designing creative apps, and I guess most think they’ll do a good job here with authoring applications. So all the problems with textbooks may well be solved here by Apple. A future where textbooks are cheap, colorful, noisy, linked, up-to-date, and light looks very good. But that leads to what makes me think this is a dangerous situation.

Could be awful:

Publishers, who currently own the content, are notoriously clueless about the digital world. They, like the movie types who pushed SOPA, are infamously attached to a monopoly/closed market business model. Schools are notoriously clueless about the digital world and strongly tend to one-size-fits-all canned solutions. And which digital company is also attached to a closed market model? Apple of course. Apple who only allows access to its music store through Apple applications that don’t run on Linux. Apple who requires developers pay them for the right to sell software for Apple hardware, and decides whether they are allowed into the store. Apple who turns your iPhones into a brick if you load somebody else’s software onto it. Apple who refuses to allow Flash on its mobile platforms (arguable pros and cons technically, but they do it for anti-competitive reasons).

Will Apple software only make textbook applications that  run on iPads? If so all students in the new system will have to buy one brand of hardware, Apple. And Apple will sell an extra gazillion iPads. Hooray for Apple shareholders, they’ve found a market thats not saturated, and they intend to colonize it. But public schools would never require all students to be driven to school in one make of car, or wear one make of sneaker or backpack, so why would they ever require students to use one brand of tablet? I fear they are clueless enough to rush heedlessly into a monopoly situation without consideration.

by Tenniel

What do the experts say on format?

Tidbits editor Adam Engst:

iBooks Author can export three types of files: text, PDF, and iBooks. The text export is likely only for extracting text from an existing file, the PDF export appears to be useful only for a certain level of proofing, and the iBooks format is apparently EPUB, with a slightly different MIME type (drop one on BBEdit if you want to look inside). You can export directly to a connected iPad for testing, which is far easier than the normal convoluted process for syncing ebooks to the iPad.

However, don’t get your hopes up for being able to use iBooks Author for EPUB in general — the license agreement states that files created with iBooks Author must either be made available for free or sold only through the iBookstore, and they will likely display only in iBooks on the iPad without some hacking. In short, if TidBITS wanted to create an enhanced Take Control ebook using iBooks Author, the only way for readers to purchase it would be through the iBookstore, which makes it much harder for us to communicate with readers and provide outside-the-book features as we do now. It would also make it harder for us to provide a similar ebook in other formats, such as one that can be read directly on the Mac or on the Kindle….

So the authoring software is OK, but not brilliant. Tellingly they haven’t bothered  to put forth a technical excuse for the blocking of other platforms.

What about ownership?

Here’s a report on the seizure of rights by Apple mentioned by Engst at Tidbits (above): publish on iBooks and lose your rights to publish elsewhere.

from  Venomous Porridge   The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.

But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

There’s more at that site.

What about distribution?

again Tidbit’s Adam Engst

…Debates are already raging on Twitter about how iBooks Author doesn’t allow works created with it to be sold anywhere but the iBookstore, and we publisher types are already trying to imagine how we can justify the extra effort and expense of creating enhanced ebooks for a single retail outlet….I’ll give Apple this — they don’t think small. These apps set a new standard for electronic books and online courses, and the apps are all available for free. The problem is that Apple also wants to own the entire pie, and in the process say exactly what is and is not possible.

On thing seems clear, whether Apple gets its monopoly, or a duopoly with Amazon or Google, or a real market with all of the above and Wikipedia, traditional publishers are that much closer to being roadkill. They really aren’t needed in the digital world, once their salespeople and contracts are rendered obsolete by an influx of digital books. For them to partner with any of the big digital players like Apple, is like playing the turkey who helps the farmer design the menu at Thanksgiving.

‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, ‘You’ve had a pleasant run.! Shall we be trotting home again?’ But answer came there none – And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one.”

My conclusions: greedy power-mad monopoly bearing benefits.

