"Would you consider a candidate's stand on privacy important enough to sway your vote?"...yes, it would, but certainly not Hillary, not with her background, but any consideration would have to take into account all the issues..
IMO, the US has had quite enough with the bush/clinton dynasty for a quarter century now to show that aristocracy doesn't work and is a bad idea. I'm sorry but we aren't supposed to have some sort of hereditary "lords" class. It's just slap wrong. 300 million and change now in this nation, how about we give some other folks a crack at it, eh?
How about a candidate who is concerned about ALL your rights, all of them up and down the list, and has the best track record bar none in Congress to protect your rights *and* your wallet, and really groks what national security and soverignty is really about and wouldn't try to pass off blood profits wars for the transnationals as being in our best interest, someone like Ron Paul, who has an exploratory committe open now?
If he got 1/50th of the news coverage Hillary gets from the controlled propaganda press, or even 1/10th the coverage that Obama dude gets, he'd be the next president handily. Well, given we clean up blackbox voting first of course.
Have you found any affordable and normal sized screens that are 12 VDC input? That's my stumbling block on making the po' mans luggable and low power system. They want a mint just for a 7 or 8 inch screen, at least any I have found.
That commodore mod is exactly the form factor of choice though, very good work and along the lines I was thinking. Right now my mini is just stuck in an old AT case, because I had it kicking around and it was the easiest.
The new boards just shown though..eventually we will be able to get a true powerful PDA thing that at home can just have normal components that can plug into it, making a desktop out of the PDA on demand. That's what I really want.
Mozilla makes money from google being their default search engine. Google makes money from ads. I doubt they want to actually include adblocker with it turned on. They have the extension, that is as far as they probably want to go.
Being able to store your power onsite first-before it gets to the net metering phase, is a huge benefit and one of the primary good reasons to have onsite power production. We've seen just a ton of news stories over the past few years of whole regions going down from storms, etc. Heck, there are still a lot of folks in the midwest struggling with that now. Think of it as a whole house (or however many circuits you have activated, you can pick and choose) UPS system then it makes more sense. And that's the good part of home solar, you can do both. From my experience, on a good sunny day by around 1:30 PM or so your battery bank should be pretty full if you have sized your system properly, then it's gravy after that, all afternoon. You are still sitting on enough juice to run everything for at least a full day, and your meter can be running backwards then if that is the set up you have.
...demozoggery, and yes, I do it all the time, I freely admit it. Have since I was a kid. Once wrote a conservation essay just slap fulla of it and won a state wide contest. You gots to have some zeal in life!
I get pretty passionate about politics, and you can't twist economics from politics, they are completely entwinned, so I have at it.
With the software vendors and the media hardware folks and then the criminal (yes criminal) **AA products companies and those nutso orgs-if they would have just kept dropping prices drastically as new tech advances made that possible to the consumer, there wouldn't even have been much of a napster-like problem. They got used to making x-profit based on costs back 35 years ago or something. Tech advances made it so they could drop distribution costs to a few percent of that now with downloading and with cheap plastic disks. They in no way, manner, shape or form dropped prices accordingly, not even close. That's it, that's their big mistake, and it is glaringly obvious. They could have easily upped their market by doing hugemongusly larger volume sales, and never pissed off one customer.
Instead of doing that they maintain thoroughly ludicrous pricing levels, they come up with insane DRM schemes every other week, they bribed and bullied their way into making their complete insanity "law", and none of that will ever really work, all it has done is push their own customers away by treating them like crap,and they still keep shafting their own talent by cheating them of more and better sales, etc. And they you have big companies like MS and all the others *who are going along with it*.
Nuts. I call it like I see it, them boys may be rich now, but they are still *nuts* and they are hurting society in general by trying to legislate away decent technological advances.
I tell ya whut, I make food for folks as my primary income. If ever a food replicator tech comes along that puts me out of a job..GREAT! NO problems at all! If the planet can be fed for much cheaper and better, eliminating mass starvation and the expense for people, drop it down to much more affordable, I am all for it, even if it means I need to go do something else for a living. I don't care, the overall benefits outweigh any temporary inconvenience for me. I'd switch to being a hunting guide or teach outdoor skills or work in the alternative energy business or just write or work on my wild ass inventions or something else I can do good, I wouldn't care a bit. I certainly wouldn't push for legislation which artificially cripples people's ability to have or use a food replicator or drive up the cost just to maintain some status quo.
That's why on the ag side I am TOTALLY against GM manufactured "terminator" seeds/plants, or plant patents for that matter. Completely crazy there, DRM for FOOD. That's even worse than what they are doing with digital bits, this is aFOOD we are talking about now, a necessity, I won't do it, wouldn't use it, would fight against it, and have. My own garden, open pollinated-no patents, all the way.
...deliberate sabotage, any way you slice it, designed on purpose to perpetuate a business model developed when duplicating content was hugely more expensive than it is now from a strictly technological viewpoint. It is (very generally speaking of course) the work of those already rich and powerful to stay that way, and to seek to lock away technological advances only to themselves as much as possible, through obvious and unchecked wide scale cartel market manipulation actions and also through extensive lobbying to make the laws reflect the profiteer's paranoid-and elitist- neoluddism.
It's Ok for the rich and powerful to have any advances and advantages from modern technology-but don't let those slavering "masses" folk have the same, even when it becomes technically and economically possible. Cuts into that "bottom line" thing, or at least that is their paranoid theory.
Enforcing artificial scarcity combined with the broken-windows economic model is the height of their intellectual business acumen.
No one disputes this is immensely profitable for them, given our current social and economic infrastructure. It remains to be seen if this will always be the case.
We left the caves a long time ago, seems like maybe it might be nice to leave the medieval period some time soon. But I guess the aristocracy isn't quite willing to give that up yet.
There is NO secure way to have computerised voting.
We had a long established precedent that any citizen worth enough to vote could verify an empty box using nothing more than a set of mark I eyeballs. No programming needed, no electricity needed for that matter.
I don't care how many standards and computers and voodoo assurances you throw at it, computerised voting doesn't pass that minimal "normal human eyeballs" test. I don't care if the code is open or not, even if it is they can still hack it upstream at the next computer, or the nexct one, and you wouldn't know. When it comes to what ownership of the government is worth-ultimate power and trillions of dollars-temptation is too great, or force of blackmail, or whatever-it'll get hacked to pieces.
All you are doing with computers is swapping around the places and manners where *extreme* and easy large scale voting manipulation can occur. The old method was pretty hard to hack every voting ballot box, even a sdmall percentage, but with computers??? Large scale regional hacking possible, and you wouldn't know. Some got hacked in ye olden days,sure,ballot box stuffing, but having the ability to inspect the empty box, then stand around at night and verify the count, worked about as well as possible over the widest range of precincts.
