Re: Social Progress

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:45:33 -0700, Eric Ammadon wrote:

Ric Locke <warrick.locke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:06:32 -0700, Eric Ammadon wrote:

Ric Locke <warrick.locke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:12:50 -0700, Eric Ammadon wrote:

Ric Locke <warrick.locke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:06:13 +0000, JF wrote:

Brenda Clough wrote:

Brenda

I raise a..glass or two... of.. hang on .. <noises off, a muffled
curse or two> Kumala red.

Buggrit.

JF

It's just about freezing here... My heat's still on for the time being,
though the gauge on the propane tank is dropping and the electric
company is sending nasty notes. I've got most of it turned 'way down,
because my wife's in the hospital and I don't have to keep the place
really warm for her. And no wine in the house, dammit.

Regards,
Ric

It's currently 19f here, up from -11f night before last.

We're running low on propane and the truck won't be out until Thursday
(weather permitting), so after I read the rest of these here nosegrope
posts I'll start a fire in the woodstove. It's a much more
comfortable heat, but it does need to be tended.

The house batteries were low enough after a cloudy day yesterday that
I started the generator. The electric company wanted me to buy them a
$14k transformer for the privilege of receiving a perpetual bill from
them, so I told them to piss off.

Plenty of bourbon in the cupboard but since I just got up for the day
I'm drinking coffee.

Best wishes for your wife's speedy recovery and return, Ric.

Thanks for the good wishes.

I don't have nearly enough solar panels up to do any good; I can run a
couple of 8-watt fluorescents for a couple of hours, and that's about
it. Running a generator costs more than buying power from TXU, but then
I don't have to buy a transformer.

Regards,
Ric

Chances are good that you already have bought a transformer, or that
somebody has, and that it was rolled invisibly into the price of your
property.

All of which is irrelevant and unimportant, if you live in an average
house it would cost you much more than the price of a transformer to
set it up to run on solar.

People seem mostly unaware of how much electricity they use. At the
moment my entire house, including this computer I'm writing from, is
using less electricity than a single 100-watt light bulb. But then I
designed and built it to use a minimum of energy, and the whole
project was a lot of work.

If you ever decide to go offgrid let me know, maybe some of my
mistakes can be helpful. Do stay warm in the meantime (it's -4f
outside at the moment, hopefully it's warmer than that in Texas).

Thanks. I have a better handle than most on my energy usage and
requirements; it was a matter of considerable interest some time ago,
and it is, after all, a matter of kitchen arithmetic.

It mostly is, but you can't always trust what's on the labels. Some
kind of actual measurement can tell you a lot more than (and
occasionally something entirely different from) what the labels say.

I think though that even reading the labels will make it clear that
garage door openers, dishwashers, clothes washers/driers, and
forced-air heaters are high-cost devices.

That's a matter of attitude and philosophy. If energy is cheap, it's not
a problem to use machines to do your work for you, especially if the
work is disagreeable (e.g., dishwashers and clothes washers and driers).
I prefer to use hand screwdrivers whenever possible, for instance, but
as I get older I find more and more uses for the 24V battery drill with
screwdriver bit.

If you prefer to split wood rather than paying the gas company for heat,
that's a preference, not a moral choice. I say "more power to you" right
up to the point where you want to send goons with guns to enforce the
choice while claiming it's a moral or ethical necessity.

If I ever get the
chance to build my dream house it will have a number of energy saving
features, but it won't be green unless that's this weeks special on
house paint.

Yah, I didn't design and build this place to be "green" (I'm not big
on political correctness), I designed and built it to be cheap to live
in.

I have no burning desire to go off grid unless the grid goes off, and if
it does I'm sure there will be other problems to deal with.

I don't see being offgrid as a political correctness badge, but I do
see the chances of the grid going off and staying off for a while as
higher than minimal. I'd rather do a little work and be comfortably
paranoid than be naive and (in this climate) frozen dead.

Again, that's your choice, and I even encourage it. It's nice to think
that there'll be a few literate folks left after the Apochralypse (no, I
didn't misspell that) rather than just the masses of people who never
learned anything different. It's the proselyters for worship of the
Goddess Gaia I want to strangle. As James Donald points out elsewhere,
religion isn't dying, although Christianity is diminishing somewhat,
being replaced by a surface-secular belief in TRVTH that's more like the
snake-handlers and speakers in tongues than anything else, and I don't
care much for those folks whatever deity they worship.

27F this morning, which is the Ice Age down here. Jai the horse was
extremely frisky, dancing around the paddock when I came to feed him and
kicking up his heels. He was born in Michigan, so I suppose it makes
sense. Me, I was bundled to the ears and not enjoying it much.

It would be very cool if human bodies worked with the same apparently
effortless grace as those of animals in terms of handling low
temperatures. Maybe they did originally but we civilized that
capability away, maybe we're just not up to spec.

Oh, sure. Humans don't have body hair, so we can't adapt to cold as well
as furry and feathered critters do, but it's largely a matter of comfort
rather than necessity. Indians wandered all latitudes of North America
protected from the cold by a layer of grease (plus whatever dirt adhered
to that), and their metabolisms weren't any different from yours or
mine.

I was out yesterday afternoon splitting some wood and shovelling some
snow, but the wind turbine was making free electricity and at 5f when
the wind turbine is working it's time to go inside.

One of the reasons I like the Celsius/centigrade scale is that it
matches my comfort levels in 5 degree increments:
40 -- too damn hot
35 -- a little too hot
30 -- about right
25 -- pleasantly cool
20 -- a little too cool
15 -- starting to get cold
10 -- too damn cold
anything below 10 -- "ditto"

Regards,
Ric
.

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