You must have cornered the market on tinfoil in order to create that hat. Oh, really? Then let's see you refute his positions. They all look entirely reasonable to me. But what would I know? I'm just a former econ major from a family of policy geeks who has actually researched all of these points.
Sorry, guys, but to me these seem like choices for people who are techies first and last and writers only incidentally. There are tools out there that were designed for writing complex documents *without* needing to bloody well learn tech skills. Personally, I'm quite fond of Quark CopyDesk, which was designed for professional writers who want to explicitly be able to block out formatting stuff and just focus on the words. Let's also remember some of the useful orphans out there like Nisus. These days you can get copies for ten or twenty bucks, including everything, and the feature set is rich as the dickens. Of course, I do most of my writing in TextEdit, which replaced BBedit for me, and do the rest in Indesign so YMMV.
I was going to foe you but then found that you posted anonymously. Funny how most neocons do. Not willing to be accountable for your actions, maybe?
I'm thinking nuclear power plants Oh, I don't doubt that you are. Which right there shows that you have no idea of the real comparative costs of various possible energy sources. Howsabout this, you go and build (not plan, actually build and get operational) a standalone, pays its own bills, unsubsidized and safe facility built that will store any and all nuclear waste in a form where twenty randomly chosen engineers with relevant expertise agree that your storage means is safe for at least a thousand years, regardless of what happens to management of the facility or possible sabotage or theft and then we can *start* to discuss how you're planning to do "cost effective" nuclear power.
Fucking anti-intellectual, cowardly, petty ass, right wing, mumble, grumble...
Amazing how much disinformation there is out there on this one. So far I've only *occasionally* been able to track it back to oil companies. Do the research. The real primary reasons for increases in grain prices are massively increased Asian demand for meat, more and more crop blights (mostly from global warming and from agribusiness-caused problems), and ever heavier use of petroleum-derived fertilizers. Yes, biofuels-destined crops have caused *some* of it, as well as boomtime increases in prices for some kinds of cropland. But even there we're talking about the kind of virgin sourced, feedstock inefficient approaches that nobody responsible in the biofuels community was ever recommending in the first place. The only reason that those crops were grown and used that way was that yet again the agribusiness companies like ConAgra and Archer-Daniels-Midland had undermined a social trend for their own short-term enrichment.
I must say, I've found this whole "biofuels caused the food price increases" meme impressively persistent and, if you look into it, one with a formidably fast rise time. Just kinda appeared out of nowhere in about a year and a half. Do the research, folks. Search on "grain crop blight" and things like that instead of terms that will just point you back to the disinfo.
I live four blocks from a car lot that is always filled with nothing but seventies and eighties BMWs and Mercedeses. There are quite a few of these in Portland and two that I know of in Eugene. Why? Because there are now companies that do nothing but buy up those old cars, clean them up, optimize them for biofuels, and resell them. There's even a company near me called (seriously) Lovecraft, that does just the conversions. They're busy all the time. (Should I say damned busy? Busy with tentacles on top?)
Yeah. I don't know about the rest of the country, but out here on the freaky west coast, diesel cars are already an everyday fact of life.
Coffee grounds are nowhere near rich enough in oils to make your scenario reasonable. For coffee to be worth more as fuel than as tasty beverage, fuel prices would need to reach, oh, fifteen dollars a gallon, while somehow production, processing, and shipping costs for coffee stayed constant. You might as well say that people will stop eating shitakes because they might become more valuable as compost.
Thanks for the linkage. But let's not forget that modern algal production means could be done just fine on rooftops and over spaces like parking lots. Not only is this, in that sense, utterly unused land, it would even protect what's there now from the elements. Not to mention that the people "working the farm" could walk to work from city center apartments.
No, many of us would rather live in 21st century Europe (but with more space and less regulation) than in 1970's America. Because that's what the previous poster's world would most resemble. Dude, hate to break it to ya (no, I don't) but *you're* the one living the clumsy, outdated lifestyle. As for costs, I'm guessing that you haven't done the math on cost/benefit here. Those of us who eat our daily serving of clue know better. I've got three words for you: Tyson's Corner redesign.
My. Your points are exactly the kinds of reasons that folks like me are trying to get intentional communities to regulatory parity with nuclear family-oriented lifestyles.