Computerised voting is designed on-purpose to fake people out with "new shiny" blinkenlights, and that's about it. It's a scam to perptuate the one globalist party system so that this election's "fearless leader" chose by the globalists "wins"..
The old system wasn't broken so bad that we have to spend billions to completely finish smashing it to pieces.
Paper ballot, indelible pen for marking. No hanging chads, no voodoo "code" counting at some remote server buried in a locked basement someplace and three paid off dudes "verifying" it, none of that. It's lame. A simple ballot box and paper ballots are just fine for voting, and if it takes a-horror!-whole day to vote and another to count..who cares? Why don't we have a full 24 hour voting period *anyway*, what's with near bankers hours for voting? And we have run out of humans who can count, just adding simple sums? I don't think so.
Contracts. And with any breaking of the contract..the loser..loses. Anything other than that with children would fall into the criminal realm no doubt, so again the state would decide regardless of any contract. If it is an amicable split, just do a new contract. You can agree in the first contract to binding arbitration for that matter. You can agree as a default joint custody always in the first contract, unless someone really screws up. either a provision was written, or the joint arbitrator couild decide.
It's possible.
I just don't like you (allegedly) need their permission for your living arrangements "legally". Nonetheirbiznezz
.....that's all licenses are, permits wherein the state has decided that your have no inherent right to do something so you need permission to do something from them-are holdovers from the old racial and racist miscegnation laws (about the same as all gun laws really, too). And that's it, there are no other historical precedents. Before that, a marriage might have been registered at your local church if you were married in that faith, etc, or no place for that matter, but the state had nothing to do with it at all.. And it shouldn't be any of their business at all either, and is just another form of them exerting more power over the citizenry and further widening the us versus them deal with government and the people. The only debate should be, get the state to butt out completely because it is none of their business, y/n.
Here's one guy who is probably running that I think most freedom loving folks might endorse. Longshot, the media will go out of their way to ignore him, his own party sort of ignores him but he gets relected by his locals because he's an honest dude, a true rarity in the district of criminals. Pretty smart guy, strict Constitutionalist, and etc. There needs to be a ton of pressure applied (and support for and $upport for) from the grass roots level.
"There is nothing wrong with debt"...you lost it right there. If you don't get it, why it is better to have produced wealth than debt...nothing much more to say. And if you haven't read article after volume about all the warning buzzers going off over the here and now and upcoming serious debt problems..I mean..sheesh..what financials are you reading? Some alternate internet? And which consumers trust it will be paid off? All the ones projected to lose their homes now when they got ARMs based on some inflated wage projections they picked out of the air? And you ainb't noticed folks talking about huge companies going bankrupt? Miss the news with the airlines and the big car companies and so forth? Pensions? Social security?
And one of the main reasons the head of the main chinese central bank said that his nation had enough dollars now-and that was his quote, "enough dollars", and why they are going into other currencies and PMs and tradeable tangibles like buying up long term resources either by contract or outright purchase like mines, etc in foreign nations, to them, was *precisely* because they have no way of knowing how much the inflated pool of dollars is. There has never been an audit of the FED, never, and even so, they have the ability to print up boatloads and you wouldn't know about it. And they stopped reporting the most important indicator last march, and started seriously lying about it. The Chinese (and a lot of others now) don't want to sit on any more dollars as they lose worth. They have been losing billiosn just sitting on the cash-that's from inflation and global loss of confidence in the dollar, nothing else. You can go google up all of that, I don't really save a ton of bookmarks. And there's nothing conspiratorial about it at my end, this is all mainstream news and analysis. You don't get the comptroller of the US going out on dog and pony shows every day sounding the alarm over the looming debt and entititlement crisis. In fact, I think, as far as I can remember going back to the 60's when I started paying more attention, this might be only the second time, the first was immediately after the opec embargo and uberhigh interest rates, around that era.
Anyway, let's hope YOU are right! For real! Honest, if they can keep pulling off this total scam with the fednote, and keep foreigners buying our mostly worthless paper and exchanging valuable tangible goods like oil and manufactured goods for IOUs based and backed by nothing-swell, their loss for being tards! I won't bitch much at all..but I don't think they can. I really don't, and everything I see now would be classified as the "cracks in the dam". I know I have adjusted my personal finances and living arrangement accordingly, thinking that odds are we'll see a series of drastic "corrections" and we will be lucky to avoid great depression version 2 and some more big wars.
Now I have to go out and tend to my chickens and cows again. Why? I like to eat and won't be in any refugee situation or standing in the government soup line. I have clear detailed memories of my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles telling me stories about the great depression and how FAST things can change, as in normal, to a few weeks later things got pretty sucky with the economy despite all the wall street experts assurances, and here's a hint-city folks are gonna suffer badly once the just in time situation for their reality starts to breakdown. The fatcats won't care, they'll take your house, your ride, everything and put you on the street or in some government fema workcamp if you don't have enough of "their" money they control the distribution of. And once the foreign folks stop swapping real goods for our paper-lookout. We don't have a backup system in place, you can see that clearly with katrina-the government can't take care of 700 thousand people let alone 7 million or 70 millions. We still got folks sitting ion fema camps miles from any work, why is this again? Aren't we rich beyond measure, don't wee have all this wonderfu
My cows running on pasture grass produce tons of fertilizer-how much do you want to buy? Bring your own container!;) (No, they make chemical fertilizer from natural gas, not oil, but your point is still the same there)
With that said, the big push and breakthroughs for cellulosic based ethanol production is getting closer. Stuff like switch grass* doesn't require any external fertilizer and only needs to be planted once. I know we will be going through a transition stage and use corn, etc, for awhile, but eventually the prices and demand will force the switch over, pun intended. It's a fast evolving business/technology right now.
* and by all means, everyone in the US lobby their federal congress critter to support industrial hemp and get the fascist 'tards at the dea to backoff. We can get human food, animal food, fiber for clothes, paper and fuel, both biodiesel and ethanol and all sorts of stuff from the same crop that has tremendous yield per acre with not a lot of input.
disclaimer, never built the kit: discliamer2, if I had the loot I'd buy one and build one right now, they look spiffy (or spec out my own parts for a larger vehicle experience). Probably do a small pickup, then when I wanted a "hybrid" I'd throw my genny in the back or tow it with a small trailer. I probably will sometime, right now not enough spare change kicking around to do it though and we already have a lot of vehicles.
