Book Review: Pay It Down

Jean Chatzky's take on debt  

This was a quick read from the library: Pay It Down: From Debt to Wealth on $10/day by Jean Chatzky.   The  book is abbreviated and condensed into this series of articles on Money.cnn.

First off, this book is nearly entirely about budgeting.  Figure out what you're already spending, and then take a look.  The topic was just as dreary as it could be in this relentless little book.  It would not let you escape the reality that you're going to have to spend less than you earn if you want to pay off debt.  No bright promises of riches, no assurance that this will be easy, nothing but the drilling down of a determined accountant.  This was a root canal.

If, however, you need a root canal, better to get one than to be given a tube of teeth whitener.  This book has me headed over to my spreadsheet to see if I can't set up a budgeting tool to use with my clients.  I've got one coming in tomorrow I can try it out on.

There was some good stuff in there about how to find places to cut in your budget, some of which would be worth the price of this book if you were fairly new to this.  Short version: sell things you own that you can't afford to own and go get a second job.  (Uh, did I mention that most of this book was dreary?)

I also appreciated her take on ways to improve your credit score.  It was more specific than I've seen before.  She said:

35% of the score is based on how well you pay your bills on time.  One late payment can drop your score by 20 points!
30% is based on "balance and burden", where they want you to have a lot of available credit you're not using.  (This indicates that someone checked your income at some point.
10% is based on whether you've had new inquiries.  All inquiries in the same 15 day period count as one inquiry.  Inquiries over 12 months old don't count.
10% is financial composition: what percentage is bank-card debt and what percentage is installment debt.  They prefer a ratio of 60-70%bank card debt to 30 to 40% installment debt rather than you have too much of one or the other.  I'm not sure what "installment debt" is: the only kind I've seen on my credit report are student loans and they're all paid off.  I can't see how that hurts me, but apparently it does a little.
15% is based on the average age of your credit cards.  It's best to keep cards for a long time and not close them.

She had some interesting notes on health insurance, too:

She suggests looking at eHealthInsurance.com and Fortis Health for quotes on health insurance policies.  (She noted that medical expenses were the leading cause of people getting into trouble with debt, and any solution has to involve getting health insurance.)

She quoted some figures for health insurance costs that were roughly 1/2 of what I'd expect to pay and it sent me scrambling for the copyright date on this book.  My guess is that it was written five years ago.  Could health insurance rates have doubled in that time?  It seems unlikely, but possible.  Nevertheless, the point is the same.  People need to be prepared to seek out their own policies, just as they seek out their own life insurance, car insurance and possibly disability insurance.

In Massachusetts, though, I'd recommend that you start with the Commonwealth Connector if you're trying to find health insurance.  I tried out eHealthinsurance.com and it said it didn't work in my zip code.  I suspect it wouldn't work in any of MA.

She also mentioned that you can search for insurance agents in your area through the National Association of Health Underwriters and review health insurance companies at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners'  and/or the National Committee for Quality Assurance sites.

Book Review: Richest Man in Babylon

"The Richest Man in Babylon", or "Wisdom Through The Ages"  

I had originally meant to review both financial books I've just read in the same post, but The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason  deserves its own review. It's a slim volume and the copyright is expired so I will make this easy and link to a PDF you can download. There. Consider yourself led to water.

Have you ever noticed how movies set in the seventies seem dated, but if they were set in the distant past they don't? For example, compare "All The President's Men" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Point is, if you put something back in time it stays fresh. The author, George S. Clason does this by setting his lessons in the ancient times of Babylon. The language is vaguely King James-ish but it's not hard slogging once you listen to his voice. He's amusing and immediate, actually. This is one of those classics that is a classic exactly because it's worth reading.

The rules themselves are self-evident. The parables that illustrate the rules are what inspire you to adopt these rules for yourself. It's like learning that the way to fat loss is to eat less and exercise more. It's not enough to KNOW that, you've got to visualize integrating it into your life, you've got to make positive steps to make it happen, you've got to actually DO it. This book is helpful with THOSE pieces.

Nevertheless, I'll tell you the rules just because I want them in my notes.

Don't be a slave, use determination to get out of debt in three easy steps

1.  Stop living on the edge and get some savings.  "First, the plan doth provide for my future prosperity.  Therefore one-tenth of all I earn shall be set aside as my own to keep."

