How to Spot a Psychopath

A reader brought my attention to Cracked's 6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes (People Are Actually Trying). I've could make a couple of minor technical complaints about it, but overall it's great. The more people point out the idiocy of things like running your car on water and magic gasoline pills, the better.

I got a kick out of the Khaos Super Turbo Charger (KSTC), which apparently made as big a splash in the Philippines as Firepower did here in Australia. The KSTC has its very own page on fuelsaving.info; there's another page about air-bleed devices in general.

Fuel scammers often seem to take the thirty-something per cent thermodynamic efficiency of internal combustion engines to mean that sixty-something per cent of the fuel isn't being burned, when the actual amount of fuel that escapes the engine unburned or only partially combusted is a few per cent, at the very worst. For most vehicles today, it's well under one per cent, as I noted when Firepower tried the same line on me.

Cracked's number one Retarded Gas Saving Scheme is "Water4Gas" from one "Ozzie Freedom". It's a particularly elaborate kit of parts - including various aquarium components, and not one but two jam-jars - that's meant to let you run your car at least partially on, that's right, water.

I mention this in hopes of attracting some more of those hilarious Google ads from the several other water-fueled-car companies out there, all of which have mysteriously failed to make the trillions of dollars you'd expect.

(This is, of course, because of The Conspiracy. Which somehow doesn't stop these people from selling their ridiculous kits to soon-to-be-disappointed customers.)

Oh, and meanwhile it's come to light that the list of people to whom Firepower promised money and never delivered includes the Liberal Party of Australia.

At this stage I'm surprised that Tim Johnston - who in the photo accompanying the article has a hairstyle that looks not unlike a Brylcreemed ballsack - didn't go door-to-door slipping IOUs into people's letter boxes.