I just looked at some of the pics and specs. If you get one of the custom kits, designed for a particular car, it's straight swapping around looks to me. 20 grand for that for labor would be WAY a rip and you might as well just get a prius or something. No way is that figure close, try one tenth of that maybe to hire someone to do that. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely hard about it other than going and renting an engine hoist one weekend to pull the old motor before you start, and that's cheap. If you buy your target vehicle from a junkyard, saya a good chassis with a borked engine so you can get it cheap, just pay them to do it, they'll do it. They do stuff like that all the time. I would think even paying top dollar per hour it shopuldn't run you more than 200 bucks to get a small engine pulled, then have the wrecker tote the rolling stock home and have at it (you need to keep the flywheel apparently though)
It certainly looks like any geek even remotely capable with a set of sockets and wrenches, etc could do the swap, and if you can't, you actually need to develop a few wrench skills. Skip the next level in the video game (whatever, spend some time away from entertainments of choice) and learn some tool wrangling, it will come in handy your entire life. Nothing to be scared of there. Every geek should have some basic mechanical, electrical, woodworking, plumbing, etc skills. Not saying you need to be a master in all of them, but the basics you should be familiar with-and it's fun for the most part, building stuff and fixing stuff.
People aren't owning their homes now, they are getting longer and longer term mortgages, as I pointed out, they own larger debts. Before the globalism push 30 year to 50 year to interest only mortgages were mostly unheard of., you just didn't see it. And inflation? You believe the official numbers when they removed the *critical* M3 stats last year? Why would you believe that? Why would they do that other than to help hide the fact the printing presses are roaring? Independent analysts have done their best to come up with some real numbers and they are findng it is (roughly)twice as high as the government claims. Here, check it out. And the jobs? Huh? They reclassified burger flipping as manufacturing, and stuff like that. They count the loss of a 20$ an hour job with full complete and robust bennies manufacturing with a swap in to walmart at 7$ with toy bennies as "still a job".
I don't. It's a job maybe, but not the same. that's cooking the books to make it look the same or better when it isn't.
I take the long view, because I've been around. I just don't fall for three card monte stuff.
Sorry, it's still hooie. I am not tryng to flame or be mean but it's hooie. They are cooking the books and calling debt wealth, when it is not. Globalism as they are practicing it, not academic theory as it is somehow taught but as it is on the ground, is serving mostly to increase the bottom line of the top 1% while they push credit on everyone else, give it to them, and try to convince them more credit=produced wealth. Sorry, that is the magic beans for the cow scam. It really is. Credit created out of thin air with the central bankers and printing press money and fractional reserve is not the same as produced wealth, nor will it ever have the same impact as using actual work that leads to produced wealth then being traded.
Sorry, it's a scam for the rubes. As for other nations in a similar situation per debt and trade imbalances? Yes,hell yes, they are in potential future deep doo doo as well unless they stop the huge manufacturing shift.
You can NOT printing press your way to "wealth". You have to work for it by producing true tangible wealth. You can't just reshuffle around what is already produced and call it "more". You can dump the same 5 gallons of water back and forth with many buckets, and I don't care how many buckets you wind up using (analogy is with paper financial "products" here), you'll still only have 5 gallons. You can reclassify how much is in a gallon, you still won't have any more.
And if you still want to argue,you need to argue against some powerful folks who know what is what. I could point you to a Fed governor who said the same thing just a few months ago, or perhaps the GAO office, and other top economists, they saw the credit exposure globally is pretty risky right now. And if you recall, it wasn't too many weeks ago the US sent a huge economic delegation to china basically begging them to do something with the yuan, and the chinese told them to *get stuffed* because they are calling the shots now because they *produce wealth*, they don't just talk about it and manage it and bring up powerpoint slides, they manufacture it. They also said they have "enough dollars now".
"Enough". Let that sink in a scosh.
Wealth is grown, mined, or manufactured from the previous two. That's it. Everything else is paperwork shuffling or wealth rearranging and servicing. Servicing wealth does not produce more wealth, that's a variation on the broken windows economy. Extending more layers of credit paper on top of already produced wealth does not increase the pool of wealth, it just makes more credit and dilutes the produced wealth. Printing up more money using numbers picked out of thin air doesn't make your money more valuable, it makes it less valuable. Yes, you can "free trade" in it,and trade is a wonderful
Sorry, that's hooie. Joe worker is in no position to compete when his costs remain the same and are relatively high compared to the nation that the capitalists can ship their capital to. If it's only a few percent, sure, possible, but to say someone in the US can live on a buck an hour or 5 bucks a day (whatever, some absurdly small number) is just retarded, because they are saying you should be able to compete at that price. And it *is* black and white that way. The big company says they'll ship the job to where they can save on the labor, to increase their bottom line and some CEO salary by a few million, because it's insanely cheaper there, yet they want the same loot for the product.
Yet, I am not seeing any big push by the capitalists or their stooges in government to drop rentals or mortgages or real estate property prices, or even freeze rates by law,nor utility bills, nor cost of transportation, nor local property taxes to pay for the illegals invasion, etc, none of that. You can go to the poorest cheapest cost of living place in the US and you still couldn't live on a buck an hour, even if your house was completely paid off and your car was completely paid off and you never needed new clothes. You still couldn't do it. Our society was set up over a long period of time the way it was, certain costs and obligations, and wealth gradually built up over a lot of manufacturing and then a ton of internal trade. You lose it as a worker in the middle of paying off a house and car and etc you can go down the tubes fairly readily now, and you do it in some area where the bulk of the adults are all in the same industry and all of a sudden everyone is laid off you can't even hardly sell your house. It's happened to any number of millions of people and this year with the ARM rates going up it is going to get worse.
And you want even more proof that this isn't working? Easy! They have to cook the books on the economy to make it look good, use every possible word parsing tactic to call credit "wealth" and get people to believe that fairy tale, they dropped some of the FED reporting on cash in circulation to coverup the on purpose credit expansion by running the presses and just adding zeroes to the data entries, they adjusted cost of living and took out critical necessities to make it look good, they reclassified jobs, and we are now without any shadow of a doubt and this is not debateable, just accept it the most in the red any nation has ever been, all within the last 20 years of this big globalism push. If globalism worked, we'd see some results other than cheap crap at walmart. You wouldn't see so many people against it. We'd still be a creditor nation, not a debtor nation. And if you think debt is wealth, go ahead and try it on a small scale at your bank, try to get a big fat loan approved by using your other debt load as collateral. Go ahead, try it see what happens. But nationally that is what has happened in the US and you and they call it good? If we had a true, not fairy tale but true good economy, 30-50 year mortgages would be unheard of, and those interest-only mortgages they push now? Wouldn't exist. Back before the big globalism "offshore all the jobs you can jobs inshore what can't be offshored" push (the war on the middle class in other words) it was 10 and 20 year house notes max and 18 month car loans and total debt (government/corporate/personal) was extremely low and savings rate was high.
