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Green people should not make calculators

Kiplinger has released an online calculator to determine how much you’ll save by riding your bike to work rather than driving a car. This calculator is asinine for a variety of reasons as I’ll explain below.

My round trip to and from work is 40 miles. It says I’ll save $16 dollars per day. Exactly where does the savings come from?! The calculator only assumes I’ll stop driving to work. Where is the assumption that I’ll stop owning a car, thus stop paying car insurance, making car repairs, etc?! Accordingly the estimate is completely inaccurate. There is simply no way I could save $16 per day merely by riding to work on a bicycle.

And furthermore, it does not even ask which sort of car I drive. I could be driving a 2 ton Ford F350 4×4 truck or I could be driving a Prius. The fact that the calculator assumes no difference between these two vehicles makes it pretty clear that it’s completely fricken worthless.

Additionally, it does not factor in the simple and quite obvious fact that my time has value!!!! It takes me about 40 minutes to drive to work and back home each day. It’s nearly all expressway traveling. For me to bike the same distance, using all back-roads, would take several hours. I make about $20 per hour. So I’d be wasting well over a $100 per day in my time to save a mere $16. Which as I explained above, I would not be saving in the first place.

Someone will argue that this calculator is not for everyone. That’s it’s designed for the people who could save money by biking to work. That’s BS too. First, even if you live only a mile from work, the calculator says you’ll save only 80 cents per day. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d gladly pay 80 cents per day for the privilege of not spending the day covered in sweat or drenched in rain.

And second, exactly where does it say the calculator is not for everyone?! It doesn’t. And that’s the real problem with it, why didn’t they program the calculator to determine that for some people a car is more cost effective than a bicycle?! Because that’s clearly the case for the vast majority of people.

I used to have a neighbor who’d drive 300 miles round trip to work every day. He worked construction and his employer made him work in the next state. According to the calculator he’d save $120 per day in riding his bike. However, it ignores the impossibility of someone driving 300 miles on a bike each and every day. In other words, the calculator is wrong, he could not save $120 riding a bike to work each day because it’d be impossible for him to drive a bike to work each day. (Not to mention the fact that he was using his employer’s truck and his employer was paying for his gasoline.)

Completely fricken asinine. It’s this sort of completely irrational and illogical BS which makes the green movement look like idiots.

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For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.

- Thomas Sowell

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He’s my sun!

I’m here for XXX’s trial. Is that going today?

I wanted to look up his name on the computer to get his new trial date, so I asked…

Do you spell XXX with two Ts?

I don’t know. He’s my son.

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