All Is Not As It Seems

A friend of the blog emails:

https://www.startribune.com/biodiesel-not-electric-buses-may-join-metro-transit-fleet/600029359/

[The Strib notes that] “Biodiesel, not electric, buses may join Metro Transit fleet. “

Biodiesel? Made from animal fat?

That means I’ll need to eat more meat!

After almost three years of keto, it’s a tempting conclusion.

But I’ll haste to add that a key source of biodiesel is…

…er…

…the downstream leg of the human digestive function, ifyaknowwhatImean.

10 thoughts on “All Is Not As It Seems

  1. Adds even more applicability to mass transit being a big pile of $#it.

    <poetic license> I know the Twin Cities has a decent bus system and it could be even better were it not for the met Council’s inexplicable fetish involving 18th century technology.

  2. I don’t know that the Twin Cities has that great of a system, as it really doesn’t work very well unless your goal is to move from the outer parts of the metro downtown. My car and bike both have the good sense to figure out how to be driven where I actually want to go, which generally is NOT downtown.

  3. That’s really a great point, bike. The bus routes, as I understand, run like spokes on a wheel when they should be running in something like concentric circles around the metro so users in one suburb can go to another (yes, yes, there would have to “some” spokes to go from circle to another). But government run mass transit is never, ever about fixing problems, much less providing a service.

  4. Mitch, what are the sources for your biodiesel source composition? I’m tangentially involved in this business and your statement is absolutely full of the downstream leg of the human digestive function And don’t you dare hide behind definition of “key”.

  5. …the downstream leg of the human digestive function, ifyaknowwhatImean.

    They’re gonna run on digested reprobates?

  6. Isaac Orr with the Center for the American Experiment, was on Justice and Drew this morning. He said that, like everything else that the Met Clowncil does, this experiment has already failed. It seems that “the science” defeated them, in that they had trouble with the chargers and the buses couldn’t make it through their routes. As early buyers of Chevy Volts here in Minnesota learned, heaters and air conditioners suck up a lot battery life. Now, those 8 buses are sitting idle, costing money.
    Obviously, the Met Clowncil didn’t learn anything about bio-diesel from the debacle that befell another gubmint run entity; the Bloomington Public Screwals. A few years ago, the orcs on Bloomington’s school board, assured us peasants that they could run their own buses, more reliably and economically than outsourcing it to a transportation company. The first winter after the switch, the bio diesel in the fuel systems of thirty of their shiny new buses, gelled in the cold and would not start. Students were left standing at cold bus stops and classes were forced to start late. Parents were angry, but they re-elected all but one of those board members.

  7. I’d been under the impression that biodiesel was overwhelmingly soybean oil, whether fresh from the bean, or after a series of uses frying fries and such. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to make it from Walz, but I don’t believe that’s the major source.

    I also remember the biodiesel school buses. Officials swore on a stack of Bibles that there was nothing wrong with the fuel, but having put a container of soybean oil in the freezer myself once (to figure out how saturated the fat was), I do know that bad things happen to saturated fats in the cold. It’s one reason whale oil was so cool–it kept liquid in cold weather in the days before kerosene lamps because a whale would die with a lot of saturated fat in its arteries.

    Electric is worse, and it’s one of the big reasons rail travel is so inefficient. Smart people would use a doodlebug configuration and use the waste heat from the engine to heat a carriage. Dumb people use power from a locomotive or grid to power an HVAC system in each carriage, using far more energy.

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