Monday, September 05, 2005
Random Musing Of A Tired Man
This past weekend, I went up to my old fraternity house at school to help them out with rush. More details on that later, but for now, suffice it to say that I only got about 12 hours of sleep total over the past three days, and spent about 16 hours in the car. It's generally not good when you've spent more time driving than sleeping in any significant time span. However, I figured I'd throw some random thoughts out there:
It's looking like the death toll from Hurricane Katrina will be at least 3,000, possibly as large as 10,000. Will anyone be placing magnets on their car in support of "hurricane preparedness"? Will there be special license plates made commemorating this horrendous even, labelled "Never Forget"? Will we start singing an additional song at sporting events? Of course not. Honestly, the stories from New Orleans are horrifying and mind-boggling. There's nothing I can say to do it justice, but I do think this is something we should never forget. The lack or preparation and support that allowed the problem to be as bad as it was deserves just as much attention as our attack preparedness did post-9/11.
On an utterly unrelated and much less significant note, my Outlook has started giving me problems whenever I try to delete a message. It says: "The message interfacing returned an unknown error." It's like a meta-error. But, about as useless as an error message saying "unknown error". Thanks Microsoft. In the meantime, my inbox will continue to grow until it destroys my entire computer, given that I can't clean anything out of it.
I bet you haven't noticed, but gas is expensive. I spent about $120 bucks getting to Boston and back. One might think that at some point, flying's gonna be cheaper than driving, but one's also gotta think that fuel costs will drive up flight costs a bit. Still, you're splitting those costs among a lot more people, right?
The Orioles are way out of the pennant race, but the Nationals still have a shot at the wild card. It would be quite a story if they made the playoffs their first year here. People are definitely excited about them. It's pretty cool. Hopefully one day they'll overtake the dismal Redskins, but I'm not holding my breath: D.C. is definitely a football town. But if you didn't have a baseball team, you'd follow football too. What are you gonna follow? Basketball? Don't be silly.
That's it. My brain is toast. Time to watch something insanely stupid on television. I have many exciting tales to tell when I can form a coherent sentence.
It's looking like the death toll from Hurricane Katrina will be at least 3,000, possibly as large as 10,000. Will anyone be placing magnets on their car in support of "hurricane preparedness"? Will there be special license plates made commemorating this horrendous even, labelled "Never Forget"? Will we start singing an additional song at sporting events? Of course not. Honestly, the stories from New Orleans are horrifying and mind-boggling. There's nothing I can say to do it justice, but I do think this is something we should never forget. The lack or preparation and support that allowed the problem to be as bad as it was deserves just as much attention as our attack preparedness did post-9/11.
On an utterly unrelated and much less significant note, my Outlook has started giving me problems whenever I try to delete a message. It says: "The message interfacing returned an unknown error." It's like a meta-error. But, about as useless as an error message saying "unknown error". Thanks Microsoft. In the meantime, my inbox will continue to grow until it destroys my entire computer, given that I can't clean anything out of it.
I bet you haven't noticed, but gas is expensive. I spent about $120 bucks getting to Boston and back. One might think that at some point, flying's gonna be cheaper than driving, but one's also gotta think that fuel costs will drive up flight costs a bit. Still, you're splitting those costs among a lot more people, right?
The Orioles are way out of the pennant race, but the Nationals still have a shot at the wild card. It would be quite a story if they made the playoffs their first year here. People are definitely excited about them. It's pretty cool. Hopefully one day they'll overtake the dismal Redskins, but I'm not holding my breath: D.C. is definitely a football town. But if you didn't have a baseball team, you'd follow football too. What are you gonna follow? Basketball? Don't be silly.
That's it. My brain is toast. Time to watch something insanely stupid on television. I have many exciting tales to tell when I can form a coherent sentence.
Comments:
"I bet you haven't noticed, but gas is expensive. I spent about $120 bucks getting to Boston and back. One might think that at some point, flying's gonna be cheaper than driving, but one's also gotta think that fuel costs will drive up flight costs a bit. Still, you're splitting those costs among a lot more people, right?"
