Month: December 2013

Categories
age of lithium carbon reduction charger Christmas demand desk top drop electricity use Global Warming grid energy hard drive Improvement Ipad lap top power consumption tablet watts

Hope for the Holidays: The Unexamined Eco-Revolution caused by the IPad and it’s Copycat Tablet Devices

I am writing from a decidedly un-Christmasy culture.. They aren’t Christians, 97% of them anyways, and they aren’t that consumeristic, although that is changing (spreading like a flower scented cancer from the malls of the capital city)… but they aren’t my readers in any large measure I would guess either, and my readers are staring down the barrel of a loaded ‘fun gun’ called ‘Christmas in America’ right about now.
I get it, I grew up with it, I wanted my Red Rider BB Gun once, and I felt no shame in the filthy orgy of misinterpreted Christianity and greed it was…it was fun, some of the presents did change my life and the life of my family and friends for the better, and it was one of the only times of the year that anything approaching reverence crept into the cocky wreck we called a family. And I get the Christianity part too.. I took it quite seriously for a while…and I like to think that my now South Park version of Jesus would be kind of shrugging with amused chagrin at it all…

So my defense of Christmas aside… it’s fair to say that something much maligned as ‘Consumerism’ is a main driver of many of our Environmental woes. It’s ‘consumerism’ when other people do it…. when we do it, it’s the Christmas Spirit… I ain’t casting stones… but all this buying stuff, stuff beyond food and basic necessities, a nice example of how adaptive and successful our cultures have been, is really screwing things up in the planet department, in general (again, no pointed fingers… we cool? We cool…).
One huge example is electronic goods. I am pretty sure although you don’t need one to survive, they don’t issue them to Buddhist Monks, that your nose is buried in some light producing screen spitting out info-tainment as we speak… in fact, I can almost guarantee it…
There are perhaps 2 billion of the things, maybe more, for a population of 7 billion… and they take a lot of resources to both produce and run… just think about that.. 2 Billion Computers, when you could count them on your hands after World War II.
They came into my house, perhaps at Christmas, as a way for us to keep up with a trend… this was the early 80’s. They were cumbersome and labor intensive ( We had a Texas Instruments) but you could smell something amazing was happening…

 I watched the first MTV video from a spot on the carpet where we used to plug the TI into the TV, next to the spot where we dragged the phone to drop onto the modem… Media was coming on strong..
The First MTV Video: Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles

Imagine the combo of these three instruments I was crawling behind the TV to make work by unplugging the VCR (the Fourth) and plugging in the TI… You don’t have to imagine it, it’s 2 billion strong…. and you are nose into one now… how did I know?!
Now when this all first started to happen, it was the Government using these huge IBM mainframes to do what at the time were considered huge calculations.