You may call trillions and trillions in debt a good economy, IOUs funding more IOUs trying to fund yet more IOUs, while the CE whatever class keeps getting chunks of billions per year because they "work so hard", but I call it one international dump the dollar panic run away from great depression version 2. And it's going to be much suckier than the first one when it happens. And it is going to happen, inevitable, it's too far gone now.
Many regimes and empires and nations have tried the fiat-fairy tale styled economy dodge in the past, to just paper shuffle busy wo
This is why many more people need to be already solar equipped, all over the place. With enough panels in any area, some would survive, and it's easy to store panels securely out of harms way. I keep one large one and two of the roll up flex panels tucked away, along with a small 300 watt aeromarine windgenny. And I don't think you'd need to truck in batteries, just scrounge car batteries on-site. Not perfect, but they work well enough. Heck in ye olden hippie days, we ran "alternative energy" just by having two identical car batteries. Inside the cabins/huts/tents whatever, a 12 VDC car radio and a parking light (and sometimes an 8 track player and CB) sufficed. You just swapped out the battery into your ride well before it went too flat to start the car, or set it to jumper cables for 15 minutes or so to the still good battery in the car and started it then, let it run a scosh, then swap it out for full charging as you drove to work or whatever. A little tedious, but I know some guys lived for years like that and I did myself off and on. A little more work and a run to the trunk and you can add a place for the second battery there, or build a shelf in the engine compartment. And real small cheap generators exist now commercially, starting around 200 bucks.
I am a big proponent of personal preparedness. I think everyone should make moves to being more self sufficient during emergencies. The biggest problem is when huge numbers of people have *nothing at all* in the way of preparations, one or two days food max in the home, no alternative electricity source at all, not even a good flashlight battery stash, no emergency radios at all, no stored water, no emergency medical kit, etc. I think that's silly. So many people might have a big screen TV and go to ball games and bars and spend loot on junk food and beer (and drugs), etc, but won't drop pernny-one on some sane modest and useful preps. Even in an apartment you can store some fair amount of stuff with some judicious planning and adding a few more shelves. Just canned and dry goods under the bed can give people weeks of emergency food and water if they just did it. A good marine trolling battery and a small trickle charger is under one hundred dollars at *mart, and easy enough to be kept topped off and left in a closet say.
As to flooded lead acid being a pain, I never found it so. I used to maintain the dual battery banks (36 deep cycle total) for a fairly large array, it didn't take too long once a month to top them all off with distilled water, which I made with a solar thermal panel water distiller. and these were batteries that were used heavily, one n storage mode is pretty simple to maintain. And for that matter, the more expensive gas mat gels require about zip in the way of maintenance.
If batteries aren't used at all, even a once every three months trickle charge is way more than adequate. Someone who can't do that...I ain't got a lot of sympathy for when it comes to the "help me" part. Comes a time joe citizen has to do something for themselves and not rely on the nanny state or someone else.
As to the fragile panels, I know the unisolars are tough as nails, so are the siemens panels. They'll work even if shot through with a bullet. Some of the others are sorta wimpy in the frame department I admit, just got to shop around.
The US is a *rich* nation. If we had spent one tenth since the 70s on gettng solar and wind out there to individual homeowners and businesses (with long range tax credits for instance) as we have spent so far in the iraq war we would already be well towards the eventual goal of total energy self sufficiency. We just mostly mass-spend our loot on things that require energy, rather than produce it, and rely on that fragile external grid system which inevitably fails right when you need it the most. I think we should have equal numbers of both, centralized grid, and decentralzed on-site generation. We already done built and run the grid, so now let us add to decentralization. It's also better for national s
During field days this is what they do. Quickly set up and power a very sophisticated amount of high tech communications devices, out in some field someplace. They've been doing this for years.
As to solar rigs, that price is not unreasonable. You can get true plug and play module rigs as well, all-in-one units, or two pieces at the most, the movable PV arrary plus the charger/controller/inverter/batteries on wheels or on a trailer. I would suggest the full trailer routine, probabgly the easiest solution and you can adapt what you might need as to more cargo space, etc. And add in a fuel generator anyway, you really will be better of with both if possible.
Is that primarily for heating/cooling? If so your best bet is more insulation/better windows, etc. buck for buck you can't beat it, for most climates and most purposes, without really trying to paint with too broad of a brush. "Payback" on insulation is really superior for most people though before chucking money at electrical supply. If that power bill is for running electrical devices-too many variables there. You'd have to decide what is more valuable, and what devices could be economically exchanged for a lower demand device, etc.
How alternative energy companies work is sorta simple but very important. You need a full energy audit of all your requirements in the home and how your home is built, etc., along with what is called a site survey to determine how to proceed. There is no one size fits everyone there, again, too much variance.
Energy independence is best achieved by working both ends towards the middle, reduce your demand--/--increase your (personal and local)production. Eventually those lines cross at the independence point (of the exterior power company).
When I was in this business before we used techniques like infared photography, we'd take exterior shots of the house to determine where heat loss and gain was the worst, then proceed to fix that. Houses are different, you never know. One house may have had the leakiest wimpiest roof, so we'd primarily fix that, others because of how they were situated and with window placement and quality of winjdows, that was the big energy hog-it all just depends. Some have walls that are compromised, I've seen homes where the insulation was borked from water and insect and rodent damage, even though the owners thought it was OK, they never looked behind the drywall. Some folks are better off just getting rid of their old furnace and going to a ground effect heat pump deal, others.....See? There's a lot to look at. But the basic rule of thumb is insulation *works*, efficient devices work. The more you can reduce your demand, the cheaper the alternative energy production part becomes.
If you just think of an ice chest for camping, then think of your house like that, it makes it easier. A good ice chest with heavy walls that is thick and seals good will work well with a small amount of ice, a cheap 3 dollar thin one and your ice won't last one afternoon out camping. Same deal really.
quote FTA: ""In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. "I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.""
Fuedalism has never gone away, it has never been "repealed" despite a lot of people thinking this happened somehow by some mythical all powerful world court of supreme justice and niceguy goodness or something. They, the alleged "aristocrats", the top of the two class feudalistic system, our economic and political "leaders" who still think of themselves and act as our "masters", just realised they needed to be a bit more sly about it so as to not lose their heads periodically in the traditional peasant/serf uprisings. And now they have a lot more technology to pull it off, that's it, just a lot more toys and a few centuries more psychological studies into how to control their herds of "human resources" more effectively, hence why I call the phenomenon technofeudalism.
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"Would you consider a candidate's stand on privacy important enough to sway your vote?"...yes, it would, but certainly not Hillary, not with her background, but any consideration would have to take into account all the issues..
