According to howstuffworks.com, the United States consumes about 400 million gallons of oil a day across 100 million households, or approximately 4 gallons per household per day. If you drive a 25 MPG car, that’s a hundred miles of driving a day. How does your household stack up? You using more or less than your four?

If we melt Greenland, we can get 50 billion barrels of oil. Actually, it’s already melting and oil companies already have oil exploration licenses to start poking around in Greenland. So, really we need to do nothing differently. Oh, and I heard penguins and polar bears make excellent soups so let’s melt the ice from under them too.

General Motors, as of the recent IRS report, has sold a mere 8,485 hybrid vehicles. By comparison, Toyota crushed the 60,000 limit and Honda just recently exceeded it. Ford is over halfway there. GM is, well, slightly slower out of the gate but remember the tortoise beat the hare.

The Tesla Roadster is a fully electric car made by Tesla Motors. On a single charge, it can travel 220 miles with an efficient of a reported 4.7 mi/kW·h which is the equivalent of 135 MPG. $100,000 is the price of one of the Tesla’s “Signature One Hundred” in all its tricked out glory. Fortune just published an article yesterday about the Tesla.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The Dow opened on January 2nd, 2008 at 13,261.82 and opened on July 1st, 2008 at 11,344.64 – for a spectacular fall of over 1,917 points. Don’t calculate the percentage, it’ll just make you throw up.


This week, a barrel of oil (NYMEX Sweet Crude) topped $145. A barrel of oil cost an average of $15.70 ten years ago (adjusted to 2007 dollars). I will be investing in a Flintstone-mobile. Here are the latest energy prices on Bloomberg. *sigh*


Can someone with better math, or better descriptive skills, explain why a 50% difference is only considered “slight?” We expected 40,000 fewer jobs in June, there are actually 62,000 fewer jobs… but it’s only slight. “Job losses in June were slightly worse than the 40,000 expected by economists surveyed…”


Starbucks to close 600 stores with 12,000 affected workers. Stockholders rejoice as SBUX jumped 4.6% and MBA professors sob as one of the most referenced marketing case studies gets a black eye. At least there’s always Southwest.



Royal Caribbean’s Project Genesis, a cruise ship yet to be named, will be the most expensive and largest cruise ship ever constructed and will cost a mere $1.24 billion dollars. It will carry 6,400 passengers, weight 220,000 gross registered tons, and displace more water than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. (it wasn’t announced this week, in fact it was announced over a year ago, but it was worth putting in this week just because!)

Have a great Fourth of July Weekend!

(I’m going to start doing Week in Numbers [WIN] every Friday afternoon, please let me know what you think!)