Built-in Obsolescence
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Too much e-junk floating around
With apologies and thanks to Polyp for letting me shamelessly steal chunks of drawing.
Maybe we can all power our indlulgences with Bloom Boxes in the future
Even the Saudis seek to diversify in the face of peak oil
The NEW WEBSITE - www.marcrobertscartoons.com - will be going LIVE very soon, honestly.
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1 comment:
SUSAN left this helpful comment and link -which I incompetently deleted amongst the endless spam, so I'm pasting it here;
This on the bloom box: sorry, no something for nothings (sand is common (raw material for glass) and of course there's common sense, much rarer:
"Consider the Bloom Box. The pitchman, K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale, is not your typical scam artist, but an artfully understated business xecutive. He can go on 60 Minutes or Good Morning America and never make a slip. But there are warning signs. What is it he’s selling? "It starts with beach sand” he says, opening a box of the stuff. It's like saying a diamond is a lump of carbon. Silicon dioxide is the most abundant mineral on Earth, and essential to modern electronics. With the help of animation, he explains that plates made of the stuff enable hydrocarbon gases to react with oxygen, producing an electric potential. It's a fuel cell. He never says so, maintaining the fiction that this is something really new. It’s not. Fuel cells date back to 1838, but have found little application. The magic calls for painting the two sides of the plate with secret green and black ink respectively. Well there's a
little more to it, but CEOs don't worry about details. Oh, and the Bloom Box is not cheap. However, Google, FedEx and Wel-Mart can afford to test the Bloom Box. Everybody loves the idea of distributed energy production, where we have our own power plant in the backyard. But a Bloom Box is not totally isolated; it needs to be tied to a gas pipeline. Is this the future? Probably not."
(from Archives of What's New which can be found at
http://www.bobpark.org
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