2.  Budget to live on 70% of what you bring in. "Second, the plan doth provide that I shall support and clothe my good wife ... Therefore seven-tenths of all I earn shall be used to provide a home, clothes to wear, and food to eat, with a bit extra to spend, that our lives be not lacking in pleasure and enjoyment. But he doth further enjoin the greatest care that we spend not greater than seven-tenths of what I earn for these worthy purposes. Herein lieth the success of the plan."

3.  Put together a payment plan with 20% of your earnings and start someplace.  Anyplace.  Just get started.  "Third, the plan doth provide that out of my earnings my debts shall be paid.  Therefore each time the moon is full, two-tenths of all I have earned shall be divided honorably and fairly among those who have trusted me and to whom I am indebted. Thus in due time will all my indebtedness be surely paid. Therefore, do I here engrave the name of every man to whom I am indebted and the honest amount of my debt.  I visited my creditors and explained to them that I have no resources with which to pay except my ability to earn, and that I intent to apply two tenths of all I earn upon my indebtedness evenly and honestly. This much can I pay but no more. Therefore if they be patient, in time my obligations will be
paid in full."

LO, MONEY IS PLENTIFUL FOR THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE SIMPLE RULES OF ITS ACQUISITION
(Seven Cures for a Lean Purse)

1. Start thy purse to fattening.  For each ten coins I put in, to spend but nine.

2. Control thy expenditures.  Budget thy expenses that thou mayest have coins to pay for thy necessities, to pay for thy enjoyments and to gratify thy worthwhile desires without spending more than nine-tenths of thy earnings.

3. Make thy gold multiply.  Put each coin to laboring that it may reproduce its kind even as the flocks of the field and help bring to thee income, a stream of wealth that shall flow constantly into thy purse.

4. Guard thy treasure from loss by investing only where thy principal is safe, where it may be reclaimed if desirable, and where thou will not fail to collect a fair rental. Consult with wise men. Secure the advice of those experienced in the profitable handling of gold. Let their wisdom protect thy treasure from unsafe investments.

5. Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment.  Own thy own home.

6. Insure a future income.  Provide in advance for the needs of thy growing age and the protection of thy family.

7. Increase thy ability to earn.  Cultivate thy own powers, to study and become wiser, to become more skillful, to so act as to respect thyself. Thereby shalt thou acquire confidence in thy self to achieve thy carefully considered desires.

THE FIVE LAWS OF GOLD

 The First Law of Gold
Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put by not less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family.

"Any man who will put by one-tenth of his earnings consistently and invest it wisely will surely
create a valuable estate that will provide an income for him in the future and further guarantee safety
for his family in case the gods call him to the world of darkness. This law always sayeth that gold
cometh gladly to such a man. I can truly certify this in my own life. The more gold I accumulate, the
more readily it comes to me and in increased quantities. The gold which I save earns more, even as yours will, and its earnings earn more, and this is the working out of the first law."

The Second Law of Gold

Gold laboreth diligently and contentedly for the wise owner who finds for it profitable employment, multiplying even as the flocks of the field.

"Gold, indeed, is a willing worker. It is ever eager to multiply when opportunity presents itself.
To every man who hath a store of gold set by, opportunity comes for its most profitable use. As the years pass, it multiplies itself in surprising fashion."

The Third Law of Gold
Gold clingeth to the protection of the cautious owner who invests it under the advice of men wise in its handling.

"Gold, indeed, clingeth to the cautious owner, even as it flees the careless owner. The man who
seeks the advice of men wise in handling gold soon learneth not to jeopardize his treasure, but to preserve in safety and to enjoy in contentment its consistent increase."

The Fourth Law of Gold
Gold slippeth away from the man who invests it in businesses or purposes with which he is not familiar or which are not approved by those skilled in its keep.

"To the man who hath gold, yet is not skilled in its handling, many uses for it appear most
profitable. Too often these are fraught with danger of loss, and if properly analyzed by wise men, show small possibility of profit. Therefore, the inexperienced owner of gold who trusts to his own judgment and invests it in business or purposes with which he is not familiar, too often finds his judgment imperfect, and pays with his treasure for his inexperience. Wise, indeed is he who investeth his treasures under the advice of men skilled In the ways of gold."

The Fifth Law of Gold
Gold flees the man who would force it to impossible earnings or who followeth the alluring advice of tricksters and schemers or who trusts it to his own inexperience and romantic desires in investment.

"Fanciful propositions that thrill like adventure tales always come to the new owner of gold.
These appear to endow his treasure with magic powers that will enable it to make impossible earnings.  Yet heed ye the wise men for verily they know the risks that lurk behind every plan to make great wealth suddenly."

