Since everybody is throwing everybody in prison these days for civil offenses, I think we should jail Eugene Robinson for the ridiculous first paragraph of this article.
Apparently, you can’t disagree with a damage recovery strategy and remain Obama-compliant pissed off at BP. Choose one of the above. If you don’t think we should hit them in the knees with a crowbar, then whose side are you on, exactly?
The article ends with a middle-fingered dare to try this philosophy out on the American people. Unfortunately, this threat rings more accurate than anything in the article.
All Barton’s situation shows me is that we are now completely incapable of holding a dialogue on anything. Our banana republic factions keep decrying the fact that other Republicans shared Barton’s view. Fitting with the conventions of our political theater, he only took it back because he got caught saying something too unpopular at too important of a time. You think he doesn’t believe in what he said?
I personally take a more pragmatic view of the situation, and given $20 billion will likely not cover the tab, the ends seem reasonable while failing to justify the means.
Of course, now that they’ve set aside the funds they should not be persecuted for issuing their dividends on schedule for the rest of the year.
You only have so many knees to bash in, after all.
One morning while walking to work I decided Alison Krauss’ voice is birdsong fanned by angel wings. You honestly forget you’re listening to bluegrass.
I have also decided that Nickel Creek is my new favorite band, and “This Side” is my new favorite song. Never would have seen that coming. That’s a lot of bluegrass, or something similar. I wonder if that will hold up after we get back to the States.
STP’s Purple has also provided some good listening recently. What an album. We need some new rock that sounds like that.
Work is very quiet today, and I started looking at solar panels after reading some random comment online. They are, as I would have expected, still priced predatorily to capitalize on those who really want to try to do something good for the world’s energy progress, not just Netflix An Inconvenient Truth. They are also big and ugly.
But, while looking through the options I came across a 5 watt trickle charger intended for car and marine use. Not too expensive.
This is when I realized: LED Christmas lights are extremely low-power. Like, 2.4 W/string for a 17’ string.
Of course, lights need to be on at night, so a $60 marine battery is necessary.
The battery I found is capable of outputting 80 Ah at 12 V. That’s 0.96 kWh for those who use real-life measurements. Aside from being the unit upon which you are charged for electricity, a kWh in this case answers the question: how much power can I provide for a one-hour period? So, I can provide 960 W for 1 hour with this battery. For the coming calculations, it’s better to think of the total battery capacity as 960 Wh.
If I want to run 10 strings of lights (170’), I need about 24 W. Doing a brief algebriac flip, that means my marine battery can run this kit for 40 hours without any charging or external input. Not bad.
But, the bigger question is the sustainability question: how much energy is expended per night? My 24 W load will run from 6 PM to 2 AM, 8 hours. This means I will require 192 Wh per day.
From what I read in the reviews, 4 W is probably a reasonable expectation of the output from the solar panel. This means, per day, I need 48 charger-hours of energy. If we get an average 8 hours of good sunlight per day (in the winter), this implies a humming array of 6 trickle chargers to keep my ship afloat. You only eliminate one charger if you assume they run on spec (5 W) for the whole 8 hours. They don’t call them trickle chargers for nothing.
We have just arrived in Energy Policy Land: what now?
I can cut my load to 6 strings of lights, dropping my wattage to about 15 W. At my daily charge of 32 Wh per panel per day, I reduce my panel requirement to 4. If I cut my run time down to start from 7 PM and run to 11 PM, I only need 60 Wh per night, which can be provided by just a pair of solar panels running at my conservative 4 W rating. This sizing seems at least reasonable, but it’s a pity to start the lights so late and shut them off so early.
Pulling a move one might call the Pelosi, I could simply assume we will get more sunlight than originally planned.
Thinking outside of the box and definitely removing me from consideration for a cover feature in Martha Stewart Living, I think it would be awesome to install a manger scene yard decoration and put small solar panels on the roof. What a cool statement that would make!
The best idea is to upsize the equipment. The real weakness to the plan is the trickle charger.
I found this far superior device, but it’s also far larger. Definitely impossible to hide amid shrubbery.
To give us a pan-energy-source view of this load, let’s propose actually plugging the battery into an exterior AC outlet to charge. This still allows cord hiding during prime times (actually the main objective of the project) but is definitely a Peter-to-Paul situation energy-wise. The linked charger outputs 15 W, between three and four solar panels depending on how you calculate it.
Since we’re no longer dependent on sunlight, we could easily replenish the battery simply by leaving the charger plugged in for a while. The circuitry in this charger takes care that the battery does not overcharge. The circuitry may also slow down the overall charge rate, meaning lengthier plugins might be necessary.
As cool as the solar thing is, I think it’s an interesting illustration that the time is not yet ripe. I might actually consider the plug-in scenario just to avoid the cords.
As I heard Lady GaGa’s far inferior work “Alejandro” in the cafe this morning, I realized that my folk revival is now basically depending on the next sub-generation to produce.
Given they grew into adolescence thinking Green Day’s first album was American Idiot, my hopes aren’t particularly high.
