And you'll find that fructose is the hardest of the simpler sugars for humans to digest. In fact endurance athletes will avoid it almost entirely since it creates havoc in the intestinal system while under stress. Even while not under stress. Many have had the experience of getting the "shits" from eating too much fruit, and you'll be hard pressed to live on it, with the possible exception of the banana, which ought to be revered.
Starches, such as found in grains and tubers, in the presence of sufficient water, will digest nearly as fast as sugar, which we derive from. ..a grass. Which is lovely to eat raw.
Oddly enough, we seem to be better tuned to water plants, such as rice, than land plants, where you'll also find fish. Go figure.
No, things aren't simple, and we're essentially omnivores, but If I had to choose one thing to live on entirely it would be fresh, green rice. We seem designed for it. If I could have two things I'd add bananas, which we also seem tuned for, in moderation. Any decent survivalist can tell you you run the risk of starving to death on a diet of fish, even fairly fatty ones like trout and salmon. The Inuit also eat a lot of seal, whale, etc.
However, suppliment starchy plants with fish, insects and the odd rodent or two and you have the nearly perfect human diet, so far as I can determine.
Without turning to fairly advanced tools you'll have a hard time catching and making a meal from a cow.
Sure. I've tried wild rice, millet, and amaranth in the raw form. Not bad really, although I do prefer it cooked. I don't like raw termites either, although they are a staple food of some. I'm told I used to have quite a taste for ants though.
You'll find my kitchen contains a fair amount of these grains in their preserved by drying form, which necessitates my cooking them to return their natural moisture content, and yes, most the vitamin C is gone by not eating them in their raw, green form.
I'm curious, why do you suppose early agriculturalists, around the world and independantly, would go to such great lengths to domesticate grain if they didn't already consider it a staple food? It seems a pretty daft thing to do if you're already living on bananas and papaya.
If you wish to sell your risk to someone else you must have sufficient funds to do so, no? The risk buyer has carefully calculated his own risk to come out ahead, otherwise why would he buy risk?
It isn't an all or nothing thing, but this "capitalist thing" is essentially about taking your own risks. Even selling your risk is a form of risk. If you don't suffer a loss, you lose.
It's about being responsible for yourself. Not about making a lot of money. The notion that it's about making a lot of money is a fairly modern myth. You can arrange things so that you take less risk for lessor possible returns, but even if you just want to run a simple lawn mowing business to make ends meet nobody is going to buy the risk that you won't be able to find customers.
The social structure under which risk is distributed in such a way that you are guarunteed a salary even if you can't find customers is called socialism, but socialism, while it restricts your risk, sells that risk to the general populace, who then have a right to tell you what risks it will, or will not, tolerate you takeing.
In any case, the idea of risk is relative. If you start out with nothing you naturally have less to work with. If all you want to do is mow lawns, and all you have is $100 in your pocket, well, you're going to have to find some crappy old used mower, fix it up as best you can, eat Ramen noodles, and work your way up.
If you've already got $100k in the bank from somewhere, well, it's damed sight easier to spend a few hundred bucks on equipment and just eke out a continuing living without having to worry about where tomorrow's meal is coming from.
We're born naked. Until we can make our own we're dependant on what others give us. Some of us get given more. The ones who get given more have an easier time of it.
As well as high fat, and high a number of other things. Corelation does not equal causation. In this case they isolated choline in making the tests, which is at least proper methodolgy.
Oddly enough, working completely from memory (noncholine "supercharged"), human breast milk is the lowest in protein and fat content of any of these, as I recall ( and it's been some years since I specifically looked into this) about the same percentage as is found in brown rice.
Although remarkable omnivores, human beings are still, deep down, essentially grain eaters. It's the Staff of Life. We require far less protein than most other predatious creatures, like cats, dogs and . . . rats. The myth of "complete protein" comes from a study done on rats in the early 1930s, and debunked in the early thirties as well, although the myth has proven nearly impossible to shake. Once something makes it into print it seems impossible to unprint.
I'm naturally sceptical of animal studies applied to human beings, especially when it comes to nutrition. Our physiology is hardly unique, but it seems to have an odd sort of pliablity that gives strength. Like the reed bending in the wind. Unlike most animals we seem to be able to eat nearly anything, anywhere, and so long as it contains at least minimal amounts of the core substances of life, come out of the deal looking and acting basically the same. I'd say this is a prime reason we were able to spread across the earth. Wherever we went, we found food. A chimpanzee in the desert is hosed. A human will turn to snakes and lizards and do just fine. In the semidesert of a prarie, well, we're surrounded by the Staff of Life.
I'm with Mr. Jones on this one. Until such time as there is some real evidence of effect on human development I entirely hold my judgment, and I'm not inclined to hold my breath over it.
Note that I did not say "without oil." I know perfectly well where my bicycle tires, and the plastic shell of my bicycle saddle, come from, as well as the energy burned to create the high quality steel tubing from which it is made, and to deliver that tubing from Italy or England to my home in America.
However, the amount of oil used to lubricate your sewing machine for hundreds of years is expended in a single automobile oil change, and easily derived from locally produced vegetable sources. One ear of corn a year ought to do it.
