The Trunk Monkey... Much better than the GEICO cavemen.
http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Time Article about Dean Kaman's Water Purifier
Big Problem, Neat Solution
The inventor of the Segway scooter sets his sites on a new problem: delivering electricity and clean water to the world's poorest.
Mark Peterson / Corbis
Nice Segue: Kamen went from scooters to water purification
By Brian Braiker | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Apr 5, 2008 | Updated: 5:26 p.m. ET Apr 5, 2008
One person in six lives without regular access to safe drinking water, and more than twice that many lack access to adequate sanitation, according to the United Nations. Water-related diseases kill a child every eight seconds and are responsible for 80 percent of all easily preventable illnesses and deaths in the developing world. These alarming statistics have not escaped Dean Kamen's attention. The entrepreneur and quixotic inventor best known for the heavily hyped (and somewhat disappointing) Segway scooter has been working on what he promises will be a revolutionary new water purifier. Dubbed the Slingshot, Kamen's washing-machine-size device produces 10 gallons of clean water an hour on 500 watts of electricity. It uses heat to distill water—boil it, condense it and recycle the energy. The heat that it uses is captured from a new type of generator that, you guessed it, Kamen invented. NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker spoke with Kamen about his mission to bring light and water to the world's poorest. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You've been working on this for a few years. What's new now?
Dean Kamen: In a perfect world I'd say we're still probably a year away from being able to make reasonable quantities for testing and probably two years away for very high-volume production that will meet the needs of the world. We have been slowly but steadily improving it, making it simpler, cheaper, more reliable, able to deal with more and more different kinds of problematic kinds of water. We get more confident that we really have a neat little solution to a very big problem.
We're talking about two machines that work together, correct?
If you have a source of electricity, you only need one machine: the water machine. Of the billion-plus people on the planet who have no access to clean water and the billion-plus people who have no access to electricity, the overlap between those two populations is pretty large. Which means that if you make a water machine that, on the good-news side, doesn't need disposables—it doesn't need chemicals, doesn't need osmosis membranes, doesn't need activated charcoal, it doesn't need consumables—you sit and say, "That's really neat." But when you say that it does need electricity, you'd be wiping out a huge percentage of potential applications.
So one of them is a generator.
Right, so one of them is the Stirling-cycle generator.
Which generates how?
Actually, that's a great story. We have two separate villages, each about 75 kilometers from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. In each place—and these are small villages, but they've never had electricity—we entirely electrified them for just about exactly six months of continuous operation. The only fuel that went into these machines was cow dung. These machines were put in huts. Next to the hut was a pit. People would collect their cow dung, throw it in the pit, cover it with a cloth and just the natural decomposition would create very, very small vapor pressure of methane gas. It was pretty crummy methane gas—it was full of moisture, full of carbon monoxide, which is toxic. But it turns out, for a Stirling engine, it's got an appetite for methane; it's got an appetite for carbon. It even turns the carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide.
The generator runs just by naturally decomposing cow dung?
Yeah. And methane, by the way, is 21 times as bad for the environment as CO2 is! So we collect the methane right there in the pit, we turn it immediately into heat by making it the fuel for our little Stirling and we clean up the environment—we get rid of the methane—and we make enough electricity for a little village! So we're pretty excited by that.
How many cows does it take to turn on a light bulb?
[Laughs] That's a very good question to which we don't know the answer. The good news is that I'm not sure it matters that much, because they've got lots of other stuff they can use as fuel.
How much does the water purifier and the generator cost?
Therein lies the rub. We have no production tooling on either machine. Right now they cost me hundreds of thousands dollars apiece because they're being custom built, piece by piece, by my engineers. It's like building a Bugatti piece by piece. Once they're tooled up, we have pretty credible quotes. Over the last year we've been working pretty hard at reducing the manufacturing costs and increasing the required reliability. We believe that each machine will be under a couple thousand bucks. We need to develop the business models and the relationships. In some countries it's going to require microfinancing and entrepreneurs; in other countries it'll be [nongovernmental organizations] or governments.
