Whilst with many providers calls to mobiles with the same provider are free, this system makes them always fee.
I'm also pretty sure you don't need to hack out to get on the mesh, and not make paid calls, you just don't put any credit on your pre-paid phone.
I have been reading "Deep Economy", and it argues the case that the larger modern farms (as most smaller ones have now consolidated or disappeared) produce more food per dollar than farms of the past, however to do this they use vast amounts of excessively cheap energy given to us by oil. They also use petroleum based fertilisers etc etc. Historical farm practices developed before mechanised farming was driven by oil and diesel produce more crops per unit of land, and are less energy intensive, simply because the farmers had to make a living off a small allotment of land, and did not have an abundant supply of energy. These days it's all about driving down costs, and this can be done by increasing the size of a farm to push down overheads. The margins are so low in that business now, there is little choice about how you think of efficiency, it has to be efficiency in terms of dollars. It's more efficient in terms of dollars to buy more land, than to hire more labour to reduce (cheap) energy costs, or to use that labour to further maximise yield.
A lot of the historical farming methods also utilised free energy in forms like encouraging animals that would eat the weeds and not the crops.
I doubt energy efficiency and other forms of efficiency will become a focus until there are large changes in our economic system, or legislation that ties somethings dollar value closer to it's energy input and environmental cost values. At this point it is far cheaper to just burn some extra oil, than to make your process more efficient.
Eolas deserves a smack for extorting money from Microsoft, even though their patent has been rejected (according to summary).
Whilst I did chuckle that MS had to pay money for something so simple, I though it impossible there was no prior art, or that running a flash object without clicking is not obvious!
Looking at http://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au/, The Prius comes first in terms of greenhouse gasses and air pollution, and equals the diesels in terms of fuel consumption. The Prius also offers more usable space than it's most fuel efficient competitors.
Sure the embodied energy of any new car isn't amortized across as many passenger/kms, so you are nearly always better off putting the kilometres on a used car than a new one in terms of total energy use, but the Prius amortizes those manufacture costs much more quickly than almost any other cars. Your actually better off buying the *most* used car rather than a recent one, since it's manufacture costs have already been spread across a lot of mileage.
I'd be surprised if the transport of cars to market is a big factor, especially spread across the volume of cars. I think you'd find those ships are reasonably efficient for the amount of cargo they move (the very nature of their scale makes this an important factor for the companies operating them).
It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market.
Nice crack about the communists! 52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government, sure sounds like central planning to me!
In reply to **
The difference is it can be seen that an SUV driver does affect others, whilst it's hard to show that Jane Doe aborting has an effect on others (I'm going to stay out of the argument of whether the unborn is one of the others for this post).
Jane Doe would have gotten the same effect by not having sex leading to pregnancy, so the main ways she affects people is by making someone put up with a condom, or not have sex.
The SUV driver makes the roads less safe (even just with vision blocking concerns), perhaps changes the climate, aside from road damage.
I hope you can see how someone might feel the SUV driver is infringing upon others freedoms more than the aborter, even if you don't feel that way yourself.
No you are completely right. Let the factories pour heavy metals into the rivers, it'll regulate itself when their customers die off! Better that than the business moves to China to wreak the same havoc there!
You have to worry about gas guzzlers for the same reason you have to worry about anything that uses a lot of resources - the resources have to come from somewhere.
Now it may be better for the US to get it domestically rather than from the middle east, but there is always an opportunity cost. Fuel production may compete with agricultural land used for food production, forcing the society as a whole to decide between more food and more fuel. At this point a rich person buying a gas guzzler, is likely depriving a poor person of food.
Efficiency is never a bad thing, if you can have a car that performs exactly the same, but consumes less resources, thats a no disadvantage situation.
Most people who can afford expensive cars, can afford to buy efficient cars too.
It bothers people who see it as a waste of human effort, that society has put that person in that car. They've earned/allocated themselves a larger than usual portion of what society produces, and then used it for a superficial or not so useful purpose. It's not so much jealousy as the "better than others" attitude that is incubated within people like this that puts people offside.
