Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 19:57 - Category: Unfiled ;
Gosh, that shouldn’t slow evacuations down much at all.
“Officer, the water is at our waists and rising.”
“I’m sorry sir, but we can’t let you through until the power comes back on and we can enter your name in the computerized records and then issue you a RFID wristband.”
Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 15:47 - Category: Unfiled ;
Under each post now you’ll notice a bookmark icon. Mouse over it and you can add the post to a multitude of social bookmarking sites, favorites, etc.
This is a free service from AddThis.com and is super-easy to install on a WordPress.org blog, just copy their code into the plugins folder and activate it, no template changes needed.
So, please add Polizeros posts that you like to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 11:18 - Category: Energy conservation Tags: power strips;
Even when electrical devices are off or on standby, they still draw electricity, a wasteful practice indeed. We need smarter devices that truly turn themselves off.
Jetson Green runs the numbers, showing how much energy is wasted. One example
-It’s estimated that only 5% of the power drawn by cell phone chargers is actually used to charge phones, so the other 95% is waste when left plugged in.
So, only charge when needed, turn computers and monitors off when not being used, and turn power strips off after turning the computers off, else they’d still be draining power.
Yes, that’s right. Computers and many other devices will draw power even when turned off. But they can’t if the power strip is off.
Happily, power strips are getting smarter (see image)
Plug your PC into the main socket, and then plug your printer, scanner, monitor etc into the other sockets. When you turn off your computer, the smart unit shuts the power off to the other sockets. Saves power from constantly-on transformers, saves the environment, and saves lives from electrical fires caused by overheated DC adaptors.
Yeah, what is it with power adaptors that generate heat even if the device isn’t plugged into them? That is so last-century. Ditto for a different adaptor for each device. Seems to me that standardized chargers could be made for a class of devices, like cell phones, thus simplifying recharging and cutting down of the number used (and left plugged into the wall, draining energy)
Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 07:22 - Category: Unfiled Tags: GIMP, Linux;
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) runs on Linux, Windows, and OS X, and while not Photoshop, it provides all the power for image editing and creation that most of us will need.
And of course, because it’s open source, it’s free. Check it out.
Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 00:24 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: recession;
Thus, at this point the debate is less on whether the US will experience a soft landing or hard landing but rather on how hard the landing will be, i.e. whether the coming recession will be “mild” or “severe”. That is a radical change of the macro debate relative to a few months ago.
Indeed. Until just a few weeks ago The talking heads on Bloomberg were saying everything is just fine and we’ll get through this little speed bump of a subprime thingee no problemo. But then, darn it, that subprime thingee metastasized and has now spread to commercial real estate and the credit markets at large.
Yet even with that the talking heads almost comically persist in their folly. Morgan Stanley announced yesterday that, oopsie, they lost $9.4 billion last quarter. I guess that speed bump must have somehow morphed into a high speed run off a cliff. But, eternal optimists that they are, it wasn’t more than about 60 seconds after the news was announced that someone on Bloomberg said, so this must be a buying opportunity now for Morgan Stanley, right? Ah, no. Sometimes stock go to zero, as witness Enron.
But more and more those talking heads are getting a bit grim about what’s coming. Which is something that readers of blogs like Calculated Risk, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, and The Big Picture have known about and been discussing for months.
The combination of a worsening housing recession, a severe liquidity and credit crunch, oil prices well above $90, a retrenchment of capex by the corporate sector, and a saving-less and debt-burdened US consumers being buffetted by a variety of negative shocks is making the recession as the leading scenario for the US economy.
So now the question is now longer if there will be a recession, but rather, how bad will it be.
Bob Morris @ Dec 20th 2007 00:09 - Category: Unfiled ;
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