Mark Gregory Turansky

“When I have a dollar to blow on a bottle of water, I buy Perrier!” quipped Robin Williams in his late ’70s stand-up days.

It killed. The audience howled at Williams’ derision of paying a lot of money for something we get nearly for free from the tap, especially when the EPA does a very good job enforcing water quality standards in the country.

Today, bottled water is a $50 billion business globally. We consume copious amounts of energy and fossil fuels to produce, fill, and ship plastic bottles of water while 1/6 of the world’s population (over a billion people) do not have access to reliable potable water.

The math from a recent Fast Company article is particularly illuminating:

If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

Enjoy: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has advocated painting roofs white as a cost saving measure that also reduces the impact of climate change.  The theory is that more heat would be reflected, thereby lowering a building’s cooling costs, which in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions because we’re using less power to cool the building.

An article (blog entry) on Time magazine’s website says studies have concluded that whitening a roof actually works and can make it 20% more cost effective to cool your house on hot days.  I’d love to see links to the studies, but the physics makes enough sense that I believe it.

You can read the article here:  http://cheapskate.blogs.time.com/2009/07/30/why-isnt-your-roof-white-already/

Here in sunny South Carolina, I spend more on air conditioning in summer than I do on heating in winter.  When my roof is due for an overhaul (and those shingles are getting pretty old), I will be looking into a light colored rooftop.

Finally, something that might — might — make me buy this game! It’s a true game changer…! Although, I still feel I should instead continue to learn to play Beatles songs on my real guitar.

$45 of every $100 dollars spent at local businesses stays in circulation in the local economy.  The money is spent on local salaries, payments to other merchants, and so on.  A big chain, on the other hand, only keeps $13 in local circulation.  This is the finding of an economic study done in Austin, TX.

Buying local is a nationwide trend.

For years, I’ve seen bumperstickers around Charleston, SC that read “Friends don’t let friends buy imported shrimp” or other slogans mean to encourage support for the local fishing industry.  Other communities have taken the Buy Local idea even further.

One community businessman in Brewton, AL handed out $2 bills to his employees with the rule that after a charitable gift the money must be spent locally.  The bills floated around town and eventually found their way back to his store, which dramatically drove home the point that money circulating in the local economy is its own form of stimulus.

Other communities have encouraged a “10% shift,” which encourages people to redirect 10% of their spending to local businesses or “$20 on the 20th” campaigns where you would spend $20 at a local business on the 20th day of the month.

Best selling author Barbara Kingsolver wrote “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about her and her family’s quest to grow or buy only local food for one year. They intimately learned the value of their labor, the strength in their community, and the power of taking control of their health and environment.  They put the kitchen back in the center of their family and learned to work together toward a common goal.  Yes, they had to give up the instant gratification of being able to buy strawberries year-round, but they gained an intense appreciation for delectably fresh asparagus that you can only get by growing it yourself and you can only experience once a year in springtime.

Some may call buying local mini-protectionism, and in a sense it is, but it makes for a strong local community.  It’s kind of like saving your money during a recession.  It’s good for the individual who’s saving, but it’s bad for the overall economy because no one is buying.  But just as saving keeps more dollars here at home than abroad, so too does buying local keep our dollars in our own community.   There are intangible benefits, too, in that communities and families are strengthened as they come together not just for the greater good, but for their own.

I just read a Fortune magazine article about a farming youth movement and how young people are starting organic farms and businesses.   I find the article timely considering I just wrote an article of my own advocating backyard organic gardens.

You can read the Fortune article here:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0907/gallery.farmers_organic_local_young.fortune/

The Federal government is bleeding red ink, as are nearly all other states in the union.  Why?  Because Americans have lodged in their heads the idea that we are entitled to everything, which includes paying nothing.

We expect and demand safety and security from our police force and fire fighters.  We ask our real estate agents about neighborhoods with good schools and the best test scores.  We cry about the ever-increasing age at which we can retire and collect social security because we all want to retire early.

But we don’t want to pay for any of it.  We feel entitled to it all.

The Greatest Generation was raised in the depths of the Depression only to be called upon to fight World War II.  During the war, families grew Victory Gardens and accepted rationing to aid the war effort.  Buying Victory Bonds was patriotic.  Women entered the workforce, manned the factories, and worked hard to increase our industrial output that proved to be a decisive material contribution to the war.  This generation sacrificed, saved, worked hard, and built a nation.

After September 11, 2001, what did George Bush ask the nation to do?  What kind of sacrifice did he call us all to make?

None.  He told us to go shopping.

