Comment Re:Pre-Crimes? (Score 1) 554
Poor judgment on the part of the photographer. Who the hell cares if you get sloshed? Not like they're going to follow up and see what you did while drunk.
I got pulled over by a young cop on a power trip for driving too fast through a chicane designed to slow people down. I was probably doing half the speed limit (25 in a 50 zone), and it was about 10:30 at night in a deserted part of town.
Yeah, I had a lot of body roll (older car), so perhaps it looked dangerous. The cop basically had a shout at me, while his co-cop stood there and said nothing, and then drove off to harass someone else.
Where's the good cop in that? The guy doing the shouting was clearly an asshole, but the other policeman who just stood there was also culpable. If your 'good cops' are sitting passively by while bad cops abuse their good name, they're not really good cops are they?
Wait. You were driving like a moron and you're upset that all you got was a warning? Would you have been happier if he calmly gave you a road-side sobriety test and then wrote you a reckless driving ticket?
Who's being a moron? Body roll doesn't mean skidding, it means body roll, and taking a chicane at 25 sounds downright conservative compared to how I drive.
Your desktop computer probably tops out at 200W, monitors included. The hot water heater isn't a continuous drain, and neither is the fridge. Sure, it could be better, but you have to look at the overall usage - I use between 15-70KWh/day (electric heat and crappy windows, I think), which works out to about 600-3000W continuous usage. Even with this large amount of consumption, I pay at most $5/day.
With your solar installation, you can switch to a gas-powered heater and probably only budget for 20 amps or do grid-tie, depending on your location. If you did a grid tie system and got about 2kW capacity, that's $6k + what, $2k for install, other equipment? It won't solve all your problems, but it'd probably pay for itself in under 10 years.
If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for. -- W.C. Fields
