Taxes are both an arbitrarily imposed political burden and a form of outright punishment, and are also primarily a form of rigid political control by the power elite, and being a proponent of personal soverignty and Freedoms, they are anathemic to my basic core philosophy of living.. In addition, the entire notion of taxes in an artifical fiat currency based economy are economically and logically *absurd*. They are ludicrous. That they are even considered valuable and necessary by most people is, to me, the result of massive and persistent brainwashing of the populace by the same power elite via their overtly propogandized controlled educational system and mass media. Not only in the US but in any other nation that has its economy controlled by central bankers and their criminal peers in so-called government.
I'm sorry, but as a thinking person...really, I am just not that stupid. I simply refuse to be dumbed down to that utterly absurd level.
When we have a true produced tangibles wealth-based currency system, you can get back to me on imposed taxes. they might be necessary then, who knows, but perhaps. Until then, I am against taxes and only recognize reduction of taxes or tax credits as the only legitimate non threat of violence form of gentle persuasion by the societal groupings known as "government".
And perhaps you don't know much about me, but I am a big alternative energy proponent,I am a consumer of same, and an innovator of same. I have been a true conservationist and politically active since the early 60s on this subject. I am fully aware of the future and our responsibility to the planet and our progeny. And in my studied political and economic opinion, taxes are not the way to induce positive change, in fact, they usually result in the opposite occurring.
I would never seek to coerce, punish, admonish or threaten any of my fellow humans. I seek only to gently encourage and educate. Two paths,and I know the one I chose long ago.
We have off road diesel in a similar lesser taxed manner but it is only for off road use. None of the road trucks can use it legally from in any manner, from the farm through all the various middlemen to the dinner table. and no other tradesmen who have to carry tools and materials can use it either, full price at the pump. If it goes on the road, full taxes.
And from what I am seeing your farmers are going to be hurting soon, and you've already put a lot of them out of business. Don't worry, your turn to pay much higher food prices is coming, along with the rest of the planet. Not sure when, but it'll happen. Enjoy the good old days while they last. North Sea oil has peaked, and we are one more loony tunes stunt away from losing a lot of mideast oil and possibly venezuelan oil as well. The USA/UK axis of middle east meddling for the past century is coming home to roost.
Yours has come about over a long period of time and in a relatively small nation compared to the US. Imagine if your government tomorrow tripled your fuel tax on your gasoline by passing a law. You honestly think that wouldn't bork your economy then? C'mon, you know it would cause problems. I live way over here and distinctly rember you had truckers and farmers strikes and such like over pretty small fuel price increases, and not too long ago.
We just saw what happens in the US when there's even a smaller but sudden increase, through either tax or sudden reduction of supply, with our twin gulf coast hurricanes. We have some exact recent scenarios to look at. It caused a lot of problems that rippled way beyond the immediate areas of destruction. I'll give you an exact example from right where I live how sudden significant energy cost increases can spread out.. the loss of natgas from the gulf after the hurricanes drove up prices for natgas, not a huge amount but enough, which put an additional demand on propane,as those places that could switch were prepared to do so, so those prices went up almost immediately as well. Where we farm here, propane is *critical* to keep the poultry houses running in the colder months. Just this increase and the volumes needed (the bulk tanks here are all 50,000 gallons or larger) have put this operation into the red from the black, all winter now will be operating at a slight loss, where "slight" is a cubic boat load of cash.. There are no deals to be gotten to reduce the costs, that price is fixed so far upstream there is little you can do about it with hardly any notice. And that wasn't anything like tripling the prices, although they have doubled over the past few years and it's already been quite a burden.
An artificial tax tripling the prices of a critical infrastructure component would effectively kill it off except for the top 1% of wealthy people and government, who basically demand at the point of a gun once you eliminate the polite BS.
No, I like tax credit incentives better than tax increases, if government has to be involved some way.. if you want to help society along to better tech, let them have more money to do it with. Tax credits always work better than a direct tax. Honey or vinegar deal. We had one time when we had national alternative energy credits and it worked great! it was fabulous for the people who took advantage of it. They expired then after a few years. We recently got some legislation that has revived the tax credits, and you can already see stories where it's being taken advantage of now.
I think a lot of it is two different political philosophies, for myself, and a lot of americans, we just prefer less government forced mandates to do such and such and get your pocket picked. We've noticed that whatever the tax is, 50% gets skimmed to run the bureaucracy and to pay too much for something, it just gets wasted. Too high an overhead, it sucketh the big one and just doesn't work. Leave us alone with a combination of market forces and more cash in the wallet and we can figure out what to do then. Not for everything but for a lot of things.
Before OPEC embargo, very few 4 cylinder cars offered for sale in the US, and less adoption. I remember seeing VWs, simcas and some renaults, and a few datsuns, etc and not many of them compared to other cars. After OPEC, 4 cylinders got sold, developed, talked about, used, whatever and it *stuck* to this day, it has become common, just about every manufacturer now sells models with 4 cylinders and good mileage.. they suck more to work on this is true, but still, you can get them. Now to work on the fuel they burn..biofuels, start with blends, work up.
We got the lightweight 4 cylinder pickup out of it as well for that matter. That didn't even exist before then IIRC, closest you could get was a full sized with a 6 cylinder. Before OPEC, solar arrays were fantastically non existent except for very limited research projects and use in space etc. some few perivate folks had them but not too many. Since then a slow but sure climb, year after year, now there's an actual shortage of PV panels on the market, even with a slew of manufacturers. Wind chargers, the same,(after a small but intense period in the early 20th century that fizzled) now they are the fastest growing method of commercially produced grid electricity around the planet. More wind by the megawatt going in then anything else. I'd call that fairly significant. Yes, it's a long time, because we are living it, but historically it's short. We as a society can change radically in a short time, as long as the shock or kick in the butt isn't permanent. A little wake up call now and then is good, but a permanet borking of the economy isn't, because then there isn't enough to MAKE the cool new stuff. Catch 22.
I remember when there really were not that many computers, mostly some large mainframes. Then hobbiest computers and build your own kits hit, then the first commercial "home" computers, then the apple and pc revolution seriously kicked it in gear, now-they are as common as televisions, and we are so many evolutions down the road that now we have antique personal computers. It didn't happen in two years, but 20-30? Bam, done deal, society is completely changed in one generation. Yes, personally I would have liked to see it happen much faster, but so it goes... Sure, stuff is doable on mass scales then,when the time is right, stuff just happens. Give society an incentive because it's practical, you'll get a lot of interest and some early adoption (stage we are just leaving now, IMO). When the interest increases demand enough to where economies of scale kick in, then you'll get mass adoption (the stage we are just entering now).
What with all the manufacturing layoffs announced lately, someone is going to bingo to the fact that building wind chargers in particular is not all that hard, and we might see some really large factories switching over. Going from hybrids as we have them being sold now to plug-in hybrids is a relatively easy step, that could possibly take advantage of the wind chargers going in perhaps, and the interest in solar PV combined with the mature market now and the recently passed tax incentives is accelerating there as well. Instead of taxing fuel more, they eliminated in a way and offered a tax credit on the alternatives. Which is a much better choice if you ask me, given that government will always be bound and determined to "do something", I'd rather have them err on the side of leaving me and you with more cash in our wallets to do what we think is cool..
