Dudes at Texas A&M have created and licensed a process to create gasoline from bio mass. They claim to be able to do it for under $2 a gallon and will supply 2% of the nation’s gas supply in 2 years.
WOW! HOLY CARP!
This is the awesomest awesome that was ever declared awesome!
Biomass includes garbage, biosolids from wastewater treatment plants, green waste such as lawn clippings, food waste, and any type of livestock manure.
Does the bolded part above mean what I think it means?
From your sphincter to your car’s gas tank!
If I were the marketing guru at Byogy Renewables, I would create my entire campaign from that slogan. No need to thank me guys, just make it happen!!
Today’s new word for the Games Industry is karoshi.
It seems that the Japanese have suffered under the same sort of “management” as game developers. If you have been in games long enough (which isn’t really all that long), you are sure to know someone that has checked out of the business or literally “checked out” from stress.
I have examples (other than myself) in both categories.
A complete ethanol home fueling system. Creates E-100 for under $1/gallon from ineatible sugar and yeast. Hooks up just like a washing machine in your garage and has a familiar fuel pumping mechanism.
I totally need this, even at $10k (less $1k Federal tax credit).
Well, maybe not… I mean it is super cool but to make the investment back, based on $4/gallon gas you would need to use around 3500 gallons. That’s about 230 tanks and I use about a tank a month, which makes it around 19 years to earn back the investment.
Then again… I would be free of big oil and when the oil spigot gets turned off, I will still be driving… At least until the rest of humanity descends into barbarism and civilization as we know it comes to a grinding halt… it would be really hard to justify this in my garage to our new Saudi overlords, so it wouldn’t make much sense for me to welcome them…
I was just floored by the mail today. I will explain in a moment.
I now have 2 mortgages, one on the house we are in the process of buying and moving into and the house I left behind when my last job didn’t work out. The newer mortgage is a 15 year fixed. We went fixed and conventional just because of the current market and fears of becoming just another leech on the US Treasury via a bailout.
The old house, which we still own because the market sucks rocks, has an adjustable rate mortgage. We went that way for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that we were cash strapped and we could get an ARM with a lower down payment and much lower monthly payments. At least to start.
Because we had that house/mortgage, we rented a house in our new location. We figured we should hold off buying until we could afford to buy a fixer-upper. We paid our rent and the old mortgage all this time without complaint. We borrowed the money, we pay it back. A totally American attitude, at least in my mind. We will continue paying the old mortgage until we can sell the house, or more likely, until it is paid in full.
Responsibility. Honesty. Honor.
We could have gone ahead and bought a house when we moved. We could have taken a crazy “creative” mortgage but we decided to wait until our finances were back in order. That just happened (almost 3 years later).
Back to today’s mail…
The adjustment statement for the old mortgage just arrived. I experienced a moment of panic as I started to open the envelope, my heart raced and head hurt as I unfolded the letter with all the confusing numbers on it. I quickly searched for the “bottom line” number, worried that I just bit off way more than I could chew by buying the new house.
Turns out that my adjustable rate mortgage is not of the “crazy/stupid” variety. There are caps on how far the rate can move, both up and down. The rate cap came into play this year, but not the cap you’re thinking… The rate dropped so much the lower cap was activated.
That’s right my monthly payment went DOWN. Actually it went down 10% from last year’s payment. It would have been EVEN LOWER if the low end cap didn’t exist. Of course, I am happy those caps are there. Then again, it should not have come as a surprise that we had a “sane” mortgage, its not in my character to take crazy risks with my family’s future.
OK, what does this mean?
I was mildly sympathetic to the people that are getting caught up in the “mortgage crisis” and losing their homes. Not enough sympathy for me to support a Government bailout, but enough to support some non-direct-money actions like a restructuring initiative, or loans to those that have good credit otherwise.
This is no longer my opinion.
In order to be smacked upside the head by your ARM you would need to have no caps, which can’t be the case as my ARM went down, or your ARM had to have some sort of crazy/stupid provision like a low fixed rate for 3 to 5 years then a ridiculous reset rate after that. Maybe a huge balloon payment too.
I have no sympathy for people that either didn’t care about the nuttiness of these kinds of loans or actively sought them out because of investment priorities. I also have no sympathy for 110% borrowers, speculators or “house flippers”. If you can’t get a mortgage that is sane, maybe the lenders are telling you something.
Of course, I have negative sympathy for lenders that wrote these kinds of loans.
I should have known, the Market is the best regulator of risk. Live on the bleeding edge, sometimes you get cut, deal.
Apparently, some random black guy is criss-crossing the country demanding change from random strangers:
CHICAGO—According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.
That takes some mighty big balls, 4,000 people and not one of them told the man to leave?
“I’m a hardworking American who pays his taxes, and the last thing I need is some guy on the street demanding change from me,” said William Overkamp, a Springfield, IL gun-shop owner.
He added, “What he really needs is a job.”
