David Owen’s recent New Yorker comment, Economy vs. Environment, draws an apt analogy between the mortgage and ecological crises we face. Countless living beings over millennia deposited their saved energy as carbon so that we might burn the resulting coal and oil with less heed than a homeowner on her third subprime equity loan. When [...]
Finding ourselves unable to install a windmill on the roof, Gene and I choose the NStar Green option today. So this means that we’ll be running our lights and laptops on wind power, right? Not quite. Our switch to green supports wind power, but apparently can’t guarantee wind sourcing. For that, we’ll be paying [...]
To stave off recession, Congress and the President urge us to buy more stuff. Encouraging Americans to keep shopping, they tell us, will plump our economy — despite fundamental shifts in the world economy, not to mention two large-scale wars. Whatever the economic merits of this plan, I believe that promoting consumerism is bad for [...]
I’ve frequently traveled between Boston and New York for the last 15 years, and I’ve tried every mode of transit from car to bus to train to plane. Recently I’ve been choosing travel options based purely on convenience from/to my end/start point, so when I’m off the West Side, I take the Greyhound or Amtrak; [...]
smart cars are coming to the USA in 2008, and we got a preview last weekend in Harvard Square. These are the perfect vehicles for urbanites and, if their egos can deal with it, suburbanites too. For families with kids, the fortwo would make a good second car, since there’s only two front seats.
Photo album [...]
Below are my first impressions of the new Kenesis Freestyle keyboard. This is a little off-road for this blog, but I’ve literally been waiting for this keyboard for over 2 years, and I also think I can finally have the pleasure of announcing, “First Post!”.
The main feature of this keyboard is that it splits completely [...]
A syndicated column in this past week’s Sunday Globe asserted that home ownership is always better than renting, even when home prices go down. I won’t go through the logic here, but it rests on the assumption that your goal is lifetime consumption maximization, not, say, saving money for your children to inherit.
Today the Economix [...]
This is a cross-post from the Green Computing forum that I recently convinced SilentPCReview.com to create (the interest of silence freaks and eco-computing are actually closely aligned most of the time). I actually think the following is an achievable goal with a meaningful potential impact on the environment:
As Vista prepares for a delayed takeoff, I’m [...]
Back in 1983, when our family bought a new, brown Cutlass Ciera,
my mom stated that the car would be like another room of the house –
she could take naps or I could do my homework there. She was probably
trying to justify the impact the purchase would have on our quiescent
family budget, but as I was [...]
Funny how an article that starts out talking about how penny-wise wives check their husbands’ profligate stupidity (”We were newly married with no money to be spending on stereos,” said the only sane person interviewed in the entire article) evolves into a pro-consumerism booster that equates empowered, working women with the need to buy more [...]
