Patriots Guide to Voting

Vote with your wallet – here are two steps to Liberty; choose Made in USA goods and reduce personal petroleum consumption by 20% - 50%.

Imagine living in a neighborhood with a majority population of addicts. Each day most residents will busily secure a supply of their drug of choice and there are dealers on every corner with a ready supply to meet their demand. The dealers and their masters are in control of most of the wealth and dictate to the addicts how they should conduct their lives. The dealers use every scheme imaginable to deepen the addictions of their victims, mocking the “Company Store” concept with a far more efficient form of enslavement, the modern Corporation. Under the “Color of Law” and using the legislative process, the dealers gradually eliminate all forms of self-sufficiency with clever devices of rules and regulations that favor a select few by making criminals out of those who oppose them or their practices.

This is how it is now in my neighborhood, and the drug everyone is after is petroleum. The fog has been lifted and I can see the insidious nature of the petroleum addiction on my friends, family and neighbors. Incredibly, about half even deliberately use as much as they can, seemingly in a show of force or wealth of some sort. The other half guiltily join in the mad rush, shutting out the reality of their addiction as best they can by staying busy, busy, and busy! The dealers have nearly complete control now, and have even taken our young people to war to secure more supplies, but there is good news! We can take our lives back, and it is really very simple to do, here is how:

Vote with your wallet – choose Local and Made in USA goods and reduce your personal petroleum consumption by at least 20%. These two simple actions will require some sacrifice and modification of lifestyle, but consider the benefits and consequences for the right choice.

1. Choose Local and Made in USA or do without. One example is found in the last brand of shoes I could find that is still Made in USA, Red Wing. Be prepared to spend $150-$200 and remember you are not only supporting US workers, but the shoes are a terrific value with a lifetime warranty on stitching, shoelaces and shoe cream and guaranteed to fit comfortably including stretching or whatever it takes to provide a perfect fit and style for any need. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find products Made in USA, but with a little diligence a surprising number can still be found, and usually competitively priced when all features and benefits are considered.

2. Reduce your personal consumption of petroleum. By simply adhering to the 55 MPH maximum speed limit already in place on most US highways, a vehicle will consume 20% to 50% less fuel. By starting off gradually and anticipating the green light ahead instead of racing from red light to red light you will use less fuel and your brake pads will last longer, resulting in less emissions from fuel burning and less brake pad dust emissions. Brake pad dust is a significant source of highly toxic air pollutant as older vehicles use asbestos brake pads, and the material in use today is ground into ultra fine dust and disbursed into the air we all breath. Choose surface transportation over air, public transit over personal, and bike or walk whenever possible. Choose trains over jets, busses over cars and bike or walk instead!

By doing these two things we will all be doing our patriotic duty to preserve our homeland resources and take a leadership role to promote individual responsibility for the choices we all make every day. Remember, elections (of questionable integrity in the first place) only happen occasionally, but we all vote with our wallet every day.

By simply adhering to the 55 MPH maximum speed limit already in place on most US highways, a vehicle will consume 20% to 50% less fuel.


It's true that a vehicle consumes much less fuel at 55 mph than at 65mph or faster, but I don't think that 55 mph is the maximum speed limit on most highways. For example, we're driving to Kansas City today, and the speed limit will be anywhere from 65 mph to 75 mph most of the way.

You are right, I misspoke and appreciate the correction. Being in California my view sometimes get rather narrow. Here it is 55 for trucks and cars pulling trailers, not that anyone obeys it anyway as for cars it is 65 and sometimes 75, not that anyone obeys that either.

http://Drive55.org

I've often wished we could organize a week where everyone in the U.S. would drive no faster than 55 mph. We'd save tons of gas and shake up the oil companies for a few days.

at 70 mph (34 mpg) as 55 mph, due to the fact that the engine is operating at a much more efficient BMEP at 70 mph. Internal combustion engines are terribly inefficient at very light loads, and my Camry is fairly aerodynamic. An SUV will probably do better at 55 than at 70, though.

PLEASE try a Real World Vehicle Efficiency Report! Download the form here:
http://drive55.org/assets/docs/RWVER.pdf

Or, to prove this in a basic way, hop on a bike and get going as fast as you can, then stay at that speed for a while to see how much more energy is needed to maintain a higher rate of speed. I can ride many miles at 3-5 mph, but at 8 mph it get winded pretty quick.

my car is operating in a much more efficient thermodynamic regime at 70mph than at 55mph, very near the torque peak. If it takes twice the energy, but if the thermodynamic efficiency at that BMEP is 30% instead of 15%, then your mileage will be the same. If internal combustion engines were equally efficient at all combinations of RPM and BMEP, you would be 100% correct, but the efficiency is actually highly dependent on RPM, BMEP, engine configuration, and load.

As I said, the BMEP "sweet spot" varies by vehicle; small, 4-valve, aerodynamic vehicles with low power overheads and high final drive ratio will be more efficient at higher speeds than lower-geared SUV's with large frontal areas.

Try your car at various speeds and see where the sweet spot is. For mine, it's somewhere between 60 and 70, with a fairly flat mileage curve in that region. Over 70, the mileage falls off fast.

