And face it with a grin, smilers never lose and frowners never win… Ok, silly song, but it always makes me smile. Other things that bring a smile to my face include writing with my partner (@We_Deny_Everything) because he  is meticulous, thorough, and a generally smart mo-fo. And economics, economics make me smile, especially when they are used to solve problems for things like energy AND poverty… My heart is singing this morning.

John provided a very detailed, accurate report on solar panels and heating. He broke down a usage chart, price per watt, and what you would need to power. The man is impressive. I will not offer that detailed information. You can find that article here: http://we-deny-everything.xanga.com/759666153/photovoltaic-dreams/?page=1&jump=1524763308&leftcmt=1#1524763308 .

 I was inspired to research solar costs recently after reading an article in “The Economist” called Starting From Scratch.  

The irony of living in a tropical paradise is the level of poverty. Not even a tropical paradise, but sunny and warm – perfect environment to tap into solar energy, but the costs are simply unattainable. Until now, that is. Eight19, a British company based in Cambridge, has begun a program to offer solar cells to rural, poor families in Kenya. It is an attempt to bring entire villages off grid combining solar and mobile phone technologies to work together. 

This is the program in a nutshell: 

Kenyans can receive a small solar cell that is able to generate 2.5 watts of electricity, a battery that can deliver a 3-amp current, and a lamp with an energy efficient light bulb. They can receive all of this for $10 down, which is not a small price in Kenya, whose average daily wage is $1.00 to $1.20. In Boulder, the area median income for a single person is $65,700, which would make average daily wage of approximately $127.00. That would make their $10.00 investment equal to an investment in boulder of $1,270.00, or slightly over 2/3 the price of average rents. OK, so that was a little off topic, but it is sometimes hard to compare costs in foreign places because we are unable to disassociate our own prices, costs, and wages from our home country. 

Once the battery is charged, it is able to light two small rooms and charge a mobile phone. They can set the cell out again the next day to recharge. This is a small cell, the starter level. In addition to the $10 deposit, the buyer must also buy a scratch card for about $1.00. There is a reference number on the card that the user texts into the company. Once a person buys approximately $80.00 worth of scratch cards (generally taking 18 months) the unit is theirs OR they can upgrade their equipment for a bigger model. That can power more things and longer. The choice is theirs. This is a reasonable, affordable and admirable way of offering energy to people who need it the most, can afford it the least, and are in the best position to tap into solar energy. In Kenya, the average customer spends $10 a year on paraffin to fuel lamps and $2 a month to charge their phones at the market. That would make the total cost of the solar unit $90 over 18 months, or $5 a month for power until the unit is owned. The savings in only paraffin and cell charging is $2.83 a month, leaving the monthly addition expense of $2.17, or approximately 2 days wages. In Boulder land, 2 days wages equal $250 a month, not chump change. After the unit is paid for, there is only the savings of $2.83 a month and no additional cost (if they choose not to upgrade). The additional charge for the unit above the savings totals $39.06 over 18 months. This means 13.8 months until break even and positive cash flow (actually not flow, just savings) and an improved quality of life. 

The company is expanding to all rural African areas and hoping to provide clean energy to 1.6 billion people. While popularity and usage increases and there is higher demand, the cost of solar technology will fall and become more affordable, efficient, and common. I can’t stand behind this company enough, and I know there are 50 more like this I haven’t heard of yet. 

Here in the states, a photovoltaic system as discussed in @We_Deny_Everything post averages $10,000.00 to $80,000.00. He has more accurate costs over there, but a simple run down of what this means to you is this: (I should add, this is ignoring tax incentives and grants available.)

1. Solar paneling saves at different rates, depending on where you live and what time of year it is. 

2. It saves 30 to 40 percent on your power bill immediately.

3. No maintenance costs.

4. In 6 to 12 years, your panels pay for themselves. 

5. Panels have a 25 to 30 year lifespan.

6. All of this averages to be a ROI (return on investment) of 8 to 16 percent. Wonder if that is good or not? Just look at the same data for your cute little hybrid SUV that makes you look so eco-cool.

Sorry, got off topic there for a minute. I am not and energy expert or environmental expert, but I can’t see how reducing our oil usage, providing power from an unlimited source, and making it affordable for everyone can go wrong. 