There are quite a series of parables.  Other morals crop up:

MEN OF ACTION ARE FAVORED BY THE GODDESS OF GOOD LUCK

BETTER A LITTLE CAUTION THAN A GREAT REGRET

WE CANNOT AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT ADEQUATE PROTECTION

WHERE THE DETERMINATION IS, THE WAY CAN BE FOUND

'Thou can't get ahead by shirking,' Megiddo protested. 'If thou plow a hectare, that's a good day's work and any master knows it. But when thou plow only a half, that's shirking. I don't shirk. I like to work and I like to do good work, for work is the best friend I've ever known. It has brought me all the good things I've had.'

This book was originally published in the high-flying days before the Great Depression.  It is worth reading at least once and won't take too long.  If you know all this stuff already it will re-enforce it.  If you don't know this then this sort of information can save your life in hard times and make it easier in good times.  That's as strong an endorsement as I've ever given a book.  A free book.  That I linked to.  Drink up!

Book Review: "Killing Sacred Cows"

"Killing Sacred Cows" or, "Portrait of Hubris", a Grasshopper Manifesto

There's a guy named Garrett B. Gunderson who made a bunch of money in his twenties and made the mistake of thinking he was smart, not lucky.  He wrote a book called "Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying your Prosperity", copyright July, 2008, (except his website shows a self-published version he released in April, 2007.)

I'm struck by a few things after reading this book.  One is how incredibly young he is.  This is a book written by someone who has never known a bear market, never seen asset prices plummet.  He just doesn't understand why you wouldn't kill the cow.  I'll tell you why: because the cow will give you a steady stream of milk that can sustain your kids at a subsistence level, whereas killing it will give you a couple of good feast days at most.

This book is all about feasting now.  It's a grasshopper manifesto.

Myth 1: The Finite Pie.  He counsels that people will be richer if they stop acting like resources are scarce and start acting like everything is limitless.  He explains that he went from making $133,000 the year he graduated from college to making $450,000 the next and he did it by cooperating with others and not being all stingy, so scarcity is bad, mmkay.  I wondered if he meant to imply that everyone he cooperated with ALSO made $450,000 that year.  I also found it interesting that he found $133,000 to be a reasonable starting wage for a hard-scrabble new graduate.

Myth 2: You're in it for the Long Haul.  In this chapter he explains that it's silly to live within our means as the road to wealth never comes from reducing expenses, it comes from flaunting it to attract more wealth, and, besides, sometimes people die young so what's the point in saving, as you'll never really use that retirement money anyway.  Oh, and it's selfish and shortsighted to be frugal, as you're keeping the velocity of money down by not spending now.

Myth 3:  It's All About the Numbers.  In this he reveals that money isn't worth anything, the only true value is in how much enjoyment you can get from it now.  He laughs at people who are trying to save up for retirement, explaining that more money won't make them happier and they're likely going to be skewered by higher tax brackets.  Thing is, he completely misses any concept about storing excess labor now while you're young and strong to help support you later, when you're old and decrepit.  He has no concept of "rainy day" in his thinking.

Myth 4: Financial Security.  I tended to agree with a lot of his points about people being responsible for their own financial freedom and security, but he went too far and laughed at Enron retirees for trusting their pension plan was okay.  Even when I agreed with some of his philosophies here (a few paragraphs on page 101), the logic of his sentences is seriously flawed in many places.  Around now I started wondering whether he was a Jehovah's Witness, as he was starting to remind me of a Watchtower publication.  There's a strong evangelical element to his writing that backs that up, although it reminded me of Mormans, too.   Whatever it is, it's rooted in faith rather than reality at a core level.  For example, he makes a distinction between Consumers who rely on things like the SEC (fools!) and Producers who are the "responsible, innovative, and creative people who create all the products and services that we buy and use. They are more concerned with giving than with receiving."  ORLY?  That doesn't exactly describe the people I know making the products and services that *I* buy and use.

Myth 5: Money is Power.  This is a throw-away chapter in which he explains that having money isn't a source of power because anyone can go get as much as they want anytime they want.  Yes, you can be just like John D. Rockefeller just by promoting a really good business plan - people will throw money at you because of your superior soul purpose.  (He completely neglects to consider that your soul purpose might be a poorly compensated activity like feeding the hungry or tending the aged.)  Oh, BTW, money isn't evil, because you can give to nice charities.   This read like he was rebutting his grandmother's chastisements that he was too concerned with money.

