August 17, 2008 by roland.

It is amazing how seemingly unrelated events send you down a path only to find everything was related. This path started many months ago when a septic tank finally hit the end of its life cycle on the family farm. Since it was planting season and the backhoe we have couldn’t go deep enough to set a septic tank, we had to have a contractor come out and install the tank. This lead to an inspector coming out to inspect the job.

The inspector had basically no training to hold this job that anyone has been able to discover. His sole qualification was that he used to be a truck safety lane inspector. Reports differ as to whether he was terminated or allowed to resign. The truth will probably never be made public.

Rather than inspect the septic tank he wandered around the farm unattended and came across a water well which hadn’t been used in nearly 60 years. Being a natural born asshole, he started a flurry of mail about how if the well was no longer in use it needed to be abandoned. The well was no longer in use because it had quite a bit of sulfur in the water and an old jack pump to pump it with. Since he was such a shining example of a walking talking rectal sphincter, I decided to pull the jack pump and sink a submersible pump in the water well. The well could then have a hydrant placed on it and be plumbed through one of the houses on the farm to have a spigot placed on the far wall for watering the garden. With the well in use it wouldn’t have to be abandoned. Keep in mind, this wasn’t an open hole, it was capped and still had the rod and leathers down it for the jack pump. The well was around 874 feet deep and dug by horses before my dad was born.

This weekend, the well drillers showed up to assist in pulling the pipe. Given the depth, we opted to use a sawzall rather than a torch to cut the first couple of pipe joints free. By the time we got to the third pipe joint we got to the ones which had been under water so they came apart with pipe wrenches. When the fourth joint was taken off we noticed some significant bubbles coming up in the water. (The foot valve was still good for the jack pump, so water remained in the pipe.) A joint or two later, the bubbles became a mist rising nearly a inch above the broken connection.

We made a call to NGPL, but by the time they arrived, the water had risen back up in the well and no gas was being emitted. They had done some research before coming and determined we could be inside of a methane vein. When the drillers return to sink the pump they are going to come back with additional testing equipment and sample containers to try and determine what kind of gas and how much of it comes up when we pump out a lot of water. While we could always vent the methane into the atmosphere, if there was a sufficient quantity I wanted to come up with some method of storing and utilizing the gas. We go through a lot of propane during corn drying season, not to mention house heating, etc. It would be nice to have that cost removed from operation.

This lead me to do a little research today. Methane is the primary component of “natural gas” supplied in cities. I’m old enough to remember a house my aunt an uncle had in a city not far from here where the gas company actually put a port on the side of the garage so they could run a gas grill. A little bit more research showed that both Fiat and Volvo had been selling Bi-Fuel vehicles in Europe for a long time. In the case of Volvo, we aren’t talking about an eggbeater sized car, but a Volvo 850. A nice big sedan. It can burn either methane or E85. In fact, you can switch between the two giving the car a 600+ kilometer range on a fill up. (300 for methane and another 300-350 for E85) The Bi-Fuel engine just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

One has to wonder how come Ford hasn’t had the vision to put that engine and bi-fuel system in the 850 sold here in the USA. Natural gas already has a very large distribution network in place. Many older homes in cities also have a port on their garage already to run a gas grill. You could easily fill your car at home before leaving.

Apparently the management at Ford prefers to keep methane between their ears rather than in their cars. How many gas stations already have natural gas plumbed into them for their heating and hot water? Would it really be that much work to extend a line to a pump for sale? Volvo already has the engine and fueling system to take the US market by storm. E85 gas stations are being set up all over the country with many states funding the addition of E85 pumps to existing gas stations. Yet Ford seems intent on going out of business.

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August 4, 2008 by roland.

The following actually came from CNN:
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Part of the problem with 401(k)s, says Money’s Walter Updegrave in CNNMoney.com, is that 21 percent of Americans “turn to friends and relatives for advice” in picking their 401(k) allocations. There’s way too much at stake to have your “retirement prospects riding on odd Uncle Otto’s mutual fund picks.” You can hire a money manager to advise you, but the fees may make that unprofitable — unless your employer picks up part of the cost. But you can manage on your own, too, if you do “two key things: create a diversified blend of stock and bond funds and then rebalance annually.” You usually get free advice and other tools online. At the very least, try a target-date fund.
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Because CNN hasn’t bothered to hire a journalist in the past 20 years and run by MBAs, nobody pointed out the real problem with 401k plans. YOUR COMPANY CHOOSES THE VENDOR AND YOU ARE LEFT WITH ONLY A HANDFUL OF TRULY SH*TTY FUNDS TO CHOOSE FROM.

I remember listening to workers at the stock exchange I contracted at. Upper management had chosen “a big name fund company which advertises a lot” to be the retirement plan manager. At the time they had some of the highest performing mutual funds out there, and were making a lot of money for those with millions to invest. Only one catch. Of the funds available to retirement plans, there was only one which had made any money over the past 5 years and it had only made something like 5 or 7 percent. All of the others had lost money. You have to understand that this was during the up-swing of the DOT-BOMB bubble when even funds with bad managers were returning 30% or more.

The real problem with the 401k industry is that the mutual fund companies have been allowed to bleed it, and upper management hasn’t been sent to prison for their choices.

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