You're right, living the way that you do and disposing of your "waste" the way that you do, every little change is tiny gain trying to justify significant cost. But out here in Oregon more and more people are living illegally, getting by with less access to mortgages, violating fire codes, and so on to live five to twenty people to a household. But since regulations are designed to obstruct adding more bathrooms, they tend to have to share them even though they would gladly pay the cost of building in more. Since water regulations make it a crime to put their greywater on their gardens, they sneak it out a little at a time and never put in efficient dedicated greywater plumbing. Since putting a greenhouse on the lot would also be a tell of those illegal people, not to mention unfundable with a second mortgage shared by all those people, instead they build cheesy little ones out of scrap and grow a third of the food they could, using twice the space and adding almost no living space to the house. And on and on.
Why do I bring all this up? Because in a two or three person household, you're right, this kind of thing is all pain almost no gain. But the larger the household, the more practical it gets to either sort into more categories or perhaps even build a little homebrew-style setup and do the diesel separation right there. Yet again we see that the real barriers to living sustainably trace back to our corporate-backed, fifties originated, "nuclear family" lifestyles.
Thank you. Actually, I'm hoping that a friend of a friend who is a chemist at an oil company will be joining this thread soon. Seems like plenty of folks have no idea how much processing takes place to get that stuff to and ready for the gas station.
More like the "eyes", "ribs", etc. are on 12th street, 17th street, 20th street, etc. You're pushing the scale. I don't know. Maybe it's being a Portlander. Maybe it's having studied the data on just what the distribution of Starbucks outlets is as a monopolistic practices issue. But I seem to be considerably more aware than many of y'all of just how much coffee is brewed in this country. Howsabout you walk through your nearest downtown and actually count the density of coffee consumers? And remember that we're largely talking about not just pure cases of coffee and not much else. We're largely talking about IHOP, Dunkin' Donuts, and others who generate tons of waste oil otherwise who are or will be getting pickups of biowaste for oil generation already. This is, as I point out in my other main post, about the specifics of things just like that and frankly, I'm not sure I can be bothered to post anything more in response to people who simply don't seem to know where to place the commas and decimal places in their numbers for this situation.
It's been a hell of a long time since anybody just "pumped it out of the ground". Oil these days is forced up with thousands of tons of pressurized (and now toxic) water, run through hundred million dollar curving, shifting pipe complexes that are prone to breaking waaaaaaay down in the ground. If, that is, the platform can be kept on station, the local government doesn't collapse, the pipeline isn't blown up by rebels or simply competing power groups, and on and on. If you think that we're comparing biofuels to a process where people just dig a hole a few feet deep and oil just politely spurts into a tank, then I think that you need to take a look at how these things are done in the modern world.
Sure. In some places. Two years ago or even longer ago. Times have changed since then. Check it out. These days there have been increasing problems with waste oil being *stolen* from behind restaurants. Around here waste oil tanks are chained, locked, and covered in PROPERTY OF.. stickers these days. Certainly, not everybody has figured it out yet but the economics of used oil have changed, even with fuel prices now dropping back down. For a while.
As for the mechanics you're talking about, just like anything else, a new approach is taking a while to get new infrastructure. Waste oil containers *designed* for transfer. Sealed transfer means that are more like the effluent pipes for a motor home than like the kind of manual lift, turn, and scrub you're used to. Catalysts to reduce residue in tanks. Spinner filters that push all that goo out of the way with far less use of consumables.
This kind of thing not only has to deal with half a dozen categories of health and safety regs, it also gets alternately obstructed and improved by big, semi-monopoly firms like Waste Management. But it's also being addressed by more engineers and private designers than the Manhattan Project.
But the bottom line is that these kinds of things are very new and to judge long term viability, let alone net pricing, based on the cobbled together amateur hour stuff you're talking about is like judging what a PC can do based on a badly soldered Altair. Demand is there. Supply is there. McDonalds and the other fast food chains, plenty of non-profits, and several hundred governments are funding the creation of better ways to do this. In fact, McDonalds has been selling their waste oil in Europe for quite a few years now. For, mind you, a hefty profit.
Oh, and fwiw, I'm well acquainted with the mechanics of this. I was just pricing retail space last night, I've been through quite a few waste oil facilities and have gone over things like transfer techniques, residual water percentages, and so on, with people up to and including the head of process engineering for Kettle potato chips and various demand side folks in both east and west coast biofuels processors, including ones from near you. Just talked last month with the New York State head of such things a few months back about the lack of publicity the NY State programs done upstate under Pataki got. I think that you'll find that Patterson will change that.
