Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005 Status: offline
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Other than being a little mixed up here, I think we are doing OK. Slave, there is an element in your shower head that you can remove and again enjoy a real shower. Let me go into the water thing. I do agree with the other poster about toilets. I had a cheap one and it sucked, required near daily cleaning and when I got tired of that it turned dark brown. It was an American Standard. Now I got a new one, for $160 and it has lasted the last few years with not much problem. When buying it I had a buddy with me who knows this shit, and we did research it a bit in the store. Square inches at the bowl water level is very important. And even though it only uses 1.2 gallons to flush, there are about three gallons pushing it. There is a diference.This is a high tech one, and in this case high tech seems to have worked out well. Lightbulbs are the same way. Unfortunately mine make heat. I use high output bulbs and a dimmer. You can't use a dimmer on most of these newfangled ones. They last alot longer. Three 100 watters in the livingroom, but rarely turned up over halfway. They do last longer. That is a point I brought up, not here but somewhere else. We bought a few flourescent fixures and some low energy bulbs for them. Put them in the basement. Now understand that I do look beyond the surface of an issue, it's just one of my curses, I am simply not allowed to be ignorant. I said "These people take all day to make a forty watt tube only consume thirty two watts, but then the thing only lasts a month". What about the energy required to make a new one ? I said that, nobody else. If we are truly to be energy concious and conservationist, we must look beyond our own electric bill. This is what people do not understand. It is like law, respect for others' rights. People only think of themselves. And you fucking know it is true. Some of us would sacrifice 23 human lives to cut our electric bill. You know who you are. If we are to think in terms of true conservation, we must think of the longevity of these products. It is not that we are against China's economy (where everything is built) it is that a true convervationalist will think in terms of what a certain action costs the environment as a whole. Very few people do that. Most do not have the scientific knowledge to do so. That is because the powers that be wanted a generation of idiots. Wait until I turn the idiots against them. Teaching goes a long way in righting the problems of humamity, and I think most of us agree that the powers that be are a major part of the world's problems. But the political aside, those high efficiency lights are great. They last longer, pull less juice and put out more light. Additionally some of them look really cool. But in my livingroon there are incandescents, on a dimmer. I don't use the full three hundred watts all the time, and when turned down they have a "warmer" glow. However I do have a flourescent bulb at the top of the stairs, this after I got tired of changing it so many times. At the bottom of the stairs is what is known as an IQ bulb. This one will turn itself off after thirty minutes unless you turn it off and back on quickly, that disables the IQ function. It has been there for twelve years now. I can't seem to find these IQ bulbs anymore. I recall there were several types, I got the timer type, but they had a dfimmer type, where you turn it off and on quick it dims. Way better than the old three way bulbs that were in vogue in the 60s and on. There was another type of IQ bulb IIRC, but I can't remember now exactly what it did. If I could go back in time I would buy them all. I think it was a great idea, and I don't know how the company didn't succeed, and become a household name. Somehow they failed on the marketing end of it, or got bought out by the electric company. I would not let that happen. You don't know me, you could put million dollars in cash right in front of my face and I will not bat an eyelash. It does not impress me. I'll tell you what else, the olman has this box, which is a combo caller ID and BLOCK box. We can block any number we want, and can block all "private" numbers that call here. It has a voice "Sorry we are not accepting calls from your number at this time" or "Sorry we are not accepting calls from blocked numbers at this time, please unblock your number and try again". To do that in the US of course you dail *82 before the number, but the little box does not give out those instructions. You can't buy those little boxes anymore. You can't buy the chips for those little boxes anymore. You can't buy anything like those little boxes anymore. But that is OK, the phone company has a service for which you pay monthly, which does pretty much the same thing. Let me say that again, so you can have a chance to understand (I know some do, but we must facilitate the others) THE PHONE COMPANY HAS A SERVICE FOR WHICH YOU WILL PAY EVERY MONTH THAT DOES THE SAME THING AS THE LITTLE BOX. Are you starting to get it ? That little box was about $30, tht is two months of privacy manager from SBC. We got one, and the only other person around here with one is my Mother. We are actually switching the basement back over to regular light sockets, but we will be using the high efficiency bulbs. Four foot flourescents are junk now. They wrecked them. I bought a friggin case of them and each only lasts about a month. They start flickering and then fail to fire up. Very annoying. There is nothing wrong with the fixtures because a new bulb/tube works fine. It all comes back to the shortsightedness of the engineering community and the governing body. When profits are paramount, We The People suffer. It is that simple. So go ahead, phase out everythig that works, and replace it with things that do not work. We don't need to be bombed back into the stone age, we will be led back into the stone age by gross incompetence. I do like those high efficiency bulbs though, the ones that screw into a standard socket. What is it called a T2 ? something like that. If you happen to feel too good about the US, let me lay this on you. In Cleveland here LTV steel was a big employer, the biggest mill, but not the biggest company. Nobody gets that because Citibank was headquartered here until recently. The employees at LTV steel stole so many lightbulbs that they paid union electricians to change every socket in the plant to a left handed thread. Sure the bulbs cost more, but you get to use them. When they used regular bulbs they were always running out no matter how many they bought, because people were stealing them. So at triple the cost for each bulb, they saved alot of money. I don't have any idea what kind of response to expect from this, fuck it, gimme what you got. T
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