HOW DO YOU GET RID OF STYROFOAM PACKAGING?

One of the questions that I often get from new tenants at the start of the school year is: “How do I get rid of styrofoam?” A lot of the products that students buy when they move to college towns come packed in styrofoam. First, let me tell you what you shouldn’t do with it. Don’t put styrofoam in your recycling can. Styrofoam is on the short list of plastic products that the city doesn’t recycle. There are 2 kinds of styrofoam, molded blocks and shipping pellets or ‘peanuts’. There is nothing you can do with molded blocks of styrofoam except put them in your regular garbage can. Although shipping pellets cannot be recycled, they can be reused. When I get styrofoam pellets in a parcel, I save them in a kitchen trash bag, and when the bag is full, I take it to a FedEx or UPS shipping store. They are always happy to take and reuse them. It saves them money. Be sure that the pellets are clean, and that there is nothing else in the bag. Always bag styrofoam pellets. Never put loose styrofoam pellets in your garbage can. If they get loose when the garbage collectors dump the can, they can blow all over the neighborhood. Below is a photo taken at the back door of the Tsukiji wholesale fish market in Tokyo. On some days, the styrofoam piles are twice this high.

FAKE I.D.s
The photo below is of a bar in a college town (not Berkeley) where the owner has decorated the top of the bar with fake I.D.s confiscated from college students. In 1984, Congress passed a law making the drinking age 21 nationally. Prior to that, states had different drinking ages. When I went to the University of Maryland, the drinking age in Maryland was 21. However, in Washington, D.C., 6 miles away, the drinking age for hard liquor was 21, and the drinking age for beer was 18. Every Friday night, a caravan of cars left the University of Maryland headed for bars and nightclubs around Georgetown University and American University in D.C. Carloads of students from other colleges in southern Maryland and northern Virginia also headed for those same bars. Most of these bars and nightclubs disappeared quickly after Congress raised the drinking age nationally to 21. I have always thought it was madness to expect college students to wait until their 21st birthday before drinking their first beer.

MORE OF MARK’S KITCHEN TIPS – BACON.

CURED VS. UNCURED BACON. What is the difference between cured and uncured bacon? You probably assumed that the answer is that cured bacon is cured, and uncured bacon is uncured, but if you did, you were wrong. The answer is that they are both cured. How can that be? First, you need to remember that the word ‘cured’ has 2 very different definitions. ‘Cured’ can mean that an animal was sick but now is well, but ‘cured’ can also mean that meat was preserved by any of a variety of methods, including salting, drying, or smoking. Cured bacon is not bacon that came from a pig that was sick but is now well. ‘Cured’ simply means that the bacon was preserved. The difference is this. Regular cured bacon is bacon that was cured with chemically produced nitrate. Uncured bacon is bacon that was cured with nitrate from a natural source, usually an extract of celery. So, both ‘cured’ and ‘uncured’ bacon are cured. They are nutritionally the same, and they taste the same. Uncured bacon usually costs more than cured bacon, but is it worth the extra money? I don’t think so. I think that labeling bacon as ‘uncured’ is just a marketing gimmick to get a higher price for the product by making the bacon appear to be natural and healthier.

OSCAR MAYER. Oscar Mayer made a fortune on bacon. He came up with the idea of selling pre-sliced bacon and with the slices shingled on a piece of cardboard. Before that, when you went to a butcher shop to buy bacon, you got a block of bacon that you had to slice at home; however, it is very hard to cut bacon into thin even slices without a slicing machine. By the time Oscar Mayer’s competitors realized that consumers were willing to pay more for pre-sliced bacon, Oscar Mayer had cornered the market.

KOSHER HOT DOGS. People have always been suspicious about what goes into hot dogs. Perhaps that explains why so many people buy kosher hot dogs. Over 60% of all kosher hot dogs sold in the United States are purchased by non-Jews even though only 2% of Americans are Jews, and most of them do not keep kosher. Kosher meat inspectors are much tougher than government food inspectors, and a lot of people seem to know that. Blood and a long list of animal parts that go into regular hot dogs cannot go into kosher hot dogs. (I am not going to tell you what those animal parts are. It’s too disturbing.)

