March 2010 Archives

Then click here!

And here!

But do not click here. Just don't do it.

Oh god, you did it! No! Click here before its too late!

Phew. That was close.

The camera holds frame as a tall, dark man in a cowboy hat and boots walks away from us, as if he's stepping into the frame out of another picture entirely. The edges of the screen fill in with the scene around him: a South Beach pool party scene straight out of a Michael Bay movie. We follow him across the pool, cowboy boots smacking against the concrete. He sits down across from another dark man, this one slicked back and slippery. The slick man looks nervous but tries to hide it as the cowboy approaches. He invites the cowboy to join him for lunch.

The cowboy tells him there is still time. He's given the slick man 24 hours to leave town, and he's still got two minutes left. But if Slick is still in town when the 24 hours are up, he'll shoot him on sight.

I don't think I've ever been hooked on a television series faster than I was in those two minutes.

Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who starts out of the Miami office, but quickly finds himself transferred to Kentucky near the town where he grew up.
That first scene is out of a different, but equally fascinating show. It would have been  a twist on the fish out of water: Marshall Givens might look like he's out of place, but his supreme cool tells us the real story: he isn't a fish out of water. He's still in the water, and everybody else has been thrown in there with him.  It was not to be: Givens is not long for Miami, and finds himself back in his old Kentucky home before the second act of the pilot. Before the first hour is through, he'll once again find himself in a showdown facing a deadline to leave town.

I've seen Olyphant in a few roles - about 15 minutes of that video game adaptation where he is bald, the ineffective villain in Live Free or Die Hard - and never felt I'd seen him in anything that suited him. That is, until I saw him in a cowboy hat.

The Suze and I spent some of our Saturday at the Bayou City Arts Festival in Memorial Park in Houston. For the most part, if you've been to one arts festival, you've been to them all: its all jewelry makers, photographers who all seem to have been out shooting in the same part of Italy during the same sunset, and creepy bearded dudes playing New Age-y versions of 80s pop hits on 16 string guitars. I went because it was outdoors in the Spring, and it was an excuse to eat a gyro sold to me by a man in a tent. I never intended to actually buy anything there.

So how did this guy end up in my house?

Well, the obvious answer is, because it is AWESOME. The creator of these guys, Fred Conlon, calls them Gnome-B-Gones, and he has a whole line of these characters he sells on his website, Sugar Post. Here's a little one for your fridge. Here's one with a baseball. And here is a freaky awesome spider.

Wondering what the hoop is about in the figure above? It's a wine holder!!

GLUG GLUG GLUG. Suzi got one for her desk at work, too. Well, not a wine one.

Here's the email I got the next day: "You know what's even better than putting a pen in his hand? EXACTO KNIFE."

Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.

The California utility commission has created a program where the renewable energy producer who offers the lowest sales price for renewable energy will be guaranteed that price throughout the life of the contract. This price will still be higher than the going rate for electricity on the open market. What does the difference between the renewable energy price and the regular energy price tell us, and how can it be applied to a cap and trade system?

Let's take the concept of the California program and move it to an electricity market I know a little more about, Houston. Clearly, the point of the program is to incentivize the generation of renewable electricity. But the same goal could be achieved by taxing electricity that generates carbon. If we assume that the price of electricity is 10 cents/kWh, and the renewable feed-in tariff will be 2 cents/kWh, then we could achieve the same goal of promoting renewable power by levying a tax on non-renewable power. As long as the tax was higher than 2 cents, it would be cheaper to purchase the renewable energy.

Every area has its own mix of power sources: coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, and renewable. The particular mix of power sources will dictate how much carbon is in the baseline available electricity. In Harris County, an average 1000 kWh of electricity produces 990 lbs of CO2. Or, to flip it: 1 ton of CO2 is generated by 2,018 kWh of electricity.

The program with my assumed prices (we don't actually know what the premium for renewables will be yet) is that the carbon-free power costs 2 cents more per kWh, then we have learned that the externality cost of a ton of CO2 is approximately $40.

Now here's the problem with a feed-in tariff: it affects producer behavior but not consumer. The utility commission will raise the money to pay the feed-in tariff by charging all of its customers a fee. It is, essentially, a small carbon tax.

