First drive in our Fiat Panda

I drove our Fiat Panda into work today; it went easily and pleasantly. It was my first time driving it which may seem strange but I can tell as much as I need to about if I will like a car from a combination of being a passenger in it and mst3kmoxie finding it okay to drive. I realized that I maintain a mental picture of myself on the road which I found hard to fill in with the unfamiliar Fiat and mostly imagined that I instead looked like the Peugeot.

Being sat rather higher than in our old Peugeot 306 felt odd but nice. The Fiat's seats provide firm lumbar support. I don't know if car controls are more standard these days or in the UK or what: I am used to having to learn my way around them but the steering column stalk controls in the Fiat seem identically arranged to those in the Peugeot.

This morning's commute reminded me that I have a couple of unusual opinions on safe driving. One relates to how I was getting used to that the brake pedal is a little more to the left than I am used to. I generally like being barefoot; many jurisdictions are at least leery of barefoot driving but I find it safer. Not only can I still apply a sharp impulse to a pedal using the ball of my foot but I can feel exactly where the pedal edges are: there is much less chance of my pressing the side of a pedal or even accidentally including its neighbor.

My other unusual opinion is that I much like cruise control even for city streets. We had it on nearly all our cars in the US but never in the UK. I was thinking of it while driving in Dundee on a narrowing street with many parked cars and some pedestrians and bicyclists, especially in a car that I had never driven before: What I like to do is set the cruise control on a low speed then have my foot over the brake instead of the throttle and my eyes always on the road instead of my speedometer so that I am very ready for a surprise pedestrian in my path.

Inequality; government websites

My change in car exposed me to the website of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency which among those of Her Majesty's Government is rather unusual in being both usable and useful. Living in Ohio I was pleasantly surprised by how much value was offered by state and Federal websites. One of the best is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis: their historical economic datasets are not only downloadable but there is an easy web interface for interactive graphing.

Recently I wondered how easily signs of a rise of economic inequality in America may be coaxed from Federal Reserve's data. It turns out that it is not difficult to generate apparently corroborative graphs:


For example, in this case the rise in Gross Domestic Product per capita appears to rather outstrip that of median personal income, in real terms over the course of forty years. I am no economist so I may be mistaken about the meaning of such plots but I was unsurprised by its form nonetheless.