HOT DOGS AND ANTI-GERMAN HYSTERIA. Prior to 1917, hot dogs were called ‘frankfurters’ or ‘franks’ in the United States, but during World War 1, the U.S. government banned a long list of German words including ‘frankfurter.’ The government recommended that people call them ‘hot dogs’ instead, and the term stuck. Other words banned by the government during World War 1 included: hamburger, sauerkraut, German shepherd, kaput, kaiser roll, and dachshund. Some dachshund owners had their dogs euthanized out of fear for their safety. In 1918, the California legislature passed a law banning the teaching of German in public schools, declaring that German is “a language that disseminates the ideas of autocracy, brutality, and hatred.” California ordered schools to stop using the word ‘kindergarten’ and to scratch the word ‘Fahrenheit’ off of classroom thermometers. This may seem silly today, but people took this anti-German hysteria very seriously during World War 1.

FRENCH FRIES AND ANTI-FRENCH HYSTERIA. In 2003, the U.S. was gripped by anti-French hysteria that was reminiscent of the anti-German hysteria of World War 1. It was triggered by French opposition to the War in Iraq. President George Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons. Among major Western countries, only France voted against the war at the U.N. Jacques Chirac, the president of France, said that his intelligence service concluded that Iraq did not have these weapons and wanted to see Bush’s evidence, but Bush refused to produce any evidence. Anti-French hysteria ran wild in the U.S. Restaurants renamed french fries ‘freedom fries’ and french toast ‘freedom toast’ on their menus. Newspapers removed French accent marks from words like entrée and soufflé. A chain of stores in California’s central valley named ‘French Dry Cleaners’ were all vandalized or firebombed. The real estate firm where I worked at the time stopped using the terms ‘french doors’, ‘french drains’, and ‘facade’ in our ads. The hysteria ended after the U.S. invaded Iraq and discovered that the French were right. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. It turned out that President Bush had been lying. There was no evidence that these weapons existed.

THE WORST TOURIST ATTRACTION IN THE STATE OF WASHINGTON.  I am thinking about covering all 50 states.

The Seattle Gum Wall. There are a lot of interesting places to see in and around Pikes Market in Seattle and a lot of good food there too. However, more people go to see the gum wall than any store or restaurant at Pikes Market. Sticking used chewing gum on the back wall of the Market Theater on Post Alley has been a Seattle tradition for decades. In 2015, the city removed over 2,000 pounds of used chewing gum from the wall. They did this because the sugar in the gum was eroding the bricks and mortar in the wall, but more gum appears on the wall every day. This job is now done by steam cleaners in haz-mat suits. The gum is several inches thick and extends 15 feet high in places. Strangely, the gum wall is a popular site for wedding photos. It is not illegal to put gum on the wall, but the health department advises against touching it; however, you can find photos on Google of people licking the wall. What could they be thinking? If you want to visit the gum wall, I recommend that you do that in cold weather. I went there on a hot summer day, and the stench in this narrow alley was just unbearable. There may be a more disgusting and unsanitary tourist attraction in Washington state, but what could it be?

MY ‘TENANT NEWSLETTER’ IS NOW JUST MY ‘NEWSLETTER’.

You may have noticed that I have dropped the word ‘tenant’ from the name of my newsletter. Over 95% of the people on my mailing list are either former tenants or people who were never tenants of mine, so it seemed time to do it.

COMMENTS? If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Blog

LeConte Hall is the largest academic building in the United States.  If you have never seen the T-Rex in the building’s rotunda, you should. It’s very impressive. In 2020, UC Berkeley decided to rename the building. A permanent name has not yet been chosen. Why is the building being renamed? John LeConte was an early president of the University of California, and his brother Joseph headed the university’s physics and natural history departments. The LeConte brothers grew up in Georgia on their father’s plantation, where the family owned over 200 slaves. During the Civil War, the LeConte brothers did important work for the Confederacy. After the war was over, the LeConte brothers found Reconstruction intolerable. When Joseph LeConte was told that he had to allow black students to attend his lectures at the University of South Carolina, he resigned his professorship. He moved to Berkeley, where his brother John was already running the university. Joseph LeConte taught his theories about white racial superiority at UC Berkeley until his death in 1901.

Theistic Evolutionism. Joseph LeConte believed in both evolution and creationism and tried to find a way to reconcile the 2 ideas. He believed that God created plants and animals and then allowed evolution to take place. LeConte rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but he also did not believe in biblical miracles. His geology textbooks were widely used in high schools and colleges in the United States in the 1890s. These books introduced students to the theory of evolution before that theory became so controversial in the early 20th century that most school systems in the U.S. dropped geology from their curriculums. Some states made it a criminal offense to teach evolution in public schools.

