perfectly designed for that purpose. You even have the pole mount, and the beginnings of the sun-tracker. Alternate energy, in all the news and stuff...
If you want something less challenging, inverted, umbrella fashion, and covered with some tarp or cloth or fiberglass or whatever, makes a nice sunshade over a picnic table.
Turn it the other way, plaster it, you have the basis for a garden pond.
Get two of them, arrange them together half open, so it looks like a giant clamshell on the beach, you get the old lady to put on a mermaid costume and lounge around in there provocatively, and snap some pics and give us the links plz!;)
To be fair about bemoaning lack of this or that modern tech convenience, I have ranted more than a few times about not being able to get any sort of broadband, even crappy broadband, where I live. The tradeoff is..I don't have to live where it is available either, meaning closer to cities* with all the negatives that implies, and no desire to move just to get broadband. It would be *nice* to get it, I am currently paying twice for dialup plus necessary landline than what I read people pay for lowball broadband, but I wouldn't trade what I have for it either, if it was an either/or proposition.
* I am a mile and change too far from the nearest telco box. DSL is around two miles max from what I have read. Cable most likely would be a non starter, I am last in line on both the phone and electric string. Now I lived in Vermont a long time ago and loved it, certainly much further out in the sticks than I am here now in georgia, but I would bet the issue is one more of mountains there than geographical distance. And I found most of the people there to be just fine, hippies/straights/preppies/yuppies, you name it, the ambience was great compared to most places I have been to. And true second amendment!
...to still be a fantastic tradeoff. I just can't see being annoyed with being able to live in *beautiful* Vermont over lack of some trendy gadget from a grossly over priced California company. In fact, I'd call that a +plus bonus feature, keep them sort of folks out.
..because that is the only thing they found, because that is all that is there. If provided by work and all they can find is windows, then there ya go. If they go into compu-stor-be-us, and all they "find" on the shelves is windows, then there ya go. And you can go to cuzin leroys house out in the sticks where he owns ten hound dogs and they all hang in the front yard and anyplace you step you "find" dogshit, it still doesn't make it convenient just because you found it, it just means you are stuck having to deal with crap;)
...is that in these days of severe fuel price rises, and environmental awareness, that so many people who just sit in front of a screen and type for a living are still forced to commute somehow to go..sit in front of a screen and type. And it doesn't matter if it is in a gas hog SUV or by Prius or Tesla or bicycle or train or bus, commuting a human to do that sort of work is still pretty wasteful compared to commuting electrons over a wire. And then there's the actual time involved just for the commute. So maybe it is a better idea if you "accidentally leave the laptop at home" to just go to work there and be done with it.
That solves the range problem now until batteries get better, especially for any theoretical cheaper all electrics. They need to get the 50 mile range much cheaper commuter cars out there now, then the generator trailer option for trips-plus handy to have said generator around the house. And the generator could be run on home made biodiesel for that matter.
The efficiency gains are not maintaining parity with the worsening economy,near as I can tell remembering prices and looking at it now. Solar PV was a better deal several years ago (I got mine right before peak "good deal" level), because they are built out of tangibles, expensive metals and silicon, and all that money being used has been inflated beyond all reasonableness. The cost rise in the raw materials and getting the fabs to put out silicon and using the aluminum and steel needed for construction and so on, the energy used in the plants and moving them around, the expense of supporting layers upon layers of middlemen to get panels from factory to end users after filtering it through wall street, etc are making the whole watts per dollar go up, not down. The panels themselves have gotten better, we get more watts per square meter now, but it is lost with the other aspects of modern business and manufacturing and how there is no rationality to the "money" system any longer. Another of the larger problems is our global society decided they wanted throw away "iWhatever-touch-yer-pods of the month club" gadgets by the billions as some place to use up expensive fabbed silicon. You want to know where the cheaper solar PV is, it is sitting in hugemongous dumps across the planet in the form of e-waste and tied up with speculator profits/axis of maximum greed and stupidity central banks economy borking. That is where it is at now. Back a decade or so ago, all the stuff needed to make the things and the energy required was loads cheaper, now it is not. People who looked ahead and could run simple sums and thought it might be a good idea to get some solar then bought it, people who didn't bought two dozen cellphones and two dozen different gaming computers and all sorts of other crap like endless streams of giant ass televisions and so on, for which most of them are now sitting in the junk drawer or at some landfill. Now it is going to *require* some amazing Tesla level breakthroughs to get cheaper, whereas with a little economic rationality in the past decade it could have been way more affordable with the normal way of getting incremental improvements. 99.999% of humans *didn't give a crap* back when it was affordable enough to start to do some energy switching around in a big way, along with the transportation mess now of being stuck with giant ass automobiles that the majors put out based on the assumption that oil was near free and would stay that way like forever. It was the mass cult like brainwashing belief system of the "cheap energy forever just because we sayso and refuse to believe it would ever get bad" that has been the largest impediment.
Anywho, to get to a polite mild criticism at society in general, if "anyone you" don't own solar now it is because you just refused to buy it in the past, you made a decision, based on a gamble, an assumption, that you were going to hold out on the miracle breakthroughs. A million people around the planet though, decided differently, they had a different assumption based at looking at markets and organizing their personal priorities differently, and bought into solar when it was cheaper, and are enjoying it and especially in the last two years are seeing their "investments" in practical home improvements go up in economic value because of price increases for conventional power and metals for manufacturing and so on. It's all in choices, what do you really want, what is more important to you.. Millions of people in the past decade have bought very expensive toys like home theater systems and "personal watercraft" and way overly expensive automobiles with heated rotating cupholders nonsense , all with a negative ROI, where that cash could have gone to some solar panels and gear, that at least had *some* ROI plus insuring some electricity supply completely outside the still manipulated markets and prone to crash and burn when you *least* want or need it to happen centralized electricity delivery system. *Choices* Wait for some tech to be some theoretically "perfect" in your mind, you'll never buy into it.
...but to take advantage of this, doesn't it mean that the ultimate end user and wherever they are connecting to both need to be on optical networks, end to end? Like, how much difference would this be anyway on my copper dialup connection, or even folks on copper dsl or copper cable? Will my modern full bloat AJAX page I am trying to view go from a minute and half to kinda sorta almost load, to a minute and 29.999999 seconds instead? And my ISP bill and phone line bill go up several bucks apiece to achieve such a "new speed increase"?
It isn't *that* hard or dangerous. Virtually every farm of medium to larger size in the US has their own diesel and some also gasoline "station", and some have propane taps to keep forklifts running, etc. They certainly don't drive all their equipment miles into town and go "fill er up" all the time. We sure don't, only the larger road trucks that use road diesel get filled at an outside fuel station, but the bulk of our fuel use is offroad so we have a "station" and it gets bought in bulk. I am thinking and I really can't remember any decent farm I worked on that didn't, put it that way. And home natgas filling stations for cars are available now, just check with your local supplier, see if they offer that service, that's too big a variable but I know it is at least somewhat common, although usually more used for fleet vehicle use. And farmers are leading the way with the alternative fuels, example, one of our customers for our poultry litter is the largest regular corn and soybeans, etc guys around here, maybe the largest (we are the largest poultry operation by far locally). Last year he put part of his production into sunflowers and got a commercial biodiesel rig to use that sunflower oil for his equipment. And we got no choice, none whatsoever, the big oil companies/wall street/foreign national suppliers, etc are making -shoot-most everything in the "necessary" department unprofitable, if we DON'T switch to alternative energy in all the forms and decentralize soon we are all screwed, and those folks don't seem to care as long as they can squeeze out an extra trillion or two in short term profits.
those inexpensive mowers last a long time with a few simple non tricks, just common sense, the main thing is people will not follow the maintenance advice that comes with the mower in the operators pamphlet
They aren't industrial bush hogs, you can't mow baby trees and rocks with them
Change the dang oil often, and use synthetic oil, it withstands the higher temps the little air cooled engines get to better than regular oil. The little mowers are built cheap, they don't have oil pumps just slingers so dirt can accumulate, so just change the oil at around 20 hours. The little ones take less than a quart so it isn't expensive to do this.
change / clean the air filter a lot-this is vital, air filter starts to get dirty, engine will start to run rich, fouls the plug and carbonizes inside the cylinder head. Leads to the endless yanking trying to start it.. Personally I don't even use the factory air cleaners any more, just got a sheet of thick foam rubber and cut out my own with scissors, toss them when they get dirty.
