Just as something cheap and elements tight to start out with, they are fine, no different from a camping trailer except no axles and wheels. The planet is awash in those things now, especially north america. Like the others said, add insulation and white reflective paint to the roof (we use that here on the broiler houses, brand name polar guard), and so on, and perhaps site it in shade.
We live in a tinroof cabin in Georgia, where it gets plenty hot, without AC. The reason we can do that, is because it sits in shade. Being oaks, the leaves drop in the winter when it is colder and it sits in mostly sun then, and we use wood for heat off the property primarily. Both ways of dealing with temp extremes work, and are a lot more affordable than the alternatives, and we stay comfy. Back to the containers, you can also construct a free standing roof with around a two foot clearance over them to act as man made shade. I've seen that a lot in RV parks, not only makes it cooler, but it protects from hail damage or snow accumulation damage or rain leaks. And speaking of which, we lived in our RV, which is smaller than a shipping container, for four years before we moved here, so I'll call that similar to your office experience. It was comfortable enough, it had insulation and so on. I actually liked it, forced you to make decisions on what is really necessary or not. Saved a bunch really. Paid a grand even for a "home", that not only is adequate shelter, but is self contained with a generator and onboard water tanks and so on, plus I added solar PV and a battery bank to it. That's another alternative cheap housing today, well, in areas where RVs are common anyway. And if you ever need to move from job relocation, there ya go, makes it ewasier.
The bottom line is, there are practical ways to avoid the 30 year mortgage and the going into tremendous debt with zero job security anymore just to have a place to live, no matter where you are. I think it is a fine idea what Tata is doing, trying to make things affordable for their own people there, plus still make a buck at it. Seems a win/win for everyone concerned. Right now we are going through a lot of economic bullshit in the US because everybody and their cousin decided they needed a bloated energy hog mac mansion at a matching huge bloated price, insatead of actually looking at things more realistically and "making do" with something smaller and cheaper and more affordable in shaky economic times. Seems to be near epic fail at this point with the "supersize" everything reality we acquired as a society, combined with losing sight of the difference between what your home should be and some random house you are occupying and treating as a get rich quick "investment".
Tata Nanos are meant to be affordable upgrades for families that try to haul mom and dad and the kids and the groceries all on some little scooter. I doubt that is safer than the Nano.
I mean, never ever. We understand your NYC existence, but it DOESN'T RELATE to us. We aren't naieve, we are as practical as you are.
You just don't get it on what it takes to make your lifestyle in NYC possible, not really grokking it.
There is NEVER going to be some sort of universal "mass transportation" that will work for the population in general, and our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.. It is not going to happen, there is never going to be any sort of huge change. There are *millions and millions* of us out here who need to carry more than a laptop and some takeout from the deli. And that's that. That's reality.
Public transpo does not work for much more than that sort of very light load. And you might not believe it, but our work, involving moving big quantities of stuff, is both useful and necessary and isn't going away. And it is a big list,and it makes your ultra urban lifestyle possible. Without us, your huge cities don't exist. Period. So just stop with telling us what we "don't understand" and stop giving us advice on transportation, it got old years ago.
Some of us live rural, some live suburban, and we are going to drive personal vehicles, because that is the only thing that works for our lifestyle, and once in awhile take public transportation, but not very often. Some of us live on farms, others work in factories (some still anyway) outside the major urban areas, some in mining some in energy related fields some in logging and so on. And we need an even higher number of folks to then work retail and services and etc in the hundreds of thousands of local communities that service these necessary and productive pursuits, and that covers a huge area of the US, much larger than the top 100 urban areas combined, where mass transpo can be somewhat practical (including your cabs).
Maybe 5% (guessing, some smallish number) of the US land area can be served well with mass transportation, the other 95% will need roads and trucks and cars. And that 5% is already at least partly covered with that sort of transportation, buses and trains, etc.
Bicycles are useful as well, I like them, I used to own and operate a bicycle shop, but they in no way manner shape or form can contribute to much in the way of bulk transportation and useful necessary work that needs to be done outside of light duty courier work and very small and very local small size delivery.
For everything else, cars and trucks for the most part, excluding railfreight, which mostly has to be tied to the road network anyway for most purposes.
You want to make a REAL difference? Lobby your bosses and companies (if you are a shareholder and get to vote on such things and make a point at shareholder conferences) to institute more telecommuting for those folks who really only sit in front off a screen and telephone and get rid of those huge wasteful SUV styled energy hog buildings that are nothing more than big dick statements for your Cxx class of overpaid and stupid offshore specialist job killing buffoons.
Stop insisting that those folks who want to live with a bit of green around them and to actually have yards travel "downtown" every day to do what they could be doing in their home office. Moving bits and bytes is a lot cheaper and would make more of an environmental impact for the positive than trying to come upo with yet another hugely expensive way to move people every day so they can then go move bits and bytes, even if they are "taking the train" or riding a bus or a bicycle. Wasteful as all get out..
THAT is a real practical solution to commuting for millions of people, building out our broadband infrastructure better, not trying to make some small scale mass transpo work across the broad land.
Broadband for the Broad Land should be the number one priority now, not these "everyone take the bus" arguments. Stop moving people AT ALL if it isn't necessary.
Yes, and it still means it costs them less in the long run. I believe everyone here in the US who is an adult and has done their taxes knows the difference between a tax deduction and a credit, and I was careful to say "deduction". The WSJ is an exception to the subscription rule there for that and the other reasons people brought up in the thread. The entire point was *most* online sources won't be in a credible position to start charging fees, whereas a few periodicals like the WSJ can. I just brought up one more reason why they are able to do that, it helps somewhat with taxes when it is deductible, plus their readership demographics are probably representative of a much higher average pay scale, making such things more affordable.
Also, you do know you can reply here to someone without nasty comments, right?
Did joe academic add in the cost of buying an unobtanium brand electric vehicle, or plug in hybrid? Oh wait, you can get one for a hundred grand and sit on a waiting list, and the fifty grand models are "coming soon" for the past buncha years, and even fifty grand is sorta steep for most folks nowadays.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but lets get real, it will take decades of them being on the market at affordable prices before we get rid of all the internal combustion vehicles out there, decades and multiple trillions of dollars in cost to the consumers. Right now, liquid biofuels are the only credible option to OPEC and friends cartel price manipulations. And forget switchgrass, why not push for legalization of industrial hemp instead, because it can be grown on marginal and hilly ground not suitable for food production and has tremendous yield at not much production cost.
I think that most folks who subscribe to the WSJ also deduct it as a business expense. A lot of other periodicals it might be sorta iffy if that would fly with the tax man.