Why not bypass the whole feed-in tariff concept and begin taxing carbon directly? A true carbon tax can incentivize not just renewable energy, but all kinds of steps to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon can be reduced through use of renewable energy, but also cleaner fossil fuels and carbon capture. Carbon reduction programs should be technology neutral.

Feed-in tariffs require regulatory agencies to pick winners and losers in technology. Cap and trade (which is really just another word for carbon tax) would allow innovation in any number of technologies, and let the market decide which one was best.

After a particularly good play in a game of Scrabble, a certain someone I know - for the sake of anonymity we'll call her "Moozie" - will exclaim that I am autistic. "You are so autistic!" She means it as a compliment, I guess. Its not her fault. Rain Man made it seem like autism was some kind of super power.

But could she be right? 1.4 million people submitted NCAA brackets to ESPN.com, and through the first two rounds, guess how many of them are perfect? Zero. But on CBSSports.com, somebody does have a perfect bracket. Kansas getting upset in round 2? Called it. Cornell into the Sweet 16? Nailed it. Here's your headline: "The perfect bracket: Autistic teen from Chicago area nails the first two rounds".

If there was ever proof that I'm not autistic, Moozie, its this NCAA tournament. Not only did I not call Kansas getting upset in round 2, but I picked them to be my national champion. Through two rounds, I've got 29 of 48 picks correct. But in the OC Bracket Challenge, where people either listened to my advice or are even less autistic than I am, that's good enough for 4th place out of 12. Here's the Sweet Sixteen update:

Tier 5: I swear we're not related

Rose, 56 potential points

Currently in 3rd place, but its going to be tough to get any more points with all of your Final Four picks already out of the tournament.

Tier 4: Sorry about that national champion pick, everybody

Krun, 90 potential points
Greg, 91
Jesse, 98
Randy, 101
Elisa, 101

Guess what everybody in this group has in common? Hint: it rhymes with Mansas.

Tier 3: Waiting to strike

Bolts, 109 potential points
The Suze, 111
Sam, 112
Jim, 112

Tightly packed, this group needs one of the leaders to slip up to make a charge. The most daring of this group was The Suze, who, in an attempt to not follow any of my advice (including that you should start your bracket by picking a champion), has not picked a winner for her bracket. If I had tickets to the NCAA championship game this year, I would be very afraid.

Tier 2: The Contender

Judy, 126 potential points

Currently tied for 4th, Judy has the second highest potential point total. His surest route to victory is a Syracuse championship. But he currently has a sizable lead on...

Tier 1: The Favorite?

Daytrader, 139 potential points

By far the highest potential total. But currently? Only 31 points, which is tied for last. But with 3/4 Final Four and 5/8 Elite Eight teams left, still plenty of opportunity to climb up the leaderboard. And the jerk didn't listen to my advice. He didn't even have Kansas in the title game! What nerve.

Being an advocate for mass transit is tough these days in Houston. It was always going to be an uphill battle in a city whose largest local industry is Big Oil, but its much harder when the agency in charge of developing transit strategies for the city is... well, let's just say that if you told me Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown had taken over Metro after he was done with FEMA, I'd say, "Well done sir! Hilarious juxtaposition of the thousands dead in New Orleans with the poor job being done running Houston's mass transit authority."

Here's what sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: "So a Metro Bus and a Metro Train are entering the same intersection..." I'll give away the ending. It ends in a bang. Here's the surveillance footage:

Before I continue my comments on cap and trade and the externality costs of dirty power, I want to quickly address some points raised by a college friend of mine who now works in the nuclear industry. Scott Friend comments:

[You are] just hitting the two extremes of the spectrum: dirty coal, and clean solar, and it makes me wonder what your take is on how this legislation effects our other options.

I'll address two things separately. First: he is correct that I am just hitting the two extremes. That was done for simplicity of the analysis. What really happens is that the electricity being replaced by solar is not necessarily coal. Every local grid has its own mix of coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables. Depending on that mix, the electricity you consume has a different carbon impact. For example, if you live in Texas, then this website will tell you the emissions of the electricity you consume county by county.

