“It takes a village”. We should be able to insure that stupid parents are not able to shove the stupid into their childrens’ heads. As to the actual breeding, well, whatever works. We are far from having a deficit in that department.
And when people raised by modern “villages” start kicking ass I’ll take note.
The link I used in the OP is the local newspaper to the North Carolina town where all this went down. The paper is the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. Here’s the wiki page for them -
According to their masthead they’ve been in business for 101 years, (although maybe not in this current corporate arrangement).
I’ve never heard of them before but I appreciate their willingness to name and shame their neighbors.
Elsewhere:
Daylight Savings Time Stupid and Doesn’t Understand Traffic Lights Stupid are definitely worthy candidates for our list.
It’s been doing that for 43 years? 
:dubious:
I was going to link a google maps pic from a parking lot that I know that has them (on the top/8th street side), but the street level view is from before they were installed. :smack:
Do you live in the 'burbs or even more rural? That solution won’t work in a city neighborhood. Great username/post combo, BTW.
So, is there any reason you can’t put solar panels on the sides of buildings? (I’m talking about, say, skyscrapers that tower over the surrounding area.) Do they not work so well with indirect light?
Also, if we mandated that every single building (where practical) had solar panels on the roof (just for the sake of argument --I know it would be obscenely expensive), around what percentage of our total power needs would it cover?
Yes, the angle of the panel makes a big difference. Use this handy insolation calculator with module tilt β =90° for a vertical panel, and see how crappy your light intensity will be as compared to a flatter panel.
Basically, the issue is that the sun is much more “overhead” than “off to the side”, at least for the vast majority of the daytime. You see sun shadows projected on the ground, not on objects beside you, right? Except when the sun’s right at the horizon and is getting a lot more of its radiation absorbed by the extra atmospheric thickness anyway.
[QUOTE=brujaja]
Also, if we mandated that every single building (where practical) had solar panels on the roof (just for the sake of argument --I know it would be obscenely expensive), around what percentage of our total power needs would it cover?
[/QUOTE]
Well, it’s been claimed that 496,905 square kilometers of solar panels (an area somewhat less than that of Spain) would be required to supply the electricity needs of the whole world. In most parts of most land regions, building footprints account for only a fairly small percentage of total land area. So just off the top of my head, I’d imagine that relying on rooftop panels to cover all electricity requirements would be extremely optimistic.
It does, if you have either a balcony or enough windowsill surface.
My father’s second wife refused to have satellite TV because it required installing a dish antenna somewhere, and she believed it would attract harmful radiation.
One of the first measures taken by the current mayor of Barcelona (elected this same year) was to close down the Fairgrounds in Montjuic. She thinks they’re “too expensive”.
Fairs and congresses which were supposed to be held there during this same year have had to move to L’Hospitalet (the next town over, you can’t even tell you’ve walked from one town to the other unless you look carefully at street signs), whose own mayor is very very very happily busy finding space for all those week-long congresses, fairs, meetups et al. Tickets for the minor events number in the low six figures, major events have been known to reach eight.
The Barcelona Aquarium has announced that their mammals will not be performing in public any more. It’s animal exploitation.
They will still be doing acrobatics, synchronized swimming and playing nose-ball, but in private. As explained by one of the veterinarians, the animals actually demand to get their games when not provided.
Was that this teacher?
Didn’t really happen, if you’re thinking of the same incident.
Can’t we vaccinate against global warming?
I once saw a PBS special on genetically modified food and they interviewed grocery store shoppers. One woman said she wouldn’t eat anything with DNA in it.
What - or who - caused weather and earthquakes before astronauts got to the moon? What was stomping around up there?
Santa and his reindeer.
So everything will look green everywhere we go?
Thats the one, guess I got fooled.
Declan
Well then I"d like to complain about stupid people who believe every stupid asinine thing that pops up on their facebook page, and then forwards it to all of their stupid friends.
Fascinating that these stupid, false facebook memes are frequently ones about how some horrible liberal did some horrible liberal thing.
I once had a facebook “friend” who posted every idiotic stupid thing under the universe, particularly if it had a slant to it that showed how terrible “the left” was. And they were all complete and utter crap. I called her on each and every one, with a link to a factual site. She got very snippy with me because I was “taking her fun away”. I guess she preferred to be an ignorant stupid cow that forwarded stupidity to other ignorant stupid cows.
I’m not dismissing the idea completely but it might be a tough one to get through congress but that’s gonna be an issue for both of them, I suppose.
My garden is so large, it is soaking up all the solar radiation that should be going to furnish life-giving energy to plants outside the garden’s boundaries. No wonder my neighbors’ yards are brown and lifeless.
On the plus side my garden is consuming so much carbon dioxide that I have solved the local problem with global warming (we are at least 5F cooler than surrounding neighborhoods).