Let me state the obvious: AIDS is a tragedy. Millions of people a year die from this disease.
Let me state the obvious: people die in car accidents and motorcycle accidents. People die skiing, too.
When someone dies unexpectedly, it is a loss to their loved ones. Nearly all who are reading this have experienced the horrid feeling of such a loss.
Let me state the obvious yet again: Every one of us participates in risky behavior all the time. Getting out of bed in the morning is risky. Apparently 600 Americans die each year falling out of bed.
Go look it up.
Associated with each and every one of our 24-hour-per-day activities is a risk of dying.
So, let me state the obvious again: people have sex. Some people even have standard heterosexual intercourse with strangers.
Go look it up.
The question that should immediately pop into your mind is “What are the odds of dying from AIDS because of a single unprotected ‘normal’ heterosexual encounter compared to, say, taking a single airplane flight?”
The politically incorrect answer is: Roughly the same. About one in 5,000,000.
Go look it up.
The odds of you being killed in a car accident each year is about 1:5000. Basically, you are at greater risk of dying driving to work than participating in an activity that a family newspaper only hints at.
Having said all that, there is a kind of sexual behavior that can dramatically increase the risk of contracting AIDS from nearly nonexistent to really really risky. Riskier, in fact, than the odds of dying base jumping (1 in 2600 jumps). You will have to look up what this fairly common naughty sexual activity is.
It is participating in this fairly common activity that causes the MAC AIDS fund to say that AIDS is the No. 1 killer of women under 35 in the U.S. The flipside to that statistic is that of the 2,426,264 deaths in 2006 in the US, 12,113 died from HIV. See National Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 57, Number 14.
So the MAC AIDS fund manages to cherry-pick the data to make this tragic disease appear to be even more tragic. I put this tragedy into context.
So why is it that a paean to AIDS victims, the play Rent, has the seventh longest run on Broadway and is mentioned fondly in Erika Stutzman’s December 2nd editorial in the Daily Camera?
I suspect that the reason is that the above-mentioned naughty behavior is a favorite of homosexual men. Homosexual men have been discriminated in our culture since … forever.
So in liberal New York with its heavy concentration of homosexual men and risky homosexual behavior, AIDS and death from AIDS is yet one more tragic burden that an already-oppressed group bears; a burden inflicted by nature, herself.
Since a large segment of our society would prefer that we be Puritan in our thoughts, words, and deeds, it is no wonder that HIV victims are discriminated against.
Yes, we could (almost) all avoid getting HIV if we did not participate in any sexual behavior. To me, that’s not a life I want to live.
What AIDS/HIV/sex education should teach is “If you do this then there is a chance you will get a disease that will kill you. Here are the odds.”
Erika wrote in that editorial, “… we`ve heard first-hand anecdotes from college-aged students who are less concerned about it than their predecessors.” To which I say, “Good. They have balanced the hysteria against the reality and are deciding that, yes, maybe life is actually worth living without the constant drumbeat of guilt.”
We can reduce the odds of dying by participating in less risky behavior. We can reduce the odds of dying from AIDS from very low to nearly zero; but is it worth doing that?
What I write, above, is politically incorrect. I have already been excoriated elsewhere for simply reporting what the odds of contracting AIDS are.
Life is short. We are all going to die. Some of us will die horrible and tragic deaths due to things we haven’t done wrong. Some of us will die of improbable things because of what we have done wrong. Some of us will die base jumping.
Many of us will die because we spent too much time writing opinion pieces rather than enjoying the breathtaking joy of spending quality time with the opposite sex.
Cash for Clunkers didn’t work. Make all those people give back that money so that we can try it again.
Posted by RalphShnelvar on April 30, 2009 at 2:44 a.m.
NESHAMA ABRAHAM: “Boulder, we have the talent and knowledge to reduce our city’s contribution to global warming and be a leader nationwide for innovative environmental ideas. Let’s make rooftop PV arrays on nonresidential rooftops a long-term sustainable solution that one day, when we look back, we’ll say ‘well done!’”