BTW, even though there are many cars designed for going fairly fast, public roads are designed that way. Thats what race tracks are for.
Because the sum is larger than the parts. It's made up of individual people, but since those people do whatever is most necessary to them at any given point in time, and the whole bureaucracy can get a lot of momentum, they can always make it most necessary for certain people to do fucked up things at some points in time.
Of course there is some debate about if property rights includes intellectual. I don't believe it did when the term Laissez-faire was coined. Besides like you said, reverse engineering isn't stealing, so there need be no economic interventionism in this case to maintain individual liberty, peace, security and property rights.
Lying about your product is a big part of capitalism. It's called advertising. We *REGULATE* that because it can become an unhealthy part of capitalism. There is certainly nothing non-capitalist about driving up the price of your product, but increasing it's demand, and that is what they are doing. There is nothing non-capitalist about driving your costs down so that you are more competitive in the market. In fact, if demand is eleastic enough, Apple would be forced out of the market as the price comes down. Pure capitalism comrade.
Even when a computer is "soft-off" some power supplies draw a couple of watts just to keep the PCs clock, and power switch working.... Newer supplies are better at this of course. It will use the same power if you just plug it in of course.
People have been running villages off solar power since the 70s. It's not a version 1.0 model, it's more like a version 10..... Even the 17% efficient cells have been out there for decades of testing.
The reason is, your trying to reduce the weight of the vehicle to increase how far you can go on the energy you gather. So your far better to have the solar panels on the roof of your garage at home, and on the roof of the parking station or some other building at your workplace, and leave them stationary. Putting them on the car itself doesn't make them generate more energy, in fact they are far less likely to face the sun in this case, and they add weight to the car. You probably have more surface area on your garage than on your car in any case.
Indeed. Chuck a power meter on your devices that are in "standby"...... You'd be surprised how much more than a simple IR reciever is drawing power in these devices that are in standby. According to this hardcoreware review at idle, the xbox 360 draws 157 Watts, the PS3 177 watts, and the Wii 13.5. In standby, the Wii draws 1.3 (or 9.6 with Connect24 On), the 360 draws 2.5 watts, and the PS3 uses 1.9.
2.5 Watts, 24 hours a day, just for being plugged in. Pathetic. I could leave a light on 8 hours a day and use less power.
Where I live, it'd be close to impossible to get council to approve build a wind turbine mast.... But people are able to put up high TV antennas willy nilly... I don't believe the wind turbine would be louder than the drone of the waves on the beach nearby.
The problem is, what do you do when you have done all that? Hopefully your energy demands are now low enough you can cover it with a small amount of solar panels.
Get an electric bicycle. I did, I can travel the 10kms to work in around 30 mins, without lifting a finger. But lately, I've been getting more exercise by using the battery less and pedaling more, thus getting a secondary benefit of getting fit. I sweat a little on warmer days if I push myself, but I just head to work a little early, cool down out the back, and then get changed into fresh clothes I take with me, and put on plenty of deodorant. You'd be surprised how quickly you can cool down on a hot day in the shade. (assuming you did pedal, and thus needed to cool down.)
Does a CRX fit four adults in relative comfort?
Would you rather be in a poorly ventilated car park full of Prius's getting around around on battery power, or slowly moving/idling CRX's?
I think the CRX was/is a great car, but the prius has some advantages in being a much greener option than other comparable cars. If you only need a car the size of a CRX, it's probably a better option.
It is very dependent on your terrain. Nice flat road, you can go a long way, it's acceleration that kills it. I've done more than 2.5 miles in my Australian spec Prius (I have a regular 5 km jaunt I do where I think it'd be a waste to start the engine. It's mostly flat, with a slight rise and then drop at the end. I have to creep up the rise a bit slowly, but then I recharge the batteries a bit on the short drop at the end).
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Whilst with many providers calls to mobiles with the same provider are free, this system makes them always fee. I'm also pretty sure you don't need to hack out to get on the mesh, and not make paid calls, you just don't put any credit on your pre-paid phone.