MISCEGENATION.

I grew up in Maryland. Maryland was a slave state, but it didn’t join the Confederacy. Nevertheless, when I was a kid, Baltimore schools were still segregated, only white people were allowed to eat at lunch counters, and miscegenation was a felony crime. What is miscegenation? Miscegenation is the marriage of people of different races. In many states, people of different races who were cohabitating could also be charged with miscegenation. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

The reason I bring up miscegenation is that the Supreme Court has just overturned Roe vs. Wade on the grounds that there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion and therefore, it is a matter for state governments to decide for themselves. A lot of people have wondered if the Supreme Court will apply that same logic to state laws that ban gay marriage. There is nothing in the Constitution about marriage laws, and marriage laws vary greatly from state to state. 29 states have provisions in their state constitutions banning same-sex marriage, and 17 states have never repealed their miscegenation laws. So, could interracial marriage become illegal again? Would Justice Clarence Thomas vote to allow the return of miscegenation laws? Remember, his wife is white.

California.  A lot of people assume that miscegenation was just illegal in the South, but that isn’t true. Miscegenation was illegal in every state west of the Mississippi River except for Minnesota. In 1943, the all-white, all-male California state legislature voted unanimously to toughen up California’s miscegenation law. The 1943 California law stated that ‘no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race.’ Their definition of ‘Mongolian’ included Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. In 1945, the penalty in California for an interracial marriage was a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. $10,000 was a lot of money in those days. In 1945, you could buy a house in San Francisco for $5,000. By comparison, the penalty in Mississippi in 1945 for miscegenation was only $100 and 1 year in prison.

Public schools used to have Home Economics classes where girls were taught how to cook. Home Economics courses have largely disappeared from public schools, not because of changing attitudes about gender-specific classes, but simply because cooking classes were relatively expensive. When I was a kid, my sister used to bring home things she made in Home Economics class. I still remember her crackle sugar cookies, which were very good. Below are some useful cooking basics that they used to teach in Home Economics classes. These are not recipes.

WEIGH YOUR INGREDIENTS. Professional cooks don’t measure ingredients by volume but by weight. How much does a cup of packed brown sugar weigh? That can vary depending on how firmly somebody packs the sugar. Just how big is a medium size apple? You can find volume to weight conversion charts on Google.

POTATOES. Panned-fried potatoes should be crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, but most people fail to get their potatoes to come out like that because they overcrowd the pan. Instead of getting crispy, the potatoes drown in their own juice. Use a wider pan. Allow space between the potatoes.

CHEESE SAUCE. There are 2 reasons why cheese sauces come out lumpy instead of smooth. 1. The cheese was covered with sawdust. Pre-shredded and grated cheeses are usually covered with cellulose (sawdust) or starch in order to prevent the cheese from sticking together. Read the label. This is not a problem if you intend to sprinkle the cheese on a salad, but if you want to make a cheese sauce, buy a block of cheese, and shred it yourself. 2. Too much heat. Most cheese will start melting at 90 degrees. If you add cheese to a hot liquid, cheese will lump up.

HARD BOILED EGGS. Hard boiled eggs are easy to make, but a lot of people make a mess of it because of temperature shock. Don’t put cold eggs into boiling water. The shells will crack, the white will leak out, and the shells will be hard to peel off. Put room temperature eggs into room temperature water. Take the eggs out of your refrigerator at least 2 hours before you intend to boil them. Use the freshest eggs you can. It is hard to peel the shells off old eggs.

OUNCES. There are 2 kinds of ounces, liquid ounces and dry ounces, and they are completely different. Liquid ounces are a measure of volume. Dry ounces are a measure of weight. For example, if a recipe calls for 8 ounces of powdered sugar, that means they want you to use 8 dry ounces, or 1/2 pound, of powdered sugar. Measuring cups measure liquid ounces. An 8-ounce cup of powdered sugar weighs 4.5 ounces.