All these bubbles can be laid at the feet of easy credit. And it starts with a credit based money supply scheme, rather tha a past produced wealth money supply system. For millenia, money was actual wealth, or a tangible and portable representation of wealth, wealth that had been produced, past tense. Now nations use a future credit system that inflates the money supply way beyond what actual wealth production would indicate as being sane, thinking that in the future, enough wealth creation will be done to cover that inflation. It is "loaned into existence". About as crazy a notion as it gets. They never get it right, no matter how much they try, and always eventually overly inflate, as they did with these mortgages then the derivatives of the mortgages and the sliced and diced risk contracts, which are bets on inflated wishful thinking once you distill it down. This leads to a series of boom and bust cycles that are more intense than they would have been if the supply really represented past produced wealth. Because you can't loan that which doesn't exist unless you inflate the system and base your figures on wishful thinking. That's all currencies are "backed" with now, a few fatcats ideas and some wishful thinking.
With people losing jobs left and right, maybe you wouldn't need as many permanent reporters if you offered to pay a cheap but reasonable sum for freelancer submissions. I mean heck, look how many people want to biog just because it is fun for them, something to do. Sweeten the pot a little with some cash, who knows... Identify what you want by subject and give some guidelines in advance, etc. I guess you'd have to wade through a lot of crap at first to see who did quality work or not and was reliable so you could count on them, but perhaps that might be a way to cut costs but still have good content. And like you said, that would be a way to reduce office space requirements as well if they just emailed the copy to you. I know every local community has folks who go to just about every local sporting event, other people are court junkies, just go there to watch, other folks love going to the county commission meetings, etc.
Just perhaps. I was just thinking about it, going back to the onions on belts days, how many of us wrote and gave it away free to the "alternative" press back then, just because we were passionate about the subject (usually politics and stuff, that's what I did, but I remember a lot of the artsy fartsy crowd did it as well, covering the local scene, the concerts and local theater and movie reviews and so on).
You may be able to outrun the cops old ford, but you'll never be able to beat his motorola...at least that's what we used to say back in ye olden days in detroit during the height of the muscle and pony car years.
I'd subscribe to a local if it was custom tailored to my requests. That would really be a way to "give the customer what they want". A weekly that was so designed and still came in cheap would be sufficient. Such as, I would prefer a lot more local and state news coverage, as national and international is just so much better online, and they could skip the huge middle section they push with high school sports. Other people might want the opposite, even more local grade school sports and gossip, etc. If newspapers had a way to easily do a custom version, it might work. And I also notice the totally free mostly ads/classifieds newspapers seem to be doing OK, both the English and Spanish papers around here.
Newspapers now throw the kitchen sink at people and they only read a couple of sections and the rest is a waste of paper and just costs them money and the advertisers for those sections you skip are paying for no eyeballs. Which makes the costs way higher than they need to be. Even on a large newspaper, I never read the fashion or travel or food or sports sections, woodstove kindling instantly. And I bet most folks read the newspaper in a similar fashion, just those sections they are really interested in and skip most of it. Making a custom fit paper, "news a la carte", could be an alternative way to do business. How hard to pull that off with the dead trees version, no idea.
And exactly what options do these "escorts" have? A big jumbo jet being "escorted" can still go where it wants to go. If you mean they could shoot it down, it is flying over one of the more densely populated areas of the world. Shooting it down there would probably result in as much destruction as if it just smashed into a building around there.
This isn't like some dude in a getaway car can get pushed by a squad car off to the side or something, "escorting" means they are close by observers and can do the menacing "waggle the wings" at them and use harsh language over the radio. In other words, they are about useless if in the situation as described in the article. If the potential hijackers have control of the plane, once they are at or near their target, which the escorts don't know what that is, they can most likely still hit it or get extremely close.
...but think of it another way. You have a job* in this economy, you DO get paid, I bet it is a *reasonable sum* with more bennies than most folks get, including vacation time and every federal holiday, and you get to work for Nasa.
There are worse fates than losing the odd half a day wage....
This is interesting in a political and an historical context. Gandhi worked with non violent means as a choice, but not as the only choice except by circumstance. Although he was a pacifist, he recognized that the "gun control" laws that prohibited the Indian people from ownership (mostly) were designed to quell any insurgency against the British colonial powers. The Indian people had been disarmed by the British, on purpose and "by law", (privately and even for the most part they had no armed governmental workers either) and as such they had no means to use force against their "masters". Non violent resistance then became their only option, and they suffered a lot for it. And in Germany, one of the very first acts the fascists managed was the almost total disarming of the civilian populations, making it quite easy for them to implement their "solutions". There's a pattern...
People seem to forget, civilization doesn't necessarily equal freedom or peace. Civilizations can be quite organized and have a great amount of civil governmental infrastructure, but still be violent with state sponsored terrorism and oppression of all the people or selected subgroups of the people there. Civil does not equal free. A full oppressive police state can be quite "civilized". Or like they are wont to say, "pacified".
I'll also add this as a personal anecdotal. As a civil rights worker back in the day (belts..onions..), there was some success, but it was one step back for every two forward and it was scary and it sucked mostly. It wasn't until the scene changed as more and more vets came back from viet nam who were either black and returned to still oppressive society or poor whites, who had gotten drafted while their richer peers got off with basket weaving majors in college with the 2s deferments, and those dudes weren't all necessarily into being non violent, quite the opposite actually, they had just returned from where being very violent was the expected norm. Whoops....
These folks and a growing sense of direct action combined with some other factors led to the major riots in the mid to late 60s. The powers that be (here comes my opinion) finally got scared enough to actually DO something about the situation rather than just talk about it. They didn't want to, they were *forced* to make some concessions.
The 64 civil rights act didn't do much of anything until the fatcats realized they could wake up one day with one or several major cities no longer under their control, important big cities. They would have been seized and occupied by outright rebels with a cause and several legitimate and rather large beefs, or burnt to the ground, either way, lost to their control. They capitulated, although they won't admit it, that is exactly what happened and it went beyond non violent protest or threat and promise of same to get there.
And everyone knew it.
Then stuff changed, for real this time. They *really* starting enforcing the civil rights laws, in a lot more places. They changed the draft to a lottery system so no more fatcats kids getting out of it. That backfired on them though, because that in turn lead to the war finally ending (started to become obvious it would end, put it that way), because the protests then quintupled/more in size from all these new kids suddenly realizing it wasn't going to be just the blacks from the ghettoes and rural farmers kids going, but THEM too, so they joined in the protests. It went from thousands to hundreds of thousands at protests, and rather quickly. And the situation was clearly not going in wallstreet's/government puppets favor, they had to keep backing down or they were eventually going to face the "heads on pikes" stage of social readjustment.
