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03/21/2008: "People Piss Me Off"

The title of this entry is not quite my motto, but it is a subtext for my life. I was just thinking about how much the wind annoys me (I know how that sounds, but I don't like that I have to worry about tying everything down all the time), which brought me to windmills.

Now, I happen to be a firm believer in efficiency, which is why I support the building of windmills and solar farms. There's nothing more efficient than taking something that you get in abundance for free into electricity, and it bugs me that circumstances, if not people, conspire to make the most efficient forms of energy production so expensive to set up. I know that eventually, the costs will come down, but some temporary subsidies wouldn't hurt.

Anyway, I was thinking about windmills, and whenever I think of something that I've heard ridiculous things said about, I immediately think about those ridiculous things. In the case of windmills, some people actually argue against them because of the sound and the danger of the blades ripping off the thing and decapitating their dog. Right. Because you wouldn't hear the wind blowing across the plains without a big machine in the way. You also want to take care to avoid problems whose likelihood of occurring is roughly equal to the chance that you'll live to be 200 years old and completely ignore a known factor in killing you earlier (namely the smoke from the majority of the power plants in the country).

Look, if you're too cheap to give a rat's ass about wind power, that's fine. But if someone is willing to spend the money to allow you to trim your energy costs and not increase the crap you breath in, shut the hell up and move aside. You're an idiot.