It ain't over yet, dude. And if you check into petrochemical processing from a hundred years ago you will find that it was messy, awkward, wasteful, and far more dangerous. These things take a little time. And they're improving fast.
Take a look again at my pricing. I give fifty cents a pound as the net value for oil. Which is a damned conservative valuation even including those costs. Think of what oil sells for now. Dude, I'm a former logistics and process consultant; I'm way ahead of you.
Oh, and for future reference, comedy shows, especially ones meant to undermine respect for thinking and work, are rarely good guides to framing the utility of an activity.
Couldn't agree more. Not only that, we're getting much better at turning vegetable-sourced feedstocks into all of this, including the plastics. Gawd, I love the future. At least these parts of it.
Our car companies and national vehicle policies haven't turned out to be very bright. Some people say that eventually this may even cause American car makers to have financial problems. Maybe you've heard about it.
Funny how people keep talking about fuel used to transport other fuel being some sort of dealbreaker. How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers? If transporting gas half way across the world, which is what we do now and have for generations, isn't a big deal, then why do people keep thinking that transporting some other fuel a few hundred miles will eat up all of its net energy advantage?
This isn't about COFFEE FIXES THE ENTIRE WORLD. It's about yet another proof that we are surrounded by hundreds of viable sources of sustainable fuel. That now that we're finally waking up to it, gasoline and diesel and the lot are just carbon and hydrogen and a few other plentiful elements, all of which are quite literally common as dirt and easy to shift from one simple set of molecules to another. It's only being subjected to over a hundred years of propaganda and sabotage by the oil companies that made us forget that in the first place. Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel, to name two, certainly always knew better.
Do you consider a single teacher useless if she or he can't personally teach every student in the world at once? Do you consider a meal useless unless it means you'll never have to eat again? Do you consider RAM useless unless each piece can hold all the files you'll ever need to store?
This isn't "a scale mismatch". It's just people going out and significantly decreasing the problem. And with them cutting it down by maybe a third of one percent this week and somebody else finding another approach that cuts it by another half a percent next week and so on, the work gets done. Thats what real life is. You go out and make things better. And with six billion of us, you don't need to assume that one little development will fix the problem. Only that it moves us forward.
Every vehicle anywhere that switches away from gasoline to diesel or some other fuel cuts the demand for gasoline. Demand goes down, prices for gas go down.
I doubt many coffee shops go through enough grinds to make this remotely economical.
Let's do some rough math. According to TFA, coffee grounds are at least 15% oil. So if a typical coffee shop disposes of 20 lbs of grounds a day, which I would guess is modest, then we're talking about approx. 3 pounds of oil. Are you saying that it will use up a pound or more of oil to transport that to somewhere to process it? And if a coffee shop generates less, why would they have to dispose of it daily? Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.
If we assume that retail space costs $4 per square foot (which is a high estimate for much of the country) and that grounds are stored 4' high, then if, say, 20 lbs of grounds are stored per cubic foot, each square foot of space can store at least 12 lbs of oil. Assuming that oil is worth fifty cents a pound and pickup once every three days, then $0.50 * 12 lbs * 10 pickups = $60 net revenue.
You tell me, is $60.00 bigger than $4.00? It's been a while since I took arithmetic but I seem to remember that this is so.
You didn't read what I wrote very carefully, did you? I didn't write just "something with a logo on it". I wrote about sending some of an actual distinctive product to then be used by people on Mars. Do you have any idea how much your own suppliers would spend for this privilege?
"The Mars team uses Fluke temperature sensors. Shouldn't you?" "On Mars they enjoy real Wyoming free range beef."
You want to make sarcastic remarks about Squall jackets? Dude, do you have any idea of the cred Lands' End got in their early days from having their stuff photographed being worn by sailing teams? Personally, I was over at J. Crew for some of that time and I can guarantee that the folks who ran J.Crew in those days would have jumped at such a chance. These days I live in Portland. As the poster before me noted, have you ever heard of our little local outfit, Nike? They spend a few bucks now and again to get their gear seen being used by high profile people. Certainly no more than half a billion dollars a year. Maybe you've seen some of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You must have cornered the market on tinfoil in order to create that hat.
Oh, really? Then let's see you refute his positions. They all look entirely reasonable to me. But what would I know? I'm just a former econ major from a family of policy geeks who has actually researched all of these points.