Because of this and other factors, the externality cost that emerges from California's experiment will not be exactly applicable everywhere in the country. What California's program will do is provide a methodology by which the cost of carbon may be determined for areas around the US, and thus for various electricity generating technologies.

The "other options" Scott referred two fall into two categories: classical renewables (wind, solar, hydro) and nuclear. Classical renewables are not without their own environmental impacts: hydro alters the environment of native species, wind turbines can chop up a flock of birds faster than Capt. Sullenberger, and solar requires vast stretches of unoccupied land.

And nuclear can melt an entire city's face off. Now, lets be clear: there hasn't been a major nuclear accident in decades. In their own perverse way, the events of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were good for society. While those in the immediate area around those plants felt the consequences of those failures, they were object lessons in what not to do for the nuclear industry. There's a reason that there's been no release of radiation from a US plant since TMI. After you burn yourself a couple of times on a hot pot, you figure out how to use a potholder.

Unlike solar, nuclear plants does not need to be incentivized. If regulations were no obstacle, I'm sure nuclear plants would spring up around the country. In fact, its the opposite that is true: the customers need to be incentivized to allow nuclear power plants to be built in their area.

We already have the answer on how to do this. The feed-in tariff concept can go both ways: utilities could offer nuclear power plants permits in exchange for reduced energy costs. What if nuclear power cost 20% less? 40%? How low would a nuclear plant be willing to go? Let the market decide how much people think the risk of having your face melted is worth compared to the reduced cost of electricity.

The point is that carbon is not the only externality. The perceived safety of the power source is also a societal effect that could be, but currently is not, priced into power.

[You can find Dr. Bracketology's original Keys To The Tournament here.]

After last year's poor showing in the Advanced Bracketology pool, I decided it was time to revise my world famous Keys To The Tournament. And by poor showing, I mean dead last mother-goddamn-fucking-place, behind such luminaries of bracketology as my wife who had to be actively forced to sign up, my sister who names every entry into a sports betting pool as "i hate <name of sport>" and Jim, a man who willingly roots for Philadelphia sports teams.

Actually Sign Up For A Pool

Right? Cause otherwise, who gives a crap? Hey, ObscureBlog has a pool! Perhaps you'd like to join? Click here!

Start With An Actual Winner, Not A Team That's Going To Lose In The Goddamn Final Four

Last year, I advised you to start your pool off by picking a winner of the whole tournament. It remains good advice: the championship is worth as many points as the rest of the tournament combined. If you get that right, your odds of winning your pool are good.

Except that I didn't pick a champion last year. I picked Louisville, who choked and lost in the Final Four. So here's my advice: don't just pick any team to be the champion, pick the team that's actually going to win the tournament. Which, we all know, is going to be Kansas. YOU ARE WELCOME.

The Selection Committee Spends Half Its Time Picking Teams, And The Other Half Gently Tickling Duke's Taint

While the other #1 seeds have tough roads to the Final Four, Duke faces Mrs. Johnson's 4th period middle school gym class. Remember, with no North Carolina this year, Duke is the marquee team in the tournament. Pencil them in to a spot in Indy.

Pick A Conference

Every year, there is one conference where the level of competition is superior to others around the country. This year its the Big East. Conversely, there's a conference where the level of competition is equivalent to Mrs. Johnson's 4th period middle school gym class. That's the ACC. So what does that mean? It means expect West Virginia and Syracuse to make the Final 4, and look for Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, and Maryland to be upset early.

This Has All Happened Before, It Will Happen Again

The one prediction I made last year that worked out well was to look for upsets with teams that have done it before. Once again, look for Siena to pull the first round upset. Adding the wrinkle to look for upsets over teams that have been upset before, I also like Florida over last year's first round loser BYU, Gonzaga over Florida State, and Missouri over Clemson.

[If you haven't caught up with Lost, I discuss Season 6 up to this point, so spoilers for you. Also, I can't imagine why you'd give a crap about the rest of this post.]

