I continue to be amazed by the Tom Lauricella article in the WSJ: “For Rebuilt Markets, A Test in 2010 : Government Saved the Financial System from Collapse. Now Investors Have to Stand on Their Own.”
How dare this Government thing have such delusions of grandeur when it was I, Julius Caesar, who saved the financial system from collapse, just as surely as I saved the Roman Republic back in 49 B.C.
The lead headline from page R1 in today’s WSJ:
The article that makes this wild assertion is written by one Tom Lauricella, who must not care a great deal about his journalistic credibility. Maybe he’s thinking of quitting his day job for something else, and this is his way of burning his credibility behind him. I just made that up, but then so did Lauricella make up his stuff.
We’re having a new high-efficiency boiler installed in our house. An HVAC contractor is doing most of the work, but over the New Year’s holiday I have been installing thermostat wires so we can be ready when the boiler is ready to go into action.
After three days of studying thermostats on-line, I’m coming to the conclusion that the type of thermostat I had hoped for does not exist. Not even close. What I want is programmable thermostats with good override features. There are programmable thermostats, so-called, and there are override features, but they don’t do what I think we need in order to save energy.
Some explanation: For the past 30 years we have lived in an old farmhouse without central heat. Our main heat has been a wood stove in our dining-room/kitchen that is strictly radiant. No forced air. We burn 10-12 face cords of hardwood in it each year. Also, our electric bill also goes up in winter because we use radiant space-heaters in certain other rooms on an as-needed basis, as well as a couple of electric heaters with fans in the bathrooms for extra-quick heat when it’s needed.
We really like the warmth of the wood stove and don’t plan to give it up. It’s the central gathering point in the house. But we have also been getting tired of tending the stove in the middle of the night. It’s a small one that can’t hold a fire all night in cold weather. If we let the fire go out at night, it takes too long to get the house warm enough in the morning to be comfortable again. There usually comes a time in February when the constant getting up to tend the fire once or twice in the middle of the night starts to wear on me, and I feel an overall loss of energy.
We also don’t like the fact that it’s hard to go anywhere in January or February, because someone needs to be home to tend the stove. When we do go away for extended periods in winter, we drain the water from the pipes, add a little RV-type antifreeze to the toilet bowls and drains, and drain the electric hot water heater. It’s not a big deal, but when we return, it’s a while before we have hot water again, and it typically takes two days to get the house back to a comfortable temperature and no longer need to huddle around the wood stove.
So it’s time to re-join the modern age of central heat. We’ve also built a new addition with a two-car garage for our one little car, and about 240 sq feet of sun-room, entryway, or breezeway, depending on what we’re calling it at the moment, and 240 feet of workshop/office rooms for me in the back of the garage. Some might call that a man-cave. I’ve put pex tubing in the floors of these two rooms for radiant floor heat.
So now we’re having a modulating, high-efficiency boiler installed that will produce low-temperature water for these concrete floors and higher-temperature water for baseboard and panel radiant heat. There are seven heating zones, two for future use when more remodeling gets done, and five for right now.
We’ll take the tax credit for the boiler, and I’ll rebate some of it to help elect people to Congress who vote against such credits. Congress should be encouraging energy conservation through net-zero carbon taxes, not through tax credits.
For now I have five zones, each of which needs a thermostat. The programmable thermostats that are available will probably work OK for a couple of the zones, though even there it would be good to have something better.
Here’s what I want: I’d like a thermostat on which I can program a base schedule of cool temperatures during sleep hours and higher temperatures when we’re likely to be up and about. Whether it’s the same program each day, or a 5-2 or 5-1-1 schedule doesn’t matter a lot in our case. But for some of the rooms even the “higher” base temperature for early evening hours would be a relatively cool temperature, because we don’t use those rooms a lot. I’d like to be able to specify and store even higher temperature setting for when we’re actually using the room, which will be on a very irregular basis. When we want to use the room I want to go up to the thermostat and do something like we do on our microwave: Tell it we want the high temperature for the next 3 hours, or 4 hours, or whatever.
The problem with most of the so-called override features is that you can press buttons repeatedly to select a higher temperature, which will stay in effect until the next change-point on the schedule is reached. But I don’t want that. I want to press one button to specify the pre-specified temperature, and I want it to stay in effect until the specified time period has passed, at which point it can revert to its regular schedule.
One can do analogous things with microwave timers, so why not with house thermostats?
(I realize the radiant floor heat will not be nearly as responsive as what I’m talking about above. But that’s just one zone.)
But I’d also like to be able to go to the thermostat, and with a very minimum of button-pushing specify three things: 1) I want the high-temperature override. 2) I want it to begin in 2 hours, or at 6pm, or whatever. 3) I want the duration to be X hours.
I have not been able to find a thermostat that would give me that kind of control. Without that, I’m afraid we’re going to do a lot of unnecessary heating, or else we’ll just shut off certain zones for extended periods of time and not have the full benefit of our expensive new heating system.
We don’t have air conditioning, or a complicated two-stage heating system. A lot of thermostats have features to deal with that, but those are unnecessary for us. What I’d like is a simple programmable thermostat that is truly programmable. I now suspect that such a thing does not exist. The existing ones seem to be designed by a bunch of lemmings who just follow each other, and who abuse the words “programmable” and “override.”
