MaxRedline

More California!

California lawmakers on Wednesday officially approved a measure that mandates all homes built in the Golden State in 2020 and beyond be solar-powered. The provisions add an estimated $10,000 to the cost of building a single-family home – including more than $8,400 for installing solar and roughly $1,500 for energy efficiency. Proponents of these requirements, however, say the 30-year lifespan of the solar panels will offset the utility bills. 

Um...well, no. The output power of solar panels degrades, on average, 1% per year, and over the average 25-year life of solar panels, that kind of adds up. It's even worse for the thin-film solar panels (a-Si, CdTe and CIGS), which degrade faster than panels that are based on mono- and polycrystalline solar panels. The latter lose 1% output in the first years, but are claimed to lose only 0.5% thereafter.

If you're in the area of Portland, Oregon, you may recall the SoloPower fiasco, in which local governments pumped millions in tax dollars to bring the thin-film solar panel manufacturer to the metro area amid much political ballyhoo, promising hundreds of good-paying jobs - only to have the thing go belly-up and shut down after producing doodly-squat. That was just another example of why clueless politicians should not be trying to pick winners in the business markets.

Notice that no panel ever produces 100%, and warranties supposedly last for a mere 25 years even as power output declines to 80% or lower. And this is for standard silicon, not-thin-film, units. Oh, and it's worth note that batteries and inverters typically have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years. Remember that extra $1500 that you have to fork over for "energy efficiency"? That's just for the initial installation; you get to pay for disposal and replacement of the batteries and inverters, which are classed as hazardous waste. So figure on an extra $2000 every few years, even as the power generation capability declines from your government-mandated solar panels.

By the way, the California politicians figure that their new mandate will only add $10k to the price of a home, when initial installation alone can run as much as $25k. California already has an outward migration issue, and this new mandate is only going to add to it, as people move to nearby states to avoid the onerous taxes and new mandates.

 

The Loons Are At It Again

Is it breeding season or something? The Portland Loons are becoming seasonally aggressive.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Reducing litter and saving the whales -- and more than 660 species of sea creatures and seabirds -- are some of the main reasons for a Portland City Council ordinance that aims to further regulate the use of single-use plastic.

Namely, the use of plastic straws and plastic utensils.

The proposal currently under consideration by City Council would forbid establishments like restaurants from giving customers plastic straws and stirrers unless they ask for them.

Welp, at least they aren't planning to shave the whales - yet. By what passes for their logic, shaving them would reduce water resistance, making the animals more efficient in energy use.

They haven't taken that step - so far. Probably just a matter of time.

Here's an idea: just outlaw businesses in Portland! Fine with me, as I only do business in Washington County - never in Portland or Multnomah County.

 

Latest TSA Move:

Facial recognition scanning of all airline passengers before they can board an aircraft. They call this their Biometric Entry-Exit Program.

It doesn't work as well as they'd like, due to a few minor issues: they could only identify 85% of passengers due to poor network availability, lack of staff, and airlines' insistence on on-schedule takeoff. The latter seemed particularly vexing.

The report goes on to again bemoan “airlines’ recurring tendency to bypass the biometric matching process in favor of boarding flights for an on-time departure.” DHS, apparently, is worried that it could be habit-forming for the airlines: “Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that is difficult to break.”

The report ends up concluding that this and other logistical issues “pose significant risks to CBP scaling up the biometric program to process 100 percent of all departing passengers by 2021.” And it has some ideas to do something about it, namely “enforcement mechanisms or back-up procedures to prevent airlines from bypassing biometric processing prior to flight boarding.”

"Enforcement measures", eh? It won't be long before they decide that everybody should have implanted microchips.

 

During t

Guess They're Out Of Luck If Lactose-Intolerant

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — A new state bill would give kids two options with their meals at restaurants—water or milk.

Senate Bill 1192 would make water or milk the default drink for kids meals in a push to reduce obesity and access to sugary drinks for children.

The bill passed the Assembly and is on its way to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. If he signs it, California would be the first state in the nation to have such a law.

Freedom, California-style. Drug use and public defecation are still okay, though.

California exemplifies why people are increasingly walking away from Democratics; inside every liberal is a totalitarian.

It’s a good thing there are no serious issues in California that the legislature should be addressing. But hey, vote Democrat! They’ll run your life for you far better than you can!

 

Pack Up The Trailer And Move To Venezuela!

In Venezuela's inflation-hit economy, a single US dollar can buy 3.5 million liters of gasoline.

An egg's gonna cost you, though.

 

Potato Chip Police

The roofing contractor was driving through Chingford in North East London when he was pulled over by Waltham Forest Council workers. Stewart Gosling, 43, kept the stash of empty crisp packets and water bottles in a plastic commercial waste bag in the back of his white van. But when he was pulled over by council workers carrying out spot checks, they told him he was breaking the law for carrying the rubbish without permission.

Upon inspection, the Council "workers" also discovered sandwich wrappers in the bag, so this was clearly an offense as he has no license to carry his own rubbish in a bag in his own van - and so they fined him £300.