My bicycle saddle is a nonconsubable. I will be able to hand it down to my kids in 30 years, and I've already used it for 30. The amount of rubber in my bicycle tires is about that in a couple of tread blocks of an automobile tire, much of the rubber, and its entire carcass, are from natural sources (latex and silk/cotton). I use about 3 oz. of grease in my bicycle every 10 years or so, and I'm the sort that completely strips it down and rebuilds it four or five times a year, seeing as how I travel about 10k mile/yr in all weather. Nevermind what I save in oil compared to casting and machining a single automobile's engine block.
About 20 gallons worth of gasoline covers my bicycle oil usage for life.
My treadle sewing machine is over 100 years old. thus its manufacture does not go against my personal consumption of oil. It works as well today as it did 99 years ago. Again, I'll hand it down to my kids. The only thing I've ever had to replace is the leather belt. If I were to design a new one I'd probably use a toothed rubber belt though, that requires oil to manufacture. It's a better sewing machine for patchwork and fine tailoring than any electric machine I've ever used, and I've used just about all of them ( I was a sewing machine salesman for a few years).
Again, I didn't say anything about not using oil. I said foreign oil. Nor does much of that oil need to come from petroleum stocks, so little of it is used directly, and much of that is in the form of nonconsumables.
Oil was used to make them. Oil is needed to use them. But no. not much oil. As much oil as is needed to make 22 pounds of machine, in the case of my bicycle, as oppossed to 22 hundred pounds of (oil consuming) machine in the case of a crackerbox Hyundai. As much oil was consumed in shipping its bits to me as is consumed in shipping 30 pounds, not 30 hundreds of pounds.
And my bicycle even provides some of my electric power. When I'm riding a stationary trainer, why use a wasteful source of resistence when I can use a generator just as easily?
Not to mention the fact that what I save in liablilty costs alone in a few years pays for all of my human powered devices for the rest of my life. Which means I don't have to work at all to make that money if I don't choose, which means I don't have to do the oil burning commuting to do the work either.
Tell ya what. I propose a race. From LA to NYC. We each start with 500 gallons of refined oil. You use yours to make a car and drive it to NYC. I'll use mine to make a bicycle and ride it to NYC.
I figure I'll be sipping a latte in Tavern on the Green while you're pushing your, whatever it is you manage to whip up vaguely resembling a car, through Pasadena.
Good luck with the Rockies.
Yes, I'll use oil. But not much. I'll have some left over on account.
Since we live in an oil economy we could even translate this into purely monatary terms, since each dollar represents a certain amount of energy. Thousand bucks apeice (roughly analogous to 500 gallons of refined oil). Ah, seems like you're stuck in LA. You're a little short on your oil budget. And there I am, in Tavern on the Green, sipping my latte, although I did have to subsist on rice and lentils to fit the entire trip into budget. That's ok. I like rice and lentils.
Look, I have nothing against cars, per se. The first thing anybody is prone to think when they first enter my house is
. ..but I have to service my customers first and I only have 24 hours in a day.
Bingo! And your hours are more valuable taking care of those things that only you can take care of than they are taking your clothes to the cleaners and picking them up again, and all those thousand and one little tasks that the modern "seceratary" has been taught to refuse to do.
I've known salesman who payed assistants out of their own pocket when the company refused to provide one, because their time selling was worth more than the time doing the things the assistant did for them. And I'm not talking about million dollar a year salesman. I'm talking about people in their first year or two in the trade making $20k themselves if they were lucky.
Yes, startup is tough. You thought you were through living on Ramen noodles and sleeping on a hand-me-down sofa bed when you got out of school, didn't you? Now you've got all that again, plus the fact that you'll spend many a night tossing on that sofa bed wondering how in the hell you're going to make Friday's payroll.
You rich, bloody capitalist pig you.
Even so, you'll find that you're better off in the long run (like, within a year) hiring one technologist and one assistant than hiring two technologists, because that assistant will be leveraged into more, and better, work by both yourself and your technologist. The affect it can have on morale alone is astounding.
Use the software for what software can legitimately do. Like connect you with your technologists, and them with your customers. But use people for what only people can do, like making sure you never run out of toner, and thus lose hours of valuable work time while you chase after more instead of chasing after customers or getting the print job out by deadline.
Go to your local college and find a CE sophmore who'll take a part time internship for $7.50/hr, 10 hrs/wk.
Don't lie to them. Tell them they're going to be the office schlub for a startup with dubious finances and future. If they take the job they'll bust their ass for you with a smile on their face.
Just be sure to reward them when you've reached the point where you can. They'll be yours for life if you do that.
They'll piss all over you if you don't, and you'll deserve it.
You'll find the switch in your breaker box. Or on your power strip/UPS if you arrange things carefully.
No one forces you to take your cell phone with you at all times, or to actually have it turned on if you do have it with you. If you've been trained to salivate every time a bell rings, well, untrain yourself, we have that advantage over dogs.
Yes, I know your post was a joke, but it's one of those jokes that's funny because of its ultimate truth.
The power of control was with you all along. Just click your heels together three times.
If your seceratay/personal assistant/receptionist isn't worth $40k a year you've got the wrong person in the job.
This isn't a place for a decorative "dumb blonde." That's Fortune 500 CEO stuff.
In a small, virtual, high tech company doing most of its work/business over internet/phone the assistants should be among the sharpest people you've got working for you, and payed for it.