Now they did have a goonish reactionary success that they weaseled through, the passage of the 68 gun control act. That was a huge disappointment for true second amendment rights, and was clearly a racist and reactionary bill (you had to really be there to ca
I have yet to read any cogent argument for why pulse exists, what it is for, or why we somehow need it. I spent more than two days with that...insert scatological reference... and finally just removed it and now I have audio back working.
I disagree with this bogus premise: " 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'""
That's just lame. What they need is to go back to what merchant vessels on the high seas had forever as bog standard policy, except relatively recently with bullshit political correctness, and that is, they are armed with actual ARMS for self defense, not stupid squirt guns and big stereos.
Self defense is a human right, whether on land or sea, and playing make believe that weapons don't exist or they aren't the best tool for the job is just ludicrous. And this crap about some "legal jurisdiction" is again stupid, the old ways were the best, on the high seas, YOU have legal jurisdiction over your own safety, you are the law. someone attacks you, you have the right to use lethal self defense.
If these bozo shipping companies and their insurers can't trust their own crews with defending their own ships, cargoes and lives (the latter being a good inducement for the crews to be proactive in self defense), maybe they should pick better crews and offer a bit more training. We shouldn't be forced to use huge amounts of taxpayer money to provide expensive official navy vessels for commercial escort duty given the nature of these pirates being just fools in little boats with AKs and RPGs. The big merchant vessels can have a little stouter armament than that, and be able to protect themselves in 99%+ of the situations out there.
This weeniefication of society is just crap. When only the bad guys and the police/military have self defense arms, it is called a criminal police state, and these globalist goons seem bound and determined to turn it into a criminal police planet. Screw that.
I'll say it again, self defense is a human right. Any laws/regulations/policies to the contrary are totalitarian by nature.
The increasing importance of mobile computing where small screen size and less powerful hardware are important factors might result in more websites offering a true simplistic and lower res/bloat alternative. It needs to be automatically detected and redirected though to be really useful. One can hope anyway, because there really are just way too many "supersized" 5,000 calorie a serving websites out there and it gets worse daily. As it is now you have to load the bloated page first just to start to hunt for the "print" option. I would also think that those interested in "accessibility" might have a hand in encouraging these websites to have a simpler offering that is easier to use for text based browsers and so on.
As to that deconstructing and reconstructing idea, opera mobile does something like that, but I've never used it so can't comment on how well it works.
OK, here is another way to look at it. We've had an ongoing bad problem with just normal species introduced into areas that didn't have them with bad results. Think of the zebra mussel for one, and there have been numerous others down through the years, all over, the cane toad in Australia is another, in the US south, kudzu, various insect pests, there's a big list. Then we can look at invasive species that came from just normal intra species breeding and crossing, the Africanized European honeybee is a big one there.
Now, geneticaly modified organisms are "invasive species", just all man made. We have now this political dilemma as we put stricter controls on moving species around the planet, we are lessening controls on moving/introducing man made new species. Well, which is it, are invasive species a problem or not? We just don't call man made organisms invasive species, but in a very real sense, they are. All we have is past examples, some seem to be OK, others to be really *not* OK, and we don't know until it happens. Sorta like casino bank gambling, except with living things. Are we really being honest about the risk side of risk/reward? I maintain we aren't, they are severely downplaying the risk, and there is no insurance available, we have no backup full ecosystems once invasive species get loose, and they sometimes create rather large problems that even with all our tech we cannot solve.
We have no idea long term what will happen with many of them, and all we have to go on so far is some examples like I mentioned, the canola superweed, and like starlink corn, etc., and then the side effects of modding local environments with these invasive species so that you can re-mod it with specific chemicals, and it doesn't seem to take long to start having problems from another vector, the example of the Palmer pigweed amaranth showing up heavy in GM cotton fields, then taking them over, developing huge resistance to the very chemicals pushed in the beginning as being "economical". Yes they were-for awhile., but a generation or two at the most and now these problems are starting to show up. And that is state of the art, it is as specific as we have to look at, we just don't know until after a generation or two timewise. We don't know in advance, they guess and take the default it will be OK because it is their economic investment. This has turned into faith based science, that's the worry, faith based on corporate PR.
The thing is we just don't know. And the economics can sometimes not be there either, look at the recent big wipeout of corn/maize in South Africa for an example, they had a lot of farmers there who grew monsanto GM corn that failed to produce much in the way of edible grain this season, and that is the number one food crop there. The farmers blame the company, the company blames the farmers, but none of that matters once you look at the result, a severely restricted crop. We keep seeing unintended consequences, glitches, bugs, small 0 days, biological programming errors compounded by inapproriate user actions to continue my analogy. Whoopsies. I am just worried we will start seeing really LARGE 0 days, because the small and mediums are now starting to show up after a generation. And if a big corporation screws up, I mean really screws up, they go bankrupt..but that economic bankruptcy still wouldn't solve the problem of their biological screwup now running rampant all over. There is no biological insurance out there available.
There are no easy answers here, none. All I have is this mental graph in my head of remembering back, how this industry has progressed, it started out amazing, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, then the gotchas start showing up, little niggling problems, then the larger ones, then.....it made me change my mind because I am about convinced now the whoppers will eventually show up, right now I think honeybee CCD could be the first really large one. Here's one that might happen, modding crops to produce pharmaceuticals. Ce
GMO is a scam, IMO (disclaimer in advance. I am a farmer, I admit bias against monsanto and their ilk, I effin hate the bastids for years now, so take what I write with a grain of salt). It leads to proprietary vendor lock in in spades, along with a host of other issues, health issues, environmental issues and economics, it isn't all rosy. And the issue with superweeds now is getting serious. In my own state, pig amaranth is taking over a lot of fields that were grown with GM cotton then sprayed. Except it doesn't work now, the amaranth is winning. It gets ten feet tall. Some guys just *give up*. Roundup ready crops are just crops designed to be able to withstand roundup or generic equivalent herbicide so they can spray MORE on the crop and more often and not damage the crop. It works-for awhile, that's the real bottom line "for awhile", and you get lots more herbicide residue on whatever you grow. and the stuff itself ain't cheap, over a hundred bucks a jug now and goes up all the time, even the generics keep going up.