Well, you can see how this would be a problem in England. In the future, he should just toss stuff out the window as he drives.

 

Eye Spy

How reassuring!

Department of Homeland Security has just announced that it intends to compile a comprehensive list of hundreds of thousands of “journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.”, and collect any “information that could be relevant” about them.

This is to say that DHS may not have a clue as to what could be relevant, so just to be on the safe side, they'll note everything they find about you. The motivation for constructing the monstrosity known as DHS was portrayed as necessary for fighting terrorism in a post-9/11 world, but these programs have nothing to do with terrorism; you are now the enemy.

Makes you want to run right out and order an Alexa, doesn't it? There's a reason why DHS built that huge server farm in Utah a couple of years ago.

 

First It Was Guns, Now It's Your Cutlery

Firearms aren’t common in the U.K., so they are experiencing an epidemic of “knife crime.” Also acid attacks. Now proposals for knife control are being floated:

A judge wants the points of kitchen knives to be rounded and blunted to reduce the number of young men dying from stab wounds in street attacks. “Kitchens contain lethal knives which are potential murder weapons and only butchers and fishmongers need eight or 10 inch kitchen knives with points,” the judge said.

Crown Court Judge Nic Madge said in a speech that there should be a nationwide program to file down the points of large kitchen knives and to ban their sale.  Every kitchen contains lethal knives which are potential murder weapons. "It might even be that the police could organise a programme whereby the owners of kitchen knives, which have been properly and lawfully bought for culinary purposes, could be taken somewhere to be modified, with the points being ground down into rounded ends," he said.

Next up, of course, would be scissors. You don't need them. It might be best, in fact, to eliminate kitchens altogether.

 

Recycling Again

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Marion County has joined other Oregon communities in scaling back its curbside recycling program.

Starting Monday, residents should throw shredded paper, egg cartons and most plastic containers in the trash instead of the blue bins.

Sorry, folks, that whole recycling thing was overrated - about what you'd expect from the Democratics who mandated it in the first place. How about just dumping your trash in the big blue bins? It's all going to the landfill anyway.

And the City of Portland mandates that trash can't be picked up weekly, but yard debris and recycling stuff must be picked up weekly. Because Saving The Planet, or something.

Hot New Ban

The latest one from the control freaks: ban plastic straws. Because Environment. Everybody knows that they only get used once and are then thrown away, so they should be banned...except that I've re-used them for years; they're easy enough to clean, pipe-cleaners and soap and water work really well. They also stand up well in things like milk-shakes. But the control freaks know best. They always do; it's a hallmark of liberalism. It's a big reason why Portland City Council banned plastic bags - a few years after mandating them because using them would save trees, and harvesting trees is Very Bad.

Then they decided that plastic bags were Very Bad - because Big Oil. Never mind that the bags aren't produced from oil at all, but rather from a by-product of natural gas drilling that had previously simply been burned; "flared off", in the industry vernacular. They're produced from waste, in other words. But now stores in Portland are prohibited from offering them, which is a great reason to shop in Beaverton or Tigard. In Portland today, you either have to purchase cloth bags, or hope your paper bags don't disintegrate in the rain. But the politicians sure feel good about themselves and their commitment to the environment.

A bill introduced in the California Assembly prohibiting restaurants from providing plastic straws to customers who don’t ask for them is intended to raise awareness about the harmful effects of plastic on the environment, not put waiters and bartenders in jail, its author says - although the bill introduced by Democratic Ian Calderon, as written, would do just that:

AB-1884 inserts new language into the Retail Food section of the California Health and Safety Code, violations of which are misdemeanors “punishable by a fine of not less than $25 or more than $1,000, or by imprisonment in the county jail for a term not exceeding 6 months, or by both.”

Calderon's been Twittering and press-releasing away, claiming that such punishments won't happen. He's also making other wild claims:

An estimated 500 million straws are used in the United States every day. This number is enough to fill over 127 school buses each day and is calculated to be about 1.6 straws per person in the U.S. In a summary of all trash collected as part of California’s Coastal Cleanup Day between 1989 and 2014, straws and stirrers rank as the 6th most common item collected.

The statistic is often attributed to the U.S. National Park Service (which did reference it in a 2013 environmental call for action), but the 500 million figure ultimately rests on the word of 16-year-old Milo Cress, who launched a campaign in 2011 (at the age of nine) called Be Straw Free.

Could be right; could be wrong, nobody's ever fact-checked the kid's claim. Or Calderon's claims, for that matter. But Calderon wants to essentially ban plastic straws in California. Next up: banning plastic knives and forks, most likely.

As is so often the case, these things metastasize into other places, which is occurring in parts of Portland, Oregon: Widmer Brothers Brewing, purveyors of fine craft-produced mule pee, have announced that they will ban plastic straws at their bar. Although why anybody would drink mule-pee with a straw remains unclear.

But Widmer's a Portland operation; I'd never visit there, and don't buy their products elsewhere.