Realistically, when do you see them on the ground in multiple sites?
In low volumes, testing soon. In slightly higher volumes, but still in beta sites, next year. If things go really well, I think high volume in two years.
You're also inventing a new robotic arm for amputees . How's that going?
That project is just astounding. We have a kid, a military guy, who had both of his arms blown off in Iraq. They brought him back, and after six months in rehab they had to open the door for him to bring him and say hello because he's wearing two plastic rods and a pair of hooks. By the following day, after a little bit of training with our arm, he literally could field strip an M-16, put it back together and aim it. It was amazing.
Where is that on the production spectrum?
We're not looking for a way to put them into high-volume production. Instead what we're looking to do is mass-customization, because the quantities are low enough. There'll be hundreds or maybe a few thousand of them. We're hoping we will be able to custom-manufacture individual pieces for the size and shape of each of these kids that all use the same electronics, the same controls, the same software.
Are you disappointed with how the Segway has done?
I'm disappointed with every project I ever do. Because you work on something for years that you think should take hours. You finally get it done and you think, "Now the world's going to be a better place." Then you find out that as fast as technology moves, people move at the same slow, cautious pace they always did. If anything, people have gotten more cautious, more afraid of change, more skeptical, more cynical.
Yet you have this irrepressible energy and aura of optimism about you.
If you said to me, "Do you really believe that by tomorrow you'll have a water machine for these people and electricity"—I suppose I have to say I have enough experience, enough scars on me to know probably not. But if I had to get up every morning and look at the realistic rate at which people adopt new ideas and the realistic rate at which you can turn technologies into products, I'm not sure I could get out of bed every day. If I'm awake I'm working, and I'm working hard, and I'm working as fast as I can. But I got to believe we can win some of these. It's what keeps me going.
And your Wikipedia page says you commute to work in a helicopter.
Yeah, well, I build helicopters. I love helicopters. They are very cool. It's just a way to cheat gravity.
So, if this technology is readily available, why is is so difficult to find funding to deploy these around the world? (Editor)
The inventor of the Segway scooter sets his sites on a new problem: delivering electricity and clean water to the world's poorest.
Mark Peterson / Corbis
Nice Segue: Kamen went from scooters to water purification
By Brian Braiker | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Apr 5, 2008 | Updated: 5:26 p.m. ET Apr 5, 2008
One person in six lives without regular access to safe drinking water, and more than twice that many lack access to adequate sanitation, according to the United Nations. Water-related diseases kill a child every eight seconds and are responsible for 80 percent of all easily preventable illnesses and deaths in the developing world. These alarming statistics have not escaped Dean Kamen's attention. The entrepreneur and quixotic inventor best known for the heavily hyped (and somewhat disappointing) Segway scooter has been working on what he promises will be a revolutionary new water purifier. Dubbed the Slingshot, Kamen's washing-machine-size device produces 10 gallons of clean water an hour on 500 watts of electricity. It uses heat to distill water—boil it, condense it and recycle the energy. The heat that it uses is captured from a new type of generator that, you guessed it, Kamen invented. NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker spoke with Kamen about his mission to bring light and water to the world's poorest. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You've been working on this for a few years. What's new now?
Dean Kamen: In a perfect world I'd say we're still probably a year away from being able to make reasonable quantities for testing and probably two years away for very high-volume production that will meet the needs of the world. We have been slowly but steadily improving it, making it simpler, cheaper, more reliable, able to deal with more and more different kinds of problematic kinds of water. We get more confident that we really have a neat little solution to a very big problem.
We're talking about two machines that work together, correct?
If you have a source of electricity, you only need one machine: the water machine. Of the billion-plus people on the planet who have no access to clean water and the billion-plus people who have no access to electricity, the overlap between those two populations is pretty large. Which means that if you make a water machine that, on the good-news side, doesn't need disposables—it doesn't need chemicals, doesn't need osmosis membranes, doesn't need activated charcoal, it doesn't need consumables—you sit and say, "That's really neat." But when you say that it does need electricity, you'd be wiping out a huge percentage of potential applications.
