Blessed by the Potato

It is an eternal debate: do we live for today or save for the future? Some kind of balance needs to be found, as living a hedonistic, spendthrift lifestyle only to end up spending your autumn years on government assistance is no good, but neither is playing the miser through your younger, healthier years just to die and leave it all behind.

I always thought I managed to walk this line fairly well: I work hard and save for the future, with a plan to retire earlier than 65 (after all, who knows what kind of shape I’ll be in by 60), but still enjoy the moment. I’m aware of the power of compounding, and have internalized the math that saving & investing a dollar today means I can spend three in retirement. Inversing that, taking a year off from work now might mean I’d have to tack on 3-5 more working years at the end of my career before retiring.

That’s pretty simple logic on the opportunity cost of taking time off — and it gets even worse when you consider the potential damage of a gap to my career. So I’ve never really considered taking time off without a damned good reason to. Heck, even on my vacations I tend to find side projects to work on, even if they’re not the most profitable post hoc (e.g., book). But now that Blueberry is on the scene I start to wonder.

I missed my daughter’s first steps today. That’s not such a surprise, as even Wayfare has missed some of her firsts (she seems to show off for grandma), and I’m at work all day. Yet it kind of puts a sharp focus on something that’s really been bugging me about my job: I spend so much time commuting and working that I hardly see the whole reason I’m going through the whole mess. A few months ago when she was into her “stranger danger” phase, I went a full week without seeing her, and when I finally did she freaked out and cried because she didn’t recognize her dad. So missing her first steps is a moment that does make me — for perhaps the first time — step back and seriously consider taking some time off from my career.

It’s also a bit of a timely issue because Wayfare’s mat leave has run its course, and yet Blueberry is still too young for daycare, leaving us searching for childcare options. It is heart-wrenching to even think of handing over our little girl to some stranger to watch over, yet it is also difficult to get by on just one income, particularly in this city. I know eventually she will have to go off to spend more time being raised by strangers than with us — at school if not daycare — but it doesn’t stop me from wondering if taking a year off now and draining my savings might be totally worth it. It sure seems nicer to spend some time at home taking care of my baby than to be able to take more time off at the end of my career, when the house will be cold and empty.

And this is the age when I want to be there for her: at 12 she won’t want to see “Da”, she’ll be at school for most of the day and then want to disappear into her room with a book or video/holo game when she’s not. Right now she’s thrilled to have me around, and the world is a magical wonderful place full of adventure and discovery. I want to be there to see her point to a bird singing in a tree and exclaim “Bir!” or to a passing jet and do the same*. I want to watch her dig through her bag of toys until she finds a match for whatever’s already in her hand, and then merrily bang the two similar items together. When she’s a teenager she’ll likely just infuriate me if I see her at all.

But the cold math is the same: Wayfare and I make more than a nanny or daycare service, so Blueberry goes off to the strangers’ arms while we work to keep our heads above water in this crazy world.

An alternative to quitting or taking a full leave of absence — indeed my preferred solution — would be part-time work: ideally I’d work 3-4 days a week, Wayfare would work 2-4, and with one of us having the flexibility to work weekends plus occasional childcare from the grandparents we’d be set. But unfortunately it’s tough to find part-time work — I doubt I’d be able to swing it at my current job, the HR system isn’t really set up for it. Indeed, a 9-day bi-weekly work option (adding ~1 hr to each day and then taking a day off every other week) is a recent experiment there, and that plan’s only around for the summer. Plus there’s too much for me to do to just cut back (though they could almost use another 0.5-0.8 FTE, so perhaps hiring a full-time person and dropping me down to 4 days a week would work for everyone if only the money in the budget could be found).

Health insurance is another hurdle: I get it, Wayfare doesn’t, so it made and continues to make some kind of sense for me to try to keep a stable full-time job while she gets to take the mat/pat leave and spend all the time with Blueberry, even though she’s actually the higher-earner in the family. The value of group insurance for someone so sickly nearly covers the spread in gross pay.

Taking time off would be an easier decision if I had more freelance experience and could use that as essentially a part-time career. Part of what makes me consider it so closely is that I do have some margin of safety in my planning: pushing a planned retirement age from say 60 to 65 is not so bad, not like moving it from 65 to 70 — it’s not like I’d be cutting things so close as to be taking major risks on my ability to work later in life (health, etc.).

