Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Shocking news today from the New York Times: people buy less of stuff when it costs more.

In short, a government lab set up some homes to automatically adjust their power consumption based on real-time pricing and the owners’ pricing/comfort threshold. The result? Their power bills went down by 10%.

Unfortunately the article makes several mistakes? I know, reporters making mistakes? Never happens. But the mistakes may have actually come from the lab behind the work.

They start:

Giving people the means to closely monitor and adjust their electricity use lowers their monthly bills and could significantly reduce the need to build new power plants, according to a yearlong government study.

As I’ve said before, we shouldn’t be measuring progress based on the number of power plants. The real point is to continuously be building more that operate more cheaply, cleanly, and/or efficiently that can put the old, dirty, and/or expensive ones out of business.

Also notable, the article gives an overall cost savings without much going into the overall energy savings. It suggests that peak loads could be trimmed by up to 15%, but that can be interpreted many ways. Do they mean the peak load of each day? The peak load of each year? Will the load in non-peak hours be affected much? I suspect the energy savings were on the order of 3%.

On the upside, though, they do point out that regulated utility pricing schemes are horrible, as they don’t discourage saving. On the downside, they say that most of the country has such utilities while ignoring that a large minority of the country, including New York, does not.

From TigerHawk:

Glenn Reynolds argues that Jonah Goldberg’s widely-linked prediction that an Obama loss in New Hampshire would “unhinge” certain segments of “American political life,” by which he presumably meant the more conspiracy-inclined lefties, has come true, at least for an Andrew Sullivan reader and his friends:

Watched the NH returns with some friends last night, and something quite unexpected happened when the AP called it for Clinton — inexplicable ANGER. I was surrounded by people in their early 30’s, registered Democrats, receptive to the Clintons in the 90’s, and I swear I thought someone was going to throw their wine glass at the tube during her ‘victory’ speech. We made a pact last that we all followed through on this morning — logging on to BarackObama.com and donating $100 each to his campaign (this is the first time ANY of us has donated money to a campaign). Oh, and did I mention we’re all New Yorkers?

So, there are a bunch of 30-something New Yorkers who are so enraged at whatever undifferentiated conspiracy deprived Obama of a victory in New Hampshire that they formed a pact to part with a tiny portion of their wine budget and give money to a political campaign for the first time. And to think people say that the Clintons make people cynical about politics.

Anyway, I am not sure that a room full of wine-sodden New Yorkers almost moved to throw their glass quite fulfills the Goldberg prophecy, but it is definitely hilarious.

From my perch, Obama’s campaign seems to be less about substance and more about being hip (perhaps because coverage of him that gets to me is generally filtered through young adults). Its as if you can tell that at least a visible minority of “progressive” Gen Xers really want to vote for a black guy for nothing less than to feel as if they accomplished something their baby boomer parents did not. (Not that other candidates don’t get support from young voters who make voting decisions based upon their parents’ beliefs.)

[note: Goddamn Wordpress is auto-correcting my formatting which is preventing nested blockquotes. Stupid technology.]

Tonight, I was riding the metro back from Capitol Hill to wonderful Vienna. When I arrived at the Metro stop at Union Station I was hoping to find a seat at one of the wonderfully cold granite benches. I realized that if I were to find a seat I would have to venture to the extreme ends of the platform. That is when the following wonderful phrases came to mind (and google can’t find them anywere):

Opportunity is where your competitors aren’t.

Or:

Opportunity is not where your competitors are.

Obviously neither of these is always nor strictly true. But some version of either is good to keep in mind.

Certainly these two are not guaranteed to win the nominations of their respective parties.

However, I can say that I would write in a vote for Dick Cheney before I voted for either of them… especially Huckabee McCain.

Today I donated about 50 CCs of blood in the name of science.

It was only after I agreed to do it that I learned that I would be paid $1 per 5 CCs.

So I get to feel good about myself and end up with 10 bucks. Sweet.

Certainly these two are not guaranteed to win the nominations of their respective parties.

However, I can say that I would write in a vote for Dick Cheney before I voted for either of them… especially Huckabee.