Fuel prices account for about 30% of operating expenses for an airline. Let's suppose that car gas right now costs $3.00/gallon, and that your car gets 25 miles/gallon when driving from DC to Boston. That's about 475 miles each way, or 950 miles round trip, which means 38 gallons of gas costing you $114. That, of course, is only the direct cost to you. You also have to factor in the maintenance and depreciation costs of driving your car - many people don't do this, but, alas, many people are fools. Suppose your Accord was $25,000 new, and could sell for $10,000 with 75,000 miles on it (just a guess). That translates to $0.20/mile in depreciation. Which for our 950 mile trip comes out to $190, far more than the cost of the gas. That's the reason that companies (and the IRS, in effect, too) reimburse people ~$0.40/mile for driving, when gas only costs ~$0.10/mile.
For the airlines, if a round-trip ticket from DC to Boston costs $150, about 30% of that, or $50, is fuel. That 30% is about the same as for driving if you look closely, BTW.
So, as things are now, driving by yourself is cheaper if you only account for gas, but much more expensive when you calculate the real cost of driving. Driving with a buddy, however, is roughly the same per person ($152 to be exact) as if you both flew, if you account for the real costs.
Now suppose gas doubles in price. Driving will now cost $230 in gas plus $190 in other costs, or $210/person if all costs are split both ways, while flying would presumably cost $50 more, or $200/person.
What does this mean? It means that flying is already cheaper for a trip like this, and the ratio probably won't change a lot as gas prices go up and down.
BTW, it also means that driving a car with 75,000 miles is FAR cheaper than driving a newer one, because going from 0 to 25,000 miles costs probably $6,000 in a new Accord, whereas going from 75,000 miles to 100,000 miles only costs about $2,500. Similarly, driving a new BMW is much more expensive in depreciation alone than driving a new Sentra, and even worse when you include more expensive parts for maintenance and higher insurance costs.
-Shear
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Fuel prices account for about 30% of operating expenses for an airline. Let's suppose that car gas right now costs $3.00/gallon, and that your car gets 25 miles/gallon when driving from DC to Boston. That's about 475 miles each way, or 950 miles round trip, which means 38 gallons of gas costing you $114. That, of course, is only the direct cost to you. You also have to factor in the maintenance and depreciation costs of driving your car - many people don't do this, but, alas, many people are fools. Suppose your Accord was $25,000 new, and could sell for $10,000 with 75,000 miles on it (just a guess). That translates to $0.20/mile in depreciation. Which for our 950 mile trip comes out to $190, far more than the cost of the gas. That's the reason that companies (and the IRS, in effect, too) reimburse people ~$0.40/mile for driving, when gas only costs ~$0.10/mile.
For the airlines, if a round-trip ticket from DC to Boston costs $150, about 30% of that, or $50, is fuel. That 30% is about the same as for driving if you look closely, BTW.
So, as things are now, driving by yourself is cheaper if you only account for gas, but much more expensive when you calculate the real cost of driving. Driving with a buddy, however, is roughly the same per person ($152 to be exact) as if you both flew, if you account for the real costs.
Now suppose gas doubles in price. Driving will now cost $230 in gas plus $190 in other costs, or $210/person if all costs are split both ways, while flying would presumably cost $50 more, or $200/person.
What does this mean? It means that flying is already cheaper for a trip like this, and the ratio probably won't change a lot as gas prices go up and down.
BTW, it also means that driving a car with 75,000 miles is FAR cheaper than driving a newer one, because going from 0 to 25,000 miles costs probably $6,000 in a new Accord, whereas going from 75,000 miles to 100,000 miles only costs about $2,500. Similarly, driving a new BMW is much more expensive in depreciation alone than driving a new Sentra, and even worse when you include more expensive parts for maintenance and higher insurance costs.
-Shear
# posted by 
: September 7, 2005 at 11:39 AM
: September 7, 2005 at 11:39 AM
