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Post by lagatta on Sept 26, 2009 20:34:46 GMT
Yes, what an awful name. One of the nasty things rural people get called by us city slickers, and I don't particularly like the expression "housewife" either, although I'll let those of you who've been full-time stay-at-home child rearers and homemakers (whichever your gender) find a better term. Frugal Scholar is a much more appealing name; she is not poor, she is in her own words a "pathologically frugal" professor teaching in your hometown NOLA. She has some very good posts: today it is about "cafeteria ladies" : frugalscholar.blogspot.com/ My only beef about her very good blog is technical; I can't seem to sign in. The only membership I seem to be able to use is my Google account, and I opened that with my real name showing as it was for work-related purposes... Unfortunately some of the frugality blogs and sites have a fundie religious agenda and others have utterly absurd advice, but I'm always looking for good ones. I'm amused by glossy magazines such as "Simple Living" (there are different ones) most of which espouse a lifestyle that would involve consuming at least five times as much stuff as I do and always have (family had no money at all).
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 26, 2009 21:48:51 GMT
LaGatta ~~ log out of your Google account, then create another account under a different name. Use any name you wish. That will give you an account for signing up for anything on the web where you don't wish to reveal your real name.
Thank you for Frugal Scholar! That is a delight to read. As I was reading it, though, I mused that perhaps that name might be off-putting to a whole other group of people needing instruction in practical frugality. Can't win for losing!
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 10, 2011 17:01:55 GMT
Would energy consumption labels help us reduce our use of petroleum oil "calories" in what we buy and use?
This article suggests that it might. It's written for the US, but is the sort of thing that would be adopted around the world.
Making Every Oil Calorie Count By Amanda Little. published March 8, 2011 by the NYTimes
As turmoil in Libya pushes up the price of oil, American consumers are once again feeling the sting of $3.50-a-gallon gasoline. But the impact of costly crude on our lives and economy extends far beyond the pump. Virtually everything we consume — from hamburgers, running shoes and chemotherapy to Facebook, Lady Gaga MP3s and “60 Minutes” — is produced from or powered by fossil fuels and their byproducts, all of which could grow more costly as the price of petroleum rises.
The problem is that there is no easy way to quantify how much total energy we consume. Fortunately, there’s a great model already in widespread use: the nutritional information that appears on the back of every food product. Why not create the same sort of system for energy?
Americans use more oil than people in any other developed country, about twice as much per capita, on average, as Britons. Indeed, our appetite for petroleum, like our fondness of fast foods, has spawned a kind of obesity epidemic, but one without conspicuous symptoms like high blood pressure and diabetes. And because we don’t see how much energy goes into the products and services we purchase, we’re shielded from knowing the full extent of our personal energy demands — and unprepared when rising fuel prices increase the cost of everything else.
This illusion stems, in part, from a measurement problem: while we expect and understand labels on our food products that quantify caloric, fat and nutrient content, we have no clear way of measuring the amount of energy it takes to make our products and propel our daily activities.
There’s no reason we can’t have energy labels, too. For example, in Europe, Tesco, a supermarket chain, has begun a “carbon labeling” program for some 500 products, which displays the amount of energy consumed and greenhouse gases generated from their production, transportation and use.
We could do the same thing here, with labels providing a product or service’s “daily energy calories.” Along with physical labels, imagine a smartphone app — we’ll call it “Decal” for short — that would scan a product’s bar code and report how much energy it took to produce that item.
Like the nutritional data on the backs of food products, Decal would give consumers a user-friendly, universal measure that they could use to compare products or count their daily energy intake. For example, the app would enable an energy dieter to scan two otherwise identical loaves of bread and see which one required less energy to produce.
Decal would have applications beyond the grocery-store shelf. By synchronizing with onboard computers in cars, buses and trains, it could tell you how much energy you use during daily errands and commutes. It would sync to a smart energy meter in your home to evaluate how much power you’re using and which appliances are the biggest guzzlers.
And at the end of the day, the app would generate your total energy diet: a Decal “score” that would quantify how many total energy calories you’ve consumed.
Once Decal took hold, the Department of Energy could recommend daily energy allowances, in the same way the Department of Agriculture recommends daily intakes of different nutrients. Experts could offer “diet” plans for energy-efficient lifestyles, and the Internal Revenue Service could offer tax rebates to families that achieve certain energy-calorie reductions.
True, not all Americans would adjust their energy intake. But many would, and we could expect producers to take up the program rapidly in response. After all, researchers have found that after food manufacturers were required in 2007 to state on their labels the amount of trans fat and saturated fat in their products, 95 percent of supermarket foods were reformulated with healthier fats. The effect would go beyond foods, too: by creating demand out of public awareness, Decal could help propel investment in energy-efficient innovations and industries.