Though really as I get more comfortable (even as I write this out) with the idea of sacrificing disposable income and retirement savings to spend time with Blueberry, the big remaining fear is the gap on my resume. It took months to find a decent non-academic job in the first place, and that included accepting the dreaded subway commute. It did kind of backfire on me: part of the reason I went for a non-academic job was to have more stable hours to spend time with my family, and here I am a year later lamenting how little time I manage to spend with my family. Part was for better (short-term) pay: it would have been a lot tighter on a post-doc’s salary, yet here I am considering throwing the financial plan out the window for shits and giggles (literally). With such a gap on my CV and publication record I doubt I would have the option of trying to pursue an academic career now — will it be the same for a non-academic career after a year of being a homemaker?

I just don’t know what to do. I suspect that all my considering and weighing will lead me back to the default choice: keep working, let the woman take the mat/pat leave, and after that let her work part time with hired help to cover the rest of the childcare. It’s kind of sad, but I don’t really see another path…

* - It is apparently babies who confuse birds, planes, and Superman.

Behold bath toys:

On the right is the ducky I have (and let us not now get into the issue of why a grown man with a PhD has a rubber duckie of his very own). It is an “evil duckie”, yes, but it has been built from the traditional, recognizable form. On the left is a new duckie that Blueberry has.

I do not understand this duckie.

Frankly looking at this thing just freaks me out. It sits there on the bathroom counter at night, watching me brush my teeth.

The wrongness of it gets under my skin and gives me the willies. The strange spiral markings, the hyper-dilated pupils, the weirdly-shaped beak, the centre-line seam, and the tiny head positioned in the middle of its body, with just a bit of off-kilter attitude evokes a sense of being amongst the alien other that the red tint and horns of mine do not come close to doing. There is a part of me that does not want this evil thing to be anywhere near my child, though her abstract amoeba bath toy is totally cool with my subconscious as would be the red duckie with horns (which is supposed to evoke evil).

This is not the only toy of hers that I find to be creepy — just the other day I came home to find a creepy stuffed horse in my bed, and wondered if the baby mafia was out to get me — but this is the one that turns my stomach the most.

Ever since Blueberry started sleeping through the night, I have been the one on baby monitor duty. She’s a pretty good little sleeper — and so am I for that matter, so I can sleep through the little non-emergency noises that would otherwise wake Wayfare. Most of the time I’m only woken up by the false positives of the breathing monitor going off (which, now that’s she’s 1, I can’t wait to turn off).

Well this morning I had to get up earlier than normal, so Wayfare agreed to take the monitor from me whenever she got up to pee in the night. Normally I wouldn’t even hear her come in to get the monitor, but for whatever reason today I did wake up to the creak of a floorboard. And you now have to keep in mind that I’m more than a little bit sleep deprived.

I heard the floor creaking and got really freaked out, I was like “someone’s in my room” and then part of my inner monologue was like “it was probably Wayfare getting the monitor” and then I waited, heart pounding, for about a minute, and slowly,
s
l
o
o
o
o
w
l
y
reached my hand out to check if the monitor was there AND IT WAS GONE just LIKE I EXPECTED but somehow my brain only latched onto that first bit and for like 20 seconds I was all OMG someone is in the house and stole the monitor and they’re going to steal my baby and do I call 911 first or am I being crazy and I should just rush out and stop them and the police aren’t going to do anything and I don’t want to accidentally wake Blueberry up at this ungodly hour but I have to rescue her yet these guys are obviously pros and probably have guns with silencers I mean come on they snuck into my room to grab the monitor so the sensor pad wouldn’t go off when they snatched up my baby and seconds matter here get out of bed and… oh, right, Wayfare.

So I’m off to bed early tonight.

This has been a really weird spring. A week into April, and we still have hail and snow, including just this past Thursday. On that miserable morning, with the cold April wind blowing and the hail falling down, in the middle of rush hour the TTC decided to put a train out of service. At Davisville — one of only two outdoor stations on that line. In the hail.

WTF were they thinking? Unless the train is actually on fire, there is no reason for pulling it in the middle of rush hour halfway down the leg — take an extra 40 minutes to finish the loop and, if for some reason it must be pulled at Davisville, pull it on the northbound leg. Or given the weather, why could they not have limped one more station to the indoor St. Clair? It makes me wonder whether malevolent spirits haunt and possess the TTC, for that is the only explanation.