Of course, our sub-generation converted the tiring but still hopeful alternative movement to emo and cry-rock like Staind. So, we weren’t exactly carrying the banner of righteousness ourselves.
As the record industry grapples with becoming an organizer of production rather than an integrated creative, manufacturing, and retail pan-oligopoly, I suppose the idea of a flag-carrying demographic will fade over time.
Everybody seems to think that we will get all our cues from social networking in the near future.
Never really thought about it before, but Google’s name “Buzz” encapsulates this better than any other. MySpace was a holdover from the Geocities concept: any idiot can create a website. Facebook was the networking concept, which classed it up quite a bit until they sold out for some remote hope of profitability and sustainability via FarmVille.
Is Evony available on Facebook, m’lord?
While I love my low-hundreds of Facebook friends individually and dearly, I really couldn’t care less about more than maybe thirty people’s tastes and interests on a regular basis. And those are the people with whom I, surprise, generally have more communication than snooping on a wall post.
This may make me a minority in the social networking world, but I doubt I’m alone. Definitely a minority if I magically found myself within the junior high demographic. But as we get older, hew our own logs, and thatch our own roofs, I think the independent spirit that grows in us pushes this away.
I’ve found a lot of my dark horse music by chance, and with conversation. This passive communication idea, in my view, is just lazy marketers trying to find the next way to “crowd source” the hard work.
My marketing professor pointed out that people hate advertisements until they’re in the market for what is being sold. For example, aside from enjoying hearing Frasier trying to sell me a car, Hyundai ads barely ever caught my attention in the past. But if I saw one now I would check it out, because I’m looking for reassurance that it would be a decent car to potentially replace the often whale-like Honda iterations. And shave some money off the price despite the superior warranty.
So, given this, the odds are that if I check in on a friend using Facebook, I’m not in a music-buying mood. I am in a music buying mood when I’m shopping for music, which means a well-placed, context-sensitive Amazon or iTunes embedded ad would be far more effective than encouraging me to parse through a friend’s music list in search of peer pressure. And last.fm, while frustrating in many ways, is a great and subtle way to tie music shopping to music listening. With a touch of crowd-sourced social networking effect, I might add.
So, maybe it’s “context-specific” that is the key concept here.
Which means we may be tracking back to a device-per-context philosophy. During the emergence of mature smart phones, backwards cranks like me were critical of the “one device with a small screen to do everything” philosophy. What we as a group didn’t see was that phones were not destined to do everything, but they were going to take over quite a few extra jobs.
The iPad and the ensuing duplication panic demonstrate that people are ready to run a phone OS on a larger device to compensate for the bounded nature of phone capabilities.
So Facebook will probably have to discover its bounds, as well. Facebook can easily run on phones and replace Twitter with a richer experience. It can transmit LOLs at light speed, deliver FarmVille, and keep people connected, but it may just not be a music marketing tool.
Which is tough toenails for them, because it’s a lot easier to extract commercial value from these focused activities than it is to insert themselves commercially between one friend and another.
Teddy has handled over 630 requests from Yandex, an obviously irresponsible and crappy Russian search engine, in the past three days. Although quite a few were apparently just before I applied my fix to Efendi, it’s a good sign that I held up against the last attack.
The last hammering ended about 23 hours ago as of this writing:
!
I am almost certain that CPU activity at this scale for this long would have taken me down in the past.
In a nod to the international festival that is the World Cup, I have decided to make it easier for those wily Chinese and Russian search engines to index my blog. So, I have finally externalized the RSS feed update process, which at least in my empirical testing has caused a significant gain in request-by-request performance.
I’ll also go off the record while on the record and say Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” is quite a piece of video work. But certainly not Best Of material in my book. Some serious Lynch going on back there. No midgets behind the curtain, though.
“Tonight, Tonight” from the Pumpkins also deserves mention for steampunk-ish creativity (not my thing as a style, but they do it well).
I’m sure I’m forgetting a hundred other great ones.
I clearly have been watching more picture albums arrive on the blog page than my own writings recently. I haven’t had a lot of chance for independent thought recently, and what I do generate normally comes on my walk to work and is either promptly forgotten or not particularly significant in a lasting way.
I did have quite a bit of trouble reading this article with my eyes rolled all the way up into my forehead. It took them halfway down the page, from a grocery store spokeswoman for goodness’ sake, to utter the word “commodity.”
Obama can’t figure out whose ass he needs to kick, and on the way to the World Cup Biden reminds us how pissed his boss is. Power to Biden going to the World Cup. Better than just sitting around next to your bucket… trying to look mad. Go where you can help some Americans out and put a good face on for the world. Güle güle.
Much like the global economy, for which the post-FDR US Presidency now seems to imply Senior Mouseketeer-level leadership, a negative environmental event is just kind of a passive horror that only permits symbolic reaction.
But, unlike the economy’s occasional boons from Lady Luck (Clinton’s magic carpet ride across the dot-com bubble comes to mind), you really can’t do a lot to take credit for environmental upsides. Hard to turn out a press release for flushing the toilet one less time this week (and we’re at Peak Water, they say).