I don’t mind if Apple sells some great software that only runs on Apple computers. They have always done that, and other developers have written great software that runs everywhere including Apple computers. I care that Apple will give away the software through deals with publishers and schools in order to lock everybody, authors and students, into an Apple-only ecology.

I do care that Apple controls the developer’s access to their hardware – that’s anti-competitive. I do care that Apple forces an author to give them exclusive rights – that’s restraint of trade. And I do care if Apple offers a luscious juicy package to the dim and unsuspecting Adams and Eves of the digital textbook garden, only to have those Adams and Eves wake up to discover that Apple controls all the fruit.

The Solution:

It’s simple, schools should specify only that digital books they buy, distribute, or require have versions to run on all the standard hardware/software, Android/Linux, Kindle, iPad, Nook, and whatever Microsoft settles on. In practice that might mean epub or HTML5, but it would probably be a mistake to specify a format because our long experience as users is that formats come and go, and authors should be free to use a better solution.

Some more details: Ars says, in part:

 

“iBooks” are no longer old Apple laptops made out of white plastic, nor are they simply e-books to be purchased within Apple’s iBookstore. Apple announced what it’s calling “iBooks 2″ during its media event in New York on Thursday, a textbook software program that allows textbook-makers and instructors to create rich, interactive teaching media for the iPad. As we first reported earlier this week, the announcement is akin to “GarageBand for e-books,” giving authors access to easy-to-use tools on the computer in order to create multimedia content for the iPad.

Books created for iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.

iBooks 2 itself is an app for the iPad, but books for the application can be found within the already existing iBookstore under a new “textbook” category, with free samples available to those who want to try out the books first. Students can use codes to redeem them for books and can re-download them whenever they need to.

But how does one create a textbook for iBooks 2? Apple also announced a Mac application on Thursday called “iBooks Author,” which Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller described as “powerful and feature-rich.” The interface, as demoed to the audience, is similar to Apple’s iWork applications and allows authors to format books through WYSIWYG interaction and format the pages in a variety of ways. (It’s worth noting that news broke on Wednesday that Apple had commandeered its VP of productivity applications Roger Rosne to head up this project.)

In addition to the WYSIWYG interface, authors can further customize their books with HTML5 or JavaScript, and the application provides live previews so that authors can see what the final result will be before publishing. The price of the books is capped at $14.99 or less (the company specifically said “high school” books, so it’s unclear as to whether the cap applies to all books), though instructors can sell individual chapters at what Schiller described as a “very aggressive price.”

available at Amazon

via Science needs a universal symbol – opinion – 06 January 2012 – New Scientist.

SCIENCE is under assault. In the US and throughout the world, rhetoric about evolution, stem cells, global warming and other controversial and cutting-edge technologies often transcends legitimate disagreement to challenge the work of scientists.

Less visible is the community of those who believe deeply in the integrity of the endeavour, who defend the need for rigorous objectivity in politics and education, and who – even if they are sympathetic to religion or religious themselves – believe in the need for clear jurisdictional boundaries between religion, ideology and science.

They are passionate about science and see themselves as sharing a mission to defend the enterprise. Yet they lack a sign of their position, something that could unite their effort – in short, a symbol that stands for science, in much the same way as the Christian fish symbol declares adherence to that faith on car bumpers worldwide.

A single, unified symbol would have many uses. It could be displayed to represent a position: opposition to the politicising of science in government, support for increased research spending, or concern about global warming and species loss. It could be displayed by an astronomer or geologist or sociologist or teacher as a symbol of their allegiance to science. It could be used on car bumpers and web pages, and in public venues.

It should be simple and versatile, instantly recognisable and encompass all of science – a double helix alone, say, won’t do as it does not take in astronomy or particle physics.

….

more… Science needs a universal symbol 

Chinese wheelbarrows with sails.

Another great article from one of my favorite blogs. Note that despite his admiration for the Chinese wheelbarrow design, they have the same back-twisting problem of our one-wheel wheelbarrows.

