book dissatisfaction

I'm a bit more than halfway through _Divorce Your Car!_, which has quite a lot of merit despite being 10 years old (turns out the bike advocates haven't really acquired any new arguments or statistics in the interim. I was a little surprised); a more complete review will follow when I'm done. In the meantime, however, I have decided I'm looking for a couple of books, based on reading this and _No Impact Man_, and having issues with both.

(1) A how-we-did-it parenting book loaded with anecdotes from the authors' experiences and their friends, all of whom are writers living in New York (or, conceivably, some other dense city) in one bedroom apartments. While it would be okay to have a little wow our lifestyle changed when we had the first kid, that's covered adequately elsewhere. Highlights should include: how we (or our friends) juggle 2+ kids in a one bedroom apartment; how we respond to friends/family who try to convince us to move to New Jersey (or at least a two bedroom in Brooklyn), etc.

It's quite clear that the material is out there. I don't see any reason why they can't share with the rest of us. It'd be a nice supplement to the standard, reduce-your-footprint advice to live in a smaller home. Further, if it's written by a bunch of highly educated, high status but cash poor 30 somethings in New York, it _won't_ be all about elimination communication and the family bed. There will be an amazing amount of life contortion to adhere to middle class norms within a highly constrained space. I don't know about you, but I bet I'd learn a lot.

ETA: Also, the potential for huge snarking against Park Slope parenting makes me cackle with glee.

I would anticipate at least one chapter in the book being devoted to how the family carted the wee ones around on bikes at various ages and stages, and also a chunk devoted to agonizing over at what age will I let them ride the subway without adult supervision. Also, tech toys that don't work as advertised (GPS monitors, and similar).

(2) A how-we-did-it parenting book with anecdotes from the authors' experiences and their friends, who live in places like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Somerville (MA) and other segments of Greater Boston, the Triangle in North Carolina and anywhere else with a family biking community. While it might or might not be possible to find enough families who went car free outside of dense city centers, it should be possible to find a ton of families who went car lite in city neighborhoods and inner suburbs (and a scattering out in rural areas). This entry can presume a relatively spacious family residence (2, 3 or even more bedrooms for a family of 3 or 4); the primary distinguishing feature would be that these families transportation choices don't include heavy reliance on cars.

My preferred form of non-fiction is I-am-curious-let's-go-find-out: the author stalks some experts, participates in some research, does a lot of reading and then sums it all up with the open questions in the field. About a decade ago, in the late 1990s, activist non-fiction could be summed up as blugeoning the reader with statistics, and following it up with some rah rah cheerleading about Things You Could Try to Make It Better. More recently, activist non-fiction has developed this I Followed A Bunch of Rules genre, in which the author does some batshit crazy thing with their loved ones tolerance and/or participation, mostly to get a book contract, some publicity, all in the service of Making A Point (usually along the lines of, wow, that advice is not as easy as it looks, it's depressing, families resist, and it would be a lot easier to accomplish related goals much more easily if we collectively decided to do X instead, altho occasionally, it's more about, well, it's still a pretty ideal and, even more occasionally, wow, look what a bad idea that lifestyle is. Virtually all of these conclusions being comparatively obvious from the beginning of the project.).

Parenting literature, by contrast, has a very personal, let's get our author friends together and write about what a harrowing experience ages X through Y were, as well as a fair amount of, my kid has Z, but my kid is way cool anyway. What I'm looking for is sort of a twisted melange of the two subgenres.

Because I think those books should exist, and actually, I could not write them.

economics and history

Just up front, I already own _Enterprise of Law_, so if you're thinking of recommending that as a solution to this book search, well, it won't help.

Listening to a whole lot of really nutty right wingers claim that what is shaping up to be a fairly crappy national high risk pool somehow constitutes socialism (more so than having a "free" road systme, no less) has gotten to me over the last few weeks. (Altho when Bachman calls it socialization, I cannot help but giggle helplessly.) Is there a book out there that does a 50,000 foot view of All Recorded Civilizations, categorizing them by the kind of economic system they had? Obviously, this wouldn't be, Britain = blah, since Britain would have to be broken up into when it was feudal and when it was mercantilist and so forth.