Use your air compressor and blow off nozzle and keep all the fins, etc clean of dried grass and dirt, every single time you use it, just clean it off before you put it away. They are air cooled, dirty engine=hot engine, and they sit right down next to the ground where you are kicking out clumps of cut grass and blowing up dirt and dust clouds sometimes, so they get dirty and the air cleaner gets dirty.
Keep blade sharp, if you notice a weird vibration sometimes that means you hit something nasty and the blade is bent and not balanced anymore, change the blade then. That is sort of a wild card though, not usually necessary but I have seen it. If vibration persists, ya, time to look for another yard sale project mower then. Hang on to the junkers and old parts eventually you have some nice scrap to take to the recycling and make a few bucks, a lot of aluminum there if you knock them down.
Change the plug whenever it looks carboned out or if you start to hear a misfire, again, cheap, keep some spares handy. You can clean them a few times if you want to with some emery paper. The new solid state ignition modules are binary, work/no work. Easy enough to check for spark and I've only ever see a couple that really went bad. They are actually a big improvement over the old points deals they used to have in the saber toothed badger days, IMO.
And that's about it, I get those mowers all the time for free usually or like 5 dollars at yard sales and fix them up and get them running easy. The biggest problem I see from people's broken mowers is the air cleaner leading to the carbonization and dirty spark plug, I kid thee not. That and sometimes they have hit something hard and the flywheel key shears, it is designed to do that, which saves the engine from destruction but makes it impossible to start, because that key sets the timing. New keys are a buck. Heh, I have a small fleet of those things. Some of them are pretty old now. Once in awhile maybe use some carb cleaner around and inside the carb. Oh ya and run them completely dry before storing in the winter! Get every drop of the old gas out. Don't even bother with that stabil stuff, not worth it for that last quarter pint of gas. Gas just turns to nasty glue when it sits around, plugs everything up, nasty, just use it up.
your antique buggywhip pure bloated price gouging model is from last century when a copy cost serious money to reproduce. Now that is not so, yes , it isn't totally free, but it *is* so close to free the differrnce is highly negligible, especially with file sharing and people already paying for their own infrastructure and bandwith with their connections, that even helps eliminate the lame need for expensive "server farms" and so ion, that's another artifically constructed 'scarcity" model when it comes to simple file sharing. If you say "shame on me" you are saying the same thing to all the folks who contribute freely to all the foss projects and the written literary projects out there that are free to share, for people who voluntarily share. Because they "get it" on why this is a good thing and how this new system works. You are more than welcome to charge a hundred dollars a byte or whatever you choose for your products in the digital age, and good luck with that. For the record, I have never downloaded and kept anything that wasn't authorized, I have paid for every shareware I ever used except for one that was abandonedware and zero contact information. I don't have a single pirated tune nor movie nor anything like that. If you want to try and keep artificial scarcity going for your stuff, go right ahead, I predict the effort is doomed for the most part, no matter how much DRM you throw at it though. And if you want to throw millions of people in jail for copying your stuff, good lick with that as well. As for people not creating because they aren't being directly paid in money..HAHAHAHAHAHAH! totally wrong, exceptions to your "rule" out there by the thousands and millions to look at. Maybe YOU won't, but a lot of other people WILL and are, daily, and have been doing so.
Sorry, it used to be "illegal" to terach women or black people to even read, couldn't share knowledge freely, it used to be illegal for anyone but kings and monks to have a hand copied book, couldn't share knowledge even if you wanted to pay for it. That middle ages style restrictions on sharing knopwledge let us enjoy centuries of social and intellectual stagnation, and your business model is just an evolutionary offshoot of the same dang thing, put artificial restrictions on knowledge and cultural sharing.
Freely sharing knowledge and having the ability for everyone to benefit and profit from it, all the way to society in general, is one of those complex things you either grok, or do not grok, you obviously don't, or not enough anyway to see you are being paid, all the freaking time 10 times as much, more, a lot more, "in kind" -which is an actual legal and business term, go look it up- with other digital bits, that aren't yours, that you didn't create, but are free to use, by having the ability to use others works, as much or more "wealth" as you would ever get trying to translate that into the bankers counterfeit "money". I don't care if you personally are a billionaire, that billion still isn't enough to cover all the freely available digital bits you can get today because others aren't so narrow minded and greedy. That's the game changing part, you get paid more by not being narrow minded and seeing what true wealth is, money in huge quantities and a direct one on one exchange is no longer needed for some-note, I said "some"- aspects of our society. If you want a society where every step you take costs money, if every action you take needs a lawyer and a contract, if every aspect of our lives has to be legally restricted based on which is who's "intellectual property" this or that is, where does it end? You need a "license to view" the design of a building on the street? How far? If that is what you want then you are welcome to such a society, sounds like a living hell to me, and the problems we are having today in coming to grips with digital bits and the extreme low cost thereof should by now be a little clearer, you suffer from ideology of the past where cheap copies were not possible. We hit the 21st century man, enjoy
I don't think this will be like the first great depression. People won't put up with mass moving to the camps or to government camp/work projects like they did before as the last dregs of their wealth gets confiscated and put into already wealthy people's hands. They did that once, a second time..not so sure it will fly this go around, we are more sophisticated now and more paranoid of motives and more able to get information. It's not just a small handful of newspaper owners and radio station owners they have to compromise, like they did last time to push propaganda.. They are already panicking (as well they should) over a paltry few million looming bankruptcies and houses being repoed, tens of millions in a borked economy with no way out and full complete despair facing people, living out on the street..not gonna happen. They've cooked the books on phony low-ball numbers inflation and phony unemployment stats as much as they can, they are running out of lies and excuses to cover for their sheer greed and arrogance ands stupidity. And the US was getting *very* close to mass internal revolt (against predatory capitalism mostly) by the time their bankers ww2 was run up the flagpole and used as a mass distraction. When you have the same big banks and the same multinationals and the same martini swilling cocktail partying at the yacht club people all involved in profiting from a war, it wasn't an accident, it was done on purpose.
We have way too many ways to get information out now, and people will be noticing who's fault is what. This last administration has just completely destroyed any sort of trust that the people have in government for telling the truth, the executive branch or congress, lowest approval ratings ever, lowest trust ratings ever, etc., they realize now it is all mostly an illusion to perpetuate the top 1% wealthy people at the expense of everyone else. I know there are still a lot of grassroots activists who cling to the outmoded belief that "this time" their pet big R or D candidate, "once they get in", will change things for the better, but those people come with a full belly of cult brand koolaid, they'll be the last ones to really see what is going on. Everyone else, who isn't a full time cult political party activist, is already starting to see it. and I guess..just a gues... you have to be around for a lot of election cycles to realize that past a pure intellectual level. You have to have lived it to see that D or R it doesn't make a bit oif difference, they are just two criminal political gangs in a jobs and skimming operation, they share the spils of owning government. No one who isn't in on and it and isn't a full member and adherent of that "system" ever makes it into the top ranks. Heck, I used to know before he died a *very* high ranking d party leader, I will not identify him, but he would get a little gassed on scotch and start laughing about it to me when we had informal talks/conversations, how much they sucker in the rubes to stay powerful. The term is "useful idiots" and it applies to both parties.
