Welcome To Josh's Blog O' Thoughts: September 2007

I was looking for information about the Gerber Viper toilet since we are currently looking at plumbing fixtures for our new home. I found one plumber's website that has a video demonstration of the flushing power of the Viper.

I was surprised by how much this thing can handle. It's a 1.6 gallon per flush, gravity-fed toilet. There's no pressurized air to assist, and still, this thing handles everything they throw at it.

Aside from that, the video is kind of funny to watch all them flush all this stuff.

Check it out at:
Gerber Viper Toilet Demonstration

I posted this as a response to a comment on one of my other articles, but I thought that this information deserved an article all to itself. The original question posed by the commenter was:

BTW, does any one know how long i can go with rabbit ears? will the change to HD ruin that?

My Answer:

In Februrary 2009 (I believe is the cutoff), the FCC has mandated that all television stations cease transmitting their current signal. At that point, they will only be allowed to transmit a digital signal. Many of these signals will be high definition (HD) and some will be standard, or enhanced definition (SD, ED), but all will be digital.

Likewise, the spectrum that is currently used for VHF transmissions (currently the lower numbered channels 2-13 I think) will be abandoned and auctioned off to bidders for other uses. Digital television will all be transmitted in the UHF spectrum. Most antennas these days (rabbit ears or big attic antennas) have both a VHF and UHF capability. UHF currently is all our high-number channels (14-62 I think). On rabbit ears, the UHF antenna will often be in the shape of a loop.

So, a UHF antenna will be required to pick up the digital (SD,ED,HD) signals starting in 2009. Most antennas already handle it. If you go to stores like BestBuy, you'll see HD Antennas. All this is is a UHF-only antenna. Nothing special about it other than marketing.

The thing that will cause you more pain is that, unless you already have a brand new TV, your TV will not be able to handle the digital signal. You'll either have to upgrade TVs to one that has a digital tuner in it, or purchase a converter box (sometimes called an HD set top box). The box would work like a cable or dish box, but for your OTA transmissions. I believe the government is making available $40 vouchers (2 per household) that you could use toward the purchase of converter boxes.

Also remember that if you keep your standard TV, you won't be getting the most out of the HD signal. The set top box will basically downgrade the signal to work on your TV. You might get a little more clarity from the digital signal, but you won't get HD without an HDTV.

Hope that answers your question.

After recycling yet another of the countless mass marketing mailings I get from the local cable company (Mediacom), I reaffirmed to myself why I don't have cable television. In my area of the world, the basic cable television costs about $40+ per month. To me, it's outrageous to pay this amount of money just to watch TV. Especially when you are paying for 5 channels that you'll watch and 70 channels that you'll just flip through. The same can be said for the dish companies although their plans are at least cheaper than our local cable.

For many people like me, the majority of the shows that are watched are on a handful of channels. For me, it's mostly the major networks. I currently get over the air reception which usually works pretty darn well depending on the station. But there are times when it would be nice to have a clearer picture. And I have also thought about how it would be nice to have a few of the cable channels (Discovery for example). But I can't bring myself to pay $40 per month compared to my current $0 per month for these small upgrades.

What I think would be ideal, is if the cable or dish companies could figure out a way to provide a-la-carte channel purchases. Basically you'd pay a monthly service fee and then you'd pay a fee for whatever channels you wanted. Some channels would be more expensive than others I'm sure. But I could then buy cable service for CBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, and Discovery. A 5 channel cable bill would have to be cheaper than the full 75 channels.

Just think of the new found sense of ownership the consumers would have if they could choose exactly what they wanted to buy. I think they'd be able to gain quite a few customers that would otherwise never think of getting "basic" cable.

And as an added benefit, maybe we'd completely eradicate some of those little-watched cable channels that are just taking up bandwidth.

Last year, I started a web project that I thought was a killer idea. The site, Pantoozle.com was a repository of ratings and reviews of businesses and service providers that could be localized to your city/metro area. The project was conceived because I noticed the people I worked with were always looking for recommendations or advice on where to purchase a particular item, who had the best services, what doctors were best, etc. I wrote several reviews for businesses in my local area, as did some other people. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to keep at it, and the site has been very slow over the past six months. I'd like to revive it again as I still think it could be a really useful tool for people.

The website is completely free, but does require registration to post a review (to cut down on spam posting).

If you have a review that you can post about a local business or service provider, head over to Pantoozle.com and post away!

It was announced yesterday that the Federal Reserve Board approved a rate cut of half a percent. This move is aimed at stimulating the economy to avoid a recession. Apparently, the recent troubles in the housing and job markets have outweighed the threat of increasing inflation despite rising energy prices.

This cut in rates should be good news for the stock market. Yesterday, the Dow Jones rose over 200 points within the first 10 minutes of the announcement. Likewise, this should be good for anyone who is planning on purchasing a home in the near future. Mortgage interest rates are expected to follow suit and show begin lowering today.

So far, this is all working into my master plan. I've been predicting that interest rates would come down in the second half of the year. I also predicted that we'd see some decrease in gas prices after the relatively strong rises we saw in the first half of the year. If that happens too, I'll call myself clairvoyant.

