The world’s first mass-produced gasoline-electric hybrid car launched in December 1997 against a backdrop of growing concern over human-induced climate change and a clamor for greener technologies. Debate over the economic impact of the vehicles continues to this day, fueled by shifting sticker prices, ephemeral economic incentives and spiking fuel costs. Ultimately, detecting the economic impact of hybrids is about as easy as hearing an electric motor idling at a stop sign, but I took a crack at it anyway.
Category Archives: Technology
Top 10 reasons to buy a hybrid
What was once a tenuous toe-dip into green waters for car companies looks more and more like a sea change. Manufacturers today are increasingly utilizing dual-mode drivetrains both to improve fuel economy and to make better performing cars, even as they avail themselves of the hybrid cachet to hawk them. Today, there’s a hybrid for nearly every palate and purpose.
10 tips for handling coworkers on Facebook
To friend or not to friend; that is the question. It’s a delicate one, too — but not nearly as tricky as managing the interactions among your various social networks on Facebook. Add coworkers to the mix, and you really have your work cut out for you (unless you’re okay with your team knowing that your “sick day” was really a “hangover day”).
Whatever your attitude, given Facebook’s more than 500 million active users, each averaging 130 friends, chances are you’ll bump into a coworker there eventually. Clearly, you need a plan; in this article, I’ll give you one.
Two rocket launchers and an ejector seat shy of a Bond car
Once upon a time, all you needed for a tricked-out ride were some wire wheels, bucket seats and whitewall tires. Welcome to the age of gadgetry, when even economy cars sport cool tech, and supercars are decked out in gear that runs the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. The options can be overwhelming, so I wrote this article to help you narrow your wish list.
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.