I’d even be willing to forget the programmable feature, and (for some of the rooms) have a thermostat with two buttons. One button would be for the pre-set cool temperature, and one for the pre-set high temperature. But not even that is available. With the non-programmable thermostats, you now have to push a button 15 times to go from 55 degrees to 70 degrees or vice versa. That’s a step backward (actually, 14 steps backward) from the old dial thermostats that used to be available.
I figure it’s the sound of somebody’s ox being gored.
But one commenter says that anytime he sees someone telling us to be civil, he grabs his copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
There’s no reason both couldn’t apply when the founder of Wikipedia starts lecturing on the topic in the WSJ: Keep a Civil Cybertongue: Rude and abusive online behavior should not be met with silence.
It figures. Wikipedia has become increasingly authoritarian and less democratic of late, but not necessarily more accurate.
And you’d be right if you’re guessing that the authors of the above article don’t say a word about the rude and abusive behavior that Wikipedia is accused of engaging in by James Delingpole in his article, Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia.
This is an interesting leftwing switcheroo. Usually they don’t like it when people take action to protect themselves or each other.
“One thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked,” Napolitano said. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. —URL
Note how this contrasts with the snide remarks they made about the heroics on Flight 93, or the tut-tutting they emit when someone takes matters into her own hands and tackles an armed robber, or their attitude toward concealed carry.
If this is a permanent change, it’s a welcome one. In any case, I presume Janet Napolitano would join me in honoring the passengers and crew with a Leviathan Ankle-Biter award.
The following is the comment I posted on the Battle Creek Enquirer site in response to the article, “Nigerian charged in airline attack.” In the print edition, it is the lead story on the front page.
Subheadline: “Near-terror at Detroit airport shakes area.”
I question how your reporters and headline writers could possibly know that. Did they do a psychological survey of the population to determine how shaken people were? Did they do an opinion poll?
Of course not. I bet they just made it up, maybe after talking to their drinking buddies in the bar after work. I just made that up, too, of course, but it’s as good a guess as what the Enquirer put on the front page.
It’s a little thing, but it forms bad habits among newspaper people to make up even little stuff like that sub-headline.
Happy Holy Days, everyone. Or Holidays, or however you spell it.
Democrats are in a mad rush to enact a health care plan that people don’t want. The more people learn about it, the less they like it, and the harder the Democrats work to get an even worse one enacted, even if it means violating the peace and harmony of the Christmas season.
I don’t quite understand that behavior. Yes, I understand that they want to subjugate the American people. That’s a natural and common human behavior, albeit an unlovely one. But I don’t understand the self-destructive mania by which they redouble their efforts.
Unfortunately, the only parallel I could think of is one involving Nazis and extermination camps. That seems a little extreme, even for what the Democrats are doing. Even to mention it is likely to draw reactions like “How dare you compare health care with the holocaust!” instead of leading to a dispassionate analysis of the features that the two instances do and don’t have in common. But that’s all I had, so here is the way I explained it on a political e-mailing list:
I have a little different take on it, but I need to invoke St. Godwin to explain it. Well, I can’t really explain it, but I can think of an analogy that might help us look for an explanation.
The Democrats are like the Nazis in the closing days of WWII. The Nazis were in retreat and knew they were losing. Yet instead of rethinking their ideology and trying to reform their ways before having to face the victors, they only increased the ferocity and rate at which they sent Jews to the gas chambers. Similarly, the Democrats know they are losing, but this only increases the ferocity of their attacks on the health of the American people. They have no time to lose!
I have never understood the psychology by which the Nazis did what they did, but it’s interesting that it seems not to have been a one-off phenomenon.
But then one of the other members of the list came to my rescue and gave us another example. It turns out that what we’re seeing in Congress may not be quite such a rare human phenomenon, after all.
When one of our daughters was about 2 years old, we were looking for her one day, and saw a lump underneath one of the curtains in the kitchen. We could see crumbs on the floor beneath her, and knew she was eating cookies that she had nabbed and sneaked off with. When we lifted the curtain, and she knew she was discovered, what did she do? She upshifted, and started cramming cookies into her mouth twice as fast.
Incidentally, though I am as wary of St. Godwin’s law as anyone else, I think it should be repealed. We all have the same DNA and the same temptations as the Nazis. They are an extreme example of how bad people can be, but they were not outside the human species. Bringing them into a discussion should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
Here’s why there should not be a playoff system for college football like there is for basketball. It’s a comment from the Live Glog for the MSU-Texas game at CBS Sports. It was made well into the first half, when the teams were neck and neck.
Agreed, texas looks great. Both these teams i think are going to go deep in the tournament.
So in a well-fought game that is almost becoming a traditional rivalry, instead of enjoying the athleticism of the players and the drama of the contest, people are instead thinking about the tournament.
Well, in basketball that’s OK. There are a lot of games so the individual contests don’t count for as much. But for football it would be a great loss.
It’s not often that you see the word “control” used this way in the news -especially in an article about a public meeting:
Residents have expressed concern over seeing coyotes on the south side of Marshall, but City Manager Tom Tarkiewicz cautioned against worry because the animals are afraid of people. No injuries have been reported, and he said the city is not attempting to trap or control them.
We need more of that — more of political entities not trying to control everything in sight. For his good example, the Marshall City Manager gets a Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award.
Battle Creek Enquirer url here.