inflation rising, common sense falling

Thursday’s report on consumer inflation helps to confirm what many American households have suspected for months — that rising prices are forcing consumers to lower their standard of living to make ends meet.

U.S. consumer prices shot up faster than expected in July, fueling the biggest year-over-year jump in more than 17 years, according to the latest government data. Prices were 5.6 percent higher in July than they were a year earlier. Energy prices were up 29.3 percent for the year and food costs were 6 percent higher. Times are tough, and getting tougher. When is it going to finally sink in to our Mayor, Council, and city officials? Ever? I know, I know- let them eat cake. Well, the cost of cake is rising too. Energy prices are up 29.3% this year. Biggest jump in prices in 17 years! And our Council votes to take on MILLIONS more in debt? We will run a deficit this year and a BIGGER one next year! We cant pay the debts we have NOW, how can we expect to pay more bills? I repeat- stupid is as stupid does- F Gump. Forrest could teach the Mayor and Council a few things about common sense. This makes NO sense. Bain, Best, and Garcia are too focused on their legacies to listen tho, and the City Manager will facilitate this headlong rush into a historical citywide humiliation by wasting MILLIONS of our tax dollars on a new gym. Four hundred-to-six-hundred dollars costs per square foot will yield to THOUSANDS of dollars a square foot, and more, I predict. These are yours tax dollars and mine! Replace him, and the Council, before they bankrupt us!

3 more chances to sell all your property

The Council has decided to allow the residents three more garage sales per year. Big deal, when people are struggling to put food on the table, make their mortgage payments, and gas up their car! Do they seriously think that 3 extra yard sales will make up for the MILLIONS in additional debt City officials have burdened the residents with? Not to mention the increased taxes that are coming next year to pay for their legacies on the weary and hurting backs of the residents! The City Manager acknowledges that residents are having a hard time paying their light bills, putting food on the table, and filling up their cars so they can go to work. Instead of some tax relief we get 3 more garage sales? Incredible! Let them eat cake! Incredibly and totally insensitive and out of touch with the lives of the average residents. No clue, or apparent awareness that we are in a recession and people are losing their jobs and their homes,and little concern.

unconcerned

The City is projected to have a defict next year of at least 1.5 MILLION dollars. Where will they get the money to cover these debts? They will take it out of our Reserve Fund. They have already taken 500k out to help pay for the new gym project and our reserves are dangerously low. We are a bad hurricane or two from being insolvent, bankrupt. Who is responsible for us being in this precarious predicament? The City Manager and his $400-600+ a square foot construction fiascos deserve a LOT of the blame. The Council should also shoulder considerable responsibility for not providing any significant oversight on these projects and basically rubber-stamping whatever the City Manager says it costs. How will they pay for their latest debacle? Once they have drained the Reserve Fund they will raise our taxes to cover their butts. At a time where residents are struggling to put gas in their car, food on the table, and make their mortgage payments they will raise our taxes to cover for their amazing lack of economic awareness, fiscal irresponsibility, and horrible mismanagement of each and every significant construction project in recent memory. Instead of tax relief we get 3 more chances to sell off EVERY possession we have ever ac ulated. THAT is their solution for us to avoid personal bankruptcy. Their idea to avoid municipal bankruptcy is to raise our taxes. They really arent concerned with the plight of the residents because, as those HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of dollars disappear, they can always raise our taxes to cover it! We are a deep-pocket, never ending ATM that just keeps on giving and giving, no matter HOW horribly mismanaged the City is.

out of touch with everyday reality

The Council apparently has no clue and/or doesnt care about the suffering and personal hardships of the residents. Which Queen was it, when told the people had no bread to eat, responded,"Let them eat cake!"? She was completely out of touch with the hard times of her people and our City officials are just as oblivious and unconcerned as she was. We need tax relief! not tax increases! If we had the over 600k that has been wasted on the CC and bathroom projects we would be in a MUCH better position financially. It has disappeared, tho, and City officials will simply raise our taxes to cover those disasters. Have they NO shame? common sense? financial responsibility? The 200k annual payments to pay for the new gym project HAVE to come from somewhere. If we take it from the sales tax, that money is already allocated for other city expenses, so they will need a source of NEW income, and that will be our increased taxes. We get hosed AGAIN. An already tough economic environment is made almost impossible by their lack of common sense and concern for the people.

let them eat cake

The Council has decided to allow the residents three more garage sales per year. Big deal, when people are struggling to put food on the table, make their mortgage payments, and gas up their car! Do they seriously think that 3 extra yard sales will make up for the MILLIONS in additional debt City officials have burdened the residents with? Not to mention the increased taxes that are coming next year to pay for their legacies on the weary and hurting backs of the residents! The City Manager acknowledges that residents are having a hard time paying their light bills, putting food on the table, and filling up their cars so they can go to work. Instead of some tax relief we get 3 more garage sales? Incredible! Let them eat cake! Incredibly and totally insensitive and out of touch with the lives of the average residents. No clue, or apparent awareness that we are in a recession and people are losing their jobs and their homes,and little concern.

