Iris: Setting up a smart home gets a whole lot easier. This helps to monitor the home energy use as a kind of side benefit. One of the advantages of doing this security and home management stuff yourself (DIY) is that the likelihood of actually utilizing it, and utilizing it well increases. The cost is about $10 per month for more services and longer record times, however? This probably can’t replace the home monitoring system…
How much should a hip replacement cost? Study raises more questions than answers – CBS News: Paying cash for a procedure can get wild in terms of the prices. (They did this for a similar ailment and got similar results.) Offering to pay cash, and pay up front will result in serious discounts, say 70%. But this is still a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world of medicine. What’s missing is transparency. If you can’t figure out how much…
It was a little bit of a surprise that Obama stepped up as forcefully about taking on climate change as he did. Check out this post by Peterman at Huffington: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-peterman/state-of-the-union_b_2674448.html Many environmentalists are going to complain that this is not enough, but it really is better to start late than even much much later. As Peterman shows, it looks like we are aiming for 6+ degrees C, not the 2+C that many people were…
Energy | Homeland Security News Wire: Clean Coal Might Really Be a Possibility!!! WOW! It may take me years to take back all the trash talk I have had about Coal. Dirty, Dirtier, Dirtiest Coal… But no such think as Clean. Dr. Fan at Ohio State has pioneered the technology called Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL). This lab project has contained 99% of the carbon dioxide from coal. Well maybe. This will bear some watching as it moves…
Electric Fiat 500 rated at 116 mpg This is a pretty cool achievement. 87 mile range. More than 100 MPGe, but other cars do that as well. Marketed as “environmentally sexy”… !:) An issue, of course is how does the electricity get generated? Pretty cool though…
Taxes, This is No Laffing Matter… A general Republican philosophy is that cutting taxes will lead to increased investment, increased economic growth AND ultimately to increased tax revenue to the government. Empirical evidence, including the article(s) discussed here bear only part of that out. True, true and not necessarily true. Reducing taxes does increase the private sector investment and it does increase economic growth. The end result of this does not necessarily result in more…