Indeed Mr. Overkamp. A job is clearly what is required for this guy so he can stop demanding money.
Today’s must read is from the Wall Street Journal. It takes to task the notion (held by most lefties) that you can just raise taxes on “the rich” and all problems will be solved. The author (Andrew G. Biggs) shows this notion to be pure fantasy.
But then again HOPEY-NESS!!!!!111!
Read the whole thing, but the in the following excerpt Mr. Biggs hammers home the point that changes in tax codes change the behavior of the taxpayer. I especially like who he uses as an example:
Mr. Obama’s plan would also dramatically raise incentives for tax evasion, further degrading revenue gains. Many high-earning individuals evade the Medicare payroll tax by setting up “S Corporations,” paying themselves in untaxed dividends rather than taxable wages. John Edwards avoided $590,000 in Medicare taxes this way in the 1990s. Under Mr. Obama’s plan, Mr. Edwards’s savings would have exceeded $3 million. With that much at stake, the incentive to follow Mr. Edwards lead will be that much greater.
Hmmm.. Mr. Populism himself looked for, and found, a way to avoid paying taxes? No freaking way…
“This has been happening for quite a while. For 15 years the city council has been putting Band-Aids on the problem. (It has been) extending contracts and deferring payments for public safety to the next years as a way of balancing the current budget.”
Sound familiar?
No amount of “hope” will fix the structural problems the Federalis have built over the last 20 years. What is needed is “change”, change to the principles of President Reagan. Change the Congress, change the Senate, remove pork from the menu and severely cut back spending in all areas.
The prospect of a McCain vs. Obama Presidential race does not fill me with hope the the right kinds of change will happen. McCain is better on spending, that is for sure, but represents “business as usual” in DC. Obama is following the Democrat playbook of making promises of Government checks to just about everyone, not a sound fiscal policy.
It remains to be seen what McCain’s campaign will be like, until now hes pretty much been the anti-(insert contender here) candidate. It may be that he will continue that strategy and be the Anti-Obama candidate, who knows.
The winning strategy for Obama has been to promise everything and get anchored to nothing. All “hope and change” with no plan to get “hope and change” stated. That works in the mushyheaded far left Democrat primary voter, and it may just work for the intentionally stupid “swing voter”, again who knows.
The Mac is still fantastic. I have to be forced back into the Windows world for work, but I dam well will not be back at home. I have found applications for everything I normally do (OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, Xcode) except one.
I am getting into Flash/Actionscript programming. I found a really great development IDE dedicated to Actionscript called “Flashdevelop“. The problem is that it is Windows only, further it is a .NET 2.0 program, further still the developers say that they did some Windows specific stuff.
It does not run under Mono, even the Windows version. So that is out. The developers say it runs fine under Parallels, but thats $80 + a Windows License and the nastiness of having WINDOWS BACK IN MY LIFE.
Then I ran across Crossover Mac. Man this looked promising! Running Windows programs on the Mac without a copy of Windows! Looking at the list of apps that currently work, I was filled with hope. If it cn run pigs like Office and Visio it should be able to handle a simple little Actionscript editor! Start the download of the trial version!
Guess what… it doesn’t work.
In fact I can’t seem to get the thing to install the .NET 2.0 runtime from the list of “supported applications”. Sometimes the installer crashes, sometimes it says it installed but when you run a .Net application it isn’t there.
I am really disappointed… Back to the drawing board…
The world is not coming to an end. Our free-market capitalist system goes through periodic corrections and cleansings. It’s the natural order of things. Things are going to be okay.
I was very prepared to really hate the Mac. I was a MacHead back in the day and it is my experience that former MacHeads are usually the most vehement critics (not unlike ex-smokers).
I have to say, I love teh Mac! Not just because I have no Microsoft connections (it helps though!) but as I get used to the feel of the interface and the development tools (free btw vs. $400+ for MS Visual Studio) I really think it is better. I have yet to crash Mac OSX, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say about Vista. I think my Vista laptop crashed 3 or 4 times since I got the MacBook and that’s with the power off.
I am using a bit older version of OSX, 10.4 “Tiger”. I am sticking with that version as many have told me that the new version is almost as unstable as Vista. That claim seems hard to believe but if the true believers can say something bad about anything Mac, I am willing to believe it.
Since I used OpenOffice on Vista, the Office suite is unchanged. The Dev environment is wildly different and I still prefer Visual Studio. In fact I’m pretty sure I will always prefer Visual Studio to XCode. I would love to use Code::Blocks (like I do under Linux), but the current version crashes all the time. So far the only thing that has really thrown me in the Dev side is that a Mac application is really an archive-like file that has the executable as well as all the files and frameworks embedded in the file. It seems that this is second nature for long time Mac users/coders so it is not really spelled out completely anywhere.
For now I will be primarily using teh MacBook for my personal working environment. I am stuck with WinDoze for a while for work, so the Vista machine will be pulled out for that.