Note also that this might actually be a use for computer-controlled unicycles. He speculates that the roads were poor and narrow, allowing for only a single wheel. A computer-controlled one-wheel balancer would be able to negotiate the narrowest of trails. Of course you might object that any society still capable of building them would have a transport system, but what about niche uses, like Afghanistan or trekking Antarctica?

Carrying a passenger

The Chinese wheelbarrow – which was driven by human labour, beasts of burden and wind power – was of a different design than its European counterpart. By placing a large wheel in the middle of the vehicle instead of a smaller wheel in front, one could easily carry three to six times as much weight than if using a European wheelbarrow.

The one-wheeled vehicle appeared around the time the extensive Ancient Chinese road infrastructure began to disintegrate. Instead of holding on to carts, wagons and wide paved roads, the Chinese turned their focus to a much more easily maintainable network of narrow paths designed for wheelbarrows. The Europeans, faced with similar problems at the time, did not adapt and subsequently lost the option of smooth land transportation for almost one thousand years….

Read much more.

These reports show whats really behind so-called Globalization of the auto business. The industry is totally interlinked in a complex mesh of shared suppliers and internal sources. For instance, loss of one nuclear power station in Japan affects jobs in North America. In other words, the great efficiencies of the network are also its greatest vulnerability. This echoes a historical point made by Joseph Tainter ( see this commentary on his ideas) that increasing complexity in civilization leads to its downfall. In scientific terms, it takes ever-increasing energy to maintain the network of civilization, and eventually it takes more energy to prop it up than is produced, and the civilization itself collapses.

The following quotes are all from one source: Automotive News, an industry website. It’s an interesting source because of its specificity. from here:

Japan Automakers Brace for Looming Shortfall Not enough electricity to run plants.

Quake delays Honda r&d by at least two weeks

Ford:

• Restricted dealers from ordering vehicles in 10 paint colors (brilliant black, blackberry, deep cherry red, redline, inferno red, bronze star, rugged brown, hunter green, ivory and billet metallic) produced at factory in Japan.

Chrysler:

• Restricted dealer orders for “tuxedo black” and three red paint shades; affects F-150 and Super Duty pickups, Explorer, Expedition, Focus, Taurus, Lincoln MKS and Navigator.
Europe:
•Will idle Genk, Belgium plant (S-MAX, Galaxy and Mondeo) for five days starting April to conserve parts

Subaru:

U.S.:
• Canceled overtime shifts at Subaru of Indiana (Legacy, Outback, Tribeca and Toyota Camry) until April 1; no parts shortages reported

Japan:
• Extended production suspension through March 31; facing rolling blackouts and supply shortages
•Will restart limited mini-vehicle production March 31

Honda:

U.S.:
• Likely disruptions in North American production beginning April 1 because of parts shortages.
• Orders suspended from U.S. dealers for Japan-built models including the Fit, Insight, CR-Z, Civic Hybrid, Acura TSX and Acura RL. Also affected are a small number of CR-Vs
• April U.S. launch of the redesigned 2012 Honda Civic on schedule

Japan:
• Production halted at Sayama (CR-V, Accord, Fit, Acura RL and TSX), Suzuka (Fit, Civic, Civic hybrid, Insight and CR-Z) until April 3 at the earliest;
•Resuming motorcycle and power product production at Kumamoto Factory March 28
• Expects product development to be delayed at least two weeks; transferred some employees from damaged tech center in Utsunomiya to other sites; expects several months to reopen center
• Hamamatsu (transmission and engine), Ogawa (engine) and Tochigi (powertrain) plants may begin limited parts production before March 27

Toyota:

U.S.:
• North American vehicle and engine plants (13) running; overtime curtailed
• Sent memo to workers in U.S. and Canada March 23, warning thinning supplies will cause some interruptions in production; no definite time frame for stoppages
• Prius availability in the U.S. could be affected by damage to a hybrid battery plant; RAV4 crossover also affected

