Turbine economics
Last week I had one of those experiences which felt at the time like small defeats but which actually are steps forward — although not necessarily in the direction I really want to go. Call it a tactical withdrawal. I moved my computer from the Winter Palace up to the Void. In the Void — the huge old cattle shed which forms the hub of our community-that-is-not-a-community — it can use mains power, rather than depending on my wind turbine. Also, it can use the landline broadband, rather than using my satellite connection. The truth is that at this time of year my wind turbine is not generating enough power for my day to day use, and as I am now running low on the money I earned last year and need to start looking for employment again, I need to use my computer (and the Internet) more.
So this is a post about the energy economics of living off grid.
This picture is illegal in Scotland
This picture is illegal in Scotland.
What! Why?
Against Land Value Tax
They've been in the family a long time. They were improved, it's true, by his ancestor Robert Grosvenor in the early nineteenth century. But essentially their current huge value is down to two things: first, the growth of London, to which the Grosvenors made no special contribution; and second, improvements in infrastructure — roads, railways, sewers and so on — that have been paid for out of the public purse.
This is the case for Land Value Tax. Landowners — like the Grosvenors — make windfall profits out of public works and out of pure luck. This is just one among many ways that the rich are rewarded purely as a result of being rich, and without making any reference to the desirability of the equable distribution of wealth there is a clear public interest in profits generated as a result of works paid for out of the public purse returning to the public purse.
Cycle helmets, and road safety: a letter to the Lord Advocate
I've written about cycling helmets and safety a couple of times before. See 'Using, not losing, your head', and 'Lies, damned lies, and cycle helmets'. But more often, as you know, I write about things which relate to public policy in Scotland. Now, sadly, I'm having to combine the two topics.
In brief, in August 2011 a driver named Gary McCourt mowed down a 75 year old cyclist, Audrey Fyfe, on the Portabello Road in Edinburgh. She was killed. Nor was this the first time that McCourt had mown down and killed a cyclist; in 1985 he had been jailed for killing 22 year old George Dalgity.
McCourt stood trial this month for the death of Audrey Fyfe. He was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, and banned from driving for five years. In passing this remarkably lenient sentence, Sheriff James Scott commented that Audrey Fyfe "...was not wearing a safety helmet and that in my view contributed to her death."
Savings, and loans
The text is obvious. Homes in the US are big — really big. Everyone has a big home. They're big in city centres, bigger in the suburbs, simply huge in the outer suburbs, still big in remote rural locations. They're also, claims the graphic, growing rapidly — the last panel claims the median home has grown in size by 50% in just twenty five years — interestingly, up to 2007, a date we'll come back to later.
The graphic shows, but doesn't explicitly say, that they're also staggeringly expensive. In New York, where the median size is apparently around 1500 square feet, the price is given as US$1295 per square foot, or about 1.9 million US dollars for an ordinary family house. That's not the extreme — Phoenix, Arizona is shown as even more expensive (why?!?). At the other end of the scale, housing in Dallas, Texas is stated to sell for US$59 per square foot, with a median size of 1650 square feet implying a price of just under a hundred thousand US dollars.