These things needed their own Power Plants.. then Cray Supercomputers helped us refine the Nuclear Age (so last century!) and perhaps the energy demand was dropping, but it was well past affordability for the householders of the world. Then the personal computer came in, and made it easy to do so many things, from Skyping relatives across the world for Christmas, to making Christmas plans, to shopping for said Christmas, to even getting directions to the relatives in Jersey, where you have to go for Christmas even though you hate to, so you used to print them out because you always intentionally forget the confusing route, and now your phone just tells you…
All that computing, it takes energy…
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
like a brain needs vitamin B to keep up with the endless stimulation (Anyone want to get a Pizza?.. they have Christmas specials! Reindeer Sausage and Red and Green Peppers!). Multiply it by two Billion, and the energy demands likely exceed those of some large fraction of the smallest countries on earth ( I am guessing.. it’s Christmas, I don’t want to do the math… but imagine an average of say just 100 watts per computer, x 2 billion… agh… moving on…).
You can imagine the demands this places on energy grids, and we all know that unless you live in Iceland, your grid is doing something bad… heck, even in Iceland, you flood valleys to get 3/4 of your power, so let’s make it a blanket statement. The US only get’s 20% of it’s grid power from non carbon sources, and they still have environmental consequences and costs in production, so yeah, your computer, it’s doing something somewhere, as we speak, unless you are powered by solar, and planted a tree and remedied a rare earths mineral mine to cover your footprint.. The idea of coal is a double whammy on Christmas (My jerk sister used to love to stuff it in my stocking, just to let me know what Santa might be too nice to say…) so I won’t bring up that depressing subject, but you better live in Hawaii or maybe Puerto Rico to not think you aren’t getting some juice from it in the collective right now.
So let me bring up a guy named Steve Jobs… he’s no longer as concerned about his legacy I would guess.. because he’s dead… if you didn’t know, you must not own a computer, so I will assume you do. The guy was no Jesus, he was a businessman… He made addictive little contraptions, and leveraged insecurity, pretension, and a love of media to make money selling them to you. Bill Gates, who is still alive, did something a bit different.. he might have had less ideas, but he had some slightly more Utopian visions, no matter how much the marketing of Mr. Jobs was swaddled in Utopianism.. and is now spending his days of idly pursuing a sainthood of sorts. Those of you on a more modern Version of Windows wish he was as obsessive as Jobs, because Windows sucks without Gates there to supervise, but this accentuates my point that although no saint, Steve Jobs was the ever acclaimed perfectionist and made a good product. His single minded pursuit left something else by the wayside too… the Environment.. which is why he will seem an unlikely hero in a few lines. Maybe it is just the scrutiny it gets from it’s ultra hip bloggy mc-graduate degree customers (although mac’s increasing popularity is watering that gene pool down a bit these days.. yup, your tacky housewife cousin who Facebook posts too many pics of her kids has one… the sorority girl.. yup.. her), but Mac might have come in a lot of colors, but very few, Jobs included, saw it a green. They got Flack for not pushing for recyclable or sustainable materials, and more flack for the pollution caused by it’s Southern China factories and the methods used to extract and refine metals used in it’s production. He was single minded in pursuit of sales, and if that collaterally led to greenness, he was all for it, but it is my assumption that Jobs didn’t want to get side tracked by making bamboo and banana leaf computers when that in and of itself would have required a pretty huge and un-demanded investment. But, with market demand, he did start another revolution, a word I begrudgingly use because it used to make me cringe whenever the Beatles Song of the same name was blasphemed from it’s sacrosanctity by being used in his campaigns to sell his idiot boxes with extra buttons…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXhtFik-vI
sorry, it was Nike, but same difference to some of us..
anyhow, so I am about to describe something that will seem small.. it is small, but multiply it by 2 billion, and it isn’t so small. Let’s start by describing how it was small in a good way. I am talking about the IPad… what it is, is a solid state computer, and by solid state  I mean no moving parts. it’s magic is that it’s just a series of circuits.. it’s somehow our privilege that Planck’s Constant gave us RAM that could be hand portable without ROM before the guy who knew what to do with it died… make it snazzy and give it a really nice touch screen. If the last sentence went past your head, this one will make sense to anyone who passed high school physics or pays attention to plugs or their electric bill. These Tablets that Steve Jobs introduced, because they have no moving parts, use something like 1/10 of the energy of their recent predecessors. I’m talking about Tablets, which were led by the Ipad, the newest incarnation of the Computer Revolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9qbgQdAxls