 

Sources:

The Economist – Starting from Scratch

www.env-econ.net

www.eight19.com

www.renewableenergyworld.com

 

 

My husband doesn’t usually read my posts, but he did read this one http://boulderchristina.xanga.com/759310849/beneath-the-neon-lights/ on homelessness. He is more sensitive than I am, and he wrote a poem about this. I am going to post it for him because he only uses blogging for work. Oh, and his name is Corey. Mr. Corey BoulderChristina. 

There’s an old man who doesn’t have a home the last time he did he didn’t live alone He met Joanne the day his mother died despite Joanne’s faults he tried and he tried Jojo got sick at 4 am three mornings in a row Then she confessed to him she’s gonna have a child not sure if it is his He loved Joanne so much he forgave her this     Are we responsible is it our fault There’s a man sleeping out on the asphalt living on borrowed money on borrowed time Hey there mister Can you spare a dime? I gotta call my girl she’s having a child I haven’t heard her voice In quite a long while   There’s an old man with a story to tell about a girl named Joanne who didn’t live so well She had a substance problem and a baby on the way but our man kept working fourteen hour days He was captured by her beauty held by her charm He came home from work to find a needle in her arm Jojo’s on the couch her skin cold as ice He looked unbelieving into her open eyes Then he picked up his bag and walked out of his home And ever since that day he’s always been alone Are we responsible is it our fault There’s a man sleeping out on the asphalt living on borrowed money on borrowed time Hey there mister Can you spare a dime? I gotta call my girl she’s having a child I haven’t heard her voice In quite a long while    There’s an old man  living out on the street  A handful of change  will feed him for a week  His mind is trapped in a time  when things were cheaper  for an hour and a dime  He’ll have you thinking deeper  about what its like  to live a life that rough  sleeping out in the open  where people steal your stuff  What would it be like  to never escape  an event in your life  to much for you to take    Are we responsible  is it our fault  There’s a man sleeping  out on the asphalt  living on borrowed money  on borrowed time  Hey there mister  Can you spare a dime?  I gotta call my girl  she’s having a child  I haven’t heard her voice  In quite a long while

 

Obviously, he is much more poetic than I am. I love that about him. Here he is on our wedding day, isn’t he classy?

Monogamy is found in less than 3 to 5 percent of all living creatures. Some included on the list are wolves, beavers, eagles, and gibbons. Gibbons are the most closely related to humans genetically, of course. Gibbons have men and women that are about equal size, and biologically on pretty equal footing.

The study I read was about Prairie Voles. They are lifelong monogamous partners and researchers have been studying what is in their biology and genes to cause the difference in sexual and social behavior between them and their close relatives. 

“Why has so much scientific study been devoted to monogamy in voles? Because it’s possible that what goes on in their genes, brains, and nests resembles what goes on in the genes, brains, and bedrooms of human beings. “Mammalian species share many similarities in terms of their physiology, anatomy, and behavior,” says Zuoxin Wang, who studies the changes that mating brings about in the vole nervous system. “Particularly if you look at dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin—it has been demonstrated that they play an important role in human society; for instance, in love, social attachment, and reward. So there are great similarities between voles and humans.” (Nationalzoo.si.edu)

This is a fascinating subject and there is a wealth of information for you to peruse through, but the summation of the study is that mammals with high levels of vasopressin (in men)  particularly are monogamous. This is not the only hormone, and if you choose to look into it you will see that other hormones, oxytocin (the cuddling hormone) in particular, play a big role. 

There have been reports about human monogamous behavior studies that appear to be less than scientific. One “article” I ran across on the internet suggested that beautiful women are women with higher levels of estrogen, and have an hourglass figure. These same women are more likely to trade up their partners for new and better partners because of a high level of oestradial hormones. I am not sure I buy that one. People are using this hormonal monogamous behavior to sing for their own causes. There are religious articles stating we have these hormones because God gave them to us, there are other sites stating cheating is not my fault, it’s biology. 

I am curious about this subject because they are doing some research about these hormones and how they are lower in autistic children. If somehow they were able to have an increase in the hormone levels they may be able to make human attachments more easily. I am excited to see what the studies find and the developments are for this, but I fear more sinister results will come from this type of research. 

I keep hearing in my head infomercials for “Love Potion #9 – say goodbye to the  date rape drug and hello to Love Potion #9, the newest breakthrough in making him all yours! Simply spike a little in his drink, spend some time and VIOLA! He is yours for life.”  Ok, maybe this will never happen, but you can’t say it’s impossible. 