Building Dept.

Is there a serious backlog of plans to be approved at the Building Dept.? Inspections to be done? That may justify having another part-time contractor to catch up and act as a resource person for the others. What is the usual and customary time frame for our Building Dept to approve plans? Specific times and dates are necessary to determine the exact nature of these incidents. Mr Wells used to do ALL of the inspections himself, so I hear- plumbing, electrical, roofing, etc. With the serious downturn in construction, maybe he would be interested in more hours, if they could be justified.

Finance follies

MORE fictitious numbers. When are we going to get REAL numbers that reflect REALITY from the Finance Dept.? Are they massaging the numbers up or down to suit the City Manager? Most of the Departments under him are in a state of CHAOS. When will we get a forensic audit to restore some confidence in City operations? All we have are guesstimates, possible averages of possibly maybe close-to-accurate figures, multiple errors, or outright fiction. Who knows which set of numbers are accurate? When, if ever, are we going to get the real numbers? Falsifying numbers is criminal fraud; multiple errors is incompetence- neither should be tolerated by the residents.

contract deadlines and penalties

Is it possible that this construction contract with Link will have some enforceable deadlines and penalties for noncompliance? The Country Club project didnt have any deadlines or penalties AND neither does the bathroom contract. Deadlines and penalties for noncompliance are a standard facet of ALL construction contracts, EXCEPT ours. Why is that? Is it because the City Attorney FORGOT to put them in (like the bathroom hookups)? Maybe he has never seen or done a construction contract and didnt know what went into one (incompetency)? Or is it possible that his boss, the City Manager, told him NOT to put them in because of some reason we arent aware of yet? Perhaps City officials dont care when they are completed, like the CC enclosure AND the bathrooms. If it takes five years to complete they are pretty much assured a job for that long, no? It has taken two years or more to complete both the CC enclosure (520 sq feet) AND the bathrooms (1116 sq feet). The over/under is five years at this point, and judging from their recent records, the OVER is a LOCK.

The American Way

If City officials truly believe this site is only for crackpots, is useless, and doesnt count, why do they monitor it so closely and even post their own comments from time to time? This bulletin board is one avenue to exercise our First Amendment rights as Americans. It is part of the American democratic process and entails debate and discussion of the issues of the day that directly affects us. The Gazette and the Herald are two other helpful avenues in this discussion, in addition to the multitude of blogs that are available to anyone interested in where our City, State, and Country is headed and how its going to get there. Its the American Way!

bozos

The ramps for the bathrooms are due to arrive this Friday, nearly TWO YEARS after the bathroom project was approved. How long will it be before they are installed? How much were we overcharged to make them? How much will we be overcharged to install them? Are the barricades permanent and how much are we being billed for? How much are we being charged for the rock fill under the slab, that was washed out? Why are there NO water fountains or mop sinks in place? Aren't they required by code? Who is going to sign off on this project, and when? Who signed off on the plans for this Stafford bathroom? No water, sewer, or electrical hookups, elevations grossly overcharged, sewer hookup finally done but cost SIX times what it should have been, nonfunctional TWO years later, WAY over budget, back fill and barricades needed to stop slab from cracking from lack of support, wheelchair accessibility an expensive afterthought- how many MORE ways can this be declared a exercise in ineptitude and incompetence? THESE are the bozos that are going to be responsible for a new 32,000 foot gym? The bathrooms are a total of 1116 square feet. They bumble, stumble, and fumble a $140k project into well over 400k and counting, and they are going to be rewarded for THAT abortion with a 6.7 MILLION dollar project? Absurd. Preposterous.