KOSHER SALT. Kosher salt is not like holy water. Holy water is water that has been blessed by a priest. Kosher salt is not salt that has been blessed by a rabbi. Kosher salt is chemically different from table salt. Professional bakers use kosher salt because kosher salt does not contain iodine (which is bitter) or anti-caking chemicals found in table salt. Kosher salt makes baked goods taste better and less salty. Kosher salt also sticks to food better than table salt. That’s why most steakhouses use kosher salt. Buy iodized salt for table use. Iodine deficiency causes thyroid problems.

BAKER’S CHOCOLATE. Baker’s chocolate is not baking chocolate. If a recipe calls for baking chocolate, that means that you should use unsweetened dark chocolate. Baker’s chocolate is a brand of chocolate, not a type of chocolate. Baker’s Chocolate Company was founded by James Baker, who named the company for himself. Baker’s makes baking chocolate, but they make many other kinds of chocolate as well.

BROWN SUGAR.  Brown sugar is not natural sugar. People associate brown with natural and white with refined. White rice is made by removing the bran and germ from brown rice, and white flour is made by removing the bran and germ from whole wheat, which is also brown. However, that model does not apply to sugar. Brown sugar is made from white sugar. Refining sugar cane produces 2 products, white sugar and molasses. Brown sugar is simply refined white sugar with some of the molasses added back in.

How to Keep Brown Sugar from Getting Hard. If left in a box or bag, brown sugar will eventually become hard as a rock and unusable. Lots of websites sell ‘sugar savers’, devices designed to keep brown sugar soft. Forget about those things. There is a better way to keep brown sugar soft. Just put your brown sugar in a freezer ziplock bag and toss it in your freezer. ‘Sugar savers’ made sense back in the days before people had refrigerators with freezers, but there is no need for them now. Brown rice and whole wheat flour should also be stored in the refrigerator or freezer if you use them infrequently. The oil in the germ will go rancid with time at room temperature.

Are you interested in more kitchen basics?

Please don’t bring home furniture that you find on the street! At the end of the school year, there is always a lot of furniture left on street corners in college towns. Bringing home furniture that you find on the street is dangerous! You don’t know where this stuff came from or what might be hiding inside. There are a lot of nasty things inside furniture left on the street, including bedbugs, fleas, lice, ticks, and mold. I understand that most college students have very little money to spend on home furnishings but bringing home furniture that you find on the street is not a money saver. You are endangering your health and the health of all your roommates by bringing home furniture like that.

Also, college students are often offered free sofas and mattresses from friends and relatives that they have been storing in a basement or a garage. Don’t take them. Those things should go to the dump as well.

HAMBURGER. A cooked hamburger should be flat, but most people’s grilled hamburgers come out oval-shaped (higher in the center and lower at the edges) and shrunken so they are a lot smaller than the bun. Nobody likes hamburgers like that. There are several reasons this happens.

1. The hamburger patty was oval shaped to begin with. If you are forming ground beef into hamburgers with your hands, it is easy for them to come out oval shaped. Make sure your patties are really flat or dimple them in the center with your fingertips.

2. The grill was too hot. Meat shrinks when it is cooked too quickly.

3. Your ground beef had too much fat in it. The cheapest ground beef can be over 30% fat. The best ratio for hamburgers is 80/20. That’s 20% fat.

Also, don’t buy oversized buns. Bigger isn’t better. A lot of hamburger buns are ridiculously too big. Ideally, a hamburger should be the same size as the bun.

Florida and California have been rivals for generations. Warm beaches, spring break, Disneyland vs. Disney World, retirement communities, oranges, avocados, etc. However, for me, there is no contest. The quality of life in Florida cannot compete with California.

Earthquakes vs. Hurricanes. People in Florida often say that they would never live in California because we have earthquakes. Well, we do have earthquakes in California, but over the past 100 years, fewer than 500 people have been killed in all California earthquakes combined. By contrast, in Florida over the past 100 years, more than 10,000 people have been killed by hurricanes and tropical cyclones. We don’t have them in California. We also don’t have alligators.

Alligators. There are over 1 million alligators in Florida. Yes! 1 million. Alligators are in every lake and river in Florida. People in Florida find alligators under their cars and in the crawl spaces under their homes, in playgrounds, and in their swimming pools. Below is a photo of a lake in Florida at sunset. Each pair of lights is sunlight reflecting off the eyes of an alligator. Of course, these are just the alligators on the surface.

