Category Archives: energy

BSOD of the day

Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard Transocean Deepwater Horizon: For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.” “It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.” Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the [...]
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Healthcare debate: generational warfare

That is why they’re bringing out the guns. It‘s not just the right-wing gothic imagination run amok (though it is that). It’s war. The healthcare debate in a nutshell: declining revenues + rising costs = growing competition for shrinking resources. And on one side of that conflict, an aging segment of the population, weaned on [...]
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Q&A

Q: To how many other problems can this point be applied? A: All.
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Journalistic ethics, NYT edition

Randy Cohen, who currently “writes the The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine” and will write another weekly column (“Moral of the Story”) “examin[ing] a news story from an ethical perspective,” shows either (a) sloppy writing, (b) a complete disregard for national sensibilities, or (c) a sort of carpet-bombing ignorance of the arts and [...]
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Absolute power shuts off absolutely

El Reg: New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid [...]. The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President [...]
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Rural terror

Stranded Wind: I started digging into the details and unless I’m badly mistaken people are going to be starving in 2009 over causes and conditions being set down right now. (s-t)
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Enron

The gift that keeps on giving. WikiP: Arthur Andersen LLP, based in Chicago, was once one of the “Big Five” accounting firms among PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young and KPMG, providing auditing, tax, and consulting services to large corporations. In 2002, the firm voluntarily surrendered its licenses to practice as Certified Public Accountants [...]
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Motown’s greatest hits

GM CEO Rick Wagoner “referring to GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler,” in the FT (Simon+Guerrera, “GM Chief Defends Reliance on SUVs,” 6 June ’08; liberated version here). Is it the US manufacturers who are stupid? I don’t think so. You have to recognise that the consumer makes the call here … and we are reacting. [...]
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Feb ’74

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National energy stragety

Wald, “Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund,” NYT (29 July ’08): Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday. The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution [...]
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A day late and a dollar short

The NYT: To put this in perspective, the difference between a [Ford] Focus and an F-250 over five years is $60,000. The annual pretax income of a typical family in this country is also about $60,000. So choosing a F-250 over a Focus is like volunteering for a 20 percent pay cut. Of course, the [...]
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Refractory turn on red: RTOR, CAFE, SUVs, UPS

Right-turn-on-red (“RTOR,” in some circles) was introduced nationwide in the mid-1970s as part of a broad, national fuel-saving strategy in response to the “Arab fuel embargo” of 1973–74 (context here). The goal was to save gas by minimizing idling. In a tribute to former Senator Dale Bumpers, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said: The [...]
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