Are you poor?

My guess would be that you have cable TV, air conditioning, computers, but no video game system. Right or wrong?

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Same here, all the tv shows i want to watch are available for free on the internet or broadcast. Quit going to the movies when they raised the price of admission to $1. Cook all my meals fresh, no processed food for me and no restaurants.

Best Regards Tom.

My electric bill went up to $51 last month due to a/c usage, and I'm worth every penny. I'm hot and tired when I come home and need respite from the near 100F temps if I'm going to get up and do it again the next day.

I, too, refuse to let morons dictate where I spend my funds, and was not happy to send off yet another $550 check to the IRS this week toward next year's taxes. The gov't seems to think that since we pay taxes, they can waste the money on frivolous bullshit. I think our country would do _much_ better with about 3/4 fewer gov't employees and 3/4 fewer (mostly redandant) programs.

last search nets us 13,100,000 hits alone.

Har! I think you're right about the ad quality vs the programming, but both suck the big one.

I don't listen to or watch broadcast radio or TV in my house any longer, and I'm happier for it. I save $80 a month and don't have to listen to inane commercials 24/7.

-- Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Then you've never heard any of the scam medical ads on early radio? The boarder blasters were the worst. XERF ran lots of ads for 'medical services' that were illegal in the United States. Just bring your money across the boarder for some quack can do worthless surgery on you in an unsanitary environment! Other ads were for quack medical devices and scams that would have made 'Bigmouth Billy, the dead screaming pitch man blush.

perhaps you have heard of a thing called "public radio", in which willing participants pay their radio station? No advertisers required, and the ones in my local area at least receive virtually no government support. I guess that's not conservative enough for you guys though, what with people voluntarily paying for content, yet allowing some others to have the content as well, without paying. Maybe when the republicans own the country they can confiscate the airwaves and eliminate our right to listen to radio that we choose to pay for - that would be good for business, I imagine - steal from the public and give to your friends in exchange for money contributed to your election campaign.

Perhaps you'll learn to use proper quote annotation? I have about

20,000 radio stations available, from around the world.

I've never found anything on public radio worth listening to. Interchannel static had more information, and was more entertaining. Public Radio could replace waterboarding as torture.

I've certainly heard of and periodically listen to NPR, however one station per market isn't a good thing by anyone's standards, and indeed it is difficult to get a good NPR signal where I live.

I guess you haven't actually spent more than a few minutes listening to public radio. There are is a lot of very good programming on NPR, certainly not all of it is good, but at least 50% is.

Of course it is! They did a survey, and they've counted how many of your pickup trucks have coathangers in the antenna sockets.

Listen to it if you like it. I don't. A few minutes at a time was all I could take. I like to listen to music at low volume to mask background noise. Most talk radio makes me want to smash every radio in sight. I no longer give a shit about sports, so music is all that's left. I currently have

streaming all the time that I'm home & awake. I was a radio & TV broadcast engineer for years, and the low quality of today's programing and service is an embarrassment. The stations around here are useless. There is so much electrical noise that the AM band is useless, and the FM band is more talk radio, "Soft Rock" (Wet drywall?) and low power religious stations. There are two stations that claim to play country music, but like the line in a real country song: 'That ain't country, it's just bad rock & roll!!!'

That leaves the internet to find something to listen to.

Methinks I'd like to consider myself "comfortably poor".

Modest upscale house paid for. 1 year old car paid for. Well- equipped manual work shop paid for. DVD player for the odd movie or photographs. No consumer debt. 1993 RX7 toy car needing some work on the engine now. Maybe engine re-build after 180,000 Km???

2 computers; IBM Think Pad 10 years old and a Dell whiz-bang 3 years old. Digital camera 7 years old, digital video camera 1 year old.

Modest irregular income but at high $ per hour. Modest pension. Some savings and investments to provide that "warm and comfortable feeling..."

Soon after my wife died I discontinued the cable TV as I found it unwatchable, and only listen to the radio when I must drive through Toronto in order to get the traffic forecast.... this usually too late to avoid traffic jams.:-)). Get my news from the 'net.