Last week, one of Lost's long-standing mysteries was solved. A few years ago, there was a flashback involving Locke as a young boy. One of the Others, Richard, appeared at his home. Even though the flashback occurred some 30-odd years before we meet Richard on the Island, he looks exactly the same. He does not age. Is he immortal? If so, why? And how did he come to be on the Island? Last week, we got the answers. They are: sort of, Jacob, and he was a slave on the Black Rock. He can die, but not by his own hand. Someone else must kill him.

Reading the comments section on some Lost commentary the next day because I'm a huge nerd, somebody made this connection: remember when Michael couldn't die back in Season 4? The "why" of that was seemingly never resolved. Except now it has, right? Jacob must have granted him the same gift of sorta immortality that he gave to Richard.

Now here's the problem: I'd completely forgotten that was a question to begin with. I barely remember that Michael was even a character. Nevermind that he had tried and failed to kill himself multiple times, and seemingly couldn't die.

The general feeling about this season of Lost is that we have five seasons worth of questions, and its time to start dealing out some answers. This manifests itself as a general uneasiness about the direction of the show. I don't feel like I'm getting the resolution I want. Except, maybe I am. Maybe the real problem is Lost has been so dense and so confusing for so long, that I can't even remember the questions I want answers to. Are there other things that I missed? When I rewatch the series from beginning to end after it concludes, will it all make sense? I don't even know.

I'm still enjoying the show. The general air of confusion and not understanding is part of the Lost experience, one I've come to accept at this point. But because I am not a Lost scholar, and don't remember every loose plot thread - I only remember that they once existed - I wonder if this final season can't help but be a disappointment.

Click here for part one.

Last time, we talked about externalities, and how they apply to environmental policy. The short version: activities which pollute have an adverse effect, and thus a cost, to society. Those costs are not incorporated into the cost of the polluting activity, i.e. electricity that pollutes costs the same as electricity that doesn't. A price which incorporated externalities would allow the market to decide whether or not the polluting activity was a better choice. How to incorporate the cost of these externalities on electricity pricing? It is perhaps an unimaginative answer to say the government must impose them, but can you think of a better way?

Once we come to the conclusion that the externality costs of pollution should be incorporated into electricity costs, we must now answer a difficult question, that is, the monetary cost of the externality. When a kWh of electricity produced from coal is concerned, how much worse off is society? Two cents? Ten cents? Am I asking alot of questions? Sorry. Here come some answers.

Put yourself in the place of a power producer. You are considering expanding your business and making more power. You will sell your electricity on the open market, which currently has a value of $0.10 cents. You have the option of building a coal power plant or a solar power plant. The coal plant will pollute, but costs less. You build a coal plant.

Now, perhaps you are in an area where the utility is considering a feed-in tariff. The feed-in tariff will guarantee you a higher price for electricity than you would get for your coal power. (Feed-in tariffs are why Germany is a world leader is solar, despite a rather poor climate for sunshine.) In the classical feed-in tariff situation, the tariff is set by the utility. Under this situation, there are two possible outcomes. Either the tariff is too low, and you decide to build a coal plant, or the tariff is too high, and you build the solar plant, but the system is inefficient (there is a price at which you would have still built the solar farm, which is the outcome I wanted, but I would have had money left over to pay someone else to also build a solar farm.)

Enter the California Public Utilities Commission and their reverse auction proposal. The commission will set the feed-in tariff at the lowest price that a utility is willing to sell solar power. In other words, they will let the market decide what the actual value of the externality price is!

There are two exciting results from this proposal. The first, obviously, is that more solar power will be built in California, which will reduce pollution and spur the growth of the alternative power market. The second is that we will have an answer from a free market that tell us exactly what the externality price of pollution is.

How does this result potentially apply to cap and trade? Stay tuned to part 3.

Sitting right behind health care on the President's agenda is climate change legislation. Any meaningful change will take one of two forms: either cap and trade or a carbon tax. Republicans will attack this bill as raising taxes on working American families. And, in a very real sense, they will be right.

