From FUH2.com

So GM has been trying to unload the Hummer brand for a couple of years now, without much luck. One company in China was interested in buying it, but get this: “its bid … was unable to receive approval from the Chinese government, which was trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment” (NY Times).  I have a feeling that’s not the whole story, but what do I care.  Hummer is dead.  Fuck yes!

GM is going to be winding down operations over the next couple months.  Let’s just hope that the sale isn’t resurrected during this glorious dismantling process.

It’s a fundamental tenet of capitalism that individuals are rational and self-interested, and will act accordingly in the marketplace. Such is the social internalization of this principle that we tend to extend its logic to the majority of personal choices, assuming that the invisible hand has created an equilibrium of cost and utility. A common example of this is when choosing where to live; buying a home in the suburbs often necessitates commuting a longer distance for work and shopping, but this is balanced by having more space at a lower cost.

Or is it? A fascinating paper from the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Zurich seems to indicate that people systematically underestimate the impact of long commutes, corresponding with a highly statistically significant decline in subjective well-being. For whatever reason, people who have longer commutes are simply not being compensated enough financially, socially, or aesthetically for their choice. When it comes to commuting, perhaps we are not as rational as we should be.

Basically, people who don’t need cars to get around are happier. Do everything you can to find a job that’s close to home (or vice versa), ride a bike to work, and be glad.

While industry and power generation emit significantly more greenhouse gases overall, a NASA study has found that in terms of net radiative forcing, the climate impact of fossil-fuel burning road traffic is the number one contributor. While it’s not necessarily reassuring when it comes to overall planetary health, it turns out that release of sulfates and aerosols in industrial and power sectors reflect solar radiation, mitigating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Cars are relatively clean in these emissions, and so have a greater warming effect.

The bottom line is a little bit different than what you might typically hear, with the biggest climate culprits being:

1) Cars, buses, trucks

2) Household biofuels (wood and dung for heating and cooking)

3) Livestock production (cattle make lots of methane)

It’s an interesting interpretation of climate data, and forces scientists and policy-makers to really take stock of what the priorities will be in the short-term. If climate change is the ultimate threat, then this analysis paints a somewhat different picture of reform than the typically energy sector-heavy plans that have been drafted to date.

Makes the prospect of China’s 45% year-on-year growth in auto sales (total sales of which were 30% greater than the US in 2009!) even more terrifying, doesn’t it?

I feel a bit odd posting about this given my general abhorrence for war, but technology for creating a ‘virtual minefield’ may be one of the only examples of a new killing machine that is less evil than its predecessor. Metal Storm’s multi-barreled, computer-controlled, non-mechanical machine gun is the basis of the weapon, which lays a minefield that consists not of explosives, but of proximity sensors. When the sensors are tripped, the gun fires a projectile to its exact location. The weapon can be turned off and on at any time, and apparently it can even fire ‘less-lethal’ projectiles, whatever that means. Military types will be happy because they gain inexhaustible coverage of the minefield as long as the sensors remain intact, and humanity on the whole will be happy because we’re no longer sowing the earth with perpetual, indiscriminate death. Once the gun is gone, so is the minefield.

Not like it’s going to be adopted, though, so long as landmines cost pennies and are so very effective at the maim-not-kill objective that helps to make them such a terrifying weapon of war.

When we add new posts to this website, they all get secretly tagged and categorized so related posts can be read together.  That’s how the “similar posts” thing at the bottom of each article works.  What you may not know is that one of our most popular categories is “anal fisting”.   It started after Pavel wrote a bit about the sudden rise in the popularity of anal fisting in the Czech Republic, but has quickly become the catchall category for reports of the world going to hell.  I was on thestar.ca today, and found the ultimate example of anal fisting.

A school board in California has banned the Merriam Webster Dictionary after complaints about the entry for “oral sex.”  That’s right.  We’ve moved beyond censoring classic literature and science textbooks to censoring a book of words - a book that inherently cannot advocate anything.  The school board has now promised to scour the dictionary for other inappropriate terms before returning a modified version to the schools.  I’m going to suggest they just go whole-hog and use Google’s China censoring software so they can get rid of anything pertaining to liberty or free thought in addition to pornographic references.  And with Google threatening to withdraw from China, I’m sure some unemployed software engineer would be more than happy to modify the program for California.

To me, the saddest part of this tale is that it appears that the majority of parents down in Cali are in support of this move.  I think someone needs to go on an anal fisting crusade down there and try to loosen up some of those tight asses.

Last night I watched a relatively recent documentary called Food, Inc. which takes a critical look at the American food industry and its transformation over the last 50 years or so.  It was pretty mind blowing and worth recommending (I’ve set a small personal goal to tell everyone to watch this film) as it’s full of terrifying, revealing and interesting interviews and studies.  I would say that I was a moderately aware consumer prior to watching the film, attempting to buy local, organic produce when possible, only buying meat from my local butcher and cooking as much as I reasonably can.  To say that Food, Inc. has reaffirmed my desire to live this way would be a massive understatement.  One thing it does as an informational film is to explain why ethical, healthy eating in 2010 is barely feasible for a vast majority of our population.  You won’t believe the grip that corporations have on this industry in the United States (and by extension, Canada).  I’ll let you pass your own judgments on the movie but do me a favour; watch it, and let me know what you think.   That neat little link down there will get you to the trailer.

