Panos for Progress: Thoughts and Selections

Provided input to several questions for  WalletHub's advisory article  on Teen Drivers which was also covered by several radio stations as well as NewsWeek  and MSN . What tips do you have for parents of teen drivers? There is no rush for teenagers to drive. If they do not show sufficient maturity at home and at school, placing them on the road in the driver’s seat, unsupervised, is an accident waiting to happen. In states with graduated licensing schemes, this risk is reduced. Strongly recommended is a hands-on safety course such as Street Survival, Driver’s Edge and similar programs. Search “teenager safety driving school” to find programs in your vicinity. I am a Street Survival instructor and my teenager took the Saturday full day course twice. Teenagers finish the day with several tools for dealing with emergency situations while driving, and more humbled about their (inflated) driving abilities. What is the biggest risk that teen drivers face? The crash risk of teen...

A passive, thermoelectric generator that could decrease battery size by 25 % saving both cost and weight for vehicles, helicopters, etc. Possibly a big winner... "The researchers tested their prototype in a laboratory and found that with a change in temperature of 190 degrees, their thermoelectric generator produced 40 watts of power, enough to charge a phone or a few LED lights and act as a supplementary source of energy for a vehicle’s battery.... It converted about 15% of exhaust heat into electricity. Other commercial thermoelectric generators typically convert about 6% to 8% of heat into additional electricity."

  It is possible. It'll take over a decade, and in today's values, it'll likely cost about $3,500 for a basic model  or about three times the current iPhone -Made-in-China price, as explained below. 1. In a recent interview, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that manufacturing in China has nothing to do with cheap labor. That ended ten years ago. He stressed the tooling engineering expertise needed for such a powerful and miniature device. If I called for a meeting of suitable tooling engineers in the US, he said, I'd fill up a room. If I did the same in China, I'd fill up a stadium. 2. WSJ's Nicole Nguyen explained more:  Let’s talk assembly first…putting together the different components of the iPhone. This is very complex. Electronics manufacturing at scale has been perfected in China over a generation. The U.S. would need hundreds of thousands of skilled workers it doesn’t have, not to mention the facilities. Analysts say it would take many billions of dollars...

My response to questions from Wallethub . Do you have any advice for someone searching for the best extended car warranty? Extended warranties can be a Godsend or pure “dealer gravy” as many refer to them in the social media. Their value depends on several circumstances. For example, a special warranty for tires covering road hazards for a car owner with low profile tires who uses his or her car a lot at a region with poor pavements and potholed roads can actually save a lot of money in tire replacement costs. The reliability of brands varies widely as reported by Consumer Reports, J.D. Power and other automotive testing/surveying outlets. An extended warranty on a less reliable brand or car model makes more sense than an extended warranty for the most reliable car in each class of vehicle. When does paying for an extended car warranty make the most/least sense? Extended warranties make less sense for EVs which are mechanically simple vehicles and their battery is covered for an extend...

Eight updates on tariffs.   "The Trumpers, in addition to not knowing what they’re doing, don’t even know what they want." -- P Krugman Trump's tariffs are "highly likely" to reignite inflation, Fed chair Powell said on April 16. Broad based 10% tariffs will boost manufacturing employment by 100,000 jobs and decrease employment overall by five times as much, roughly 500,000 jobs. This is a normal case forecast that does not include a possible recession. --Goldman Sachs report on Axios China’s government has suspended exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, both critical to many modern industries and the military. Chinese airlines had plans to buy 29 Boeing aircraft in 2025. China halted imports of American jets. Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s top trade official, reportedly has "struggled to determine America’s aims." The travel industry was worth $1.3 trillion in 2024, and supported 15 million U.S. jobs, per the U.S. Travel Association. Too soon to tell,...

  The F-150 is the top selling vehicle in the US, with 732,139 units sold in 2024. Paul Krugman: Trump has slapped high tariffs on Canadian aluminum, which is cheap because smelting uses lots of electricity, and Canada has abundant hydropower. Yet Trump somehow thinks Canada is exploiting us by offering us a key industrial input at a good price.” WSJ: Ford’s F-150 trucks, one of the company’s biggest profit generators, are among the most aluminum-intensive vehicles on the market. The company a decade ago converted the trucks to a mostly aluminum exterior, including the hood, doors and truck bed, to save weight and enhance fuel efficiency.

  Back in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council published Global Trends 2025, A Transformed World , a 100 page report translated in several languages an debated in many governmental proceedings and conferences. The report included sections on climate change and sustainability. I presented those in my CEE 444 course on infrastructure sustainability and resilience. I recently stumbled upon this report and took another look at it because it is now 2025. How much did they get right? What did they get wrong? I provide answers for four major areas of the report: geopolitics, energy, climate and destabilizing factors. On the geopolitical front they focused on BRICs… Brazil, Russia, India and China. They expected a bigger role of Brazil. But their contentious politics did not let Brazil shine. They did not expect Russia to become more demographic or technologically important. They got it right, but they did not focus on their cybersecurity advancement and threat. They expected that ca...

  Multifaceted writer Cliff Slater dies at 91 I will always remember fondly and with much appreciation my friend, mentor, advisor and neighbor Cliff Slater who passed on January 20. He had a full and most accomplished life. He survived Hitler's V2 bombs in his native UK, hurricanes while crossing the Pacific Ocean in his boat, cancer, and decades of Hawaii's antibusiness environment. He was a very successful businessman, author of transportation books and articles (including one in Transportation Research!), had a regular newspaper column, and was an active participant in Honolulu's civics.  RIP.

"This is not another social media. This is not another smartphone. This is something altogether different. Titanic things, beyond everyone’s grasp, are happening." This is a concluding quote from a portion of Dean W. Ball's (of Hyperdimensional ) take on the current status of AI.  Read it below and and then think about it for a minute. All the expected vast change in the next couple of years will be managed by the same politicians (worldwide) that "handled" Covid, Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, etc. There is no effective large-scale crisis management, and Trump's governance is a global crisis. That's the scary part... so much potential for mayhem. Novus Ordo Seclorum--Reflections on DeepSeek by Dean W Ball "I predicted that a Chinese lab would credibly replicate OpenAI’s o1 model within a few months in my first analysis of o1 back in September. For me, this was priced in. But it was not priced in for many others, and I did not remotely anticipa...

For many years I enjoyed Nutella straight up as a snack, a couple of spoonfuls at a time. But a couple decades ago, I started getting a good idea about nutrition. Then I stopped eating it altogether despite Costco's efforts to sell it to me for a few pennies per spoonful! Look at the label: Two tablespoonfuls is a small snack, but it's loaded in sugar and saturated fat. Bye! As I started having more time in my hands (retirement, and winter in Reno, NV helps,) I found many recipes for homemade nutella. After a few tries, the one below is my favorite; healthy and easy to make. The engineer in me would say that this recipe is 90% healthier than the real thing, and 90% as good as the real thing. Go for it as follows: 1.5 cup hazelnuts (I get mine from Trader Joe's) 0.5 can (200 grams) cannellini beans, rinsed 5 tbs natural unsweetened cacao powder 4 stevia packets (optional for extra sweetness) 15 dates softened in warm water for about 15 minutes 1 cup warm oat milk (any milk) ...

GM Cruise, the second most advanced driverless technology company in the US (the first is Waymo ) is now history and a $10 billion sunk investment .  Some of the lessons learned and technologies are incorporated into GM's advanced driver assistance system or ADAS for its regular vehicles, such as Super Cruise . For the foreseeable future, outside China and a handful of other places, driverless vehicle deployment will be marginal, and much smaller than the share of EVs.