Big news for the Mittster, as he stomped Sanatorium in AZ (as expected), and squeaked past poor little Ricky by about 3%. And so, yet another Republican hopeful is now being declared all but dead because of his pandering to the most radical parts of the GOP base. Of course, since they’re all running against Romney, expect somebody else to make some noise in the next round.<\/p>\n
In other news, Apple has scheduled a big announcement on March 7th, to announce that a new iPad 3 will be released. It promises to be a revolutionary new device, ripe with features that have already been available on Android-based tablets. I predict that it will produce record sales.<\/p>\n
Speaking of iPads, I’ve going back and forth with a company named Sungevity about installing solar panels on my house. Not to buy them (which is too expensive; it would actually cost me about $3,000 more over 20 years than I’d save in electricity costs), but to lease them. <\/p>\n
The quote I got was for a no money down lease for the installation of a system that would do 40% of my current usage. They would guarantee at least 95% output for what they quote. Payments would start out at $45 a month, and increase by 2.9% per year (they predict a $41 per saving in the first year – in other words, I’d be down about $48 – and lease payments wouldn’t equal savings until year 8). Over 20 years, the payments would average $59 a month, and they predict a saving of $551 (total, over 20 years – which is, what, less than $28 a year average).<\/p>\n
In order to achieve those rather paltry savings, they used an estimated 4% per year increase in electricity prices. I don’t think that’s got any basis in the historical record (but it’s hard to research. All I could find was that the company got a 12% increase over 4 years back in 2003, and that they hadn’t got an increase since 1993, but I don’t know if they have some sort of automatic increase based on production costs or something).<\/p>\n
Anyhow, if I do all that, I get an iPad2 with their monitoring app.<\/p>\n
As much as I’d like to go for it, I just can’t see getting locked into a 20 year lease for what amounts to no gains. If technology improves, prices drop and\/or efficiency increases in, say, five or ten years, I’d be stuck with what I’ve got.<\/p>\n
So, I think I’ll have to pass on it. Now, if they were offering a Transformer Prime TF-201 in champagne gold with the keyboard docking station….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Big news for the Mittster, as he stomped Sanatorium in AZ (as expected), and squeaked past poor little Ricky by about 3%. And so, yet another Republican hopeful is now being declared all but dead because of his pandering to the most radical parts of the GOP base. Of course, since they’re all running against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7003,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7002\/revisions\/7003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}