I think the government using their flag waving hessians along with their black suited economic spokesmodels murmuring soothing words will try a few more various schemes to both cork up dissent and also to try and "fix" the economy, but will not succeed, because not only have they screwed over their own people, they took a lot of powerful foreigners to the cleaners as well, and those folks are pissed off now and trying to slide away for support of the US and the fedbuck as much as possible in a loss-cutting way..
I worry the most about a rather involved and destructive false flag operation though, and I wouldn't put it past them for one second to not already have such plans sitting on the shelf, or to implement them when they deem it necessary.
Well, I don't want civil war, but I sure would like to see a more realistic and equitable split in the worth of this or that area of the nation and between urban and rural. I really don't think a lot of pure urbanites understand how their lives and lifestyles are so very much tied to a healthy and robust rural economy and infrastructure, so they dismiss it out of hand.
As for myself, I saw the upcoming economic collapse starting around the late 90s so I moved back rural. When I was a kid I listened and paid attention to my older relatives stories about the great depression, and when I saw all the same clues they mentioned that were the prelude to that, I knew the same result would be coming. And it isn't really rocket surgery, it's just seeing trends, reading and understanding some history, noting that human behavior isn't all that different from thousands of yearts ago, and having the ability to work simple sums.. the economy isn't even near done collapsing, and that's reality, I won't even put it in the speculation category anymore. The monetary supply is inflated WAY beyond any sort of rationality, and they have pushed magic beans paper financial products into the realms of clinical insanity. There is no possible way to avoid collapse, none, it doesn't exist, it isn't even theoretically possible at this point..
Being poor and broke in the cities is an absolute no win situation, at least in the rural areas you have some immediate and onsite fallback positions for life's necessities. And all these highly paid folks now in the cities will be almost helpless to do anything about their situations once those big checks stop coming in, or even if they hang onto their jobs, a really big *if* right now, that money simply won't be enough to cover the basics, although their contractual debts will remain intact.
Well, right now today you would sell the heck out of them if you could get them on the car lots. Around here now I am seeing very prominent signs in the windows of vehicles at the car lots emphasizing some alleged bragger mileage, like "30" mpg. If you could put 40 or 50 up there and it not be consumer fraud I don't think you'd have much trouble selling them. I know I went last year and snagged an old beat on datsum diesel pickup because I knew they got fantastic mileage, but those sorts of vehicles are rare here. And we've had demand, it has been there, but none of the car companies has been able to address it fully, toyota has a backlog for priuses for instance. And no one has electric vehicles yet, nothing between a glorified golf cart or an exotic sportscar. They keep saying americans only want giant crappy mileage vehicles, when the reality is that is primarily what they produced and put on the lots so that's what people wind up buying, because they have no choice at all, that's all there is for the most part, even though it sort of "looks" like there are choices.. I see a ton of smaller cars on the roads, and people are keeping them running, but you look at the car lots and very few of them are in the lines at the new car dealers, and it has been that way for some years now, the public has been buying up the smaller more efficient vehicles, but the millionaire bosses at the car companies just can't seem to see what is reality in front of their faces and kept pushing out the huge monsters, even as they closed plant after plant and are going bankrupt. Those guys who make the big decisions are all so rich they just didn't "get it" on the economy at all, out to lunch, clueless, the same as their majority big rich shareholders, so they had no realistic corporate governance. They just so much didn't "get it" on the worsening economy and the need for affordable vehicles and vehicles that got better mileage that I guess they just assumed that it wasn't getting bad or something. At least that is all I can figure out, just a near total disconnect with what non-millionaires have been going through. Apply the same to the big union bosses and still working union workers, they make so much more than the median here they don't get it, even with their business crumbling around them. I was in the UAW in the 60s and it was like that, both management and rank and file out to lunch, you just couldn't get nary a one of them folks to see Japan coming on strong, it would bounce off their brains and they would dismiss it, I tried, I really did, to get some acknowledgment of the situation to sink in there, eventually gave up and quit that work I was so disgusted with the lack of vision and no apparent long view on things, and it looks to not have changed one single bit. Those people in that business in the US just can *not* use some normal data and business analysis acumen and extrapolate more than a couple years into the future worth beans, they just can't. Henry Ford was the only one who could near as I can see.
de centralized power in the form of billions of solar PV modules could help eliminate any new huge transmission lines being needed. My theory is, if it's a roof sitting in the hot sun, it needs to be covered with solar panels. And the government wouldn't need to do much more than a few lines on a new law authorizing 100% tax credits up to..some level determined, around 20 thousand amortized over five tax seasons would be sufficient I guess. Not partial credits or deductions, full credits. The slack in taxes there could be made up elsewhere as new manufacturing and service industries grew, with the end game result of a lot more energy independence. Last place we lived as caretakers was mostly all solar powered, a 29 thou installation did the bulk of the circuits for the owners three story mini-mansion. I've lived with it and seen it work, awesome. That and also use the same form of credits for just more insulation, and mandate better energy efficiency standards for new construction and deed/title transfers.
As to cities, to be clear, I am not saying tear them all down, but help people who can and want to not be forced to live there or be forced to commute there to have a viable option or two. I have no idea what the real figures might be, but there simply has to be millions of jobs that can be done at home that are currently being done by commuters to the cities.
I think big cities are partially to blame, everything they need has to be transported in to them, nothing actually comes from big cities that much, stuff comes from the countryside and the outskirts mostly. Big cities main export is governmental BS and what passes as "culture"..like gangstah rap! And also because of the corporate practice, a carryover from when it was manadatory before electronics was developed and communications became easy, of having central command giant ego office towers that force people to commute to them when all they do more or less is electronic office work that can be done at home. Forget efficient commuting using mass transit, that is still wasteful; as all get out, no different from driving SUVs around, because a ton of it is *not needed*, it is done, but it isn't needed. Just eliminate commuting all together whenever possible. This is the digital age, why are people still "going to the office" like it is the Dicksonian ages with quill pens, to stare at a computer screen and mash the print button? that's crazy stuff now, just mega silly. Collaboration can be done over the net. Eliminate the entire middleman as much as possible of moving people instead of moving electrons, then people can stay home, and we won't need to waste as much resources keeping those giant buildings up, or even constructing them in the first place. Just the sheer *waste* building those looming office towers is appalling. And cities screw up nature, no place for rainwater to soak in, Most trees that are there struggle, the only nature you see is ghetto rabbits and skyrats mostly, they trap heat and poisonous pollution gases and so on and screw up the weather downwind from where they are. Personally, I wouldn't raise a kid inside big cities now, I think it is borderline abuse just from the pollution they soak in 24/7 while their brains and bodies are developing.. We probably wouldn't even be having a fuel crisis right now if as many people who could work at home just did so. I think a lot of these pro giant cities people just have never thought it through all the way, they skip the bad parts of it, gloss over it. big cities came about from the necessity of face to face with trade and transportation way back in ye olden days, a lot of them are on the old river routes and ocean ports, but now...no need for all that face to face all the time, they exist from *inertia*. People went to the suburbs en masse when they could because they wanted to, they wanted out of the big cities, a lot of humans actually need some green around them, and then you *do* have space for a decent garden and a yard where the kids and dogs can play safely.
