‘I make up a little chart every day,’ Kin said. ‘This past week was sunny, so I was electricity neutral about every other day, which I’m excited about.’ Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign legislation that will make it possible for more Californians to sell the electricity they produce back to their utilities at retail prices. The legislation, written by Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), doubles to 5% the overall amount of energy that California’s investor-owned utilities must buy back. Previously, state law required electric companies to sign so-called net-metering contracts for up to only 2.5% of their load. Solar advocates said the net-metering boost would allow consumers to recoup their investment faster, which is critical to California’s goal of installing a million rooftop arrays by 2017. Some 50,000 California homes benefit from net-metering today, a number that would need to grow rapidly if the state is to reach its goal of obtaining 3,000 megawatts from rooftop solar. California leads the nation in solar energy, accounting for more than 65% of all the solar installed in the U.S., Skinner said. ‘Net metering has been absolutely fundamental to that success,’ she said. But […]
For the frequent traveler, there is a stark dichotomy across the world. Almost without exception, traveling with an Asian carrier to any Asian airport is a pleasure. In contrast, using any airline domiciled in Europe or North America with passage through airports in that part of the world is stunningly inconvenient. Your plane for one – the Asian carriers’ jet, like its European counterpart, was assembled either in Seattle or in Toulouse, France, but it is a million miles away from the aircraft you are used to flying within Europe or North America. Plonk yourself down on a suspiciously comfortable seat and there is the large television panel with an array of entertainment. Great food, courteous service. And then you remember, this is the ‘economy’ class, which beats the ‘business’ class on any European or American airline. Deplane and walk past the immigration without much fuss; as you reach the baggage belts you are shocked to find your checked-in baggage already there. Then you look up and see rows of baggage belts in either direction, all quietly whirring away and depositing their contents with an almost sinister efficiency. Recovering from the shock, you recall the last time […]
Hands off my health care’ goes one strain of populist sentiment. But what if? Suppose Congress and President Barack Obama fail to overhaul the system now, or just tinker around the edges, or start over, as the Republicans propose - despite the Democrats’ latest and possibly last big push that began last week at a marathon televised forum in Washington. Then ‘my health care’ stays the same, right? Far from it, health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree. The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly. ‘People think if we do nothing, we will have what we have now,’ said Karen Davis, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group in New York. ‘In fact, what we will have is a substantial deterioration in what we have.’ Nearly every mainstream analysis calls for medical costs to continue to climb over the next decade, outpacing the growth in the overall economy and certainly increasing faster than the average paycheck. Those higher costs will translate into higher premiums, which […]
When Sen. Jim Bunning (R) of Kentucky held up a bill authorizing the extension of certain unemployment benefits Friday, he put the plans of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans on hold. By allowing extended benefits to expire, Congress has put the plans of a few hundred unemployed Americans on hold. Are you worried about your benefits? With those benefits set to expire at midnight Saturday, here’s a look at what they can expect: 1. What’s the immediate impact? There’s little practical impact over the next few days. Even though the extended benefit program officially ends Saturday, unemployed Americans will still be able to file Sunday and Monday for the benefits they are entitled to this week. It’s the benefits for next week that would be affected. 2. How many people are affected? At the outset, a couple hundred thousand of the nearly 5.4 million unemployed American receiving benefits will be affected. If Congress doesn’t act, the number of Americans will grow to 400,000 during the first two weeks of March and nearly 3 million by May, according to the Labor Department. 3. Are all unemployed Americans at risk? No. The […]
GUANGZHOU, China – Just a year after laying off millions of factory workers, China is facing an increasingly acute labor shortage. As American workers struggle with near double-digit unemployment, unskilled factory workers here in China’s industrial heartland are being offered signing bonuses. Factory wages have risen as much as 20 percent in recent months. Telemarketers are turning away potential customers because recruiters have fully booked them to cold-call people and offer them jobs. Some manufacturers, already weeks behind schedule because they can’t find enough workers, are closing down production lines and considering raising prices. Such increases would most likely drive up the prices American consumers pay for all sorts of Chinese-made goods. Rising wages could also lead to greater inflation in China. In the past, inflation has sown social unrest. The immediate cause of the shortage is that millions of migrant workers who traveled home for the long lunar New Year earlier this month are not returning to the coast. Thanks to a half-trillion-dollar government stimulus program, jobs are being created in the interior. But many economists say the recent global downturn also obscured a longer-term trend: China has drained its once vast […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