Millions of Americans say they want the country to become more energy-efficient, but they’re wary of government-enforced rationing. Decal would avoid such overreach by giving consumers the information to change things themselves.
What America needs isn’t more cheap oil to feed a gluttonous economy, but rather better ways to use less. Any other path is the equivalent of ignoring our high cholesterol numbers and attributing our corpulence to a broken bathroom scale.
Amanda Little is the author of “Power Trip: The Story of America’s Love Affair With Energy.”
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Post by mickthecactus on Mar 10, 2011 17:26:57 GMT
$3.50 a gallon.
Ours is now £6.
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Post by onlymark on Mar 10, 2011 18:07:52 GMT
Different sized gallons though. 1 UK gallon is 1.2 US gallons, so 3.5 x 1.2 = 4.20 USD per UK gallon. 4.20 USD = £2.61.
Just though I'd have a play with that for comparison.
Egypt - 1 litre diesel costs 1.1 Egyptian pounds (LE) So 1 UK gallon = 1.1 x 4.456 = 4.9 LE per gallon 4.9 LE = £0.51 per gallon.
It's cheap here, isn't it?
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Post by onlymark on Mar 10, 2011 18:29:18 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 10, 2011 18:54:41 GMT
Before returning the rental car today, I was happy to fill it for "only" 1.48€ a liter at Carrefour, since some stations in Paris are charging as much as 1.80€
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 18, 2011 14:02:53 GMT
I found this editorial piece in the NYTimes online interesting:
Plastic: Too Good to Throw Away By Susan Freinkel, Published: March 17, 2011
Since the 1930s, when the product first hit the market, there has been a plastic toothbrush in every American bathroom. But if you are one of the growing number of people seeking to purge plastic from their lives, you can now buy a wooden toothbrush with boar’s-hair bristles, along with other such back-to-the-future products as cloth sandwich wrappers, metal storage containers and leather fly swatters.
The urge to avoid plastic is understandable, given reports of toxic toys and baby bottles, seabirds choking on bottle caps and vast patches of ocean swirling with everlasting synthetic debris. Countless bloggers write about striving — in vain, most discover — to eradicate plastic from their lives. “Eliminating plastic is one of the greenest actions you can do to lower your eco-footprint,” one noted while participating in a recent online challenge to be plastic-free.
Is this true? Shunning plastic may seem key to the ethic of living lightly, but the environmental reality is more complex.
Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were invented as substitutes for dwindling supplies of natural materials like ivory or tortoiseshell. When the American John Wesley Hyatt patented celluloid in 1869, his company pledged that the new manmade material, used in jewelry, combs, buttons and other items, would bring “respite” to the elephant and tortoise because it would “no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” Bakelite, the first true synthetic plastic, was developed a few decades later to replace shellac, then in high demand as an electrical insulator. The lac bugs that produced the sticky resin couldn’t keep up with the country’s rapid electrification.
Today, plastic is perceived as nature’s nemesis. But a generic distaste for plastic can muddy our thinking about the trade-offs involved when we replace plastic with other materials. Take plastic bags, the emblem for all bad things plastic. They clog storm drains, tangle up recycling equipment, litter parks and beaches and threaten wildlife on land and at sea. A recent expedition researching plastic pollution in the South Atlantic reported that its ship had trouble setting anchor in one site off Brazil because the ocean floor was coated with plastic bags.
Such problems have fueled bans on bags around the world and in more than a dozen American cities. Unfortunately, as the plastics industry incessantly points out, the bans typically lead to a huge increase in the use of paper bags, which also have environmental drawbacks. But the bigger issue is not what the bags are made from, but what they are made for. Both are designed, absurdly, for that brief one-time trip from the store to the front door.
In other words, plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment; it’s the way we tend to make and use them that’s the problem.
It’s estimated that half of the nearly 600 billion pounds of plastics produced each year go into single-use products. Some are indisputably valuable, like disposable syringes, which have been a great ally in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like H.I.V., and even plastic water bottles, which, after disasters like the Japanese tsunami, are critical to saving lives. Yet many disposables, like the bags, drinking straws, packaging and lighters commonly found in beach clean-ups, are essentially prefab litter with a heavy environmental cost.
And there’s another cost. Pouring so much plastic into disposable conveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials we once held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If we understood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivial throwaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material can do for us.
In a world of nearly seven billion souls and counting, we are not going to feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone; we need plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbon footprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energy to produce and transport than many other materials. Plastics also make possible green technology like solar panels and lighter cars and planes that burn less fuel. These “unnatural” synthetics, intelligently deployed, could turn out be nature’s best ally.
Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better, safer plastics — forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health. We have the public policy tools to build better recycling systems and to hold businesses accountable for the products they put into the market. And we can also take a cue from the plastic purgers about how to cut wasteful plastic out of our daily lives.
We need to rethink plastic. The boar’s-hair toothbrush is not our only alternative.
Susan Freinkel is the author of the forthcoming “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.”
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Post by Kimby on Mar 22, 2011 19:52:38 GMT
In order to dodge the "paper or plastic" quandry at the supermarket checkout, I have accumulated about 8 cloth bags to bring my purchases home in. I need to retrain my mind however, because they are always in the car when I am standing at the checkout stand wishing I'd remembered to bring them in with me...
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Post by mich64 on Mar 22, 2011 20:13:10 GMT
I have to admit that I did not use cloth bags until all the food markets began charging for plastic bags. We now use them quite often but occasionally we forget to put them back into the vehicle and have to pay for some bags. Cheers, Mich
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Post by Deleted on Mar 22, 2011 20:19:33 GMT
Free plastic bags will have disappeared from the EU in another two years or so. In Paris, the basic little plastic bag that most of us are used to in supermarkets incur a charge of 0.03€ in quite a few places. Hypermarkets now charge for all bags, as do the Picard frozen food chain, my Chinese supermarket and even Virgin Megastore...
There are sturdier bigger bags available for 0.10€ or 0.50€ and the advantage of these are that they are exchangeable free of charge for life. You just turn in one that is worn out and they give you a new one.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 3, 2012 15:50:06 GMT
So anyway, today I finally broke down and bought a new television and I was in great torment about what to do with the old one, which is in absolutely perfect condition after about 15 years.
But I told the store to take it away when they deliver the new one (an obligation for stores here is to take back for recycling whatever you are buying a new one of, if requested). I would really have liked to give it away to charity or to someone who needs it, but then I thought that these old TVs with tubes and excess energy use must be taken out of circulation as quickly as possible. After all, the new TVs are now extremely cheap and more ecological.
So my poor old TV, which doesn't deserve such a fate, will be dismantled by professional recyclers and the different metals will live new lives in all sorts of other products.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 2, 2019 18:10:22 GMT
Next week legislation is being submitted in France to ban short domestic flights when a rail alternative is possible. Marseille is only 3h15 from Paris by train, and Strasbourg is only 1h45, and yet there are still flights. (Obviously, there are plenty of other examples.) A person taking a plane pollutes 52 times more than someone taking a train in France.
For some reason, the government does not support this proposal, which is being made by the Greens and the Left. I am waiting to hear the reason for opposing the proposal, because it makes total sense to me.
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Post by mossie on Jun 2, 2019 18:39:53 GMT
I guess if one adds in the hassles getting to, and at, the airport, the train is quicker.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 2, 2019 21:33:47 GMT
Meanwhile in the US our poor and very limited passenger rail service is being phased out instead of improved. Only a few heavily-used commuter corridors will continue having a rail option. SMH.
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Post by lagatta on Jun 3, 2019 0:43:54 GMT
The train is faster in many situations. Montréal-Toronto is faster and more hassle considering check-in and screening time and the time taken reaching airports outside the city. The railway stations are dead centre in both cities. Unfortunately that is not the case in Ottawa, where the right of way to the old railway station was dismantled (idiotic mid - 20th century anti-urbanism. I have to take a but from there to the city centre - not a huge problem if a tourist or but visiting family, but stressful if I'm interpreting. The original station was just across the way from the Parliament buildings.
Nowadays the trains have wifi so one can work on them - or pretend to.
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Post by bjd on Jul 4, 2019 18:10:15 GMT
I once took the train from Toronto to Ottawa. I was surprised how far the Ottawa station was from the centre. It was really slow for someone used to European trains too, and expensive. What was most surprising was how empty the train station in Toronto was -- in a city with nearly 5 million people, the place was echoing and there were only about 5 trains listed for the day.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 4, 2019 19:02:46 GMT
Union Station in Los Angeles looks like a ghost town.
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Post by rikita on Jul 11, 2019 13:12:47 GMT
yes i always wonder when people say they fly because it is faster, but in fact they only maybe save an hour considering the waiting times and the journey to/from the airport - and have to spend the time constantly switching from one thing to the other (waiting area at the airport, security line, another waiting area, airplane, etc.) while for a train ride, they could sit in the same seat the whole time reading or napping ... of course, there is still lots that can be improved about trains, but especially for not-so-long distances, they are more comfortable ...
