Ugliest Dog Contest
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 20:53 - Category: Unfiled ;
Archive for June 12th, 2008
Switchgrass for home heating
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 20:15 - Category: Renewable energy Tags: heating oil, switchgrass;
Switchgrass grows all over the US. It can survive drought, doesn’t need fertilizer or to be grown on cropland. Researchers have designed a stove for $3,000 that can burn the sticky switchgrass in pellet form, a comparable price to efficient home heating stoves that use wood pellets.
The northeast US in particular seriously needs to do heating some other way than heating oil. Switchgrass pellets are renewable and don’t require forests being logged to make wood pellets.
Spot heating oil is nearly $4.00 a gallon today (it was $1.97 in the winter of 2007.) Next winter in New England it could easily be more than that. Many will not be able to heat their homes at that price. But with switchgrass and a new stove (which would literally pay for itself in a year or so) they will be able to.
Switchgrass, of course, can also be used as a feedstock to produce ethanol. Amazing plant, isn’t it?
Ethanol directly from algae
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 16:09 - Category: Renewable energy Tags: algae, biofuel, ethanol;
Algenol plans to build a saltwater algae plant in the desert in Mexico. Unlike other methods that require the algae be squeezed to product the oil, they’ve GMO’ed algae to create ethanol directly, and claim the output is dramatically greater than using corn or sugar cane. And it doesn’t require using farmland better used for growing food.
GreenTechBlog has more.
The Fleecing of Alabama: The bills come due
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 11:30 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: Jefferson County;
JPMorgan Chase led four banks in selling interest-rate swaps to Jefferson County at six times the going rate. Now, the FBI is investigating the bankers, the SEC has sued a local politician and the county is on the verge of going bust.
Bankers may well may face criminal charges, BofA is cooperating in exchange for leniency, and the FBI has raided financial advisers. My guess: People will be going to prison.
“It’s ironic that the Fed can do corporate welfare for the banks, but they can’t bail out a county that was victimized by these banks,” says Craig Greer, a Catholic chaplain at a Birmingham hospice.
Bear Stearns sold $3.2 billion in swaps to Jefferson County and was bailed out of bankruptcy by the Fed in March. If Jefferson County goes bankrupt, it will be the biggest county bankruptcy in US history.
Subprime isn’t over
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 09:34 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: Option ARM;
From Businessweek
Option ARMs give you an option of how much to pay each month on a mortgage. There are generally several options or choices. However, once you owe a certain amount (like 110-125% of the original loan amount) then the interest rate rises sharply and no further options are allowed.
The blue bars show when ARMs would reset to higher rates five years after the origination date. The gray bars show the expected reset rate, which is much earlier. This indicates that strapped homeowners are making the smallest possible payment each month. Thus, the amount owed rises faster and the rest happens sooner.
Today, outstanding option ARM loans in the U.S. total about $500 billion, about 60% of which were sold to California homeowners.
Yikes.
Two-thirds of Sacramento sales for May were foreclosures
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 07:30 - Category: Credit crisis ;
Yes. Two-thirds.
Global Guerrillas reports relevant, if uncheery, news
The Chicago Fed has found that under normal circumstances, every increase in the foreclosure rate by 2.87%, there is a 6.68% increase in violent crime. Further, housing values fall by nearly 1% for each foreclosed home within 1/8 of a mile.
This could lead to what they call The Swiss Cheese Effect
As US cities, suburbs and neighborhoods begin to look like swiss cheese, there’s little doubt that the US will experience a radical increase in the formation of gangs, militias, and other violent groups. A volatile mixture of wealth/expectation destruction, neighborhood decay (due to empty and abandoned properties), and a visceral sense of economic betrayal/abandonment will be the drivers. Connectivity (both local and global) will ensure that the damage spreads virally.
It’s difficult to see how this will not happen, at least in some places.
On Russian “stop list” censorship of dissent
Bob Morris @ Jun 12th 2008 03:37 - Category: Unfiled Tags: censorship;
“Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy.” Wow.
They even digitally delete dissenters out of videos now.
Fox News needs to study this Russian return to Stalinism in an attempt to learn important new ways to censor and distort the news.