Almost forgot to mention, not that I would ever condone piracy of any sort, but I have heard that it’s available somewhere on youtube…

That title seems like it should be on The Onion, but the Internet is a strange place. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, a local bearded man spent 2009 without driving or riding in a car. The story itself is kind of a fluff piece, but far more interesting is a glance at the comments section. I would have expected most readers to offer up a somewhat dismissal, if genuine, “good for him,” but there’s a full gamut of comments ranging from militant derision of his accomplishment, to standard right-wing hate blather towards all things that might potentially fall under the umbrella of ‘Democratic.‘

Are people so terribly threatened by anything that falls outside their small range of ‘normal’ behaviour?

The Earthrace, a biodiesel-fueled trimaran that broke the world record for circumnavigating the globe, was recently sold to the Sea Shepherd Society and renamed the Ady Gil, acting as a symbolic flagship for the marine conservation group. Historic clashes between the Sea Shepherds and fishermen have not always been peaceful; the group espouses a brand of vigilante justice in order to protect sea life from those fishermen who don’t abide by international treaties and cannot face legal retribution for their actions in unregulated waters.

The latest spectacular meeting between whalers and the Sea Shepherds happened today, when a Japanese ship fired upon the Ady Gil with a water cannon before ramming it, destroying the composite bow of the highly sophisticated $2 million vessel. A full article is available at the Times.

Usually in incidents like this, there are two distinctly different sides to the story, but the true outcome is pretty obvious here. Take a look at this video footage taken onboard the Japanese ship:

And if that’s not convincing enough, here’s the view from another Sea Shepherd ship.

Update: The Ady Gil has confirmed to have sunk while attempts were made to tow it to safety. Efforts were made to take fuel, oil, and batteries off the ship before she went down. Sad.

God damn it’s cold today.  Fox Glacier felt like a tropical holiday compared to this shit.

I have an electric toothbrush with a rechargeable battery; it uses a clever little inductive charger as a base, and worked very well until recently. It wouldn’t retain any charge for a few subsequent uses, so I figured that the nickel-cadmium battery in it had bitten the dust.* As it happens, the design is quite decidedly sealed, and the manufacturer definitely does not endorse battery replacement. Frustrated at the prospect of throwing away a perfectly good chassis and motor (and of paying $30 for a new one, when all I needed was a $5 battery), I decided the only sensible thing to do was to hack it, Instructables-style. I figured I could even replace the NiCd with a high quality nickel-metal hydride one, and my toothbrush would be even better than a new one.

The instructions say “Caution! Opening the handle will destroy the appliance and invalidate the warranty,” and they are probably right. I am not a patient person, and so I managed to mangle it quite nicely while disassembling it (though with the aid of a Dremel, I did learn how I might be able to take one apart properly in the future). Adding to my frustration though, the battery they used wasn’t anywhere as exotic as the pair of 2/3A’s that I thought I was going to need to solder together. It was a single lowly, ubiquitous AA.

Now realistically, there are a lot of reasons for a company to design a toothbrush that’s sealed. It requires fewer parts, which means less (expensive) tooling when manufacturing. It also improves the reliability because you can gasket a sealed unit very thoroughly. Ultimately, the cost savings mean you can deliver a high-quality product at a reasonable price. While the company could readily produce a design with a replaceable battery and sell it for a few dollars more, it’s not really in their economic interest, because the $30 replacement cost is low enough that most consumers won’t think twice about buying a new one. Planned obsolescence is a cash cow for manufacturers, but frustrating as hell from a sustainability point of view, and there’s no easy way to reconcile the two angles. As it is, the other components are definitely robust beyond the life-span of a single battery, and because there’s no way to recycle the co-moulded plastic/rubber case, you end up with a tremendous amount of waste for a high-end product that is designed to be disposable.

This is the kind of challenge that faces any product designer with a conscience, and right now, there is little incentive for manufacturers to change their ways. Designing products for disassembly and recycling would increase costs, and the vast majority of consumers would likely throw it out, anyway. For product design to truly become sustainable, we either need a material revolution or we need to radically change our model of consumption. One way to do this is to make manufacturers responsible for end-of-life disposal of products. While this sounds like a ridiculous proposition to North Americans, the idea has been embraced by the European Union, which has begun introducing measures to make manufacturers accountable for their waste. If phased in properly, such initiatives can allow smart manufacturers with a cradle-to-cradle mentality to save money. One such success story is Interface, a carpet company which has vowed to eliminate any negative environmental impact from its products by 2020; as it has implemented new techniques for recycling its products at the end of their lifespan, they have actually managed to reduce their costs. It goes to show that, yet again, sustainable development often makes equally as much sense from a financial point of view as an environmental one.

*In the end, it turns out that the outlet that the charger had been plugged into in the bathroom had tripped its switch, and stopped working. Once I reset it, it worked again, so I’m pretty sure that the battery in my old toothbrush was decidedly alive and well for at least another few months, and this whole exercise was for naught. So it goes.