One thing leads to another. Maybe someone with some juice in some large corporation facing loss of business in one direction might even read this and get inspired. Or perhaps a big union guy facing a lot of his brethren out of work soon. People get to thinkin'... Ya never know, but humans have a habit of rising to the "build stuff and use it" challenge pretty readily when the time is right. We always have anyway...
Did you EVER have a job where you had to haul tools and material around? Where every job you get might be two counties over from where you live? The entire planet is NOT just people who only need to haul a laptop or some schoolbooks from the apartment to some convenient office or school. You are suggesting that some plumber or carpenter needs to take 18 trips on the bus just to get to work and back with all his tools, plus walk hauling a backpack of tools and lumber over his shoulder from wherever the bus stop is and the job site isn't? Or are you prepared for the price of about everything to go up like triple or more? That's the choices you have. That's what tripling the gas price would do, it ripples throughout our economy. All these people who actually build stuff and grow stuff and do stuff-actual wealth PRODUCING jobs-not wealth re arranging jobs or paper or electron shuffling jobs-have to drive, have to haul mass quantities of stuff,there is no other way around it, and if you up their prices, they will guaranteed "up yours". Like ordering stuff online and getting it delivered by UPS or Fedex? Think they will keep the same rates? how about snail mail? Trip on the plane to go see grammaw? All the stuff that has to get from factories or mines or farms to the processing plants and manufacturing plants then to the wholesalers then to the jobbers then to the retail outfits "downtown"? In the US anyway, 6 buck a gallon prices would cause a great depression to make the last one look like a charity give away.
Perhaps you might need to think this reactionary tax through just a scosh more, follow the economic food chains around. And speaking of actual food chains, I live and work on a farm, you raise the fuel prices to triple what they are now, well get ready for 12$ chickens and 3$ a piece corn on the cob and 6$ loaves of bread at your local urban store. And because the costs of energy are closely related, how about tripling your winter heating bills now? When one fuel goes up in price, they ALL do basically.
I think a better idea is what we are doing now, people switching to hybrids or the coming soon plug in hybrids, adding solar to their roofs, large wind generational projects going in, research into clean coal burning technologies, and etc.
and..just for grins...what you got going at home now, how large is your personal solar array? Or anything similar? How much organic food do you produce with a hoe and shovel and carry to the local food coop or haul with your bicycle trailer and sell cheap?
See? It's big problem, it's not all just cars and finger pointing. That just gets the finger pointed right back at ya.. That crap with cars is sorting itself out just fine now, people may be dumb but they aren't so dumb as to not notice fluctuations at the pump with mostly UP as the range and the general rise of "other" fuel prices like in their natgas bills and propane and whatnot. People ARE switching to better mileage and cleaner burning cars. check the stats, hybrids are the fastest growing market. And an SUV made it into the top 5 mileage vehicles sold in the US this year, the Escape hybrid. Clunky as it is and slow, the system is starting to work. We are talking overcoming inertial with 300 million people in the US and a lot of entrenched industries. This stuff takes time and a lot of individual effort as well as corporate effort and governmental incentives. . And the track record of governments passing laws and RAISING taxes to try and fix stuff is just mostly pure dismal. People fix stuff when it is practical, logical and do-able to do the fix and not much sooner. That's just how it works.
We are a mobile society, we sunk our infrastructure bucks into roads designed for personal vehicles and trucks as the primary method of travel, and it just isn't practical to have full public transport that goes everywhere, it would cost dozens of trillions of dollars just to get started on it and even then it would never fit all situations..
Amazon lets readers post online reviews of the books they sell. Seems to work Ok for them. In an academic journal variant, any peer with appropriate credentials in the field could do the same on any paper. Let the chips fall where they may then.
with knoppix and some other live cds you can use a cheatcode (I think it's knoppix:toram or some such) and when it is booting it puts the entire OS into RAM if you have enough, like you have. I do this with a mini distro, austrumi, and it makes it *blazingly fast*, as in quick. Like a megaprocessor upgrade or something. Knoppix is I think 2 gigs compressed with the single CD version, so 4 gigs of ram would give you some decent cushion.
There are various solar ovens you can purchase or build. One interesting one I saw was built into the south wall of the kitchen. Basically a large insulated box that had glass on the southside and the oven door on the kitchen side. It was only good for one quick cook from around 11 am to 1 pm, but still enough to toast a chicken or whatnot. The stand alone ones work well ( I have a commercial model you just set oputside on the picnic table or whatever), you just have to go turn them to face the sun occassionaly, but that could be somewhat easily automated with some photocells and a small turntable, or just a mechanical timer and some good maths for that matter if you wanted to. a lot of times I just default to "biodrive"-me_ to do simple tasks if it's feasible and easy, the K.I.S.S. principle.
One bit of advice, you just cannot beat insulation on payback and useability. Look into the "superinsulating" concept of structure design. It's very googleable. You shoot for R-55 floors walls and ceiling, and you can almost eliminate much in the way of heating or cooling, you can get it down to a ridiculous small level to maintain a decent comfort zone. The one house I worked on, back during the OPEC oil shocks, as a serious retrofit, we built interior walls around 6 inches away from the existing walls, then used blow in insulation to fill it up, then normal drywall to finish it. The old windows got replaced with triple panes, and much work on the various cracks, etc to make it tight. It's an *amazing* difference. In a lot of cases, just normal lightbulbs and inside cooking and whatnot is sufficient "heat" in the winter, with the furnace only turning on occassionally. similar with the cooling, the AC just won't run that much. dollar for dollar no other technique can touch it. Insulation is not sexy, but man it works! It's a serious "silver bullet" alternative energy technique that isn't being explored much. People "get it" woith high MPG cars, they can understand that, but with their homes they will pop for a long term mortgage for some place that is the energy gashog equivalent of an SUV with fouled plugs running on flat tires uphill. I have no idea why this is so but it sure is. And the banks will give them a note for it! R-18 maybe cut the mustard back when oil was a few dollars a barrel, but not now.
The whole subject is fascinating, it's quite possible nowadays to not only have a totally energy self sufficient home, but also get a check back from the electric company every month, or at least bank kilowatt hour credits.
If you are going for active solar, now is a good time as you can combine a lot of tax breaks with tying the installation into your home note long term. Most folks go for a hybrid system, solar PV, thermal, wind charger, fuel generator, then a grid tie. It just depends on your location what is practical or not. You are about covered for juice then with any mixture of the systems, and combine that with a good sized battery bank. having a whole house UPS system is quite spiffy...... And greenhouses are just *neat*. I was just up in ours looking at the tomatoes and peppers and cabbages and whatnot..... while the outside garden is now mostly gone by for the winter. We even have some roses blooming in there and some tropicals, but I don't know if the heavy tropicals will make it this is the first winter and we don't really want to artifically heat it, just cost too much and I don't have that other composter heater built yet, just too many back burned projects behind now. What some guys have done is combine raising meat animals inside the greenhouse with plants, like chickens or rabbits. The animals throw off good heat 24/7 and can eat a lot of the vegetable scraps. You can put tanks for fish as well and use the water for thermal storage. Lotsa neat stuff you can do. If you go the small meat critter route, you can use their, uhhh, how do you put it, their "exhaust", heh, in a methane digester to get burnable gas.
