Amazing stuff

If we are smart, there is a way out of the environmental mess we have gotten ourselves into. I was watching one of the handyman networks...DIY I think, where they were talking about some emerging technologies that (IMHO) hold a great deal of promise. The first thing they showed me was solar panels made pretty much out of the same stuff they make car bumpers out of. Basically, the photo-voltaic cells are embedded in plastic which is then molded into whatever shape is needed. The sheets on the show were made to follow the profile of barrel tiles, but, if you can do that, then you can make 'em fit any roof profile. These things are weatherproof and have and estimated life of at least 35 years. That means the homeowner gets about 25 years of straight profit from his roof.

The other product highlighted was a heat pump designed to remove heat from the fridgid air of our northern latitudes in winter. They showed a unit that could heat/cool and 1800 ft^2 home for about $1000 per year. In other words, this heat pump is a hugely more efficient use of energy. Instead of using fossil fuels to heat one's home, use electricity, preferably created by those solar panels on one's roof, to run this heat pump. Even if you are using electricity produced by burning fossil fuels, it is still more efficient than using that fuel in individual home furnaces.

Now all we have to do is get the Tea Party to see the light.

We're doomed...unless we can keep them the hell out of Washington, D.C.. Come November, do your part by voting AGAINST all Tea Party candidates. I don't care who you vote for as long as you don't vote for anybody endorsed by the Tea Party and/or Sarah Palin.

Another bit of proof that your banker is your friend.

The time between when you write a check and when the money is taken out of your checking account (also known as float) is now down to zero. If you write a check at someplace like my employer (a major big box specialty retailer), the check goes into the cash register and “BOOM” the cash leaves your account. Right then and there. There is no more two or three day grace period for checks.

However, this is still not true for the checks you deposit to your account at the bank. Show up with anything other than a paycheck or a government check, and you have to wait a few days for the money to show up in your account. That means that the bank has free use of your money from the time you deposit the check until the time it finally appears in your account. Now, you can’t tell me that banks that process E-checks for merchants can’t do the same for their customers. If I don’t have a float period anymore, then the banks shouldn’t have one either.

‘Nuff said….

Junk Mail

There is something wrong with this: I just went and looked at the Junk Mail folder for Thunderbird. This is the junk mail that gets through the filtering process provided by my various mail servers. Thunderbird has instructions to delete junk mail after 30 days. That provides me an opportunity (seldom taken) to review what is in my junk folder just in case Thunderbird made a mistake. Today was one of those rare occasions that I did look, but I wasn’t looking because I thought Thunderbird made a mistake. No, I was looking for another reason entirely.

I went and checked my junk mail folder because Thunderbird told me there were 862 unopened emails in that folder. That is 862 offers for Viagra and other worthless dreck. That 862 doesn’t include the regular ads I get from places like Amazon, Buy.com etc.- ads that I glance at before moving one.

All I can do is shake my head and marvel at the venality of the human race. First, the greed, avarice and lust (3/4 of these have to do with sex in one way or another) of the people flooding the net with these broadcast emails. Second, the stupidity and/or desperation of the people who actually answer these ads has to be enough to make it profitable to keep sending them out. And that is the key. If people just stopped answering these things, sooner or later the spammers out there would run out of money, or just get discouraged from the lack of results, and they would stop.

Yeah…like that would ever happen.

Teacher Unions

Yesterday, there was a piece, actually the cover story, in the Times Sunday Magazine about education reform and teachers' unions which I think provides a pretty good look at the need for educational reform and the role the teachers’ unions have in blocking truly meaningful reform. What I come away from the article with is that the major impediments for the unions are accountability, teacher evaluation and tenure.

The unions fight tooth and nail to preserve tenure, seniority and the lack of accountability on the part of teachers for student progress. In effect, the unions are working hard to protect the jobs of poor and mediocre teachers. The problem is that there are too many of those in the unions to make it easy to get around them. Remember the old saw, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” or, “If you can’t get a real job, you can always teach.” Teaching was always considered a fall-back option for new college graduates looking for work. In the past, too many positions in the public schools have been filled by…well, let’s just say that they were/are not our best.

The thing is, if you are a good teacher, if you are one of those people who former students remember fondly as being agents of change in their lives, then you shouldn’t have to worry about any of this. And, from what I can see of all the reform efforts, if you are a good teacher, you will end up being paid well; at least better than you are being paid now.

So, what is needed is a new type of teacher’s union. This union should be limited to good teachers. And don’t kid yourselves, the teachers out there know which among them are good and which are mediocre, or worse. Give the teachers in these unions grievance mediation tools, protection from abuse, of any kind, from supervisors and the ability to bargain for anything not connected to tenure. Set up an evaluation process which utilizes independent evaluators who have no connection to the teachers/school district being evaluated. Then let’s see what kind of data we get from tracking teachers who are considered “good” to “excellent.” I’ll bet that a few years of headlines detailing the progress and benefits to the kids this arrangement brings will be enough to sound the death knell to the unions which protected the incompetent teachers.

Copyright, continued

Ars Technica has another article. posted today, about copyright infringement/piracy. Now, while I have no problem with creative people getting compensated for their creativity, I do have a problem with how we, as a culture, are dealing with this. First of all, most of us do our jobs using some degree of creativity to get things done, and we don’t get paid in an ongoing stream for past work. I also have a problem with people who did not create anything owning copyrights and extracting ongoing revenue streams out of them.