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Post by Kimby on Jul 11, 2019 13:55:29 GMT
In the US, trains are not an option for most cross-country travel. It takes several days each way, eating a huge chunk of your vacation time.
Though it takes most of a day to fly from Montana to Florida, and we change planes once or twice, I always think of the covered wagon days when it took months of hardships to travel these long distances, and thank my lucky stars for air travel.
PS There’s a reason middle America is called “fly-over country”.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 11, 2019 14:16:29 GMT
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Post by fumobici on Jul 11, 2019 14:39:15 GMT
yes i always wonder when people say they fly because it is faster, but in fact they only maybe save an hour considering the waiting times and the journey to/from the airport - and have to spend the time constantly switching from one thing to the other (waiting area at the airport, security line, another waiting area, airplane, etc.) while for a train ride, they could sit in the same seat the whole time reading or napping ... of course, there is still lots that can be improved about trains, but especially for not-so-long distances, they are more comfortable ... I dread the day that the bullshit security theater at airports gets imposed at train stations as well. it feels inevitable, all it will take is one incident and a big serving of cynical opportunistic political cowardice.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 11, 2019 15:07:39 GMT
Apparently they do it for the AVE trains in Spain ever since the Madrid bombs in 2004, but I don't know how drastic it is. They did the same thing for the Thalys in France in 2015, but it is just pandering to public opinion since they don't have security in the Belgian, Dutch or German stations that are served by the Thalys. And even at Gare du Nord you can board up to 2 minutes before departure.
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Post by rikita on Jul 12, 2019 16:10:10 GMT
kimby - of course i meant on distances where a train journey would only take a few hours, not on distances where it would take a few days ... though for those long journeys, i suppose in the long run some solution has to be found (or it has to become something special to travel that far, again), as the amount of flying taking place now just isn't possible in the long run, at least not with the way airplanes are now ... on the other hand, i hope i can still occasionally travel to far away places (even though i have already flown much too much in my life, considering there was a time i traveled to the US several times a year) ... wonder if more high speed trains would help, and overnight trains with sleeper cars ...
kerouac - does the app only compare in absolute, or also relative to what you are buying (i mean, is a chocolate bar always red, no matter if it is one that is relatively better for you than another chocolate bar? i suppose a chocolate bar can never compete with fresh tomatoes ...)
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2019 16:28:27 GMT
I don't have much sweet stuff to scan, but I do have a milk chocolate tablet with hazelnuts and it gave me 24/100 "bad" for that. Too many calories, too much sugar, too much fat but good for protein, fibre and salt But the jelly beans from Hema got 29/100 "mediocre". Too many calories, too much sugar, good for not having salt or fat.
I went to the supermarket today for the first time since I uploaded the app and was happy that I forgot my phone at home or I would probably still be there.
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Post by lagatta on Jul 12, 2019 18:47:34 GMT
If I bought a 90% chocolate tablet, would it get a better score due to very little sugar, or would the fat content still make it a "bad" food?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 12, 2019 18:52:48 GMT
When I finally take my phone to the store, I will be able to tell you.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 17, 2019 15:43:01 GMT
kerouac - does the app only compare in absolute, or also relative to what you are buying (i mean, is a chocolate bar always red, no matter if it is one that is relatively better for you than another chocolate bar? If I bought a 90% chocolate tablet, would it get a better score due to very little sugar, or would the fat content still make it a "bad" food? Okay, I scanned a 90% chocolate bar today - Noir prodigieux 90% by Lindt It scored 31/100 "mediocre". calories -- 592 kCal -- too many calories saturated fat -- 30g -- too fat However, the score was good for protein -- 10g -- excellent quantity sugar -- 7g -- very little sugar salt -- 0g -- no salt
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Post by lagatta on Jul 17, 2019 16:32:21 GMT
You'd have to eat the whole thing to get 592 kCal, non? It is not easy to eat a whole tablet of bitter chocolate. Thanks!
Bjd, the railway station in a remote corner of Ottawa was a planning error. It used to be dead centre, across from the Château Laurier (railway hotel) which is next to the Parliament buildings. I always suspect real estate speculation or corruption in such absurd decisions. Especially with the winters in Ottawa; it was so handy not to have to wait for a bus, tram or taxi.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jul 18, 2019 18:58:23 GMT
I have passed my old jeans on to my sisters and nieces (too baggy and....oh the horror FLARES!) ...and instead of replacing them with department store ones I've treated myself to a couple of pairs of Levi jeans. Reckon they'll last longer and still look good even if I lose weight (HAH!) I may never take them off ever again...
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