Sorry, guys, but to me these seem like choices for people who are techies first and last and writers only incidentally. There are tools out there that were designed for writing complex documents *without* needing to bloody well learn tech skills. Personally, I'm quite fond of Quark CopyDesk, which was designed for professional writers who want to explicitly be able to block out formatting stuff and just focus on the words. Let's also remember some of the useful orphans out there like Nisus. These days you can get copies for ten or twenty bucks, including everything, and the feature set is rich as the dickens. Of course, I do most of my writing in TextEdit, which replaced BBedit for me, and do the rest in Indesign so YMMV.
I was going to foe you but then found that you posted anonymously. Funny how most neocons do. Not willing to be accountable for your actions, maybe?
I'm thinking nuclear power plants
Oh, I don't doubt that you are. Which right there shows that you have no idea of the real comparative costs of various possible energy sources. Howsabout this, you go and build (not plan, actually build and get operational) a standalone, pays its own bills, unsubsidized and safe facility built that will store any and all nuclear waste in a form where twenty randomly chosen engineers with relevant expertise agree that your storage means is safe for at least a thousand years, regardless of what happens to management of the facility or possible sabotage or theft and then we can *start* to discuss how you're planning to do "cost effective" nuclear power.
Fucking anti-intellectual, cowardly, petty ass, right wing, mumble, grumble...
Amazing how much disinformation there is out there on this one. So far I've only *occasionally* been able to track it back to oil companies. Do the research. The real primary reasons for increases in grain prices are massively increased Asian demand for meat, more and more crop blights (mostly from global warming and from agribusiness-caused problems), and ever heavier use of petroleum-derived fertilizers.
Yes, biofuels-destined crops have caused *some* of it, as well as boomtime increases in prices for some kinds of cropland. But even there we're talking about the kind of virgin sourced, feedstock inefficient approaches that nobody responsible in the biofuels community was ever recommending in the first place. The only reason that those crops were grown and used that way was that yet again the agribusiness companies like ConAgra and Archer-Daniels-Midland had undermined a social trend for their own short-term enrichment.
I must say, I've found this whole "biofuels caused the food price increases" meme impressively persistent and, if you look into it, one with a formidably fast rise time. Just kinda appeared out of nowhere in about a year and a half. Do the research, folks. Search on "grain crop blight" and things like that instead of terms that will just point you back to the disinfo.
I live four blocks from a car lot that is always filled with nothing but seventies and eighties BMWs and Mercedeses. There are quite a few of these in Portland and two that I know of in Eugene. Why? Because there are now companies that do nothing but buy up those old cars, clean them up, optimize them for biofuels, and resell them. There's even a company near me called (seriously) Lovecraft, that does just the conversions. They're busy all the time. (Should I say damned busy? Busy with tentacles on top?)
Yeah. I don't know about the rest of the country, but out here on the freaky west coast, diesel cars are already an everyday fact of life.
Coffee grounds are nowhere near rich enough in oils to make your scenario reasonable. For coffee to be worth more as fuel than as tasty beverage, fuel prices would need to reach, oh, fifteen dollars a gallon, while somehow production, processing, and shipping costs for coffee stayed constant. You might as well say that people will stop eating shitakes because they might become more valuable as compost.
Thanks for the linkage. But let's not forget that modern algal production means could be done just fine on rooftops and over spaces like parking lots. Not only is this, in that sense, utterly unused land, it would even protect what's there now from the elements. Not to mention that the people "working the farm" could walk to work from city center apartments.
No, many of us would rather live in 21st century Europe (but with more space and less regulation) than in 1970's America. Because that's what the previous poster's world would most resemble. Dude, hate to break it to ya (no, I don't) but *you're* the one living the clumsy, outdated lifestyle. As for costs, I'm guessing that you haven't done the math on cost/benefit here. Those of us who eat our daily serving of clue know better. I've got three words for you: Tyson's Corner redesign.
My. Your points are exactly the kinds of reasons that folks like me are trying to get intentional communities to regulatory parity with nuclear family-oriented lifestyles.
