LED energy thieves

I bought a toaster that has LED readouts. They're always on when the toaster is plugged in. My printer, my modem, my gateway, my stereo, my oven, my microwave, and other appliances all have them. On the night of a new moon with thick cloud cover, I can walk around my house with all the lights out and see perfectly by the light of the LEDs. All these appliances keep draining power, 24/7. It's like the food industry designing food to spoil faster so you'll buy more sooner, or a car that keeps using gas even when you're not driving. Not only do I dislike the light pollution, in a world where our energy policy should be conservation conservation conservation, these LED machines with their power draining standby modes are insidious leeches. Lisa has been trying to get me to put power strips on everything, or better yet, a master switch that turns them all off. If I'm going to preach the evils of these little parasites, then I dern well better get on it.

Energy

I read an article in old paper about the energy bill that passed the congress. Can't say which one, don't particularly care. It jogged loose another of those cerebral blogs that will now become bytes of bits. Way way back under Reagan, I went to a public forum on offshore oil drilling. I wrote a letter to somebody, probably Don Hodel informing him of what our primary energy policy strategy should be. He must not have gotten it, because my brilliant idea was never implemented. Here it is: conservation, conservation, conservation. At the hearing, when it was my turn to speak, I expressed my disgust that we were debating whether to drill offshore to increase our oil supply while we had a TV commercial on the air at the time that had the line, "When you step on the gas, it's like kicking in an after burner." How can we be debating the need for more oil while we were simultaneously encouraging wasting it? Oh, yeah, because profit is the driving force. Love of money is the root of all evil. Where is that quote from? The bible. Like most bumper sticker wisdom, it's not the truth, but it refers to the truth. Obviously then the real solution is to dismantle our economic system. And to have a loving relationship with your partner, simply stop having any problems. I'm reminded of the wisdom of the pinball wizard:

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high
You'd laugh and say that nothing's that simple
But it's been said many times before
Messiah pointed to the door
No one had the guts to leave the temple

Ok, we're not likely anytime soon to set up a world where every human being had healthy air to breathe, safe water to drink and bathe in, a steady balanced diet of sufficient calories, appropriate attire, a decent bedroll, reasonable shelter, access to basic health care, and protection from agression and oppression, and to have all of these things without having to provide a monthly payment. If these basic things were provided to every individual human being, they would not be required to sell themselves as wage slaves. If people did not have to work to have access to these basics, how many jobs would end? Most people would still want to work, because really, who would be satisfied with that basic survival lifestyle? But would they still go to a job that was a soul sucking, health threatening grind, like a slaughterhouse?

Well, I left my energy path, and ended up on the dismantle the economic system soap box. Tomorrow, I hope to return to energy, and discuss all those LED lights on your appliances.

Below are some chunks I ended up not using in this diatribe:


Well actually, most people in the U.S. can have these things, but it's not enough for us. We also want our own automobile, and computer, and to drive to the festival, and etc. etc. It's the shelter

It's not like I don't like to drive fast. I'd drive 90 on the freeway if I could get away with it. But if we're pondering drilling offshore for more oil, and dependent on foreign oil and all that implies, shouldn't we be seriously conserving oil? Instead, we were subsidizing Hummers with a full tax write off until congress finally ended it. Cars are getting less miles to the gallon. Somehow, 28mpg is being toted as fuel efficient. I had a 1985 mazda that got 38 around town.

What have we today

Again I begin with no plan, not even an inkling of what to say. I suppose if I read the news or other blogs, I'd have reactions to report. Ah, I remember a thread I've been wanting to weave into my verbal quilt.

Consumption driven by whimsical desire for gratification leads our culture down a cancerous path. Wow, that's a sentence huh? A cancerous path? I suppose I should be writing this in flipitoff, since that phrase is best explained by the quote in the matrix where Smith is pointing out to Morpheus that humans resemble cancer more than mammals. By way of illustration, allow me to develop this theme using happy meals, and I'm borrowing that particular branded term to represent all the childrens' meals that come with a toy. Typically those toys are made of plastic, and I suspect that few of those toys are played with for more than a day. How many millions of plastic toys in sealed plastic bags with ink printed on them are torn open by a child, then shortly after are discarded? Now the production of plastic is a pretty nasty process in terms of the toxics that are generated and added to the industrial waste stream. I doubt the ink is good for the environment either. Then off to the landfill with the minimally used item. I have this image of a machine excreting goop from its bottom into a mold, and the little robot turd is bagged, tagged and given to a child who plays with shortly then tosses it aside and it drifts into a huge mound of machine droppings. Can't even grow a garden with that shimmering pile. We have the toxicity of the production of these whimsical gratifiers and the two waste streams they enter. We also have the psychological implications of perpetual gratification of our children. I can only ponder the effect that these meal toys have on the psyche of our youth, and I'm not assuming it's all negative. It's that I believe that we the people of the industrial empire, particularly the inhabitants of the U.S. must cultivate a culture of frugality. We must consume less resources, and produce less waste. These happy meal toys are counter productive in both the material and psychological realms. We are encouraging our children to expect personal gratification in the form of a material item that does little more than promote consumption and produce waste. Many of these toys are associated with a motion picture and are simply a form of advertising to promote additional consumption. I think it's time for me to reread A Brave New World.