The real crack in the foundation wasn’t 9/11, though.  It was the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.  Together, these cuts turned surpluses into massive deficits. After 9/11, the Bush administration engaged in two wars without asking the American people to sacrifice anything, even while our sons and daughters were sacrificing everything overseas.  Profligate spending accompanied by reckless tax cuts were a recipe for disaster.

Worse still, tax cuts at the Federal level forced all state and local government officials to cut taxes, too, lest they lose their jobs.  That was the political climate of the day.  Today, government at all levels — federal, state, and local — are in extreme financial straits.  All are hemorrhaging money and drowning in a sea of red ink.

Reaganonmics is dead.  Paul O’Neill was Treasury Secretary in 2002 when Cheney was discussing the tax cuts that passed into law in 2003.  O’Neill was concerned that the U.S. was “was careering toward a fiscal crisis” but was silenced by Cheney’s retort “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”  Paul O’Neill resigned later that year.

For the party that loves Reagan so much and hails his landmark tax cuts of 1981, Republicans seem to have forgotten that Reagan raised taxes!  In 1982, he signed two tax increases into law that raised 1% of GDP as tax revenue (~$40 billion, equivalent to $100+ billion today).  Other tax increases followed in 1983, 1984, and 1985.  George H. W. Bush raised taxes in 1990.

The Gipper raised taxes.  It was fiscally prudent to do so in order to reduce his growing deficits.

What should we do today?  Raise taxes!  We’ve got the money!  The average savings rate jumped to over 4%.

Thanks, Obama, for my $1,000 tax cut, but please, take it back.  In fact, raise taxes by 1% of GDP, just like Reagan did.  Restore my tax rate to what I was paying before Bush took office.  Cut spending wherever possible (like that F-22 you successfully fought against).  Restore fiscal sanity to the Federal balance sheet.  Return us to a surplus and start paying down the national debt.

I would much rather pay a few hundred extra bucks per month than be in the crisis we’re in today.  I would much rather be asked to sacrifice to continue the prosperity of our country than be able to buy more imported plastic pieces of crap I don’t need. I have children.  I am looking forward to bettering their future.

Mr. President, please, raise my taxes.

President Barack Obama declassified satellite imagery that graphically shows the effect of global warming. The imagery was previously kept classified by the Bush administration.

Read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/26/climate-change-obama-administration

View the images:

http://gfl.usgs.gov/Publications.shtml

It’s time for fall planting in South Carolina.  I sowed lots of seeds in my starter trays with my eye on mid-August for transplanting outside.

I planted cantaloupe, (lots of) snow peas, swiss chard, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cucumbers, broccoli, collards, green peppers, kohlrabi, romaine lettuce, and lil’ gem lettuce.

Let’s hope for nice weather, lots of sun, and some good luck!

And I thought writing about composting in a Victory Garden was a good thing to do, but I’ve been easily bested by people in Fiji who created composting toilets because they found their sewage was seeping into the sea and affecting their coral reefs.

The toilets separate liquids and solids, with the liquids becoming a fertilizer after some filtration (it’s sterile, afterall).  The solids are mixed with dry stuff like sawdust and then packed away for several months.  The solids compost over time and become fertilizer, too.

I’ve read before that nitrogen-rich urine makes good fertilizer and also helps a compost pile break down faster, but this is the first I’ve read about people using good ol’ #2 for their garden.

Here is the secret way to kill your application’s portability — and by portable, I mean across different computers, let alone operating systems:  Hardcode all your paths.

That’s it.  That very quickly kills portability.  It’s easy to accomplish, too.  Simply refer to all your configuration files, for example, by fully qualified pathname, like this:

System.setProperty("com.yourcorp.refdata.config.filename",
    "C:\\Documents and Settings\\FOO\\Perforce_FOO\\PATHS_CHANGED_FOR_ANONYMITY\\RefDataConfig.xml");

The above snippet is something I’m battling with to get unit tests working in my project. Naturally it doesn’t work for me because “FOO” isn’t my username nor is my Perforce sandbox “Performance_FOO” because, again, “FOO” isn’t my username.

This unit test won’t work across machines using the same OS, and our brethren using Macs or Linux boxes are completely hosed.

Don’t hardcode any paths in your application!

In Java, use a classpath resource.   This gives you portability.  It also allows a Configuration Management team the ability to package all required resources into a single artifact for better version control.

The safest way to get a classpath resource would be to use your current classloader to find the resource.

// Well-behaved Java programs set the thread's current classloader when running in a
// multi-classloader environment.  You see this when you write containers of any type.
Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResource("/some/path/RefDataConfig.xml");

// or another way... sufficient for most cases
this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("/some/path/RefDataConfig.xml");