So, yeah, most HF tools are absolute garbage, but that $3 pneumatic cutoff wheel? Jeez, when have you ever found better value for money? The air-fittings cost more than the tool, and luckily I have some lubricant I can use from other pneumatic tools - I bought the cutoff wheel because it was so damn cheap and I already had all the fittings, compressor, etc. About a year later, I wanted to cut off about 100 nail tips inside an attic to make it a safer play space for the kids and that wheel just ate them like nothing and is still spinning.

I do somewhat regret the $200 chinese trailer kit I bought there - on one side of the value analysis, it did the job at hand, and did it well, at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, now 8 years later, I've got an ugly, peeled-paint, rusting thing that I should just throw away, but the damn thing still works, so I have to look at it and be constantly reminded of the $300 I saved compared to another trailer I might have bought for the same job that would look better sitting outside the garage now. I suppose when the metric wheel bearings give out I will finally ditch it, but like so many other cheap tools, it just keeps on doing the job - improbably long for the price paid.

F- yeah, WalMart shoppers perpetuate it, but not traveling 40 miles to the next town to shop because WalMart drove all the local competition out of business, oh, wait, they did that in the next town too....

It's completely irrational when the same underwear you bought in 2001 for $3.88 lasted 5 years, but the similar (only offered option) underwear you bought in 2006 for $2.88 only lasts for 1 year.

WalMart drives their suppliers to do this, mercilessly, and there's often a huge gap between the WalMart underwear and the "next best" option for $12.50 a pair that also only lasts 5 years.

I think that point came somewhere in the 1990s.

Today, I go to WalMart to buy disposables, like diapers, sun-screen, branded anti-freeze and motor oil - things that alternate suppliers have jacked up to 2.5x the cost for the same commodity. It's remarkable how much other crap they sell, and how little of it we ever buy.

Price alone driving all decisions has been WalMart's creed for decades, and it really does make visible terrible impacts on product quality as products "mature" in their WalMart distribution cycle.

What's a shame is that so many other retailers follow them - buying from the same suppliers, getting the same cheaped-out products and just selling them in a slightly better smelling store for a few cents more. I really wish that competing retailers like Target would push their suppliers for increased quality at the same or very similar pricing instead of decreased prices with no respect to product quality.

Something else to remember about WalMart (besides the horror of the bathroom, should you need it), is that they have the "lowest price guarantee - in your neighborhood." If you drive 15 miles to another WalMart where there are competitive retailers in the city, you can find prices varying by as much as +50% in the WalMart "conveniently located" in the town where they've driven all their competition out of business, especially on smaller $3-5 items, $2.99 in the city, $4.99 in the country for the exact same item that is available for $3.15 from Target in the city and only available for $6.99 from CVS in the country.

One can "borrow" a credit card to sign up for the free tier service, theoretically.

People come out hard against one form of energy production or another, the truth is that they all have their costs, and the ones that appear better today mostly do so because they haven't been rolled out big like coal, so they haven't been fully analyzed for all the external costs.

Yes, some are better than others, and I put solar high on the "good" list, probably followed by wind, but they will both start to lose their appeal as they scale up - I don't think to a point as bad as coal was in the 1960s, but they will not look as attractive as they do now while they're new and cool.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.

I'm not saying don't build wind turbines because they're going to wipe out the migratory species, I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground.

Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline - a similar thing happened with pigeons that stood on the tracks of the Miami metro-mover.

And, in the "told you so" vein, they wouldn't have been in such a risk taking mood if they hadn't been under pressure from the Cold war to do more with less.

Also... the exclusion zone is better for wildlife than "normal" forest preserves where humans can still enter. Not saying it's "good" for wildlife per-se, but it's better for wildlife than co-existence pressure from H. sapiens.

Fukushima is the first such example of such a disaster in a western economy. Chernobyl was a failure induced by the USSR's response to cold war pressures - they knew how to build safer reactors, but they chose to live dangerously and operate more less expensive reactors instead. In the west, we can afford to build safer reactors, but instead, politically, we have chosen to grandfather the existing ones past their original design lives and block construction of newer, safer designs - that finally came home to roost in Fukushima - somewhat ironic for the country that also suffered the only atomic strikes during wartime.

Fukushima is a horror story, and a tremendously costly event, but Three Mile Island+Chernobyl+Fukushima+every other nuclear accident, ever, are not even close to as costly as the cumulative damage of coal power to-date. Strip-mines to feed coal power plants consume far more land than radiation exclusion zones, and the out of control coal mine fires are even less eco-friendly than the radiation exclusion zones.

Kill birds, dam rivers, gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar, spew sulfur and mercury into the air, all forms of electricity production have their prices.

When the ash pile collapses into the nearby stream and poisons everything downstream for miles? Generally, the power company gets bailout help from the local government and zero liability for damages. Whether that's backed by an official law, or just common practice between utilities and government, it's what's happened again and again for coal and other power generation plants that poison their local environment, both subtly with incompletely scrubbed stack emissions, and dramatically with things like fly-ash avalanches.

Nuclear is as expensive as we make it, just like wind, solar, and gas benefit from subsidies and lax regulations, nuclear is suffering from (perhaps justified) regulatory costs and lack of substantial subsidies.

It was the de-facto video delivery standard. BBC, security cameras, YouTube (for a while), everything played on Flash and most things only played on Flash for a while.

Thank God it's dying.