One good rule of thumb measure for how much energy something consumes to make is how much it costs.
Assuming that you think that CO2 is the evil that I think that it isn’t, and …
If it costs $40,000 (not some phony subsidized price) to produce enough electricity to run the average home …
You have to ask yourself, is it worth the carbon footprint to produce that $40,000 device compared to the carbon used to generate that same electricity for 25 years?
$40K is, at high market prices, 10,000 gallons of gasoline.
The average household in the United States uses about 8,900 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/B…)
10,000 gallons of gasoline is roughly equivalent to 366,000 kilowatt-hours. (http://www.convertunits.com/from/gall…)
Over the current 25-year useful life of a PV systems, the average American home would consume 222,500 kilowatt-hours. (25 x 8900).
Thus … a PV system costs the environment 366,000 gallons of gasoline versus 222,500 gallons for a conventional electric grid.
One can, of course, redo the numbers for coal or natural gas but it remains that PV is NOT a panacea.
Thus it costs the environment AND the economy about twice as much (in CO2 _and_ dollars) to install PV than to simply use the current grid (which, presumably, uses gasoline-equivalents).
Assuming that my computations are correct,
NESHAMA ABRAHAM, do you want to change your mind about PV?
More to the point … if it is _proved_ that the carbon footprint associated with the production and installation of PV is worse than simply using the current power grid, will you change your mind?
Ralph Shnelvar
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I also replied to another poster in the same day’s blog:
gilbysm: Go tour a PV manufacturing facility. They all have big PV arrays on the roof, which they use to power their manufacturing equipment, which means that PV panels are made using solar electricity.
As others have said, you simply cannot run a plant on the power produced on the roof of a building.
Just go to Home Depot and look at the roughly one square meter panel the sells for about $300. It produces a whopping 45 watts of power.
From: http://solarpowerauthority.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-install-solar-on-an-average-us-house/
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A conservative value to use for a solar panel’s generating capacity is 10 watts/sq. ft. This represents a panel conversion efficiency of about 12% which is typical. That means that for every kW you need to generate, you’d need about 100 sq. ft. of solar panels.
One kilowatt doesn’t even run a hair dryer. Do you really think you can run an entire plant if you cover the roof?
And, if you were producing wind towers, wouldn’t you put a wind tower(s) on your property as an example of what you are producing?
gilbysm: Furthermore, equating dollars to gallons of gasoline is asinine. It’s like saying a dollar spent on Coors coal-powered beer in an aluminum can is the same as a dollar spent on an apple at the farmer’s market. Surely with all of your vast knowledge of markets and the evils of market distortion, you know that fossil fuel prices exclude the vast majority of their real costs.
Of course it is. That dollar that goes into the apple represents: the energy cost of the fertilizer, the harvester, the transportation. What else is involved?
gilbysm: Add to that the fact that PV panels generate more electric energy than the total energy used in their construction (the same cannot be said of fossil fuel plants, which merely deplete existing stocks of energy-dense material very inefficiently), and your comment makes even less sense.
As others have asked … please prove that. I will cite an article I wrote showing that I _did_ do the research and that PV is net energy negative: www.dailycamera.com/blogs/letters-editor-blog/2007/sep/12/shnelvar/
gilbysm : Just admit that you love cheaply priced fossil fuels and the privileges they afford you at the expense of everyone else, already. Your grandkids will sure love you for burning over half the fossil fuels ever created in your lifetime, so they can tell each other stories about how you wasted so many precious, non-renewable resources while they struggle to subsist on the leftovers 50 years from now.
gilbysm , you are not paying attention. I am delighted when there is a technology that will efficiently convert solar power to electricity in an economically reasonable way.
What you are doing when you promote PV _now_ is to make a bad problem worse. It is you that is spending precious nonrenewable resources in an ideological quest for clean power.
Just because it looks green does not make it so.
Ralph Shnelvar