Happy Earth Day, everybody.

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

YouTube - Discovery Channel : I Love The World

Boom dee atta.

[Shadowblade225]

Happy Earth day. Do your part and be a druid for a day

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

Be a druid Every Day  

[lonnarin]

Be a druid Every Day  

Every night, shift into a party animal.

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

LOL Just make sure you put your trash in the right place  :p

[lonnarin]

One thing I've always wondered though... why does the city usually charge you to recycle?  I move into this house, they say, "hey, welcome!  Do you want to recycle?  give us 30 bucks for this plastic box, and you can give us your old bottles!".

Don't they uh... make money off recycling for the simple fact that they don't have to go dig sand for more bottles, that they can simply melt them down and reuse them, or heck, why even bother melting them?  I mean, overhead costs of the recycle trucks aside, they still don't have to bother hiring millions of people and wasting billions of dollars digging.

But no... you want a box to save the bottling companies some money... they charge you for it.

And in order to save trees and to save the government resources on postage you can elect to do online or over the phone billing for utilities.  Thing is, they charge you a 4-6 dollar fee each time you do so, even though they don't have to physically pick up your bill from the doorstep for mailing, burn gas for shipping and hire somebody to physically process the paper bill, which is the price of a stamp.  If anything, phonein and online billing should be cheaper... but there's the same $6 fee every month...  If you elect to needlessly slaughter a tree, you get a 6 dollar discount, essentially.

And when you take money out of an ATM, they charge you 2 dollars every time, even though it costs less for a machine to hand you your own money when compared to having a 12 dollar an hour bank teller sit there and do it for you in a line, where you waste gas money driving out to your bank.  Shouldn't the ATM be cheaper than the fully staffed bank with complimentary coffee and donuts?

I think the key to living greener is to take these procedural insanities and make them illegal to charge.  Our government and industries are actually CHARGING us for saving them time, man hours and money...  They charge us for saving on wastepaper and gas.  There must logically be some money to be made in the act of pollution itself.

Meanwhile every time I look at my electric bill, it says half of the amount is a fuel charge, meaning fossil fuels were burned for half that energy.  We have a perfectly nice set of nuclear plants out here, can build plenty more, and somehow my power company sees fit to burn oil during an oil crisis.  My electricity bill shouldn't be rising, since the cost of splitting the atom has only decreased over time, but somehow some braniac in government decided to make my home 50% oil compliant.

Is it just me, or is the whole world insane?

[Marswipp]

The world isn't really say "insane", its more or less "corrupt".

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

Those "fees" are to pay the people whose jobs are being eliminated by those resource saving things like ATMs and online bill paying...

Go figure...

[darkstorme]

Bear in mind, Lonn, that the government sees little (if anything) for municipal recycling collection.  Often the companies that do the actual recycling offer money if you bring the stuff back yourself, but at five cents/container, blue boxes don't really show a quick ROI to the municipality.

While it conserves resources to recycle, it doesn't necessarily save anyone money.  (Other than to generally improve productivity by making more resources available.)  Plus, since you don't get 100% of the people recycling (even if it WERE free), the companies that might pay people for recycled materials still have to go out and get new materials, incurring all the expense you talked about earlier.  They save a BIT, sure, by reducing the amount they need to get, but they don't save enough to pay the city what it costs to handle municipal recycling.  You pay for garbage removal too, after all - you're not paying for the process, you're paying for the transport.

Now, as for the online billing - I'm not certain what it's like where you live, but up here in Vancouver you actually get a little bit taken OFF your bill if you elect to handle it online, since you've saved the company postage and paper.

Likewise, I don't know where you bank, but at TD or CIBC (my primary banks), going to see a teller costs money.  ATMs are complimentary.

Finally, I can give a fairly comprehensive answer to the last one: because building a new nuke plant takes about a decade, and U-235 (along with pretty much every other metal) is suffering a minor crisis tied to the oil crisis because (naturally) it takes oil to mine for things.  So every fuel you could possibly burn or fission to generate power has gone up in price.  Ergo, fuel charge.  Again, in BC, we generate most of our electricity through hydroelectric installations, so we've been spared the fuel surcharge.  I expect the new wind projects will likewise be spared that surcharge.

I'd say it's high time the US started cranking up research into the IFR rather than building more LWRs (with the full knowledge that the CANDU is, sadly, almost as inefficient), and started letting the sunshine in - and then those pesky fuel surcharges would stop appearing on anyone's utility bill.

Happy Earth Day!