I don't have anything online yet, when I do I will post a link off of technocrat.net to it. A lot of the stuff from the olden daze I have no pictures of unfortunately. The thing I worked on I am the most proud of is, I was one of the first guys to have a working protype of what is now called "the mountain bike". I won't claim I was the first, but I will claim one of the firsts and it was developed without me even knowing about anyone elses efforts along those lines. It worked great! Man did I think it was cool, able to get way back in the woods where the dirt bikers went easily. I never commercialised it, but I know that one large manufacturer saw my working bike and very soon thereafter had one on the market. Very coincidental.... They also failed to see the second stage of the design, which I have never built yet because I got pissed off bigtime, a different drive system, which I would have sold at the time for pretty cheap as I was just a po ole hipster then. Wait.. I still am! hahahahaha!
only about a week, it was just one of many alternative energy experiments I tried. I've built passive air based thermosiphon room heaters, methane digesters, the compost heater, made ethanol and run engines off of it, built earth bermed sunken greenhouse like garden beds that worked at below zero F, used various solar, worked on two "superinsulated" homes, and etc. Fun stuff for me.
We have a very large commercial greenhouse now (and a whopper chipper to get the chips) and I plan on retrofiting it to have at least an adjunct to the normal propane fired heaters for it with the woodchip pile heater. Basically, put the heat source, the woodchip pile, downhill of wherever you want to pump the heat to, to your radiator action. heat rises. As the water gets heated in the coils it will naturally start to flow uphill to the radiator, where it dumps the heat, cools, and falls back downhill to the coil. I've never built a very large one but the principle is the same, you just can't extract too much heat as it will slow down the composting too much. It's really simple concept and you don't need much, coils of high temp hose or hot water pipe glued together in a coil like shape, then insulate it as it exits the pile leading to where you want to dump the heat, which can be anything I guess like pipes in the floor or radiators of some kind, like them old fashioned room radiators or what have you. Cobjob to taste I guess. I was just seeing if the theory would work and it worked well, after a couple of hours of construction and letting the pipes sit with relatively fresh made chips it started flowing and just kept it up. IIRC I was getting 130-150 degree water out of it. I would imagine it would last a year or two if the chip pile was large enough, couple of dump truck loads maybe. Then you got nifty garden compost soil, double win...
Doing anything on a large scale is just costly, hard to find good backers for new techniques, and most VCs seem to want to double their money in like 6 months or something, they just aren't interested in both new research and in longer payback periods. I got *very, very* discouraged back in the 70s with all this, although everything worked, and I was one enthusiastic hard working inventor type dude,I just never could find any credible backers to do a real company or anything. I am still rather discouraged seeing as how it is 2005 and it's still "controversial" and not well adopted yet except for a few large wind projects and a bit more solar use. I mean, solar hot water heater is as close to a no brainer as imaginable, yet still rare. Way back then I fully expected to see most roofs by now covered with solar devices and methane projects to be very common, along with biofuels. It's only since energy prices have gotten so very bad that there's much interest, and even still about all I see is enthusiasm for making the monopoly nuke builders richer and maybe hybrid cars for some people.
You can get propane fired tankless water heaters, it is not necessary to have piped in natural gas. Go to most any rural hardware store to see them.
As for other alternatives, rooftop solar thermal water pre heaters are also very common, relatively cheap,the payback period is more rapid than about any other alternative energy devices on the market.(I used to sell them, they work great and it is quite possible to build your own at home, as opposed to building your own PV panels which is sort of difficult) And being modular, they can be piggybacked and give you all the hot water you might reasonable want. Basically just big tanks in insulated boxes with glass coverings. They work well in a lot of areas. And you can also get external to the home wood furnaces that produce simply huge amounts of hot water for direct use bathing or washing or for heating the home, using a renewable fuel, or fuels actually, some burn not only wood but corn or entire large custom hay bales, etc.
I once built a small hot water demonstrator that used coils of hose inside of a big woodchip pile in a closed loop cycle using thermosiphoning to transfer the heat. Once it initially heated up due to normal composting action, I got a nice constant flow of hot water out of it.
I guess it depends on how many chairs you want to use all the time with the laptop. If you have your one favorite living room chair, you can always use a piece of black steel strapping or a tape measure and snake an ethernet cable under the carpet and bring it up exactly next to or under the chair. It's not a permanent installation then and the tiny carpet cuts are quite easy to fix if you re arrange the furniture and need to move your "drop" as it were..
But, I understand the problem and the lure of the wireless and I'm not against it per se, it's certainly easy enough and cheap enough, I just happen to like hard wired stuff if at all possible. I've been doing the POTS line snake it under the carpet for...uhhh..shoot, near 40 years, I really don't remember. Same with clambering under floors and into attics to add mains outlets.
and plumbing for that matter. Just ain't a-skeered of home deconstruction and improvements I guess... fun stuff to me as long as it isn't an emergency repair.
My reply was also more in the way of relating and responding to the premise of the article, just too much wireless going in all over for the spectrum we have to use for free now. Eventually it will become so saturated that it might make it more of a PITA than useful. Who knows, I don't, but the premise seems reasonable. I have some laptops but whenever I use them I am so close to various plugs and the modem line (zero broadband here) it just doesn't matter,I just throw it out there, when done, coil it up, back under the desk where it lives with the other geeky stuff and the trained attack dust bunnies. I also got my longwire shortwave antenna tacked across the ceiling, just because the function is more important then the looks for me.
All the appliances in your home are battery powered? I bet she puts up with cords for a variety of things, even the television. Of course, most of those are hidden down the edge of the walls and behind the furniture, etc so I see your (hers) point but only somewhat.
It's not the wires that are a problem, it's the builders philosphy of where to put outlets and what to have "outletted".
The solution is just modern home design with some better plug-age in the normal areas. The problem is, it is only in the last few years that ethernet and coax cabling to every room has become sort of common in new residential construction. Most places it is somewhat doable as a retrofit, others it is not or exceedingly difficult. Another problem is the aversion people have to floor as opposed to wall outlets, because it forces a somewhat fixed furniture location. A dictatorship like an office can get away with it, but most homeowners wouldn't want it unless it was camoflauged somewhat or they could be content with their initial furniture layout and add in the ethernet/cable outlets where they fit the best. Yes, work, but maybe worthwhile work.