You never *really* get rid of all the weeds, you just fast track selective breed resistant weeds (or insect pests if it is insecticide, like with their BT modded corn). Even the crops themselves turn into weeds, they are having a hard time controlling their GM supercanola, it will spread to other fields and being resistant to herbicides...I think you get the picture.
Our farmers are by and large stuck in the 70s by mindset, swallowed all that rah rah rah corporate PR bullshit, now are stuck because they don't know any better and can't avoid it and will NOT admit they got suckered bad.
You think microsoft has vendor lockin...computer OS or some "office suite" is WAY down the list of humanly important *things*. Be concerned, be very concerned over food and availability going into the future is all I can say. They already have had several screwups, one of them one of these days is going to be the czar bomba screwup and will lead to mass famine sometime. I don't know what it will be, but I can about guarantee it will happen. That's my prediction.
We have climate indicators, and we have health of the crop and insect indicators, and the status of our honeybees now is a good indicator or canary in the coal mine if you will. Superweeds, honeybees croaking off, vendor lockin, loss of biodiversity..you have to look at the whole picture.
And it isn't so much that the tech is just evil, I don't believe that, it's that the tech is near completely uncontrolled despite so called regulations and studies and they have no idea whatsoever what the long term consequences will be and there's more than a little hanky panky going on with the studies. Think about all the past big corporate screwups, the really bad stuff, and they all have two things in common: 1) the corporations themselves always maintained until the last second there wasn't any problem and if there was they were just innocent bystanders, and 2) they always manage to trot out their posse of tame private scientists and academic scientists to "back them up" until it was so obvious they had to 'fess ip, pay up and admit wrong doing. That's just normal corporate policy taken as a general rule of thumb (same with governments, never admit they were wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence). Just the nature of the beast. Your default should be, be a skeptic to corporate and governmental PR and spin.
Extrapolate at your leisure, but I am not convinced at all they are the best way forward at this point. They are very profitable for monsanto and a few others, at this time, but that's it. It's bankrupting smaller farmers all over the world and leading to a global hegemony on seeds and food. Do we *really* want that to happen, do we really want to lose natural biodiversity and to keep putting millions of the poorest even further into the poorhouse? And, more importantly than that, something that impacts everyone, think of this: we have no "food insurance" or backup planet either once they
The tech is fine, just this particular test was sorta lame. I think solar PV works quite well, as do realistic sized windchargers. I own a small windgenny and several solar PV panels myself, along with fuel generators, all for backup.
I lived at another place as a caretaker that was mostly powered with solar PV and it was just spiffy, whenever the local grid went don't, we didn't, And this wasn't a joke little place, it was a three story huge house with full everything normal. The only thing that didn't run off of solar PV was the ancient heat pump and an electric range, everything else though, lights, fridges, freezers, the well pump, many computers, big screen TVs, you name it, all solar powered at around 30 grand price 9 years ago now (and that could have been cheaper, the owner paid for full install and we really could have done most of it).
I maintained the system and it was very easy, and it even worked well during extended periods of heavy clouds, etc, several days worth of power in the battery banks as long as you weren't totally nuts about using it. Heck, I posted on it back then right here on slashdot. There were only a few tricks to using it, the main one was to schedule heavy loads for as close to midday as possible, during times of maximum solar gain. We'd do the washing and water the garden, etc around those times. That was really the only thing "different" I can recall about it, every other use was normal "on demand".
So, I am proly one of your envirowhackos who think it works and should be used more, because I've seen it work.
There's no magic one silver energy bullet, but a nice mix to fit the situation here and there could go a long way to reducing dependence on coal and petroleum. I've been into alternative energy since the late 60s when I helped build a simple but effective solar swimming pool heater. Solar power is the only practical fusion power we have now, and wind in areas that can use it works so good it is a commercial success today. I've also worked extensively in the superinsulation retrofit and construction biz, we have the tech now to drop most household power demands down to one third or even less with NO new technology being needed and using just a saner approach to building, with maybe a 5% premium cost with new construction. That is BY FAR your best alternate energy dollar spent, really nail the insulation in your home and the other issues like doors and windows, etc. to "superinsulation" standards. It is googleable, some on it at wikipedia if you care to go look, it is quite good tech, and I've seenit work really good as well, like I remember one lady called us up and complained after a remodel that her AC wasn't coming on. I said, "Your house is still cool though, right"? along thoise lines.."Well, yes" "It's working ma'am". She was used to every couple hours having the electric sucking beast coming on, when it went past a whole day and it didn't it freaked her out, she just couldn't believe how good it worked, even though she had paid for it and it is what we told her would happen!
I'm a big fan of that as well. The combination of more and better insulation, more efficient appliances and vehicles, plus more points of production of differing energy sources are just all swell ideas in my book.
I don't like being tied so much to the big energy cartels and weird geopolitical events outside my control and their price gouging, and I really don't like them jerks having all that cash and influence because conventional energy causes wars and massive air and water pollution and health issues. I favor (really just speaking for myself, others can think and live different) a more self independent lifestyle model. Living it now, for instance, we are now producing half of our food here right where we live, in season it proly tops 90% or so. And although we have a propane tank and heater, we haven't used a bit of it for two winters now, pure "stored biosolar", firewood.
Very interesting. Nice amount of power at ground level, and the local windspeed didn't look too high either, those magnification vanes look to do the trick quite well. If they get a non flash site I'd be interested to see what they cost.
No one in the industry I am aware of would say one of those tiny (those montana and skystream models are the exception there, as they are more realistically sized) windchargers would power a household. And further, no one credible who sells or installs realistically sized residential windchargers would recommend it be installed on a household roof. I have a very small windcharger, 300 watts max output in ideal conditions, it is designed to provide a small amount of battery recharging capability for like sailboats or a small weekend cabin or something, and that's it. Same as no one solar panel is going to power your home. This is the duh part, I mean, read the dang specs before you buy and try to keep in mind what your demand would be. There are still a lot of decent windchargers out there that fall between these tiny models and those megawatt sized hugemongous models.
This was sort of a *really* stupid test. Might as well throw a lawnmower engine in your caddy to try and achieve epic mileage, and then see how far you get down the road. It is that dumb to anyone who knows anything about alternative energy.
There are tens of thousands of people who own and use residential windchargers, all over the planet, but they are all designed for the task, they are all large, and mounted on sturdy tall towers. The mentioned two largest ones there should be considered entry level in size for practical household use. Yes, size matters obviously, and this info has been out there for close to a century now as regards wind to electrical power.
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Just as something cheap and elements tight to start out with, they are fine, no different from a camping trailer except no axles and wheels. The planet is awash in those things now, especially north america. Like the others said, add insulation and white reflective paint to the roof (we use that here on the broiler houses, brand name polar guard), and so on, and perhaps site it in shade.