So one of them is a generator.
Right, so one of them is the Stirling-cycle generator.
Which generates how?
Actually, that's a great story. We have two separate villages, each about 75 kilometers from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. In each place—and these are small villages, but they've never had electricity—we entirely electrified them for just about exactly six months of continuous operation. The only fuel that went into these machines was cow dung. These machines were put in huts. Next to the hut was a pit. People would collect their cow dung, throw it in the pit, cover it with a cloth and just the natural decomposition would create very, very small vapor pressure of methane gas. It was pretty crummy methane gas—it was full of moisture, full of carbon monoxide, which is toxic. But it turns out, for a Stirling engine, it's got an appetite for methane; it's got an appetite for carbon. It even turns the carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide.
The generator runs just by naturally decomposing cow dung?
Yeah. And methane, by the way, is 21 times as bad for the environment as CO2 is! So we collect the methane right there in the pit, we turn it immediately into heat by making it the fuel for our little Stirling and we clean up the environment—we get rid of the methane—and we make enough electricity for a little village! So we're pretty excited by that.
How many cows does it take to turn on a light bulb?
[Laughs] That's a very good question to which we don't know the answer. The good news is that I'm not sure it matters that much, because they've got lots of other stuff they can use as fuel.
How much does the water purifier and the generator cost?
Therein lies the rub. We have no production tooling on either machine. Right now they cost me hundreds of thousands dollars apiece because they're being custom built, piece by piece, by my engineers. It's like building a Bugatti piece by piece. Once they're tooled up, we have pretty credible quotes. Over the last year we've been working pretty hard at reducing the manufacturing costs and increasing the required reliability. We believe that each machine will be under a couple thousand bucks. We need to develop the business models and the relationships. In some countries it's going to require microfinancing and entrepreneurs; in other countries it'll be [nongovernmental organizations] or governments.
Realistically, when do you see them on the ground in multiple sites?
In low volumes, testing soon. In slightly higher volumes, but still in beta sites, next year. If things go really well, I think high volume in two years.
You're also inventing a new robotic arm for amputees . How's that going?
That project is just astounding. We have a kid, a military guy, who had both of his arms blown off in Iraq. They brought him back, and after six months in rehab they had to open the door for him to bring him and say hello because he's wearing two plastic rods and a pair of hooks. By the following day, after a little bit of training with our arm, he literally could field strip an M-16, put it back together and aim it. It was amazing.
Where is that on the production spectrum?
We're not looking for a way to put them into high-volume production. Instead what we're looking to do is mass-customization, because the quantities are low enough. There'll be hundreds or maybe a few thousand of them. We're hoping we will be able to custom-manufacture individual pieces for the size and shape of each of these kids that all use the same electronics, the same controls, the same software.
Are you disappointed with how the Segway has done?
I'm disappointed with every project I ever do. Because you work on something for years that you think should take hours. You finally get it done and you think, "Now the world's going to be a better place." Then you find out that as fast as technology moves, people move at the same slow, cautious pace they always did. If anything, people have gotten more cautious, more afraid of change, more skeptical, more cynical.
Yet you have this irrepressible energy and aura of optimism about you.
If you said to me, "Do you really believe that by tomorrow you'll have a water machine for these people and electricity"—I suppose I have to say I have enough experience, enough scars on me to know probably not. But if I had to get up every morning and look at the realistic rate at which people adopt new ideas and the realistic rate at which you can turn technologies into products, I'm not sure I could get out of bed every day. If I'm awake I'm working, and I'm working hard, and I'm working as fast as I can. But I got to believe we can win some of these. It's what keeps me going.
And your Wikipedia page says you commute to work in a helicopter.
Yeah, well, I build helicopters. I love helicopters. They are very cool. It's just a way to cheat gravity.