Then that same day on the way home, the train lost power at York Mills.

Including leap years, assuming my vacation days escalate with the corporate schedule, that there are 11 stat holidays in a year, that I will have on average 9 flex/lieu/sick days per year, and that I retire at 60, there are only 5699 more days to deal with rush hour on the TTC…

The housing bubble has spurred a huge increase in building over the last decade in Toronto. Massive new condo towers now crowd the lakefront, highway 7, Yonge St., and along the Sheppard subway. The suburbs have grown by leaps and bounds: not so long ago, Canada’s Wonderland was in some kind of magical hinterland north of the city. You had to drive by farms to get to it. Now, the McMansions are packed next to each other, fully covering the rolling hills nearly to King township. And it’s the same in the other directions too.

When I left Toronto, nearly 10 years ago, it was not exactly an empty place: the subway was standing room only for several hours of the day, and rush hour was a nightmare. Now, the subway is standing room only at most times. Most mornings the train is so full people can’t fit and have to wait for the next one as early as Sheppard (just the 3rd stop along the long trek downtown), and people are seriously getting up in my personal space. Traffic is a nightmare at almost all points during the day — even at 4 am, closing a few lanes on the 401 can cause backups — and forget about trying to nip out at 6 pm to grab some grub even up in North York or Markham; it’s gridlock until after 7. Toronto might not be quite as populous or densely populated as New York or Tokyo, but it’s up there, on par with Chicago.

I think New York is a bit of an outlier on our continent, and that it’s not necessarily the goal to shoot for; this isn’t Sim City, we don’t get points for cramming people in just because we can, and we’re not about to turn the CN tower into an arcology.

Toronto’s been growing at about 2% per year, almost double the population growth of Canada as a whole. That sounds like “modest” or “reasonable” growth, but it’s actually quite high for a city that’s as mature as Toronto is. That would mean that in 35 years, 11 million people would call the GTA home. I don’t know about you, but that sounds ludicrous to me. Importantly, consider whether our infrastructure capacity has also grown at 2%/year? I don’t have the data handy, but I recall a decade of service cuts at the TTC, and just a few gains on the GO; I don’t recall any major projects to expand our sewage or water-handling systems. The closest we’ve come is the bare minimum geographical expansion as the borders of the city grew.

And those other large American cities, according to Wikipedia, have not been growing at anywhere near that kind of rate: Chicago topped out somewhere in the 1930’s and has been fairly steady or even shrinking in size since then. New York and LA have been growing at a fraction of the rate the GTA is.

I think it’s time to accept that Toronto is full.

Though that in itself may be a great and lively debate, I think the real question is what to do once that fact is accepted. Toronto hasn’t been growing because of land grants and baby bonuses, and it makes no sense to try to set up a “Toronto quota” to forcibly keep people out. But perhaps it has been just a little too easy to build a massive condo complex in the city — are the development charges anywhere near appropriate for the increased infrastructure costs?

As an aside, I think the city missed a great opportunity with the massive build-out along certain corridors: as long as the ground was being dug up all along Queen/King or the lakeshore for condos, subway lines could have been being built as part of the foundations, stipulated as a necessary part of the design. Then a new subway line (or lines!) would not only track the developments so it would be where the population density was, but would require minimal work from the city itself (connect the fragments together, bridge the area that was already built-up around University).

Back to the question of what to do: I think one goal should be the diversion of growth to the other great cities in Ontario: Hamilton, Guelph-K-W, Kingston, Barrie, Windsor, and of course my adopted hometown, London.

Now, how to redirect the growth there?

I think we can start by throwing incentives right out the window: paying people to move out of Toronto just won’t work, and will be expensive to boot. How do I know it won’t work? There’s already a big economic incentive to not live in Toronto: car insurance is higher, food is more expensive, and the big one: houses are more expensive (you can get more for less than half the price in London) — though a large part of that is a temporary artifact of the housing bubble. All-told, I estimate that it’s about 30% more expensive to live in Toronto, and that’s before lifestyle inflation and the unspoken psychic cost of the godawful commute.

