Truth!

 

Why can't we do this?

Business recycles packaging and rubbish in Denmark (Automatic video start up).

On the road again...

A stove that makes electricity.

Mitt Romney fired this guy.

HOLY CRAP!  Landslide in British Columbia.

Mitt Romney is hiding his taxes because of Stericycle?

Stericycle, a medical waste company that, among other things, disposed of aborted fetuses.

Inside the corpse-harvesting industry

Becoming one with the ocean.

Shackleton and Scott's Antarctic huts are put online by Google

2012 in 2013!!11! OMG!11/

Space Storm!!! Starring Bruce Willis and Will Smith ....

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

Omg!

RCA Airnergy Charger Harvests Electricity From WiFi Signals

The Airnergy Charger is amazing.

This little box has, inside it, some kind of circuitry that harvests WiFi energy out of the air and converts it into electricity. This has been done before, but the Airnergy is able to harvest electricity with a high enough efficiency to make it practically useful: on the CES floor, they were able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% to full in about 90 minutes, using nothing but ambient WiFi signals as a power source.

The Airnergy has a battery inside it, so you can just carry it around and as long as you’re near some WiFi, it charges itself. Unlike a solar charger, it works at night and you can keep it in your pocket. Of course, proximity to the WiFi source and the number of WiFi sources is important, but at the rate it charges, if you have a home wireless network you could probably just leave anywhere in your house overnight and it would be pretty close to full in the morning.

I think I'll buy 3000 of these...

Power outages are fake.

They're power FAILURES.

What's wrong with this picture?

Compare and contrast:

HOUSTON – Exxon Mobil Corp. on Friday reported a profit of $45.2 billion for 2008, breaking its own record for a U.S. company, even as its fourth-quarter earnings fell 33 percent from a year ago.

To this:

At least 1.3 million homes and businesses were without power across a wide swath of the country. Utility companies struggled through ice-encrusted debris into Friday morning as they worked to restore power, but warned it may not return until Saturday at the earliest. It could take until mid-February for some to come back online.

At least we have our priorities straight...

Zero Emissions Challenge

Is it even possible?

So watt?

Why should we care that China is working on an electrical plant in Iraq instead of the U.S.?: (my bold)

Recently, the US media reported what seems to be a not very important event: China is among the countries that has received contracts for building electric power plants in Iraq. Still, close scrutiny of the event revealed a lot about the nature of not so much China's but the US's foreign policy and political system, and the real state of the US economy.

The very fact that China was invited to build power stations in Iraq looks like a rather surprising development. The point is that this should be done by the Americans, who not only have the expertise but - and this should be quite an important consideration - have allocated literally billions of dollars of taxpayer money for Iraqi "reconstruction", ie, providing the country with essential services, without which, as the George W Bush administration rightly asserts, a stable government is not possible. Still, after several years of work and all the billions spent, as one Iraqi official acknowledged, little has been done to provide even such essentials as electricity.

[snip]

During the Cold War era, the nations of Eastern Europe publicly proclaimed their desire for liberty as the major reason for their attachment to the US. Still, liberty was not the major attraction: the desire was for the American way of life - as it was visualized - and it was the life of economic plenty, a life where everything ran smoothly and efficiently and the American dollar was the king of currencies.

Still, as the experience of those who encounter Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other parts of the world reveal, these characteristics - efficiency and concern for results - have become more and more passe. American companies have behaved in extremely "non-American" ways; they immediately created several layers of highly paid but absolutely useless management, brought workers from abroad for exorbitant wages and spent on themselves all the "aid" money - presumably given to help the populace - and then departed with with little to show for their "expertise".

And this image of US management as wasteful, corrupt and inefficient, after years and billions of dollars spent, and unable not just to improve the life of ordinary people but even to return Iraq's basic services in many areas to a level existing even during Saddam Hussein's rule, has damaged the US's image much more than all the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. At the same time, however, the inefficiencies of the American economy are not just reflected in a change of the image of the US. The implication is much more serious.

It is true that the US continues to be one of the major economies of the world and has considerable financial resources. Still, as the dollar's value continues to fall against all major currencies (this in itself reflects the realities of America's economic health) and the US's debt continues to rise to astronomical levels, the ability of the US to maintain its imperial presence continues to erode.

It is not only that the weakening dollar makes maintaining the US global presence more and more burdensome but also that the US has fewer and fewer resources for providing substantial amounts of largess for its friends and satellites.

The US has started to lose its major weapon: the checkbook. And it is here that other nations who became "Americanized", ie, efficient and rich, have started to replace the US. And it is this that is indicated by what seems to be the trivial fact of replacing an American company by a Chinese one in building an electricity plant in Iraq.

When you run a bloated bureaucratic inefficient indifferent business.... people will actually notice and take their business elsewhere. Gee. How strange.

Guess they didn't cover that in Econ. 101 where you aren't supposed to cram your greedy cronies into government contract jobs and rip off the treasury, taking the money without doing the work, huh, Georgie?

Californians, don't say you weren't warned

About our aging infrastructure for water and power:

Al Gore uses electricity!

This is obviously a hypocritical thing to do.

I bet he breathes air, too, damn him!

But we're painting schools!

Why worry about drinking water?

Update: Or electricity?