This was under 4 years ago, and I would have to guess that IPad’s and their new derivatives, the Tablets, number in the hundreds of millions today.
I had one for a bit..  a good buddy made me get one so I could communicate easily during a trip abroad. Addictive little thing. I had to literally destroy it to go cold turkey. It didn’t brake easily either ( I was literally in a war zone, so shooting it like Elvis would have been pretty dramatically misinterpreted by the soldiers guarding my hotel.) I had to bounce it against about 4 walls (making NEWS: North, East, West, South) because it was so solid state. Before that act, I could literally never disconnect from my wired state.. I could wipe and keep watching The Daily Show at the same time without even putting it down.. I don’t know how to explain it’s power better than that… Jobs was plunging his system deep into my psyche, and pulling cash out as well…which didn’t escape the observations of the South Park Guys:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e01-humancentipad
But my addiction aside, let’s go back to the whole solid state thing again… Remember hard drives? They spun.. they moved.. the required power to do so, and Desktops… they had a big ol’ TV attached to them.. must have used 50-100 watts or more…gone…now even mouses are obsolete.. not that they used much power.. they were, well, mouse-like, dainty in their consumption… but now, again.. obsolete with the touch screen, well, credit to the touch pad, but still an investment and a power user…  but the touch screen? the coffin is sealed…
So right before my NEWS incident, I left my charger behind in a major city.. like cars before the gas crisis, I had never really wondered how much power they used because it never was an issue.. no one thinks about efficiency in computers.. we need them too badly to question them…we take what they give us… but Jobs, in his pursuit of something better.. the reliability and hand held possibilities of a tablet, not to mention the battery life possible in 2010 (the beginning of the age of Lithium) addressed this problem without us even knowing it..
Where I was looking for Ipad Chargers, I was in the land beyond them.. the city I had just left, was a city of 3 million, and had two mac outlets.. I went into a province with no paved roads leading to it, but due to the miracles of the Cell phone and cheap Chinese crap being everywhere, I could buy IPhone chargers there.. it created about half the charge, but it was enough to trickle charge my IPad.. now the big moments.. how much does an IPhone charge on.. 5 watts… the Ipad.. about 10… 10 watts.. no, not 10 kilowatts, which might have been what the first plasma screens needed.. There are clock radios that run on more than 10 watts, and they sure as heck don’t do what this thing can.. it’s pretty amazing.. and it uses next to no power.. it runs on about 2.5 watts
http://techlogg.com/2011/03/qa-whats-ipad-2s-power-consumption/2322
that’s an almost negligible amount of power.. there were too many things to sell it on to have this be a selling point… to even talk about power consumption almost breaks that magic.. implies limitations and weakness.. Jobs might have been right to never mention it.. but he has launched a revolution for real.. This whole commercialism thing that is slowly sinking the planet… there are two routes out… Luddite solutions (make some NEWS!) and innovation… efficiency was an afterthought here, but if you do the math, every minute that you are curled up with your IPad in bed instead of sitting in front of your desktop or laptop, you are saving the planet, relatively…. and any time you ask a question of your IPhone instead of your laptop or desktop.. again.. triple bonus points.. unless you have it sitting asleep but on all the time, waiting to be cranked up if the tablet or phone stops entertaining you… then you suck!

I wonder how many hours it takes to get past the environmental costs of the production of that devious little Monolith (My god.. it’s full of stars!) and be in the black on power usage… you could run it for over 2000 hours without incurring 1 dollar’s charge on your power bill, in California where energy costs are the highest in the Contiguous US states by some rough math.
And the world has followed suit.. Samsung and Asus and now Chromebooks are all essentially IPad variants.. no moving parts but the buttons, using 1/10 if not 1/40th or 1/100th of the power of the device they replace…
So since Santa and Jesus made peace, consume away if it brings these kinds of (relative) savings.. not Black Friday savings, but black coal savings.. leaving it in the ground and not in the environment, from China to Charlestown, WV!
….. wait.. you didn’t watch that.. it was literally the first South Park even made by Parker and Stone as film Students at UC Boulder..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSQczYEeB2w
watch guilt free.. on a tablet, of course… you info-tainment gobbling consumer.. just don’t shoot yer eye out!
Oh and…
there might even be innovations in the big screen category to come, just in case you can’t give it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED
http://www.oled-info.com/flexible-oled
Merry Christmas Every One!

Categories
Asia Ban Carbon China Electric Bike Electric Scooter four stroke government Hope Improvement Motorcycle Ban Numbers Pollution PRC Progress Scooter Shekou Shenzen two stroke

The Electric Scooters of Shenzhen

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/import-electric-scooters-from-china.html

Post Soundtrack (click here and keep reading)