So, if this technology is readily available, why is is so difficult to find funding to deploy these around the world? (Editor)
Frank Zappa - American Hero
Today would be Frank Zappa's 68 birthday and its appropriate to share his appearance on Crossfire to discuss censorship. He handles the establishment commentators with ease.
He was a musical genius and a man ahead of his time. RIP.
He was a musical genius and a man ahead of his time. RIP.
Money as Debt
Found this wonderful and easily understood movie explaining how money is created. Hate to spoil a movie but this one doesn't end well. Please take the time to see this, I promise that this is 45 minutes that will change how you see banks and you'll never see money the same way again.
It IS a Class War!
Here is a great article by David Cox on Salon:
It IS a class war and it always was....
It IS a class war and it always was....
Will You Go Quietly?
By David Glenn Cox
Can we cut the crap here? Can we look dispassionately at the issue before us? This is a class struggle; it has always been a class struggle and it is always going to be a class struggle. We can cloak the issue of globalization in the mantle of altruism, that this is good for all concerned, but that is just not so. Globalism is good for the investment class and the ownership class and the banking class.
Globalism has injured working people on every continent on the planet. In the disguise of free trade, polluting industries migrate to where the laws most allow pollution. Globalism has brought about societal breakdowns everywhere that it goes. Subsistence farmers in Mexico find their water supply polluted by a US-owned blue jean factory. Unable to grow crops they abandon the land and head north to the United States, adding to the problem of illegal immigration.
Mexican peasant farmers must now compete with US agribusiness in their domestic market place and find themselves pushed below subsistence level. In our domestic market coffee prices have soared, but the amount of revenue going to the farmers has gone down. Free trade has benefited the coffee consortia, but the revenue is never passed along to the workers. This is the recurring theme of globalization over and over, productivity goes up, profits rise and wages fall. As coffee prices rise and fall, farmers in Vietnam react by cutting down more rain forest to plant more trees in an endless spiral of working harder for less.
As reported by England’s Prince Charles, hundreds of subsistence farmers are committing suicide in India over the failure of genetically modified crops. The GM crops are shunned in the industrialized world but were sold to the Indian farmers as super seeds that didn’t need pesticides. But they didn’t tell the farmers that the seeds that cost twice as much also needed twice as much water than the regular seeds would need. When the water didn’t materialize Monsanto shrugs and says, "Not our fault." But the farmers who once had the option of saving seed from year to year now find themselves without seed, deep in debt, and without a future.
We in America have been waiting for that promised white knight of new jobs to arrive, and for twenty years we have been told that new jobs are coming, clean, high-wage jobs. But it is a lie; there is no high-wage job growth in a country that exports high-wage jobs. Two minus two cannot equal three; you cannot export jobs that pay $30.00 per hour and expect them to be replaced by jobs paying $35.00 an hour. In the 1990’s we were told that IT and computer jobs would be our salvation, but it's like trying to fill a sieve. Every time you develop an industry someone in the third world will develop a parallel industry and do the job for less money.
In my twenty-five years in the industrial engine business I have seen American companies that have made many mistakes. But I have also seen them try to compete with their own superior products against primarily Asian competitors operating as worldwide conglomerates. When the importers first came to the American market there was no pressure for them to show a profit, only to gain market share. They approached equipment manufacturers with free financing, design, and engineering assistance.
Once market share was gained, replacement parts cost rose, warranty dispositions declined. Discounts for distributors and suppliers were cut; the factory now serviced OEM customers directly, eliminating a lucrative market share for the distributor. The American companies had no choice but to head for lower cost labor and suppliers. Milwaukee suffered, Memphis suffered, Huntsville suffered as the cities lost employers and tax revenue. But who gained? Not the consumers, the prices remained the same or went up. Manufacturing jobs were replaced by warehouse jobs and in the small engine industry the repair business has all but disappeared from the landscape
The foreign manufacturers make profits by building more engines, not by repairing them. The American engine that could be overhauled for half the price of a new engine is replaced by a foreign product that will cost 75% of original cost, making replacement the better option. No need for lawn and garden equipment dealers, no need for independent repair shops. The discontinuation of a major component or modification can sometimes make even a simple repair impossible. Thus another American industry fades away, not because of quality or cost issues but because independent industries cannot compete against a global megalith.
