Do the Math

September 29. 2008 by Dick.

Lordy Lordy™. Do the math, people.

Oh.

Wait.

It isn’t math. It’s simple arithmetic.

Under the subject line, A Bail Out Plan That Works, I’ve been subjected to about 14 repeats today alone of the following bright idea:

I’m against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG.

Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in “We Deserve It Dividend.”

To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a “We Deserve It Dividend” …

It goes on from there.

I’m all for giving $700,000,000,000 to individual Americans in “We Deserve It” dividends (as long as it’s your money) but do the math, people.

85 billion dollare:	$85,ØØØ,ØØØ,ØØØ
divided by 200 million peeps	2ØØ,ØØØ,ØØØ
=	$425 per person

Maybe we should put the $85 million into our elementary schools instead of Wall Street.

---

And speaking of Wall Street, the yahoos in Congress blocked the bailout today (September 29, 2008).The DOW is down about 777 points, the largest one day point drop ever. Anybody want to guess how many Congress Critters are buying stock right now because they know, absolutely know, the market will soar when the package passes.Wouldn’t you? After all, we’re talking more than 10% right now for a few days “work.”

I love politics. It is so enriching.

Congress wants to make sure nobody on Wall Street gets rewarded for this mess. Do you suppose we could take away Congress’ parachutes and severance?

Lordy Lordy™.

Posted in Stupidity, Banking, Society, Politics, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | No Comments »

RIP, PL

September 29. 2008 by Dick.

I don’t care what “they” say at funerals. Losing a family member or a close friend is not a cause for celebration; it’s a time to fill up the hole left in our lives when all we have are memories.

Paul Newman wanted to be remembered as a racer who supported his habit by acting. He died last Friday at 83 after a battle with cancer.

Darn it, that’s like losing a friend who really made it.

We feel that way when a popular actor dies. We invite great actors and writers into our homes and our thoughts and our lives in a way we would never do with an acquaintance down the street. We often spend more time with them and they stay in our memory longer than people we work with or even our real life friends.

“No, it IS losing a friend who really made it,” my real friend “Lido” said. “You just hadn’t seen him in the last 32 years.”

Well, sort of. We had more of a relationship with PLN than he did with us. See I started driving race cars a year or so after he did. We drove the same tracks at the same times but rarely in the same class. We rubbed elbows and he even helped push my car in the pits. We shared a favorite track (Lime Rock) where he ran some hot laps just this past August. He was always a better driver than almost anyone else I know.

But he would have known me in Nomex, not in street clothes. I would have known him anywhere.

The Oscar-winning actor was intensely private in public but he never played the part of a celebrity at the racetrack. He didn’t play any part there. He was not just there for his good looks. He was a driver

P. L. Newman drove Bob Sharp’s Datsuns in SCCA and in the under 2-liter Trans Am but he won his first race at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut in a Lotus. I may have driven that race in what was then my E-Production TR-4. I went on to muddle about in Camaros in A-Sedan and GT-1 although I came back to the Triumph a couple of times and even drove a Lotus Formula C. He went on to drive B-Sedan, C- and D-Production, and GT-1, a Porsche 935 at LeMans, an assortment of Corvettes, and a Mustang in GTS at the 24 Hours of Daytona.

“If he had started younger,” Bob Sharp said, “he would have been World Champion.” He was simply that good a driver.

It has been a bad year for racing. Phil Hill, our only American-born Formula One champion, died in August. Watkins Glen founder Cam Argetsinger died in April. Jimmy Stewart, who carried the Scottish flag against Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorne and Juan Manuel Fangio and who inspired his little brother Jackie to go racing, died in January.

I don’t feel the same sense of personal loss about them. See, I didn’t know them.

Paul Newman was one of the good guys. My c.1974 race at Bryar (now New Hampshire Motor Speedway) was red flagged and the entire pack was diverted to sit in the pit lane. The pack inched forward but pit lane was pretty flat where I sat and I couldn’t get the Camaro to roll without starting the engine. Race cars don’t have fans and don’t idle well so no one wants to start one without reason. He was walking through the pits at the time. He grabbed a couple of other guys to push me along. It’s what everybody did.

“Can you send me that picture of you guys at Pocono?” Lido asked me.