Japan:
•Resumed limited production of Prius at Tsutsumi plant; Lexus HS250h and CT 200h hybrids at Kyushu plant March 28
•Will halt production of hybrid vehicles in Japan March 30 to check for adequate parts supply
•Will resume production at its Tsutsumi and Miyata plants on March 31
• 18 assembly plants closed indefinitely
• Resumed production of replacement parts for vehicles already on the market on March 17; resumed production of parts for overseas production on March 21
• Damaged: The Central Motor plant in Miyagi, which manufactures the Yaris; the Kanto Auto Works Iwate plant, the Scion xB and xD models; parts plants in Hokkaido and Tohoku
•Delayed Japanese launch of wagon-style Prius; not expected to affect U.S. or European launch

Paywalls are widely despised in the digital world as “not getting it,” meaning failing to understand the Internet culture with terminal lack of hipness. Interlopers like Rupert Murdoch are ridiculed for trying to bring old-media hyper-controlling mega-conglomerate ways to a flexible, personal, mash-up of ideas. Fundamentally I agree with these critiques, but let’s note that there is probably room for all kinds of experiments, hip, unhip, and totalitarian on the Web. And everybody recognizes the professional journalism crisis.

What struck me while I was being sapped by the miniature saga through Conde Nast, was that their paywall worked, but not the way they probably intend. I do pay for a subscription to the New Yorker, and I read the article. But I am not going to pass it on, dissect it, engage in discussion with others about it, or generally enhance its visibility. The author’s intellectual property ( I suspect the NYer sees this as their IP) has been protected from copying, and in the process doomed to a smaller and less energetic audience. There are just too many accessible articles and books to share to bother with difficult-to-reach-and-handle information.

Notable magazines and proper journals were once the pinnacle of intellectual life. They appeared as islands on a dumb, unknowing sea. Once upon a time authors could only publish on one of these discrete islands where their work was marooned. But now the sea itself is a bloom of information, discussion, and publishing. It’s as if one can publish directly to the main library, without waiting for publishing, printing, distribution and purchase. But those publishing on desert islands are not wetted by the nutrient bath of seawater, nor do their works easily slip down the beach into the mix. However there is a corrosive effect from the Web on these notable islands – their once-prized editing and thoughtful, definitive writing is being dumbed-down even as the publishers try ineffectually to get into the nutrient-rich seawater using paywall submarines and editorial gimmicks.

Just how they can monetize their magazine franchise I don’t know. Possibly subscribers get the latest edition before it goes public in the archives. Possibly they can sell podcast subscriptions on the coming wave of iPads and Android tablets for a few bucks annually. I do know that some of the most topical, thoughtful writing I read is free on the Web, complete with discussions, digressions, occasional hostile critiques, and more or less moderation. It’s understood on these sites that authors are subject to direct critique from anyone who cares to write. True, the quality of Web comments varies wildly from the too-inane-for-10-year-old-boys to thoughtful expansion on the original entry. But learning to dismiss poor sites and information quickly is a part of the library science of the Web age, just as it was with books in the stacks, it’s just a lot easier now.

I have examples of web articles I thought good on my feed if you care to look. Warning: popular culture is mostly ignored.

“…Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would begin offering devices this summer at a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

Since the new Kindle is very expensive at $489 list, I doubt this meets the necessary price point, but I’ll be looking at the deal as a way to supplement the fast- evaporating LA Times.

The discussion about what to do about the death of newspapers has been marked by futile hand wringing from obsolete newspaper people, and silly statements from the internet Pollyannas, with a few interesting experiments in hyper-local news coming online. But it comes down to the fact that reporters and editors need to be paid , and so news organizations need a revenue stream.

