TGIF

Good morning again:

The picture here I show you to demonstrate the big learning curve we need to learn about converting a car from gas to all electric. You see here the batteries and the controller in this set up.

At the meeting last night there were only six cars there, all with either regular batteries, airline batteries or liquid batteries. All of the cars there got only get 30 and 72 miles between charges. Good enough for the guys who made these cars. Each drive his or her car from home to work. One lives in southwest Portland and works in northeast Portland. He has a car that gets about 35 miles between charges, so he charges it at home and when he gets to work.

Once we start converting cars the range our cars get 200 miles, at least, between charges. We are using lithium ion ferrous phosphate batteries from China. These batteries cost well over $2,000 each here in the U.S. but we can get them from Shenzhen China for a fraction of that price. It is also from a reputable company there. This means I can drive either to Eugene or Portland and back on only one charge.

I applied for another big grant two days ago, the new money from the Stimulus Recovery Plan that our beloved President announced a few days ago.

Too many books awaiting for me at the library. Plus I have The Wilderness Warrior "in transit"; this book is over 900 pages long. I like to read everything Douglas Brinkley writes. Read his book on Hurricane Katrina. It is the best thing written about New Orleans and the big storm.

Seven books waiting for me and another 14 books on hold.

As I told you before we have a regional library here, meaning we can get books from any library in the Chemeketa Community College district. The three books I have here at home, one is from McMinnville, another from Woodburn and one from Stayton.

Right now I am reading China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage. I like to read everything I can about China and its economic model. I want to find an article on the downturn of the economy there. I did read southeast China has around 400,000 factories. I do believe more than 100,000 of them have closed down. In the early 1990's there was the biggest migration in the world's history were those from the countryside to the cities on China, over 3,000,000 people moved from the farms to the cities to work in factories and in construction in the big cities. We estimated that Shanghai has over 2,000,000 migrant workers in it.

It is hard to move about in China for the Chinese. Each person, including me, has to get a residence permit from the police department that allows you to live in a city. For the native Chinese they reside in the city where they were born. It stays with you for your entire life. It is hard to move from your birth city.

Upon arriving in China in 2007 I had to go the police station soon after my arrival there. When we moved a different apartment in Shanghai I had to go the police department to show them my new address and the proof of my new place. I know this is totally unacceptable for Americans. Can you imagine if you had to visit your local police station to register your address every time you moved, even if you moved from one place to another in the same city?

This is what I get for living in a totalitarian state. We forget that China is a dictatorship, with a People's Congress that has not one elected official. I rank Mao in the same group as Hitler and Stalin. His Great Leap Forward and the later Cultural Revolution killed over 20,000,000 people. Yet the Chinese people revere him. He shows up on all of the paper money and the dollar coins there. His body is on public display in Beijing. There is a big statute of him in the capitol city. But like I said Mao is the worst dictator in the world's history.

Even though the economic system there is mostly capitalist, the government there still manages the macro and micro economic system. The gas pipeline is owned by the government, so it controls the gas price there.

Any dollars that come into China must be turned over The Bank of China, the government-owned bank. No matter where the dollars come into China. It must be turned over The Bank of China. That bank then keeps the dollars. The Bank of China has over one trillion U.S. dollars in it possession.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Steven