You're right, living the way that you do and disposing of your "waste" the way that you do, every little change is tiny gain trying to justify significant cost. But out here in Oregon more and more people are living illegally, getting by with less access to mortgages, violating fire codes, and so on to live five to twenty people to a household. But since regulations are designed to obstruct adding more bathrooms, they tend to have to share them even though they would gladly pay the cost of building in more. Since water regulations make it a crime to put their greywater on their gardens, they sneak it out a little at a time and never put in efficient dedicated greywater plumbing. Since putting a greenhouse on the lot would also be a tell of those illegal people, not to mention unfundable with a second mortgage shared by all those people, instead they build cheesy little ones out of scrap and grow a third of the food they could, using twice the space and adding almost no living space to the house. And on and on.
Why do I bring all this up? Because in a two or three person household, you're right, this kind of thing is all pain almost no gain. But the larger the household, the more practical it gets to either sort into more categories or perhaps even build a little homebrew-style setup and do the diesel separation right there. Yet again we see that the real barriers to living sustainably trace back to our corporate-backed, fifties originated, "nuclear family" lifestyles.
And you think that you're adding something useful to the conversation why, again?
Thank you. Actually, I'm hoping that a friend of a friend who is a chemist at an oil company will be joining this thread soon. Seems like plenty of folks have no idea how much processing takes place to get that stuff to and ready for the gas station.
Okay, you had me until you took it as a given that "In the course of business" a "pickup" costs $500. Could you point us to a citation for that?
Don't we all?
Truth is, with things like thermal depolymerization getting more common, we may be closer than you think.
More like the "eyes", "ribs", etc. are on 12th street, 17th street, 20th street, etc. You're pushing the scale. I don't know. Maybe it's being a Portlander. Maybe it's having studied the data on just what the distribution of Starbucks outlets is as a monopolistic practices issue. But I seem to be considerably more aware than many of y'all of just how much coffee is brewed in this country.
Howsabout you walk through your nearest downtown and actually count the density of coffee consumers? And remember that we're largely talking about not just pure cases of coffee and not much else. We're largely talking about IHOP, Dunkin' Donuts, and others who generate tons of waste oil otherwise who are or will be getting pickups of biowaste for oil generation already.
This is, as I point out in my other main post, about the specifics of things just like that and frankly, I'm not sure I can be bothered to post anything more in response to people who simply don't seem to know where to place the commas and decimal places in their numbers for this situation.
It's been a hell of a long time since anybody just "pumped it out of the ground". Oil these days is forced up with thousands of tons of pressurized (and now toxic) water, run through hundred million dollar curving, shifting pipe complexes that are prone to breaking waaaaaaay down in the ground. If, that is, the platform can be kept on station, the local government doesn't collapse, the pipeline isn't blown up by rebels or simply competing power groups, and on and on. If you think that we're comparing biofuels to a process where people just dig a hole a few feet deep and oil just politely spurts into a tank, then I think that you need to take a look at how these things are done in the modern world.
Sure. In some places. Two years ago or even longer ago. Times have changed since then. Check it out. These days there have been increasing problems with waste oil being *stolen* from behind restaurants. Around here waste oil tanks are chained, locked, and covered in PROPERTY OF.. stickers these days. Certainly, not everybody has figured it out yet but the economics of used oil have changed, even with fuel prices now dropping back down. For a while.
As for the mechanics you're talking about, just like anything else, a new approach is taking a while to get new infrastructure. Waste oil containers *designed* for transfer. Sealed transfer means that are more like the effluent pipes for a motor home than like the kind of manual lift, turn, and scrub you're used to. Catalysts to reduce residue in tanks. Spinner filters that push all that goo out of the way with far less use of consumables.
This kind of thing not only has to deal with half a dozen categories of health and safety regs, it also gets alternately obstructed and improved by big, semi-monopoly firms like Waste Management. But it's also being addressed by more engineers and private designers than the Manhattan Project.
But the bottom line is that these kinds of things are very new and to judge long term viability, let alone net pricing, based on the cobbled together amateur hour stuff you're talking about is like judging what a PC can do based on a badly soldered Altair. Demand is there. Supply is there. McDonalds and the other fast food chains, plenty of non-profits, and several hundred governments are funding the creation of better ways to do this. In fact, McDonalds has been selling their waste oil in Europe for quite a few years now. For, mind you, a hefty profit.
Oh, and fwiw, I'm well acquainted with the mechanics of this. I was just pricing retail space last night, I've been through quite a few waste oil facilities and have gone over things like transfer techniques, residual water percentages, and so on, with people up to and including the head of process engineering for Kettle potato chips and various demand side folks in both east and west coast biofuels processors, including ones from near you. Just talked last month with the New York State head of such things a few months back about the lack of publicity the NY State programs done upstate under Pataki got. I think that you'll find that Patterson will change that.