We live in a tinroof cabin in Georgia, where it gets plenty hot, without AC. The reason we can do that, is because it sits in shade. Being oaks, the leaves drop in the winter when it is colder and it sits in mostly sun then, and we use wood for heat off the property primarily. Both ways of dealing with temp extremes work, and are a lot more affordable than the alternatives, and we stay comfy. Back to the containers, you can also construct a free standing roof with around a two foot clearance over them to act as man made shade. I've seen that a lot in RV parks, not only makes it cooler, but it protects from hail damage or snow accumulation damage or rain leaks. And speaking of which, we lived in our RV, which is smaller than a shipping container, for four years before we moved here, so I'll call that similar to your office experience. It was comfortable enough, it had insulation and so on. I actually liked it, forced you to make decisions on what is really necessary or not. Saved a bunch really. Paid a grand even for a "home", that not only is adequate shelter, but is self contained with a generator and onboard water tanks and so on, plus I added solar PV and a battery bank to it. That's another alternative cheap housing today, well, in areas where RVs are common anyway. And if you ever need to move from job relocation, there ya go, makes it ewasier.
The bottom line is, there are practical ways to avoid the 30 year mortgage and the going into tremendous debt with zero job security anymore just to have a place to live, no matter where you are. I think it is a fine idea what Tata is doing, trying to make things affordable for their own people there, plus still make a buck at it. Seems a win/win for everyone concerned. Right now we are going through a lot of economic bullshit in the US because everybody and their cousin decided they needed a bloated energy hog mac mansion at a matching huge bloated price, insatead of actually looking at things more realistically and "making do" with something smaller and cheaper and more affordable in shaky economic times. Seems to be near epic fail at this point with the "supersize" everything reality we acquired as a society, combined with losing sight of the difference between what your home should be and some random house you are occupying and treating as a get rich quick "investment".
Shipping containers
Tata Nanos are meant to be affordable upgrades for families that try to haul mom and dad and the kids and the groceries all on some little scooter. I doubt that is safer than the Nano.
I mean, never ever. We understand your NYC existence, but it DOESN'T RELATE to us. We aren't naieve, we are as practical as you are.
You just don't get it on what it takes to make your lifestyle in NYC possible, not really grokking it.
There is NEVER going to be some sort of universal "mass transportation" that will work for the population in general, and our towns and cities are designed the way they are because that is what has worked.. It is not going to happen, there is never going to be any sort of huge change. There are *millions and millions* of us out here who need to carry more than a laptop and some takeout from the deli. And that's that. That's reality.
Public transpo does not work for much more than that sort of very light load. And you might not believe it, but our work, involving moving big quantities of stuff, is both useful and necessary and isn't going away. And it is a big list,and it makes your ultra urban lifestyle possible. Without us, your huge cities don't exist. Period. So just stop with telling us what we "don't understand" and stop giving us advice on transportation, it got old years ago.
Some of us live rural, some live suburban, and we are going to drive personal vehicles, because that is the only thing that works for our lifestyle, and once in awhile take public transportation, but not very often. Some of us live on farms, others work in factories (some still anyway) outside the major urban areas, some in mining some in energy related fields some in logging and so on. And we need an even higher number of folks to then work retail and services and etc in the hundreds of thousands of local communities that service these necessary and productive pursuits, and that covers a huge area of the US, much larger than the top 100 urban areas combined, where mass transpo can be somewhat practical (including your cabs).
Maybe 5% (guessing, some smallish number) of the US land area can be served well with mass transportation, the other 95% will need roads and trucks and cars. And that 5% is already at least partly covered with that sort of transportation, buses and trains, etc.
Bicycles are useful as well, I like them, I used to own and operate a bicycle shop, but they in no way manner shape or form can contribute to much in the way of bulk transportation and useful necessary work that needs to be done outside of light duty courier work and very small and very local small size delivery.
For everything else, cars and trucks for the most part, excluding railfreight, which mostly has to be tied to the road network anyway for most purposes.
You want to make a REAL difference? Lobby your bosses and companies (if you are a shareholder and get to vote on such things and make a point at shareholder conferences) to institute more telecommuting for those folks who really only sit in front off a screen and telephone and get rid of those huge wasteful SUV styled energy hog buildings that are nothing more than big dick statements for your Cxx class of overpaid and stupid offshore specialist job killing buffoons.
Stop insisting that those folks who want to live with a bit of green around them and to actually have yards travel "downtown" every day to do what they could be doing in their home office. Moving bits and bytes is a lot cheaper and would make more of an environmental impact for the positive than trying to come upo with yet another hugely expensive way to move people every day so they can then go move bits and bytes, even if they are "taking the train" or riding a bus or a bicycle. Wasteful as all get out..
THAT is a real practical solution to commuting for millions of people, building out our broadband infrastructure better, not trying to make some small scale mass transpo work across the broad land.
Broadband for the Broad Land should be the number one priority now, not these "everyone take the bus" arguments. Stop moving people AT ALL if it isn't necessary.
Yes, and it still means it costs them less in the long run. I believe everyone here in the US who is an adult and has done their taxes knows the difference between a tax deduction and a credit, and I was careful to say "deduction". The WSJ is an exception to the subscription rule there for that and the other reasons people brought up in the thread. The entire point was *most* online sources won't be in a credible position to start charging fees, whereas a few periodicals like the WSJ can. I just brought up one more reason why they are able to do that, it helps somewhat with taxes when it is deductible, plus their readership demographics are probably representative of a much higher average pay scale, making such things more affordable.
Also, you do know you can reply here to someone without nasty comments, right?
Did joe academic add in the cost of buying an unobtanium brand electric vehicle, or plug in hybrid? Oh wait, you can get one for a hundred grand and sit on a waiting list, and the fifty grand models are "coming soon" for the past buncha years, and even fifty grand is sorta steep for most folks nowadays.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but lets get real, it will take decades of them being on the market at affordable prices before we get rid of all the internal combustion vehicles out there, decades and multiple trillions of dollars in cost to the consumers. Right now, liquid biofuels are the only credible option to OPEC and friends cartel price manipulations. And forget switchgrass, why not push for legalization of industrial hemp instead, because it can be grown on marginal and hilly ground not suitable for food production and has tremendous yield at not much production cost.
I think that most folks who subscribe to the WSJ also deduct it as a business expense. A lot of other periodicals it might be sorta iffy if that would fly with the tax man.
