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How Many Electoral Votes Does It Take To Become President?

10/31/2011 in Fun Stuff, News, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

If I were to run for president, I could do it very smart and target and win the minimum number of states required to win. This morning I sat down and actually figured it out. A Presidential Candidate needs to only win 11 states. 11! Can you imagine that?

Now, some states allow the electoral votes they can cast to be split between the candidates and every ten years or so when the census is taken this list may change slightly. This is from the 2008 Presidential election.

The list and the breakdown in descending order of electoral votes:

  1. 55 California
  2. 34 Texas
  3. 31 New York
  4. 27 Florida
  5. 21 Pennsylvania
  6. 21 Illinois
  7. 20 Ohio
  8. 17 Michigan
  9. 15 New Jersey
  10. 15 North Carolina
  11. 15 Georgia

These 11 states represent 271 electoral votes. In other words 20% of the states wield half the electoral votes.

Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have gotten a lot of attention in the last few Presidential Elections, represent about 1/4 of the Electoral Votes required for a person to become president.

I am not going to run for office. I am just saying. (In Washington Speak that means I might.)

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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How Does The Electoral System Work?

10/29/2011 in Fun Stuff, News, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

While playing around on twitter.com I came across a video that explains in plain english how the U.S. process for electing the President works.

How the Electoral System Works (on YouTube)

There is only one thing they left out – that some states split the electoral vote (if it isn’t a landslide.)

Thank you CommonCraft.com

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Water Table and Runoff

05/23/2011 in Intelligent Designing, Landscaping, Our Mountains, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

Several years ago in front of our place the county brought in some heavy equipment to clean the ditches that run alongside the road. They brought in backhoes, dump trucks and a grader. Being a man I just watched them – not thinking too much about it because I had to go to work shortly.

A few days later as I was mowing the lawn (we were renting at the time and that was part of the agreement – personally I don’t want a lawn) in the waning light of evening it struck me that what they do to maintain these roadside ditches is really environmentally unsound.

There had been some grass growing alongside the road and a little bit in the ditch. When they were done there wasn’t any grass along the road and no vegetation in the ditch. Now, anyone who has looked at a stream knows that water coursing down hill likes to find the path of least resistance. The less resistance that faster it can flow and the more soil it will carry with it.

This whole thing came to mind partially from a show we watched on PBS entitled “Mystery of the Megaflood” and in it they talked about how water works to carve out dirt and rock. It was really interesting.

The ground here is very high in clay – ok, all clay – which makes runoff, especially in areas not covered with vegetation, as clay is very slow to absorb water and cannot hold all that much. So, vegetation is all the more important to hold back the water and prevent erosion.

They removed all the vegetation that would have slowed the flow of water reducing the rate of erosion and it will be several years before there are enough plants to reduce the runoff. They have done this before as there is a fire hydrant there which was set into a block of concrete and you can see that the bottom of the concrete is beginning to show.

I don’t think that the planners have taken into consideration that roadside ditches like these that are void of growing plant material will erode the road base and destroy the integrity of the road. Which between the annual scraping and future road repairs is more costly than a couple of people picking up the refuse and using weed whips every 3-4 weeks.

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Whither Goest The Bees…

05/21/2011 in Gardening, Health, Things that Suck, Thoughts, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

I remember as a child that seeing 40 to 50 butterflies a day was not uncommon. About 3 miles from where I lived thousands of Monarch butterflies would gather for their migration. It truly was a sight to behold. This was back in the day before wide spread use of massively toxic chemicals were used to try to control insects and unwanted plants (referred to as weeds.)

Bees were scary because they made a buzz noise and stung (which really hurt.) I knew they were part of nature and beneficial. They were beneficial because they pollinated the plants and gave us honey, but I really didn’t pay much attention to them. Well, with the exception of one that hung out in the space between my parents patio and the neighbors shed. I didn’t know why (or what kind it was) it was just an interesting thing to watch as it bombed other insects that invaded its turf.

As a note I also enjoyed watching spiders spin their webs. If you haven’t done that try it – fascinating.

A few years ago I started hearing about CCD (colony collapse disorder) and how the bee population was decreasing suddenly and rapidly. My girlfriend and I started talking about this and how Isaac Newton stated that when the bees are gone man won’t be far behind. We rely tremendously upon the bee for our agriculture. We rely on the butterfly as well which I haven’t seen many of over the last 20 years or so.

A few months ago my girlfriend and I watched a show on PBS about the state of agriculture in China and how the absence of bees has affected it. China has approximately 1/3 of the worlds population and for a significant portion of their agriculture they now rely on people collecting the pollen, drying it and manually pollinating the flowers.

