Monday, October 18, 2010

....buzz, chirp, psssssst! What's an iCar?

America, land of the mono-cultured everything is going back to the roots that the Asian folks never left. Business wise we have individual companies that have tightly focused on narrow product lines, where as the Asians have industrial conglomerates. So under one brand-name you will find electronics, appliances and autos. Here in the American mono style we merge and absorb then consolidate and downsize for efficiency, er a profit. The Asians gather companies under an umbrella brand-name and each industry concentrates on it own product with the caveat of sharing production ideas, technology cross-overs and innovations, bypassing the legal constraints and copyright and patent restrictions of individual companies. It's just an impression folks, but mono has plagued America from the industrial revolution till today.

Look at farming. Because farming is what it is we have fast food eateries, pre-processed foods and canned goods out the kazoo, all laced with sugars, starches, salts and dyes, on top of pesticides, fertilizers and preservatives. Now ask yourselves why the medical "industry" is an industry.  We save time and shorten our lives at the same time. It is also why you need a big honking grid sucking refrigerator to store and preserve. Thinking out loud we should have one refrigeration unit in a house that will chill the house and the food too.

Back to the food, if food was grown local, consumed local, though you would go to market more often, you would need less storage. Oh, did I just turn big city living into a small town life. We have hurried lives and we rest in front of the TV. Going to the market every other day is........oh wait, there is so and so, haven't seen him since he sold his big screen TV. He looks good, healthy, rested. Oh and by the way, cooking is not a lost art, stop watching it on TV and cook your own grub. Where's the book on low powered cooking? and does microwave cooking really alter the molecular structure of foods so that they are less healthy?

Somebody should write an illustrated book about low powered lighting, how to do it with style, get enough of it and how to energize it with local solar and wind (vertical wind turbines are less intrusive), with special emphasis on city dwelling. You can do it in RVs and space stations but not in a typical city house. I would call this a hybrid power thing. Take lights off the grid and use that power to fuel your big honking refrigerator, air conditioner, washer and dryer and for backup. Gee!, you don't need to cover the whole roof with solar after all. This kicks starts a domestic industry by getting some green product on every house and sold by Lowes and Home Depot etc. The deep cycle battery business will be off the hook and people will be off the grid (at least for lighting).

Every laptop I have worked on had a memory card reader slot and a PC card slot. Instead of loading the operating system onto the hard drive, it can be burnt onto a memory card or solid state device for the PC card slot. The PC would be generic until the operating system card is plugged in. The applications and user files would be in separate partitions on the hard drive. Or you put two card slots in a laptop, and a bios app lets you single/dual boot or run one OS as a virtual machine within the other OS.

Oh wait, there is a disturbance in the force, you are calling me nuts. Just like Sith lords, there's one or two.

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