It ain't over yet, dude. And if you check into petrochemical processing from a hundred years ago you will find that it was messy, awkward, wasteful, and far more dangerous. These things take a little time. And they're improving fast.
Take a look again at my pricing. I give fifty cents a pound as the net value for oil. Which is a damned conservative valuation even including those costs. Think of what oil sells for now. Dude, I'm a former logistics and process consultant; I'm way ahead of you.
Oh, and for future reference, comedy shows, especially ones meant to undermine respect for thinking and work, are rarely good guides to framing the utility of an activity.
Couldn't agree more. Not only that, we're getting much better at turning vegetable-sourced feedstocks into all of this, including the plastics. Gawd, I love the future. At least these parts of it.
LOL. Well, now I can sleep. Thanks ;->
Our car companies and national vehicle policies haven't turned out to be very bright. Some people say that eventually this may even cause American car makers to have financial problems. Maybe you've heard about it.
Funny how people keep talking about fuel used to transport other fuel being some sort of dealbreaker. How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers? If transporting gas half way across the world, which is what we do now and have for generations, isn't a big deal, then why do people keep thinking that transporting some other fuel a few hundred miles will eat up all of its net energy advantage?
This isn't about COFFEE FIXES THE ENTIRE WORLD. It's about yet another proof that we are surrounded by hundreds of viable sources of sustainable fuel. That now that we're finally waking up to it, gasoline and diesel and the lot are just carbon and hydrogen and a few other plentiful elements, all of which are quite literally common as dirt and easy to shift from one simple set of molecules to another. It's only being subjected to over a hundred years of propaganda and sabotage by the oil companies that made us forget that in the first place. Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel, to name two, certainly always knew better.
Do you consider a single teacher useless if she or he can't personally teach every student in the world at once? Do you consider a meal useless unless it means you'll never have to eat again? Do you consider RAM useless unless each piece can hold all the files you'll ever need to store?
This isn't "a scale mismatch". It's just people going out and significantly decreasing the problem. And with them cutting it down by maybe a third of one percent this week and somebody else finding another approach that cuts it by another half a percent next week and so on, the work gets done. Thats what real life is. You go out and make things better. And with six billion of us, you don't need to assume that one little development will fix the problem. Only that it moves us forward.
Every vehicle anywhere that switches away from gasoline to diesel or some other fuel cuts the demand for gasoline. Demand goes down, prices for gas go down.
I doubt many coffee shops go through enough grinds to make this remotely economical.
Let's do some rough math. According to TFA, coffee grounds are at least 15% oil. So if a typical coffee shop disposes of 20 lbs of grounds a day, which I would guess is modest, then we're talking about approx. 3 pounds of oil. Are you saying that it will use up a pound or more of oil to transport that to somewhere to process it? And if a coffee shop generates less, why would they have to dispose of it daily? Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.
If we assume that retail space costs $4 per square foot (which is a high estimate for much of the country) and that grounds are stored 4' high, then if, say, 20 lbs of grounds are stored per cubic foot, each square foot of space can store at least 12 lbs of oil. Assuming that oil is worth fifty cents a pound and pickup once every three days, then $0.50 * 12 lbs * 10 pickups = $60 net revenue.
You tell me, is $60.00 bigger than $4.00? It's been a while since I took arithmetic but I seem to remember that this is so.
You didn't read what I wrote very carefully, did you? I didn't write just "something with a logo on it". I wrote about sending some of an actual distinctive product to then be used by people on Mars. Do you have any idea how much your own suppliers would spend for this privilege?
"The Mars team uses Fluke temperature sensors. Shouldn't you?"
"On Mars they enjoy real Wyoming free range beef."
You want to make sarcastic remarks about Squall jackets? Dude, do you have any idea of the cred Lands' End got in their early days from having their stuff photographed being worn by sailing teams? Personally, I was over at J. Crew for some of that time and I can guarantee that the folks who ran J.Crew in those days would have jumped at such a chance. These days I live in Portland. As the poster before me noted, have you ever heard of our little local outfit, Nike? They spend a few bucks now and again to get their gear seen being used by high profile people. Certainly no more than half a billion dollars a year. Maybe you've seen some of it.