They'll pay back their high salaries in triplicate. Thus they're cheap. The reduction of the assistant to a "seceratary" is one of the greatest tragedies of the corporate world.
KFG
Re:So that's where it goes...
on
The Power of Sewage
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yes, there is something woefully wrong with those books. They are oversimplified for their ignorant target market, oftentimes by members of that target market themselves who have no deep understanding whatsoever and are merely cribbing from other such books with no deep understanding.
They do ignore waste, such as that found in excrement and the the heat put off by the body, but that's because that waste is of no interest to them.
Nontheless they do manage to get some of the crude details right. Those charts ignore waste, but not by not taking it into account, rather by simply ignoring those calories not actually consumed by the body in producing useful energy.
Yes, I can can power myself on my bicycle for half an hour at 15 mph or so on the fuel contained in a single chocolate donut. Three chocolate donuts will drive me at 25 mph for an hour or so. Substitute about three large bananas for each donut if you like. This is one of the reasons I prefer to bicycle rather than drive.
The human body is an astoundingly wonderous device for turning hydrocarbons into mechanical energy. Just how wonderous can be seen from your own observation, a good deal of the chocolate donut ends up as waste in the urine and excrement, and yet I still drive my bicycle with what I've absorbed for half an hour.
Pay no attention to those stupid calorie counting books. If you want to the know the real deal, explained in hard scientific fact, but written for the intelligent layman, go to your library where almost certainly find these works:
Aerobics. The groundbreaking work itself, based on Dr. Kenneth Cooper's work with training in the military.
Move on immediately to Covert Bailey's Fit or Fat . Covert is formerly a professional sports bum, and currently a Doctor of Exercise Physiology, with an absolutely wonderful way of expressing his knowledge for popular consumption. He's the Carl Sagan of exercise and diet. Read the book, but if your library has his tape series, watch them. If they don't, request them.
From there go to the bicycling science books of Dr. Edmund Burke (also a Doctor of Exercise Physiology), the record holder for bicycling from Buffalo to Albany, NY (14 hours and some minutes. 320 or so miles). These are bit more hard core, but still intended for popular reading.
Supplement with MIT Press's Bicycling Science and Engineering. This is a general lay scientific work on human power generation and the bicycle, the most efficient means of harnessing such power.
If your interest is, or becomes, more in depth than these books cover they are full of references to the orginal studies they are based on.
Then go buy yourself a bicycle, a treadle sewing machine, a wind up radio and a shakable flashlight. These are the most wonderous of all of man's creations so far. People are lazy, so they have spent most of their time developing technologies to avoid using their muscles, but if you combine high tech with muscle power you can accomplish amazing things, and all without foreign oil.
Not to mention the benefits to strength, health, and general fitness.
If I'm paying $$$ for a commercial grade table saw, I don't wanna have to buy an aftermarket book to tell me how to use it?
There is a difference in "how" to use something, i.e. what the levers and dials do, and the art, craft, and wisdom is in applying those dials and levers.
My table saw manufacturer is obliged to provide me with a manual explaining the proper and safe use of the device. He is not obliged to tell how to apply the device specifically to the making a grandfather clock and a Shaker trestle table.
Other people write books to help me figure that out.
Digesters have been around for about 100 years. During WWII with gas rationing they became quite common, one version even coming on a trailer you could pull behind your car while collecting manure, and then run your car from.
During the gas crunch of the 70s digesters popped up all over the place and there was hardly an issue of Mother Earth News that didn't have some new design/application of a digester featured in it showing how you could power your farm/homestead on shitty methane.
There are still thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of digesters scattered across Americas rural areas. Virtually all of them are built by the owners out of scrap materials for nearly nothing.
Perhaps there are only 20 of this expensive commercial variety. A lot of companies like to make money by taking old ideas that people in general have forgotten about, plate them in chrome, and sell them as the latest technology for a premium price.
Go to the library. See if they've got back issues of Mother Earth News from the 70s and 80s. Lots of good digesters ideas in there, although often a bit crudely implimented.
The mere idea of excrement for fuel energy goes back to God only knows how long. It's certainly prehistoric. The Plains Indian relied on Buffalo Chips for fuel, and the Indian Indian still does today.
Latrine Officer was one of the most important posts in Napoleon's army. His job? To retrieve human excrement. It was too valuable an energy source to waste. They used it to be able to make their own gunpowder as they traveled, which is one of the reasons that Napoleon's armies seemed to be able to pull off almost magical feats of translating themselves from one location to another and arrive ready to fight.
Shit is energy. We know that. We've always known that. We've known that that energy can be extracted as natural gases and used to run combustion engines and turn electric generators for over a century. It's news so old it's boring.
It's even a reasonably viable way to go about making energy, if you live on a small farm with lots and lots of animals producing lots and lots of shit you need to do something with.
For city dwelling humans, well, it will never be anything more than a suppliment to other forms of energy. Something you can use because it's there, but nothing to be relied upon.
Why? Well, how much did you shit today? Does that amount of shit convert into the electricity you used?
Not even close.
You'll need a lot of other animals who don't watch TV shitting for you as well. Like on a farm, say.
And nevermind the fact that most of the shit (including human) is more valuable as a fertilizer (which is where much of the treated sewage is going right now) than it is as a fuel, so you're invoking the whole food for fuel argument. It may be better to burn that fuel we can't eat, or use for food production, and eat the fuel we can.