Last Friday night, I watched 20/20 on ABC. The program was an hour-long special by John Stossel on what is wrong with the American health care system. His view was not that the problems were related to the fact that there are millions of people without health insurance, but rather, that our problems stem from the fact that so many people DO have health insurance.

Surprisingly, a lot of what he presented in his program mirrored a lot of the thoughts I have posted in previous blog articles:

Doctors Should Give a Satisfaction Guarantee
What Happened To Competition?

In my blog posts, I complained about how nobody shops around for health care services. We simply do what the doctors tell us regardless of cost. Most of the time, the doctors don't even give you an idea of what the cost of a procedure might be. Stossel said the same. He said that people with insurance are more likely to have procedures/tests done without thinking about costs because "insurance will pay for it". And when customers don't care about costs, prices go up. Why? Because they can. Health care providers are in business to make money and anyone who thinks they are just good Samaritans is completely wrong.

My posts had suggestions of have a "menu" of prices for different procedures and tests. According to Stossel's report, some private clinics already do this. They do it because they have to. They don't take insurance because of all the paperwork headache, and since their customers are no longer using insurance, they are more likely to shop around. Thus competition has caused them to advertise their prices and to lower prices in response to more competition in the market.

Although a lot of the information in the program mirrored my own posts, it was still refreshing to see that some of this stuff DOES, in fact, exist.

I remember being in grade school and being taught the motto that was going to help us save the environment: "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle", collectively known as the 3R's. Sounded really good at the time. If we could do all three of these things, we could stop a lot of pollution. Now, 20 years later, how have we done at meeting the 3R's?

Recycle

At the time that the 3R's were being preached to us in school, educators were heavily touting the benefits of recycling. In my estimation, I would say that recycling got more "air time" than either of the other two R's. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It brought community awareness to the recycling movement and look where recycling is now! Most cities have curb-side recycling pick up that doesn't need to be sorted and will accept most major forms of recyclables. Granted, recycling still needs some improvements in many areas. I'd like to see better recycling opportunities for Styrofoam, batteries, electronics, and compact fluorescent light bulbs. That being said, I'd say that recycling is the R that has advanced the most in the past 20 years.

Reduce

In the last 5 years or so, Reduce is probably the R that has gotten the most media coverage. With threats of diminishing fuel supplies and spikes in energy costs, everything these days seems to be related to reducing our usage of these materials. Recent topics include Hybrid cars, compact fluorescent light bulbs, geothermal heating/cooling, solar power, and wind power. Politicians are jumping on the media bandwagon and touting their plans to reduce dependencies on oil and other fossil fuels. I imagine that within the next 15 years, we will see the same kind of revolution we saw with recycling. Energy efficient devices will become common place.

Reuse

The R that I think has gotten the least attention and improvement is Reuse. In fact, there is even a case to be made that we have gone in the wrong direction here. If you look at TV commercials these days, you see what appears to be more commercial for disposable, non-reusable products. There's disposable cameras, razors, toilet cleaners, plates, flatware, and food containers (i.e. Gladware). I wonder if we now think that since people recycle, it's more acceptable to use disposable products. Or have we just become too lazy to bother cleaning and reusing some of this stuff. It's obvious to me that we have a long way to go in the area of reuse.

Overall, I think we've come a long way on recycling, gotten a good start on reducing, and have yet to really focus on reusing. Maybe this is just a natural progression. Perhaps recycling was focused on first, because there was low-hanging fruit that was easy to accomplish. The increased exposure of reduction was possibly expedited due to fears of rising prices, shortages, and global warming. If this trend continues, we should see focus switch to reuse in the next couple decades. This could be spurred by massive over crowding in landfills or similar problems. However, at this point, my guess is that the American people can only handle advances in one R at a time.

Apparently, the effects of global warming on the environment are already pronounced enough that cartographers are having to redraw world atlases to match the actual terrain. The world is losing coastlines, ice sheets, rivers, and lakes.

Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk 95% in roughly the last 50 years. This used to be the sixth largest lake in the world and provided water to millions of people in Africa. This loss of water can cause a massive strain on an already stressed region. Check out the before and after pictures yourself (pictures are from LiveScience.com and are credited to Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World).

1973:


2003:


In addition to Lake Chad, water level in the Dead Sea is 82 ft lower than it was 50 years ago, the Rio Grande river runs dry in some areas, the Aral Sea has shrunk by 75%, and many coastlines in low-laying or island countries are vanishing. And don't forget about other more surprising results of Global Warming including the increase of allergens in the air. Finally, one of the biggest results is that Global Warming could delay or even prevent the next Ice Age. Ice Ages come and go every 100,000 years or so. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, the current amount of carbon in the air and the amount generated through the side effects of this carbon are enough that it could delay the next Ice Age. And if we burn more, we could affect the next 5 Ice Ages!

If these grim results aren't enough for you, take a look at the estimated timeline for Earth's climate over the next 100 years. There's some scary predictions in there, many of which could be realized in our lifetimes or those of our children.

Does it make you want to reconsider your outlook on how you affect the environment?