As to space for food, urban guerrila gardening, on wasted public lands and over grown weedy unkempt lots, rooftop gardening, etc, are all viable. There's a huge movement in cuba now to do mass scale urban gardening and it is actually working out quite well. You don't need a ton of space per person, a 10 foot by 10 foot square in total size will give a lot of food during the season. Heck, I once went nuts in a second floor apartment I had that had a few sunny windows and one little sunroom on the south side, at one time I had over 200 houseplants in there, including a lot of veggies (no pot though..). I even had a baby apple tree growing in there and some sunflowers that reached to the ceiling that had peas and cucumbers climbing them. It worked OK as a daily small salad provider. Oh ya, a couple rose bushes! That made that apt smell pretty nice all the time. On the cheap and small all you need is a 5 gallon plastic bucket or two, a bag of dirt from the garden center, and a sunny window. Throw a tomato and a pepper plant in there, done, healthy snacks. I've kept the same tomatoe plants growing for years before inside apartments, I mean, ya, your traditional ferns are cool, but why not some tomatoes or something else you like? the colored lettuces are all nice and grow like crazy. spinach is easy, radishes are fast and throw a lot of green around the room. Big fun, cheap eats, you are paying the rents anyway, might as well get a little payback from the windows!
Yes, it would be, and that should be our goal as advanced monkeys who can use and make tools. Why so much of society and in particular the business community is against this is beyond me, they should be the first ones to see the obvious advantages. Some do, obviously, witness the slow and gradual rise of FOSS and some of the more benevolent "open university" efforts. Most of them though, bucket 0 fail. When you have a huge problem eliminated..well...just that! Go on to the next one, then the one after that. Hopefully, eventually, most everyone will "get it". Can you see back in the caveman days "sorry mr. Ug, that stick you are using as a lever is patented!" We'd probably just now be using fire on demand. Maybe. Probably homecaveland security would make it illegal though.
Treating easily replicated digital bits exactly the same as tangible commodities, by (relatively) newly written laws and by industry practice, creating a purely artificial scarcity business model.
Digital copying is a huge game changing tech advancement, and society has fallen flat on dealing with it. It is one of the few "star trek" level tech advances in the past few generations, yet we can see that business society has freaked out, it made a lot of the older practices virtually unneeded, and wants both to be able to use this tech freely for themselves, and also to be able to restrict it to others, entirely in their favor following the old and now obsolete so called "laws" of supply and demand as they might pertain to such products today. There is the potential for unlimited and "so close to free it doesn't matter" supply now, so they are trying to restrict it through DRM and laws and lawsuits such as they can still extract the same (or more) level of profits "per unit" as when back in the day they had to actually publish a dead trees book or stamp out a vinyl album, etc.
What will we be seeing when we can do such replication as easy with tangible objects, if we can't even embrace and adapt to digital copies? This effort is not only ill conceived it should be *embarassing* to humanity in general, why it is even contemplated. We all should be enjoying the big freedom to freely share and share alike and have a huge expensive burden of transferring knowledge and culture from each of us and to all of us removed from our backs so we can concentrate on the next tech hurdles that could ultimately lead to humans being able to universally exist without a huge amount of drudgery and dangerous labor. Isn't that some sort of goal anyway?
It won't happen all at once, but every time we lick a major tech problem, like we have with copies of this or that chunk of knowledge or culture, why should we -or even allow- go out of our way to create an additional problem just to perpetuate the old problem, which has been solved now? This is illogical and makes no long view historical sense. Unless we want the space aliens to start calling this the planet of the buggywhip traders (part of the embarrassing part)
disclaimer: all I can do is not be hypocritical about it. I have a ton of digital stuff on the net over the past decade, if anyone thinks it might be useful (stop laffing!), take a copy share a copy, go for it. I work ag in meatspace, I encourage everyone who is so inclined to get seeds and "grow their own copies", use open pollinated so you can share copy making potential, go for it, feed yourself and the planet as cheaply and nutritiously as possible, leading to all free someday when the tech gets better. I seek no DRM restrictions or patents or any of that other nonsense on your ability or desire to produce your own food, even if that means I might theoretically make less, I'll be much happier once everyone is fed for cheap or free, and will go on to do something else. And that's the best I think I can do right now with voluntary sharing.
....are going to be constantly in the oil drip/slick section in the center of the lane (if you mean eventually a lot of them will be sharing lanes). With a normal bike you ride to either side of that accident strip.
..is economically sound. Buying small single meal servings and going to the store or deli or latest cool restaurant for every meal is rather wasteful and overly urban trendy. It makes much more economic sense and green-sense to get your purchases bulk whenever, which is what costco stores are for, so the parent had a point. No one single vehicle fits all situations, the VW in the article is primarily for commuting or cheap road triops with light luggage, and as such would be interesting once they got the costs down a lot more. Mostly here we just use a mid sized sedan that gets in the 20s and can still do a lot of bulk shopping, as in hundreds of lbs, bulk dogfood and catfood, various other stuff, we do combined big shopping trips (and we are both skinny folks here) but occasionally we need a truck, and once in awhile I could get by with a scooter (if I had one). There is just never going to be a one size fits all vehicle, situations are just too different, household and family sizes are too different, etc.
Two of the tractors I use have air cooled diesels, simply outstanding machines. Deutz. The smaller one with a 60 horse engine I can get around two full shifts out of 12 gallons running at heavy working rpms, 2000. The water cooled ones I use (kubotas mostly) tend to start to run hot as soon as the radiators get plugged up with dust and debris, which happens constantly, even with the protective screens in front of them, and they don't get near the mileage even though they are smaller engines. I think they like radiators in cars though so you can get some decent heat into the cabin as part of the reason anyway. The old bugs had some pretty non existent heat, if you were running the stock exhaust, and zero heat if you ran a better power and mileage exhaust. VW had to eventually go to an additional gas run heater for real cold weather use. heh, what we used to do in ye olden hipster days was just clamp a small camping propane heater in there and run with the windows open a little.
And with that said, remember when they were working on ultra light weight ceramic engines? What happened to those? Very little to no size changes when they got hot, meaning they could run them with no piston rings! Stuff like that. Maybe it just costs too much to build them, I really don't know, but they had some working. That's disappeared into the amazing inventions that have disappeared category. Smokey Yunick's engines he built for mileage with still good power, just to show it was entirely possible, gone, poofed, GM offered him toy money for it so he said no and went back to racing.
Way too high a price and still years away. If they could drop the price severely by just using all aluminum instead of exotic materials and still get a mileage of half that, 117.5 MPG (which would be still pretty snazzy and also hit the x-prize for cars deal), maybe they could get them out on the lots sooner. All these various alternatives the majors are working on are just too darn expensive. 100 grand for a tesla sportscar or "only" 60 grand for the sedan. Nuts. Honda fuel cell cars "lease" for 600 a month and like two hydrogen stations. Nuts. 60 grand for a chevy volt, only jumped 20 grand since they been talking about it and still none for sale. nuts. Perpetual design wanking. We'll see the Chinese and Indians eat the great mileage and cheap car market before detroit, stuttgart and yokohama pull it off. They just don't seem to understand affordable and get it done now, not years and years from now. Look at GM and Ford, they make good mileage cars but don't sell them in the US. GM used to make a decent and modern good mileage car for the US market, the original Saturns, now it is just another ho hum car with medium crappy mileage. Where's the real improvements? Old falcons and darts and valiants got 25 mpg with crappy transmissions and they were solid steel stout vehicles. 35 years later we are still stuck at that 25 MPG plateau, despite apollo moon rocket plumbing and wiring?? They need to study it more and keep throwing concept cars at shows at us?
My idea of a homebrew good mileage car that might work would be if you could get around a 7 speed transaxle for old air cooled VWs (you can mod one to a 5 right now), put that in a lightweight rail buggy with one of the new small Kohler two cylinder diesel engines (or another brand, just small, and not costing mega thousands and have all sorts of exotic controls either). If you want a real body they got them too or it could be fabbed, it is just fiberglass after all.
I want a web browser that will magically still display something legible on those javascript and flash heavy pages, with that stuff turned off. Is it too much to ask some sort of links that function without javascript?