Somewhere along the line I dropped the bit where I was supposed to say, "If you live somplace with conditions similar to Cape Cod," as did my Boston/New Bedford family (one of the lights I'm using right now is a ship's lantern from the Charles W. Morgan, sold to my grandfather when the ship was stripped of gear before sending it off to Mystic).
Obviously below the line in Chile your milage will vary.
Insolation, no. They didn't use any when the design was developed (except for snow), although they did have an understanding of passive heating. The real issue though was that they had to use tallow and whale oil for light. Facing what windows you had all toward the sun was a major plus, especially in the winter when the sun stayed low and set early, and as it happens on Cape Cod the prevailing winter winds are from northwest and the sun rises in the southeast. So yes, it was designed to face in a particular direction. Just not for a reason that's necessarily obvious to a modern who doesn't regulate his day by the sun.
Because cheap electric lighting has somewhat obviated that need. It really is a wonder and dirt cheap stuff, even today. It's things like the refrigerator, washing machine and climate control that really suck the juice down.
I'm perfectly happy to generate electric light with nothing more than muscle power.
The TV? Forget it.
Of course if your skies aren't predominantly blue and sunny as they are on the Mass. coastline, and light is mostly shades of grey, you can put your windows anywhere you want and face your back to the wind without much penalty.
This is exactly why the geodedic dome died as a personal living structure. Yes, they enclose the most space with the least materials, but most of that space is wasted in a house sized dome.
The first Quonset huts were just half circle shells. Oops. That sucks. Add a four foot high "knee" wall. Much better. Ah! That's the why the Iroquois built the long house that way. And they didn't even have to deal with bookcases.
I'll take a slightly different slant to most of the other responses.
I have nothing against cookie cutter houses, per se. A good design is a good design. There's a bit a movement now among the Navajo to start building tradtional hogans again, with modern materials, because, as it turns out, it's a good design, better than the modern house for where and how they live. The real problem with the houses in suburbia is that they regurgitate poorly made bad designs.
But at least they're vastly overpriced and wasteful, so they've got that going for them. They are what a local architect calls "cartoons" of houses.
Then you've got the houses that are at least well made, but nonsensically. The Cape Cod salt box built because it's a "style," but with absolutely no clue that it's shaped like that for a reason. You'll see these with the high face pointing northward and into the wind. Morons.
It's a house. It's supposed to house you. Make a nice one and don't worry about your indviduality over much. That's what your lawn ornaments are for.
But at least build a good house, not some crackerbox that's all expensive (but ugly), nonfunctional (or even counter-functional) facade and no substance.
In fact, salt boxes are very nice houses, if you face them south with their backs to the wind.
Yeah, I was waiting for that response, that's why I put it in there like that.:) How did you know about the racoons though? Oh, yeah, another upstater.
GT Pinto intrigues me. I might have to start keeping my eyes open.
The hits are going to come from people who mostly know better though. i.e. people intimately familiar with the workings of this club.
Right. People who get there by bookmark. Google on cars and the site is nowhere. Google on Sports Cars and hit #1 is the SCCA national site, and the regional sites are nowhere.
Very odd site to spoof. The only thing I can think of that makes any sort of sense at all is if it's part of a spamming campaign of some sort.
What a wishy-washy article. To sum up and save you the 2 minutes of your life to read that article, all 4 techs are good, and they are all good for something, bad at others.
Yes, this was the one truely useful and vaguely professional aspect of the article.
Well, I assumed they probably chose the regional site, rather than the national one, on that basis.
I just can't see a regional site drawing what they would consider decent traffic. Nobody in the SCCA, let alone in the actual region, is likely to go to the rip off site, even by accident, and the number of people not in the SCCA who would pay it much attention, even by accident, must be fairly miniscule.
What a totally weird thing to rip off, a regional SCCA website. ..
I've been kinda scratching my head over that one too. It's hard to imagine drawing much illicit traffic from people wondering about F500 regional events at Watkins Glen, innit?
It's not like it's a general car information site that would show up in a search about oil change intervals or what to do with that old Gremlin sitting on blocks in your yard.
Very strange. Perhaps the people responsible are just actually clueless.
The whole, very short and cursory, article was peculiar from start to finish. It gives evidence of being written by someone arguing against current perceptions of infringement as theft, and as being good for everyone in general, and yet wholely wrapped up in wholely modern conceptions of intellectual property as promolugated by the media industry.
Every time he talks about "piracy" in the recording industry he's really talking about a legal right granted by Congress under Constitutional law, "pirating" from the public domain.
In short, he really thinks of intellectual property as property and that using it without the author's permission is some sort of theft.
Slashdot Mirror
And note that rats have gone everywhere people have, in their company.
KFG
And you'll find that fructose is the hardest of the simpler sugars for humans to digest. In fact endurance athletes will avoid it almost entirely since it creates havoc in the intestinal system while under stress. Even while not under stress. Many have had the experience of getting the "shits" from eating too much fruit, and you'll be hard pressed to live on it, with the possible exception of the banana, which ought to be revered.
.a grass. Which is lovely to eat raw.
Starches, such as found in grains and tubers, in the presence of sufficient water, will digest nearly as fast as sugar, which we derive from. .