And besides, it's always nice to have an excuse to get out the sawzall!;)
Pure speculation just for funzies. This is an off the wall-tinfoil hat-from my naturally suspicious mind angle on this article, and some others lately of similar nature. Perhaps all these new music download deals of the obviously bogus and overly high priced genre are a scam. Disinformation put out for a longer term desired political and economic effect. A little public "See,we listened, here's your net downloads!", while in the background they are *expecting* them to fail, planning on it, so they can continue to lobby congress and engage in media propogandizing for even more draconian anti file sharing and more hardware lockdown laws. Similar to them more or less forcing iTunes to go up in price soon. If anything, if they were serious, offerings would be getting cheaper and cheaper as tech advances make it possible and as you can see in the electronics tangibles markets- except for music and movie offerings for some strange reason....
...as well. The value of free to use "intellectual property" is a two-to-infinity way street. Producers of something are usually consumers of other folks products. That's the value of it, they share and in turn get to share with literally millions of other people, and those people's products. The theory anyway. Now people seek to interject transference of generic "money" into the sharing, but the real wealth is the transference of the "intellect" and not necessarily in calling that "property". This scenario, in a theoretical sense, benefits immensely if it is equal sharing and if the middleman of additional money for the privelege of sharing is reduced to zero. And if most everyone wants to leech without offering into the pool, and also bypassing the money, it won't work for very long. If the majority want to leech without offering back, again, it will not work well. If even a sizable minority are leeches only, it still won't be effective, and that's roughly the point we are at now and why it is still contentious.. It's only when the numbers reach parity, is where that system really starts to shine, where freely sharing producers are the common median. Then society will really grow from that exchange. Sadly we are still far from that goal, happily, there is a general trend in that direction, and it is from a bottom up direction, instead of the traditional top down. The next generation as they have grown up with sharing will most likely see to it that the laws reflect the benefits of sharing over the past benefits of protectionism that only made sense when the mere act of copying was tedious and expensive. Now that this isn't so we are in a societal transition period and the laws haven't caught up with technology yet, and gross perceptions are even further behind that.
I even tried to shop this sort of idea to the owners at the last place I lived that had a full solar rig. I tried to interest them in getting a commercial wind tower of considerable size like 1 megawatt, then run some businesses there from it (they had a lot of acreage and a mountaintop). They didn't want to and already made enough money...but I think it's still an excellent idea for someone who wants free power plus have a good income. Instead of installing "just enough" alternative energy devices for your personal use, and figuring out some "payback" period, go whole hog wholesale size, have all you can eat, build some businesses around USING the juice. Payback would be a lot sooner and then make you some serious cash. I think it might be a viable idea even for a co op of partners, invest in land, then build homes and shops/faqrm action, power the whole thing from commercial sized alternative energy installations.
I once worked at a woodshop that did a variant of this. They used to purchase electric power to run the shop, eventually someone there smart bingoed to the fact of all the valuable woodscrap waste they generated that they used to sell off cheap for firewood just to get rid of it. They installed a GE steam turbine boiler/generator system, generated 100% of all the power they needed to run the factory from burning the wood scraps, plus made an additional 10 grand a month selling the surplus electricity into the grid. that was 70s money, too. They could have easily expanded operations with all that extra juice. Moved away, no idea what became of them other than they closed that factory eventually and outsourced manufacturing to China. I think all that is left is the marketing and shipping. Good idea (seemed to me anyway) while it was running though.
...then potentially you aren't listening to a 99 cent iTunes song. I think that is the primary reason. And yes I am aware you can have tracks have other than iTunes on the iPod, but the theory is still probably valid from an Apple marketing decision viewpoint.
"OTOH, the best wind areas often are not near urban areas"..and so on. Yep. this is true. For now anyway....
For all the talk and interest of colonizing space, we still have a lot of areas on the good ole Earth that are very unpopulated, and actually quite a bit more attractive climate and resource wise than Mars. No comparison really.
In centuries past, people moved and created habitable areas based on any number of criteria, being where a river entered an ocean was always a biggee for trade, being close to fertile river valleys for agriculture, being near major mountain passes, etc. This is and has been mutable to the extreme, so there's no reason to think what we have now is "it" for how-or where-humans will be living in the future..
Perhaps in the future due to humans ability to conduct trade and work and live most anyplace now that we might be creating new areas to live based on local available energy supplies as the primary criteria. As imported energy costs go up, it becomes more attractive to settle where these sources are going down in price. Example, Siberia and Alaska and northern Canada, even Antarctica, currently not all that populated relatively speaking, but with *tremendous* potential in the future due to extensive and quite varied energy reserves, including massive wind power potential. People might start to think why export raw energy for some small profit when you can use it yourself to develop industry, etc. and receive profit times x more large amount? Why make the other guy rich off of your valuable stuff? I think there's still a lot of "wild wild west" left on this planet, and energy costs and availability will push the "great expansion part deux" soon.
Bragging rights, mindshare, the integrated environment and all sorts of various marketing reasons. MS wants to be the computer system for all uses and users from gaming consoles and cellphones to super computers. And they certainly have enough money to try. I haven't looked, but bet their advertising budget is higher than the gross income for all the linux distros and apps. And if it isn't they could make it so tomorrow and not break sweat. Not saying it is wise, or warranted, but they have the proven ability to extract cash from society like no other single company ever has before.
Your vision was sort of tongue in cheek but that is exactly the direction we are headed with increasingly onerous "IP" laws and globalist trade schema. There very well could come a time where some invention was owned in perpetuity by some corporation or corpora-governmental hybrid, which I see as the next geopolitical evolution on the planet.
Anecdotals, reported right here on slashdot, showed one very good use for hybrids. During the hurricane katrina immense long evacuation lines, MANY normal cars ran out of gas just sitting idling,creeping along, whereas the hybrids, shutting off completely at standstill, conserved their fuel and were able to make it out on the one and *only* tank of gas they could get at the time. I have no idea what sort of "price" you could put on such an advantage, but it's pretty high if it meant the difference between a successful evac for you and your family or stranded in a storm someplace because you ran out of fuel or starter battery charge.
And now with the aftermarket modding of hybrids into true plug-in hybrids, and some manufacturere making noises like they could offer them soon, the economics might be better, as one could conceivably keep the batts topped off from a solar array or wind charger at home, reducing reliance on both the grid and on fossil petroleum fuels.. now what the jerk government might do about road taxes then I have no idea, as this is such a variable and subject to non engineering related political change overnight. They would most likely switch to more monitoring and charge you by the mile traveled via some blackbox gizmo. That's one annoying part in all this, politics always gets involved. "here's a tax credit, go electric or hybrid!" "whoops, because our road fuel tax income just dropped, now we have to monitor you and charge by the mile and offer you an urban "congestion fee" alternative.
With all that said, I would like a pure electric vehicle, with the generator part that makes it a hybrid contained in a trailer for longer trips. Best of both worlds then, and no need to cram all the hybrid drive train stuff inside the vehicle..