Slashdot Mirror
perfectly designed for that purpose. You even have the pole mount, and the beginnings of the sun-tracker. Alternate energy, in all the news and stuff...
If you want something less challenging, inverted, umbrella fashion, and covered with some tarp or cloth or fiberglass or whatever, makes a nice sunshade over a picnic table.
Turn it the other way, plaster it, you have the basis for a garden pond.
Get two of them, arrange them together half open, so it looks like a giant clamshell on the beach, you get the old lady to put on a mermaid costume and lounge around in there provocatively, and snap some pics and give us the links plz! ;)
To be fair about bemoaning lack of this or that modern tech convenience, I have ranted more than a few times about not being able to get any sort of broadband, even crappy broadband, where I live. The tradeoff is..I don't have to live where it is available either, meaning closer to cities* with all the negatives that implies, and no desire to move just to get broadband. It would be *nice* to get it, I am currently paying twice for dialup plus necessary landline than what I read people pay for lowball broadband, but I wouldn't trade what I have for it either, if it was an either/or proposition.
* I am a mile and change too far from the nearest telco box. DSL is around two miles max from what I have read. Cable most likely would be a non starter, I am last in line on both the phone and electric string.
Now I lived in Vermont a long time ago and loved it, certainly much further out in the sticks than I am here now in georgia, but I would bet the issue is one more of mountains there than geographical distance. And I found most of the people there to be just fine, hippies/straights/preppies/yuppies, you name it, the ambience was great compared to most places I have been to. And true second amendment!
...to still be a fantastic tradeoff. I just can't see being annoyed with being able to live in *beautiful* Vermont over lack of some trendy gadget from a grossly over priced California company. In fact, I'd call that a +plus bonus feature, keep them sort of folks out.
..because that is the only thing they found, because that is all that is there. If provided by work and all they can find is windows, then there ya go. If they go into compu-stor-be-us, and all they "find" on the shelves is windows, then there ya go. And you can go to cuzin leroys house out in the sticks where he owns ten hound dogs and they all hang in the front yard and anyplace you step you "find" dogshit, it still doesn't make it convenient just because you found it, it just means you are stuck having to deal with crap ;)
...is that in these days of severe fuel price rises, and environmental awareness, that so many people who just sit in front of a screen and type for a living are still forced to commute somehow to go..sit in front of a screen and type. And it doesn't matter if it is in a gas hog SUV or by Prius or Tesla or bicycle or train or bus, commuting a human to do that sort of work is still pretty wasteful compared to commuting electrons over a wire. And then there's the actual time involved just for the commute. So maybe it is a better idea if you "accidentally leave the laptop at home" to just go to work there and be done with it.
That solves the range problem now until batteries get better, especially for any theoretical cheaper all electrics. They need to get the 50 mile range much cheaper commuter cars out there now, then the generator trailer option for trips-plus handy to have said generator around the house. And the generator could be run on home made biodiesel for that matter.
The efficiency gains are not maintaining parity with the worsening economy,near as I can tell remembering prices and looking at it now. Solar PV was a better deal several years ago (I got mine right before peak "good deal" level), because they are built out of tangibles, expensive metals and silicon, and all that money being used has been inflated beyond all reasonableness. The cost rise in the raw materials and getting the fabs to put out silicon and using the aluminum and steel needed for construction and so on, the energy used in the plants and moving them around, the expense of supporting layers upon layers of middlemen to get panels from factory to end users after filtering it through wall street, etc are making the whole watts per dollar go up, not down. The panels themselves have gotten better, we get more watts per square meter now, but it is lost with the other aspects of modern business and manufacturing and how there is no rationality to the "money" system any longer. Another of the larger problems is our global society decided they wanted throw away "iWhatever-touch-yer-pods of the month club" gadgets by the billions as some place to use up expensive fabbed silicon. You want to know where the cheaper solar PV is, it is sitting in hugemongous dumps across the planet in the form of e-waste and tied up with speculator profits/axis of maximum greed and stupidity central banks economy borking. That is where it is at now. Back a decade or so ago, all the stuff needed to make the things and the energy required was loads cheaper, now it is not. People who looked ahead and could run simple sums and thought it might be a good idea to get some solar then bought it, people who didn't bought two dozen cellphones and two dozen different gaming computers and all sorts of other crap like endless streams of giant ass televisions and so on, for which most of them are now sitting in the junk drawer or at some landfill. Now it is going to *require* some amazing Tesla level breakthroughs to get cheaper, whereas with a little economic rationality in the past decade it could have been way more affordable with the normal way of getting incremental improvements. 99.999% of humans *didn't give a crap* back when it was affordable enough to start to do some energy switching around in a big way, along with the transportation mess now of being stuck with giant ass automobiles that the majors put out based on the assumption that oil was near free and would stay that way like forever. It was the mass cult like brainwashing belief system of the "cheap energy forever just because we sayso and refuse to believe it would ever get bad" that has been the largest impediment.
Anywho, to get to a polite mild criticism at society in general, if "anyone you" don't own solar now it is because you just refused to buy it in the past, you made a decision, based on a gamble, an assumption, that you were going to hold out on the miracle breakthroughs. A million people around the planet though, decided differently, they had a different assumption based at looking at markets and organizing their personal priorities differently, and bought into solar when it was cheaper, and are enjoying it and especially in the last two years are seeing their "investments" in practical home improvements go up in economic value because of price increases for conventional power and metals for manufacturing and so on. It's all in choices, what do you really want, what is more important to you.. Millions of people in the past decade have bought very expensive toys like home theater systems and "personal watercraft" and way overly expensive automobiles with heated rotating cupholders nonsense , all with a negative ROI, where that cash could have gone to some solar panels and gear, that at least had *some* ROI plus insuring some electricity supply completely outside the still manipulated markets and prone to crash and burn when you *least* want or need it to happen centralized electricity delivery system. *Choices* Wait for some tech to be some theoretically "perfect" in your mind, you'll never buy into it.
...but to take advantage of this, doesn't it mean that the ultimate end user and wherever they are connecting to both need to be on optical networks, end to end? Like, how much difference would this be anyway on my copper dialup connection, or even folks on copper dsl or copper cable? Will my modern full bloat AJAX page I am trying to view go from a minute and half to kinda sorta almost load, to a minute and 29.999999 seconds instead? And my ISP bill and phone line bill go up several bucks apiece to achieve such a "new speed increase"?
It isn't *that* hard or dangerous. Virtually every farm of medium to larger size in the US has their own diesel and some also gasoline "station", and some have propane taps to keep forklifts running, etc. They certainly don't drive all their equipment miles into town and go "fill er up" all the time. We sure don't, only the larger road trucks that use road diesel get filled at an outside fuel station, but the bulk of our fuel use is offroad so we have a "station" and it gets bought in bulk. I am thinking and I really can't remember any decent farm I worked on that didn't, put it that way. And home natgas filling stations for cars are available now, just check with your local supplier, see if they offer that service, that's too big a variable but I know it is at least somewhat common, although usually more used for fleet vehicle use. And farmers are leading the way with the alternative fuels, example, one of our customers for our poultry litter is the largest regular corn and soybeans, etc guys around here, maybe the largest (we are the largest poultry operation by far locally). Last year he put part of his production into sunflowers and got a commercial biodiesel rig to use that sunflower oil for his equipment. And we got no choice, none whatsoever, the big oil companies/wall street/foreign national suppliers, etc are making -shoot-most everything in the "necessary" department unprofitable, if we DON'T switch to alternative energy in all the forms and decentralize soon we are all screwed, and those folks don't seem to care as long as they can squeeze out an extra trillion or two in short term profits.
those inexpensive mowers last a long time with a few simple non tricks, just common sense, the main thing is people will not follow the maintenance advice that comes with the mower in the operators pamphlet
They aren't industrial bush hogs, you can't mow baby trees and rocks with them
Change the dang oil often, and use synthetic oil, it withstands the higher temps the little air cooled engines get to better than regular oil. The little mowers are built cheap, they don't have oil pumps just slingers so dirt can accumulate, so just change the oil at around 20 hours. The little ones take less than a quart so it isn't expensive to do this.
change / clean the air filter a lot-this is vital, air filter starts to get dirty, engine will start to run rich, fouls the plug and carbonizes inside the cylinder head. Leads to the endless yanking trying to start it.. Personally I don't even use the factory air cleaners any more, just got a sheet of thick foam rubber and cut out my own with scissors, toss them when they get dirty.
