Highway planners gone wild - or have they?

The Onion reports that the Department of Transport was spending $270 billion on lanes for reckless drivers - it turns out that was all a big joke, the reality is instead they decided to just send all those crappy drivers to my home town Oakland, California. Seriously, does anyone else think their town has the world's worst drivers, or is it just me? My partner noticed that I've now taken to driving with my thumbs on the horn buttons of my steering wheel. It's not defensive driving - only once in my 24 years of driving have I been able to use a horn defensively and it didn't work (the SUV still backed right into me) - I just figure if someone runs a red light, stop sign or does something crazy in front of me I'm going to let them know because I'm sick of people pretending they are driving just fine. I'll admit that I'm not a perfect driver but if someone honks me when I've done something wrong I'll admit it - embarrassed by my mistake I'll even take the finger or whatever they throw at me (although living Oakland I'd rather it was not fast moving lead from a Glock).

Never mind gas prices, here come the ATM fee hikes!

Folks, never mind federal investigations into the price of gas, how about an investigation into the outrageous prices banks charge for using someone else's ATM? It was bad enough at $2.00 but now Wells Fargo is apparently leading the charge with a hike to $2.50 - expect all the other banks to follow in short order. Basically this is easy money for them, like $0.20 per text message for the phone companies. They could make it $5.00 and people would still be paying it because when you absolutely have to have cash what alternative is there?

I'm sure banks look at cash as a competitor to credit cards so whatever percentage they get for a credit card transaction should guide their pricing on cash withdrawals. If fees are too low they will canabilize their credit card fee income - which as we all know is at least 2% and probable more like 3 or 4%. So if the average person sucks out $100 per ATM withdrawal then they need to charge $2, $3 or more per transaction to avoid hurting their credit card fees.

But this is really just BS, why are there no federal investigations into how banks can justify these fees? Their usual excuse is "well we have to cover the fees other banks charge us" but guess what those fees are just made up, one bank just charges other banks what they charge them. It doesn't reflect anywhere against the actual cost of providing ATMs. In fact it is well known that ATMs save banks money because they allow them to have fewer branches and fewer staff. We know this for a fact because it is is why banks have checking accounts that are cheaper if you don't use branches to do your transactions.

Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Gone Wrong

I'm sorry but I can't help thinking that pumping liquefied carbon dioxide into the ground is a bad idea waiting to go horribly, horribly wrong. From reading about the idea it sounds like the only problem with the CO2 leaking to the surface is a carbon credit lost, but what happens when 100,000 tons of denser than air CO2 reaches the surface, perhaps catastrophically one day? I really don't want to be around to find out because its gonna hang around near the ground and start killing people. If you think this is far fetched you should read about Lake Nyos, the "bad lake" where more than 1,700 people died from CO2 poisoning. The CO2 came from underground sources - and rolled out over a 10 mile radius killing all it encountered. Now does that sound familiar?