Every once in a while you stumble upon something, and you are surprised at the change. I travel so much, I know what to look for when it comes to change, and I know how slowly change usually happens. If the change is environmental in nature, in this case the application of a technology to reduce air pollution, and you see a complete turnaround in 4 or 5 years, you get a bolt of Hope in a hurry, especially if it happened in the heart of the world’s new global warming bette noir, The Peoples Republic of China, and to be exact, it manufacturing powerhouses in the areas around Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the old Canton. What am I talking about.. it’s gunna seem small, it is small, but I hope I can find statistics to explain to you just how large it really is. I am talking about 2 stroke scooters, or the apparent lack of them, in Shenzhen. I used to have to imagine Asia without the whine of these ubiquitous little motors, now I can experience it. Every scooter in Shenzhen that I saw during a long days night of pacing the streets was electric. It was a complete change out of inventory in a way that could only occur under the type of authority extant in the wold’s largest Capitalist Dictatorship, the PRC, which just passed These Here United States of America for Overall Atmospheric Carbon Emissions a few years back. Let’s not talk per capita just yet, that’s embarrassing for the west. But in this blog, I wouldn’t be pointing such a hairy finger of blame, in part an accident of demographics, if it wasn’t somehow involved in displaying something good.

So what was I doing in Shenzhen, China’s fourth largest berg, or more accurately Shekou, it’s nicest sub city, for one night? Partying with a bunch of drunken sailors. Seriously. I was temporarily one of them, and we were 23 days land deprived and in need of a good look around and a night to remember. While the bosun and the watch officers unloaded and loaded our cargo of containers with the Chinese Longshoremen as part of the traffic between Long Beach, Oakland, and a quintet of Chinese ports as part of a regular service, those of us left got to sally onto shore for a bit of recreation.. The afternoon started with the normal sight seeing, let’s not talk about how the night ended to the uninitiated, but it was fun to see 20 drunken Brothers of the Sea from 4 different nations acting like teenagers on the town from one big happy family, and it was nice to be greeted by what we were greeted by in the form of these electric scooters. When you spend a lot of time at sea, there can be a symphony of mixed feelings involved in coming to shore. You remember how sad things can be. You have been staring at more stars than you can imagine, and the only humanity you were interacting with was humane, thoughtful, and only in a hurry when it needed to be, and there was no rancor but for the regular pulse of the engine, which becomes like a mothers heartbeat with time. So as I signed out of the gate with my new buddies, I braced myself for the smoggy insanity I know Mainland China to usually be. What greeted me was something distinct.. sure, people were still in a bit of a hurry, and the buses made a bit of noise, but something was missing, distinctly missing, and it is the signature sound of Asia beyond the twang of of the Huqin. The sound I am talking about is the whine of the two stroke engine, that is the heart of the Motor Scooter, ranging from 50 to 300 cc in strength. It is the modern Asian ride,the bike of the Post War Boom, the symbol of floating through a sea of humanity with modernity. There are hundreds of millions of motorized two and three wheeled conveyances inAsia, and they make an awful sink and an awful din, but it reminds you where you are in a way that can also be comforting.