All these bubbles can be laid at the feet of easy credit. And it starts with a credit based money supply scheme, rather tha a past produced wealth money supply system. For millenia, money was actual wealth, or a tangible and portable representation of wealth, wealth that had been produced, past tense. Now nations use a future credit system that inflates the money supply way beyond what actual wealth production would indicate as being sane, thinking that in the future, enough wealth creation will be done to cover that inflation. It is "loaned into existence". About as crazy a notion as it gets. They never get it right, no matter how much they try, and always eventually overly inflate, as they did with these mortgages then the derivatives of the mortgages and the sliced and diced risk contracts, which are bets on inflated wishful thinking once you distill it down. This leads to a series of boom and bust cycles that are more intense than they would have been if the supply really represented past produced wealth. Because you can't loan that which doesn't exist unless you inflate the system and base your figures on wishful thinking. That's all currencies are "backed" with now, a few fatcats ideas and some wishful thinking.
With people losing jobs left and right, maybe you wouldn't need as many permanent reporters if you offered to pay a cheap but reasonable sum for freelancer submissions. I mean heck, look how many people want to biog just because it is fun for them, something to do. Sweeten the pot a little with some cash, who knows... Identify what you want by subject and give some guidelines in advance, etc. I guess you'd have to wade through a lot of crap at first to see who did quality work or not and was reliable so you could count on them, but perhaps that might be a way to cut costs but still have good content. And like you said, that would be a way to reduce office space requirements as well if they just emailed the copy to you. I know every local community has folks who go to just about every local sporting event, other people are court junkies, just go there to watch, other folks love going to the county commission meetings, etc.
Just perhaps. I was just thinking about it, going back to the onions on belts days, how many of us wrote and gave it away free to the "alternative" press back then, just because we were passionate about the subject (usually politics and stuff, that's what I did, but I remember a lot of the artsy fartsy crowd did it as well, covering the local scene, the concerts and local theater and movie reviews and so on).
You may be able to outrun the cops old ford, but you'll never be able to beat his motorola. ..at least that's what we used to say back in ye olden days in detroit during the height of the muscle and pony car years.
I'd subscribe to a local if it was custom tailored to my requests. That would really be a way to "give the customer what they want". A weekly that was so designed and still came in cheap would be sufficient. Such as, I would prefer a lot more local and state news coverage, as national and international is just so much better online, and they could skip the huge middle section they push with high school sports. Other people might want the opposite, even more local grade school sports and gossip, etc. If newspapers had a way to easily do a custom version, it might work. And I also notice the totally free mostly ads/classifieds newspapers seem to be doing OK, both the English and Spanish papers around here.
Newspapers now throw the kitchen sink at people and they only read a couple of sections and the rest is a waste of paper and just costs them money and the advertisers for those sections you skip are paying for no eyeballs. Which makes the costs way higher than they need to be. Even on a large newspaper, I never read the fashion or travel or food or sports sections, woodstove kindling instantly. And I bet most folks read the newspaper in a similar fashion, just those sections they are really interested in and skip most of it. Making a custom fit paper, "news a la carte", could be an alternative way to do business. How hard to pull that off with the dead trees version, no idea.
WRAN, or Wireless Regional Area Network
And exactly what options do these "escorts" have? A big jumbo jet being "escorted" can still go where it wants to go. If you mean they could shoot it down, it is flying over one of the more densely populated areas of the world. Shooting it down there would probably result in as much destruction as if it just smashed into a building around there.
This isn't like some dude in a getaway car can get pushed by a squad car off to the side or something, "escorting" means they are close by observers and can do the menacing "waggle the wings" at them and use harsh language over the radio. In other words, they are about useless if in the situation as described in the article. If the potential hijackers have control of the plane, once they are at or near their target, which the escorts don't know what that is, they can most likely still hit it or get extremely close.
...but think of it another way. You have a job* in this economy, you DO get paid, I bet it is a *reasonable sum* with more bennies than most folks get, including vacation time and every federal holiday, and you get to work for Nasa.
There are worse fates than losing the odd half a day wage....
*assuming you might still have the job....
This is interesting in a political and an historical context. Gandhi worked with non violent means as a choice, but not as the only choice except by circumstance. Although he was a pacifist, he recognized that the "gun control" laws that prohibited the Indian people from ownership (mostly) were designed to quell any insurgency against the British colonial powers. The Indian people had been disarmed by the British, on purpose and "by law", (privately and even for the most part they had no armed governmental workers either) and as such they had no means to use force against their "masters". Non violent resistance then became their only option, and they suffered a lot for it. And in Germany, one of the very first acts the fascists managed was the almost total disarming of the civilian populations, making it quite easy for them to implement their "solutions". There's a pattern...
People seem to forget, civilization doesn't necessarily equal freedom or peace. Civilizations can be quite organized and have a great amount of civil governmental infrastructure, but still be violent with state sponsored terrorism and oppression of all the people or selected subgroups of the people there. Civil does not equal free. A full oppressive police state can be quite "civilized". Or like they are wont to say, "pacified".
I'll also add this as a personal anecdotal. As a civil rights worker back in the day (belts..onions..), there was some success, but it was one step back for every two forward and it was scary and it sucked mostly. It wasn't until the scene changed as more and more vets came back from viet nam who were either black and returned to still oppressive society or poor whites, who had gotten drafted while their richer peers got off with basket weaving majors in college with the 2s deferments, and those dudes weren't all necessarily into being non violent, quite the opposite actually, they had just returned from where being very violent was the expected norm. Whoops....
These folks and a growing sense of direct action combined with some other factors led to the major riots in the mid to late 60s. The powers that be (here comes my opinion) finally got scared enough to actually DO something about the situation rather than just talk about it. They didn't want to, they were *forced* to make some concessions.
The 64 civil rights act didn't do much of anything until the fatcats realized they could wake up one day with one or several major cities no longer under their control, important big cities. They would have been seized and occupied by outright rebels with a cause and several legitimate and rather large beefs, or burnt to the ground, either way, lost to their control. They capitulated, although they won't admit it, that is exactly what happened and it went beyond non violent protest or threat and promise of same to get there.
And everyone knew it.
Then stuff changed, for real this time. They *really* starting enforcing the civil rights laws, in a lot more places. They changed the draft to a lottery system so no more fatcats kids getting out of it. That backfired on them though, because that in turn lead to the war finally ending (started to become obvious it would end, put it that way), because the protests then quintupled/more in size from all these new kids suddenly realizing it wasn't going to be just the blacks from the ghettoes and rural farmers kids going, but THEM too, so they joined in the protests. It went from thousands to hundreds of thousands at protests, and rather quickly. And the situation was clearly not going in wallstreet's/government puppets favor, they had to keep backing down or they were eventually going to face the "heads on pikes" stage of social readjustment.
