Yup, this unit looks almost identical to a unit I have bought several of, for use as a fake ATM at Burning Man.

They are most definitely toys. When you want to withdraw money, you tell it how much, and it lets you then push the button to pop open the door at the bottom, and you can pull out the bills manually. Nothing connects what you remove with what you say you took out.

It's for children. If I could get a real dispensing toy ATM for this price I would jump at it for my fake ATM project.

The "card" is just a piece of plastic. Any card works.

There is not possibly enough time to do this before the terms of both congress and the President expire, even if there were the political support for this to happen, which I suspect there is not.

As such, Kucinich is making it so that Bush will be recorded as a President who had articles of impeachment read in the house, but which failed to get out of the house. Perhaps better, I suspect the leadership thinks, that it be recorded that they never tried to impeach, rather than tried and failed.

Like all life cycle analysis, it gets people confused. The Mr. Green article is one of the worst attempts at refuting the claim I've seen, using orange juice.

What people are really pointing out with this analysis is how much fossil fuel is used in producing our food.

And that's 1.1 gallons per person, per day. Some for fertilizer, some for tractors, some for processing, some for shipping, etc. When you map that to calories it's 10 Calories of fuel for each Calorie of average food, and 40 Calories of food for each Calorie of beef.

Now these are the hard numbers, hopefully not too much dispute there, other than to same some foods are grown much more efficiently (like open range grass fed beef) and some much worse, but these are the totals, and the average.

So yes, if you work this out, it does show that walking 10 miles on beef burns a gallon of petroleum, and that is more than driving a hummer 10 miles. And yes, that accounts for the fact that people sitting in cars consume calories to sit and people walking consume MORE calories. This is based on the more calories.

But again, the lesson here is not "get in the Hummer rather than walk." The walking has many other benefits, and there are many other issues. The real lesson here is to understand how much fuel we use for agriculture. Agriculture, especially cattle, emits more greenhouse gasses than cars. That's the lesson.
How your food is made is important.

Yes, on the raw numbers, a person who chooses to walk somewhere they would otherwise have driven, and who would not have walked or otherwise exercised to burn those calories, and thus consumed more food because of the walk -- that person is not reducing consumption of fossil fuels significantly. But few people are that person.

You and they say "off the grid" like it's a good thing. Off the grid is what you do when you live so far from the grid you can't connect, and living out there with power is more important to you than being green -- not what you do when you're in a town.

Why? Because off-grid solar systems use giant banks of batteries. And the properties of these batteries mean you try to keep them charged up. But as soon as they get mostly charged, most of your solar output is being thrown away because the batteries can't take it. Unless you have something that can store all your extra power output (pump water sometimes works) off-grid solar is fake green.

Being grid tied means your extra power goes into the grid to offset fuel-burning generators and reduce the fuel burned. Anything less is fake green. People think "grid power is dirty" and thus they should not connect to it. That's just plain wrong.

Hey guys, a text version of this would be really great. I can read text 10 times faster than you can talk!