Tag: need

Bring a friend over the border! Both of you can sell your blood.

3 Comments

❝ Every week, thousands of Mexicans cross the border into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma to profit-making pharmaceutical companies that lure them with Facebook ads and colorful flyers promising hefty cash rewards.

❝ The donors, including some who say the payments are their only income, may take home up to $400 a month if they donate twice a week and earn various incentives, including “buddy bonuses” for recruiting friends or family. Unlike other nations that limit or forbid paid plasma donations at a high frequency out of concern for donor health and quality control, the U.S. allows companies to pay donors and has comparatively loose standards for monitoring their health.

❝ The U.S. is the largest supplier of blood plasma in a $21 billion global market…The border clinics are the most productive, according to internal…documents obtained by ARD [German TV]. While most U.S. centers receive around 1,000 paid donations a week, centers at the border count more than 2,300. The documents show that border centers also rank highest in donor frequency; they top of list of centers with customers who donate 75 times or more per year.

But, then, you would expect a leech like Trump to be aiding bloodsuckers profiting from poor migrants.

The “New American Home” loses size, gains efficiency

2 Comments


The “biggest and the bestest” diminishes in size

The “New American Home” is shrinking.

Every year at its convention, the National Association of Home Builders highlights the New American Home, a high-end model designed and built to capture emerging trends in residential building and the shifting lifestyles of Americans.

This year’s showpiece, which measures 4,181 square feet and is one of the smallest in the popular program’s 29-year history, shows that the love affair with McMansions seems to be waning.

Indeed, last year’s featured home sprawled over 6,800 square feet. The nation’s average home size, which peaked just above 2,500 square feet in 2007, is expected to shrink to 2,152 square feet by 2015…

The showpiece, described as a modern take on the classic “boxes” of the 1960s and ’70s, has two bedrooms, and features additional rooms that could house parents or boomerang kids — those moving back home because of the weak economy. It also boasts energy-efficient features such solar panels to run the HVAC system and to heat hot water.

This year’s builder decided to keep the house as a showcase for clients…instead of offering it for sale. And it is great to see sizes starting to come down to match good sense instead of market agitprop.

The “New American Home” has to be larger than life because the intent is to show off the best of everything. Cripes, the last NAHB Show I attended the house on display was up over 8,000 sq.ft.. And that year I worked on a couple houses – including a vacation “cottage” – that were in the 24,000 sq.ft. range!

I’m retired, now – my wife will be, sooner or later – and we live in <1400 sq.ft. with room for dogs as companions and 1 room leftover as a spare.

Losing sight of reason in the debate over quiet electric vehicles

Leave a comment

Recently, Nissan unveiled it’s “Approaching Vehicle Sound for Pedestrians” (VSP), a wonky name for the noise added to the upcoming Leaf electric vehicle (EV) at low speeds. Doing so immediately ignited a debate about the aural aesthetics of the noise itself, but it also indirectly brought more attention to the issue of adding noise to cars in the first place.

For most of a year, it’s been bubbling under the surface, since the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has instigated legislators to believe that with their (in theory) quieter motors, hybrids and plug-ins are pedestrian-killing machines in the making. Initially, there was lots of hand-wringing over the Leaf’s acoustics specifically, whose tones many people found off-putting when heard in the initial videos. This was soon replaced by a fair amount of placation by the journalists and stakeholders flown by Nissan to Japan to test the Leaf in person. “Don’t worry about the regulation”, we’ve essentially been told in various blog posts, “the Leaf sounds aren’t so bad in person.”

Except, this isn’t about the Nissan Leaf – and it’s not really about blind people either. Or rather, it shouldn’t be…

To the extent that quieter vehicles might present a problem, the blind community is hardly the largest potentially affected group. Pedestrians in general – many of whom have less sensitive hearing than the blind and are often distracted with iPods and cell phones – and cyclists would be affected too. Of course the blind should be considered, but only as part of a much broader conversation. After all, we’re all blind to a vehicle approaching from behind.

But adding sound to transportation creates other problems – raising the general ambient noise makes it that much harder to detect any one vehicle, let alone oncoming bicycles and other pedestrian hazards. There are economic issues for communities located along freeways and major streets, whose property values are often lower largely due to increased levels of noise and pollution. And there are quality of life issues from the generally higher noise pollution levels of urban areas. The percentages can be debated, but most studies agree that some significant portion of passenger vehicles will be hybridized or electrified in coming decades and transportation in general will become quieter, added noise seems like a fairly perverse version of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

RTFA. Lots of room for discussion. I admit to almost stepping out in front of a hybrid SUV in a supermarket parking lot; but, that could have happened even if it was running on the internal combustion side of the dialectic.

Giving the NFB veto power over hybrids and EVs approaches the absurd in the realm of special interest groups. I have kin who are profoundly deaf with another set of problems that might be aided – in traffic – by having every vehicle on the road equipped with strobe lights.

Once you start, when do you stop?