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Taxes are both an arbitrarily imposed political burden and a form of outright punishment, and are also primarily a form of rigid political control by the power elite, and being a proponent of personal soverignty and Freedoms, they are anathemic to my basic core philosophy of living.. In addition, the entire notion of taxes in an artifical fiat currency based economy are economically and logically *absurd*. They are ludicrous. That they are even considered valuable and necessary by most people is, to me, the result of massive and persistent brainwashing of the populace by the same power elite via their overtly propogandized controlled educational system and mass media. Not only in the US but in any other nation that has its economy controlled by central bankers and their criminal peers in so-called government.
I'm sorry, but as a thinking person...really, I am just not that stupid. I simply refuse to be dumbed down to that utterly absurd level.
When we have a true produced tangibles wealth-based currency system, you can get back to me on imposed taxes. they might be necessary then, who knows, but perhaps. Until then, I am against taxes and only recognize reduction of taxes or tax credits as the only legitimate non threat of violence form of gentle persuasion by the societal groupings known as "government".
And perhaps you don't know much about me, but I am a big alternative energy proponent,I am a consumer of same, and an innovator of same. I have been a true conservationist and politically active since the early 60s on this subject. I am fully aware of the future and our responsibility to the planet and our progeny. And in my studied political and economic opinion, taxes are not the way to induce positive change, in fact, they usually result in the opposite occurring.
I would never seek to coerce, punish, admonish or threaten any of my fellow humans. I seek only to gently encourage and educate. Two paths,and I know the one I chose long ago.
We have off road diesel in a similar lesser taxed manner but it is only for off road use. None of the road trucks can use it legally from in any manner, from the farm through all the various middlemen to the dinner table. and no other tradesmen who have to carry tools and materials can use it either, full price at the pump. If it goes on the road, full taxes.
And from what I am seeing your farmers are going to be hurting soon, and you've already put a lot of them out of business. Don't worry, your turn to pay much higher food prices is coming, along with the rest of the planet. Not sure when, but it'll happen. Enjoy the good old days while they last. North Sea oil has peaked, and we are one more loony tunes stunt away from losing a lot of mideast oil and possibly venezuelan oil as well. The USA/UK axis of middle east meddling for the past century is coming home to roost.
Yours has come about over a long period of time and in a relatively small nation compared to the US. Imagine if your government tomorrow tripled your fuel tax on your gasoline by passing a law. You honestly think that wouldn't bork your economy then? C'mon, you know it would cause problems. I live way over here and distinctly rember you had truckers and farmers strikes and such like over pretty small fuel price increases, and not too long ago.
We just saw what happens in the US when there's even a smaller but sudden increase, through either tax or sudden reduction of supply, with our twin gulf coast hurricanes. We have some exact recent scenarios to look at. It caused a lot of problems that rippled way beyond the immediate areas of destruction. I'll give you an exact example from right where I live how sudden significant energy cost increases can spread out.. the loss of natgas from the gulf after the hurricanes drove up prices for natgas, not a huge amount but enough, which put an additional demand on propane,as those places that could switch were prepared to do so, so those prices went up almost immediately as well. Where we farm here, propane is *critical* to keep the poultry houses running in the colder months. Just this increase and the volumes needed (the bulk tanks here are all 50,000 gallons or larger) have put this operation into the red from the black, all winter now will be operating at a slight loss, where "slight" is a cubic boat load of cash.. There are no deals to be gotten to reduce the costs, that price is fixed so far upstream there is little you can do about it with hardly any notice. And that wasn't anything like tripling the prices, although they have doubled over the past few years and it's already been quite a burden.
An artificial tax tripling the prices of a critical infrastructure component would effectively kill it off except for the top 1% of wealthy people and government, who basically demand at the point of a gun once you eliminate the polite BS.
No, I like tax credit incentives better than tax increases, if government has to be involved some way.. if you want to help society along to better tech, let them have more money to do it with. Tax credits always work better than a direct tax. Honey or vinegar deal. We had one time when we had national alternative energy credits and it worked great! it was fabulous for the people who took advantage of it. They expired then after a few years. We recently got some legislation that has revived the tax credits, and you can already see stories where it's being taken advantage of now.
I think a lot of it is two different political philosophies, for myself, and a lot of americans, we just prefer less government forced mandates to do such and such and get your pocket picked. We've noticed that whatever the tax is, 50% gets skimmed to run the bureaucracy and to pay too much for something, it just gets wasted. Too high an overhead, it sucketh the big one and just doesn't work. Leave us alone with a combination of market forces and more cash in the wallet and we can figure out what to do then. Not for everything but for a lot of things.
Before OPEC embargo, very few 4 cylinder cars offered for sale in the US, and less adoption. I remember seeing VWs, simcas and some renaults, and a few datsuns, etc and not many of them compared to other cars. After OPEC, 4 cylinders got sold, developed, talked about, used, whatever and it *stuck* to this day, it has become common, just about every manufacturer now sells models with 4 cylinders and good mileage.. they suck more to work on this is true, but still, you can get them. Now to work on the fuel they burn..biofuels, start with blends, work up.
We got the lightweight 4 cylinder pickup out of it as well for that matter. That didn't even exist before then IIRC, closest you could get was a full sized with a 6 cylinder. Before OPEC, solar arrays were fantastically non existent except for very limited research projects and use in space etc. some few perivate folks had them but not too many. Since then a slow but sure climb, year after year, now there's an actual shortage of PV panels on the market, even with a slew of manufacturers. Wind chargers, the same,(after a small but intense period in the early 20th century that fizzled) now they are the fastest growing method of commercially produced grid electricity around the planet. More wind by the megawatt going in then anything else. I'd call that fairly significant. Yes, it's a long time, because we are living it, but historically it's short. We as a society can change radically in a short time, as long as the shock or kick in the butt isn't permanent. A little wake up call now and then is good, but a permanet borking of the economy isn't, because then there isn't enough to MAKE the cool new stuff. Catch 22.
I remember when there really were not that many computers, mostly some large mainframes. Then hobbiest computers and build your own kits hit, then the first commercial "home" computers, then the apple and pc revolution seriously kicked it in gear, now-they are as common as televisions, and we are so many evolutions down the road that now we have antique personal computers. It didn't happen in two years, but 20-30? Bam, done deal, society is completely changed in one generation. Yes, personally I would have liked to see it happen much faster, but so it goes... Sure, stuff is doable on mass scales then,when the time is right, stuff just happens. Give society an incentive because it's practical, you'll get a lot of interest and some early adoption (stage we are just leaving now, IMO). When the interest increases demand enough to where economies of scale kick in, then you'll get mass adoption (the stage we are just entering now).
What with all the manufacturing layoffs announced lately, someone is going to bingo to the fact that building wind chargers in particular is not all that hard, and we might see some really large factories switching over. Going from hybrids as we have them being sold now to plug-in hybrids is a relatively easy step, that could possibly take advantage of the wind chargers going in perhaps, and the interest in solar PV combined with the mature market now and the recently passed tax incentives is accelerating there as well. Instead of taxing fuel more, they eliminated in a way and offered a tax credit on the alternatives. Which is a much better choice if you ask me, given that government will always be bound and determined to "do something", I'd rather have them err on the side of leaving me and you with more cash in our wallets to do what we think is cool..