There are also different levels of monogamy in the animal kingdom. There is social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and serial monogamy. Social monogamy is having a single mate, but sexual infidelity, much like humans. Sexual monogamy is just that, sexual monogamy and serial monogamy is monogamous for now. Emperor   Penguins and my 21 year old daughter display this behavior, one at a time, but not forever. 

No idea why I started reading about this today, but it killed an hour of my productive time. Thank goodness Xanga  offers me a place to write about the weird shit that comes into my head.

 

I read an article recently in TIME magazine titled “Head in the Clouds”. It was a great article and pointed out how our memory is different than it used to be. Previously we needed to retain information and knowledge we read and heard, such as remembering or writing down an address from a phone book to a place we are visiting, or what various organs in our body did and how that serves us. 

Everything is digital now. We live in a world of information that is free and readily available. I no longer need to look up an address, I can punch the address or even the business name into my phone or Garmin and it will guide me. I do not need to remember the rules of fractions when calculating sales prices, I can punch it in. If I can’t remember the name of a movie or actor, I can use IMDB from my phone app and look as if I knew it all along. I only need to remember and store how and where I found this information so I can go back to it. 

This frees up a lot of memory for me. I do not have to memorize much or worry about on the spot regurgitation to look smart or educated. When I know information is free, accessible, and at my fingertips I do not need to make the conscious effort to store it. What this doesn’t help with is higher level thinking skills. It doesn’t help me to learn to be a critical thinker, or use my imagination, or learn how to solve complex problems. Though I have a world of information that nobody could ever have dreamed of 100 years ago at the tips of my fingers, I don’t believe I have exercised my brain enough to be as skilled a thinker as I could have.

I am always plugged in. I am a hippie in a sense, I love nature, green technology, peace, love and the “natural way” of doing things. But I am never far from my information. My Iphone, laptop, Garmin, Ipod (when I am hiking and do not want to risk my phone) and Kindle accompany me at all times. I even get more than a little irritated when I have my Kindle somewhere where I have to ask for the network key to connect to the internet. I mean, I don’t want to have to wait until I get home for my magazines to download. 

What would I do if something happened, and there was no longer a grid to rely on? What if I had to go back to books with paper? How would I ever get around Denver? Am I capable of retaining information anymore, or has my brain gone soft? I see many people talking about going off the grid, but I think I am too old and my brain is spongy. 

Google, don’t fail me now.

I am watching all the Lonesome Dove I can this week (thanks for the suggestion @Bricker59 ) and there is one part that chokes me up every time I watch it. (Spoiler alert) Gus, the most lovable character, refuses to give up his legs and ultimately gives up his life. 

I wonder about our right to die. In college I did a study on physician assisted suicide, this was around the Kevorkian days. This was also before I had a terminally ill child. My view was that a person could not exercise their right to die due to a multitude of factors, including mental health and awareness, too much physician power, slippery slope. Then I had a child with terminal cancer. I made a decision in the final year of her life to no longer aggressively treat her disease, rather to mildly attack her disease and preserve her quality of life. There was a possibility that with more aggressive and experimental treatments, she may have gone into remission.  The possibility was slim, less than .5 percent, but it was there. Rather than proceeding with an aggressive, painful and low odds treatment plan, I chose a mild plan, fewer surgeries, no more radiation, no more bone marrow transplants. She could keep her hair and not be so immuno-suppressed that she spent most of her time in the hospital. This was a parent exercising their right to let go. 

Hospice is also an organization that exercises palliative care. They offer comfort and pain management to terminally ill. They work with the family or the patient directly to determine how aggressively to treat anything, such as whether or not to administer antibiotics for infection. 

Patients and families have the right to determine medical care and treatments, but physician assisted suicide is still illegal. I can see the argument against it, I was against it once, myself. As I grow older and have seen and heard of different scenarios, this is no longer a black and white issue. Everything is a shade of grey. I can refuse food and drink, create a living will refusing this treatment, but I will have to suffer much before I can find relief in death. I have trouble seeing how that is more humane and a better option than euthanasia. 