Myth 6: High Risk = High Return had a nice section on page 147 on gambling versus investing that I wish more people understood.  But he goes on a few pages later to explain that there is no such thing as a risky investment.  Those ships carrying spices from the Orient - they should have been appropriately hedged.  Done his way, no one ever loses money.  Uh. yeah.  Did I mention that he's REALLY young?  Also, that this was published in 2007?  He made me glad that most of my own stock holdings are in the field of reinsurance.  (His way is still a gamble, but one where the house always gets a good cut either way.)

Myth 7: Self-insurance is a chapter where he explains that you should pay money for all sorts of insurance and hedges so you don't have to keep any money sitting around in savings.  He considers it the job of a clever person to figure out all forms of risk and hedge them.   He considers himself to be clever enough to have foreseen all possible problems he'll face in life.

Myth 8: Avoid Debt Like the Plague.  Instead of having pesky savings sitting around doing nothing, you can leverage all your savings into tons of sub-prime real estate which you will easily be able to flip whenever you get into a cash flow crunch from servicing all that debt.  Do I really need to comment on this advice?  I think I do not.  There is a nice paragraph or two on page 200 about good debt versus bad debt, though.

Myth 9: A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned explains that we need to live large, buy the most expensive of everything and really seek out value.  There's no such thing as not being able to afford something - just put it on debt!  He laughs at people who don't run the air conditioner as being silly in their frugality and view of the world as having scarce resources.  Live it up!

Through-out the book there's some pseudo-religious crap about living to your highest Soul Purpose and how that requires you drive the best cars ($200,000 ones!) and wear the most expensive sneakers (tell the clerk money is no object!) and attend the most expensive seminars (his!).  He seems to think that he's not just smart, he's divinely ordained to live large.

To say I found this book offensive would be wrong.  Mostly I felt like pointing and laughing at a guy who is surely hurting right now.  He mentioned a couple of times how smart he was to get me to shell out $25 for his book and I was smugly pleased each time to note that I got it out of the library.

He had just enough smatterings of insight about what's involved with becoming financially well-off that it tainted the message of utter Wrongness with Correctness in a few short paragraphs.  I find this worrying more than offensive.  I sincerely hope whoever gets it out of the library realizes that the lines underlined in pencil were the places he was dead WRONG, not insightful gems.  (It not being my book, I didn't make margin notes beyond occasionally underlining to use for this review.)  If you're interested in how to overcome middle-class views on entrepreneurship, risk-taking and buying real estate to flip, a better read would be Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.  But my advice is to get that one out of the library, too.

Books about Changing

Change sucks. These books can help.  

I just finished reading "Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes: Strategies for coping with the difficult, painful, and confusing times in your life" by William Bridges (copyright 1980).

It was really helpful, one of those books that everyone needs on their shelf for when life gobsmacks you.  This is just a stub for this entry, but I would consider it a good companion book for most life changes, along with:

On Death & Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross for dealing with grief.

Fattitudes by Wilbert & Wilbert for dealing with changing a lifestyle that has left you fat and out of shape.

What Color Is Your Parachute for changing your career or in general dealing with those in-between times in a life.

There's probably a good one for when a marraige ends.  I recall vaguely reading one when my Mom was getting divorced twenty years ago, possibly "The Dance of Anger" or "Codependent No More".  It talked about what it was like when one person in a marriage had moved on and the other hadn't and the left-behind partner was in that in-between state.  Happily, that's one change I haven't had to wrestle with in my life so I'm not really up on that one.

Book Review: Plan C: Community Survival Strategies

Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil & Global Climate Change  

Have you ever gotten a book out of the library and then deliberately kept it out extra long just to reduce the chances that some poor soul will read it and be influenced by it? I felt that way about Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change by Pat Murphy. I wanted to like it. The title is everything I've been working on for the past year. My sense after reading his book is that he's more on my side than not in terms of preparing to transition to a world without cheap oil.

But with friends like these, who needs enemies. His writing reminded me of a Michael Moore film. Even though though his point is substantially correct, he makes it in such a sloppy and annoyingly inaccurate way with completely inappropriate side trips that you find yourself stuck with an indefensible argument of what ought to be well-established.

This guy has little mean-spirited diatribes through-out the book. Things like, "only get 1/2 an hour of non-propaganda news each day" and "corporations are evil" and "don't eat meat" and "white colonialists perpetrated slavery on innocent Africans." He hates everything about modern American life, including regional malls, the internet and the way we've structured our family life. The first part is a ninety page treatise on how we're all going to hell in a handbasket and richly deserve it because of the many crimes we've committed. I kept wanting to ask, seriously, "Why do you hate America so much?"