One thing leads to another. Maybe someone with some juice in some large corporation facing loss of business in one direction might even read this and get inspired. Or perhaps a big union guy facing a lot of his brethren out of work soon. People get to thinkin'... Ya never know, but humans have a habit of rising to the "build stuff and use it" challenge pretty readily when the time is right. We always have anyway...
Did you EVER have a job where you had to haul tools and material around? Where every job you get might be two counties over from where you live? The entire planet is NOT just people who only need to haul a laptop or some schoolbooks from the apartment to some convenient office or school. You are suggesting that some plumber or carpenter needs to take 18 trips on the bus just to get to work and back with all his tools, plus walk hauling a backpack of tools and lumber over his shoulder from wherever the bus stop is and the job site isn't? Or are you prepared for the price of about everything to go up like triple or more? That's the choices you have. That's what tripling the gas price would do, it ripples throughout our economy. All these people who actually build stuff and grow stuff and do stuff-actual wealth PRODUCING jobs-not wealth re arranging jobs or paper or electron shuffling jobs-have to drive, have to haul mass quantities of stuff,there is no other way around it, and if you up their prices, they will guaranteed "up yours". Like ordering stuff online and getting it delivered by UPS or Fedex? Think they will keep the same rates? how about snail mail? Trip on the plane to go see grammaw? All the stuff that has to get from factories or mines or farms to the processing plants and manufacturing plants then to the wholesalers then to the jobbers then to the retail outfits "downtown"? In the US anyway, 6 buck a gallon prices would cause a great depression to make the last one look like a charity give away.
.what you got going at home now, how large is your personal solar array? Or anything similar? How much organic food do you produce with a hoe and shovel and carry to the local food coop or haul with your bicycle trailer and sell cheap?
Perhaps you might need to think this reactionary tax through just a scosh more, follow the economic food chains around. And speaking of actual food chains, I live and work on a farm, you raise the fuel prices to triple what they are now, well get ready for 12$ chickens and 3$ a piece corn on the cob and 6$ loaves of bread at your local urban store. And because the costs of energy are closely related, how about tripling your winter heating bills now? When one fuel goes up in price, they ALL do basically.
I think a better idea is what we are doing now, people switching to hybrids or the coming soon plug in hybrids, adding solar to their roofs, large wind generational projects going in, research into clean coal burning technologies, and etc.
and..just for grins..
See? It's big problem, it's not all just cars and finger pointing. That just gets the finger pointed right back at ya.. That crap with cars is sorting itself out just fine now, people may be dumb but they aren't so dumb as to not notice fluctuations at the pump with mostly UP as the range and the general rise of "other" fuel prices like in their natgas bills and propane and whatnot. People ARE switching to better mileage and cleaner burning cars. check the stats, hybrids are the fastest growing market. And an SUV made it into the top 5 mileage vehicles sold in the US this year, the Escape hybrid. Clunky as it is and slow, the system is starting to work. We are talking overcoming inertial with 300 million people in the US and a lot of entrenched industries. This stuff takes time and a lot of individual effort as well as corporate effort and governmental incentives. . And the track record of governments passing laws and RAISING taxes to try and fix stuff is just mostly pure dismal. People fix stuff when it is practical, logical and do-able to do the fix and not much sooner. That's just how it works.
We are a mobile society, we sunk our infrastructure bucks into roads designed for personal vehicles and trucks as the primary method of travel, and it just isn't practical to have full public transport that goes everywhere, it would cost dozens of trillions of dollars just to get started on it and even then it would never fit all situations..
Want to make
Amazon lets readers post online reviews of the books they sell. Seems to work Ok for them. In an academic journal variant, any peer with appropriate credentials in the field could do the same on any paper. Let the chips fall where they may then.
with knoppix and some other live cds you can use a cheatcode (I think it's knoppix:toram or some such) and when it is booting it puts the entire OS into RAM if you have enough, like you have. I do this with a mini distro, austrumi, and it makes it *blazingly fast*, as in quick. Like a megaprocessor upgrade or something. Knoppix is I think 2 gigs compressed with the single CD version, so 4 gigs of ram would give you some decent cushion.
There are various solar ovens you can purchase or build. One interesting one I saw was built into the south wall of the kitchen. Basically a large insulated box that had glass on the southside and the oven door on the kitchen side. It was only good for one quick cook from around 11 am to 1 pm, but still enough to toast a chicken or whatnot. The stand alone ones work well ( I have a commercial model you just set oputside on the picnic table or whatever), you just have to go turn them to face the sun occassionaly, but that could be somewhat easily automated with some photocells and a small turntable, or just a mechanical timer and some good maths for that matter if you wanted to. a lot of times I just default to "biodrive"-me_ to do simple tasks if it's feasible and easy, the K.I.S.S. principle.
One bit of advice, you just cannot beat insulation on payback and useability. Look into the "superinsulating" concept of structure design. It's very googleable. You shoot for R-55 floors walls and ceiling, and you can almost eliminate much in the way of heating or cooling, you can get it down to a ridiculous small level to maintain a decent comfort zone. The one house I worked on, back during the OPEC oil shocks, as a serious retrofit, we built interior walls around 6 inches away from the existing walls, then used blow in insulation to fill it up, then normal drywall to finish it. The old windows got replaced with triple panes, and much work on the various cracks, etc to make it tight. It's an *amazing* difference. In a lot of cases, just normal lightbulbs and inside cooking and whatnot is sufficient "heat" in the winter, with the furnace only turning on occassionally. similar with the cooling, the AC just won't run that much. dollar for dollar no other technique can touch it. Insulation is not sexy, but man it works! It's a serious "silver bullet" alternative energy technique that isn't being explored much. People "get it" woith high MPG cars, they can understand that, but with their homes they will pop for a long term mortgage for some place that is the energy gashog equivalent of an SUV with fouled plugs running on flat tires uphill. I have no idea why this is so but it sure is. And the banks will give them a note for it! R-18 maybe cut the mustard back when oil was a few dollars a barrel, but not now.
The whole subject is fascinating, it's quite possible nowadays to not only have a totally energy self sufficient home, but also get a check back from the electric company every month, or at least bank kilowatt hour credits.