So let’s instead examine why someone possessed with rational thought and a bit of a frugal streak would want to live in Toronto, and try to play off that. Enter Wayfare: she’s got a master’s degree, is not against saving money, and has spent time in London to see that it is an awesome place with ducks and decent transit, so she’s not blindly biased against the mullet perception. Why then did she want to move to Toronto?

• The network effect: her family is in Toronto, and even though London is only a 2-hour drive to go visit, and Hamilton under an hour, she wants to be closer (to be fair, her family has been super-helpful with Blueberry and drop in for a visit twice a week or even more often). A high population begets more population.
• The two-body problem: though there’s a lot of high-tech research, education, and health care in London, it’s tough for a professional spouse to find gainful employment. This is, I suppose, another facet of the network effect of large cities.
• Certain infrastructure is better in Toronto: though London is a regional medical centre, and you can get an MRI or an oncologist really easily there, good luck trying to find a GP to give you a regular check-up. For some reason even though UWO churns out plenty of doctors, all the GPs want to move to Toronto to set up practice. London has a few good restaurants, but Toronto has so many that you can go around stiffing waitstaff on tips for years before you have to revisit a place and risk having your food spat upon.
• The prestige of the big city: I think this is something that mostly affects the female mindset, perhaps because of the giant phallus anchoring the city, but I have been told that there is just something “magical” about Toronto: London has some decent malls, and you can buy anything you want there (or from the internet, like civilized geeks), but “the shopping is better in Toronto”. London has movie theatres and sports teams, and for the number of times most people (including us) actually go to the ROM/AGO/Canada’s Wonderland/Ontario Place/Jay’s game/fringe/a musical, it’s no problem to make the short drive down. Yet somehow it’s not enough to know that it’s possible to get to all that occasional stuff when you want it, it has to be right there, just in case.
• Putting down roots: the flip side of the godawful commuting is that commuting is taken for granted in Toronto. I could quit my job, and likely find a different job that’s also in Toronto, and then commute there… even if it’s on the other side of the city. That would be considered normal. A lot of changes can take place without having to move. Conversely, as nice as London is, if I were to quit a job there odds are my next job might not be in London, or it might involve a move within the city to be closer (because you don’t live in London to commute).

I know that Toronto is full. I believe that the growth rate is going to crash sometime in the next few decades as people find that reality inescapable. Whether because it just gets too expensive and run-down for people to continue to pour in (the New York model), or because the reeking masses of humanity start to turn to crime and rioting (the Detroit model), or because people just can’t keep up an intrinsic reproductive rate when they’re all living in 400 sq ft shoeboxes… but looking at that list, I have no idea what can be done to try to redirect the population growth now, before it gets worse. The network effect is hard to break: the government can move more functions to London, Hamilton, and Kingston, but that won’t necessarily create jobs for lawyers, salesfolk, or librarians. Paying businesses or people to move is expensive (and ineffectual).

There’s the cargo cult approach: build the trappings of a world-class city in the hopes that people will show up. Though I think something practical like a subway might help, the art galleries, theatres, concert halls, and museums of smaller centres have been little more than money pits. After all, someone who’s actually attracted to a city for its “culture” isn’t going to be fooled by Orchestra London, and Hamilton theatre snobs will still just drive to Toronto for their Mirvish or fringe fix.

We could try the stick approach, but the League of Shadows didn’t look so friendly in the Batman movies…

Peanut butter is a truly magical substance. Like many people I have at one time or another tried to make it myself by blenderizing peanuts (and once tried to smoosh honey roasted peanuts in a failed attempt to create the world’s most delicious spread) and it is just not the same. This is reflected in the fact that there is peanut-butter-flavoured ice cream, but not peanut-flavoured ice cream: somehow the process of turning peanuts into peanut butter creates an all-new taste that is just that much better.

Yes, there’s sugar in there, but it’s not just that it’s sweeter. It goes with everything, a kind of universal compatibility that doesn’t just come from a little bit of sweetening. There’s the classic peanut butter and chocolate pairing, but as good as that is it doesn’t really demonstrate peanut butter’s intrinsic cooperative nature, since chocolate-covered peanuts are also good. Consider instead apples, jam, bacon (or so I am told), bananas, crackers, rice krispies, soy beans, and that mass of cellulose fibre that spans the border between food and building material: celery. Nothing made of mere matter could be so universally compatible, so delicious, and yet still contain nutrients.