Now they did have a goonish reactionary success that they weaseled through, the passage of the 68 gun control act. That was a huge disappointment for true second amendment rights, and was clearly a racist and reactionary bill (you had to really be there to ca
I have yet to read any cogent argument for why pulse exists, what it is for, or why we somehow need it. I spent more than two days with that ...insert scatological reference... and finally just removed it and now I have audio back working.
I disagree with this bogus premise: " 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'""
That's just lame. What they need is to go back to what merchant vessels on the high seas had forever as bog standard policy, except relatively recently with bullshit political correctness, and that is, they are armed with actual ARMS for self defense, not stupid squirt guns and big stereos.
Self defense is a human right, whether on land or sea, and playing make believe that weapons don't exist or they aren't the best tool for the job is just ludicrous. And this crap about some "legal jurisdiction" is again stupid, the old ways were the best, on the high seas, YOU have legal jurisdiction over your own safety, you are the law. someone attacks you, you have the right to use lethal self defense.
If these bozo shipping companies and their insurers can't trust their own crews with defending their own ships, cargoes and lives (the latter being a good inducement for the crews to be proactive in self defense), maybe they should pick better crews and offer a bit more training. We shouldn't be forced to use huge amounts of taxpayer money to provide expensive official navy vessels for commercial escort duty given the nature of these pirates being just fools in little boats with AKs and RPGs. The big merchant vessels can have a little stouter armament than that, and be able to protect themselves in 99%+ of the situations out there.
This weeniefication of society is just crap. When only the bad guys and the police/military have self defense arms, it is called a criminal police state, and these globalist goons seem bound and determined to turn it into a criminal police planet. Screw that.
I'll say it again, self defense is a human right. Any laws/regulations/policies to the contrary are totalitarian by nature.
The increasing importance of mobile computing where small screen size and less powerful hardware are important factors might result in more websites offering a true simplistic and lower res/bloat alternative. It needs to be automatically detected and redirected though to be really useful. One can hope anyway, because there really are just way too many "supersized" 5,000 calorie a serving websites out there and it gets worse daily. As it is now you have to load the bloated page first just to start to hunt for the "print" option. I would also think that those interested in "accessibility" might have a hand in encouraging these websites to have a simpler offering that is easier to use for text based browsers and so on.
As to that deconstructing and reconstructing idea, opera mobile does something like that, but I've never used it so can't comment on how well it works.
Bruce was one of the main ramrods getting the requirements eased so that more folks would get Ham licenses.
OK, here is another way to look at it. We've had an ongoing bad problem with just normal species introduced into areas that didn't have them with bad results. Think of the zebra mussel for one, and there have been numerous others down through the years, all over, the cane toad in Australia is another, in the US south, kudzu, various insect pests, there's a big list. Then we can look at invasive species that came from just normal intra species breeding and crossing, the Africanized European honeybee is a big one there.
Now, geneticaly modified organisms are "invasive species", just all man made. We have now this political dilemma as we put stricter controls on moving species around the planet, we are lessening controls on moving/introducing man made new species. Well, which is it, are invasive species a problem or not? We just don't call man made organisms invasive species, but in a very real sense, they are. All we have is past examples, some seem to be OK, others to be really *not* OK, and we don't know until it happens.
Sorta like casino bank gambling, except with living things. Are we really being honest about the risk side of risk/reward? I maintain we aren't, they are severely downplaying the risk, and there is no insurance available, we have no backup full ecosystems once invasive species get loose, and they sometimes create rather large problems that even with all our tech we cannot solve.
We have no idea long term what will happen with many of them, and all we have to go on so far is some examples like I mentioned, the canola superweed, and like starlink corn, etc., and then the side effects of modding local environments with these invasive species so that you can re-mod it with specific chemicals, and it doesn't seem to take long to start having problems from another vector, the example of the Palmer pigweed amaranth showing up heavy in GM cotton fields, then taking them over, developing huge resistance to the very chemicals pushed in the beginning as being "economical". Yes they were-for awhile., but a generation or two at the most and now these problems are starting to show up. And that is state of the art, it is as specific as we have to look at, we just don't know until after a generation or two timewise. We don't know in advance, they guess and take the default it will be OK because it is their economic investment. This has turned into faith based science, that's the worry, faith based on corporate PR.
The thing is we just don't know. And the economics can sometimes not be there either, look at the recent big wipeout of corn/maize in South Africa for an example, they had a lot of farmers there who grew monsanto GM corn that failed to produce much in the way of edible grain this season, and that is the number one food crop there. The farmers blame the company, the company blames the farmers, but none of that matters once you look at the result, a severely restricted crop. We keep seeing unintended consequences, glitches, bugs, small 0 days, biological programming errors compounded by inapproriate user actions to continue my analogy. Whoopsies. I am just worried we will start seeing really LARGE 0 days, because the small and mediums are now starting to show up after a generation. And if a big corporation screws up, I mean really screws up, they go bankrupt..but that economic bankruptcy still wouldn't solve the problem of their biological screwup now running rampant all over. There is no biological insurance out there available.
There are no easy answers here, none. All I have is this mental graph in my head of remembering back, how this industry has progressed, it started out amazing, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, then the gotchas start showing up, little niggling problems, then the larger ones, then.....it made me change my mind because I am about convinced now the whoppers will eventually show up, right now I think honeybee CCD could be the first really large one. Here's one that might happen, modding crops to produce pharmaceuticals. Ce
GMO is a scam, IMO (disclaimer in advance. I am a farmer, I admit bias against monsanto and their ilk, I effin hate the bastids for years now, so take what I write with a grain of salt). It leads to proprietary vendor lock in in spades, along with a host of other issues, health issues, environmental issues and economics, it isn't all rosy. And the issue with superweeds now is getting serious. In my own state, pig amaranth is taking over a lot of fields that were grown with GM cotton then sprayed. Except it doesn't work now, the amaranth is winning. It gets ten feet tall. Some guys just *give up*. Roundup ready crops are just crops designed to be able to withstand roundup or generic equivalent herbicide so they can spray MORE on the crop and more often and not damage the crop. It works-for awhile, that's the real bottom line "for awhile", and you get lots more herbicide residue on whatever you grow. and the stuff itself ain't cheap, over a hundred bucks a jug now and goes up all the time, even the generics keep going up.
