Social Networks for the life of the world
Since last fall (fall 2022) Ollie Jones has been working on a project to get solar panels on the roof of Central Congregational Church. This is an explanation of the project, with some questions and answers. The proposal: to authorize the reinvestment of up to $70,000 of the church’s endowment fund to build this solar-panel … Read more
See also https://cityofnewburyport.com/resiliency.
My municipality recently announced a program that will cut the cost of electricity supply from $0.339 / kWh to $0.218. That’s great. But it’s not great that public utility pricing is going the way of pharmaceutical pricing, with almost everybody needing to rely on opaque deals to get reasonable pricing. There’s a Massachusetts law enabling … Read more
To improved sustainability of software like WordPress, it’s important to ask Where is power consumed? At the data center, at the client (the user’s machine or device), and in the network routers and line drivers used to transport the data. To reduce data center power: To reduce client power: To reduce network power, make your … Read more
Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. … Read more
I was chatting with a co-worker today, and she said she’d heard “they” were thinking about calling Pluto a “planet” again after it was demoted in 2006. Is Pluto a planet, or a dwarf planet, or a planetoid comet, or a cometoid planet, or what? It’s a wonderful debate. It’s a debate about how to … Read more
It’s hard to avoid the Amazon behemoth even if you prefer to send your business to other companies. And, there’s not a whole lot an individual householder can do to spread the wealth around because, not much wealth. But here are a few things you can do. Most importantly: try to think of yourself as … Read more
National Grid, the company selling electricity here in eastern Massachusetts, ran a Smart Energy Solutions pilot program in Worcester from 2015-2018. Serving about 15,000 customers, this program gave discounts when customers used energy off-peak. Here’s how it worked. As of November 2018, they sold energy at three rates: Off-peak: $0.10697 per kWh On-peak: $0.13100 per … Read more