Ask yourself a question: why do we use fossil fuels now? Why doesn't everybody have solar panels and wind turbines? Cost, as always, is the answer. Energy from fossil fuels is cheaper to generate than energy from the sun. Yes, the fuel for solar energy is "free", but the cost of generation doesn't just include the raw fuel, but also the capital cost of the generation equipment. A typical coal power plant is a Kia, and solar panels are, say, a Jaguar. Or, if you prefer irony, a Hummer.

If the government wants to incentivize the purchase of green energy, then they either need to increase the cost of dirty power or reduce the cost of clean power to level the playing field. There are three mechanisms that they can use:

1)    Reduce the cost of the generation equipment with subsidies.
2)    Provide subsidies for the production of alternative power, increasing its value relative to dirty power.
3)    Increase the cost of dirty power through taxes.

That's it. Those are the variables that can be modified by the government. Either cap and trade or a carbon tax fall into category 3. In order for carbon to actually be reduced, the cost of carbon must increase until clean generation is cheaper.

Let me quickly address some typical complaints. First, liberals: "People are installing solar power right now! Why can't we all just do the right thing. No, not smash pizzeria windows with garbage cans. Why can't we all just buy solar panels and hold hands and make the world a better place?"

To which I reply, shut your pie hole, hippie. That's not how the world works. If you are willing to pay more for solar power than for dirty coal, then that's a luxury expense. If you can afford it, and that's how you want to spend your money, then you are free to do so. But people who can't afford it, or, more importantly, businesses that have to keep their prices low to remain competitive, won't impose this cost on themselves.

And conservatives: "It isn't the government's role to take MY money and give it to some hippies who want solar panels. I should be able to purchase whatever power is cheapest and let the market dictate whether or not alternative power should survive."

And I almost agree with that point of view, except that the current market evaluation ignores part of the cost of that cheap dirty power. Tim Harford, the official economist of ObscureCraft (since he is the only one I have read) talks in his book, The Undercover Economist, about the cost of externalities. The example he uses is driving. When I drive, there is a tangible cost to me: the purchase of the car, the maintenance, the gas, and the taxes. But when I drive, I impose on others. I clog up the streets, I help create traffic, I emit pollution, and sometimes (all the time) I drive like a total asshole. Each of those actions has a cost to others. Pedestrians and bicyclists are less safe, ice caps melt a little bit more, noise, etc. Clearly I am making other people less well off than they would have been if I didn't drive. I have therefore created a cost to them that I am not paying. This is called an externality cost.

In the example of power, the dirty power has an externality cost in climate change, the consumption of finite natural resources, and the global social cost of sustaining petro-dictatorships, to name a few examples. But these externalities are not built into the cost of dirty power. If we truly accounted for the full cost of dirty power, there's a good chance that renewable energy would come out ahead.

Climate change legislation will raise taxes on working families. It will increase the cost of dirty power until it becomes cheaper to buy clean power. That is what it must do to have any effect. But the extra cost for dirty power is a tangible representation of the externality cost we are already paying.

Actually valuing these externalities is one of the hardest questions in economics. In part 2, I'll talk about a California program that might have come up with an answer.

The greatest poster from one of the coolest poster shows I've ever seen. It will be one of the great tragedies of my life that this poster sold out before I could possess it.

If health care doesn't make it through congress, you can probably blame/thank (depending on your point of view) Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich) for voting against it and potentially taking a dozen other Democrats with him. Stupak and his like minded cohort are hung up on the issue of abortion. Specifically, government funding for abortion.

Follow along: if the government subsidizes your health care, and your health care provider subsidizes abortions, and somebody with that same health care provider gets an abortion, than the government paid for an abortion. Got it?

Stupak wants to make any health care provider that provides coverage for abortions ineligible for subsidy payments. This means that anybody who gets government subsidies (read: poor people) will not have their abortions covered by their insurance.

Complicated, right? Issues of abortion and poverty and government policy all wrapped up in one distasteful political mess. Allow me to make it more complicated for you by asking this question: what is the cost of an abortion, anyway?

Here's the dirty little secret of the insurance industry (okay, well, not THE dirty little secret, one of probably countless dirty little secrets, each one filthier and more vile than the last, but whatever): its cheaper to pay for an abortion than for a delivery. And its not even close. A first trimester abortion costs ten times less than an actual baby.

