Two More Games You Don’t Need

You probably don’t participate in any of these, but lots of other people do, and for no good reason.

1. Direct deposit of your paychecks to a debit card through a check cashing place—I just saw a commercial for one of our largest check-cashing businesses offering people direct deposit to one of their special “easy breezy” debit cards. Here’s the downfall of this little scheme: just as they take a percentage of your check upon cashing it, they will also take a percentage of your paycheck before depositing it onto your card. Depending on how often you get paid, this percentage can add up to a tidy sum of guaranteed income for the check cashing place.

By belonging to a real bank or credit union, you can get your direct deposits sent to your ATM card for free.

2. The much-touted T. Boone Pickens “oil salvation” plan—you may not know that T. Boone Pickens (“Boone” to his friends) has had the natural gas market cornered for some years now, because he no longer makes money from oil (even now). The sticky part of Mr. Pickens’ plan is that getting the power from his magnificent wind turbines (some 35x more power than we run through the grid already) are under protest by greenie-weenies. This means we won’t see any of that magical wind power for at least 10 years, but the abundant and domestic natural gas PLUS massive car conversion to burn it is just what the economy ordered for a failing auto industry and securing an already-made fortune for an ex-oil tycoon-turned-Swiftboater.

The existing electrical grid cannot handle the massive load of incoming wind-generated power, whether in raw form or stepped-down to a transportable current (we currently get power through our lines at 400volts, which is stepped down to 220 volts at substations, then stepped down again (at neighborhood transformers) to 110 current for household use—this means that 390 amps are lost from the power source to our houses each and every second of the day, but this is what it takes just to get 110 power to your home. Now multiply this times the number of households in America (and some businesses as well), and you see exactly how enormous the power loss is. By introducing a new, vastly more powerful source of generation without the necessary new grid, substations, and transformers to handle it, it’s a giant waste, not to mention probably chalking up to be a bigger leak in the transmission of energy to your house. This is why the greenie-weenies are up in arms about the new transmission lines, besides the fact that they don’t want them in their backyards, or running through public lands (which belong to ALL of us last I heard).

Also, have you noticed the lack of brown-outs and black-outs we’ve experienced so far this year? A cooler summer in spite of global warming is the reason for that. It looks as if our ancient grid is performing the task quite nicely in spite of the doom and gloom from well-heeled politicians and wannabes, and our “energy problem” is really more market manipulation than over-demand.

Next time you watch TV, notice the latest T. Boone Pickens ads no longer include wind energy images and talk. He’s finally starting to come clean about his “plan for clean energy”—he and several high-ranking congress-critters (Nancy Pelosi for one) are invested in natural gas, and intend on making MORE money off our transportation backs. Boone already has the natural gas market cornered, and is trying to create more demand for it by using fear and intimidation. It doesn’t help that the natural gas market has plummeted from its recent market highs.

MY solution to the "lack of future fuel" mess? There are companies operating RIGHT NOW that make diesel fuel from trash and E. coli, and I say we wait for those to come online. They're already making this fuel for the military overseas (Iraq is proving to be a fertile experiment ground), and it will eventually trickle down to us as all other commercially-viable things do. The military and NASA brought us such useful things as Velcro and zippy bags, so it won't be long now.