I have been reading "Deep Economy", and it argues the case that the larger modern farms (as most smaller ones have now consolidated or disappeared) produce more food per dollar than farms of the past, however to do this they use vast amounts of excessively cheap energy given to us by oil. They also use petroleum based fertilisers etc etc. Historical farm practices developed before mechanised farming was driven by oil and diesel produce more crops per unit of land, and are less energy intensive, simply because the farmers had to make a living off a small allotment of land, and did not have an abundant supply of energy. These days it's all about driving down costs, and this can be done by increasing the size of a farm to push down overheads. The margins are so low in that business now, there is little choice about how you think of efficiency, it has to be efficiency in terms of dollars. It's more efficient in terms of dollars to buy more land, than to hire more labour to reduce (cheap) energy costs, or to use that labour to further maximise yield. A lot of the historical farming methods also utilised free energy in forms like encouraging animals that would eat the weeds and not the crops. I doubt energy efficiency and other forms of efficiency will become a focus until there are large changes in our economic system, or legislation that ties somethings dollar value closer to it's energy input and environmental cost values. At this point it is far cheaper to just burn some extra oil, than to make your process more efficient.
Eolas deserves a smack for extorting money from Microsoft, even though their patent has been rejected (according to summary). Whilst I did chuckle that MS had to pay money for something so simple, I though it impossible there was no prior art, or that running a flash object without clicking is not obvious!
Looking at http://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au/, The Prius comes first in terms of greenhouse gasses and air pollution, and equals the diesels in terms of fuel consumption. The Prius also offers more usable space than it's most fuel efficient competitors. Sure the embodied energy of any new car isn't amortized across as many passenger/kms, so you are nearly always better off putting the kilometres on a used car than a new one in terms of total energy use, but the Prius amortizes those manufacture costs much more quickly than almost any other cars. Your actually better off buying the *most* used car rather than a recent one, since it's manufacture costs have already been spread across a lot of mileage. I'd be surprised if the transport of cars to market is a big factor, especially spread across the volume of cars. I think you'd find those ships are reasonably efficient for the amount of cargo they move (the very nature of their scale makes this an important factor for the companies operating them).
It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market. Nice crack about the communists! 52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government, sure sounds like central planning to me!
In reply to ** The difference is it can be seen that an SUV driver does affect others, whilst it's hard to show that Jane Doe aborting has an effect on others (I'm going to stay out of the argument of whether the unborn is one of the others for this post). Jane Doe would have gotten the same effect by not having sex leading to pregnancy, so the main ways she affects people is by making someone put up with a condom, or not have sex. The SUV driver makes the roads less safe (even just with vision blocking concerns), perhaps changes the climate, aside from road damage. I hope you can see how someone might feel the SUV driver is infringing upon others freedoms more than the aborter, even if you don't feel that way yourself.
No you are completely right. Let the factories pour heavy metals into the rivers, it'll regulate itself when their customers die off! Better that than the business moves to China to wreak the same havoc there!
You have to worry about gas guzzlers for the same reason you have to worry about anything that uses a lot of resources - the resources have to come from somewhere. Now it may be better for the US to get it domestically rather than from the middle east, but there is always an opportunity cost. Fuel production may compete with agricultural land used for food production, forcing the society as a whole to decide between more food and more fuel. At this point a rich person buying a gas guzzler, is likely depriving a poor person of food. Efficiency is never a bad thing, if you can have a car that performs exactly the same, but consumes less resources, thats a no disadvantage situation.
Most people who can afford expensive cars, can afford to buy efficient cars too. It bothers people who see it as a waste of human effort, that society has put that person in that car. They've earned/allocated themselves a larger than usual portion of what society produces, and then used it for a superficial or not so useful purpose. It's not so much jealousy as the "better than others" attitude that is incubated within people like this that puts people offside. BTW, even though there are many cars designed for going fairly fast, public roads are designed that way. Thats what race tracks are for.