Nothing beats empirical knowledge. Your words simply do not equate with reality and I beg you to download a RWVER and fill it out, trying both MAX speeds. Perhaps you are not including the energy required to accelerate to the higher speeds in your Guess?

repeated several times on the 830-mile round trip between here and northwest Florida, on low-traffic Interstate highways with the cruise control set on 70, the A/C off, and no stops, using 93 octane fuel, measuring the distance traveled on each tankful via the odometer and calculating the mileage both for each fillup and for the whole journey. I'm talking sustained speeds here, with almost no speeding up and slowing down, few hills to speak of, and no stopping except every 400 miles or so to refuel. Temperature was probably in the 50's 60's, IIRC. The difference in the fuel required to accelerate to 70 vs. 55 once (as in steady-state driving) is negligible.

I did download the RWVER at your suggestion and will try it out next time I make the trip (it's a great idea).

My point is simply that fuel mileage is a nonlinear two-variable function involving both drag and engine thermodynamic efficiency, not a linear function of load, hence the most efficient point will come at slightly different speeds for different vehicles.

I've driven that way for a good 20 years, well except for the 55 on the interstate. Just can't do it, I don't like getting run over. That, however, is only when I travel more than 50 miles from my house on trips.

I buy local brands when possible and never shop at Walmart. I feel better already....:hippie:

Well, if a person was to actually limit their purchases to only products made in the U.S., I wonder what that would leave available...

So little seems to be made here anymore, and as you point out, it's declining rapidly. If all Americans would "buy into" buying only American, it might very well support a reasonable manufacturing base here, but short of massive support--it won't work. As you point out too, we would all be looking at considerably higher prices--and, alas, a very large number of Americans aren't making it right now, despite the relatively cheap goods. Those higher prices would end up raising the costs to businesses in the U.S. as well, and that would result in further price increases and effectively eliminate our already modest export industry--though our 'trade deficit' would be affected both positively and negatively. As buy American became ubiquitous, we'd obviously import less and less until it would consist of little more than raw materials we happen to need. Of course, that all means that we'd have very little trade with the rest of the world--and we do "enjoy" using the lure of access to American markets as a diplomatic tool and a form of international influence. There's something to be said for that as it's been useful. While in some way it might not be to our advantage to worry about other nation's economies, the influx of U.S. dollars into many other countries has helped substantially to grow their economies and improve the lives of their citizens. It's also simultaneously served to export more than a little "American culture", including "Democracy" and/or human rights and environmental laws. Of course, that's been far from perfect or conclusive, but it has resulted in some positive or desirable outcomes.

It seems to me it's a complex issue, and it would require considerable input from experts in economics, foreign relations, government and who knows what in order to even make an educated guess what effects such an economic policy would produce. Alas, though, even if everyone could afford it and it was determined that the good it produces here offsets any harm and further, at least considers the effect on the rest of the world... I just don't see Americans, in any large number, organizing, agreeing and comitting to such a plan, and it seems to me it would involve a pretty significant comittment (and one that might not even provide benefits in a "fair" manner). I must admit, while I might be willing to consider such a thing when there are competing American products which are reasonably competitive and it doesn't appear that the corporations involved aren't going to export their manufacturing capacity regardless of whether or not their North American arrangement is already profitable. Many companies have exported their manufacturing despite the fact that they were in fact profitable already--in favor of even more profits... and if they don't see a highly likely reduction due to 'buy U.S.', they'll just do it anyway. A laudable goal, though, to stop all this foreign outsourcing... Just seems unlikely to occur, at least not until things have gotten so bad that it's already too late.

I do hope there are some good answers--this or some other--that we can all get behind (and that we all get to hear about from our "leaders"), but so long as we rely on free (semi-free)/capitalism markets on a global basis, there's going to be a continued shift until wages are much more uniform across the globe. Countries that have more or better resources, including human (skills/education/health/age), raw materials, transportation, weather and more, will end up with many of the more desirable jobs (though wages will likely not be what they once might have been). The real answer to everyone having a good/better life will depend upon population controls and the evolution of capitalism into something that distributes the wealth more evenly (perhaps something beyond our current understanding with all the best points of socialism and capitalism)(perhaps something like "Participatory Economics" http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm) .

As for energy sufficiency and alternative energy, I'm all for anything we can do--individually or as a nation/government to advance as rapidly as possible. I'm sure that includes a majority of us--but, alas, it does not include the immense Oil Companies (which more or less control the leadership of our government). To move ahead, it's going to take at least a considerable increase in the traditional kind of votes in the right amounts at the right times and places. Of course, we could have many more votes (and perhaps even an honest polling system) if we could finally create the desperately needed Libera/Democratic broadcasting network. All in all, I'd say--for now at least, we'd do better to take all the spare funds we might have with which to either buy U.S. or improve our fuel economy and send it in as either a donation or investment in a not-for-profit corporation for creation of such a broadcasting company (if only there were an organization to organize and collect such donations/investments--after some time, with some real success, we could literally buy/build a new network from scratch if need be!). Alas...

Welcome to DU!! :toast: