I think the headline is a bit overblown, but this is pretty cool – wind generators that don’t turn (cheap and no dead birds), pedal-power charged batteries and more from Discover Magazine

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We all know by now that plastic bottles are filling landfills and supposedly drinking bottled water is evil. Of course, drinking Odwalla juices is merely outrageously expensive instead of evil, for reasons that have more to do with perceptions of evil than with the differences between a juice bottle and a water bottle. And of course, we know that a bottle of water, when production and transport and disposal are counted, uses roughly enough petroleum to fill that bottle a quarter of the way to the top (and a bottle of juice?). And finally, we know that the real looming crisis in America (and Australia and many other developed yet arid parts of the world) is not so much energy, but running out of water. So if all that’s old news, what’s the new news? The new news is that Elizabeth Royte has written an entire book about bottled water. If Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is as good as the New York Times review of it, it’s probably a surprisingly interesting read.

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How many times have we seen this?

I love this picture by Stephen de Sousa which has been going around to BlogTO and Treehugger (where I found it).

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Please, let’s all tell Hillary Clinton to shut up with her false claims to be ahead in the popular vote (forgetting for the moment when she was ahead in delegates, she consistently said that the popular vote didn’t matter). If you believe her rhetoric, please do yourself a favor and read Jonathon Alter on The Problem With Clinton’s Popular Vote Math. In brief and in rough, it goes like this.

Obama is 450K votes ahead not counting caucus states, 560K ahead if you count them. He is 63K behind if you count FL and MI where he was not on the ballot of course. If you count the uncommitted votes from Michigan, though, that brings him up by almost another quarter million voters. Leaving those votes aside, if the expected settlement happens – FL and MI get 50% of their votes/delegates counted – O is still ahead 325K in pop vote.

Meanwhile, Clinton is keying her people up to say the nomination was “taken away”. For reasons I’ve discussed ad nauseum, I won’t support Clinton because of past votes, but for a while in the middle of the campaign, I was starting to warm to her. Recent events such as claiming a popular vote lead and positioning herself as the candidate of white workers who think the black dude is a Muslim are just so crass it suddenly makes me understand the Clinton haters of the 1990s (when I was partly out of the country and never really got it). In short, they will do anything for power, no matter how damaging to the causes they believe in.

Before these last weeks I had nothing particular against Hillary Clinton except my commitment to not vote for any senator who voted in favor of giving Bush unlimited war power. Now I actually fear seeing her in the White House.

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Want someone who has some insightful stuff and actually posts more often than every two months?

Check out The Carpetbagger Report. Some of the stuff in his archives is really excellent.

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I got it wrong yesterday when I said, based off a radio report, that twelve Nobel winners had signed a letter saying the gas tax holiday was a bad idea. Actually, it was only four Nobel winners. And 280 other professional economists. I haven’t found the letter yet from Nobel winners saying it’s a good idea.

It astounds me that someone running as a conservative and a straight talker, the guy who told the auto workers that their jobs weren’t coming back, would propose this. I think that was fairly brilliant on McCain’s part actually, but don’t we deserve more than politics aimed at taking advantage of desperate people and pitching to the lowest common denominator? Like I say, give relief to people who have families and low to middle income through some intelligent means, not an eighteen cents discount on gas that will mostly just get absorbed by the oil companies in higher profits.

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Four Nobel-winning economists and over 280 other economists just posted a letter arguing that the best studies suggest that the gas-tax holiday is a bad idea that will lead to windfall profits for the oil companies, will encourage consumption and provide little relief to consumers. One thing I didn’t hear on the news report or on their site, that I also object too, is that it provides a tax break to everyone, whether they need it or not. Bill Gates gets the same break as Joe Schmoe. Why should Bill get a break on gas? Makes no sense.

Hillary Clinton just denounced the Nobel-winning economists’ advice as elitist talk and said she won’t be throwing her lot in with economists. Bill Clinton was criticized as a closet Republican because he hired the best economists he could find and tended to follow their advice whether it fit his ideology or not. Some people say he went too far, but one can make a good argument that part of the reason that the economy was so strong under Bill was because, less than most presidents, he didn’t play politics with the economy. Apparently, Hillary would rather adopt ill-advised policies that will do little or no good for working people rather than taking the tough road and doing what makes sense.

By the way, if you have a car that gets 20mpg and commute 40 miles per day, the gas tax holiday will save you 36 cents per day. Most people could save that much by using cruise control and checking tire inflation. For the people who can’t afford gas, this won’t fix it. If you really want to help working class people, give them a transportation subsidy, which can be used for gas or mass transit, and phases out as income rises, so that people who make more than a certain amount don’t get the subsidy. That way, unlike Hillary and John, my plan does not give a tax break to Bill Gates. Nothing personal Bill, I just don’t think you or Steve Jobs (or The Ranter for that matter) need the $0.18 per gallon tax break (assuming the oil companies don’t just skim that profit).

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No, it won’t take you 40 minutes to read my blatherings. That’s not the best 40 minutes you’ll spend. Rather, you’ll spend it watching the videos below.

Every once in a while, something comes along that is jaw-dropping. And over at TED.com it comes along so often, that they have a whole category for stuff that is jaw-dropping. And it is. I’ve been a fan of William McDonough for a long time (see my review of Cradle to Cradle), so I wasn’t surprised to find that his TED video was awesome. But I had never even heard of Hans Rosling, co-founder of Doctors without Borders, sword-swallower (really) and poverty researcher. I’ve never seen anyone with a similar ability to make statistics as gripping as the climax scene in an action movie.

» Watch the videos... »

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I’ve been meaning to look this up for a long time: what is middle class or, more appropriately, what counts as middle income? My thought was that middle income should be plus or minus one standard deviation from the median. But I was just saved the trouble of doing the research, because I’m listening right now to an interview with sociologist Claude Fischer, co-author of Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years, economist David Henderson, editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics and Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project.

Henderson started it all off by saying that he defines middle income as the middle 60% of households (so, in other words, he calls the bottom 20% lower income and the upper 20% upper income). That seems like a good definition. So, before I reveal the numbers — answer quick — are you middle income?

Why do I ask? Two reasons:

1. Politicians are always talking about helping the middle class, but never telling us who they actually mean by that.
2. Most Americans, no matter what they’re income, like to think of themselves as middle income. When you poll people who are in the 95th percentile, they will typically say they are middle income. Of course, if they score in the 95th percentile on, say, a grammar test, they will not tell you that they are middle of the pack on grammar issues. But with income, it’s different.

So then, here it is: you are middle income in America if your household income (so not your personal salary) is between $20,000 and $97,000.
Of course, there are a lot of variables. Where you live makes a big difference. California median household income is $70,000 for a family of four.

Anyway, an interesting hour on the idea of Middle Class on Forum on KQED. In theory, starting tomorrow that broadcast should be available in the Forum Archives for February 18, 2008.

I have to say that I find the numbers a bit surprising because if memory serves, the bottom end hasn’t risen much in the last 15 years, whereas the top end has. I remember back in the late 1980s when $85,000 put you in the top 1% and 114,000 dollars put you in the top 1%. I remember this, by the way, because of a multi-day argument with a doctor friend of mine who insisted that he couldn’t possibly be in the top 1%.

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As I sat in front of the television in my bathrobe eating cold soup straight from the can, I was struck by the feeling that I was not going to exceed my father’s expectations.

Epilogue. My hopes were renewed when I noted that at least I had taken time to dig a spoon from the pile of dirty dishes.

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