An apology in advance is certainly indicated to those who are offended by the term BOZOS, as used in reference to our City officials. No other nonsensical and truly unbelievable term comes anywhere close to describing their actions. An apology is therefore offered to bozos everywhere for denigrating them by comparing them to our city officials. Real, honest bozos would be an upgrade.

construction frustrations

I could be wrong, but I thought the contractors main frustration with the Building Dept is their overall lack of construction code knowledge and response times for inspections. Those issues should be investigated and steps put into place to remedy those situations (more qualified staff, more training). At the same time I would NOT encourage those staff to hurry thru the inspection process and possibly miss something important. Occasional reasonable construction delays in inspections seems to be a part of the time-honored construction process, but repeated long delays could be indicative of a bigger problem and needs to be addressed. Is Skip Reed a part of the problem, or the solution? He is the qualified and licensed person there, and the logical construction resource. That WAS the reason for which he was hired, no? BEING a contractor, we would hope he knows how to talk with other contractors, in a language they will both understand.

cant afford him

Is there anybody who would say that the City manager has ANY clue about construction, in view of the recent series of exorbitant disasters at the CC and the bathrooms? That is one area we can agree on, that he should not be involved in because, when he is involved, WE get hosed, BIG TIME, and left with VERY expensive bills to pay. He is not a General Contractor and apparently has little, if any, construction experience, so putting him in charge was a LOUSY idea in the first place. He apparently refuses to use Skip Reed, who IS a General Contractor, in making these construction decisions. Whether that refusal is a sign of stupidity, arrogance, lack of caring, or hubris (or some of all) each person has to decide for themselves. HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars down the drain later, we have finally come to that conclusion clearly. We CANT afford for him to do any more construction projects. He should excuse himself and defer to a competent, experienced, honest, preferably local, professional. There are plenty of problems at the Building Dept, the pool, the bathrooms, the City website, the Finance Dept, and Public Works to keep him occupied.

no shame

Permitting fees are WAY up. That must be part of the 16.5% increase in charges for services that they are projecting for the next fiscal year. Fees and licenses are projected to increase by 5.9% also in the coming year. How else to minimize the 1.5 MILLION dollar deficit for next year? They have thrown away HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of our tax dollars on the CC and the bathrooms, and now want to cover their butts on the backs of the working residents and small businessmen. They have NO remorse, no sense of guilt or embarrassment, and no shame in coming back to us to pay for their colossal mistakes. The only two significant increases in money goes to the City Manager (22.3%) and the City Clerk (25%). All this s to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, because we dont REALLY know if these numbers are accurate or not. DOZENS of the 05-06 numbers on the City website were erroneous by up to 185k. We need an OUTSIDE independent audit badly to discern which of the numbers posted are the correct ones, if any. Can it be that the City has TWO sets of books and numbers? We wont know until an audit is done. TWO years later and all we have is guesstimates about the revenues that were taken in and dispersed. Incredible incompetency, all the way up the line.

flimsy excuses

OK, for the sake of discussion, lets say that the City Manager is NOT a crook, or incredibly incompetent. He just has Government Worker Syndrome, where he is a well-paid government worker who DOESNT CARE if he wastes HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of our tax dollars because HIS job is safe. Does THAT in any way excuse the disappearance of our tax monies? Is THAT the type of person we want running our city? No way. The solution is to find sombody who DOES care and give them the job. Male or female, black, white or Hispanic, old or young, no matter- somebody with experience and qualified, who cares about the financial wellbeing of our town, and will safeguard the interests of the residents, for a change. IS his job safe? No matter what his performance record is? A debacle follwed by a fiasco, followed by a disaster- and the residents are left to pay the bills off. The bathrooms will take a LOT longer to complete and a LOT more money, if they are even salvageable. The one at Stafford, at least, looks shaky at this point.

comparisons of biofuels- chart missing

Written by Clayton B. Cornell

Published on May 8th, 200817 CommentsPosted in Algae, Biodiesel, Ethanol, Food vs. fuel, cellulosic ethanol
Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.


Biofuels are increasingly lumped into a single category of environmentally apocalyptic dead-end solutions. As the food vs. fuel debate rages on, it’s no wonder that the general public believes this.
But not all biofuels are created equal, as the chart above illustrates (click the image to see full size). It’s one of the best depictions I’ve seen of how each biofuel feedstock has completely different impacts on overall greenhouse gas emissions, water and pesticide use, and the energy required to produce the fuel. (Click on the chart for the full image)

The chart was created jointly by faculty members from University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy and published in the Seattle P-I (see the article Bio-debatable: Food vs. fuel).

grease theft

It’s early in the pre-dawn dark hours of the morning. A group of Northern California pseudohippies just finished a game of Zonk — or rather, the game just stopped because somebody quoted a line from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and everybody forgot what they were doing.

Yet, by a stroke of luck, the conversation about Harold and Kumar reminds the group of their real reason for staying up so late. They pack into a truck and head down to the local fast food joint looking to load up — but it’s not the food they’re loading up on, it’s the nasty, half-rotted, leftover fryer grease.