I asked the question recently of some friends: what doesn’t go with peanut butter? And really all we came up with was laundry (indeed, I got some peanut butter on my shirt while eating apples writing this, and that’s going to need to be pre-treated).

In my head, the Kraft factory consists of large cauldrons of bubbling peanut mush, overseen by teams of witches who imbue it with that magical essence, channelling the vital incantations that transmute a mere collection of ground peanuts into something that is not of this realm. A magical substance composed more of the essence cooperation and taste than it is of sugar, protein, and fat.

I will leave you with one last combination that I thought was common-sense, but my sister (who learned it from me) says blew the mind of some of her friends: peanut butter and pop tarts. Just get yourself a frosted (or plain, though that defeats the point) pop-tart — I’m partial to raspberry but strawberry is every bit as good — toast as usual, and cover with peanut butter before eating. Breakfast is served!

The just noticeable difference (JND) is the smallest difference in something that can be perceived. For instance, if you show me two pieces of string that are very nearly the same length, and then another similar pair, and another, there’s a certain length difference that I will just be able to perceive, and any that are closer together than that I won’t be able to tell apart. Similarly for other senses: two audio tones have to have a certain amount of difference in their volume or frequency in order for me to tell that they were different rather than the same tone repeated. The size of the JND is dependent on methods: you can notice a smaller difference in lengths if you look at two pieces of string side-by-side rather than one on one day, and one on the other. It can also help if there’s a point of reference, such as a grid in the background. But nevertheless, there will be some small difference below which you will be unable to tell two things apart.

So the JND can vary quite a bit depending on the experimental procedures, but given a particular method, the JND scales with the starting size of what you’re looking at: JND ∝ dl/L. If you have double the length of string, the difference in length between two comparison pieces also has to double before you’ll notice that there has been a change. If you’re in a dark room with one candle lit, lighting a 2nd is very noticeable addition to the brightness. If you’re in a bright room with a thousand candle power light on, lighting a candle may not noticeably increase the brightness — and if you can just notice adding (or subtracting) one candle against a background of say 200, then you should be able to just notice a change of 1/200^th of a candle against a background of one candle.

Let’s consider the case of hair. I cut mine every 50 days or so. It goes from about 0.3″ when freshly cut to about 1″ in that time, for a rate of growth of 0.014″ per day. After I cut my hair it takes about a week before I notice that it’s gotten longer. So the constant for the JND is:
0.014*7/0.3 = 0.33

If the starting length for hair was instead say, 12″, then the scaling indicates the JND would be 3.9″. That is, a girl with shoulder-length hair would have to cut off about 4″ in order to have a good expectation that — with a one day to the next observation — a boy would notice that indeed her hair had been cut. Getting a 2″ trim would fall well below the JND, and psychophysically, it would be highly unlikely for such a difference to be spontaneously noticed. Nay, nearly physiologically impossible for such a difference to be detected under such conditions.

Everyone’s JND constant will be different, and circumstances can vary (e.g., someone may consistently wear shirts with horizontal markings on them to serve as a guidepost, or an observer may have superhuman vision discrimination, or the hair may be pulled into a ponytail, making the judgment even more difficult).

But whatever the individual circumstances, don’t forget the pioneering psychophysics work of Weber when someone doesn’t notice your haircut — they may not have been able to!

Let’s start with the nazis: grammar and food.

For the grammar issue of the week, I bring you singular they: do you think it’s wrong to say something like “A consumer of 2012 expects their laptops to be lighter and more powerful than ever?” Or do you think the “they” referring to a single consumer is the wrong pronoun, and “him/her” should be used instead?

I’ve long been fine with the singular they: tradition was to use “him” in such cases, even where the gender was indeterminate. When that became politically incorrect, “they” seemed to be an appropriate alternative: it has some parallels in the disuse of thee/thou in favour of the singular ye/you (which then just became “you”). Many writers started to use it, and I hear it all the time in casual speech. It’s certainly a damned sight cleaner than putting in the awkward “his/her” or “his or her” compound everywhere.

