The Certified Skeptic ™

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Link to article..

Check out this well-written article about the current economic issues confronting our nation. I found it helpful in understanding how we got here and what we may still be facing.

T

Fuel prices are at record levels and people are having to adapt. It can be a hardship and the additional money spent for fuel has to come from somewhere else… food? vacations? entertainment? health care? Often, there’s not much one can do but pay the price and get mad… and maybe look for someone to blame.

Recently, I’ve been criticized for driving around in a motorhome — “a pig of a vehicle that gets less than 10 m.p.g.” Specifically, the criticism was the result of a piece I wrote in my political blog that was hard on the President for not using the patriotic fervor after the 9/11 attacks as a catalyst to make the USA independent of foreign oil, or at least, independent of Middle Eastern oil. The writer thought I was a hypocrite.

Simply put, I think the implication was that I have no right to criticize the President if I choose to drive a vehicle that has poor fuel efficiency.

Let me try to respond.

The motorhome is our home, our house — our ONLY house. It’s NOT our daily transportation. We only drive it when we’re moving to a new “home-base”. It will be driven less than 10,000 miles this year, and as fuel prices rise the miles we drive will go down. We don’t drive the motorhome when we run to the store, go sightseeing, run out to a restaurant or a movie, or when we go anywhere else while we’re parked at a “home-base”. We have a car for those trips… just like almost everyone else… except that we have only one car and most every other couple has two or more.

When it comes to the facts of our energy consumption, I’ve analyzed our usage both prior to embarking on this lifestyle, when we had a “real” house, and after, with the motorhome. I can assert, and I have the data to back it up, that the motorhome uses less energy than the average “real” house… including the diesel fuel we burn to move our house from one place to another.

Yes, we do consume about 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year that we wouldn’t be using if we didn’t have the motorhome. But we’re only heating and cooling about 300 sq. ft., and use only a small fraction of the energy the average homeowner uses for the same purpose.

We have a solar array on our roof that produces power from the sun. We can live “off the grid” indefinitely while the average homeowner is buying energy to power their much larger houses. Thus, our consumption of grid-electricity is very low.

We’re careful with our use of hot water; we don’t have snowmobiles, boats, quads, or other adult energy-consuming toys; we don’t use energy to mow our lawn or clear the snow; we’re buying much less “stuff” during this phase of our lives because we’re more into exploration than into accumulation — remember that there’s an energy component to each and every “thing” you buy. In general, our fulltiming lifestyle is a low energy lifestyle.

Apparently, in the minds of these critics, the issue isn’t the amount of energy we’re using… the issue is that I’m not using energy the way they’d like me to use it… the way they’re using it. I guess they’d be happy if we actually used more energy than we are fulltiming in our motorhome… as long as we used it in a “normal” way… the way they’re using it.

Or maybe they just need to understand what this lifestyle is all about.

Thomas Hoch
www.tdhoch.com

Friday, May 16, 2008

NYT Headline Today: Bush Rebuffed on Oil Plea in Saudi Arabia

I find it sad and embarrassing to have our president pleading with the Saudi’s to produce more oil because the price is too high here in America. Saudi Arabia is the country that produced 15 of the 16 hijackers that perpetrated the Twin Tower attacks on 9/11. It’s the country that indoctrinates all young people to hate the infidels of the west. And our leader, the purported leader of the free world, is “pleading” with these guys for more oil. This is the second time this year he’s prostrated himself for this purpose. And both times he’s been rebuffed.

How fitting is this for a president who has no energy policy? Recently, Tom Friedman pointed out in a recent column that this is the president who told people after 9/11 to go out shopping and buy something instead of asking Americans, who were passionately patriotic and wanting to help at that time, for some personal sacrifice in helping to reduce our dependence on imported oil. If we had spent the past 7 years on a national initiative for energy independence we may have been in a position by now where we don’t need that part of the world. Instead we’ve doubled the National Debt by waging a needless war, have nothing to show for it, and will be there — blowing more trillions of dollars — for many, many more years.

It’s beginning to look like the country with the greatest power is the country that has the most oil… and the country that uses the most oil is the beggar.

“Please Dad, Please… Can I have the keys to the family car?”

How sad. How tragic.

T

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Lately I’ve been feeling like Phil Conners. Who’s Phil Conners you ask? He’s the character played by Bill Murray in the 1993 movie “Groundhogs Day”.

If you’ll recall, Phil is caught in some kind of time warp. Every morning the clock radio goes off at 6:00am with Sonny and Cher singing “I’ve got you Babe”. Every morning it’s Tuesday and it’s Groundhogs Day. He then proceeds through the day running into the same characters and repeating the same events. It’s a good film — it’s probably been a while since you’ve seen it, so rent it and enjoy it all over again.

