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OccupySF IT Admins Using Pedal Power For Protest
99luftballon writes "The OccupySF team have been running an ad-hoc computer network on the streets of San Francisco without a steady power source, no Wi-Fi and even the occasional police raid. It turns out the best way to keep the lights on is car batteries and pedal power."
The American Work Ethic? I'd say they have it. They're pedaling to keep things going.
I've met many of those protesting. You know what? Many of them do have jobs. They do have lives. They're there anyway because they know things are messed up.
In my city the protestors are feeding the homeless. They're doing good works, and they're encouraging discussion about the future of our nation. There is no possible way this is a bad thing. Why are there so many unemployed out there? It isn't because the employed don't care, it's because the employed are trying to keep their jobs.
Pedal away, SF.
Oh my! My webpost parser jammed up bad on this one! Either you are horribly deluded about the present situation and woefully ignorant of why freedom to assemble to address grievances is a constitutionally protected right, or you are a serious troll doing serious trolling.
In the case of the former, the problem is that the "american dream" you are alluding to no longer exists in the form you are implying; it is no longer possible to "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" as you put it, due to artificial barriers to entry that are strongly enforced by power of law.
Beating the protesters to disperse them is a violation of their civil liberties, and the fact that their protest irritates you is simply a sign that it is working. A protest that does not illicit a reaction is a protest that means nothing. Simply because somebody is doing something you don't like is not reason to lynch them. Under that logic the protesters should drop their signs, and instead pick up ball bats and molotov cocktails and start firebombing rich people's houses and beating them bloody when they run out screaming from the fire.
So, as far as I can tell, the only whiny bitch I see here is the one whining about the protesters.
One effect of being well organised is that only a few need to be taken out for the movement to fail. Taken out can include bribery, change of attitude, killing, etc.
Not having one key demand makes it very hard for the power structure to undermine the key message.
It is often considered to be one of the strengths of the movement that saw NZ buck its dominating partners (Britian and US) and become the first country in the world to go nuclear free. There were attempts by the authorities to undermine the power structure, only they could not find it as there was no heircachial power pyramid for them to comprehend.
Many other example can be quoted but the real message is the effect - a group with similar goals but no strong structure can be a very effectivce counter to a strong power structure with rigid form and plentiful resources.
Hopefully Occupy Wall Street will remain somewaht amophus. Tight enough for people to agree they support it, loose enough to be hard for the indrisal-military combine and allies (banking and oil included) to comprehend.
Probably the easiest and most sustainable setup would be to convert a port-a-potty into a biogas digester, and use it to run a small gas genset or even a thermoelectric generator. Of course that would make something of a target for police.
Some motorcycles or scooters have alternators, that can be used for battery charging. Or if size is an issue, there's always a small generator like the Honda EX350 that can be had for around $200.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It is also important to take the elapsed time since your "success" into account. The situation the protesters are protesting is the situation in the now, while the situation that gave rise to your success story is in the "then."
I agree that the movement seems nebulous. I attribute it to a total constellation of several effects, including but not limited to the following things:
The american school system sucks balls to the point that higher education is essential to become gainfully employed. The number of institutions offering that service has not appreciably grown to meet demand, causing prices to rise. Students leave colleges with thousands of dollars in debt for a slip of paper that essentially just says "I can finish what I start and am not an idiot who can't write his own name." Given the actual value of their degree in the job market, they are naturally angry to have been forced into having to take on mountains of debt to accomplish this simple milestone when a simple core competencies test would have sufficed.
Coupled with the proclevity for large corporations to offshore inexpensive and low training jobs to places like mexico, china, and india, there is a stark lack of entry level jobs for these debt laiden college grads to take to gain the much needed work histories they need to create careers.
The reasons why these trends are occuring is indeed because of systemic greed at many levels, so protesting against institutionalized greed sorta does make sense.
The greed of the accredation institutions motivates them to maintain the status quo of very high student tuition.
The greed of the public school system, coupled with absurd laws, makes it originate the need to require a degree for janitorial work.
The greed of multinationals makes them seek every possible means of squeezing profit from the market.
The greed of stockholders (and by proxy, wallstreet) drives the corporations to be ever more greedy to satisfy the already horribly unrealistic expectations of those stock holders. (Purpetual gains in profitability are not sustainable.)