There's a concept in financing called capital offset, where the cost of an upgrade is not compared against spending zero dollars, but instead is compared against some minimum amount you have to spend anyway. If you have a house, you aren't necessarily going to run out a buy a new water heater because the one you have is inefficient. However, if the water heater explodes, you have to buy one anyway, so now you can look at the cost of the cheapest available water heater as a capital offset towards the purchase of a new one.

Well, once you get pregnant, should the cost of an abortion be compared against zero? Or is your water heater already broken? That baby is coming out one way or the other. What does it mean to "pay" for an abortion when abortions cost less than the alternative?

Before the results, some quick hit observations from last night's show:

My side bet with Jim on who would be the last man in the "In Memoriam" package was lost on a technicality: John Hughes didn't get included because he got his own segment.

Although I don't think anybody had Karl Malden slotted into the final slot. That was the upset of the night.

One more "In Memoriam" observation: whither Farrah Fawcett?

Okay, one more "In Memoriam" observation: what does it say about the show that the most second-most talked about segment was clips of dead people? They should have added "Interest in the Oscar telecast" to the reel after last night's snooze-fest.

Literally. Suzi was snoozing.

The most talked about segment, of course, was the director of the winner for documentary short getting Kanye'd by his producer. The fascinating backstory: they ended up suing each other over control of the film, she took her name off of it, and they haven't spoken in two years.

That link via Roger Ebert's twitter feed, as are all links on the internet these days. Honestly, I don't think the man sleeps.

Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin as co-hosts was a seemingly good idea that went horribly wrong, like a fall season of "So You Think You Can Dance."

Speaking of which: was I the only one playing the "spot that SYTYCD alum" during the musical score dance montage? I was?

This year's pool had 15 participants. Some interesting trends I noticed:

There was one 0/15 category (doc short) and one 15/15 category (animated feature).

According to our group, the biggest upset of the night was a tie between Inglourious Basterds losing Original Screenplay to The Hurt Locker (12/15 picked Basterds, only 1 vote for THL) and A Matter of Loaf and Death losing Animated Short to Logorama (12/15 for Loaf, 1 vote for Logorama).

Awards for Special Achievement in Prognosticating are given out to anybody who is the only participate to get a category correct. This years winners are:

Steph for selecting Logorama in Animated Short.
Melissa for selecting The New Tenants in Live Action Short.
Greg for selecting The Hurt Locker in Original Screenplay.
Matt for selecting The Secret In Their Eyes for Foreign Film.

Enough foreplay! On with the winners!

[The thrilling conclusion! To participate in this year's ObscureCraft Oscar Pool, email your own picks to craftj2@gmail.com. The rules are here. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. And here's part four. And, for the love of Christ, here is part five.]

Jesse's take

Best Picture

Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Token, A Serious Man, Up, Up In The Air

Jim, I know nobody reads this blog, but the expansion of the Best Picture category from 5 movies to 10 almost feels like a direct response to our discussion last year. If I may briefly jog your memory of a time long, long ago in an email conversation far away: last year, the 5 nominees were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire. This group left what seemed to be an egregious number of snubs, including well-received box office smashes that people could root for like The Dark Knight and WALL-E, as well as smaller films that maybe didn't get the love they deserved like The Wrestler (I say maybe because I never saw it; I know you'll go to your death bed ranting about this snub).

I wasn't necessarily arguing for an expansion of the category; I was just lamenting that the list of worthy snubs was especially long. But when I first heard about the move from 5 films to 10, I was prepared to defend it. Think about it: the BAFTAs nominate 10 films. Every film critic on Earth publishes a Top 10 list at the end of the year. 10 seemed like a good change. And then I saw this list.

Much like how a sculptor can look into a piece of marble and see the shape he wants to create, I can look at this list of 10 and find the 5 "correct" Best Picture nominees and the 5 that are padding. Under last year's rules, here's how it goes down: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Token, and Up In The Air are nominated; I bitch about Up getting snubbed because it was animated; and that's it. This category is more padded than a mall Santa.