Recently I read that the German Coalition against Bayer Dangers brought a charge against Werner Wenning, chairman of the Bayer Board of Management, with the Public Prosecutor in Freiburg (south-western Germany). The group accuses Bayer of marketing dangerous pesticides and thereby accepting the mass death of bees all over the world.

The Coalition introduced the charge in cooperation with German beekeepers who lost thousands of hives after poisoning by the pesticide clothianidin in May this year. Read more…

Clothiandin is the successor to Imidacloprid whose introduction years before coincided with another sudden drop in the bee population. Clothiandin was released and pushed, as legal protection (meaning patent protection) was set to expire and any competitors could produce it without having to pay royalties.

Why is it that we, as a species, must develop things without looking at the impact it will have? The Iroquois Confederacy used to say “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” We need to start thinking about our world in this way and put an end to the short term, near-sighted approach we are taking today.

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Sometimes words fail to describe a situation

05/17/2011 in Fun Stuff, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

Every once in a while I see, hear or experience something that makes me unable to find words to describe it. This picture gives me butterflies AND makes me smile. I found it on the web and wish to thank the owner – whoever you are.

ENJOY!

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Forget ANWR Forget Global Warming Forget the Environment

05/15/2011 in Saving Energy, Things that Suck, Thoughts, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

For this article it doesn’t matter if you believe in Global Warming or if you are for or against drilling off the coast or in ANWR (Alaskan National Wlidlife Refuge) or if you think we are harming the environment. What does matter is that you take a good long look at where we as a species are headed.

Face the fact that we live on a spec of celestial dust withlimited surface area and limited volume. Within that there are thousands of objects – plants, animals, rocks and other combinations of the elements. Since the surface area and volume are limited everything on this speck we call Earth is limited.

If you can argue against those facts, by all means post a comment.

Now, if everything is limited, we can only use a natural resource for a finite time before it is gone (without replenishment.) It becomes consumed.

“Consume: to destroy or expend by use; use up. – “

There comes a point where half of it is gone. If demand increases while supply decrease the will be a crisis, especially if nothing is done until the resource is exhausted. China is consuming natural resources at an increasing rate. As is India. America isn’t slowing down. Developing nations are starting to desire it.

We have come to that point (maybe not quite or maybe just past it) with respect to oil. There is a lot of arguing going on about this between the “tree huggers” and the “stay the course crew.” I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter which side you are on – OIL IS GOING TO RUN OUT! When it does the world is going to fall into the second Dark Age because we have become addicted to one thing and one thing only.

It doesn’t matter which side of the argument you are on – there has to be a paradigm shift. We will need solutions, and fast, if we want to keep living even close to the level we are now.

President Bush has said that the free market works, keep government out of business. I say, OK, let’s do it, with one caveat remove all the tax breaks, take away all current subsidies and plough it into truly renewable resources (and I don’t mean ethanol made from food crops or require decimation of a forest to grow.) If all those businesses that receive subsidies are true businesses they don’t need them because they are viable. If they aren’t economically viable they will go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo.

Let the market decide!

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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1 Trillion

05/13/2011 in News, Reflections & Discoveries, Things that Suck, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

Just how much is one trillion dollars?One Trillion Dollars seems like a large amount of money. It can be a little hard to comprehend so, I broke it down with several examples so that we can see what it really is.

  • It is only 18 times Bill Gates net worth
  • It is enough for every (legal) man, woman and child to each receive $3,333.33 (based upon a population of approximately 300 million).
  • It is enough to build 20,000 new schools at $50,000,000 each.
  • At 0.0043 inches thick 1 trillion dollar bills would reach 72,428 miles high, or circle the earth 2.8 times
  • With 105,480,101 households, each household would receive $9,480.46 – enough to solarize each and every household (averaging $9,000 per installation) and eliminate the need for coal fired, gas fired, nuclear AND hydro powered electricity generation facilities.
  • At 16 square inches if you laid them side by side they would cover 3,500 square miles or cover a little more than half state of Massachusetts (7,840 sq.mi.)
  • As of 2007 1 trillion dollars would almost cover half the total U.S. expenditure on health care of $2.3 trillion dollars.

To date the United States Government has subsidized the oil and coal industries a total of $1 Trillion.

President Bush has said to stop regulating business and unviable businesses will fall to the side. OK, I can see that – but we should also stop the subsidies and put the money to better use.