So, the protest message as I can see it is "I have been victimized by the system you created. I had to sell many years of my life in the form of intractible debt JUST to be ABLE to work, only to have to fight for scraps with what are essentially slave laborers in other countries because of your insatiable greed. We want to be released from the burden of our unfair debts, and have the possibility of finding work without competing with HIB visas and slaves from china."
When you think about it, that doesn't really sound like such a terrible demand.
The TARP was a TINY fraction of the free money the banks got. They paid back the TARP money they got directly but they didn't even have to pay back all the money that was funnelled through AIG directly in to their pockets, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank in particular. If AIG has been allowed to fail and those tax payer billions hadn't been funnelled through AIG, Goldman Sachs and the rest would have failed.
The banks are still getting free money by the truck loads.
First, they got to unload hundreds of billions in toxic assets on the Fed in exchange for fresh green backs at 100 cents on the dollar.
The Fed has their interest rates to banks set at approximately zero. The economists term for this is "financial repression", where interest rates are substantially below inflation. Its designed to completely screw people who save to bail out debtors including banks. It especially screws seniors who live on CD interest. It is designed to force them to gamble on the stock market to just stay even. Many seniors who remember the '29 crash dont want to play the stock market.
There are also still trillions in loan guarantees that will dealry cost someone if those assets crater which some of will if there is a double dip.
And the Fed constantly pumps hundreds of billions in short term, low interest loans, to all sorts of troubled banks, all the time through the discount window.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are pure gamblers, they pocket the profits when they win. They should NEVER be allowed to come to the U.S. taxpayer or the Fed when they lose.
Bottom line, banks get their money at zero percent. The poor get their money from payday loans at 30% and up.
@de_machina
Two paragraphs after the one you quoted from TFA: "However, one bright spark managed to cobble together a new converter that downstepped the 12 volt supply directly to five volts much more efficiently, using mail-order parts and a bit of ingenuity."
The other problem with stepping 12V DC down to 5V is that often, the only charger people have for their phone is the proprietary AC one. The industry has standardized on mini/micro USB lately, but most older phones will only charge with an AC adapter. And almost nobody will be willing to chop up their laptop's AC adapter plug to be able to hook it up to straight DC. So the universal power supply remains 120/240 V AC.
I do have to wonder though, given this report is from San Francisco and the type of people drawn to OWS, why hasn't anyone thought to set up a windmill or some sort of solar array (about 4-5 m^2 @ 0.15 capacity factor should generate as much power as people taking turns cycling 24/7). PV solar sucks in comparison to other electricity sources, but it's forte is off-the-grid applications like this.
i've taken apart about 20 no-name car chargers now. linear regulators are too expensive, too much dissapted heat means you need expensive metal to make a heatsink. counter-intuitively, switching regulator designs are cheaper to produce. they are almost all based on the mc30463 or equivalent circuit.
A brilliant lie. Almost believable, with that tiny grain of truth in the middle. Of course, the top 10% of earners pay 70% of income taxes. Which account for well under half of the government's revenues. Most of the rest comes from Social Security payroll taxes, of which the vast majority is paid by the middle class.
Once you account for that, you quickly find that the top 10% earn about 45% of the income and pay about 45% of the taxes. Except for one small problem. No one is out there saying "We are the 90%". The top 1% of earners have 35% of the wealth and pay only around 25% of the taxes.
And then, of course, you need to account for disposable income. Someone in the bottom quintile has no disposable income at all. If you charge them an extra dollar in taxes, you have to give them an extra dollar in food stamps or else let them starve. Someone in the middle quintile has some disposable income, but not much. Most of their paycheck immediately goes to their mortgage and car payments and insurance premiums and grocery bills and so on. They pay what they can, but higher taxes can cause them serious hardship.
In the top 1%, nearly all wealth is disposable. These people could live in luxury on just 10% of their incomes... often on just 1%. Raising their marginal tax rate by 5 percentage points would have no real impact on their quality of life, while giving us enough extra money to (and this is just an example, not a recommendation) double the funding of the Department of Education.
And I haven't even started talking about sales taxes yet....