That’s right — the leftover, sun-warmed, Joey Chesnut-defeating grease from a McDonald’s fry-o-lator has become valuable enough to steal due to the skyrocketing demand for biodiesel and the out-of-sight costs of regular diesel.

Most restaurants store their smelly, used fryer grease in large tanks outside and out of view of the public eye — and for good reason. If the customers actually knew what their food was fried in, they might never eat there again.

But the necessity to store the grease outside and away from public view has left it in a rather vulnerable and unexpected position.

Rendering plants in Northern California and elsewhere are reporting loses of $15,000 per month due to the increasing amount of grease theft. These rendering plants normally make their money off of contracts with restaurants to collect the grease and recycle it into biodiesel and feed supplement for livestock.

For sure, some of the thieves are looking for a cheap way to make their own backyard biodiesel — a fairly straightforward process that can be accomplished for less than $1/gal. With the cost of regular diesel hovering around $5 per gallon, the enticement of the free grease has proved to be too much to avoid.

However, it’s hard to believe that there are enough do-it-yourselfers out there making backyard biodiesel to drive such a huge growth in grease theft.

Looking at the larger economy, the trading of leftover fryer grease —referred to as yellow grease — is booming on the commodities market.

Eight years ago yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound and now it trades closer to 36 cents a pound, or $2.73 a gallon. If a thief can load up a 2,500 gallon tanker truck, that’s $6,825 dollars — not bad for a few nights of work.

Authorities have had little luck in catching grease thieves and so have no idea if the thefts are conducted by organized groups or, as I suggest above, by random groups of stoned psuedohippies looking to save a buck.

In reality it’s probably both, but I’d say that the pseudohippies make up a very small percentage and the actual growth is being driven by organized groups. Whatever the case, it’s amazing how the value of something as lowly as used fryer grease can see its fortunes turn around so quickly.

the logistics of plugins

The Problem:

There are 54 million garages for the 247 million registered cars in the US, meaning that the majority of cars are parked overnight in parking structures, parking lots or curbside.

As a result, most potential plug-in vehicle consumers do not have an adequate place to charge their vehicles. This problem is even more pronounced in urban areas like San Francisco, where only about 16% of cars are parked in garages overnight and the rest end up curbside or in parking lots.

Also, although the US power grid probably has enough overall capacity to supply energy to a nation of plug-in vehicles, it may not have the ability to charge them when they all plug-in and demand energy at the same time — say 6 pm every weekday.

The Vision:

Imagine pulling into any old parking spot downtown, plugging your electric car into a box on the curb, running some errands, and coming back ten minutes later to find your car completely charged and your bank account automatically debited for the balance of your electricity use without you having to swipe any cards.

Now imagine you park your plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) overnight on the curb outside your apartment after driving all day. You’ve driven enough that your batteries have stored excess energy from the combustion of a fuel (gas, ethanol, biodiesel, whatever).

As soon as you plug that PHEV in, it communicates to the power grid that it has excess energy. As it turns out, the power grid has a need for that extra energy at the moment you plug your car in. In response your car gives some of its stored energy back to the grid. Your account is then credited for the amount of energy you supplied back to the grid.

Later, in the wee hours of the morning when the energy demand is quite low, the grid tells your car (along with a smallish group of other plug-ins) that it can start charging. Ten minutes later, when your group of cars is done charging, another smallish group of plug-ins is told they can begin their charge cycle. And so on and so forth until all the cars that need to be charged are charged.

If three collaborating companies have their way, this may indeed be what the future looks like.

At the Plug-In 2008 conference hosted in San José, CA, this week, Coulomb Technologies and V2Green announced a partnership to create an intelligent charging infrastructure for plug-in vehicles.

Their partnership will combine Coulomb’s charging station and communications network technology with V2Green’s bi-directional net metering technology to make the complex communications between plug-in cars and the power grid an effortless endeavor for drivers and a boon for the already overloaded grid.

Coulomb and V2Green’s announcement comes on the heels of news earlier in the week that eTec will be working with V2Green to develop a smart power grid charging infrastructure that would adapt to the needs of the power grid and be able to charge electric cars in 10 minutes.

The collaboration between eTec and V2Green is funded by the US Department of Energy and is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of charging electric vehicles quickly using eTec’s proven Minit-Charger system as well as test the benefits and problems associated with net metering of a connected car battery.

Not coincidentally to the site of the Plug-In 2008 conference, the City of San Jose is leading the “charge” on developing infrastructure for plug-in vehicle charging (PDF) and announced a partnership with Coulomb Technologies to provide city residents with smart charging stations located on streetlights, curbside and in parking lots.