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 off topic postModerators: Moderators Jump to page : 1 2 Now viewing page 1 [25 messages per page] | View previous thread :: View next thread |
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hnia |
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| Cyndi |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098   Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | Hey Hnia, We have an OT forum at the bottom of the list on the main forum page. To answer your questions.... No, I'm not suffering, YET. But, it is making me more disicplined in my errands and forcing me to manage my time more wisely on the road. This is nothing new to me since I live in the boondocks and have to utilize time management skills constantly....it's just instead of my usual 2 hour long hauls, where I get everything done by going to the big city...I have to do it locally as well. My nearest big "small" city is 25 mins. away, where all the local stuff gets done. Now, the day I can't get to the lake to do my walk, or to the mountains to do my hiking and outdoor yoga/meditation....that would be suffering to meeeee....because I'd have to walk a long way....and bicycling would be the only option. I don't care for biking straight up hills,  | ||
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| tourist |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 8442    | |||
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| Cyndi |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | I personally think its a waste of a good vehicle, particularly mine,  to go out and trade it for something else. Like, WTF are we suppose to do with all that junk metal after we run out of fuel?? This is just downright wasteful. I wish, hope and pray they can develop some type of technology that can be added on "existing" automobiles for fuel alternatives. I know we can do it...question is whether we will or not. Like my step-father says, "It's all rigged", | ||
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| Orbilia |
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One garage in the UK this week was in the news for having prices that meant it cost £100 to fill the tank of an average car  Fuel costs here are 70% tax. The UK government has been pressing motorists hard for years now as a means of encouraging a reduction in use with mixed results. Here, you can look forward to : - Congestion charging whereby you pay to use roads in the inner city of London and soon other UK cities. - High road tax - High insurance charges - High parking charges, if you can find parking at all - Extortionate fines for speeding, 'illegal' parking, and even being the single occupant when using special lanes meant for car-sharers. Do we have much sympathy with US complaints about fuel costs which are still about half ours? 'Erm, not much  Fee | |||
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| Cyndi |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | Actually Fee, All those things you mentioned...High taxes, high insurance, high parking, those extortionate fines for speeding....we pay all that and more!! Not only do we have high gas prices, but in addition to it, we pay annual taxes on our vehicles, we have trolls, oops I mean tolls  on our roads, we also have to register and pay for car tags/plates. If you don't pay your taxes and keep your vehicle insured at the cost of having another car payment, you don't get your tag. To top it all off....all these taxes are "suppose" to pay for our infrastructure - you know roads and bridges and so forth...NOT...it goes to corrupted city and local governments who mismanage the funds, yadda yadda. As for our gas costs being less, I don't think so when you compare the ratio of the US dollar to the Pound. Most cars in Europe are smaller, get better gas mileage, etc. I think its all about the same. Like I said, "it's all rigged"...that means in your country too!! | ||
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| Orbilia |
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| tourist |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 8442 | jim - you are right. But in the 50's people could walk where they needed to go, and safely, I might add. We have built our cities based on the concept of cheap fuel and cars so now we are chained to an outmoded system that is essentially killing us. Adapting will not be easy. Cyndi - you are right. We need to be able to retrofit our existing cars, homes etc. so we don't have to pay the costs of rebuilding our entire lives. uel costs here are 70% tax. The UK government has been pressing motorists hard for years now as a means of encouraging a reduction in use with mixed results. Here, you can look forward to : - Congestion charging whereby you pay to use roads in the inner city of London and soon other UK cities. - High road tax - High insurance charges - High parking charges, if you can find parking at all - Extortionate fines for speeding, 'illegal' parking, and even being the single occupant when using special lanes meant for car-sharers. Fee - yet in spite of all this, the UK, like everywhere in the developed world (maybe we should start saying "overdeveloped" world) is jam packed with cars. Even the huge fee people have to pay to drive in London is not seeming to reduce the traffic. I was sad to see in 2003 that people with no parking spots in front of their homes had paved their front gardens/yards to park their cars. And then we get health advisories about things like Nalgene bottles that now, due to the probably teeny tiny minuscule chance that they might contribute to cancer, all have to be tossed. Great! Dispose of millions of tons of petroleum product and replace it with what? Oh right - stainless steel! If I remember my eco-warrior facts correctly, what is one of the most non-green, raw materials consuming, nasty manufacturing processes on the planet? Right! Steel. Ach - I begin to think that it IS all rigged.   | ||