So anger now reigns supreme. But much like Yosemite Sam doggone’ing it in the wake of Bugs Bunny, anger is an expression of helplessness rather than strength.
We all need to be angry, apparently. We need to read New York Times articles to find out exactly how to kick BP in the nuts without compromising other key social grievances and sparing the fate of the Quik-E-Mart jobber.
We can vote, we can accept our 8% dividend yields from the stocks of actually well-maintained multinational oil companies, we can buy property with a reasonable assumption that it won’t be expropriated, and we can buy the Monster Cables if we think the bits stay a bit sharper on the way through. What we can’t do is address problems as they come our way. We can’t accept downside risk.
The same conspiracy types who could probably tell you a lengthy fable about Goldman and their ties to the government are often the ones calling for their criminal prosecution and seizure of assets. People normally think of Big Brother as surveillance, but misuse of the criminal justice system and property rights are by far more disturbing to me.
What bugs me is the new solution mechanism for problems. We look to our President, whom the forefathers really didn’t intend to empower that much, to kick the dirt and call meetings. If not, he doesn’t care, and my would that be hurtful.
Then, we want to throw everybody in jail. Because that’s just what freedom loving people do.
Then, let’s have the government take over all those nasty oil wells and hire the same contractors to run them and blow them up at a rate defined by the calculated risk allowed by regulation/ethics and the market’s tolerance for astronomical cost bases associated with extracting these valuable commodities safely.
We own the benefits, blame the negative externalities on the source, and look to the cops to save the day or at least yell at people until it works itself out. What a pathetic way to go about things.
I briefly feel like a tree-hugger here, but if anything binds us all together on this crazy world of ours, it’s the world itself. We own it together, we delegate power to decide and enforce who owns each chunk to (hopefully) well-run entities, and we share the positive and negative outcomes with each other.
The gatekeepers do not bind us like the earth and air. But we see our gatekeepers (be it Chavez or the White House) as the landlords. And guess whose problem it is when the apartment fridge leaks coolant? We’re not in a totalitarian government, or a communist government, or a fascist government, or a theocracy, or an anarchy, or an oligarchy, or a democracy for that matter.
We’re sharecropping. This isn’t right, because we own the land together.
We need to stop this. We’re better than all of this.
I am pleased to announce that, on this Atatürk Memorial and Sports and Youth Day national holiday, I have completed Dragon Warrior IV, thus finishing my run through all four Nintendo-based Dragon Warrior games. My top to bottom preferences run: 4, 1, 3, 2.
4, as I already knew, was complex, huge, and fun. In my eyes the definitive NES RPG.
1 was elegant and groundbreaking. Not so much fun, but when done with love the grinding was fulfilling (especially at 250% speed!).
3 was complicated like 4, but on the wrong vectors. Adding a fairly second rate class system was kind of a letdown. Getting to name and design your own characters was fun, but it hurt the depth of the story (I mean, seriously, you built them in a cafe and hauled them off using a menu screen). But, this was still a seriously good game.
2 was bad in many ways. It lacked the complexity of 3 and 4, and its attempts to repair the non-fun aspects of 1 just killed off the elegance. Two cream-puff allies with draconian combat rules and unbalanced gotcha enemy abilities (like wiping out 20% of your magic in one swipe) made it a chore. Plus, the difficulty curve hockey-sticked at the end and made for a really painful last-minute level grind to get back up to speed.
I followed the FAQ line-by-line to finish 2. I was afraid my progress would be derailed if I didn’t. 1 needed a little FAQ help, but mainly for those don’t-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot things. 3 was really big and got away from me in places. It had a more open-ended plot (again, not a lot of character gears turning) that long breaks between plays kind of screwed up. I didn’t look at anything for 4 except the map and item data that came with the original cartridge. Of course, I’ve also played it a few times, but I was only lost once and found my way just fine.
In the end, this was a fantastic way to reconnect with some of the best material from the early days. I will at some point suck it up and play Final Fantasy I through, since it’s a classic and has always eluded me.
We’re going to play either Secret of Mana or Seiken Densetsu now cooperatively. There may be some FF I going on in the background, as well. I was in a bad mood with work when we played Seiken for the first time, so I’m looking forward to a clean rerun through the game.
There may not be any ivy growing on my diplomas, but I strongly object to the New York Times assuming the highlighting of a word implies I don’t know what the word means, and darn it, while they’re at it, that I sure would like them to look it up for me. ‘Cause we’re pretty stoopid down Sowff.
Have you considered I might be bored and waiting for you to get to the point, Mr. Harvard?
What’s more, triple-click means “highlight paragraph” in this brave new world, and flashing a little short-lived question mark bubble up there and then canceling my highlight is simply not cool. It’s my OCD and I’ll keep it where it is, thank you. At least I stopped rotating my cursor counter-clockwise while I wait for your stupid flash ads to load.
Apparently, being up in the ivory tower puts you quite a bit closer to Daniel Webster’s spiritual mien. Well, have fun up there, Smedley. Don’t get a nose bleed.