Florida vs. Communism. Southern politicians sometimes talk about public school teachers as though they are trying to turn their kids into Communists. They are especially suspicious of American history teachers – like me. Many Southern politicians sound like they have still not accepted that both the Civil War and the Cold War are over, but Florida tops the list. Florida still requires high school students to take a course on the evils of Communism in order to graduate. (No. I am not making this up!) I know a Cal student from Boca Raton who had to watch movies in class in which they showed Fidel Castro delivering anti-American speeches and people being shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was demolished almost 30 years ago. This guy said that he had to watch the movie ‘I Married a Communist’, made in 1949, and write a report on it. If you want to see this movie, I can lend you a copy on DVD. Like many other movies made during the Cold War, the Communists in this movie are acting more like Mafia dons than Russian spies. The Reds make money by blackmailing people and employ hit men to murder the disloyal.

Florida’s war on Communism is not fading away. In May 2022; Governor DeSantis signed a new law declaring November 7 “Victims of Communism Day.” On November 7 of every year, public school students in Florida will spend the day studying the evils of Communism. At the signing of the new law, DeSantis said that this is a “blockbuster day for freedom.” Florida politicians sound like they are in a time warp about Communism.

Duck and Cover. My elementary school didn’t have anti-Communism classes, but we did have atomic bombing drills. When the a-bomb siren went off, we had to go into the hall and squat down against a wall. That’s what Bert, the Defense Department’s cartoon turtle, told us to do in the ‘Duck and Cover’ movies that we watched in class. Bert told us that we that we can all survive an atomic bomb blast if we duck and cover when the bomb goes off. The government stopped making these movies because of criticism that they were promoting a hoax. You can’t actually survive a nuclear bomb blast by falling on the ground and pulling a tablecloth over your head, which is the sort of thing these films told us to do. Here is one of them: Duck and Cover.

The Hiroshima bomb myth is that by August of 1945, World War 2 was almost over, and Japan was ready to surrender, so the U.S. didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japan to force the Japanese to surrender, that we did it for some other reason. I heard this myth again on a PBS documentary last week, and it annoyed me. Some people believe that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan to send a message to Joseph Stalin that we had this weapon and were willing to use it. Others claim the U.S. were using the Japanese people as guinea pigs to see what the effects of atomic bombs would have people and cities. Still others believe that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan for revenge. Americans were angry about the treatment of American POWs by the Japanese.

However, there is an obvious flaw in all these theories, and it is simply this – If the Japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn’t they? In 1943, when Italy was ready to surrender, they surrendered. In May 1945; when Germany was ready to surrender, they surrendered. When Robert E. Lee was ready to surrender to Grant, he surrendered. That’s the way surrender works!

Because the U.S. had broken several Japanese codes, President Truman knew that some people in the Japanese cabinet were ready to surrender, but they were not willing to give up the emperor. So, before Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima, he sent a message to the Japanese saying that if they surrendered, they could keep the emperor. The Japanese government received Truman’s message, but they chose not to reply to it. After Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb, Truman again demanded that Japan surrender, and he said that more cities would be destroyed if they didn’t, but again the Japanese government did not reply. After Nagasaki was destroyed by the second atomic bomb, Truman again demanded they surrender, but again they replied with silence.

It was Emperor Hirohito who ended the war. After the bombing of Nagasaki, Hirohito split with the military. The generals wanted to continue with the war, but Hirohito had had enough. Hirohito made a radio broadcast to the nation saying that the government had agreed to Allied demands for Japan’s surrender. So, can you think of a good answer to my question: If the Japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn’t they?

 A lot of people also think that the war was nearly over by August of 1945, but that also is not true. Thousands of people, literally thousands of people, were still dying every day because of the war. The U.S. was bombing Japanese cities day and night. Japanese submarines and kamikaze planes were sinking American and British warships. Bloody fighting was still going on in China, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and many other places. In addition, large numbers of people were being killed and dying of starvation in places still under Japanese control, including Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and Malaya. The war was far from over. Plus, millions would have been killed if the U.S. had invaded the Japanese home islands and had to fight their way across them. The U.S. did some bad things during World War 2, like locking up 100,000 Japanese Americans in squalid internment camps, but we didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japan when the war was almost over, and they were ready to surrender.