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| Cyndi |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | Seems to me that I was hearing something recently about the city of New York banning cars, and/or charging some astronomical fee to drive your car and this includes delivery trucks too, into NYC. I was like, Wow!! I haven't heard much more about that one since everyone was freaking out about it. Of course, if I drove to NYC, I would definitely park my vehicle, walk and ride the metro. That's so easy. Here where I live....not easy. In fact, I'd be willing to ride a train and park outside the city...although...it would be so hard to carry all my stuff, I pack my SUV full to the max when I travel. It's getting easier though since there are more organic food places and healthier water available. When I'm making honey and candle deliveries, well....you just got to have the right vehicle dammit! When we were in Italy, it was so hard to drive everybody around making 2 trips. That little tiny panda bear car only held 5 people and barely your groceries. They put all our luggage on top of the other larger car when we were picked up from the airport. I was so scared going back..I was so worried my Olio baggage was going to fall off and bee scattered across the highway in Rome. Oh yea, once me and dear daughter was out and about and wanted to wash the little tiny car. OMG, I don't know what the heck went wrong or if that car was even washable...the front floor was totally flooded. If you could only see me in Italia, in a parking lot using a cafe cup scooping the water from the front floor. But hey, we had a really clean car thereafter, scary stuff Tourist, can you imagine the world if we really did run out of gas?? One sight that really disturbs me more than anything is a giant heap of metal, YIKES!! | ||
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| Orbilia |
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| Oh, I agree we need to reduce consumption. Reduce, re-use, recycle's my mantra. I just get fed up with the diversionary tactics used to prevent governments actually having to DO something useful such as providing subsidies on the cost of replacing your roof tiles with solar ones or laying in a special technology under roads (when resurfacing anyway) that converts the friction-generated heat into electricity. The most recent here was making you feel like a social pariah if you took a plastic bag at the supermarket. Yes, there are too many. Yes, they get dumped irresponsibly. However, I've been re-using mine for years - for freezing bread, lining buckets, disposing of mucky waste like soiled cat litter, even more shopping. They have also been made of recyclable plastic for years. One argument was that shops should offer card/paper ones instead. These are heavier so use more fuel to deliver. Mmmm, so they actually have a heavier carbon footprint. Another was use a bag for life instead. Ok, I do that already too, but if I used it exclusively, how would I cover the uses above? Oh, I know, buy bin liners as instructed by my local council when I asked how to stop my bins from getting loaded with maggots when they switched to fortnightly collections (1 week recyclables, 1 week non-recyclables). Confused, you soon will be again! We need to stop the knee-jerk responses and start some joined-up thinking and **** quick! Fee PS, Anyone know how to get soapbox splinters out of your feet? | |||
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| bstqltmkr |
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| Rock and Roll will save us- http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/443872 Now if they can only retrofit my furnace for heat this winter. | |||
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| Orbilia |
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| Some folk here are trading in their car for models that can safely run on vegetable oil. Guess which commodity will be increasing in price next? Fee | |||
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| Cyndi |
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | about the plastic grocery bags... My problem is the same as your's Fee. I use those bags for all sorts of things. When I started using my "green" bags, I ran out of the plastic grocery bags. Now, when I go to the grocery store, if I need plastic bags, I don't bring in the "green" bags..on purpose. Yep, it's confusing alright. But, now that I'm over being confused, I figured out how to be "skillful" about it, | ||