The middle section is his version of what changes he thinks we need to make in terms of buildings, transportation and food. He's not entirely wrong. It's that the entire book is filled with his crotchety yearnings for what people OUGHT to do instead of what they WANT to do. It's pretty clear that he's happy to impose his will on the cretinous public because he is right and they are wrong. My particular favorite is his assertion that we ought to fax messages rather than email them to - uh - save electricity. (???) What can I say, he mentions his desire for people to stop using the computers in general and the internet in particular several times.

The final section is mercifully short. It's a brief recap of each of the previous chapters with no additional insight. I really appreciated it because now I could suggest that people picking up this book just start on page 227 to get the fifty page version of the book. (He has nearly fifty pages of end notes and index, a trait I've noticed is common among people who play fast and loose with the truth: they bolster their bullshit six layers deep. If you actually look at his cites they are ridiculously sourced for the most part.)

But, really, don't even read the last fifty pages. There's got to be a better place to get this. Because, from him, you get stuff like this:

"Community is very weak in conglomerations of people living urbanized, industrialized lives. In those places the following characteristics hold sway.

• Teaching lust, violence and competition - Through corporate media giants, young people are taught violence and sexually inappropriate behavior. Most American TV shows, including cartoons for small children, are about little more than aggression, violence and sexual desire in some form or the other. The mass media also teach people to be fiercely competitive in sports, school, social life and work. Americans are taught that material possessions are the primary determiner of happiness."

There's quite a long list, I just chose one little gem.

Overall, this book struck me as a diatribe from a mean, angry man ranting about how no one has any friends anymore and no one volunteers or loves their family or watches out for their neighbor. It is demonstrably false in my life, but in his, gee, I bet he's right

Book Review: "Collapse" by Jared Diamond

Chwal Batay and "Collapse" by Jared Diamond  

I finished "Collapse".  It was much better reading than pretty much anything by Paul Ehrlich.  It read a bit like a SWOT analysis: evaluating Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  I like that framework; it peels away so much judgment and just gets to a baseline.  Here we are.  We face these threats.  We've got these tools.  Having been through business school, I appreciate reading case studies.  Most of them kept my attention, although Australia got pretty repetitive at the end.  (What, the editors didn't make it that far?)

I like it when a book lays out huge, insurmountable problems.  They inspire me to tackle them.  I look at these things from a perspective of a cog in a great wheel.  I'm a cog.  What do I do?  Make some jam, dig up a bit of sod to make a garden, ride my bicycle or carpool or take the bus, use a CFL bulb.  Each thing is so tiny (and there's always more to be done) that I have to remind myself that perfect is the enemy of good.  Good is good enough if it's on the trajectory towards perfect.  I also liked Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" concept: a few weirdos can become an unstoppable social trend seemingly overnight.

But every now and then it's good to find a Chwal Batay, a "Battle Horse", that can carry a great deal of momentum to get a bunch of people working on a single problem.  The term comes from Paul Farmer's quest to end AIDS in Haiti.  By getting well-meaning people to fund that, he was able to get an infrastructure in place that provides clean water, sustainable agriculture, public health systems and advocates for environmental issues.  All because people want to fight AIDS.  The money and attention and effort can do such a lot of collateral good.

One of Paul Farmer's messages, and the one I take from "Collapse", is that it really doesn't matter what chwal batay you take.  Work to sustain watersheds.  Work to preserve healthy soil.  Work to keep forests under sane stewardship.  Check out where your copper comes from... and your diamonds.  Think about mine tailings and the age of dams and how over-population in Pakistan affects you.  It doesn't matter what piece of the puzzle you grab, just grab one and work on it for a bit.  Come back and grab another later when you so choose.  It's that easy.

Book Review: Oil on the Brain

Everything you never knew about oil but really ought to find out  

I've just finished an amazing book.  It's taken me three months to read this, partly because the information was so astonishing and new that I kept having to put it down and go assimilate what I've learned. 

The title of this book is "Oil On The Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline."  It's an investigative journalist's take on what's involved with getting gas or diesel or heating oil (and to some extent natural gas) to our fingertips. The author, Lisa Margonelli, is a journalist of the highest caliber: she writes for varied venues such as The Washington Post, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover and Jane.  She has the narrative presence of Bill Bryson and the astonishing access and insight of Tony Horwitz.  In fact, this book reminded me a lot of Tony Horwitz's amazing book "Baghdad Without A Map".  It opened up to me an entire world that I never knew a thing about.  And it's a world that matters to me - a lot - in every day life.