IMO, the US has had quite enough with the bush/clinton dynasty for a quarter century now to show that aristocracy doesn't work and is a bad idea. I'm sorry but we aren't supposed to have some sort of hereditary "lords" class. It's just slap wrong. 300 million and change now in this nation, how about we give some other folks a crack at it, eh?
How about a candidate who is concerned about ALL your rights, all of them up and down the list, and has the best track record bar none in Congress to protect your rights *and* your wallet, and really groks what national security and soverignty is really about and wouldn't try to pass off blood profits wars for the transnationals as being in our best interest, someone like Ron Paul, who has an exploratory committe open now?
If he got 1/50th of the news coverage Hillary gets from the controlled propaganda press, or even 1/10th the coverage that Obama dude gets, he'd be the next president handily. Well, given we clean up blackbox voting first of course.
Have you found any affordable and normal sized screens that are 12 VDC input? That's my stumbling block on making the po' mans luggable and low power system. They want a mint just for a 7 or 8 inch screen, at least any I have found.
That commodore mod is exactly the form factor of choice though, very good work and along the lines I was thinking. Right now my mini is just stuck in an old AT case, because I had it kicking around and it was the easiest.
The new boards just shown though..eventually we will be able to get a true powerful PDA thing that at home can just have normal components that can plug into it, making a desktop out of the PDA on demand. That's what I really want.
Mozilla makes money from google being their default search engine. Google makes money from ads. I doubt they want to actually include adblocker with it turned on. They have the extension, that is as far as they probably want to go.
Being able to store your power onsite first-before it gets to the net metering phase, is a huge benefit and one of the primary good reasons to have onsite power production. We've seen just a ton of news stories over the past few years of whole regions going down from storms, etc. Heck, there are still a lot of folks in the midwest struggling with that now. Think of it as a whole house (or however many circuits you have activated, you can pick and choose) UPS system then it makes more sense. And that's the good part of home solar, you can do both. From my experience, on a good sunny day by around 1:30 PM or so your battery bank should be pretty full if you have sized your system properly, then it's gravy after that, all afternoon. You are still sitting on enough juice to run everything for at least a full day, and your meter can be running backwards then if that is the set up you have.
I like Randy Rhino
...demozoggery, and yes, I do it all the time, I freely admit it. Have since I was a kid. Once wrote a conservation essay just slap fulla of it and won a state wide contest. You gots to have some zeal in life!
I get pretty passionate about politics, and you can't twist economics from politics, they are completely entwinned, so I have at it.
With the software vendors and the media hardware folks and then the criminal (yes criminal) **AA products companies and those nutso orgs-if they would have just kept dropping prices drastically as new tech advances made that possible to the consumer, there wouldn't even have been much of a napster-like problem. They got used to making x-profit based on costs back 35 years ago or something. Tech advances made it so they could drop distribution costs to a few percent of that now with downloading and with cheap plastic disks. They in no way, manner, shape or form dropped prices accordingly, not even close. That's it, that's their big mistake, and it is glaringly obvious. They could have easily upped their market by doing hugemongusly larger volume sales, and never pissed off one customer.
Instead of doing that they maintain thoroughly ludicrous pricing levels, they come up with insane DRM schemes every other week, they bribed and bullied their way into making their complete insanity "law", and none of that will ever really work, all it has done is push their own customers away by treating them like crap,and they still keep shafting their own talent by cheating them of more and better sales, etc. And they you have big companies like MS and all the others *who are going along with it*.
Nuts. I call it like I see it, them boys may be rich now, but they are still *nuts* and they are hurting society in general by trying to legislate away decent technological advances.
I tell ya whut, I make food for folks as my primary income. If ever a food replicator tech comes along that puts me out of a job..GREAT! NO problems at all! If the planet can be fed for much cheaper and better, eliminating mass starvation and the expense for people, drop it down to much more affordable, I am all for it, even if it means I need to go do something else for a living. I don't care, the overall benefits outweigh any temporary inconvenience for me. I'd switch to being a hunting guide or teach outdoor skills or work in the alternative energy business or just write or work on my wild ass inventions or something else I can do good, I wouldn't care a bit. I certainly wouldn't push for legislation which artificially cripples people's ability to have or use a food replicator or drive up the cost just to maintain some status quo.
That's why on the ag side I am TOTALLY against GM manufactured "terminator" seeds/plants, or plant patents for that matter. Completely crazy there, DRM for FOOD. That's even worse than what they are doing with digital bits, this is aFOOD we are talking about now, a necessity, I won't do it, wouldn't use it, would fight against it, and have. My own garden, open pollinated-no patents, all the way.
No Food DRM!
...deliberate sabotage, any way you slice it, designed on purpose to perpetuate a business model developed when duplicating content was hugely more expensive than it is now from a strictly technological viewpoint. It is (very generally speaking of course) the work of those already rich and powerful to stay that way, and to seek to lock away technological advances only to themselves as much as possible, through obvious and unchecked wide scale cartel market manipulation actions and also through extensive lobbying to make the laws reflect the profiteer's paranoid-and elitist- neoluddism.
It's Ok for the rich and powerful to have any advances and advantages from modern technology-but don't let those slavering "masses" folk have the same, even when it becomes technically and economically possible. Cuts into that "bottom line" thing, or at least that is their paranoid theory.
Enforcing artificial scarcity combined with the broken-windows economic model is the height of their intellectual business acumen.
No one disputes this is immensely profitable for them, given our current social and economic infrastructure. It remains to be seen if this will always be the case.
We left the caves a long time ago, seems like maybe it might be nice to leave the medieval period some time soon. But I guess the aristocracy isn't quite willing to give that up yet.
There is NO secure way to have computerised voting.
We had a long established precedent that any citizen worth enough to vote could verify an empty box using nothing more than a set of mark I eyeballs. No programming needed, no electricity needed for that matter.
I don't care how many standards and computers and voodoo assurances you throw at it, computerised voting doesn't pass that minimal "normal human eyeballs" test. I don't care if the code is open or not, even if it is they can still hack it upstream at the next computer, or the nexct one, and you wouldn't know. When it comes to what ownership of the government is worth-ultimate power and trillions of dollars-temptation is too great, or force of blackmail, or whatever-it'll get hacked to pieces.
All you are doing with computers is swapping around the places and manners where *extreme* and easy large scale voting manipulation can occur. The old method was pretty hard to hack every voting ballot box, even a sdmall percentage, but with computers??? Large scale regional hacking possible, and you wouldn't know. Some got hacked in ye olden days,sure,ballot box stuffing, but having the ability to inspect the empty box, then stand around at night and verify the count, worked about as well as possible over the widest range of precincts.
Computerised voting is designed on-purpose to fake people out with "new shiny" blinkenlights, and that's about it. It's a scam to perptuate the one globalist party system so that this election's "fearless leader" chose by the globalists "wins"..
