[OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs

[Chris Olson]

From: Derek Broughton 
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 10:10 PM
To: An Open Discussion Forum on Just About Everything,Especially for Techies. 
Subject: Re: [OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs


> Wonderful, but all of your toys came from those cities you despise.

Which is fine - all I'm saying is that the Big City infrastructure needs to be reconsidered because it uses more of man's resources than it contributes back into society.  The whole Big City system is broken.  Especially when it comes to transportation.  Example: when my wife and I haul soybeans to South St. Paul, MN we average 7.6 miles per gallon with our semi's loaded to 80,000 lbs on rural roads.  As soon as we get into the Metro, running the freeways, our average fuel mileage drops to 4.9 miles per gallon.

Why?

Because the people that live there crawl over each other like ants - including when they drive.  The speed limit on the freeway is 65 mph.  Nobody pays any attention - they all go 75+ mph.  How much fuel does that alone waste in a year?  Quite a lot.  And then they don't know how to drive.  If we run the speed limit with our heavy trucks we'll invariably have some idiot pass us going like a bat out of hell, then suddenly swerve in front of us and slam on the brakes to make an offramp.  That causes us to have to brake and downshift - costing us fuel mileage.

The whole Big City thing is wasteful because the people living there are largely idiots that never think about something as simple as slowing down to the speed limit saves on fuel (and man's resources).

> If you want the benefits you have to put up with their dumps, too.

I think we can do without the perceived "benefits".  Us country folk are pretty resourceful and we'll manage just fine when the Big City infrastructure falls apart.  And make note that I said "when" it falls apart, not "if".

> I'll grant that your personal net use of petroleum may be less than mine

We probably use less gasoline, but we still use more petroleum than you (I would guess) simply because of the relative size of the things we do.  For instance, logging; I burn about 1,000 gallons of petroleum diesel fuel in my log skidder in a year, simply because I can't get it started on biodiesel when it's sitting on the landing in the middle of the woods at -20° F.  And our on-farm genset is a detuned 180 hp 5.9L Cummins/Onan 85 kW unit, and for reliability I burn B50 biodiesel in that in the winter time (about 3 months out of the year).
--
Chris