By Christopher Barker Beijing has its medals. Canada has its metals. A Toronto-based mining company stepped to the podium this week to announce a shiny set of earnings. Yamana Gold (NYSE: AUY) reports that second-quarter revenue increased 83% from the prior year to $337 million, while adjusted earnings improved 34% to $103 million. Yamana produced more than […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
Archive for August 8th, 2008Huddler’s tight-knit community of eco-minded consumers share their knowledge about sustainable products and services ranging from electric cars to organic toothpaste. Click here to participate. Sometimes I think it would be nice to buy a brand-new shiny vehicle, but then I consider all the downsides. Vehicle payments. Being at the mercy of what the manufacturers are willing to create. The off-gassing that we call “new car smell.” Credit checks. Learning how to negotiate with car dealers. Let me tell you what I’ve done instead…. Finding a reliable used vehicleWhen I last started shopping around for a “new” car, I got very excited about things like hybrids and natural gas vehicles. I dropped the dream of owning a hybrid when I saw the gas mileage; somehow, seeing exactly what mileage they got awakened me to the fact that they’re still using gas. I noticed that I had been thinking of a hybrid car as a kind of free ticket out of pollution; instead, it is just polluting about half as much as a regular automobile. I turned to the Honda GX, my natural gas dream automobile, and began reading all about it on the Honda site and researching gas stations on the Department of Energy’s site, only to discover that the company was making so few GXs that no dealership could offer to sell me one — a classic case of “greenwashing.” I was deeply disappointed, but I realized I still had one opportunity left: biodiesel. From what I had read, it polluted little, could go straight into any diesel car without any modifications, and might even remove pollutants from the air. (I later learned that if it is made from waste vegetable oil it also removes all that clogging oil from the landfills, and that these newfangled automobiles with the fuel injection pumps don’t run well with straight biodiesel.) Plus, there was a local biodiesel collective which bought it in bulk and shared the fuel amongst its members.
I cracked open Craigslist and began searching. Soon I had a $2,000 cream-colored 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300D Turbo, restored by a young automobile buff and approved by a mechanic I trusted. Everyone warned me that the parts would be prohibitively costly, but I found that it was easy to find rebuilt parts, that a trustworthy mechanic would do everything he could to keep the cost down, and that the old Mercedes seldom needed repairs anyway — at least in comparison with the old Chevy I had owned before. I can’t advocate used diesels running biodiesel enough to the cost-conscious eco-consumer. Diesel automobiles are built to run forever; mine is going to hit 300,000 miles in the next week or two and will probably run for another 300,000 after that. With proper maintenance, anyway. I replaced the engine a few years ago due to neglect on my own part; I took it to my girlfriend’s mechanic (who is not used to diesels) to get a second opinion, and he told me that I should get rid of the vehicle because the engine would cost more than a 1982 Mercedes was worth. I posted on Craigslist to state that I was thinking of selling it, and someone actually called me to explain to me for 54 minutes that while he would buy it in a second if I really wanted to sell it, I totally should not sell it because if I did replace the engine and take care of the vehicle it would run for the rest of my life. People love these vehicles, some to a nearly irrational degree. Finding reliable green fuelOf course, once you have a vehicle, you still have to find fuel. Diesel may emit less carbon dioxide than regular gas, but it’s still high on other emissions, and it’s still made from petroleum. Biodiesel, however, is becoming increasingly widespread. Four years ago, when I purchased this car, in order to fill my tank in a green way I had to:
Honestly, I never did. I did not have the energy to get over that learning curve. Fortunately, they opened a biodiesel station near me; now it’s open seven days a week, preparing to move to a four-pump, solar-powered location nearby, and joined by other stations all over the state. The above-mentioned Department of Energy site is a great place to begin looking for biodiesel stations: even though it’s not terrifically well-updated, it still lists seven stations within 75 miles of me. However, I live in California; it only lists one public station in Louisiana, and none at all in Connecticut, so your mileage may vary — literally. But don’t stop there: check Google and Craigslist for any information on biodiesel in your area and you might find formal biodiesel collectives, individuals who make it for themselves and are willing to share, or even stations in your area that the DoE simply doesn’t know about yet. But there’s still the matter of price. Both diesel and biodiesel, these days, are reliably quite a bit costlier than regular gas. Many people are willing and able to pay the higher price in exchange for not polluting; we can cut down on how much we drive, get tune-ups and inflate tires to keep mileage high, or invite others to carpool with us and share the cost. But lately, the price of both has been skyrocketing: as gas prices go up, diesel prices go up. As diesel prices go up, more people use biodiesel. As more people use biodiesel, suppliers raise the prices. In the Bay Area, as I write this in April 2008, the price of biodiesel has gone up from $3.99 a gallon to $4.54 a gallon over the past month because large companies are switching their fleets over to biodiesel and the suppliers are raising the prices for everyone. And that has brought me to what I think is the final frontier… Finding free green fuelThe wonderful thing about diesels is that they can easily be converted to run on vegetable oil. There are cheap “single-tank systems,” which are so cheap because they make very few modifications to the car. Usually they involve placing a special heating