If you are going for active solar, now is a good time as you can combine a lot of tax breaks with tying the installation into your home note long term. Most folks go for a hybrid system, solar PV, thermal, wind charger, fuel generator, then a grid tie. It just depends on your location what is practical or not. You are about covered for juice then with any mixture of the systems, and combine that with a good sized battery bank. having a whole house UPS system is quite spiffy...... And greenhouses are just *neat*. I was just up in ours looking at the tomatoes and peppers and cabbages and whatnot..... while the outside garden is now mostly gone by for the winter. We even have some roses blooming in there and some tropicals, but I don't know if the heavy tropicals will make it this is the first winter and we don't really want to artifically heat it, just cost too much and I don't have that other composter heater built yet, just too many back burned projects behind now. What some guys have done is combine raising meat animals inside the greenhouse with plants, like chickens or rabbits. The animals throw off good heat 24/7 and can eat a lot of the vegetable scraps. You can put tanks for fish as well and use the water for thermal storage. Lotsa neat stuff you can do. If you go the small meat critter route, you can use their, uhhh, how do you put it, their "exhaust", heh, in a methane digester to get burnable gas.
good website for you (dead tree magazine as well)
http://www.homepower.com/
you'll go nuts there, double heh
I don't have anything online yet, when I do I will post a link off of technocrat.net to it. A lot of the stuff from the olden daze I have no pictures of unfortunately. The thing I worked on I am the most proud of is, I was one of the first guys to have a working protype of what is now called "the mountain bike". I won't claim I was the first, but I will claim one of the firsts and it was developed without me even knowing about anyone elses efforts along those lines. It worked great! Man did I think it was cool, able to get way back in the woods where the dirt bikers went easily. I never commercialised it, but I know that one large manufacturer saw my working bike and very soon thereafter had one on the market. Very coincidental.... They also failed to see the second stage of the design, which I have never built yet because I got pissed off bigtime, a different drive system, which I would have sold at the time for pretty cheap as I was just a po ole hipster then. Wait.. I still am! hahahahaha!
only about a week, it was just one of many alternative energy experiments I tried. I've built passive air based thermosiphon room heaters, methane digesters, the compost heater, made ethanol and run engines off of it, built earth bermed sunken greenhouse like garden beds that worked at below zero F, used various solar, worked on two "superinsulated" homes, and etc. Fun stuff for me.
We have a very large commercial greenhouse now (and a whopper chipper to get the chips) and I plan on retrofiting it to have at least an adjunct to the normal propane fired heaters for it with the woodchip pile heater. Basically, put the heat source, the woodchip pile, downhill of wherever you want to pump the heat to, to your radiator action. heat rises. As the water gets heated in the coils it will naturally start to flow uphill to the radiator, where it dumps the heat, cools, and falls back downhill to the coil. I've never built a very large one but the principle is the same, you just can't extract too much heat as it will slow down the composting too much. It's really simple concept and you don't need much, coils of high temp hose or hot water pipe glued together in a coil like shape, then insulate it as it exits the pile leading to where you want to dump the heat, which can be anything I guess like pipes in the floor or radiators of some kind, like them old fashioned room radiators or what have you. Cobjob to taste I guess. I was just seeing if the theory would work and it worked well, after a couple of hours of construction and letting the pipes sit with relatively fresh made chips it started flowing and just kept it up. IIRC I was getting 130-150 degree water out of it. I would imagine it would last a year or two if the chip pile was large enough, couple of dump truck loads maybe. Then you got nifty garden compost soil, double win...
Doing anything on a large scale is just costly, hard to find good backers for new techniques, and most VCs seem to want to double their money in like 6 months or something, they just aren't interested in both new research and in longer payback periods. I got *very, very* discouraged back in the 70s with all this, although everything worked, and I was one enthusiastic hard working inventor type dude,I just never could find any credible backers to do a real company or anything. I am still rather discouraged seeing as how it is 2005 and it's still "controversial" and not well adopted yet except for a few large wind projects and a bit more solar use. I mean, solar hot water heater is as close to a no brainer as imaginable, yet still rare. Way back then I fully expected to see most roofs by now covered with solar devices and methane projects to be very common, along with biofuels. It's only since energy prices have gotten so very bad that there's much interest, and even still about all I see is enthusiasm for making the monopoly nuke builders richer and maybe hybrid cars for some people.
You can get propane fired tankless water heaters, it is not necessary to have piped in natural gas. Go to most any rural hardware store to see them.
As for other alternatives, rooftop solar thermal water pre heaters are also very common, relatively cheap,the payback period is more rapid than about any other alternative energy devices on the market.(I used to sell them, they work great and it is quite possible to build your own at home, as opposed to building your own PV panels which is sort of difficult) And being modular, they can be piggybacked and give you all the hot water you might reasonable want. Basically just big tanks in insulated boxes with glass coverings. They work well in a lot of areas. And you can also get external to the home wood furnaces that produce simply huge amounts of hot water for direct use bathing or washing or for heating the home, using a renewable fuel, or fuels actually, some burn not only wood but corn or entire large custom hay bales, etc.
I once built a small hot water demonstrator that used coils of hose inside of a big woodchip pile in a closed loop cycle using thermosiphoning to transfer the heat. Once it initially heated up due to normal composting action, I got a nice constant flow of hot water out of it.
That's certainly a valid point. The alternative wired solution might be a thin client/server model.
I like both really, heh.
I guess it depends on how many chairs you want to use all the time with the laptop. If you have your one favorite living room chair, you can always use a piece of black steel strapping or a tape measure and snake an ethernet cable under the carpet and bring it up exactly next to or under the chair. It's not a permanent installation then and the tiny carpet cuts are quite easy to fix if you re arrange the furniture and need to move your "drop" as it were..
But, I understand the problem and the lure of the wireless and I'm not against it per se, it's certainly easy enough and cheap enough, I just happen to like hard wired stuff if at all possible. I've been doing the POTS line snake it under the carpet for...uhhh..shoot, near 40 years, I really don't remember. Same with clambering under floors and into attics to add mains outlets.
and plumbing for that matter. Just ain't a-skeered of home deconstruction and improvements I guess... fun stuff to me as long as it isn't an emergency repair.
My reply was also more in the way of relating and responding to the premise of the article, just too much wireless going in all over for the spectrum we have to use for free now. Eventually it will become so saturated that it might make it more of a PITA than useful. Who knows, I don't, but the premise seems reasonable. I have some laptops but whenever I use them I am so close to various plugs and the modem line (zero broadband here) it just doesn't matter,I just throw it out there, when done, coil it up, back under the desk where it lives with the other geeky stuff and the trained attack dust bunnies. I also got my longwire shortwave antenna tacked across the ceiling, just because the function is more important then the looks for me.
All the appliances in your home are battery powered? I bet she puts up with cords for a variety of things, even the television. Of course, most of those are hidden down the edge of the walls and behind the furniture, etc so I see your (hers) point but only somewhat.
;)
It's not the wires that are a problem, it's the builders philosphy of where to put outlets and what to have "outletted".
The solution is just modern home design with some better plug-age in the normal areas. The problem is, it is only in the last few years that ethernet and coax cabling to every room has become sort of common in new residential construction. Most places it is somewhat doable as a retrofit, others it is not or exceedingly difficult. Another problem is the aversion people have to floor as opposed to wall outlets, because it forces a somewhat fixed furniture location. A dictatorship like an office can get away with it, but most homeowners wouldn't want it unless it was camoflauged somewhat or they could be content with their initial furniture layout and add in the ethernet/cable outlets where they fit the best. Yes, work, but maybe worthwhile work.
And besides, it's always nice to have an excuse to get out the sawzall!
..it's a cool holiday anyone can adopt if they so choose, and a great excuse to have a feast and kick back and chow down and relax.