One alternative I don’t care for is the idea that it’s somehow more correct to use “her” in place of “him” for a gender-uncertain third person pronoun. “A student has many books to buy at university, straining her budget.” The use of “him” in that kind of sentence has been traditional and common for so long that seeing “her” in its place makes me think that the writer must somehow know the gender — it’s not serving as an effective gender-unknown pronoun. I personally find that much more distracting than the singular they.

Like all things in life, there does need to be balance: we can’t have everyone making up their own dialect and rules, but “thou/thee” has long since slipped from common usage to anachronistic, and we’ve had to recognize that evolution. Similarly for now, writing “u” in place of you, or using numerals for homophones “to” and “for” is a disgusting mark of poor upbringing and laziness — a hopefully temporary artifact of T9 phones that will forever be forgotten with the rise of QWERTY smartphones. But I do have to accept that one day in the distant future — long after I’m dead — such usage may be commonplace. (And for all my acceptance of linguistic evolution, I will still spin in my grave if it happens.) The role of the grammar nazi is to try to keep that sort of thing from getting a foothold in the first place, not to deny the common usage long after it’s happened.

On to food/grammar nazi-hybrids: if you make a dish in a non-traditional way, does it cease to be that dish? I don’t think so: language evolves, as do tastes, yet again today I heard the old saying that “chili isn’t chili if it has beans.” Well, traditional Texican chili maybe, but I think it’s more common with than without these days, and it’s not like a totally different food either way. Or like a few years ago, when a friend of Italian descent tried to tell me that there’s no such thing as “vegetarian lasagna”, because lasagna by definition has meat in it. Well, fine, think that all you want, but my vegetarian lasagna (or as I call it, “lasagna”) is pretty damned tasty, and there isn’t any confusion over what it is I’m slopping on my guests’ dinner plates (or they’re able to surmount the seeming oxymoron). [Plus as an aside, my understanding is that the word refers to the noodle, not the dish.]

I made cinnamon rolls today — kick-ass ones, I might add — and someone asked if I put raisins in them. No, as a matter of fact, I did not, nor would I ever. Raisins are gross, and I think putting raisins in your cinnamon rolls represents a serious lapse in judgement… but they do not cease to be cinnamon rolls by the addition of the raisins and their dark influence.

–

Blueberry has been getting big so quickly. I’m finding that she’s already getting heavy and tough to carry around: though to be fair I had a lot of years of training with an 8-lbs cat, so when she was ~8 lbs I was well inside my comfort zone; now she’s pushing me into the feats of strength zone.

It’s amazing how fickle she is: perfectly content to screaming banshee in a second flat. And just as often, back again. I know that movement helps to settle her, so I hold her and walk, or do a little baby rain dance. I got tired today after just a few minutes of the baby rain dance, and it made me wonder if I had missed striking the right balance in terms of when to have kids: too young, and well, you’re too young: not ready, not able to handle them. Too old, and you can’t keep up.

Then she started crying again, and I lost that train of thought. I plodded on, doing laps of the house.

Singing turned to pleading. Pleading to soft moaning. “Pleeaaasseee. Hushushushushshhhhh.” Then I thought perhaps this is how the zombie apocalypse would feel: zombies shuffling across the face of the earth without end, moaning while being gummed by a smaller, unhappy zombie.

The Ottawa Citizen had a great couple of articles on a joint NASA/NRC/CSA project to study snow storms and weather radar. While the first article about the project is not bad, what made it notable was the follow-up freedom of information release showing the ridiculous layers of bureaucracy and message massaging that had to happen before a non-answer was released. An op-ed the next day lamented the extreme information secrecy of the government.

I think scientific communication is important — indeed, it’s something I’m hoping to make a career out of here. So it’s kind of sad to see such an epic failure of communication in this case. What makes it especially sad is the number of people involved: I counted at least 4 different people in the FoI series of emails who were dedicating time and effort to not communicate, and there were more who appeared in just one or two short snippets. I bet you could not communicate with just one person in the department, or even an unhelpful sign on the door and a voicemail message. These guys, in theory, are supposed to help translate the science for the lay people and do the communications so the scientists can do science, though with the present government the entire goal may simply to act as a firewall between the scientists and everyone else. But wouldn’t everyone have been better off if one of the scientists just did the talking for himself?

So I see this kind of thing and can’t help but think “what are they getting paid for?” Couldn’t that money be better used for the main mission: science?