Use your air compressor and blow off nozzle and keep all the fins, etc clean of dried grass and dirt, every single time you use it, just clean it off before you put it away. They are air cooled, dirty engine=hot engine, and they sit right down next to the ground where you are kicking out clumps of cut grass and blowing up dirt and dust clouds sometimes, so they get dirty and the air cleaner gets dirty.
Keep blade sharp, if you notice a weird vibration sometimes that means you hit something nasty and the blade is bent and not balanced anymore, change the blade then. That is sort of a wild card though, not usually necessary but I have seen it. If vibration persists, ya, time to look for another yard sale project mower then. Hang on to the junkers and old parts eventually you have some nice scrap to take to the recycling and make a few bucks, a lot of aluminum there if you knock them down.
Change the plug whenever it looks carboned out or if you start to hear a misfire, again, cheap, keep some spares handy. You can clean them a few times if you want to with some emery paper. The new solid state ignition modules are binary, work/no work. Easy enough to check for spark and I've only ever see a couple that really went bad. They are actually a big improvement over the old points deals they used to have in the saber toothed badger days, IMO.
And that's about it, I get those mowers all the time for free usually or like 5 dollars at yard sales and fix them up and get them running easy. The biggest problem I see from people's broken mowers is the air cleaner leading to the carbonization and dirty spark plug, I kid thee not. That and sometimes they have hit something hard and the flywheel key shears, it is designed to do that, which saves the engine from destruction but makes it impossible to start, because that key sets the timing. New keys are a buck. Heh, I have a small fleet of those things. Some of them are pretty old now. Once in awhile maybe use some carb cleaner around and inside the carb. Oh ya and run them completely dry before storing in the winter! Get every drop of the old gas out. Don't even bother with that stabil stuff, not worth it for that last quarter pint of gas. Gas just turns to nasty glue when it sits around, plugs everything up, nasty, just use it up.
your antique buggywhip pure bloated price gouging model is from last century when a copy cost serious money to reproduce. Now that is not so, yes , it isn't totally free, but it *is* so close to free the differrnce is highly negligible, especially with file sharing and people already paying for their own infrastructure and bandwith with their connections, that even helps eliminate the lame need for expensive "server farms" and so ion, that's another artifically constructed 'scarcity" model when it comes to simple file sharing. If you say "shame on me" you are saying the same thing to all the folks who contribute freely to all the foss projects and the written literary projects out there that are free to share, for people who voluntarily share. Because they "get it" on why this is a good thing and how this new system works. You are more than welcome to charge a hundred dollars a byte or whatever you choose for your products in the digital age, and good luck with that. For the record, I have never downloaded and kept anything that wasn't authorized, I have paid for every shareware I ever used except for one that was abandonedware and zero contact information. I don't have a single pirated tune nor movie nor anything like that. If you want to try and keep artificial scarcity going for your stuff, go right ahead, I predict the effort is doomed for the most part, no matter how much DRM you throw at it though. And if you want to throw millions of people in jail for copying your stuff, good lick with that as well. As for people not creating because they aren't being directly paid in money..HAHAHAHAHAHAH! totally wrong, exceptions to your "rule" out there by the thousands and millions to look at. Maybe YOU won't, but a lot of other people WILL and are, daily, and have been doing so.
Sorry, it used to be "illegal" to terach women or black people to even read, couldn't share knowledge freely, it used to be illegal for anyone but kings and monks to have a hand copied book, couldn't share knowledge even if you wanted to pay for it. That middle ages style restrictions on sharing knopwledge let us enjoy centuries of social and intellectual stagnation, and your business model is just an evolutionary offshoot of the same dang thing, put artificial restrictions on knowledge and cultural sharing.
Freely sharing knowledge and having the ability for everyone to benefit and profit from it, all the way to society in general, is one of those complex things you either grok, or do not grok, you obviously don't, or not enough anyway to see you are being paid, all the freaking time 10 times as much, more, a lot more, "in kind" -which is an actual legal and business term, go look it up- with other digital bits, that aren't yours, that you didn't create, but are free to use, by having the ability to use others works, as much or more "wealth" as you would ever get trying to translate that into the bankers counterfeit "money". I don't care if you personally are a billionaire, that billion still isn't enough to cover all the freely available digital bits you can get today because others aren't so narrow minded and greedy. That's the game changing part, you get paid more by not being narrow minded and seeing what true wealth is, money in huge quantities and a direct one on one exchange is no longer needed for some-note, I said "some"- aspects of our society. If you want a society where every step you take costs money, if every action you take needs a lawyer and a contract, if every aspect of our lives has to be legally restricted based on which is who's "intellectual property" this or that is, where does it end? You need a "license to view" the design of a building on the street? How far? If that is what you want then you are welcome to such a society, sounds like a living hell to me, and the problems we are having today in coming to grips with digital bits and the extreme low cost thereof should by now be a little clearer, you suffer from ideology of the past where cheap copies were not possible. We hit the 21st century man, enjoy
I don't think this will be like the first great depression. People won't put up with mass moving to the camps or to government camp/work projects like they did before as the last dregs of their wealth gets confiscated and put into already wealthy people's hands. They did that once, a second time..not so sure it will fly this go around, we are more sophisticated now and more paranoid of motives and more able to get information. It's not just a small handful of newspaper owners and radio station owners they have to compromise, like they did last time to push propaganda.. They are already panicking (as well they should) over a paltry few million looming bankruptcies and houses being repoed, tens of millions in a borked economy with no way out and full complete despair facing people, living out on the street..not gonna happen. They've cooked the books on phony low-ball numbers inflation and phony unemployment stats as much as they can, they are running out of lies and excuses to cover for their sheer greed and arrogance ands stupidity. And the US was getting *very* close to mass internal revolt (against predatory capitalism mostly) by the time their bankers ww2 was run up the flagpole and used as a mass distraction. When you have the same big banks and the same multinationals and the same martini swilling cocktail partying at the yacht club people all involved in profiting from a war, it wasn't an accident, it was done on purpose.
We have way too many ways to get information out now, and people will be noticing who's fault is what. This last administration has just completely destroyed any sort of trust that the people have in government for telling the truth, the executive branch or congress, lowest approval ratings ever, lowest trust ratings ever, etc., they realize now it is all mostly an illusion to perpetuate the top 1% wealthy people at the expense of everyone else. I know there are still a lot of grassroots activists who cling to the outmoded belief that "this time" their pet big R or D candidate, "once they get in", will change things for the better, but those people come with a full belly of cult brand koolaid, they'll be the last ones to really see what is going on. Everyone else, who isn't a full time cult political party activist, is already starting to see it. and I guess..just a gues... you have to be around for a lot of election cycles to realize that past a pure intellectual level. You have to have lived it to see that D or R it doesn't make a bit oif difference, they are just two criminal political gangs in a jobs and skimming operation, they share the spils of owning government. No one who isn't in on and it and isn't a full member and adherent of that "system" ever makes it into the top ranks. Heck, I used to know before he died a *very* high ranking d party leader, I will not identify him, but he would get a little gassed on scotch and start laughing about it to me when we had informal talks/conversations, how much they sucker in the rubes to stay powerful. The term is "useful idiots" and it applies to both parties.