In surveys it has been noted that 2/3 of the American public agree that physician assisted suicide should be an option for terminally ill patients with intractable suffering. When this comes to a vote, it is more divided 50/50. This I do not understand. Doing a bit of research, this is what I found:

“In the United States, most jurisdictions have prohibited physician assisted death either with specific statutory provisions or judicial applications of more general statutes. There have been attempts to change the law using several methods:

• Legal challenges to the constitutionality of the prohibitions, including two Supreme Court cases heard together (Washington v. Glucksberg and Quill v. Vacco).
• State referenda; while several challenges to prohibitions on physician-assisted death failed, Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act was passed in 1995 and has survived a variety of legal challenges.

• Civil disobedience, in which physicians admitted to breaking the law, thereby challenging the legal and professional systems to come to grips with the inequities of the secret practice.”

-The Hastings Center

Why is this still such an issue? Why do we allow people to suffer and watch their loved ones suffer needlessly?

 

I do not intend to make this a political or religious issue, but it may inevitable turn into one. I would like to hear anyone’s thoughts on this, provided they do not attack other commenters.

I hope with all of my heart that when my time comes I am able to make choices that can ease my suffering and the burden of my loved ones watching me suffer. Funny how time changes my opinions.

 

 

(Time stamped and edited, I really shouldn’t try to write at night, I don’t pay enough attention.)

 

Anybody that knows me well knows that I am a bit of an economics freak. I love them. I fell in love with Muhammad Yunus in 2006 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the bank he founded, Grameen Bank. I will post a full blog on him someday, as he is one of my heroes, but for the purpose of this post just know he was a pioneer in microfinance. 

The economy is suffering here. Job growth is slow, unemployment is high. It is hard to feel secure with the job you have (if you have one) and terrifying to think of becoming an entrepreneur. The cost of starting a business and the uncertainty of the lending environment is a huge risk that many of our best and brightest will not take. What a loss of creativity, intellect, and new ideas for our nation.

Times, they are a changing. There are new programs to help foster and fund ideas. Games, products, movie ideas, musicians, you name it. You can fund it all if you have a good business plan and a great idea. Who is going to fund your idea? Your peers, or other like minded people that have an interest in your product or idea.  Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com) is an organization that connects budding and potential entrepreneurs with potential funders. I have seen game ideas be proposed with a budget of $15,000.00 raise nearly $200,000.00. You can also fund other entrepreneurs, and will only be charged if the project you support reaches its goal. For example; you see a cool game idea and would like to buy one, provided it can be funded. You can choose to fund as little as $5.00 – there are incentives to fund, such as the first 100 people to fund $5.00 will receive a copy of the game. That’s a bargain if you really want that game. 

Everybody has a book to write. With the increasing popularity of e-readers, more and more authors are writing their book, self publishing, and selling digital copies (only) to see if they can build a following and send their book to print. Amazon has done so much to promote e-readers and e-book formats that you can find and buy new authors and new books for as little as $1.00. I love to read and discover new authors, so this is a bargain for me. Enough curious readers purchase a new book, and the author has the funding needed to print. 

Want to further your education? Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are a new and growing form of education. These are free, web based courses that are evidence based education. For example, if I take a MOOC on subject X, I can use evidence to support that I have learned the material (there is a plethora of educational resources that are provided free to students including webinars, suggested readings, etc) and you are judged by your peers, not your instructors, whether or not you understand and comprehend the subject matter. This is new, controversial, and the jury is still out for most. Some professors are offering MOOCs and some field professionals are offering MOOCs. These courses are for the self directed learner, they are not structured or graded. Though these are not yet proven or popular, it is my personal prediction that as tuition costs rise and information is more freely available, in less than 20 years, people will be able to obtain their entire education with no money, just hard work, and have their work be recognized. I am working on my digital portfolio and will use this as a tool to offer any employer or potential client. 

Care to volunteer but don’t have the time? Are you a non profit that needs assistance? Sparked is an organization that connects volunteers to volunteer projects, local and international. You do not have to make a time commitment that is large or ongoing, you can choose to edit a video for a start up nonprofit, 2 hours of effort, and make a difference to whatever cause strikes your fancy. This is online micro volunteering.  My husband helped an organization in Kenya create their website, a few hours of programming, and they were up and running. He received thank you videos and recognition, made a difference, and gave up enough time to watch a B-Rated movie. 

Times are tough, but we are tougher. If you have a dream, a wish, a desire to better yourself or the world around you, you can do it. Just get off your ass for an hour a week and do something that pushes you towards your dream, and you can make it come true.