Ah, now I've written. It's time to read.

two in a row

As is typical of me, I have 4 blogs now, none of which I keep up on. Should I be writing this here? Which blog is for what? Egads, the indecision of the undisciplined mind has cursed me all my life. When I was 17, I attempted to enlist in the Army. I was squandering my life away, much as I am now, and really wanted discipline. I took the ASVAB. I talked with a recruiter. I told him I wanted discipline in my life. It weirded him out and he advised me against viewing that way. My mom refused to sign the papers, and being under 18, my hopes for getting motivated and the ability to achieve what I later came to call longevity of intention were not to be realized in the military. By the time I was 18, I was a full blown peacenik protesting like I write blogs. Which brings me to the topic at hand I suppose, well after another diversion. Flipitoff was meant to be a project of using machine metaphors to characterize the human collective. Cryyoureyesout is for personal reflections. And Flipiton was inspired by Obama's election, and is for expressing my views on and suggesting solutions to the social problems of the day. Then there is my music blog to journalize my journey to finally completing my first CD. I have picked a title: Never Been Done. Ok, now that I've completed the long set up, I can get to the short point.

Our school system sucks. In yesterday's blog, I discussed the money spent on soda pop, and suggested that money would be better spent on youth programs. Come on America, quit buying soda pop, and invest in your schools. Money is not the what's needed most to improve the schools. We need a new focus. We currently shove our kids all through the same basic curriculum. If a student has what we call disabilities, we accomodate them (yeah right we do) so they can accomplish the same work as all the other students. For the majority of students, this system works, but if your on either end of the bell curve, your needs are not being well met. An easy way to address this problem (and discover new ones) is to change the method by which we group classes. Chronological age is not the best indicator of which social/emotional and cognitive development stage an individual has achieved. What I propose is we group children on other criteria. Three I'm suggesting are interest, learning style, and ability. If curriculum covers topics that children are naturally interested in, internal motivation kicks in and assignments are less dreaded, even enjoyed. Common learning style makes group presentations much easier to produce. The oral lecture, perhaps supplemented with handouts, or more likely today, powerpoint presentations works well for students who can process spoken word at the delivered rate. They also must possess the skills to produce notes while listening. For a student who gets new skills best by doing, listening should not be the primary delivery method. Putting a student at a 6th grade reading level in a class requiring 9th grade reading skills and trying to catch them up is a really bad plan. And one last suggestion, if a student gets inspired on a particular project and wants to focus the majority of their time on it for a while, by all means let it happen. That student can work on the "missed" assignments later, or maybe even never. Do we really need all our citizens to be proficient at all the skills. If someone can't read Of Mice and Men and write an essay about it, but can skillfully run every machine in the woodshop and produce a beautiful table, I say we minimize the focus on the essay, and maximize the time spent in woodshop.

Two caveats: I work in education, and I don't have much formal uneducation, and nothing I'm proposing here is backed up with any meaningful research. In short, I'm making it all up from a limited amount reading and discussions, and a LOT of thinking about it.

let it be

I guess I'm a fly fishing blogger. I write these incredible blogs in my head, but they always get away. Here comes a spattering of pieces I can remember. Let's require all cell phones to use the same charger. It's a gross waste of resources created with toxic processes to throw out the charger every time you have to change cell phones. Our over consumption is the greatest threat to national security. We're consuming into a massive debt that is damaging our economy, we're sucking up resources and spewing out toxic waste that's damaging our ecology. We can survive without the economy, but we're goners without the ecosystem. President Barak Obama is another politician. Likely the most decent one we've had in a long time, perhaps ever...I sincerely believe that he is a decent and sincere man, and that's rare for that occupation...but he's President of the same bunch of yo yos that watch fox news, think Paris Hilton is big news, and want a toy in every happy meal. I'm obsessed with the notion that we are 6% of the world's population consuming 24% of the world's resources. I would like to know how much money Americans spend on soda pop, and how that amount compares to the cost of providing national healthcare. I'm off to google. I'll be back.

Ok, I found something that gives some perspective. From this article comes this quote from the American Beverage Association:

...the beverage industry accounts for 160,000 jobs that generate $6.7 billion in wages and $25 billion in economic activity in New York State each year.

This quote is telling in 2 ways. That's 25 billion in economic activity in New York State alone. That's a lot of money for sugar water, especially in a nation where childhood obesity and diabetes are serious problems. How's about that 25 billion and the activity it represents being expended on youth programs promoting skills? The other telling aspect of this quote is the 160,000 jobs the Association mentioned. Oh, if people stop drinking soda pop, all these jobs will be lost. And we need to keep having wars so the weapons industry jobs are secure. This is the bigger issue, and the primary topic of my cereberal blogs that rarely get written outside my skull. We need a new economic model.

I'll wrap this up with a quick list of ideas I'm trying to develop and articulate. Create a maximum wage. Create a minimum standard of living for every human on the planet with ready easy access to safe drinking water and by extension a good toilet as the foundation. Provide work for every person willing to get up and go to work each day. Provide incentive to get up and go to work each day. A company's profit should increase the longer their product remains in use; planned obsolescene must be eliminated. Let's all learn to enjoy simpler things like sunsets and each other's company. Like how much coal was burnt so I could sit at my fan churning machine to produce this blog?