The old system wasn't broken so bad that we have to spend billions to completely finish smashing it to pieces.
Paper ballot, indelible pen for marking. No hanging chads, no voodoo "code" counting at some remote server buried in a locked basement someplace and three paid off dudes "verifying" it, none of that. It's lame. A simple ballot box and paper ballots are just fine for voting, and if it takes a-horror!-whole day to vote and another to count..who cares? Why don't we have a full 24 hour voting period *anyway*, what's with near bankers hours for voting? And we have run out of humans who can count, just adding simple sums? I don't think so.
Contracts. And with any breaking of the contract..the loser..loses. Anything other than that with children would fall into the criminal realm no doubt, so again the state would decide regardless of any contract. If it is an amicable split, just do a new contract. You can agree in the first contract to binding arbitration for that matter. You can agree as a default joint custody always in the first contract, unless someone really screws up. either a provision was written, or the joint arbitrator couild decide.
It's possible.
I just don't like you (allegedly) need their permission for your living arrangements "legally". Nonetheirbiznezz
.....that's all licenses are, permits wherein the state has decided that your have no inherent right to do something so you need permission to do something from them-are holdovers from the old racial and racist miscegnation laws (about the same as all gun laws really, too). And that's it, there are no other historical precedents. Before that, a marriage might have been registered at your local church if you were married in that faith, etc, or no place for that matter, but the state had nothing to do with it at all.. And it shouldn't be any of their business at all either, and is just another form of them exerting more power over the citizenry and further widening the us versus them deal with government and the people. The only debate should be, get the state to butt out completely because it is none of their business, y/n.
Here's one guy who is probably running that I think most freedom loving folks might endorse. Longshot, the media will go out of their way to ignore him, his own party sort of ignores him but he gets relected by his locals because he's an honest dude, a true rarity in the district of criminals. Pretty smart guy, strict Constitutionalist, and etc. There needs to be a ton of pressure applied (and support for and $upport for) from the grass roots level.
http://www.ronpaulexplore.com/
his regular website
http://www.house.gov/paul/
"There is nothing wrong with debt"...you lost it right there. If you don't get it, why it is better to have produced wealth than debt...nothing much more to say. And if you haven't read article after volume about all the warning buzzers going off over the here and now and upcoming serious debt problems..I mean..sheesh..what financials are you reading? Some alternate internet? And which consumers trust it will be paid off? All the ones projected to lose their homes now when they got ARMs based on some inflated wage projections they picked out of the air? And you ainb't noticed folks talking about huge companies going bankrupt? Miss the news with the airlines and the big car companies and so forth? Pensions? Social security?
And one of the main reasons the head of the main chinese central bank said that his nation had enough dollars now-and that was his quote, "enough dollars", and why they are going into other currencies and PMs and tradeable tangibles like buying up long term resources either by contract or outright purchase like mines, etc in foreign nations, to them, was *precisely* because they have no way of knowing how much the inflated pool of dollars is. There has never been an audit of the FED, never, and even so, they have the ability to print up boatloads and you wouldn't know about it. And they stopped reporting the most important indicator last march, and started seriously lying about it. The Chinese (and a lot of others now) don't want to sit on any more dollars as they lose worth. They have been losing billiosn just sitting on the cash-that's from inflation and global loss of confidence in the dollar, nothing else. You can go google up all of that, I don't really save a ton of bookmarks. And there's nothing conspiratorial about it at my end, this is all mainstream news and analysis. You don't get the comptroller of the US going out on dog and pony shows every day sounding the alarm over the looming debt and entititlement crisis. In fact, I think, as far as I can remember going back to the 60's when I started paying more attention, this might be only the second time, the first was immediately after the opec embargo and uberhigh interest rates, around that era.
Anyway, let's hope YOU are right! For real! Honest, if they can keep pulling off this total scam with the fednote, and keep foreigners buying our mostly worthless paper and exchanging valuable tangible goods like oil and manufactured goods for IOUs based and backed by nothing-swell, their loss for being tards! I won't bitch much at all..but I don't think they can. I really don't, and everything I see now would be classified as the "cracks in the dam". I know I have adjusted my personal finances and living arrangement accordingly, thinking that odds are we'll see a series of drastic "corrections" and we will be lucky to avoid great depression version 2 and some more big wars.
Now I have to go out and tend to my chickens and cows again. Why? I like to eat and won't be in any refugee situation or standing in the government soup line. I have clear detailed memories of my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles telling me stories about the great depression and how FAST things can change, as in normal, to a few weeks later things got pretty sucky with the economy despite all the wall street experts assurances, and here's a hint-city folks are gonna suffer badly once the just in time situation for their reality starts to breakdown. The fatcats won't care, they'll take your house, your ride, everything and put you on the street or in some government fema workcamp if you don't have enough of "their" money they control the distribution of. And once the foreign folks stop swapping real goods for our paper-lookout. We don't have a backup system in place, you can see that clearly with katrina-the government can't take care of 700 thousand people let alone 7 million or 70 millions. We still got folks sitting ion fema camps miles from any work, why is this again? Aren't we rich beyond measure, don't wee have all this wonderfu
My cows running on pasture grass produce tons of fertilizer-how much do you want to buy? Bring your own container! ;) (No, they make chemical fertilizer from natural gas, not oil, but your point is still the same there)
With that said, the big push and breakthroughs for cellulosic based ethanol production is getting closer. Stuff like switch grass* doesn't require any external fertilizer and only needs to be planted once. I know we will be going through a transition stage and use corn, etc, for awhile, but eventually the prices and demand will force the switch over, pun intended. It's a fast evolving business/technology right now.
* and by all means, everyone in the US lobby their federal congress critter to support industrial hemp and get the fascist 'tards at the dea to backoff. We can get human food, animal food, fiber for clothes, paper and fuel, both biodiesel and ethanol and all sorts of stuff from the same crop that has tremendous yield per acre with not a lot of input.
disclaimer, never built the kit: discliamer2, if I had the loot I'd buy one and build one right now, they look spiffy (or spec out my own parts for a larger vehicle experience). Probably do a small pickup, then when I wanted a "hybrid" I'd throw my genny in the back or tow it with a small trailer. I probably will sometime, right now not enough spare change kicking around to do it though and we already have a lot of vehicles.