On the hardware side, newsprint will be replaced by something. Laptops, iPhones ( yes, really) , and desktops, are not comfortable for sitting around reading, especially for the over 40 set who actually read newspapers. The technical problem is the screen. Size, weight, resolution, power need, and color are all issues to be solved. In the small formats, like the Kindle and Sony eReader, the E Ink screen is said to be quite good, but lacks size, and color. Large format screens like your desktop suffer from weight, power, portability, and illumination issues. Laptops fall into the barely good enough for a work-around category. News reports have been saying that larger color versions of the E Ink screen will solve the hardware problem. And today stories appeared saying just such a screen is near delivery, and deals are being made with newspapers ( see references below).

Stretched Kindle Image by Gizmodo

Selling the new screen will not solve the news organizations’ revenue problem, even if they get some of the profit from screen sales, which is doubtful. Until and if ad revenue fills the gap, they need subscription sales to fund the business, and likely thereafter. The Wall St Journal and Bloomberg have had some success at selling content, but few if any other services have attracted subscribers. (and Bloomberg uses dedicated terminals)

Proposed: Subscribe the Screen

News organizations could rent you a reader, as cable companies do now with set-tops and DVRs. Twenty to forty dollars a month should be quite a nice sum over three years hardware lifetime say, and subscribers would be tied, but not locked-in, to the supplier, in the way they are tied to cable companies. Subscribers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck with an unusable reader, or repairs. Because they would have hardware and software control, news orgs could figure out the marketing balance of exclusive content ( perhaps lasting 24 hours) vs free internet. Obvious tie-ins would be available like click-through ads to generate more revenue. There are many angles to be worked out in this model, but the elegance of it is that it removes the two essential problems: the initial cost hurdle of the $300+ readers and reinstates control over content distribution ( like the Bloomberg terminal), yet leaves an open platform that can be upgraded. Additional services can be tested later in the market because the basic platform would be there, and generating income.

Less Appealing Alternatives:
Google and the other companies with major internet ad revenue could set aside some percentage of their take for a non-profit AP-like version of NPR and PBS, without government support, or corporate interference. Or we could have a BBC, funded by a tax on devices. Or we could have ad-funded internet sites and flabby TV news as we do now, with virtually no local coverage (hooray! say the local pols until they realize “no coverage” means invisibility) and reality-show news aimed at the ninth-grade set.

What Amazon May Be Planning:
The Kindle costs over $300 and requires a monthly subscription, and creates a locked-in market for Amazon e-book sales. If Amazon lowered the initial cost for the new large-format reader to compete with monthly newspaper subscription costs, they undoubtedly would get a huge customer response. But if this is Amazon’s model, it won’t feed the reporters who create the content. In effect it feeds the weakest link in the delivery system, the aggregator, where the actual value is created by the device maker and the content provider. It is being reported that News Corp, Hearst and Plastic Logic are also planning to market large-format readers soon, so we might see multiple strategies.

So count this as gallows humor.

AIG has been given roughly $185 billion.

Zero electric motorcycles announced today that they are selling a street legal version of their electric dirt bike at about $10,000 less a ten percent federal tax credit.

Zero street legal lithium-powered supermotard

Tesla automobiles has already sold a few of their all-electric high-performance sports cars at about $100k.

Tesla electric roadster

If we had used the money from the AIG bailout to actually support American companies that make things, it could have funded:

9,250,000 Zero electric motorcycles or equivalent.

(Honda sold about 15 million units world-wide in 2008. All makers sold about 1 million motorcycles and scooters in the US in 2008.)

Plus,

925,000 Tesla cars.

(BMW sold about 1.4 million cars in 2008 world-wide.)

So with one bailout package we could have created an American motorcycle company selling electric bikes as the second-largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. And we could have jump-started an all-electric car manufacturer to nearly two thirds the size of BMW. Not to mention establishing a dominating presence in the clean transportation industry of tomorrow.

Somehow I’m not laughing all the way to the bank.

references:
motorcycle sales
Zero
Tesla
AIG bailout