Oddly enough, we seem to be better tuned to water plants, such as rice, than land plants, where you'll also find fish. Go figure.
No, things aren't simple, and we're essentially omnivores, but If I had to choose one thing to live on entirely it would be fresh, green rice. We seem designed for it. If I could have two things I'd add bananas, which we also seem tuned for, in moderation. Any decent survivalist can tell you you run the risk of starving to death on a diet of fish, even fairly fatty ones like trout and salmon. The Inuit also eat a lot of seal, whale, etc.
However, suppliment starchy plants with fish, insects and the odd rodent or two and you have the nearly perfect human diet, so far as I can determine.
Without turning to fairly advanced tools you'll have a hard time catching and making a meal from a cow.
KFG
Every try eating raw, unground grain?
Sure. I've tried wild rice, millet, and amaranth in the raw form. Not bad really, although I do prefer it cooked. I don't like raw termites either, although they are a staple food of some. I'm told I used to have quite a taste for ants though.
You'll find my kitchen contains a fair amount of these grains in their preserved by drying form, which necessitates my cooking them to return their natural moisture content, and yes, most the vitamin C is gone by not eating them in their raw, green form.
I'm curious, why do you suppose early agriculturalists, around the world and independantly, would go to such great lengths to domesticate grain if they didn't already consider it a staple food? It seems a pretty daft thing to do if you're already living on bananas and papaya.
KFG
If you wish to sell your risk to someone else you must have sufficient funds to do so, no? The risk buyer has carefully calculated his own risk to come out ahead, otherwise why would he buy risk?
It isn't an all or nothing thing, but this "capitalist thing" is essentially about taking your own risks. Even selling your risk is a form of risk. If you don't suffer a loss, you lose.
It's about being responsible for yourself. Not about making a lot of money. The notion that it's about making a lot of money is a fairly modern myth. You can arrange things so that you take less risk for lessor possible returns, but even if you just want to run a simple lawn mowing business to make ends meet nobody is going to buy the risk that you won't be able to find customers.
The social structure under which risk is distributed in such a way that you are guarunteed a salary even if you can't find customers is called socialism, but socialism, while it restricts your risk, sells that risk to the general populace, who then have a right to tell you what risks it will, or will not, tolerate you takeing.
In any case, the idea of risk is relative. If you start out with nothing you naturally have less to work with. If all you want to do is mow lawns, and all you have is $100 in your pocket, well, you're going to have to find some crappy old used mower, fix it up as best you can, eat Ramen noodles, and work your way up.
If you've already got $100k in the bank from somewhere, well, it's damed sight easier to spend a few hundred bucks on equipment and just eke out a continuing living without having to worry about where tomorrow's meal is coming from.
We're born naked. Until we can make our own we're dependant on what others give us. Some of us get given more. The ones who get given more have an easier time of it.
So it has always been. So it always shall be.
KFG
As well as high fat, and high a number of other things. Corelation does not equal causation. In this case they isolated choline in making the tests, which is at least proper methodolgy.
Oddly enough, working completely from memory (noncholine "supercharged"), human breast milk is the lowest in protein and fat content of any of these, as I recall ( and it's been some years since I specifically looked into this) about the same percentage as is found in brown rice.
Although remarkable omnivores, human beings are still, deep down, essentially grain eaters. It's the Staff of Life. We require far less protein than most other predatious creatures, like cats, dogs and . . . rats. The myth of "complete protein" comes from a study done on rats in the early 1930s, and debunked in the early thirties as well, although the myth has proven nearly impossible to shake. Once something makes it into print it seems impossible to unprint.
I'm naturally sceptical of animal studies applied to human beings, especially when it comes to nutrition. Our physiology is hardly unique, but it seems to have an odd sort of pliablity that gives strength. Like the reed bending in the wind. Unlike most animals we seem to be able to eat nearly anything, anywhere, and so long as it contains at least minimal amounts of the core substances of life, come out of the deal looking and acting basically the same. I'd say this is a prime reason we were able to spread across the earth. Wherever we went, we found food. A chimpanzee in the desert is hosed. A human will turn to snakes and lizards and do just fine. In the semidesert of a prarie, well, we're surrounded by the Staff of Life.
I'm with Mr. Jones on this one. Until such time as there is some real evidence of effect on human development I entirely hold my judgment, and I'm not inclined to hold my breath over it.
KFG
Then he said to me,"Look, I have given you cow's dung for human dung, and you shall prepare your bread with that."
:)
Ezekiel 4:15
God also knew which was the better excrement for fuel.
KFG
Note that I did not say "without oil." I know perfectly well where my bicycle tires, and the plastic shell of my bicycle saddle, come from, as well as the energy burned to create the high quality steel tubing from which it is made, and to deliver that tubing from Italy or England to my home in America.
However, the amount of oil used to lubricate your sewing machine for hundreds of years is expended in a single automobile oil change, and easily derived from locally produced vegetable sources. One ear of corn a year ought to do it.
My bicycle saddle is a nonconsubable. I will be able to hand it down to my kids in 30 years, and I've already used it for 30. The amount of rubber in my bicycle tires is about that in a couple of tread blocks of an automobile tire, much of the rubber, and its entire carcass, are from natural sources (latex and silk/cotton). I use about 3 oz. of grease in my bicycle every 10 years or so, and I'm the sort that completely strips it down and rebuilds it four or five times a year, seeing as how I travel about 10k mile/yr in all weather. Nevermind what I save in oil compared to casting and machining a single automobile's engine block.