I'm all in favor of MORE holidays! I think a nice one to one ratio with regular plain vanilla work days is appropriate...
very nice post
Pure speculation just for funzies. This is an off the wall-tinfoil hat-from my naturally suspicious mind angle on this article, and some others lately of similar nature. Perhaps all these new music download deals of the obviously bogus and overly high priced genre are a scam. Disinformation put out for a longer term desired political and economic effect. A little public "See,we listened, here's your net downloads!", while in the background they are *expecting* them to fail, planning on it, so they can continue to lobby congress and engage in media propogandizing for even more draconian anti file sharing and more hardware lockdown laws. Similar to them more or less forcing iTunes to go up in price soon. If anything, if they were serious, offerings would be getting cheaper and cheaper as tech advances make it possible and as you can see in the electronics tangibles markets- except for music and movie offerings for some strange reason....
...as well. The value of free to use "intellectual property" is a two-to-infinity way street. Producers of something are usually consumers of other folks products. That's the value of it, they share and in turn get to share with literally millions of other people, and those people's products. The theory anyway. Now people seek to interject transference of generic "money" into the sharing, but the real wealth is the transference of the "intellect" and not necessarily in calling that "property". This scenario, in a theoretical sense, benefits immensely if it is equal sharing and if the middleman of additional money for the privelege of sharing is reduced to zero. And if most everyone wants to leech without offering into the pool, and also bypassing the money, it won't work for very long. If the majority want to leech without offering back, again, it will not work well. If even a sizable minority are leeches only, it still won't be effective, and that's roughly the point we are at now and why it is still contentious.. It's only when the numbers reach parity, is where that system really starts to shine, where freely sharing producers are the common median. Then society will really grow from that exchange. Sadly we are still far from that goal, happily, there is a general trend in that direction, and it is from a bottom up direction, instead of the traditional top down. The next generation as they have grown up with sharing will most likely see to it that the laws reflect the benefits of sharing over the past benefits of protectionism that only made sense when the mere act of copying was tedious and expensive. Now that this isn't so we are in a societal transition period and the laws haven't caught up with technology yet, and gross perceptions are even further behind that.
I even tried to shop this sort of idea to the owners at the last place I lived that had a full solar rig. I tried to interest them in getting a commercial wind tower of considerable size like 1 megawatt, then run some businesses there from it (they had a lot of acreage and a mountaintop). They didn't want to and already made enough money...but I think it's still an excellent idea for someone who wants free power plus have a good income. Instead of installing "just enough" alternative energy devices for your personal use, and figuring out some "payback" period, go whole hog wholesale size, have all you can eat, build some businesses around USING the juice. Payback would be a lot sooner and then make you some serious cash. I think it might be a viable idea even for a co op of partners, invest in land, then build homes and shops/faqrm action, power the whole thing from commercial sized alternative energy installations.
I once worked at a woodshop that did a variant of this. They used to purchase electric power to run the shop, eventually someone there smart bingoed to the fact of all the valuable woodscrap waste they generated that they used to sell off cheap for firewood just to get rid of it. They installed a GE steam turbine boiler/generator system, generated 100% of all the power they needed to run the factory from burning the wood scraps, plus made an additional 10 grand a month selling the surplus electricity into the grid. that was 70s money, too. They could have easily expanded operations with all that extra juice. Moved away, no idea what became of them other than they closed that factory eventually and outsourced manufacturing to China. I think all that is left is the marketing and shipping. Good idea (seemed to me anyway) while it was running though.
...then potentially you aren't listening to a 99 cent iTunes song. I think that is the primary reason. And yes I am aware you can have tracks have other than iTunes on the iPod, but the theory is still probably valid from an Apple marketing decision viewpoint.
"OTOH, the best wind areas often are not near urban areas"..and so on. Yep. this is true. For now anyway....
For all the talk and interest of colonizing space, we still have a lot of areas on the good ole Earth that are very unpopulated, and actually quite a bit more attractive climate and resource wise than Mars. No comparison really.
In centuries past, people moved and created habitable areas based on any number of criteria, being where a river entered an ocean was always a biggee for trade, being close to fertile river valleys for agriculture, being near major mountain passes, etc. This is and has been mutable to the extreme, so there's no reason to think what we have now is "it" for how-or where-humans will be living in the future..
Perhaps in the future due to humans ability to conduct trade and work and live most anyplace now that we might be creating new areas to live based on local available energy supplies as the primary criteria. As imported energy costs go up, it becomes more attractive to settle where these sources are going down in price. Example, Siberia and Alaska and northern Canada, even Antarctica, currently not all that populated relatively speaking, but with *tremendous* potential in the future due to extensive and quite varied energy reserves, including massive wind power potential. People might start to think why export raw energy for some small profit when you can use it yourself to develop industry, etc. and receive profit times x more large amount? Why make the other guy rich off of your valuable stuff? I think there's still a lot of "wild wild west" left on this planet, and energy costs and availability will push the "great expansion part deux" soon.
Solar Tower Project
http://www.enviromission.com.au/
Bragging rights, mindshare, the integrated environment and all sorts of various marketing reasons. MS wants to be the computer system for all uses and users from gaming consoles and cellphones to super computers. And they certainly have enough money to try. I haven't looked, but bet their advertising budget is higher than the gross income for all the linux distros and apps. And if it isn't they could make it so tomorrow and not break sweat. Not saying it is wise, or warranted, but they have the proven ability to extract cash from society like no other single company ever has before.
Your vision was sort of tongue in cheek but that is exactly the direction we are headed with increasingly onerous "IP" laws and globalist trade schema. There very well could come a time where some invention was owned in perpetuity by some corporation or corpora-governmental hybrid, which I see as the next geopolitical evolution on the planet.
Anecdotals, reported right here on slashdot, showed one very good use for hybrids. During the hurricane katrina immense long evacuation lines, MANY normal cars ran out of gas just sitting idling,creeping along, whereas the hybrids, shutting off completely at standstill, conserved their fuel and were able to make it out on the one and *only* tank of gas they could get at the time. I have no idea what sort of "price" you could put on such an advantage, but it's pretty high if it meant the difference between a successful evac for you and your family or stranded in a storm someplace because you ran out of fuel or starter battery charge.
And now with the aftermarket modding of hybrids into true plug-in hybrids, and some manufacturere making noises like they could offer them soon, the economics might be better, as one could conceivably keep the batts topped off from a solar array or wind charger at home, reducing reliance on both the grid and on fossil petroleum fuels.. now what the jerk government might do about road taxes then I have no idea, as this is such a variable and subject to non engineering related political change overnight. They would most likely switch to more monitoring and charge you by the mile traveled via some blackbox gizmo. That's one annoying part in all this, politics always gets involved. "here's a tax credit, go electric or hybrid!" "whoops, because our road fuel tax income just dropped, now we have to monitor you and charge by the mile and offer you an urban "congestion fee" alternative.
With all that said, I would like a pure electric vehicle, with the generator part that makes it a hybrid contained in a trailer for longer trips. Best of both worlds then, and no need to cram all the hybrid drive train stuff inside the vehicle..