MSN Agrees: Gas Out is laughable

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18615572/ - It would appear that msn agrees with me on my post Gas Out: Laughable. Of course their writers are a little better than me, but I did "scoop em" by almost a week.

Gas Out: Laughable

The local radio station 106.5 was discussing the "gas out" emails that everyone seems to get every year or so. Apparently this year's "gas out" is May 15th. The basic idea is to not buy gas on May 15th to "send a message" to big oil about high gas prices, and this will force them to reduce prices in its stead.

The problem with this is that it simply shifts gasoline demand from the 15th to the 14th or 16th (or whenever). The demand is still the same over a longer period of time, meaning no real effect. In fact, if the participation became really high (say 90%), gas stations could actually save money by declaring the 15th a holiday for it's employees, so the message would be lost.

Apparently this year there is a twist: Instead of not buying gas on the 15th, everyone boycott the same 1 gas company for a week. Then they will be forced to lower prices and start a price war. The targetted company is Exxon since they are the "largest" (could be, I don't know).

This does nothing either. If customers stopped buying gas from Exxon and shifted their demand to other companies, the extra demand on the other companies would increase their prices while decreasing Exxon's prices. However the moment there was a price discrepancy, BP, Phillips, etc would buy Exxon's gas and sell it as their own - for an extra profit. This would virtually wipe out the price discrepancy. Exxon wouldn't be hurt in the least.

The only real solution would be to reduce consumption, not shift it. So, if you want to "send a message", bike to work. National Bike to Work day is May 18th (silicon valley May 17th). Commute too long, try public transit. What about carpooling - even for a day? Zero marginal consumption is pretty hard for many people, so there are some other things you can do as well:

• Check your tire pressure, make sure that they are full - if the tires have a range and you drive on paved roads, the pressure should be at the max end of that range.
• Remove crap from your car - got that old CRT monitor sitting in your trunk waiting 3 months for you to take it to Goodwill? It is weighing down your car and really does use appreciable gasoline.
  
• Speed less - energy spent making up for air friction goes up with the cube of your speed - dropping 5mph on the highway can improve your gas mileage by 10% or more. See my post Late For Work to see why speeding doesn't really save you time. One metric I've seen is that for every 5mph over 60mph you drive, it is like paying an extra $0.25 per gallon of gas.
  
• Don't buy higher octane gas - buy the lowest octane gas your car "supports". Lower octane = Higher MPG, a fact most people aren't aware of.

Decreasing consumption will lower your price at the pump and if enough people do it, will actually lower the price per gallon at the pump.

aliases

Whenever I find myself mistyping a command alot, I just add an alias for it.

alias bim='vim'
alias cim='vim'

I also come across commands that I almost always run with the same flag:

alias ll='ls -l'
alias wl='wc -l'

What aliases do you use?

Productivity hacks

I recently bought a new home computer - I wanted to upgrade along two dimensions, and I probably could have done so with my current machine, but ended up just springing for a new one. Those two dimensions are:

1. RAM - went from a mediocre 512MB to a well above average 4GB)
2. Monitor Size - went from a cheaper 19" LCD to a dell ultra-sharp 24" widescreen LCD. My graphics card can support 2 of these 24" screens for upgrading.
   

The excess RAM is mostly so that I can experiment with writing code that actually makes good use of RAM - not a reason most people are concerned with.

The monitor however is something I would recommend for everyone who does any significant amount of work on the computer, even if that work consists of something as simple as writing word documents.

Granted, it is pricey. The 24" monitor was around $650 new - but dell has refurbs available for about $100 less and the prices are coming down. They were $750ish last year.

Still, the productivity gain is absolutely amazing. Google provides it's engineers with dual 24" monitors standard, and the newest thing is to offer single 30" monitors. There have been a few published studies from Microsoft and some other companies that indicate that increasing screen size in controlled experiments improves productivity by 10-40%. The cost is inexpensive given that.

Not that long ago, I helped to set up an informal study (the experimental design wasn't as rigorous as you would need to publish the results) like this at Google for some folks doing their *real* job, instead of a controlled tasks experiment. The results showed similar productivity gains, on the order of 20% on average.

John McCain Interview Question at Google

Yesterday, Republican Senator John McCain visited Google for a "fireside chat". A little surprised to learn that a Republican would be visiting Google, I went along to the show. The first question asked of the president-to-be was:

Given that this event is basically a job interview, How do you determine good ways of sorting 1 million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?

Some days I absolutely love working at Google.