You never *really* get rid of all the weeds, you just fast track selective breed resistant weeds (or insect pests if it is insecticide, like with their BT modded corn). Even the crops themselves turn into weeds, they are having a hard time controlling their GM supercanola, it will spread to other fields and being resistant to herbicides...I think you get the picture.
Our farmers are by and large stuck in the 70s by mindset, swallowed all that rah rah rah corporate PR bullshit, now are stuck because they don't know any better and can't avoid it and will NOT admit they got suckered bad.
You think microsoft has vendor lockin...computer OS or some "office suite" is WAY down the list of humanly important *things*. Be concerned, be very concerned over food and availability going into the future is all I can say. They already have had several screwups, one of them one of these days is going to be the czar bomba screwup and will lead to mass famine sometime. I don't know what it will be, but I can about guarantee it will happen. That's my prediction.
We have climate indicators, and we have health of the crop and insect indicators, and the status of our honeybees now is a good indicator or canary in the coal mine if you will. Superweeds, honeybees croaking off, vendor lockin, loss of biodiversity..you have to look at the whole picture.
And it isn't so much that the tech is just evil, I don't believe that, it's that the tech is near completely uncontrolled despite so called regulations and studies and they have no idea whatsoever what the long term consequences will be and there's more than a little hanky panky going on with the studies. Think about all the past big corporate screwups, the really bad stuff, and they all have two things in common: 1) the corporations themselves always maintained until the last second there wasn't any problem and if there was they were just innocent bystanders, and 2) they always manage to trot out their posse of tame private scientists and academic scientists to "back them up" until it was so obvious they had to 'fess ip, pay up and admit wrong doing. That's just normal corporate policy taken as a general rule of thumb (same with governments, never admit they were wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence). Just the nature of the beast. Your default should be, be a skeptic to corporate and governmental PR and spin.
Extrapolate at your leisure, but I am not convinced at all they are the best way forward at this point. They are very profitable for monsanto and a few others, at this time, but that's it. It's bankrupting smaller farmers all over the world and leading to a global hegemony on seeds and food. Do we *really* want that to happen, do we really want to lose natural biodiversity and to keep putting millions of the poorest even further into the poorhouse? And, more importantly than that, something that impacts everyone, think of this: we have no "food insurance" or backup planet either once they
...the best laptops you saw that survived and functioned well in a harsh environment?
The tech is fine, just this particular test was sorta lame. I think solar PV works quite well, as do realistic sized windchargers. I own a small windgenny and several solar PV panels myself, along with fuel generators, all for backup.
I lived at another place as a caretaker that was mostly powered with solar PV and it was just spiffy, whenever the local grid went don't, we didn't, And this wasn't a joke little place, it was a three story huge house with full everything normal. The only thing that didn't run off of solar PV was the ancient heat pump and an electric range, everything else though, lights, fridges, freezers, the well pump, many computers, big screen TVs, you name it, all solar powered at around 30 grand price 9 years ago now (and that could have been cheaper, the owner paid for full install and we really could have done most of it).
I maintained the system and it was very easy, and it even worked well during extended periods of heavy clouds, etc, several days worth of power in the battery banks as long as you weren't totally nuts about using it. Heck, I posted on it back then right here on slashdot. There were only a few tricks to using it, the main one was to schedule heavy loads for as close to midday as possible, during times of maximum solar gain. We'd do the washing and water the garden, etc around those times. That was really the only thing "different" I can recall about it, every other use was normal "on demand".
So, I am proly one of your envirowhackos who think it works and should be used more, because I've seen it work.
There's no magic one silver energy bullet, but a nice mix to fit the situation here and there could go a long way to reducing dependence on coal and petroleum. I've been into alternative energy since the late 60s when I helped build a simple but effective solar swimming pool heater. Solar power is the only practical fusion power we have now, and wind in areas that can use it works so good it is a commercial success today. I've also worked extensively in the superinsulation retrofit and construction biz, we have the tech now to drop most household power demands down to one third or even less with NO new technology being needed and using just a saner approach to building, with maybe a 5% premium cost with new construction. That is BY FAR your best alternate energy dollar spent, really nail the insulation in your home and the other issues like doors and windows, etc. to "superinsulation" standards. It is googleable, some on it at wikipedia if you care to go look, it is quite good tech, and I've seenit work really good as well, like I remember one lady called us up and complained after a remodel that her AC wasn't coming on. I said, "Your house is still cool though, right"? along thoise lines.."Well, yes" "It's working ma'am". She was used to every couple hours having the electric sucking beast coming on, when it went past a whole day and it didn't it freaked her out, she just couldn't believe how good it worked, even though she had paid for it and it is what we told her would happen!
I'm a big fan of that as well. The combination of more and better insulation, more efficient appliances and vehicles, plus more points of production of differing energy sources are just all swell ideas in my book.
I don't like being tied so much to the big energy cartels and weird geopolitical events outside my control and their price gouging, and I really don't like them jerks having all that cash and influence because conventional energy causes wars and massive air and water pollution and health issues. I favor (really just speaking for myself, others can think and live different) a more self independent lifestyle model. Living it now, for instance, we are now producing half of our food here right where we live, in season it proly tops 90% or so. And although we have a propane tank and heater, we haven't used a bit of it for two winters now, pure "stored biosolar", firewood.
I love it every time I eliminate a bill, and can
Very interesting. Nice amount of power at ground level, and the local windspeed didn't look too high either, those magnification vanes look to do the trick quite well. If they get a non flash site I'd be interested to see what they cost.
No one in the industry I am aware of would say one of those tiny (those montana and skystream models are the exception there, as they are more realistically sized) windchargers would power a household. And further, no one credible who sells or installs realistically sized residential windchargers would recommend it be installed on a household roof. I have a very small windcharger, 300 watts max output in ideal conditions, it is designed to provide a small amount of battery recharging capability for like sailboats or a small weekend cabin or something, and that's it. Same as no one solar panel is going to power your home. This is the duh part, I mean, read the dang specs before you buy and try to keep in mind what your demand would be. There are still a lot of decent windchargers out there that fall between these tiny models and those megawatt sized hugemongous models.
This was sort of a *really* stupid test. Might as well throw a lawnmower engine in your caddy to try and achieve epic mileage, and then see how far you get down the road. It is that dumb to anyone who knows anything about alternative energy.
There are tens of thousands of people who own and use residential windchargers, all over the planet, but they are all designed for the task, they are all large, and mounted on sturdy tall towers. The mentioned two largest ones there should be considered entry level in size for practical household use. Yes, size matters obviously, and this info has been out there for close to a century now as regards wind to electrical power.