A while back I did a calculation to see how long it’d take to charge an electric car with solar panels. The answer I came up with was something like 5 – 7 days. Bummer.
But then I started thinking about this again, but from a different angle. What if cars just collected solar energy all day. Is it worth it?
Most cars around here just sit in the sun ALL DAY. Might as well be collecting energy right? Continue reading
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I’m a member of OC United BNI in Irvine, CA. At the time of this writing, OC United is the biggest chapter in the SoCal BNI region. We regularly pass millions of dollars in referral business to each other every year. Continue reading
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Please grill me. Tell me if I’m wrong about something, or if there’s a better alternative, OR if there is something I should add to this list. Thanks in advance!
In no particular order, here they are: Continue reading
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I don’t day trade.
I’m too busy working and I have a financial planner.
But it occurred to me today that if you’re thinking about day trading stocks or crypto, you might want to try this test first.
“The Pretend Trader” Test
1. Pick some trades for the day.
2. Write down / record the date and the price of your trades. You’re not going to buy or sell anything. You’re just recording your pretend trades.
3. Do this every day you plan on trading.
4. After a month or three review your data. Did you come out ahead? Are you good at it? Are you good at it just because it’s a bull market? How do your trades compare to an index fund or S&P 500?
That’s all. Test yourself first. See if you have a knack for it before losing any real money.
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I’m getting a few requests to train Shopify store owners on how to SEO their Shopify site. I’ve come up with a pretty lengthy training course, however, I just don’t know how long it will take to go through the entire thing.
If anyone wants to get a free training session with me, it will help me time the training and allow me to package it better.
Please connect with me using this Calendly form below (I’m estimating it will be 90 minutes, but you’ll help me figure out how long it will really be!):
I did a quick video last night looking at California’s energy supply. I wanted to see how much natural gas we’re burning to produce electricity (for the entire state). Welp, we’re burning a lot of natural gas to supply California’s electrical needs. I was hoping that renewables would make up most of our energy supply, but for yesterday, that wasn’t the case. Continue reading
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Porsche has announced that they plan on building a carbon-neutral fuel refinery in Chile. Thanks to Chile’s sunny, windy climate, Chile makes for an ideal location to generate carbon-neutral fuels.
Well, you can capture CO2 from the atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make almost any hydrocarbon you can think of. It’s just a matter of chemical processing and some input energy to do the work. If you have carbon-free energy from wind and solar, you’re able to produce carbon-neutral (maybe carbon-negative) combustible fuels.
And that’s a good idea. It may turn out that it’s a lot easier and perhaps less expensive than conventional oil drilling and oil refining. It’d be hilarious if it turned out to be the case, because honestly, this concept and science aren’t new. The only thing that’s somewhat new is solar, which means we could have been making this fuel in the 1980s.
To me, this is the most immediate need. Most conventional power plants on the West Coast of the U.S. burn natural gas to make electric power. Why not swap that out with carbon-neutral synthetic fuels (or syngas)?
Many cities and states have carbon-neutral goals that are coming down the pipe. This might be the quickest way to achieve those goals. Electric power plants provide the base load consistently to their customers and users. Wind and solar are great, they just provide consistent power and most of the infrastructure just isn’t in place. But if you want to hit carbon goals quickly, a carbon-neutral fuel makes the most sense since you don’t have to create smart grids, or build hundreds of square miles of solar panels. Just switch fuels.
Let’s hope that the U.S. government puts some emergency pressure on getting this technology going ASAP.
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I’m spending a lot of time this year ramping up my tree planting initiative. I’m most likely going to merge it with my business objectives over at Judicious, Inc.
Last year I had a 100 tree goal and hit it!
This year I want to do 1,000 and also see if I can get some other companies to match me. It’d be cool to try to get 1,000 companies on board!
The main reason why I chose this tree planting goal is to reverse my carbon footprint. So the first thing I needed to look at was my own carbon footprint.
There are a lot of carbon footprint calculators online. I chose trees.org/carboncalculator/ to start off this analysis.
Here’s what I came up with:
Gasoline
I have this weird habit of only putting in $25 in the tank each week. Around these parts that gets you about 7 gallons.
Air Travel
I really don’t do much air travel these days. I have kids that go to school so traveling just ain’t a thing in our lives. We did do Hawaii this year so I put down 5,000 miles for the round trip.
Trains and Subways
I never use em.
Electricity and Gas Usage
I used 250 kwh a month in my calculations and multiplied by 12 (I’m rushing here this morning, please let me know if I botched that!).
I have no idea how much gas we use. I don’t think we use that much. I grabbed 125 therms a month off the SoCal gas website (from their example bill).
This particular calculator ignores this which is a big part of your carbon footprint.
Well, there’s a specific calculator for that at: carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm
My carbon footprint apparently ranges between 15 to 30 tons a year and I need to plant around 150 trees a year to offset this. Now of course, there’s a ton of debate on whether or not trees help offset your carbon footprint. Trees obviously use CO2 to grow, however, they also release CO2 when they die. In my mind, it’s better to have an organism like a tree taking out CO2 and increasing the number of trees to do that every year. Think of trees as carbon storage. Instead of it being the atmosphere it gets locked up in a tree – from anywhere to a few years to a few decades. It’s a rate problem.
Additionally, reforestation has tons of benefits for wildlife, local climate, preventing desertification, etc. Reforesting, deforested areas is a good idea.
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I got this hair up my you know what to create a video explaining my perspective on climate change, combustion, cars, energy, etc.
And man-o-man, is video editing time-consuming or what?!?
Hopefully, as I get more hours behind Screenflow, I’ll be a little quicker at busting out videos.
Right now I’m dedicating an hour a day to content creation – whether it be a video or a blog post. This regiment has helped me keep chugging along. I used to have a habit of starting a blog post and then never finishing it. Usually, doing billable work is the priority throughout my day, so content creation gets the back burner. But no longer! I’ve scheduled it in for every day of the week, M – F. Continue reading
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Plastic clothing.
Sounds cheap, right?
But when marketed as “NEW ULTRA HIGH-PERFORMANCE THERMO-LINED ATHLETIC GARMENTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY” – people seem buy em.
Well, now you’re eating your plastic clothing fibers any time you have seafood these days. To me, this is just another rush-to-market-new-technology fail. Continue reading
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