Seriously, we put solar city on our house (46 panels). Right now, we pay $100/month for electricity and are locked in on that rate. We even end up with extra that is sold to Xcel (we expect about $300 back at the end of the year from them). Xcel is already pushing to increase their rate for next year (to 14.5/KWH) and we will continue to pay only $8 / month to Xcel for their base. Even better yet is the fact that we grandfathered in with this so that as Xcel's prices increase, they will be forced to pay us the same price. Down the road, they will get that part removed for NEW installs.

We then changed out our bulbs from a mix of incandescents/CFLs to mostly LEDs with about 13 more bulbs to replace. We did that when Cree bulb prices dropped to below $10/$5 for Br30/A19. We will replace the other 13 when the prices drop again (6 of these are the global bulbs used in a bathroom; so the bulbs are right now $20 for good ones and I refuse to buy the cheap junk from GE, Lights of America, ecosmart, etc ). Once that is done, then only 3 bulbs will remain, which will simply continue to use the old bulbs on (crawl space; under-stairs;outside light that is almost never used).
We have figured out that based on the KWH, that we save about $5-10/month (we have kids that leave lights on). As such, these will be all paid for in 2 years. That is not a bad deal considering that we have removed nearly all of the mercury, and no longer have to wait for CFLs to come on (well 7 bulbs, but they will be replaced at the next sale of cree ).

Note that this isn't talking about CO2 output, only pollutants like sulfur and carbon monoxide.

wtf are you talking about

You can see the different attitudes people have. Watch some homeless guys for a while asking for money. Some people walk by, and give them money. Other people walk by and say, "someone should help them!"

I'm not saying you should always give to homeless people, but there is definitely a difference in self-centeredness that is visible.

Apparently Ballmer wasn't the only one responsible for Microsoft's bad decisions.

So if I say to my foreign counterpart "give me this data that I have been subpoenaed to provide" I am obstructing justice? You could argue that the foreign branch is obstructing US justice when they implement the policy of automatic refusal unless/until a local subpoena complying with local legal requirements is received, but nobody there is personally bound by US law, so it's not particularly relevant unless they want to travel to the US in the future. Meanwhile they might very well be in violation of local law by supplying said data without the appropriate local legal authorization.

I'm not happy with this - it seems like an issue where there's no good solution: The US can't be allowed to be "world cops" to this degree - we've proven repeatedly that we've lost whatever moral superiority *might* have once entitled us to such a position - call me paranoid but handing more power to the gestapo-in-training seems to always go badly for the common man. Meanwhile *without* such authority I can easily imagine elaborate corporate data shell games where all sensitive data is inaccessible to any government. The only answer I can see is international treaties bringing corporations to heel, but I suspect those would be tricky in the extreme to get right, even if the self-same megacorps didn't already have pretty much all the relevant politicians in their pocket.

Hah! Nobody expects the Terapixel Revolution.

Potentially both - imagine a transparent display with an additional switchable opacity layer integrated into it - essentially making a full RGBA display where opacity can be specified on a per-pixel basis. At the most trivial level you could have opaque application windows floating on a transparent pane that obstructs your view as much or little as necessary, sort of like having a bank of adjustable-sized monitors. Laminate it onto a north-facing picture window with a great view and I'd be sold.

Boo! Hiss!

Were you responding to me? If so, note I never claimed the goal was to "erase stories from the net." I simply said that it "won't work," and by that I mean it won't do very well at achieving its goal, which -- as you correctly note -- is to make stuff harder to locate.

See, here's the problem. If TFA works, we basically have a database to find everything people have registered to be "forgotten." As I said, if this site continues to exist, then the EU ruling is ineffective: it only managed to get rid of some search engine links, while also facilitating a system where people who want to do even casual actual background checks know the second place to go. In effect, it makes it easier to find, if someone puts forth just a step beyond the minimal effort.

For people who actually care about finding the details of someone's reputation, the ruling may thus make it easier to find information someone really wants hidden... which seems to be the opposite of the EU goal.

THIS. All of the stories on this decision seem to be focusing on people who are clearly bad or did terrible things in the past.

But our modern news and social media society on the internet archives all sorts of crap that isn't actually true, and never was true. But the salacious headline will always draw attention; the minor blurb on the back page will never be remembered when the charges are dropped or the person is acquitted or everyone just admits that it was a mistake.

(Just to be clear: I don't think the EU decision will actually work, and TFA is proof of it. But we do have a real problem -- even if 95% of the claims made so far have been by people who committed horrible bad past acts, the real injustice is to the 5% who just got caught up in media attention for something that turned out not to be true, or even nowhere near as horrible as people claimed.)

Nope -- that's NOT why most people carry a balance on a credit card. They "don't have enough money to get what [they] WANT."

Yes, there are lots of poor people out there in dire straits, but most of them can't even qualify for credit cards, because they don't have reliable income or whatever credit history they have is bad. The people who charge extra on credit cards are typically people who have enough money for what they NEED, but they WANT more stuff faster than they can make money to get it. If they really NEEDED something, there are often ways to take out loans that would give a better interest rate than a credit card, or they could get government assistance or something if it's a basic human need.

The other group of people who carry a balance are the people who usually did pay off their balance in the past, but they've lost a job or had some other unforeseen expense. Most of these people could also have been saving more for a "rainy day," but I have a little more sympathy for them. And there are some for whom the "rainy day" has lasted so long that it depleted a reasonable savings... they should perhaps not be faulted either.

But most people just use credit cards for crap they don't need that they can't afford, but they want it NOW. And I personally think that's a stupid financial decision, because at credit card interest rates, it will cost you more in the long-term than just waiting a little while to save up or just buy something more affordable that will work in the meantime, like responsible adults do.

Well, I was a little off, but closer than you -- the average lifespan of the dollar bill is about 18 months. I do remember reading something a while back that estimated it to be a little less than a year, but this fact is from the people who make the bills (and thus have to replace them), so I'm tempted to believe them over an AC. I've seen other estimates, but none more than 2 years.

As for your other points, at no point did my post even argue in favor of eliminating dollar bills; I simply pointed out a savings by the government. I was just correcting a previous post that made it sound like the cost of dollar bills didn't have anything to do with him. You think coins are inconvenient? Fine. I never said they weren't. Try a course in reading comprehension before attacking people randomly (and making up your own "bogus facts").

And precisely what is the "intrinsic value" of gold and silver? Copper mostly sells for its market value as a raw material. Gold and silver have huge premiums on their price compared to their actual utility, just like fiat currencies.

All that would need to happen is for you to end up in a situation where "shiny rocks" are not particularly useful, and gold and silver would be worthless too. Just like fiat money, gold and silver "only work because people want them to and trust them to," but that could ALSO break. The only reason to trust them any more is because they have a longer history of made-up fake value ascribed to them.

In real "survival" circumstances, the people who will be able to buy stuff will be those with food, clothing, tools, weapons, etc. Those things have something closer to "intrinsic value," since humans will almost always need them. Gold and silver are just more traditional "fiat" money, and their value is held up by the market, just as any other currency.