It is NOT a dire series of predictions.  I've read "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" by Richard Heinberg and this is much more balanced a survey of what IS, with little prediction of what will be. If Heinberg is talk radio, Margonelli is in-depth magazine article.

This is also NOT a political polemic.  In fact, there's very little opinion offered at all.  If anything is subject to debate at all it would be some of the analysis she brings to bear on situations, but I'm grateful for the insight into things I'd never considered before. 

Besides her ability to tie things together into a whole, the other strength in this book lay in her amazing access.  She spent 2003 to 2006 traveling around the world doing in-depth interviews with a variety of subjects and telling their compelling stories with an overall theme of Oil.  Each time she brought up a situation I had no knowledge about (which was pretty much every chapter) I'd go google and read up on it.  She provides twenty pages (full pages - in a small font) of end notes to this book.  It's a scholarly work.  If she has a political position in the U.S., it doesn't show.  At one point she references the costs to people in Africa of keeping wildlife free in Alaska, but more as a point that you need to look at ALL the stakeholders, not just some, when making a decision.  She doesn't make the decisions, she identifies the stakeholders.

And she tells interesting True Life Stories.  She talks about the Black Giant in the 1930's in Kilgore, Texas and then explains how the mishandling of that gusher lead directly to Venezuela's Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo founding OPEC.  She went to Venezuela and discusses what it looks like when the government is essentially a subsidiary of the oil company.  She puts Chavez in context - for which I'm intensely grateful.  She can allow someone to be a clown and a despot, savvy and intellectually flawed all at the same time.

She follows up with visits to other oil-producing third world countries and her adventures in Chad and Niger do more to illustrate the woe that befalls people who live lives of external locus of power.  At one point she makes a compelling case why income taxes lead to a self-determining functional democracy.  The intellectual level of this discourse is at the highest level.

She somehow manages to get on Iran's Salmon Complex Oil Platform and relates the fall-out from the U.S. bombing of Iranian Oil Platforms on April 18, 1988.  She quotes naval historian Craig Symonds as saying it was "one of the most influential naval engagements in the U.S. History, right up there with the Battle of Midway."  Did you know about that?  I knew Iran had lost 800,000 people in the Iran-Iraq war.  I knew we accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus in the Persian Gulf later in 1988 (I personally spent the next five years of my life as a defense contractor working on gun-sights for Aegis Class Destroyers to prevent that from ever happening again.)  I just didn't know we'd come in so explicitly on Iraq's side, so explicitly against Iran.  Every Iranian knows this.  Why didn't I?

She goes to the site of the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserves and discusses its economic impact as well as its geology.   She tours inside an oil refinery (on a day with an incident causing injury) and makes gas station deliveries in a tanker truck.  She works overnight in a gas station/mini-mart and spends a day in the trading pit of NYMEX.  She hangs out with guys on a drilling rig and drives a military hydrogen test vehicle (which requires a tow truck) and attends analternative fuel vehicle event in China.

The whole trip to China was illuminating.  The gist of what she found is that they might be ready to leapfrog over gasoline engines straight to alternative fuel cells.  The cities are too polluted, the government is capable of enormous levels of directed compliance, and the infrastructure isn't already owned by Big Oil.  It's a compelling case on the theme of why China might be about to eat the U.S. for breakfast. 

The blurb on the cover says "If you drive a car, you must read this book, but please not at the same time."  It's a good synopsis.  You ought to know this stuff.  As they say in China, "If you pump oil, you have to fight for it."  (It's a pun when you say it in Chinese, "pump" and "fight" sound similar.) 

I loved her a little bit for how much she didn't hate oil.  She points out at one point that the discovery of oil saved the whales.  This book is not about climate change or running out of oil or stopping exploiting indigenous populations, although all these subjects get at least a paragraph.  It's about THINKING about this subject.  How's it working for us?  Can we do better?  She concludes with a task,

"We need many fuels, not just one.  As we try to move toward energy that is both economically and environmentally sound, we need to question whether the innovations of Oil City - the cars, the corporations, the antitrust laws, the network of roads, the murky relationship between government and industry - are still working to our advantage.  Are they giving us the strategic flexibility we need?"

I recommend this book