As you can see above that if we had invested the coal and oil subsidies into alternative energy like we needed to do back in the 1970′s (Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the white house – Ronald Reagan took them off) we would be free of oil today and not be discussing where and whether to drill here there and everywhere.

http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Foundations – a pox on the economy and the money supply

04/13/2011 in Fun Stuff, News, Thoughts, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

The other night Evelyn and I were watching the final episodes of Lost on hulu and there were an inordinate amount of commercials from foundations (including charitable organizations). Foundations for this cause, foundations for that cause. I got to thinking about it and thinking about the structures, total capital and funding of these foundations. I did some research and came up with some interesting answers.

Total Foundation Capital

I couldn’t come up with a good answer for how much capital is tied up by all the foundations.

According to wikipedia:

  1. The 27 wealthiest foundations in the world have a total capitalization of over 270 billion dollars.
  2. 18 of the 27 wealthiest foundations are in the U.S.

Let’s just say that this represents half of the capitalization of all the foundations which would bring the total over $540billion. Since this is a large number and most people (including myself) have trouble understanding just how large this is. Since this capitalization reflects world numbers I will break this down in world terms:

  • $540billion will employ (worldwide) 1,646,341 (.02% of the world population) households at a median income of $8200 for 40 years.
  • $540billion will employ (worldwide) 3,292,683 (.05% of the world population) households at a median income of $8200 for 20 years.

If we use the $270billion as what is the total foundation capitalization of U.S. foundations:

  • $270billion will employ (U.S.) 312,688 (.1% of the U.S. population) households at a median income of $21,587 for 40 years.
  • $270billion will employ (U.S.) 625,376 (.2% of the U.S. population) households at a median income of $21,587 for 20 years.

The Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. is $14.7trillion. The capitalization represents 1.84%.

The total money supply in the U.S. is $2.37trillion. The capitalization represents 11.39%. Which means that over 10% of our money supply is tied up in foundations.

If those funds were actually invested in people by creating jobs there would not be any financial crisis in the U.S. as almost all of that money would be circulating through the economy.

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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EndofAmerica33, the stock market and a looming crisis

03/31/2011 in News, Things that Suck, Thoughts by Curt Siters | No comments

I just watched a video, EndofAmerica33.com (stansberryresearch.com – this is an advertisement). It is interesting to say the least. The subjects discussed include the stock market (the Crash and today), the price of gold and silver, and a looming crisis when the U.S. Dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.

I feel that stansberryresearch.com may have either intentionally left out information or has misconstrued some information for the sake of driving fear. Some of the information is stating President Obama is a socialist and is driving the U.S. down the road of England under the Marshall Plan. This is wrong – England was not covered under the Marshall Plan. This made my red flags go up.

He spoke of the Crash and the current recession comparing them. I like to do number crunching and find that the shapes are similar, however, that is where the similarity ends.

Are the Great Depression and the Crash related? Continue reading “EndofAmerica33, the stock market and a looming crisis” »

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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Obama gives $36 Billion in Guarantees for Nuclear Power Plants

03/24/2011 in Intelligent Designing, News, Reflections & Discoveries, Things that Suck, Thoughts, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

Just how much is 36 Billion dollars?

36 Billion Dollars seems like a large amount of money. It can be a little hard to comprehend so, I broke it down with several examples so that we can see what it really is. money

  • It is one-half of Bill Gates net worth
  • It is enough for every (legal) man, woman and child to each receive $119.90 (based upon a population of approximately 300 million).
  • It is enough to build 720 new schools at $50,000,000 each.
  • At 0.0043 inches thick 1 trillion dollar bills would reach 2,605 miles high, or or reach two thirds of the way across the US
  • 3,797,468 households, each would receive $9,480.46 – enough to solarize each and every household (averaging $9,000 per installation)
  • At 16 square inches if you laid them side by side they would cover 125.9 square miles or cover a little less than one-third of New York City (468.9 sq.mi.)

36 Billion Dollars worth of solar energy would reduce the U.S. need for fossil fuel or nuclear power plants by 4% (based upon the US Census of 2000 with 105+ million households). Add to that an additional 8% (for a total of 12%) by redirecting the subsidies of $100,000,000  for the oil, coal and gas companies every year. Within 10 years our country would be energy independent.

Ever notice whenever there is a major storm or earthquake how hundreds of thousands of people lose power? That is due to the centralized power production scheme that is currently in place. If these power companies instead would invest in decentralized production by offering to help with the purchase, install and maintenance of solar systems on buildings their job would be much easier and the effects of natural, or man-made, disasters would affect fewer people.

I’m just wondering when the power companies will wake up and say “DECENTRALIZED is the way to go!”

I’m also wondering when our government will wake up and serve the people instead of the corporations (in spite of the Citizens United case).

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Curt SitersCurt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.  ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.  ~Standing Bear

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