People are constantly getting themselves into trouble because they don’t put specific dates in emails. People have shown up on the wrong date for interviews and missed dinners and parties because they relied on words like ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’ instead of specific dates. Not using a specific date can lead to a lot of problems. Think about this:

I. Emails are often delayed. ISPs (internet service providers) go down all the time. It is not unusual for an email to be received on the day after it was sent. In other words, if you send an email on May 3 that says: “The meeting will be tomorrow at 3PM”, what happens if your message isn’t received until the morning of May 4?
2. People don’t always read emails as soon as they arrive and don’t check the date when they were sent.
3. Using days of the week instead of specific dates can be confusing. Suppose you received an email on Tuesday, April 3 saying: “Our meeting is at 5PM next Thursday.” When is ‘next Thursday’? A lot of people would imagine that April 5 is ‘this Thursday’ and April 12 is ‘next Thursday’. However, that isn’t the way the dictionary defines ‘next’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘next’ means ‘immediately after’, so the next Thursday after Tuesday, April 3 is Thursday, April 5, not April 12.

All these problems and many more can be avoided by including specific dates in your emails. Don’t leave people wondering as to what date you are talking about. In the business world, that makes you look unprofessional and careless.  People sometimes get mad at me because I ask for specific dates when I get emails in which the date is unclear. I am writing this article now because that happened to me twice this month. A repairman sent me an email yesterday asking if he could come over to my house ‘the day after tomorrow’. I wrote him back and asked for a specific date, and he got mad at me!
Remember this….There are 365 todays in a year. There are 365 tomorrows. There are 52 Wednesdays. But there is only one April 11. Dates prevent confusion.

It is too bad that colleges in the United States don’t teach students how to write business letters. I majored in business administration in college, and this subject never came up.  Corporations generally don’t give any instructions to their employees about this either. I know business students at Cal who tell me that they still don’t teach this. In many foreign countries, all business students are required to learn how to write an email and a business letter.

OTHER COMMON EMAIL MISTAKES.
1. Forgetting to fill in the subject line. If you forget to include a subject line, your email may get ignored or get moved to your spam file and never be seen.2. A subject line that says nothing. If your subject line is vague or uninformative, how will you or the recipient find it later? Recently, a relative of mine sent me an email saying that he would be in San Francisco for a few days. The subject line in his email was ‘Travel’. How will I find that if I search my emails later?3. Not changing a bad subject line when replying or forwarding an email.
4. Forwarding an email to someone with an attachment when you don’t know the source of the attachment. This is how people get malware, spyware, and viruses in their computers.5. Sending an email to everyone on your mailing list. If you ever get an email that advises you to forward it ‘to everyone you know’, it is a scam. There is no message that you should forward to everyone you know.6. Replying to an email without checking to see who is on the carbon copy list. That can lead to some very embarrassing situations.
7. Not reporting spam. When you get a spam email, click the spam button. If you don’t report spam, you will get more spam.

By the 1970s, western Europe had fully recovered from World War 2, and their economies were growing rapidly. Before World War 2, people all over Europe were heating their homes and businesses with coal, but coal was being phased out in favor of natural gas. In 1980, Russia proposed building a 3,500 mile long pipeline to West Germany from Siberia, where Russia had vast reserves of natural gas. The Russians were offering to sell natural gas to western Europe at a bargain price. This project alarmed President Reagan. Reagan pointed out that Russia had always had authoritarian governments, and because of that, Reagan said, the Soviet Union would always regard countries like France and West Germany as enemies. Reagan said that over time, as industrialized democracies in western Europe became more and more dependent on Russian gas for their economic survival, someday the Russians would be in a position to use their natural gas as a weapon of blackmail or extortion. Of course, the Russians promised that they would never do that. Reagan imposed sanctions on the project to try to stop the pipeline’s construction, but greed carried the day. The Russians had powerful allies in this project. Europeans wanted the cheap natural gas the Russians were offering to sell them and big U.S. oil companies, which stood to make huge profits on the project, lobbied Congress to override Reagan’s sanctions, which Congress did, and the pipelines were built. Today, Vladimir Putin receives over $200 million a day from western Europe from natural gas sales alone. He gets much more from oil sales. If western Europe was not now dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, they would have cut off their imports of it as soon as Putin invaded Ukraine. The economy of Russia would have collapsed, and the war would have come to a quick end. Reagan got this one right.