Lido would like that photo because I was driving his car while he babysat millwrights rebuilding a chemical plant in Houston in 1976. I’m not sure anyone took any pictures although perhaps my dad did. He took a lot of photos over the years. I’ll send it if I can find it. I don’t think the car would have been in the background, though.

My whole family had come to the race. PLN was also there, driving. He won that race as well as an SCCA national D-production title that year. I introduced him to Anne and to my mom in the paddock. He stood and talked to these drooling women for quite a while, easily. That was my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary which put my dad in that “how do I top this” kind of spot.

Those are some of my memories of a genuine nice guy.

Posted in Death, Big Thoughts, Arts, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Pelletized - II

September 22. 2008 by Dick.

Who ever thought we would celebrate oil going through $100? Crude prices have dropped close to 40 percent since shooting the moon at prices near $150 a barrel on July 11. In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 7.12 cents to $2.72 a gallon, while gasoline prices dropped 10.04 cents to $2.461 a gallon. Natural gas for October delivery fell 8.7 cents to $7.29 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Anne’s hot flashes are so bad that she thought Global Warming was her fault and Al Gore keeps following her around.

I rather wish we could bottle that.

Oil is still waaaaay too expensive to burn.

We also have no cattle barn from which to bottle methane. The ground water heat pump presents too many obstacles to install this year. Coal is too difficult to use here. An outdoor wood furnace gives up too much heat to the outdoors and makes us slog through the snow in the middle of the night. That means we’ve decided to buy something that burns wood pellets.

Is a pellet stove really cheaper to run?

Pellets cost not less than $199/ton. The average is about $250 and the highest I’ve seen so far is $300. Pellets give up 24,500,000 BTU/ton. Most pellet stove makers advertise 75-80% efficiency although I used 70% in the spreadsheet last week. The numbers work even at 60% .

Oil will still be there as a fully automated backup, right?

Oh, yeah.

No matter what we do, I’ll either leave the existing oil fired boiler or upgrade the oil fired boiler. A pellet boiler would either be an add-on or have its own oil burner as a backup. The heat pump is more difficult because I can’t reliably get its transfer liquid hot enough to run our baseboards and its power draw would be more than I have generator capacity for during a power outage.

There must be a catch.

The downside to a pellet stove or furnace is its need for electricity. Unlike the wood stoves we rely on now, a pellet stove has two or even three fans and an auger without which there is no fire. If the power goes out today, we can crank up the wood stoves and keep from freezing, If the power goes out when we have a pellet something and an oil-fired boiler or an electric heat pump, we lose all our heat.

There is also the little matter of loading pellets by the ton.

What’s the Bottom Line?

I don’t know how to justify a pellet furnace on cost alone. The models I’ve found would heat the entire house at a capital cost two to four times that of a pellet stove and the savings fall in the diminishing returns category.

So. We’ll continue using the oil furnace as back up. The Vigilant, a wood stove now in the great room, will move to the living room. A pellet stove gets installed in the great room. Just as soon as I find one.

I narrowed the pellet burning field down to a few reliable products with automatic operation that runs on a thermostat, multiple heat settings, and cast iron construction. I have investigated Brosley, EKO-Vimar, Harman, Pinnacle, Viessman, and Woodmaster pellet furnaces as well pellet “parlor” stoves from American Energy, Bixby, Bob England’s Stove Works, Enviro, Harman, Hearth and Home Technologies, Pelpro, Thelin, and Whitfield.

The Harman PB-105 furnace or Harman Accentra stove at the top of my list are sold out until late next Spring.

I’ve chased stoves and furnaces from dealers in places wood burning appliances don’t sell nearly as well as they do here in New England. That search has yielded no furnaces and darned few stoves. I thought about going a little farther afield, like Florida or Arizona except Florida and Arizona probably don’t burn coal or wood because they think the economics of transporting the solid fuel is against them.

That brings us to an interesting fact.

Last year, we burned about 5 tons (10,000 pounds) of oil plus a couple of tons of firewood. If we switch to coal, pellets, or chunk wood, we will burn about 7 tons of coal, or 7 tons of pellets, or 7 tons of firewood.

Next time, I’ll tell you all about which pellet stove we bought and how I installed it.

Posted in Heating Issues, Seasonal, Random Access | 3 Comments »