No matter how many times we cut, it's still too short. During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration instituted the minimum wage because although millions were unemployed, millions more toiled for starvation wages. To work for nothing is not a victory but a defeat! Slaves have jobs! Creating jobs is child’s play; creating wealth is the trick. But the time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. We are heading headlong on a course that has brought us only poverty and cost. It’s expensive to export industries and you pay the cost every day. New sales taxes, higher property taxes and falling home prices. Every industry lost will remain lost; the train to the bottom has room for us all.
Homes are being auctioned off in Detroit for as little as $50.00, not because there is no value in those homes but because there are no jobs for people who would buy them. For the same reason you don’t by a home in Death Valley, most of us need jobs. We have seen the decline of GM and Ford and the rise of Wal-Mart and the dollar stores, so ask yourself, "who gains here and who loses?" This is not an accident or a faux pas but an organizational business plan. They smile and tell you that the good jobs are coming, just hold on a little longer, but know full well that they are not and even if they wanted to they couldn’t.
I’m a nationalist and I make no apologies for it. When I go to the open house at school I think my children’s art work on the walls is the best. That doesn’t mean that I hate the other children or that I want to see them all suffer, only that I care for my own first. I do not want to see an end to all trade or punitive trade barriers, only reciprocity. Americans cannot compete against .50 cent an hour wages, there is no increase in productivity that can offset that. It creates a wage pressure regardless of the cost of living; yet CEO’s compensation continues to rise and the worker's continues to decline. The American manufacturers Association continues to make political donations and to promise no more lead paint in toys, yet there’s more lead paint in toys.
The mainstream media tiptoe past this Godzilla and the issue is never even discussed. In the current debate for the auto bailout the Republicans turn the issue on its head. By bailing out the American big three, they argue, we are injuring the foreign import manufacturers, by choosing one taxpayer against another. They are fighting for lower wages for you! They are fighting to take the food from your mouth and the roof from over your head! Say the big three disappear, will the wages go up or down for the employees of the import manufactures? Will the cost of those cars they build go up or down once their American competition is gone? Don’t kid yourself, that answer is obvious; you will pay more and the workers will earn less.
The Republicans have two goals; they have always been the party of big business and are always the beneficiaries of the Chambers of Commerce largesse. But they smell the blood of the labor unions and see a chance to smash their adversaries, the contributors to Democratic Party campaigns. So what if a few million Americans suffer directly and millions more suffer indirectly, because this is a class struggle; it has always been a class struggle and it is always going to be a class struggle. They see a chance for a political victory and your well-being matters naught.
Somewhere along the way, though, there was a stumble, a fly in the frosting of the big, glorious cake. As Bluto told Flounder in ANIMAL HOUSE, "Face it, you fucked up, you trusted us!" Greed and speculation have foisted trillions of dollars of bad paper into the world economy, backed by the value of home loans given to people with declining incomes and a diminished future. Oh, what a surprise as the economy tanks! As Congress fights for lower wages for American workers so we can be globally competitive with nations that house their employees in Dickensian workhouses.
Bad food, bad produce, bad medicine, and every time the media talking heads try to explain it away as an isolated incident. With their six-figure incomes they explain to us that it can’t be helped and is actually good for us that the tomatoes are all mixed in one box to disguise their country of origin. The chorus of media cohorts sings the swan song for American labor because we need to compete in a global economy. But no, we don’t. America is the largest market in the world and if they wish to sell here they need to meet our standards.
This is a class struggle, it has always been a class struggle and it is always going to be a class struggle. It is not a class war but a class massacre, and the only question left is, will you go quietly?
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