Thomas Jefferson predicted that absolute monarchs and dictators would always regard a successful democracy anywhere in the world as a threat, no matter what the democracy did. That’s because people living under a dictator will always be thinking: “Why can’t we have the kind of government and the freedom that those people over there have?” Jefferson lived to see his prediction come true. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were widely read in Europe and directly led to several revolutions, beginning with the French Revolution. Jefferson correctly explained why someone like Vladimir Putin will always view countries like Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden as threats. It isn’t because these countries are in NATO. Sweden isn’t in NATO. It isn’t because they are in the EU. Britain isn’t in the European Union. It is because these countries have democratic governments and despite Putin’s best efforts, there are people all over Russia who know that and who would like to have that kind of government themselves. Jefferson got this one right.

I often hear politicians (mostly liberals) promoting renewable energy: hydro, wind, and solar, and I hear politicians (mostly conservatives) promoting increased oil production. But – how often do politicians or news commentators talk about energy efficiency? If Americans bought more energy-efficient products, we could reduce energy consumption in this country a lot – and right now. We don’t have to wait the 5 or 10 years it takes to build a new pipeline or for new energy-efficient products to be invented and get to market. These products are available now.

Automobiles. The average automobile sold in the U.S. last year got 25 miles per gallon and sold for $47,000. However, there are lots of cars on the market that get 40 to 50 miles per gallon and that cost much less than $47,000. A Toyota Prius hybrid gets 52 miles per gallon and sells for $35,000. This car has been on the market for many years and consistently gets very high marks for reliability. A Honda Accord hybrid gets 47 miles per gallon and also sells for around $35,000. The Prius is made in Japan. The Accord is made in Ohio. And lots of companies make electric vehicles.

Companies that buy huge numbers of cars and trucks are ordering electric vehicles. They aren’t doing this to please environmentalists. They are doing it to save money. Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans. They did this because they did the math and concluded that they would save money by buying electric vans over gasoline powered vans.

I don’t understand why the government doesn’t do more to encourage Americans to buy more energy-efficient cars. I would like to see President Biden go on TV and stand next to 2 new cars that look about the same. I would like him to say: “If you are in the market for a new car, why buy this car that gets 25 miles a gallon and complain about how much you are spending every month on gasoline when you can buy this car over here that gets 45 miles a gallon and costs the same?” Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to happen.

However, even without encouragement from the federal government to buy more electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids, it is probably going to happen anyway. In 2021, 5% of new car sales in the U.S. were hybrids and 3% were electric vehicles. However, a recent study by J.P. Morgan predicts that 38% of all new car sales in the U.S. will be EVs or hybrids by 2025. Why the big change? It’s the price of gasoline. In 2016, the average retail price of gasoline in the U.S. was a little over $2.00 a gallon. Few people expect to see that price again.

Refrigerators. There are many other energy-efficient products that the government should be promoting and that are available now. I see that in my business. Sometimes a landlord will ask me when it is better to replace an old refrigerator or pay a repairman to fix it. I tell landlords that this decision shouldn’t be made principally on the cost of the repair but the age of the refrigerator. Refrigerators have become vastly more energy-efficient over the past few decades. A refrigerator made today will use 50% to 70% less electricity than a refrigerator of the same size made 20 years ago, and new refrigerators last longer than they used to.

Pilot Lights. I don’t understand why gas water heaters still have pilot lights. I had to replace 2 gas water heaters last year. I tried to buy new ones without pilot lights but couldn’t find them. I don’t know why gas water heaters still have pilot lights. The gas used by pilot lights is just wasted energy – completely wasted energy – and a gas water heater can use 25% of its gas just keeping the pilot light lit. There is no need for this waste. The technology to light gas appliances without pilot lights has been around for a long time. Gas clothes dryers don’t have pilot lights. They stopped making gas clothes dryers with pilot lights 50 years ago. Yet, lots of new water heaters, kitchen stoves, and wall furnaces still have pilot lights.

The White Roof Project. In places where it gets hot in summer, just painting a dark colored roof white can reduce that home’s air conditioning bill by as much as 40%. It is really astonishing at how much something as simple as this can reduce a home’s air conditioning bill. When I was a child, my bedroom was under the roof. It was a black tar roof. In summer, the temperature in my room was much hotter than the temperature outside, and we did not have air conditioning. White roofs also last much longer than black roofs because they don’t get as hot. Again, why isn’t the government promoting things like this?