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | |||
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Expert Yogi Posts: 8442 | Here's the thing with the bags. I can remember waaaaaay back in the olden days before plastic bags so I got to thinking about how we ever coped, since we all seem to have such a "need" for the silly things now. (And don't get me started on those people who insist they need a bag large enough to carry a full sized turkey to scoop up after little Fifi when she poops in the park... ) Here's how it worked - we used paper grocery bags. a) They held a LOT more groceries per bag so we didn't have so d*mned many, b) the food we bought was not as hideously overpackaged as it is now so it took up less space (little mylar bags of "cookies" inside a great big box? Come ON!) c) almost everyone produced some food at home (gardening, fishing, hunting, preserving etc.) d) we bought ingredients, not meals - a big bag of flour and one of sugar to make all those cookies at home require less baggage - and finally, I don't think we ate as much back then. certainty not as much "snack food." So we had fewer bags. And we didn't put all the stuff in them like we do today. A paper bag would melt if we put wet stuff into it, but most of the food scraps and waste either went to the dog or in the compost. Even if you weren't a gardener and do a proper compost, there was a pile out in the back yard with vegetable peels and grass clippings in it. Most people I know burned their paper waste in a backyard burning barrel - that all goes to recycling now. And the really yucky, gross stuff got put into a tin can or milk carton and went into the garbage. So there really was not a lot to put out to the curb every week. The notion of someone needing wheels to take out their garbage can or needing two cans for a family (even 5 and 6 child families, which were not at all rare) was ridiculous and maybe even a bit distasteful. I realized that I gave up this sort of waste removal when we moved into an apartment building. No compost, recycling wasn't widely available and since everything just went down the magic chute and disappeared, I really didn't have to think about it anymore. So now I am having to get my head around trying to live more like we lived in the 60's as far as garbage goes. I can't have an open compost in my neighbourhood - the neighbours would scream about rats etc (which are around anyway, people) so I'll have to see if I can get a compost barrel on freecycle or somewhere. That will be a good start. Actually, I think if every merchant who sold something had to accept all the waste back from every product they sold, we could get this fixed up pretty quickly.  | ||
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Expert Yogi Posts: 5098 Location: Somewhere in the Mountains of Western NC | That's right Jim, Buy Local and Eat Local. If anyone is in North Carolina, East Tennessee, North Georgia or South Carolina....go to http://www.asapconnections.org Here you will find a long list of farms, partners, tailgate markets, csa's etc. I joined an organic csa this year...I just love it!!! My bee farm is a partner with this organization. It's so nice to be a part of something that's doing good things for the earth and for our community. Speaking of markets...I'm off to my little market tomorrow. Got to get up at 4 am. to sell honey and beeswax candles, | ||
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Expert Yogi Posts: 8442 | jim - while I agree with you in principle, and I do strongly feel we need to protect our farmland and not keep building condos and golf courses on it, I would say it is pretty hard to eat all locally grown food all the time unless you live somewhere like Florida or California. And even then it is a stretch. I live in a warm and hospitable area of Canada, yet I would still be pretty hungry by mid-winter if I didn't have imported food or so-called "dead" preserved food. In fact, the 100 Mile Diet folks live very close to me and they found it pretty rough going. No coffee, tea, sugar, lemons, oranges, very little wheat (though there is some produced right down the road from me), rice, etc. Things we take for granted as staples, such as pepper! So that is one aspect. The other is that, unless one is an intrepid cyclist or has other very "green" transport, having everyone drive out to the country to hit the farm stalls or markets is certainly more polluting than bringing large quantities to where the people live. I live in a semi-rural area and will gladly stop on the way home at the few local farms on my way to pick up what is in season, but I will not make special trips out to the countryside to buy a few tomatoes or free range eggs as a rule. The actual cost and the carbon cost is simply too high to make that work. But yeah - it is a problem and a conundrum, isn't it? I wanted to fill up my deep freeze with local strawberries this year, but we have had so little sun the crop is pretty much non-existent. Did I cave and buy California berries? You bet. Do I feel sad about it? Oh yes.  | ||
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