Solar Energy

I was watching this show the other day, “James May: Big Ideas.” For those of you that don’t know who James May is, he’s the dude from Top Gear…i.e. Captain slow. Anyways, on the show he was looking into alternative energy sources, as in getting our energy from somewhere other than fossil fuels. He looked at many interesting things, but one of them was so cool that it had me asking myself, “Why the heck aren’t we doing that everywhere?”

Basically they had a field of large mirrors reflecting the sun’s rays to a tower in the middle. So the sun’s light is effectively concentrated on one point, and as they had about 80 mirrors that are each about 3 metres square, it concentrates the light and heat 80 times over a 9 square metre area. This provides so much heat that it instantly boils water! They’ve managed to harness the solar energy and create a solar hot water system which powers turbines that run a small city.

This form of energy is efficient and FREE and I keep wondering why we are not doing this everywhere. As calculations go, if we cover the Sahara desert with these solar mirrors, then it would provide enough energy to power the entire Europe. Once again I ask, why are we not duplicating this? Surely mirrors can’t be that expensive and current coal power stations use steam powered turbines, so this system would be able to attach to the current infrastructure. I still wonder..

Line of Credit

What is this? This is what wikipedia says:

“A line of credit is any credit source extended to a business by a bank or financial institution. A line of credit may take several forms such as cash credit, overdraft, demand loan, export packing credit, term loan, discounting or purchase of commercial bills etc. It is like an account that can readily be tapped into if the need arises or not touched at all and saved for emergencies. Interest is only paid on the money actually taken out.The concept has been introduced recently after the East Asian Crisis.The government can borrow money from international monetary institutions without having to handle the problem of an increasing foreign exchange reserves. Lines of credit are often extended by banks and financial institutions to credit worthy customers to overcome liquidity problems.”

So basically it’s a way to ensure that the bank will lend you money when you need it. They ask you for a whole host of information, go through all you financial records, your credit records, recheck your credit rating, and they determine how much money they can lend you at a time. So you get the line of credit, good right? Wrong! Now they’ve got you. You now have to pay them every month because you have their money (which is technically other clients’ money that they’re holding.” You also (obviously) have to pay them back the money you borrowed, with interest. How much you ask? Well i’d explain how to calculate it manually, but its much easier using a line of credit calcuator, click the link to go to the one I found.

The problem I have with banks is that they charge you for everything, even keeping your own money! They charge you for deposits, withdrawals, transfers, payments, cheques, everything! They charge you monthly (usually) a service fee for keeping your money, yet they use it in their business. Yes, you heard correctly, they use OUR money to buy property and other things and sell it at a profit with interest. They also use our money and lend it to others and charge them interest with their repayments. Banks… so unfair, but do we really have much choice?

Welcome to my blog

My name is David and this is my blog about… well about anything I can think of. I guess i’l put my thoughts on small things (and maybe big things) on here.