Solar for everyone

One of the reasons I like living in California is simple: the weather is nice. That fact also logically leads to something inexplicable. Given abundant sunlight, why isn't there far more solar power in California?

That's a fine question.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't have solar panels on my roof. I'd very much like to, but capital requirements exceed my present means. Still, I'd very much like to have at least a small setup sitting up there in the sun. (Even on stormy days, like today, there's significant amounts of sun!)

So, here's a small proposal: all new homes in California should be required to have solar panels pre-installed. Given the cost of housing around here (the median is rather north of half a million), tacking on an extra $15k or so doesn't seem like a high cost. Of course, this would only cover new construction. We'll clearly need to consider some sort of plan to encourage installation on older homes. That's where the government can help out - although it's worth noting that the state government is doing a reasonable job of offering tax incentives and rebates, especially given the current fiscal environment.

Solar's not the answer to everything, of course. There's that whole nighttime and no light problem. I also read somewhere about the carbon cost of producing solar panels, and it's pretty high. That's rather disconcerting. It's certainly possible to reduce that, since all of the energy required to produce them could come from alternative energy sources like, uh, solar. Assuming that the costs of producing solar power devices can be greatly reduced, there's little reason to not get solar going in large fractions of the US. That should certainly help to get the country closer to being energy independent.

There's a lot more to say about this, so I'll return to the general topic of global warming, energy policy, etc., soon.

That election thing

So, some of you may have noticed that there's a presidential campaign in progress. More to the point, it's getting exceedingly hard to ignore. That's an annoyance, and I often wish for something more on the British model of "hey, guys? let's have an election next month." Perhaps they should move the first primaries back to August, rather than January. It would certainly make the campaigns cheaper and much less annoying. I'm not helping by writing about it, but, well, I'll pretend that I'm doing so because of the First Amendment.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. I've got two other election related topics.

The first is an interesting online flash app I stumbled upon that analyzes your real political standing. Take a look Electoral Compass USA...it's a pretty reasonable set of questions, and the results worked for me. Your answers are analyzed on two axes - your economic leanings, and your social leanings. The horizontal axis represents left or right economic tendencies, while the vertical axis has traditional or conservative values at the bottom, up to liberal or progressive tendencies at the top. To no real surprise, the centroid it produced for me was a bit above center, but generally pretty much in the middle. Within the uncertainty radius that their analysis provides, there are precisely zero candidates.

Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I suspect that's true for a large fraction of the electorate. That's really quite sad.

The other thing I wanted to discuss is candidate selection criteria. Even though it's now one week to the California primary, I don't have any idea who, if anyone, I'll vote for. I do know who I won't vote for, which annoys me a bit. I'd really like to find a candidate I can vote for, rather than a set of candidates to vote against. My selection criteria are, thus far, pretty simple. I'd like to find a candidate that actually believes in science. I don't mean some sort of faith-based belief - they are free to practice whatever faith they like as long as it's not the driving force in their decision making. Please, no goat entrails in the Oval Office. What I do mean is that I'd like to find a candidate that understands how science works. Pushing "intelligent design" in addition or as a substitute for evolution education is a guaranteed way to not get my vote.

Thus far, that means Huckabee is a definitive "no", given his direct expression that he doesn't believe in evolution. (Wasn't real impressed with him anyway, but that seals it. Oh, and I guess all of those scientists that actually use science to find ever-increasing evidence of evolution are all just horribly confused. Better send them to some re-education camps.) None of the remaining likely candidates (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, and Romney, as of this writing) have any sort of reasonable statement on the topic...just a bunch of platitude-laced sound bites. If one of them were to where this shirt (sorry, original link unavailable), I think they'd get my vote.

Obviously, other criteria will be necessary to identify a useful candidate. I'll have to think about that at some point. Can I avoid that until late October? Sigh.

Daily scary driving experiences

After years of experience, I've come to the conclusion that parents driving their children to school are the worst drivers on the planet. Crazed taxi drivers have nothing on these people.

Over the years, I've seen innumerable near accidents and a few solid hits. I once saw a parent so desperate to get their child to school on time that she jumped a curb and drove at quite a nice clip across the schoolyard to get her child to the door. I'm stunned that no one was killed in that incident.

I now drive our youngest one to high school. That's my daily excitement, and it's usually a great substitute for morning caffeine. Nothing like a little adrenaline poisoning to wake you up! On the rare occasion that there is any enforcement around the high school, they're always forcing people to not stop in what is technically a no parking/no stopping zone to drop their kids off. Instead, they force people to drive into the student parking lot, which just makes the jam and people's nerves that much worse. Thanks, guys. Part of the fun is having drivers with less than a year of experience and cars with waaaaaaay too much power driving in the same lot as parents. Mix in some pedestrians and you have my idea of the fourth circle of hell.

Is there anything we can do about this? Not really. Parents are all convinced that their 'precious cargo' is far more important the the 'precious cargo' of the person in front of them. The only real hope is to reinstate a school busing system. That would be expensive, so it won't happen here. This is one of the few cases where good weather all the time is a serious curse. When I grew up in the upper Midwest, school buses were always available. Indeed, at one point I lived in a place where riding the bus was mandatory, as walking to school, even across a couple of yards, might be deadly.

Perhaps global warming will fix that problem....

Update: It saddens me to see that there was an incident at a nearby school today, just hours after I wrote the above rant. While the circumstances of that specific incident are still unclear, traffic around most schools in this area is a major tragedy just waiting to happen.

For sale: Madison Avenue

Okay, so we all know that marketing and advertising have become so omnipresent in our society that it's actually difficult to find someplace to escape from all of it.

The question this poses is simple enough: how do we, as a society, fix this?

This problem is in my mind right now because I encountered a new form of media today. I went to get gas for my minivan ($3.209 a gallon, thanks) at a local Shell station. Above the pumps, they've installed a lovely video screen and speakers. I was treated to a slew of infotainment as soon as I picked up the pump handle. I saw the same Jack in the Box ad three times, along with the weather forecast, a trailer or two, and some NBC late night ads. I was fortunate enough to get the entire show - the minivan was thirsty enough to take longer than the entire loop.

That's not really the worst possible example, but it's a new one for me. (The worst one, so far, may be the quick service restaurant I visited that had ads in the urinals. Above them is one thing, but c'mon!)

It's not a real surprise that we're all such good consumers. We've been conditioned for it from birth, more or less. Breaking out of that pattern is something that individuals can do, but people, on the average, are sheep, so we're all pretty much stuck with all of this. Call me pessimistic, but the people that put ads on the 'up' escalators are the same people that would put advertising over our beds if they could figure out a way to pull it off for a profit.

How depressing.

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