element either within the fuel tank or between the fuel tank and the engine, so that the vegetable oil heats up and thins out before it hits the engine. The problem with this is that when you also run diesel or biodiesel in that one tank, (for example, in colder weather), those fuels can get too thinned out to be of any use. Two-tank systems are more expensive but easy to find. They involve running the automobile on diesel or biodiesel to start it up when the engine is cold and switching to vegetable oil for the majority of your driving. They range in price from as low as about $450 to as high as $2,400. The more costly ones tend to be more complicated and often use better-quality parts. One particular way in which systems can differ is in what they do with the second tank. Some install it under the trunk, using the space dedicated to a spare tire; some place it along the right-hand side of the car. The tanks come in all sizes; more massive ones are, of course, more expensive, and so are ones which are made of the sturdiest materials or custom-made. Some come with fascinating extras, like buzzers and lights letting you know it is okay to switch over from diesel to vegetable oil, and mechanisms that switch back and forth automatically. My current favorite, by PlantDrive, costs about $615 and comes with an especially high-quality filter. The beauty of this system is that the same company produces a device that lets you collect your own waste vegetable oil (WVO) from restaurants (in a watertight PlantDrive container), leave it to settle for a few weeks, and then filter it straight into your automobile. Normally, the process of getting vegetable oil fuel involves either paying retail for straight vegetable oil (SVO) or buying a huge high-priced machine that’ll let you filter food particles out of the restaurant grease and remove any water that has collected in their inexpert outside containers. Or paying someone else to do all that for you. Locally, I’ve heard accounts of people selling car-ready WVO for between seventy cents and $2.50, which isn’t bad. But finding a friendly restaurant that will collect some for me, and putting it straight into my automobile, makes it free. FREE FUEL! The ideal part is that the system pays for itself. Once I have saved up $615 for the kit, and $400-$500 for my biofuel-savvy mechanic, David Pham, to install it, I will be able to pay myself back at the rate of some $24 a week in what I’m saving on biodiesel costs — maybe even more. Once I’ve saved up another $600 or so, I can get the special filtering device and hook up with a local restaurant for free fuel — and then my entire gas budget will be able to go toward paying myself back that savings. And once that’s paid back, I can save up the $2000 that the car cost in the first place. After that, the sky is the limit!
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Booming China Suddenly Worries That a Slowdown Is Taking HoldPosted by: admin in Investment NewsHONG KONG — Many Chinese have been expecting a post-Olympics economic slowdown, but it has already started and the Games haven’t even begun. Chinese factories reported a plunge in new orders last month. Exports are barely growing. The real estate market is weakening, with apartment prices sinking in southeastern China, the region hardest hit by […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net DO THE MATH At this point I really don’t give a crap, but if you do the math when this share price was low of 10.27 last August Gold futures was around 675. Do the math at today’s price of 880. 675/10.27=880/x x= 13.38. At today’s gold price. You would have to go back to 04-05 […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
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Get inside the planes that capture Microsoft Virtual EarthPosted by: admin in General News Microsoft’s Mark Brown has put up a cool post on his Microsoft Virtual Earth blog. It’s part two of a series that’s detailing some of the bits and pieces behind the tool that gives you that oh-so-helpful bird’s-eye view of your dry cleaners. In this episode Brown sits down with Keystone Aerial Surveys, a Philadelphia-based company that’s got less than 50 employees and 14 airplanes doing all the capture work. Interesting bits:
The video is a about an hour long and definitely worth a watch if you like planes and maps. If you’re feeling impatient you can skip ahead to the 32:10 mark to get to the good stuff–like when they’re flying around to take photos of your backyard. Note: I didn’t even realize until after posting that the video was in Silverlight and not Adobe Flash, so if you totally refuse to download and install it on your system there are alternate download links courtesy of XBOX Live’s Major Nelson: iPod, Zune, PSP and WMV  If you’re already bored of getting English translated to Mandarin through JaJah, TwitterFone, another mobile service with voice recognition savvy, has put out a neat update that’s sure to burn through your mobile phone minutes. You can now listen to the last 10 tweets from your Twitter pals and respond to any of them that you’d like using the same speech-to-text system in place for publishing tweets of your own. It’s certainly not as fast or simple to parse voice messages as the mobile version of Twitter (m.twitter.com), but if you’re on an older handset and don’t have a data plan, this is about as simple as it gets to stay in touch with Twitter without buying new hardware. It’s also nice enough to list the full names of Twitter users, not just their user name, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how well you know the people you’re following. One thing that was slightly off for me was the time stamping, with tweets from just a few minutes ago being listed as a full hour behind, at least according to TwitterFone’s automated system. I’m assuming this is a kink that’ll be worked out in the future. Otherwise, if you’re a massive fan of sitting back and enjoying some blurbs from your friends while on the go (spoken like sweet nothings by a female robot), then TwitterFone is right up your alley. TwitterFone is still in private beta. Related: Dial2Do: Talk your Twitters, e-mails, SMS messages and more |
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