I'm pretty sure that whoever and however this book was put together, I would have endless complaints about it, but I'd kinda like to have a copy so I can pick it to pieces. In particular, I harbor a suspicion that our classification scheme of kinds of economies would not hold up pretty well if applied across a wide swathe of time and space.

Happy Alowine, er, Halloween

We went trick or treating around the loop. T. got tired because of all the long driveways and so forth, so about a third or so through we just walked and didn't go get more candy. We only had one person attempt to get T. to talk, and I shut him down as quickly as I could. That really annoys me. We go to a certain amount of extra effort to shepherd T. through this process in the hopes that it might be fun and it might connect him to mainstream kid culture; I just do not need additional pressure.

B. and B. held down the home front while R., T., A. and I hit up the neighbors for candy. It was especially nice that T. and I knew a lot of people because of our bicycling the neighborhood and chatting with people during the summer. R. took pictures; hopefully some will turn out. A. mostly sat and cooked in her costume. She was a little cranky by the time we got home altho some of that was teething. It was still about 70 degrees after dark. Windy, too.

We went out during the first chunk of the two hour hoover up candy event. B. and B. left around 7:30 so we caught the last of the stragglers. R. had bought candy and pretzels (packaged appropriately) and little raisin boxes (not so much, but people took them anyway). Almost all the candy is gone (of what we bought) and about half the pretzels and raisins, thus leaving us only with T.'s take to cause problems.

It was a lot of fun.

tsk, tsk: that's not very honest

There's a box in Alvord's _Divorce Your Car!_ with a worksheet to help you calculate how much your car is costing you every year. Conveniently, someone has reproduced it online:

http://www.easybreathers.org/explore/airpollution/drivingCost.html

(H/T I love google. That was item 7 when I searched on Alvord divorce depreciation)

Item A on the list has as the first two components:

Yearly cost of car purchase (monthly payments x 12 OR Purchase price divided by years owned)

Annual depreciation (ten percent of purchase price)

I don't know much about accounting, but I _can_ recognize when someone has included something twice in a list. Given that depreciation of a vehicle is typically one of the most, if not the most, if not the majority of the annual cost of owning and running a car, doubling this one item will produce a really distorted idea of what it costs to run the car.

On top of that, there are niggling issues with any of these three ways of accounting for the capital cost of the car. (1) If you lease the car, you would need to include the lease payments for the year, plus you'd probably need to capture some element of what you might have to pony up at end of lease because, say, your mileage was too high. (2) Monthly payments treat the car as free once you have finished paying for it (which may or may not make sense). (3) 10% straight line depreciation treats a car as free after 10 years. (4) If you want this to reflect market value of your car, you should probably use an accelerated depreciation schedule. (5) The number of years you take depreciation should probably also reflect expected lifespan of the vehicle, which may vary a lot depending on other factors (like, how old was it when you bought it).

The way she has structured this, if you paid cash for a 10 year old car, the first year you owned it would cost you 110% of whatever you paid for it, just for the first two entries of A. Does that seem right to you?

ETA:

Interestingly enough, over on bikeforums there's some criticisms of a different author's directions for calculating cost of a leased car.

http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-218661.html

Bizarrely, the criticism revolves around the time value of money, which I have yet to see show up in a depreciation analysis. Ever.

ETAYA: bigmieux's comment is actually quite to the point, both regarding Balish (the other author), Alvord and what the other silly folk on the thread were saying.

And finally, this is what comes of confusing an income statement with a balance sheet, when really, all you are doing is cash accounting anyway.

tragic irony

On p 145 of Alvord's _Divorce Your Car!_: a subhead "Bicycling can save your life and your health"

On p 146: a callout box quoting Ken Kifer bragging about how at fifty-one he looked so young and healthy compared to a forty-three year old at the laundromat.

My regular readers _know_ I'm all about bicycling, walking, taking public transit and blah, blah, bleeping, blah. But it's still a shock reading Kifer being quoted in this context.

ETA: Not so tragic, George Bliss, supplier of human powered vehicles (tricycles, IIRC) to No Impact Man and his family, gets a mention on page 153.