Rarely do I go out to eat; I buy a lot of my food semi-prepared since I am a lousy cook. My cleaning lady suggested that I take cooking classes... something to consider and maybe meet a hot babe??? Yeah, dreaming in technicolour here as there was only my one Mary.

I go to a lot of club meetings though for interesting conversation. Glad that this season is now beginning.

Now I am in the process of reducing the recurring bills. Thank god natural gas is cheap, but electricity is a killer. I just got my bill of $330.00 covering from mid June to mid August. This includes air conditioning and a 3/4 HP pool pump that runs continuously for 6 months of the year. Any suggestions on how to improve motor efficiency here? The motor draws 13.8 full load amps... I will measure it for actual amps but efficiency is lousy for a 3/4 HP motor.

Some years ago we added 9" of fiberglass insulation to the attic, (15" total), new thermopane windows, insulated outside doors, and a high efficiency gas furnace. This has reduced the gas bill to $105 per month for last January and February. This includes hot water and my gas fire place used about 3 to 4 hours every night during the winter.

For comparison, in 1981, for a house with 1/2 the roof area of my current digs, the heating oil bill was $125 per month for January.

Too bad my wife is not with me to enjoy all these comforts she contributed so much to..... But nobody ever said that life was fair.

Here is a cute anecdote of our 35+ years together: Whenever I appeared to be searching for something my wife would ask "What are you looking for?" To which I would reply with my standard line of "fame, fortune, fast cars, and loose women". To which my wife would reply "Well dear, 2 out of 4 isn't bad, is it?????"

Wolfgang

(...)

Do you get much use from the pool? A friend of mine decided the pain and expense wasn't worth it. She chopped out the bottom of her pool and had lots of clean fill dirt put in. It improved the efficiency mightily and boosted the sale price of the place, when she did decide to move.

(...)

:)

--Winston

Winston,

No we don't use the pool much anymore; it came with the house when we bought it 18 years ago and it was old then, at least for a pool.

We thoroughly overhauled it in 1996 including a new liner, and at that time thought about filling it in. But the pool is a nice visual thing, much like a fountain in a park.

Back in '93 we planted lots of trees and a hedge which is now 12 feet tall.

The yard looks like a clearing in the forest with a pool in the middle... very pleasant indeed. The cost is not too bad for chemicals and we open and close it ourselves.

To run the pump is about $400 for 6 months. I've tried to put the pump on a timer but during hot weather the water doesn't like it and turns green. I'm afraid to cycle the pump more than once every three hours or so as this shortens the starting switch life expectancy.

I've thought of using a 3 phase high efficiency motor with VFD. Anybody know what the max. efficiency is of one of these? Or possibly a DC motor but the commutator life expectancy could be problematic.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Wolfgang

(...)

I wonder if adding ozone to the water would allow you to run the pump less?

I know nothing about these units but they look promising.

We had our pool pump on a daily timer for about a decade. The motor was perfectly fine throughout that time.

--Winston

It appears that a larger pump and an extra inlet/outlet would be the fix for that. The small one is just not up to the job.

Dad had an ozonator on the spa he had and it worked fantastically. It allowed him to minimize chlorine and other chemical use.

He also had a 100' length of plain old 1/2" poly tubing stapled to a black painted sheet of plywood which he used as a solar heater. It dropped his heating costs to zero about 10 months a year, but that was in sunny LoCal.

Our first house in CA had an in-ground pool, and I think the filter ran 4 hours a day. It was a 16x24' oval with an 8' deep end. Pool timers are built for that.

-- Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I ain't so sure. I think Wolfgang now keeps the algae at bay by injecting O2 via the pump. It's a good thing but is not the primary purpose of the pump.

Thus the ozone injection and a reduction in pump time is in order. This is purely a guess on my part, I admit.

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There is a data point! Thanks!

(...)

As are the pump motors themselves.

--Winston

A thought. Could you connect a lawn sprinkler to the output of the pump and have its output come down into the pool. The water droplets would adsorb oxygen in the air and the agitated pool surface would also add oxygen to the pool.

My understanding is that releasing air at the bottom of the pool does not work so well. Too much nitrogen gets adsorbed by the water.

Dan

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OMG, I don't have a gaming system! I am such a failure. :(

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I am guessing that boys 5-18 years old do not live in your house...