Molasses?

by OregonDOT
Washington DOT screws de-icer industry:
[Via HorsesAss.Org]

Even the Wall Street Journal has taken notice of Washington DOT’s innovative, home brew road de-icer:

The mix consists of molasses from a local supplier, calcium chloride and brine donated by a local dairy company. Mr. Simonsen had been experimenting with the right proportions and ingredients for several years, blending them in a 1,000-gallon vat and dispersing the liquid with the same salt trucks. He first used it last year on a busy mountain pass in southwest Washington.

This season, the state’s department of transportation has been spreading the solution throughout 11 counties, up from one last winter, with the help of a new automated system that can churn out 5,000 gallons of it in an hour. It has come in handy during a particularly heavy winter.

DOT is brewing the concoction at a Darigold farm in Chehalis, and the savings to taxpayers have been significant…only about $0.48/gallon for the home brew mixture compared to $1.30/gallon for commercially available de-icer. Transportation officials are new considering building production facilities in each of the state’s six regions.

But wait… is de-icer production really the proper role of government? Isn’t the private sector always more efficient than the public sector, and doesn’t this amount to unfair, taxpayer subsidized competition to the hard working folks in the de-icing business? Perhaps all you free marketeers out there can explain this to me?

Wow. A nice innovation that can save taxpayers a ton of money. And they have a system to mass produce it. A little more sustainable than salt. Deicer was used on the streets around my house. Wonder if it was any of this mixture?

Technorati Tags: Environment

The sea always wins

by Joe Crawford (artlung)

Famed Malibu beach is disappearing under rising sea eroding:
[Via Boing Boing]

Malibu homeowners with houses overlooking Broad Beach are fighting two battles. The first one is against public-access activists, who accuse homeowners of illegally using private security guards keep the public off the beach. The second battle is erosion that has reduced the beach to a mere sliver. The LA Times reports with a story and video. The sandbagging efforts shown in the video seem futile.

Sandwiched between the advancing sea and coastal armor built to protect multimillion-dollar homes, the strip of sand is being swept away by waves and tides. Soon, oceanographers and coastal engineers contend, the rising ocean will eclipse the clash between the beach-going public and the private property owners: There will be no dry sand left to fight over.
…
“These folks in these overly rich communities will be sipping their martinis during some big El Niño and watching their backyards disappear in 5-feet chunks,” [Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory] said. “In the end, Mother Nature and global warming will win. No matter how much concrete they pour, all of those sea walls and houses will end up in the ocean.”

Malibu’s vanishing Broad Beach a sign of rising sea levels, experts say*

(*Note: Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art had a funny post a while back about news headlines with the words “experts say” in them.)

Many of the legal battles between people will be rendered moot with the oncoming climate change. Short-sighted behavior by either group will not be helpful for solving these problems, especially as people’s homes fall into the sea.

Similar changes in beaches are also seen in the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard due to hurricanes. These will also have increased effects due to climate change. Long-term actions dealing with coastal effects will be very important.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Get the Geico cavemen to do an ad

by erix!
The stories of our times:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Sigurd Rinde has a great “story” about the financial situation we’ve been in these days. The story of our times – time to abolish accounting as we know it.

Imagine this, you’re out driving… But the windshield is not there, instead you have a standardised set of reports coming up on a “dashboard” in front of you.

The reports are supposed to give you an idea as to where you are heading and what dangers might lurk, or jump out from the kerb.

I particularly like the implicit assumption that “bigger is better” in order to drive over the bumps (animals) in the roads.  Of course, when there are too many curves, the Big trucks have more trouble. While there was nothing about Theory of Constraints in his story, I couldn’t help thinking of TOC throughout, due to this kind of comment.

This financial crisis has done a lot of things for the world, including inspiring people to write entertaining and informative articles on the situation.  The first one I saw was Jim Manzi’s So Simple a Caveman Could Do It.

Imagine you live in a cave in hunter-gatherer society. Og is going to spend the day hunting. You have previously harvested some berries, lived frugally, and now have an extra handful of berries you can give Og to eat while he hunts all day. You and Og make a deal. When he returns from the hunt, he will give you two handfuls of meat.

[More]

A really nice simple explanation to demonstrate how we got here. Of course, some of those smart caveman PhDs were trying to tell others that this was a house of cards but no one listened because greed was good. Like a game of musical chairs, every one thought someone else would be the one left out.

But when the music stopped, they found that there were no chairs at all and everyone lost.

Technorati Tags: Economy