Pap and balderdash; Roman Circuses to keep you from thinking about what is happening to the American Republic and to global industrial society.

Smash your TV, stop watching this crap! It is all intended to dull your wits and turn your brain to mush...

This whole charade, this Kafka-esque tragicomedy, has become so insane and so oppressive, that I have made a personal decision not to fly anywhere, anymore. My partner has even given all her frequent flyer points to charity, so we won't be tempted to use them.

I'll travel by car and bicycle and kayak and sailboat for my vacations from now on, until this madness abates.

Join the Hell No, I Won't Fly movement, and write an airline CEO informing them of your decision. Write the folks at DisneyWorld too, while you're at it!

Larry

The crux for me is that western economists refuse to see the woman with a cow as a business. So she doesn't represent measurable economic development. Doesn't contribute to the export economy. Doesn't boost high tech competitiveness.

In fact, the woman is an entrepreneur, a small dairy business owner. Her success or failure depends on her smarts and her hard work just like a business anywhere. Contrast this to the traditional vision of economic development, which would probably look something like a local factory owner expanding and hiring more wage laborers at 50 cents an hour. Those workers have little chance to improve their lives, even if they work hard, and they have jobs as long as they make the factory owner more money. This is viewed as measurable, laudable economic development.

And what's this nonsense about peer pressure? Somehow the existence of some village peer pressure to repay a loan, so that more villagers can participate, creates a higher "burden of evidence" that lives are improved. Huh? Are they suggesting a woman would rather escape peer pressure than have a new cow? That peer pressure is too onerous a condition of a loan? I'd like to see a local US businessman stand up and swear before the whole community that he will repay his business loan!

Does microcredit work for individual people? I think the impossible "global-end-of-poverty" style measures by which economists judge microcredit by are the problem.

This is simpler: Before loan: woman has no cow and no debt and no credit history. After loan is paid: woman has a cow and no debt and a clean credit history. She is a proud business owner! That is a success.

2ndGenerationPilot is only partly right about the stand-by power used by large, flat-screen TVs. It is true that many new EnergyStar flat-screen TVs draw virtually no watts when turned "off".

But as in my work as an energy auditor, I have personally measured 42" LCD TVs that draw 55 watts when turned off. In my experience, 0-watt EnergyStar flat-screens are still the exception, not the norm (judging by what I actually see in peoples' homes, not by what's currently on sale).

Combine that with the 800+ watt consumption I've measured for some 52" TVs when they're turned on, and it's easy to calculate that the typical large-screen TV consumes more kilowatts-per-year than the typical refrigerator.

So if you're shopping for a new TV, be sure to demand that the seller disclose both the operating and the standby wattage. But good luck: most manufacturers don't bother to publish either one. I wouldn't go shopping for a TV without my handy-dandy Kill-A-Watt power meter. The salesperson may think you're weird, but you're the one paying the electric bills for the next 5-10 years, not them!

Larry

While this sounds like a very clever hack (ignoring for the moment the accuracy of the results), I suspect that it's actually much less useful in conjunction with wind turbines than it appears at first glance.

Here's the rub: even if such an app gives an accurate instantaneous wind speed, that's not what's needed to evaluate a site's wind potential.

What's needed (as I understand it) is actually an average annual wind speed. That requires taking samples at fairly frequent intervals, then averaging them over long periods (like a whole year).

It seems like there's a real risk of "selective data" here: people will tend to run outside and measure the wind when they notice it's windy. They may see many occurrences of 10, 15, 20 mph wind speeds. But they won't notice all the extended periods of low or no wind, which dramatically reduce the average speed.

And this is a very critical issue: power output from a wind turbine is proportional to the CUBE of the average wind speed! So if selective data acquisition results in a mistaken impression of, say, 16 mph wind speed, when the actual long-term average is really only 8 (realistic examples for Wisconsin, where I live), then the output of a wind turbine would be one-eighth the predicted level!

So I'd call this a nice clever hack that needs a very strong warning label lest it accidentally be misused in ways that might cost someone a lot of money for little return...

Larry Walker

Madison, WI

The new site is hideously ugly and stupidly hard to navigate!

What in the world were you thinking of when you did this design????