I just looked at some of the pics and specs. If you get one of the custom kits, designed for a particular car, it's straight swapping around looks to me. 20 grand for that for labor would be WAY a rip and you might as well just get a prius or something. No way is that figure close, try one tenth of that maybe to hire someone to do that. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely hard about it other than going and renting an engine hoist one weekend to pull the old motor before you start, and that's cheap. If you buy your target vehicle from a junkyard, saya a good chassis with a borked engine so you can get it cheap, just pay them to do it, they'll do it. They do stuff like that all the time. I would think even paying top dollar per hour it shopuldn't run you more than 200 bucks to get a small engine pulled, then have the wrecker tote the rolling stock home and have at it (you need to keep the flywheel apparently though)
It certainly looks like any geek even remotely capable with a set of sockets and wrenches, etc could do the swap, and if you can't, you actually need to develop a few wrench skills. Skip the next level in the video game (whatever, spend some time away from entertainments of choice) and learn some tool wrangling, it will come in handy your entire life. Nothing to be scared of there. Every geek should have some basic mechanical, electrical, woodworking, plumbing, etc skills. Not saying you need to be a master in all of them, but the basics you should be familiar with-and it's fun for the most part, building stuff and fixing stuff.
People aren't owning their homes now, they are getting longer and longer term mortgages, as I pointed out, they own larger debts. Before the globalism push 30 year to 50 year to interest only mortgages were mostly unheard of., you just didn't see it. And inflation? You believe the official numbers when they removed the *critical* M3 stats last year? Why would you believe that? Why would they do that other than to help hide the fact the printing presses are roaring? Independent analysts have done their best to come up with some real numbers and they are findng it is (roughly)twice as high as the government claims. Here, check it out. And the jobs? Huh? They reclassified burger flipping as manufacturing, and stuff like that. They count the loss of a 20$ an hour job with full complete and robust bennies manufacturing with a swap in to walmart at 7$ with toy bennies as "still a job".
I don't. It's a job maybe, but not the same. that's cooking the books to make it look the same or better when it isn't.
I take the long view, because I've been around. I just don't fall for three card monte stuff.
Sorry, it's still hooie. I am not tryng to flame or be mean but it's hooie. They are cooking the books and calling debt wealth, when it is not. Globalism as they are practicing it, not academic theory as it is somehow taught but as it is on the ground, is serving mostly to increase the bottom line of the top 1% while they push credit on everyone else, give it to them, and try to convince them more credit=produced wealth. Sorry, that is the magic beans for the cow scam. It really is. Credit created out of thin air with the central bankers and printing press money and fractional reserve is not the same as produced wealth, nor will it ever have the same impact as using actual work that leads to produced wealth then being traded.
Sorry, it's a scam for the rubes. As for other nations in a similar situation per debt and trade imbalances? Yes,hell yes, they are in potential future deep doo doo as well unless they stop the huge manufacturing shift.
You can NOT printing press your way to "wealth". You have to work for it by producing true tangible wealth. You can't just reshuffle around what is already produced and call it "more". You can dump the same 5 gallons of water back and forth with many buckets, and I don't care how many buckets you wind up using (analogy is with paper financial "products" here), you'll still only have 5 gallons. You can reclassify how much is in a gallon, you still won't have any more.
And if you still want to argue,you need to argue against some powerful folks who know what is what. I could point you to a Fed governor who said the same thing just a few months ago, or perhaps the GAO office, and other top economists, they saw the credit exposure globally is pretty risky right now. And if you recall, it wasn't too many weeks ago the US sent a huge economic delegation to china basically begging them to do something with the yuan, and the chinese told them to *get stuffed* because they are calling the shots now because they *produce wealth*, they don't just talk about it and manage it and bring up powerpoint slides, they manufacture it. They also said they have "enough dollars now".
"Enough". Let that sink in a scosh.
Wealth is grown, mined, or manufactured from the previous two. That's it. Everything else is paperwork shuffling or wealth rearranging and servicing. Servicing wealth does not produce more wealth, that's a variation on the broken windows economy. Extending more layers of credit paper on top of already produced wealth does not increase the pool of wealth, it just makes more credit and dilutes the produced wealth. Printing up more money using numbers picked out of thin air doesn't make your money more valuable, it makes it less valuable. Yes, you can "free trade" in it,and trade is a wonderful
Sorry, that's hooie. Joe worker is in no position to compete when his costs remain the same and are relatively high compared to the nation that the capitalists can ship their capital to. If it's only a few percent, sure, possible, but to say someone in the US can live on a buck an hour or 5 bucks a day (whatever, some absurdly small number) is just retarded, because they are saying you should be able to compete at that price. And it *is* black and white that way. The big company says they'll ship the job to where they can save on the labor, to increase their bottom line and some CEO salary by a few million, because it's insanely cheaper there, yet they want the same loot for the product.
Yet, I am not seeing any big push by the capitalists or their stooges in government to drop rentals or mortgages or real estate property prices, or even freeze rates by law,nor utility bills, nor cost of transportation, nor local property taxes to pay for the illegals invasion, etc, none of that. You can go to the poorest cheapest cost of living place in the US and you still couldn't live on a buck an hour, even if your house was completely paid off and your car was completely paid off and you never needed new clothes. You still couldn't do it. Our society was set up over a long period of time the way it was, certain costs and obligations, and wealth gradually built up over a lot of manufacturing and then a ton of internal trade. You lose it as a worker in the middle of paying off a house and car and etc you can go down the tubes fairly readily now, and you do it in some area where the bulk of the adults are all in the same industry and all of a sudden everyone is laid off you can't even hardly sell your house. It's happened to any number of millions of people and this year with the ARM rates going up it is going to get worse.
And you want even more proof that this isn't working? Easy! They have to cook the books on the economy to make it look good, use every possible word parsing tactic to call credit "wealth" and get people to believe that fairy tale, they dropped some of the FED reporting on cash in circulation to coverup the on purpose credit expansion by running the presses and just adding zeroes to the data entries, they adjusted cost of living and took out critical necessities to make it look good, they reclassified jobs, and we are now without any shadow of a doubt and this is not debateable, just accept it the most in the red any nation has ever been, all within the last 20 years of this big globalism push. If globalism worked, we'd see some results other than cheap crap at walmart. You wouldn't see so many people against it. We'd still be a creditor nation, not a debtor nation. And if you think debt is wealth, go ahead and try it on a small scale at your bank, try to get a big fat loan approved by using your other debt load as collateral. Go ahead, try it see what happens. But nationally that is what has happened in the US and you and they call it good? If we had a true, not fairy tale but true good economy, 30-50 year mortgages would be unheard of, and those interest-only mortgages they push now? Wouldn't exist. Back before the big globalism "offshore all the jobs you can jobs inshore what can't be offshored" push (the war on the middle class in other words) it was 10 and 20 year house notes max and 18 month car loans and total debt (government/corporate/personal) was extremely low and savings rate was high.