Anyway, back to me. Lately, every morning I’ve been getting up to the same back-and-forth reporting on the Democrat Presidential Campaign for the nomination. Will it ever end? It’s “tuesday” every day, we listen to the same drivel from candidates that are only telling their audiences what they think the audience wants to hear, we listen to their same spin on what the results mean — and this goes on for months and months, years and years.

How did we become a nation where not only is “politician” a lifelong career, but where “campaigner” is becoming a career too? How did we let that happen?

Why wouldn’t it make sense to mandate a campaign period of 6 or 8 weeks? To limit the amount of money spent to some reasonable amount?

I, for one, am ready.

T

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

If you have a few minutes and are interested in an intelligent article on the current energy policy in the USA, read this article by Tom Friedman at the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/opinion/30friedman.html?hp

T

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

I’m sure you noticed that during the past few weeks I’ve had some ads lined up along the right side of my web pages. These ads were Google “Adsense” ads — a program that makes it very easy for people like me to place targeted ads on web pages and get paid for doing so. I was intrigued, wanted to find out how it all worked, and hoped to maybe generate a little “coin” to offset some of the costs associated with keeping a website going.

After one month, I’m pulling the plug on these ads. It wasn’t an easy decision — the TDHoch board of directors discussed it for at least a minute or two. These ads generated over 8 bucks ($8.16 to be exact) in a little more than a month. At that rate, I could be into three figures after a year, and could actually get paid from Google. You see, your Google Adsense account must reach the magic $100 mark before they’ll cut you a check. So with this obvious success and new-found wealth, why am I killing the ads?

Well, for a number of reasons. First, I’ve read websites and blogs that encourage readers to click on ads. It may not be stated as such, but the implication is that this is a no-cost way for readers to supplement the income of the website or blog owner. The reality is that this is fraud. When someone clicks on an ad for the sole purpose of creating a “click” in order to generate ad revenue, it’s wrong. I felt smarmy asking people to shop by clicking on my ads, knowing full well that it’s a rare bird indeed that shops this way. I believe the vast majority of the clicks from the Google Adsense program are fraudulent.

Google might well say that’s right… but the program still works. The purveyors and advertisers may even have it built into their calculations… that the one click in a hundred or a thousand that actually buys something is worth all the other fraudulent clicks. But it just doesn’t feel right, and I don’t get good vibes about the whole deal. It feels like part of the “something for nothing” attitude that pervades our culture these days.

Second, I think electronic ad pollution is as bad an any other kind of pollution. It’s really just cyber-litter floating around the net — very much like the Taco-Bell wrapper blowing around your backyard (or my campsite). Businesses advertise everywhere they can to get a leg up on the competition… they have video screens on gas pumps so they can fill you up as you fill your car up… they have advertising at the urinal so they can drain your wallet as you drain your bladder… it’s everywhere and technology is making it easy to put it anywhere.

Well, it’s not going to be on our website anymore.

My third reason for killing the Google Adsense ads is that Google’s goals and my goals are not in synch. I don’t have enough traffic to generate any real ad revenue — traffic is not the purpose of my website. I put this site up to communicate and share our experiences with friends and relatives. I also had the objective of learning about website technology — what it takes to build a website and how it all works. I never once had the objective of making my website a medium for advertising to those I care for.

So the experiment is over. No more ads. You can visit, view photos, read, enjoy, and share all you want… without being bombarded by the ad pollution you hate. We are ad-free once again.

T

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 — Vancouver, WA

According to my bank, my piece of the Economic Stimulus Program — a stupid program from an incompetent federal government that you and I are responsible for by continuing to vote for the bastards — arrived today via electronic banking, zip zip zip, right from “their” account directly into mine. Wow, a whole $1200 bucks so I can run out, buy something, and save the economy so developers, real estate agents, and car dealers can get back to making money and saddling even more poor schmucks with even more debt.

Well, here’s my take on it: This money isn’t from the Federal Government. It isn’t “free”. We’re “borrowing” it from our kids and grand-kids and great grand-kids. We’re borrowing it from them so maybe, just maybe, we can pump a few last breaths into this staggering economy in the hopes that it’ll stay alive until after the next election cycle. Just maybe!

One of these days it’ll become crystal clear to us. One of these days, probably after it’s too late, we’ll understand that this is no way to run a country.

Oh, and as to where most of this money’s going to be spent?… as a result of the big increase in fuel prices, a lot of it will go directly into the gas tanks of the happy motoring public, and indirectly into the bank accounts of many in the Middle East and elsewhere that would prefer to see us dead.

