alex chiang: web 6.0

So, Jenny has been doing a lot of good work lately and has been posting her work on a website called etsy. Looking it over, it’s a pretty neat site, where lots of craftspeople sell various things that they’ve… well, crafted. Etsy serves as a middleman, making life easier for the artists, allowing them to focus on making work, and abstracting out the more annoying aspects of commerce, such as handling payments, etc.

Good idea, but the problem with Etsy is that a) no one’s ever really heard of it and thus b) most of the trade consists of artists selling to other Etsy artists.

With that in mind, and having recently read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, here’s my attempt to connect Etsy to a wider pool of consumers.

If you’re looking for art to give as a gift to yourself or your loved ones, or are looking for some home decor that isn’t mass produced schlock that any schlub can buy from Target, check out Etsy. While the work is of varying quality, all of it is unique and one-of-a-kind, and you’ll feel good about yourself for supporting a real starving artist.

And if you’re looking for a unique piece of jewelry, designed with sensible and creative aesthetics, take a look at Jenny’s work — it’s your chance to own an original Windler piece before she blows up and it starts costing $5000 for a pair of earrings.

We only have three weeks, and we’re trying to make the most of it. My preference is to spend a lot of time in one area and attempt to acquaint with it, as opposed to scattering like buckshot, far and wide. Our tentative plan is to spend a few days in Strasbourg, then wend our way down south, staying in France, and ending up at the French Riviera.

On the way back to the airport, maybe we’ll try and stop through some countries on the other side of the border, and at this point, we’re thinking vaguely of the northern Alps of Italy, perhaps Switzerland, and the Black Forest region of Germany.

Because I am a turbodork, I made a Google map highlighting our vague plans.

The area in pink is where we’re planning on focusing our efforts, and the area in grey is stuff we’d check out if there’s enough time in the backend of our schedule.

Spent some quality time on teh googles today to try and find a car for the upcoming European vacation. After banging about on Expedia, Orbitz, Avis, and the like, I decided to give up my US-centric ways and searched on european car rentals, which brought me to autoeurope.com.

A few clicks later, and we now have reserved this:

Our price? $559 USD for 22 days of pure, European driving bliss (I plan on declining the CDW (collision damage waiver) since I made the reservation with my AmEx, who automatically gives me the equivalent insurance for free). Cheapest on Avis was $775, although it’s not apples to apples, since the Avis car would have been an airport pickup. Lesson: when renting a car, get away from the airport if at all possible.

Schweet, although I hope it turns out to be a better experience than what this guy says. The 78 mpg TDI 3-cylinder engine is way more thrifty than my TDI Golf which gets “only” 42 mpg. All in all, I’m excited to be a car geek and drive it. (Hopefully it fits all of our stuff!) Here’s some more info about the VW Lupo.

Now we just have to figure out how to do this taxi ride to pick it up (19 km) with all of our stuff and without speaking any German.

On a whim, I decided to price out a solar installation for my house. I was thinking that since my house is 100% electric (no natural gas), it might be a worthwhile investment.

Boy, was I wrong.

From March 2006 — March 2007, I used 16,858 kWh of electricity, which averages out to 1404 kWh per month. Obviously, I use a lot more in winter to heat the house, when usage spikes up to 3800 kWh per month vs the summer, when I’m using around 700 kWh per month.

Ok, in Ft. Collins, the price of electricity is $0.0662 / kWh, and I pay an extra $0.01 / kWh for wind energy, making the cost of my electricity $0.077 / kWh. This means I pay, on average, $108 per month for electricity.

Based on a solar calculator for northern Colorado, we find out that a typical system that covers only 50% of my usage would cost me $48,000. The only tax credit I would be eligible for is a $2000 federal tax credit; Colorado doesn’t offer me any incentives at all. So my total cost is $46,000 out of my own pocket. Yikes!

The calculator estimates that this system would save me $560 per year. On a purely monetary basis, this means it would take 82 years to break even. If you add in some assumptions, such as a 3.78% annual utility inflation (seems a bit steep to me), then the calculator thinks it would take me a mere 29 years to break even.

On the touchy-feely side, the calculator says I’d be preventing 173.0 tons (346,000 auto miles) of CO₂ from being generated (over 25 years).

Hm, that might seem to give me some warm fuzzies, until you consider the fact that I’m already using wind power and my carbon footprint of my electricity consumption is much lower.

To me, there are several obvious conclusions to draw from this simple cost-benefit analysis.

• the government, no matter the level, is only able to project its desires and modify its citizens’ behavior by offering incentives, such as tax credits. Without incentives, few individuals will change (whether they are rational agents such as yours truly or because they are lazy, ig’nant sheeple as per our national stereotype (for better or for worse)).
• solar power has a long way to go before it is practical for individual home owners. In fact, due to the inefficiencies of these small systems, maybe it doesn’t ever make sense for each individual to spend $45k per house (assuming access to the grid). Ft. Collins has 120,000 people, and I estimate perhaps 50,000 single family homes. If each were to spend $45k on a solar system, the total cost would be $2.25 billion dollars. It would be better to invest all that money into something else like a nuclear power plant or more windmills, and gain efficiencies of scale.
• finally, the overall conclusion I draw is that the best way for people to save money and reduce their carbon footprint is simply to consume less. My house has 30 year old crappy windows, and some inefficient appliances. Changing those out would cost a lot less than $46,000 and would result in a much quicker payback period.

I want to help save the planet, but I don’t want to go broke doing so.

Hi loyal reader.

If you hadn’t noticed, I took a much needed break from blogging, not because I had nothing to say (well, not really), but because I had too much stuff going on in life. The dearth of posting was compounded by the fact that once you fall off the horse, it takes a little while to want to get back on, aka the vicious death spiral of blog abandonment.

But I’m back. At least for a while.

A quick précis of my life for the past little bit:

• read some interesting books
• started some home improvement projects
• got a new job

About that last one… I’m still working for the same company, but doing different stuff. Still an engineering dork, but I’ll be getting paid to work on open source software as a Linux kernel guy. How lucky am I?

Upcoming events:

• read some interesting books
• continue home improvement projects
• learn French real quick

About that last one… Our three week trip to France is coming up soon, and I can’t speak a lick. Turns out it’s a lot harder than Spanish, at least in my opinion.

Anyhow, I’ll probably expand and expound in the next few days as I find time. Stay tuned…