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Can you believe it? August 11th will mark the 1 year anniversary of our first published show. Many (including at least one PubGuy) didn’t think three (now four) beer swilling, bar hopping,  regular guys would ever succeed at trying to do something that no other Podcast has done – record every show from a remote location.

We have fought some and laughed a lot and solved some very (and not so) serious problems “One Beer at A Time” and we are going to celebrate at an upcoming show. We are in the process of pulling our favorite cuts and writing down our favorite stories about our first year. We want to know yours! Please comment below or email or even better, call us at 214-44GUYS4 (214-444-8974) and tell us what you think.

Look for the announcement of the date of the anniversary show soon! Cheers Bitches!

A shot of sport: About this time every four years, we hear various pronouncements about how soccer will soon take off in popularity here in the US. I have been hearing this ever since I was a kid playing soccer in Dallas in the 1970s. The dads would say that when this generation of youth-soccer, playing kids grows up then soccer would replace football and baseball as the most popular sport in the US. Nowadays this discussion often comes from the all-knowledgeable, Euro-fans who argue that Americans are more parochial and less sophisticated than our friends on the other side of the pond. Americans need more scoring, more action and are unable to get nuance in sport. We are mostly Bush-loving, go-it-alone, simpletons. Nonsense. Most sports require intimate knowledge of the subtleties to really enjoy. Soccer is no more sophisticated than football or baseball. Moreover, soccer is only the most popular sport in Europe and in Latin-America. Soccer is no more popular than basketball in China; less popular than cricket in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; less popular than baseball in Japan, Venezuela, and Cuba; less popular than hockey in Canada and Norway; less popular than badminton in Indonesia. I could go on. In this light, the fact that soccer is down the list in the US makes the US much less exceptional. Take heart US soccer fans. My favorite sport is formula one. Nascar dominates the racing scene in the US but this does not diminish my love of the sport in the least.

A tall, cold glass of economics: The Toyota Prius makes me laugh. Well, not the Prius itself, it is an innocent machine, but rather the drivers amuse me. Hybrid drivers take it on faith that they are saving the earth by driving a car with better gas mileage. The Prius inherently assumes that an investment in an extra motor (the electric motor in addition to the gas motor) and an investment into an enormous battery system is somehow is compensated by the savings of gas. Even with $4 gas it will not pay off financially comparing the cost of a hybrid to a similar non-hybrid plus the cost of the extra gas. Now, our smug, earth-saver types might argue that the hybrid reduces the “carbon footprint”. Whether this is true is far from obvious. The electric motor must be built, which requires resources and energy. The battery is made from nickel that is mined in an energy-intensive process and shipped to Japan and then to the US in the Prius. Calculating the net-impact of the extra motor and battery relative to the gas saved is extremely difficult and any attempted calculation would require heroic assumptions. So Prius owners spend a lot of money for an environmental impact that might be negative for all we know. But the real reason for owning a Prius is to show the world that “I care”, which makes me laugh.

A shot of sport: Danicamania has returned to NASCAR-land. After a poor first half of the season in IndyCars, Danica will try to adjust herself back to tintops. Juan Pablo warned that moving back and forth between ICS and NASCAR would not be easy as the feel for each car is so different. For my money, Juan Pablo is the authority regarding driving different types of cars.  He is one of the best drivers in the world and would be more recognized as so if not for his penchant for tearing up a truly amazing diversity of racecars in IndyCars, F1, NASCAR, Grand-Am, be it his or others. Danica will continue to struggle in NASCAR and her NASCAR running will in turn hurt her efforts in IndyCars.  When will her very average performances in above-average equipment finally dull the legions of fans? If you want a female to root for try Simona De Silvestro. She is a rookie IndyCar driver who has put in some nice drives for a back-marker team. And yes, thanks for asking, she is hot.

And a tall, cold glass of economics: Obama is back threatening to change tax law on US multinationals. The US has an unusual tax regime where all profits are taxed worldwide for US-based firms. Virtually all countries other than the US only tax profits within their borders regardless of where the firm is headquartered. Thus, if a firm has a factory in Japan and another factory in the US, the firm’s taxes will be lower if the firm is incorporated in Osaka rather than Omaha. Current tax law has a partial fix to make the playing field somewhat more even for US firms relative to foreign firms by not taxing the US firm’s foreign earnings until the funds are repatriated to the US. Obama has railed on this provision as giving tax breaks to firms that “ship jobs overseas”. Nonsense. This will make US multinationals less competitive as compared to foreign-based multinationals in a vain attempt to generate more revenue to help fund an ever-increasing federal budget. This is possibly good politics but lousy economics.