I’ll make it a point tomorrow to thank my two grand kids.

T

Thursday, April 24, 2008 — Vancouver, WA

I can’t get my arms around the concept of some very large numbers. I’m not sure anyone can. When reading about the cost of our military activity in the Middle East, I start seeing the word “trillion” mentioned, and that the total cost of all this could be two or three trillion dollars. It’s easy to think that a trillion isn’t really much more than a billion. It sounds the same, just change a “b” to a “t”, it’s that easy. It can’t be that much more. Million, Billion, Trillion, Gazillion… they’re all just big numbers, right?

Some years ago, I read an article about the difference between a million and a billion. That article applied a concept we do understand — time. Here’s the facts: A million seconds is a little less than 12 days.

But a billion seconds is almost 32 years. That’s right, 12 days versus 32 years. Just stop and think about that for a moment.

Now, let’s consider what a trillion seconds is. A trillion is 1,000 times more than a billion. So, let’s see, 32 years times 1000 equals… what? that can’t be? 32,000 years?? Well, to be more precise, its 31,710 years.

From 12 days to 32 years to 31,720 years.

The next time you hear some politician talk about a trillion dollars think about this comparison. And then seriously consider voting the bastard out of office.

T

Monday, April 21, 2008
(from The Sabbatical Journal)

Increasing costs for food, fuel, air travel, and almost everything we buy is affecting all of us — and it’s really beginning to bite. Gas is approaching $4/gallon, diesel is well over $4. The price of cereal grains is at near record levels. The common denominator in this problem is the price of oil in particular, and all energy in general. Coupled with the problems in the credit markets and the resulting slow-down in housing activity, it’s hard to see how we’ll escape a tough, long-lasting recession with the potential of significant changes to the way we live and work in this society.

How does all this affect us? Here are my thoughts:

First off, we went into this lifestyle fully expecting energy costs to rise. I’ve made a study of the topic of “peak oil” and the rapidly growing demand for energy in China, India, and other, less populated, countries who’ve belatedly found that capitalism works and are giving the USA a run for it’s money. It should be clear to anyone that the easy-to-get oil is already out of the ground. What’s left, regardless of the volume, is going to be harder to get out and more expensive. A large part of our decision to fulltime at this time were the beliefs that 1) it may become cost-prohibitive to travel around and explore the USA in this way at some point in the future, and 2) we’d need to find a less-expensive, lower cost, and more climate-friendly place to settle down after the sabbatical in order to weather the changes to our society that will probably occur as a result of tightening and more costly energy supplies. In other words, if we didn’t do it now, we may never have done it. We wanted to do it while we still had the chance.

Second, I’ve stopped listening to investment analysts and financial advisors. With a little homework the average intelligent person can manage their investments just fine, thank you. I don’t think the normal investor has any business being in the manipulated, rumor-driven equity markets at this time. When the interpretation, on the part of certain “experts”, of the nuances of certain words in a statement from the FRB can move the markets by 2, 3, or more percent in one day, you or I should not be in that market. Unless you’ve got so much money that the loss of half of it or more doesn’t affect your lifestyle, be more conservative and focus on capital preservation.

Yes, the bus-house is a depreciating asset. But then, so are most of the homes in America these days. As someone told me a few months ago, “If you have a home that’s depreciating, it might just as well have wheels.” The difference is that we expected the bus-house to depreciate — and worked that into our plan.

Yes, our travel depends on a lot of diesel fuel. As fuel rises from $4 to $5 to $8 per gallon, we can choose to use less of it by lingering longer in places we find interesting. Instead of driving 10,000 miles per year, we can reduce to 8,000 or 6,000 or even less if necessary. We have choices. We’re willing to travel less, if necessary, but we’re not willing to give up our exploration of America and our search for our next home town — at least for a while.

I’ve already documented [citation link] that we’re using at least 25% less energy in this lifestyle than the one we left. I have no apologies for our use of energy as we travel and believe we’re far more “green” than we ever were, or most “greenies” purport to be.

When the time comes to stop fulltiming, buy or build a house, and get back to a more traditional lifestyle, we’ll transfer many of our habits and some of the technology from our RV fulltiming life to our new home. It’d be great to live a net-0 energy lifestyle, and not be dependent on the grid for our existence.

We choose this lifestyle, didn’t come into it blindly, and don’t regret for one minute doing so.

Right or wrong, these are our ideas and goals.

T

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Follow this link to a short, well written piece by David Leonhardt in the NYTimes that attempts to simplify the complexities of the current credit crisis.

It certainly helped me.

T