About 20 gallons worth of gasoline covers my bicycle oil usage for life.
My treadle sewing machine is over 100 years old. thus its manufacture does not go against my personal consumption of oil. It works as well today as it did 99 years ago. Again, I'll hand it down to my kids. The only thing I've ever had to replace is the leather belt. If I were to design a new one I'd probably use a toothed rubber belt though, that requires oil to manufacture. It's a better sewing machine for patchwork and fine tailoring than any electric machine I've ever used, and I've used just about all of them ( I was a sewing machine salesman for a few years).
Again, I didn't say anything about not using oil. I said foreign oil. Nor does much of that oil need to come from petroleum stocks, so little of it is used directly, and much of that is in the form of nonconsumables.
Oil was used to make them. Oil is needed to use them. But no. not much oil. As much oil as is needed to make 22 pounds of machine, in the case of my bicycle, as oppossed to 22 hundred pounds of (oil consuming) machine in the case of a crackerbox Hyundai. As much oil was consumed in shipping its bits to me as is consumed in shipping 30 pounds, not 30 hundreds of pounds.
And my bicycle even provides some of my electric power. When I'm riding a stationary trainer, why use a wasteful source of resistence when I can use a generator just as easily?
Not to mention the fact that what I save in liablilty costs alone in a few years pays for all of my human powered devices for the rest of my life. Which means I don't have to work at all to make that money if I don't choose, which means I don't have to do the oil burning commuting to do the work either.
Tell ya what. I propose a race. From LA to NYC. We each start with 500 gallons of refined oil. You use yours to make a car and drive it to NYC. I'll use mine to make a bicycle and ride it to NYC.
I figure I'll be sipping a latte in Tavern on the Green while you're pushing your, whatever it is you manage to whip up vaguely resembling a car, through Pasadena.
Good luck with the Rockies.
Yes, I'll use oil. But not much. I'll have some left over on account.
Since we live in an oil economy we could even translate this into purely monatary terms, since each dollar represents a certain amount of energy. Thousand bucks apeice (roughly analogous to 500 gallons of refined oil). Ah, seems like you're stuck in LA. You're a little short on your oil budget. And there I am, in Tavern on the Green, sipping my latte, although I did have to subsist on rice and lentils to fit the entire trip into budget. That's ok. I like rice and lentils.
Look, I have nothing against cars, per se. The first thing anybody is prone to think when they first enter my house is
. . .but I have to service my customers first and I only have 24 hours in a day.
Bingo! And your hours are more valuable taking care of those things that only you can take care of than they are taking your clothes to the cleaners and picking them up again, and all those thousand and one little tasks that the modern "seceratary" has been taught to refuse to do.
I've known salesman who payed assistants out of their own pocket when the company refused to provide one, because their time selling was worth more than the time doing the things the assistant did for them. And I'm not talking about million dollar a year salesman. I'm talking about people in their first year or two in the trade making $20k themselves if they were lucky.
Yes, startup is tough. You thought you were through living on Ramen noodles and sleeping on a hand-me-down sofa bed when you got out of school, didn't you? Now you've got all that again, plus the fact that you'll spend many a night tossing on that sofa bed wondering how in the hell you're going to make Friday's payroll.
You rich, bloody capitalist pig you.
Even so, you'll find that you're better off in the long run (like, within a year) hiring one technologist and one assistant than hiring two technologists, because that assistant will be leveraged into more, and better, work by both yourself and your technologist. The affect it can have on morale alone is astounding.
Use the software for what software can legitimately do. Like connect you with your technologists, and them with your customers. But use people for what only people can do, like making sure you never run out of toner, and thus lose hours of valuable work time while you chase after more instead of chasing after customers or getting the print job out by deadline.
Go to your local college and find a CE sophmore who'll take a part time internship for $7.50/hr, 10 hrs/wk.
Don't lie to them. Tell them they're going to be the office schlub for a startup with dubious finances and future. If they take the job they'll bust their ass for you with a smile on their face.
Just be sure to reward them when you've reached the point where you can. They'll be yours for life if you do that.
They'll piss all over you if you don't, and you'll deserve it.
And yes, I'll have a look at your software.
KFG
Yes, but it's wiped out, and a good deal more, by the not so virtual self-employment tax.
But at least I'm going to get it all back when I retire, right?
Right?
KFG
You'll find the switch in your breaker box. Or on your power strip/UPS if you arrange things carefully.
No one forces you to take your cell phone with you at all times, or to actually have it turned on if you do have it with you. If you've been trained to salivate every time a bell rings, well, untrain yourself, we have that advantage over dogs.
Yes, I know your post was a joke, but it's one of those jokes that's funny because of its ultimate truth.
The power of control was with you all along. Just click your heels together three times.
KFG
If your seceratay/personal assistant/receptionist isn't worth $40k a year you've got the wrong person in the job.
This isn't a place for a decorative "dumb blonde." That's Fortune 500 CEO stuff.
In a small, virtual, high tech company doing most of its work/business over internet/phone the assistants should be among the sharpest people you've got working for you, and payed for it.
They'll pay back their high salaries in triplicate. Thus they're cheap. The reduction of the assistant to a "seceratary" is one of the greatest tragedies of the corporate world.