I think the government using their flag waving hessians along with their black suited economic spokesmodels murmuring soothing words will try a few more various schemes to both cork up dissent and also to try and "fix" the economy, but will not succeed, because not only have they screwed over their own people, they took a lot of powerful foreigners to the cleaners as well, and those folks are pissed off now and trying to slide away for support of the US and the fedbuck as much as possible in a loss-cutting way..
I worry the most about a rather involved and destructive false flag operation though, and I wouldn't put it past them for one second to not already have such plans sitting on the shelf, or to implement them when they deem it necessary.
Well, I don't want civil war, but I sure would like to see a more realistic and equitable split in the worth of this or that area of the nation and between urban and rural. I really don't think a lot of pure urbanites understand how their lives and lifestyles are so very much tied to a healthy and robust rural economy and infrastructure, so they dismiss it out of hand.
As for myself, I saw the upcoming economic collapse starting around the late 90s so I moved back rural. When I was a kid I listened and paid attention to my older relatives stories about the great depression, and when I saw all the same clues they mentioned that were the prelude to that, I knew the same result would be coming. And it isn't really rocket surgery, it's just seeing trends, reading and understanding some history, noting that human behavior isn't all that different from thousands of yearts ago, and having the ability to work simple sums.. the economy isn't even near done collapsing, and that's reality, I won't even put it in the speculation category anymore. The monetary supply is inflated WAY beyond any sort of rationality, and they have pushed magic beans paper financial products into the realms of clinical insanity. There is no possible way to avoid collapse, none, it doesn't exist, it isn't even theoretically possible at this point..
Being poor and broke in the cities is an absolute no win situation, at least in the rural areas you have some immediate and onsite fallback positions for life's necessities. And all these highly paid folks now in the cities will be almost helpless to do anything about their situations once those big checks stop coming in, or even if they hang onto their jobs, a really big *if* right now, that money simply won't be enough to cover the basics, although their contractual debts will remain intact.
Well, right now today you would sell the heck out of them if you could get them on the car lots. Around here now I am seeing very prominent signs in the windows of vehicles at the car lots emphasizing some alleged bragger mileage, like "30" mpg. If you could put 40 or 50 up there and it not be consumer fraud I don't think you'd have much trouble selling them. I know I went last year and snagged an old beat on datsum diesel pickup because I knew they got fantastic mileage, but those sorts of vehicles are rare here. And we've had demand, it has been there, but none of the car companies has been able to address it fully, toyota has a backlog for priuses for instance. And no one has electric vehicles yet, nothing between a glorified golf cart or an exotic sportscar. They keep saying americans only want giant crappy mileage vehicles, when the reality is that is primarily what they produced and put on the lots so that's what people wind up buying, because they have no choice at all, that's all there is for the most part, even though it sort of "looks" like there are choices.. I see a ton of smaller cars on the roads, and people are keeping them running, but you look at the car lots and very few of them are in the lines at the new car dealers, and it has been that way for some years now, the public has been buying up the smaller more efficient vehicles, but the millionaire bosses at the car companies just can't seem to see what is reality in front of their faces and kept pushing out the huge monsters, even as they closed plant after plant and are going bankrupt. Those guys who make the big decisions are all so rich they just didn't "get it" on the economy at all, out to lunch, clueless, the same as their majority big rich shareholders, so they had no realistic corporate governance. They just so much didn't "get it" on the worsening economy and the need for affordable vehicles and vehicles that got better mileage that I guess they just assumed that it wasn't getting bad or something. At least that is all I can figure out, just a near total disconnect with what non-millionaires have been going through. Apply the same to the big union bosses and still working union workers, they make so much more than the median here they don't get it, even with their business crumbling around them. I was in the UAW in the 60s and it was like that, both management and rank and file out to lunch, you just couldn't get nary a one of them folks to see Japan coming on strong, it would bounce off their brains and they would dismiss it, I tried, I really did, to get some acknowledgment of the situation to sink in there, eventually gave up and quit that work I was so disgusted with the lack of vision and no apparent long view on things, and it looks to not have changed one single bit. Those people in that business in the US just can *not* use some normal data and business analysis acumen and extrapolate more than a couple years into the future worth beans, they just can't. Henry Ford was the only one who could near as I can see.
de centralized power in the form of billions of solar PV modules could help eliminate any new huge transmission lines being needed. My theory is, if it's a roof sitting in the hot sun, it needs to be covered with solar panels. And the government wouldn't need to do much more than a few lines on a new law authorizing 100% tax credits up to..some level determined, around 20 thousand amortized over five tax seasons would be sufficient I guess. Not partial credits or deductions, full credits. The slack in taxes there could be made up elsewhere as new manufacturing and service industries grew, with the end game result of a lot more energy independence. Last place we lived as caretakers was mostly all solar powered, a 29 thou installation did the bulk of the circuits for the owners three story mini-mansion. I've lived with it and seen it work, awesome. That and also use the same form of credits for just more insulation, and mandate better energy efficiency standards for new construction and deed/title transfers.
As to cities, to be clear, I am not saying tear them all down, but help people who can and want to not be forced to live there or be forced to commute there to have a viable option or two. I have no idea what the real figures might be, but there simply has to be millions of jobs that can be done at home that are currently being done by commuters to the cities.
I think big cities are partially to blame, everything they need has to be transported in to them, nothing actually comes from big cities that much, stuff comes from the countryside and the outskirts mostly. Big cities main export is governmental BS and what passes as "culture"..like gangstah rap! And also because of the corporate practice, a carryover from when it was manadatory before electronics was developed and communications became easy, of having central command giant ego office towers that force people to commute to them when all they do more or less is electronic office work that can be done at home. Forget efficient commuting using mass transit, that is still wasteful; as all get out, no different from driving SUVs around, because a ton of it is *not needed*, it is done, but it isn't needed. Just eliminate commuting all together whenever possible. This is the digital age, why are people still "going to the office" like it is the Dicksonian ages with quill pens, to stare at a computer screen and mash the print button? that's crazy stuff now, just mega silly. Collaboration can be done over the net. Eliminate the entire middleman as much as possible of moving people instead of moving electrons, then people can stay home, and we won't need to waste as much resources keeping those giant buildings up, or even constructing them in the first place. Just the sheer *waste* building those looming office towers is appalling. And cities screw up nature, no place for rainwater to soak in, Most trees that are there struggle, the only nature you see is ghetto rabbits and skyrats mostly, they trap heat and poisonous pollution gases and so on and screw up the weather downwind from where they are. Personally, I wouldn't raise a kid inside big cities now, I think it is borderline abuse just from the pollution they soak in 24/7 while their brains and bodies are developing.. We probably wouldn't even be having a fuel crisis right now if as many people who could work at home just did so. I think a lot of these pro giant cities people just have never thought it through all the way, they skip the bad parts of it, gloss over it. big cities came about from the necessity of face to face with trade and transportation way back in ye olden days, a lot of them are on the old river routes and ocean ports, but now...no need for all that face to face all the time, they exist from *inertia*. People went to the suburbs en masse when they could because they wanted to, they wanted out of the big cities, a lot of humans actually need some green around them, and then you *do* have space for a decent garden and a yard where the kids and dogs can play safely.