So, which is it: right idea, wrong year? Or wrong idea in any year?

And now for something completely different: actual useful information!

As a professional in the alternative energy business, part of my job is to keep informed on all the incentives available to help pay for the projects we do. While doing the rounds today, two things occurred to me:

1. There sure are alot of incentives available for residential projects.
2. I bet nobody knows about any of these.

Here's an example I sent to my sister today. College Station Utilities will give you up to $600 to purchase a more efficient air conditioning system for your house. Or, for any of my friends still living in New Jersey, PSE&G offers low interest loans to pay for 40-60% of a new behind-the-meter PV system. 

So here's my helpful tip for the day. Go to dsireusa.org and look for incentives available in your location to help you pay for solar power and energy efficiency, and get some of those America-ruining stimulus deficit communist dollars for youself.

 

Tricksy hobbitses.

Vanishing Point! Celebrities! Bobby Womack! Robots!  The first single off upcoming "Plastic Beach" debuted today in HD on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9vAOzYz-Qs

It's not "Clint Eastwood" or "Feel Good Inc", but pretty decent.

The rest of the album, released next Tuesday, is also streamable in full from NPR here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124114812

No, this is not a headline I wrote just to see if I could get Kevin's head would explode. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) made headlines over the weekend by objecting to the senate's attempts to extend, among other things, unemployment benefits and some infrastructure projects originally funded as part of the stimulus bill. I'll let the Daily Show explain:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Senate After Dark
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Here is where I disagree with Bunning, and Republicans in general: while in control of Congress and the White House for 6 years (2000-2006), you could have given two fucks about balancing the budget. Instead, you turned a budget surplus into the biggest deficit in history, and now you're all, "Oh, we can't afford to give unemployed people benefits or sick people health care, because the deficit is too big." Fuck you, you bunch of hypocrites.

But if I'm going to call hypocrisy on the Republicans, then fair is fair: nobody forced you to pass Pay As You Go legislation, Democrats. You decided that you wanted to play politics with the Republicans and the Tea Partiers and all their bellyaching about the deficit. Maybe it was stupid, but you did it. Now to just take every piece of legislation, slap the word "emergency" on it, and pass it anyway is to be just as hypocritical as the Republicans. This is why people hate politicians. This is why people say you all suck. Because when it comes right down to it, you all do.

Jesse and Jim will be making their picks for every Oscar. To participate in this year's ObscureCraft Oscar Pool, email your own picks to craftj2@gmail.com. The rules are here. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. And here's part four.]

Jesse's take

Best Actress in A Leading Role

Nominees: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Token), Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)

Remember when I said there was only one competitive acting award on the night? Well, this is it. I do not know what to make of this field. I'm trying to narrow it down, and here's what I keep coming back to:

If this was Best Supporting Actress, I would definitely pick Sandra Bullock, because that category is notoriously ridiculous. But the love for The Blind Side, which just looks awful, continues to baffle me. So she's out.

Helen Mirren is definitely a GMILF, but even if everybody in the entire country who had seen this movie, not just Academy voters, but EVERYBODY, voted for Helen Mirren, I still think she would get, like, 8 votes. So she's out.

Meryl Streep is a legit dark horse candidate. This is how every review of Julie and Julia went: "Half the movie was a wonderfully acted biopic about Julia Child with an incredible performance by Meryl Streep, and the other half was spent wondering why I give a fuck about some lady who had a blog and waiting for Meryl Streep to come back." Meryl, as always, owns. Also a GMILF, even if I'd only do it to make you jealous.

Gabourey Sidibe is just happy to be nominated.

Carey Mulligan... can you think of a reason why she can't win? True, much like Helen Mirren, not many people saw An Education, but it was more than 8. For some reason, I keep coming back to her, only because I can't think of a reason to eliminate her.

It's a wide open category, so I'm going out on a limb. And if Sandra Bullock wins for The Blind Side, then I guess we just chalk that up to the "career achievement" award category. She was, after all, great in Speed. And Demolition Man. And Speed 2. (Seriously, how is she nominated again?)

Winner: Carey Mulligan (An Education)