KFG
Yes, there is something woefully wrong with those books. They are oversimplified for their ignorant target market, oftentimes by members of that target market themselves who have no deep understanding whatsoever and are merely cribbing from other such books with no deep understanding.
They do ignore waste, such as that found in excrement and the the heat put off by the body, but that's because that waste is of no interest to them.
Nontheless they do manage to get some of the crude details right. Those charts ignore waste, but not by not taking it into account, rather by simply ignoring those calories not actually consumed by the body in producing useful energy.
Yes, I can can power myself on my bicycle for half an hour at 15 mph or so on the fuel contained in a single chocolate donut. Three chocolate donuts will drive me at 25 mph for an hour or so. Substitute about three large bananas for each donut if you like. This is one of the reasons I prefer to bicycle rather than drive.
The human body is an astoundingly wonderous device for turning hydrocarbons into mechanical energy. Just how wonderous can be seen from your own observation, a good deal of the chocolate donut ends up as waste in the urine and excrement, and yet I still drive my bicycle with what I've absorbed for half an hour.
Pay no attention to those stupid calorie counting books. If you want to the know the real deal, explained in hard scientific fact, but written for the intelligent layman, go to your library where almost certainly find these works:
Aerobics. The groundbreaking work itself, based on Dr. Kenneth Cooper's work with training in the military.
Move on immediately to Covert Bailey's Fit or Fat . Covert is formerly a professional sports bum, and currently a Doctor of Exercise Physiology, with an absolutely wonderful way of expressing his knowledge for popular consumption. He's the Carl Sagan of exercise and diet. Read the book, but if your library has his tape series, watch them. If they don't, request them.
From there go to the bicycling science books of Dr. Edmund Burke (also a Doctor of Exercise Physiology), the record holder for bicycling from Buffalo to Albany, NY (14 hours and some minutes. 320 or so miles). These are bit more hard core, but still intended for popular reading.
Supplement with MIT Press's Bicycling Science and Engineering. This is a general lay scientific work on human power generation and the bicycle, the most efficient means of harnessing such power.
If your interest is, or becomes, more in depth than these books cover they are full of references to the orginal studies they are based on.
Then go buy yourself a bicycle, a treadle sewing machine, a wind up radio and a shakable flashlight. These are the most wonderous of all of man's creations so far. People are lazy, so they have spent most of their time developing technologies to avoid using their muscles, but if you combine high tech with muscle power you can accomplish amazing things, and all without foreign oil.
Not to mention the benefits to strength, health, and general fitness.
KFG
If I'm paying $$$ for a commercial grade table saw, I don't wanna have to buy an aftermarket book to tell me how to use it?
There is a difference in "how" to use something, i.e. what the levers and dials do, and the art, craft, and wisdom is in applying those dials and levers.
My table saw manufacturer is obliged to provide me with a manual explaining the proper and safe use of the device. He is not obliged to tell how to apply the device specifically to the making a grandfather clock and a Shaker trestle table.
Other people write books to help me figure that out.
KFG
Digesters have been around for about 100 years. During WWII with gas rationing they became quite common, one version even coming on a trailer you could pull behind your car while collecting manure, and then run your car from.
During the gas crunch of the 70s digesters popped up all over the place and there was hardly an issue of Mother Earth News that didn't have some new design/application of a digester featured in it showing how you could power your farm/homestead on shitty methane.
There are still thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of digesters scattered across Americas rural areas. Virtually all of them are built by the owners out of scrap materials for nearly nothing.
Perhaps there are only 20 of this expensive commercial variety. A lot of companies like to make money by taking old ideas that people in general have forgotten about, plate them in chrome, and sell them as the latest technology for a premium price.
Go to the library. See if they've got back issues of Mother Earth News from the 70s and 80s. Lots of good digesters ideas in there, although often a bit crudely implimented.
The mere idea of excrement for fuel energy goes back to God only knows how long. It's certainly prehistoric. The Plains Indian relied on Buffalo Chips for fuel, and the Indian Indian still does today.
Latrine Officer was one of the most important posts in Napoleon's army. His job? To retrieve human excrement. It was too valuable an energy source to waste. They used it to be able to make their own gunpowder as they traveled, which is one of the reasons that Napoleon's armies seemed to be able to pull off almost magical feats of translating themselves from one location to another and arrive ready to fight.
Shit is energy. We know that. We've always known that. We've known that that energy can be extracted as natural gases and used to run combustion engines and turn electric generators for over a century. It's news so old it's boring.
It's even a reasonably viable way to go about making energy, if you live on a small farm with lots and lots of animals producing lots and lots of shit you need to do something with.
For city dwelling humans, well, it will never be anything more than a suppliment to other forms of energy. Something you can use because it's there, but nothing to be relied upon.
Why? Well, how much did you shit today? Does that amount of shit convert into the electricity you used?
Not even close.
You'll need a lot of other animals who don't watch TV shitting for you as well. Like on a farm, say.
And nevermind the fact that most of the shit (including human) is more valuable as a fertilizer (which is where much of the treated sewage is going right now) than it is as a fuel, so you're invoking the whole food for fuel argument. It may be better to burn that fuel we can't eat, or use for food production, and eat the fuel we can.