Another idiodic piece about hybrids in the press. It never fails that they say such inflammatorily stupid things that I get all angry at them. It shouldn’t be all that surprising: you don’t become an automotive journalist because you’re smart or know science or can do basic math, you do it because you like G-forces and want to make engine noises all day. You crave the open road and have an expense account for gas. The typical automotive journalist is about as far from a hybrid buyer as one could possibly get.

But for people who are stuck in stop-and-go and pay for their own gas, a fuel-efficient hybrid is a great choice.

Asking “why carry around the battery on the highway” is like asking “why carry around gears 1-5+R if I’m only going to use 6th on the highway?” except even dumber. If you bother to look up the ratings, you’ll see that not only is the Prius efficient in the city, it is also head-and-shoulders above any gasser on the highway — even diesels. Holy crap, it even beats out the tiny Smart Fortwo by almost 20%. There might just be something to this hybrid thing. I could go into the why of it*, but the point is it’s an extremely easy fact to check, yet I’ve seen these assclowns get it wrong so. many. times.

And if you’re a travelling salesman? Then a hybrid should be the only thing on your shopping list. With a lot of miles to put on, you’ll find the payback to be phenomenal. Ditto taxi drivers, who have found it’s cheaper to get a brand new Prius than a surplus former police cruiser Crown Vic.

“So hybrids, apart from their benefit for city drivers, have failed to sweep the world. Will anything change this pattern?”

Perhaps if instead of panning them at nearly every opportunity, if auto journalists actually came out and started writing some articles more along the lines of “well, the ride’s ok, I guess, and by paying a few thousand more up-front, you’ll save thousands in fuel expenses over the life of the car. If you do a lot of city commuting, or a tonne of driving in general like a travelling salesman, you should take a look.” Then maybe people might buy.

And on the heels of that ill-informed article, this diesel-scented turd.

“Diesel fuel should be taxed at a lower rate than gasoline for one simple reason: the fuel carries more energy than a comparable amount of gasoline, thus it is more efficient.”

Actually, that’s a good argument for diesel to be taxed more on a per-litre basis, since it’s using more barrels of oil per litre to make. But, the fact is, diesel is taxed less than gasoline: the federal excise tax is 10 cents/L on gasoline, and 4 cents/L on diesel. In Ontario, the provincial excise tax on gasoline is 14.7 vs 14.3 cents/L on diesel fuel.

“The fuel-efficient turbodiesel delivers the highway fuel economy of a Toyota Camry sedan.”

…without accounting for the higher energy density of diesel, and allowing for a very large fudge factor (using the V6 Camry vs the more popular V4, and even then, he’s off by over 6%; off by over 21% when comparing to the 4-cylinder).

Now, I’m not totally against diesel: it is more efficient than gas in many driving conditions (though not more efficient than a hybrid, and with about the same cost premium). A select few models will end up being cheaper over their lifetime than a conventional gas car. But it is a dirtier fuel, and one of the benefits of hybrids is reduced emissions as well as efficiency: diesel presents a trade-off (better efficiency but higher emissions). I simply don’t get the auto-journalists’ thinking of “diesel good, saves money and fun; hybrid bad, costs more up front” when it could have just as easily been the opposite. I suppose it’s their pre-existing bias towards diesel (more torque, grunt grunt grunt). It seems so arbitrary since those positions could easily be reversed (”The diesel Touareg is $5000 more than the gas version, a premium that would take over twenty years to break-even on.” “There is hardly any difference in fuel economy in city cycle driving, and with diesel fuel a bit more expensive than regular unleaded, there’s no point if you do anything but cruise the open road.” “The new emissions systems for them are completely untested, and with so few VW diesels on the road, good luck finding a mechanic if you run into a problem down the road.” “The AdBlu emissions control additive will need to be replaced frequently, and VW is very secretive about the pricing. Unverified rumours we are too lazy to fact check indicate that this could cost you an additional $5000 down the road.” “Diesel: fine for early adopters, but not ready for primetime.”)

* - Because the engine is more efficient. Atkinson cycle, yadda yadda yadda. And that is because the battery and motors are there for peak demand. Even on the highway they are used (e.g., to pass, or go uphill). It’s a far cry from dead weight — and even if it is, well, the numbers speak for themselves.