As to space for food, urban guerrila gardening, on wasted public lands and over grown weedy unkempt lots, rooftop gardening, etc, are all viable. There's a huge movement in cuba now to do mass scale urban gardening and it is actually working out quite well. You don't need a ton of space per person, a 10 foot by 10 foot square in total size will give a lot of food during the season. Heck, I once went nuts in a second floor apartment I had that had a few sunny windows and one little sunroom on the south side, at one time I had over 200 houseplants in there, including a lot of veggies (no pot though..). I even had a baby apple tree growing in there and some sunflowers that reached to the ceiling that had peas and cucumbers climbing them. It worked OK as a daily small salad provider. Oh ya, a couple rose bushes! That made that apt smell pretty nice all the time. On the cheap and small all you need is a 5 gallon plastic bucket or two, a bag of dirt from the garden center, and a sunny window. Throw a tomato and a pepper plant in there, done, healthy snacks. I've kept the same tomatoe plants growing for years before inside apartments, I mean, ya, your traditional ferns are cool, but why not some tomatoes or something else you like? the colored lettuces are all nice and grow like crazy. spinach is easy, radishes are fast and throw a lot of green around the room. Big fun, cheap eats, you are paying the rents anyway, might as well get a little payback from the windows!
Yes, it would be, and that should be our goal as advanced monkeys who can use and make tools. Why so much of society and in particular the business community is against this is beyond me, they should be the first ones to see the obvious advantages. Some do, obviously, witness the slow and gradual rise of FOSS and some of the more benevolent "open university" efforts. Most of them though, bucket 0 fail. When you have a huge problem eliminated..well...just that! Go on to the next one, then the one after that. Hopefully, eventually, most everyone will "get it". Can you see back in the caveman days "sorry mr. Ug, that stick you are using as a lever is patented!" We'd probably just now be using fire on demand. Maybe. Probably homecaveland security would make it illegal though.
Treating easily replicated digital bits exactly the same as tangible commodities, by (relatively) newly written laws and by industry practice, creating a purely artificial scarcity business model.
Digital copying is a huge game changing tech advancement, and society has fallen flat on dealing with it. It is one of the few "star trek" level tech advances in the past few generations, yet we can see that business society has freaked out, it made a lot of the older practices virtually unneeded, and wants both to be able to use this tech freely for themselves, and also to be able to restrict it to others, entirely in their favor following the old and now obsolete so called "laws" of supply and demand as they might pertain to such products today. There is the potential for unlimited and "so close to free it doesn't matter" supply now, so they are trying to restrict it through DRM and laws and lawsuits such as they can still extract the same (or more) level of profits "per unit" as when back in the day they had to actually publish a dead trees book or stamp out a vinyl album, etc.
What will we be seeing when we can do such replication as easy with tangible objects, if we can't even embrace and adapt to digital copies? This effort is not only ill conceived it should be *embarassing* to humanity in general, why it is even contemplated. We all should be enjoying the big freedom to freely share and share alike and have a huge expensive burden of transferring knowledge and culture from each of us and to all of us removed from our backs so we can concentrate on the next tech hurdles that could ultimately lead to humans being able to universally exist without a huge amount of drudgery and dangerous labor. Isn't that some sort of goal anyway?
It won't happen all at once, but every time we lick a major tech problem, like we have with copies of this or that chunk of knowledge or culture, why should we -or even allow- go out of our way to create an additional problem just to perpetuate the old problem, which has been solved now? This is illogical and makes no long view historical sense. Unless we want the space aliens to start calling this the planet of the buggywhip traders (part of the embarrassing part)
disclaimer: all I can do is not be hypocritical about it. I have a ton of digital stuff on the net over the past decade, if anyone thinks it might be useful (stop laffing!), take a copy share a copy, go for it. I work ag in meatspace, I encourage everyone who is so inclined to get seeds and "grow their own copies", use open pollinated so you can share copy making potential, go for it, feed yourself and the planet as cheaply and nutritiously as possible, leading to all free someday when the tech gets better. I seek no DRM restrictions or patents or any of that other nonsense on your ability or desire to produce your own food, even if that means I might theoretically make less, I'll be much happier once everyone is fed for cheap or free, and will go on to do something else. And that's the best I think I can do right now with voluntary sharing.
Forgot that part!
....are going to be constantly in the oil drip/slick section in the center of the lane (if you mean eventually a lot of them will be sharing lanes). With a normal bike you ride to either side of that accident strip.
..is economically sound. Buying small single meal servings and going to the store or deli or latest cool restaurant for every meal is rather wasteful and overly urban trendy. It makes much more economic sense and green-sense to get your purchases bulk whenever, which is what costco stores are for, so the parent had a point. No one single vehicle fits all situations, the VW in the article is primarily for commuting or cheap road triops with light luggage, and as such would be interesting once they got the costs down a lot more. Mostly here we just use a mid sized sedan that gets in the 20s and can still do a lot of bulk shopping, as in hundreds of lbs, bulk dogfood and catfood, various other stuff, we do combined big shopping trips (and we are both skinny folks here) but occasionally we need a truck, and once in awhile I could get by with a scooter (if I had one). There is just never going to be a one size fits all vehicle, situations are just too different, household and family sizes are too different, etc.
Two of the tractors I use have air cooled diesels, simply outstanding machines. Deutz. The smaller one with a 60 horse engine I can get around two full shifts out of 12 gallons running at heavy working rpms, 2000. The water cooled ones I use (kubotas mostly) tend to start to run hot as soon as the radiators get plugged up with dust and debris, which happens constantly, even with the protective screens in front of them, and they don't get near the mileage even though they are smaller engines. I think they like radiators in cars though so you can get some decent heat into the cabin as part of the reason anyway. The old bugs had some pretty non existent heat, if you were running the stock exhaust, and zero heat if you ran a better power and mileage exhaust. VW had to eventually go to an additional gas run heater for real cold weather use. heh, what we used to do in ye olden hipster days was just clamp a small camping propane heater in there and run with the windows open a little.
And with that said, remember when they were working on ultra light weight ceramic engines? What happened to those? Very little to no size changes when they got hot, meaning they could run them with no piston rings! Stuff like that. Maybe it just costs too much to build them, I really don't know, but they had some working. That's disappeared into the amazing inventions that have disappeared category. Smokey Yunick's engines he built for mileage with still good power, just to show it was entirely possible, gone, poofed, GM offered him toy money for it so he said no and went back to racing.
Way too high a price and still years away. If they could drop the price severely by just using all aluminum instead of exotic materials and still get a mileage of half that, 117.5 MPG (which would be still pretty snazzy and also hit the x-prize for cars deal), maybe they could get them out on the lots sooner. All these various alternatives the majors are working on are just too darn expensive. 100 grand for a tesla sportscar or "only" 60 grand for the sedan. Nuts. Honda fuel cell cars "lease" for 600 a month and like two hydrogen stations. Nuts. 60 grand for a chevy volt, only jumped 20 grand since they been talking about it and still none for sale. nuts. Perpetual design wanking. We'll see the Chinese and Indians eat the great mileage and cheap car market before detroit, stuttgart and yokohama pull it off. They just don't seem to understand affordable and get it done now, not years and years from now. Look at GM and Ford, they make good mileage cars but don't sell them in the US. GM used to make a decent and modern good mileage car for the US market, the original Saturns, now it is just another ho hum car with medium crappy mileage. Where's the real improvements? Old falcons and darts and valiants got 25 mpg with crappy transmissions and they were solid steel stout vehicles. 35 years later we are still stuck at that 25 MPG plateau, despite apollo moon rocket plumbing and wiring?? They need to study it more and keep throwing concept cars at shows at us?
My idea of a homebrew good mileage car that might work would be if you could get around a 7 speed transaxle for old air cooled VWs (you can mod one to a 5 right now), put that in a lightweight rail buggy with one of the new small Kohler two cylinder diesel engines (or another brand, just small, and not costing mega thousands and have all sorts of exotic controls either). If you want a real body they got them too or it could be fabbed, it is just fiberglass after all.
...would be a Remington 870. Just that sound is enough to give most badguys pause. They'll hand your computer back to you %^)
I want a web browser that will magically still display something legible on those javascript and flash heavy pages, with that stuff turned off. Is it too much to ask some sort of links that function without javascript?