As an example, take the music industry. A better model for this industry would be for the labels to charge the artists for recording and marketing without having any ownership rights in the created product. It would be up to the artist (or the artist’s business manager-a paid employee of the artist) to manage the income flow. The artist could then pick and choose which services he/she/it (bands) wanted to purchase from the label. I would much rather pay the artist directly for tracks and cut out the “suits” completely. With the evolution of the Internet, this business model is much more sustainable. In fact, as far as the music industry is concerned, I think this is where the future lies. For now, I buy my music on a “per track” basis from Amazon. I’m not thrilled, but it is the best I can do right now.

Arrrgggghhhh

I swear that I am going to go postal one of these days. For the past week, it seems that almost every one on the road has forgotten all they once knew (which of itself was precious little) about the art of driving an automobile. Consequently, all of these people drive very, very badly, and that, in turn, causes me (who is stuck behind them) to begin to curse uncontrollably. This is not good. I refer you to John Brunner’s book Stand on Zanzibar and the term “berserker”.

Actually, to digress, the above book is really, really good, and it gets more relevant by the day. It was originally published in 1968, and it was disturbing then. Now, with the world’s population doubled from that time, we are getting closer and closer to the kind of future Brunner envisioned. Anyhow, I highly recommend this book…just as I highly recommend not driving in New Jersey.

*Gah!!*

Economic Recovery

It strikes me that, as fast as the private sector is adding jobs, the public sector is shedding them. Either that or freezing salaries/wages or instituting involuntary "furloughs". Anyhow, any good being done in the private sector is being undone by the fiscal conservatives in public office. Also, as was so elegantly proven during the Reagan years, trickle down economics just doesn't  work, so all those huge pay packages and bonuses going to the top couple percent of the population just plain doesn't make its way to the general economy.

And all of this explains why something like 80% of the population does not trust the economy or the earnest protestations by both the government and the mouthpieces of the rich when they tell us things are getting better. From where most of us sit, things are not getting better.

Oh, by-the-way, the organizers of the "Tea Party" are part of the problem, not part of the cure. They are, in fact, all in favor of concentrating wealth to the detriment of the quality of life for the vast majority of the population. Give them their way, and the middle class will vanish from America. We will become a nation of aristocrats and peasants/proletariat. The trend markers are already there; one just has to take the blinders off to see this is true.

The sun room project

So, it is official: it is one year since we closed on our refi and immediately cut a check to the people who had sold us the sun room. It was not a small check. We had used the refi to clean up about 90% of our credit card debt and to pay for this addition to the house. The room was to be built where our patio was. I had plans to re-use the stone to make a new patio between then sun room and the pool. This is one view of the patio, and this is another.

I figured that, after giving the builders almost 50%, I would have a sun room up in three to four weeks. We would have the room built by June and the patio re-laid by 4th of July. Silly me!! May went, and there was no room…hell, there was no communication. Ditto June, July and August. Needless to say, I was getting a little perturbed.

By September, my calls to Tristate Building Specialties of Lakewood, NJ were getting strident. I was at the point of demanding our money back, when word trickled down that they would be arriving soon to prep the site (that meant getting rid of the patio and sinking the foundation piers.) Actually, the above pictures were taken in September just before work was due to begin.

The next post in this series will show the first flurry of work.

RIP Moore’s Law?

Well, this is interesting. From what I can glean from tthis Ars Technica article Moore’s Law, which has defined computer hardware miniaturization since the late ‘60s, is pushing up against physical limits. The speed/power/memory-doubles-every-18-months equation is finally running up against its limits. That is going to have major economic and psychological ramifications across our society.

My, my….

Quarterly Traffic Report

Well, here in Central New Jersey, the already crowded traffic conditions are being even further exacerbated by what seems to be a new infusion of really bad drivers. These road hazards come in every age, sex, nationality and ethnic category. In other words, poor driving cuts across almost every demographic known or extant.

Of course, I have a bias when I talk about poor driving. To me, good driving involves getting from point A to point B in the least amount of time safely practical. That means, if there is an empty road in front of you, you crowd the speed limit by five mph or so. It does not mean that you drive like a TransAm driver, it means that you go as fast as you can safely pilot your vehicle. (Note: “Safely” means avoiding both collisions with other objects and avoiding encounters with the police. Safe driving also means avoiding traffic tickets.)

I’ll admit that I tend to drive a little too fast. I’ve been lucky in that I have not actually gotten a speeding ticket in the past 30 years because there have been times when I’ve been caught pushing the envelope some. There have been a couple warnings and one instance where I was given a non-driving ticket (obscured license plate) in lieu of a speeding ticket…but I still have lucked out with 0 points against my license for over 30 years. However, for the most part, I drive well, if a little fast. I try to flatten corners and I try very hard to drive in the future. By that I mean that I am always thinking about what is coming up…what will I have to do or react to five seconds from now…or a minute from now.

Yesterday, I was driving on a multilane highway, when a car in the far left lane suddenly swerved across three lanes of traffic in order to make an exit that was well signed for the previous mile or so. The traffic circle that is between my home and my place of employment has at least a couple accidents a week because somebody does something stupid. I treat Yield signs with the utmost suspicion because most New Jersey drivers pay either little or no heed to them or far too much heed. Too often I see drivers sail through Yield signs with their eyes firmly fixed on the road in front of them, paying no attention to what is coming into the intersection. Either that scenario or the opposite where drivers treat Yield signs as a form of Stop sign. In either case, those drivers are asking to be involved in a collision. 

*sigh*

Driving used to be fun. It isn’t so much anymore….