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Showing posts from November, 2019

Pay-to-plug coming soon to a flight near you

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Runway Girl Network has an… interesting/alarming/promising story about a new development in airline interiors – soon airlines will be able to charge you for using the at-seat power plugs . It's just the next terrible addition to the nickle-and-diming price structure that airlines seem to be in love with these days. But given the horrible direction airlines are taking their Economy and domestic First cabins ( removing all seatback entertainment , shoving in extra rows, shrinking toilets , etc) I guess the only thing left to say here is, "Welp, I guess I prefer a pay-to-plug seat over one with no power at all…" ( Quick sidebar here: can I just say how much I love that JetBlue has bucked this terrible trend? They're actually installing larger screens in Economy and they have blazing-fast, free Wi-Fi ). Oh but the horrors don't end there: a related invention from KID-Systeme has circuitry in the plug itself to let you charge for free in exchange for watchi

A great way to shrink your carbon footprint

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UPDATE (Nov 2021) We're in our 3rd year as a New York Community Solar customer and I wanted to share a quick real-world update: On average, our panels save about 325kg of CO 2 per month - enough for one person to fly one-way from New York to Denver, in Economy .  Yes, there are definitely some questions 1 here, but I still wanted to do the back-of-the-napkin calculation to see – very approximately – how many months of solar it would take to "earn" one flight. Google flights recently added a CO 2 emissions column to its listings spreadsheet downloaded from our Community Solar account ==  Original Nov 2019 post: I fly a lot and yet I absolutely care about the environment. I try to stay big picture and know that my decision to live car-free in a big city and not have children puts me well below the national CO 2 average, but still, my flying definitely makes me look for ways I can do more. When we lived in San Francisco, we installed solar panels on our condominium