It seems like things are getting real bad out there in the good old US of A. Because the OPEC gods haven’t been smiling on America of late, some upstanding citizens are turning to the real deal for lower gasoline prices.
A few people gathered in a gas station in St. Louis recently to pray to God for lower gas prices. Are cartoons allowed?
Nice article on ‘repugnance constraint’ markets - how moral repugnance may constrain a free market and if/what should be done about it. Very interesting to me was the reference to a paper [pdf] that I tracked down. It estimates the price at which the kidney wait backlog would be eliminated if live donors were allowed to be paid (see pages 11, 12). This is for the US, and the value they come up with is $15,200 per donor. Among other things, they take into account the value of a ’statitistical life’ ($1.5 million to $10 million for an average annual income of $35000), lost wages pre/post operation, risk of death, etc.
They did not have a good way to quantify loss of quality of life (they added an arbitrary $7,500), and they did not as far as I could see, take into account the ‘repugnance factor’ of paying for an organ. Not much comfort I’m sure for all those people who are waiting for a transplant.
People on the far right or far left may not like this (embedded below too; thanks, Anup!). I was cracking up!
Hat tip to my neighbor Tom for the link.
When we moved into our new home, we made sure all the lights we used most often had CFLs. Following the 80-20 rule on lights seemed the most practical option given that I would have to spend only an extra Rs 1500 on those few CFLs instead of > Rs 5000 if we had CFLs everywhere.
Recently, I identified the “Tier II” lights that could use CFLs. So I bought a Rs 200 CFL to replace the existing Rs 10 bulb in a light that was used for about an hour everyday. The problem that I didn’t expect to face, was that I had no idea what to do with the perfectly good bulb that was replaced.
There weren’t any empty sockets to plug it into. I didn’t want to keep it as a spare, because if another bulb blew, that would be a good opportunity to use yet another CFL. It could have been donated to the domestic help to use at their house but that wouldn’t save any electricity at the macro level. The last option was to break the bulb and dispose it.
This bulb dilemma is a good reflection of most energy efficiency initiatives and or initiatives to reduce CO2. When there is a new initiative or project and if there is enough money to invest, it’s easy to “buy new CFLs” and save money through efficiencies. The problem is with existing assets. How much money can one spend to upgrade these and what does one do with the residual value of replaced assets? It’s difficult to find projects with no upfront or ongoing costs.
Now the question is, what do I do with the bulb lying on my table?
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