KFG
Somewhere along the line I dropped the bit where I was supposed to say, "If you live somplace with conditions similar to Cape Cod," as did my Boston/New Bedford family (one of the lights I'm using right now is a ship's lantern from the Charles W. Morgan, sold to my grandfather when the ship was stripped of gear before sending it off to Mystic).
Obviously below the line in Chile your milage will vary.
Insolation, no. They didn't use any when the design was developed (except for snow), although they did have an understanding of passive heating. The real issue though was that they had to use tallow and whale oil for light. Facing what windows you had all toward the sun was a major plus, especially in the winter when the sun stayed low and set early, and as it happens on Cape Cod the prevailing winter winds are from northwest and the sun rises in the southeast. So yes, it was designed to face in a particular direction. Just not for a reason that's necessarily obvious to a modern who doesn't regulate his day by the sun.
Because cheap electric lighting has somewhat obviated that need. It really is a wonder and dirt cheap stuff, even today. It's things like the refrigerator, washing machine and climate control that really suck the juice down.
I'm perfectly happy to generate electric light with nothing more than muscle power.
The TV? Forget it.
Of course if your skies aren't predominantly blue and sunny as they are on the Mass. coastline, and light is mostly shades of grey, you can put your windows anywhere you want and face your back to the wind without much penalty.
KFG
for decades. Just a bit more time consuming and wasteful, since it removes material rather than adding.
You build your foundation and floor. You put a giant "baggie" over it. You pump it full of foam. Wait for it harden.
Now start carving.
Some very interesting free form homes have been made this way. I don't know that I'd want to live in one, but they are interesting.
KFG
This is exactly why the geodedic dome died as a personal living structure. Yes, they enclose the most space with the least materials, but most of that space is wasted in a house sized dome.
The first Quonset huts were just half circle shells. Oops. That sucks. Add a four foot high "knee" wall. Much better. Ah! That's the why the Iroquois built the long house that way. And they didn't even have to deal with bookcases.
KFG
I'll take a slightly different slant to most of the other responses.
I have nothing against cookie cutter houses, per se. A good design is a good design. There's a bit a movement now among the Navajo to start building tradtional hogans again, with modern materials, because, as it turns out, it's a good design, better than the modern house for where and how they live. The real problem with the houses in suburbia is that they regurgitate poorly made bad designs.
But at least they're vastly overpriced and wasteful, so they've got that going for them. They are what a local architect calls "cartoons" of houses.
Then you've got the houses that are at least well made, but nonsensically. The Cape Cod salt box built because it's a "style," but with absolutely no clue that it's shaped like that for a reason. You'll see these with the high face pointing northward and into the wind. Morons.
It's a house. It's supposed to house you. Make a nice one and don't worry about your indviduality over much. That's what your lawn ornaments are for.
But at least build a good house, not some crackerbox that's all expensive (but ugly), nonfunctional (or even counter-functional) facade and no substance.
In fact, salt boxes are very nice houses, if you face them south with their backs to the wind.
KFG
evict the racoon family and RACE IT!
:) How did you know about the racoons though? Oh, yeah, another upstater.
Yeah, I was waiting for that response, that's why I put it in there like that.
GT Pinto intrigues me. I might have to start keeping my eyes open.
The hits are going to come from people who mostly know better though. i.e. people intimately familiar with the workings of this club.
Right. People who get there by bookmark. Google on cars and the site is nowhere. Google on Sports Cars and hit #1 is the SCCA national site, and the regional sites are nowhere.
Very odd site to spoof. The only thing I can think of that makes any sort of sense at all is if it's part of a spamming campaign of some sort.
KFG
What a wishy-washy article. To sum up and save you the 2 minutes of your life to read that article, all 4 techs are good, and they are all good for something, bad at others.
Yes, this was the one truely useful and vaguely professional aspect of the article.
KFG
Well, I assumed they probably chose the regional site, rather than the national one, on that basis.
/. just gave them a hit infusion.
I just can't see a regional site drawing what they would consider decent traffic. Nobody in the SCCA, let alone in the actual region, is likely to go to the rip off site, even by accident, and the number of people not in the SCCA who would pay it much attention, even by accident, must be fairly miniscule.
Yeah, until
KFG
I resent that! Everyone knows I'm really Madonna.
My condolences.
KFG
What a totally weird thing to rip off, a regional SCCA website. . .
I've been kinda scratching my head over that one too. It's hard to imagine drawing much illicit traffic from people wondering about F500 regional events at Watkins Glen, innit?
It's not like it's a general car information site that would show up in a search about oil change intervals or what to do with that old Gremlin sitting on blocks in your yard.
Very strange. Perhaps the people responsible are just actually clueless.
KFG
Although in this case there aren't simply "stealing," they are plagerizing.
I don't think anybody here is claiming to be Madonna.
KFG
The whole, very short and cursory, article was peculiar from start to finish. It gives evidence of being written by someone arguing against current perceptions of infringement as theft, and as being good for everyone in general, and yet wholely wrapped up in wholely modern conceptions of intellectual property as promolugated by the media industry.
Every time he talks about "piracy" in the recording industry he's really talking about a legal right granted by Congress under Constitutional law, "pirating" from the public domain.
In short, he really thinks of intellectual property as property and that using it without the author's permission is some sort of theft.
Very badly thought out and written article.
KFG