Because the sum is larger than the parts. It's made up of individual people, but since those people do whatever is most necessary to them at any given point in time, and the whole bureaucracy can get a lot of momentum, they can always make it most necessary for certain people to do fucked up things at some points in time.
Of course there is some debate about if property rights includes intellectual. I don't believe it did when the term Laissez-faire was coined. Besides like you said, reverse engineering isn't stealing, so there need be no economic interventionism in this case to maintain individual liberty, peace, security and property rights.
Lying about your product is a big part of capitalism. It's called advertising. We *REGULATE* that because it can become an unhealthy part of capitalism. There is certainly nothing non-capitalist about driving up the price of your product, but increasing it's demand, and that is what they are doing. There is nothing non-capitalist about driving your costs down so that you are more competitive in the market. In fact, if demand is eleastic enough, Apple would be forced out of the market as the price comes down. Pure capitalism comrade.
And when they do, because your energy usage is low, it's a small up front cost to go solar, and get off their life-support.
If you get a grid feed system, you don't need batteries... ;-)
Even when a computer is "soft-off" some power supplies draw a couple of watts just to keep the PCs clock, and power switch working.... Newer supplies are better at this of course. It will use the same power if you just plug it in of course.
People have been running villages off solar power since the 70s. It's not a version 1.0 model, it's more like a version 10..... Even the 17% efficient cells have been out there for decades of testing.
The reason is, your trying to reduce the weight of the vehicle to increase how far you can go on the energy you gather. So your far better to have the solar panels on the roof of your garage at home, and on the roof of the parking station or some other building at your workplace, and leave them stationary. Putting them on the car itself doesn't make them generate more energy, in fact they are far less likely to face the sun in this case, and they add weight to the car. You probably have more surface area on your garage than on your car in any case.
Indeed. Chuck a power meter on your devices that are in "standby"...... You'd be surprised how much more than a simple IR reciever is drawing power in these devices that are in standby. According to this hardcoreware review at idle, the xbox 360 draws 157 Watts, the PS3 177 watts, and the Wii 13.5. In standby, the Wii draws 1.3 (or 9.6 with Connect24 On), the 360 draws 2.5 watts, and the PS3 uses 1.9. 2.5 Watts, 24 hours a day, just for being plugged in. Pathetic. I could leave a light on 8 hours a day and use less power.
Yeah, nuke is the future, people are just waving their hands to get a nuke in their back yard....
Where I live, it'd be close to impossible to get council to approve build a wind turbine mast.... But people are able to put up high TV antennas willy nilly... I don't believe the wind turbine would be louder than the drone of the waves on the beach nearby.
The problem is, what do you do when you have done all that? Hopefully your energy demands are now low enough you can cover it with a small amount of solar panels.
If the lights are timed for 30mph, you can also catch the greens at 15mph (just every second green instead of every 1st green).
Get an electric bicycle. I did, I can travel the 10kms to work in around 30 mins, without lifting a finger. But lately, I've been getting more exercise by using the battery less and pedaling more, thus getting a secondary benefit of getting fit. I sweat a little on warmer days if I push myself, but I just head to work a little early, cool down out the back, and then get changed into fresh clothes I take with me, and put on plenty of deodorant. You'd be surprised how quickly you can cool down on a hot day in the shade. (assuming you did pedal, and thus needed to cool down.)
Does a CRX fit four adults in relative comfort? Would you rather be in a poorly ventilated car park full of Prius's getting around around on battery power, or slowly moving/idling CRX's? I think the CRX was/is a great car, but the prius has some advantages in being a much greener option than other comparable cars. If you only need a car the size of a CRX, it's probably a better option.
It is very dependent on your terrain. Nice flat road, you can go a long way, it's acceleration that kills it. I've done more than 2.5 miles in my Australian spec Prius (I have a regular 5 km jaunt I do where I think it'd be a waste to start the engine. It's mostly flat, with a slight rise and then drop at the end. I have to creep up the rise a bit slowly, but then I recharge the batteries a bit on the short drop at the end).