You may call trillions and trillions in debt a good economy, IOUs funding more IOUs trying to fund yet more IOUs, while the CE whatever class keeps getting chunks of billions per year because they "work so hard", but I call it one international dump the dollar panic run away from great depression version 2. And it's going to be much suckier than the first one when it happens. And it is going to happen, inevitable, it's too far gone now.
Many regimes and empires and nations have tried the fiat-fairy tale styled economy dodge in the past, to just paper shuffle busy wo
If it is legal to do this, why not just legally auction it then? You'll get the best price and can set a minimum bid.
If it is illegal, wouldn't verisign be in a bit of a bother now offering to purchase such a thing?
This is why many more people need to be already solar equipped, all over the place. With enough panels in any area, some would survive, and it's easy to store panels securely out of harms way. I keep one large one and two of the roll up flex panels tucked away, along with a small 300 watt aeromarine windgenny. And I don't think you'd need to truck in batteries, just scrounge car batteries on-site. Not perfect, but they work well enough. Heck in ye olden hippie days, we ran "alternative energy" just by having two identical car batteries. Inside the cabins/huts/tents whatever, a 12 VDC car radio and a parking light (and sometimes an 8 track player and CB) sufficed. You just swapped out the battery into your ride well before it went too flat to start the car, or set it to jumper cables for 15 minutes or so to the still good battery in the car and started it then, let it run a scosh, then swap it out for full charging as you drove to work or whatever. A little tedious, but I know some guys lived for years like that and I did myself off and on. A little more work and a run to the trunk and you can add a place for the second battery there, or build a shelf in the engine compartment. And real small cheap generators exist now commercially, starting around 200 bucks.
I am a big proponent of personal preparedness. I think everyone should make moves to being more self sufficient during emergencies. The biggest problem is when huge numbers of people have *nothing at all* in the way of preparations, one or two days food max in the home, no alternative electricity source at all, not even a good flashlight battery stash, no emergency radios at all, no stored water, no emergency medical kit, etc. I think that's silly. So many people might have a big screen TV and go to ball games and bars and spend loot on junk food and beer (and drugs), etc, but won't drop pernny-one on some sane modest and useful preps. Even in an apartment you can store some fair amount of stuff with some judicious planning and adding a few more shelves. Just canned and dry goods under the bed can give people weeks of emergency food and water if they just did it. A good marine trolling battery and a small trickle charger is under one hundred dollars at *mart, and easy enough to be kept topped off and left in a closet say.
As to flooded lead acid being a pain, I never found it so. I used to maintain the dual battery banks (36 deep cycle total) for a fairly large array, it didn't take too long once a month to top them all off with distilled water, which I made with a solar thermal panel water distiller. and these were batteries that were used heavily, one n storage mode is pretty simple to maintain. And for that matter, the more expensive gas mat gels require about zip in the way of maintenance.
If batteries aren't used at all, even a once every three months trickle charge is way more than adequate. Someone who can't do that...I ain't got a lot of sympathy for when it comes to the "help me" part. Comes a time joe citizen has to do something for themselves and not rely on the nanny state or someone else.
As to the fragile panels, I know the unisolars are tough as nails, so are the siemens panels. They'll work even if shot through with a bullet. Some of the others are sorta wimpy in the frame department I admit, just got to shop around.
The US is a *rich* nation. If we had spent one tenth since the 70s on gettng solar and wind out there to individual homeowners and businesses (with long range tax credits for instance) as we have spent so far in the iraq war we would already be well towards the eventual goal of total energy self sufficiency. We just mostly mass-spend our loot on things that require energy, rather than produce it, and rely on that fragile external grid system which inevitably fails right when you need it the most. I think we should have equal numbers of both, centralized grid, and decentralzed on-site generation. We already done built and run the grid, so now let us add to decentralization. It's also better for national s
During field days this is what they do. Quickly set up and power a very sophisticated amount of high tech communications devices, out in some field someplace. They've been doing this for years.
As to solar rigs, that price is not unreasonable. You can get true plug and play module rigs as well, all-in-one units, or two pieces at the most, the movable PV arrary plus the charger/controller/inverter/batteries on wheels or on a trailer. I would suggest the full trailer routine, probabgly the easiest solution and you can adapt what you might need as to more cargo space, etc. And add in a fuel generator anyway, you really will be better of with both if possible.
Thanks!
I guess we should clue him in to tell his webmins to switch, eh? Point him to this thread..maybe he'll get an account! I might try that later.
www.ahmadinejad.ir/
Ask him!
Is that primarily for heating/cooling? If so your best bet is more insulation/better windows, etc. buck for buck you can't beat it, for most climates and most purposes, without really trying to paint with too broad of a brush. "Payback" on insulation is really superior for most people though before chucking money at electrical supply. If that power bill is for running electrical devices-too many variables there. You'd have to decide what is more valuable, and what devices could be economically exchanged for a lower demand device, etc.
How alternative energy companies work is sorta simple but very important. You need a full energy audit of all your requirements in the home and how your home is built, etc., along with what is called a site survey to determine how to proceed. There is no one size fits everyone there, again, too much variance.
Energy independence is best achieved by working both ends towards the middle, reduce your demand--/--increase your (personal and local)production. Eventually those lines cross at the independence point (of the exterior power company).
When I was in this business before we used techniques like infared photography, we'd take exterior shots of the house to determine where heat loss and gain was the worst, then proceed to fix that. Houses are different, you never know. One house may have had the leakiest wimpiest roof, so we'd primarily fix that, others because of how they were situated and with window placement and quality of winjdows, that was the big energy hog-it all just depends. Some have walls that are compromised, I've seen homes where the insulation was borked from water and insect and rodent damage, even though the owners thought it was OK, they never looked behind the drywall. Some folks are better off just getting rid of their old furnace and going to a ground effect heat pump deal, others.....See? There's a lot to look at. But the basic rule of thumb is insulation *works*, efficient devices work. The more you can reduce your demand, the cheaper the alternative energy production part becomes.
If you just think of an ice chest for camping, then think of your house like that, it makes it easier. A good ice chest with heavy walls that is thick and seals good will work well with a small amount of ice, a cheap 3 dollar thin one and your ice won't last one afternoon out camping. Same deal really.
quote FTA: ""In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. "I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.""
Fuedalism has never gone away, it has never been "repealed" despite a lot of people thinking this happened somehow by some mythical all powerful world court of supreme justice and niceguy goodness or something. They, the alleged "aristocrats", the top of the two class feudalistic system, our economic and political "leaders" who still think of themselves and act as our "masters", just realised they needed to be a bit more sly about it so as to not lose their heads periodically in the traditional peasant/serf uprisings. And now they have a lot more technology to pull it off, that's it, just a lot more toys and a few centuries more psychological studies into how to control their herds of "human resources" more effectively, hence why I call the phenomenon technofeudalism.
good post, man