Post Soundtrack Song II

For those who don’t know much about engines.. ahem.. let me educate you with my in fact accredited knowledge from some time I did in the garages of Community College. A four stroke engine is what almost every car has. the piston goes up and down, driving a crank shaft, which turns your wheels, usually though a transmission to change the gear ratios so you can be more energy efficient, stay within the peak performance areas of the vehicle. The Strokes are Intake, Compression, Power, and Exhaust, not these guys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT68FS3YbQ4
The problem with a four stroke engine, in addition to the facts that it is only about 30% efficient and works most easily on fossil fuels and is ruining our climate, is that it is more expensive than something called a two stroke engine to make, maintain, and it’s heavier too. Following me? a two stroke takes those four strokes of and combines them into two. When you do anything in half the time, it usually gets sloppy. It’s only about 15% to 20% efficient, but in a moped, it is lighter, easier to handle, cheaper to fix, so who cares if it is loud like a chainsaw (also almost always a two stroke) and uses say 40% more gas, only about half of which is actually burns, emitting the rest as a greater variety of  burned and half burned pollutants than even your four stroke. All those loud damn mopeds and scooters that have ruled the road from Paris to Saigon and Beyond for some 40 years now, perhaps longer, are nasty polluting two strokes. Cute as a Vespa is, and yes it’s overall better than a car, but it’s not as good as the cheap motorcycle right next to it, which is the smallest 4 stroke you tend to see in transportation, starting at about 125 cc in the Tiny Chinese Bike department, when it comes to not being polluting. So a 2 stroke scooter is better than a hummer, yes, but that hummer burns relatively cleaner, and you can’t fit as many of them in a small area as you can the 70 puffing and burping and screaming 2 stroke scooters you are apt to see waiting at an intersection from Jakarta to Hokkaido and west to Pakistan. In any nation whose development model has been taken seriously, if people start making 10 to 15 bucks a day, then can afford one, and that is more and more of the world’s factory, modern Asia, and most prolifically, the Pearl River Delta where I was hanging with the drunken sailors. When there was talk of enviromagheddon, a car that would be so cheap everyone in India would buy it, the Tata Nano, I thought to myself, well, sure it will spike traffic like crazy, it takes up 4 times the space, but at least it will be a 4 stroke.. if you are not in that traffic jam, just breathing the air on the same planet, it’s kind of a wash. Why? because it is a 4 stroke, and actually gets about the same mileage as a lot of old scooters it would be replacing, and with less of a range of emissions, so it’s almost an upgrade. Plus, it gets people out of the rain.. that’s progress! Now if it replaces one of these little motorcycles I am talking about, which are 4 stroke, it isn’t a wash, the car will be worse since these things can as cleanly give you as much as 80MPG, but who am I to say who gets to get out of the rain.
Anyhow, back to China, and Shenzhen in particular. Shenzhen is 10 million people now, but was a village over the Hong Kong Border 40 years ago. It’s growth has been exponential with the creation of a special economic zone right at that port of Chiwan, about 5 miles away, where our ship was sitting, the exact spot that Deng Xiaopeng opened China to the world in the gathering dawn after the dark days of the Cultural Revolution by making this special economic zone, with Chiwan as it’s first port a few miles, away from Hong Kong. It is the epitome of what I am talking about in scale, if not in duration of industrialized time, as places like Taiwan and Japan and Korea had a head start due to not having been plunged into the extremes of isolation and social and economic upheaval that occurred during the rule of Mao Tse Tung. Other huge populations like India and Indonesia are now plunging right into that “moped zone” of economic development, along with countries like Thailand and the Philippines, long famous for their Tuk Tuk’s, but now entering areas of per capita GDP where people sick of walking and buses (and bemos and mini busses!) can grab themselves a little two banger to get around.
If transportation creates about 15% of the world’s carbon emissions as of my writing in the year of our lord 2013 (Buddhist Year 2556), I would have to guess that the hundreds of millions of scooters we are talking about create some 2-3% of the world carbon emissions. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find breakdowns that way, but we are talking about big numbers. That is the same stake aviation has, which is spending billions of dollars to eke out marginal savings.. this is huge low hanging fruit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsUSc3OIVEg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/20/scooters-vs-hummers-which_n_177567.html
http://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/twothree_wheelers_2007.pdf This report attempted to bring order to this madness in 2007, and estimated that 85% of the world’s two and three wheeled vehicles are in Asia.
A half step is to retrofit 2 strokes to 4 strokes, as was famously done in a big initiative in the Philippines,
http://www.cleanenergyawards.com/top-navigation/nominees-projects/nominee-detail/project/37/?cHash=991e497c16
but the pie in the sky, the ideal state, is electric driven by renewable energy.
So as I begin to research here, I find a writers dilemma, a few actually. First is that I don’t speak Chinese..
Wo Bu Hui Jiang Hua Yu!… Suck it up writer, you say, it’s your dilemma, hire a Chinese research assistant for 20 cents.. you already have me intrigued! Well, moving on from my laziness, I find my second dilemma.. the coverage that is in English of this major phenomenon focuses on a dust up between Shenzhen and their now massive (for me, good news) electric bike community:
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/06/20/shenzhen-takes-on-chinas-silent-killer/
http://www.shenzhenparty.com/forum/shenzhen-legal-forum/electric-scooter-nanshan
Imagine that… 200 million electric bikes..

 Wikipedia, towards the bottom here, says that some 100 million electric bikes were made between 2008 and 2010, the scooters close cousin. Here is this great leap forward depicted in English only in light of the ban, oh, and in, light of the guy sprawled all over the pavement because these things are quiet as can be, go really fast, and don’t require a licence like scooters..now I am going to start to sound like the Chinese Government saying smog is good for your sense of humor, when I am arguing against smog!
Turns out I was wrong about this being government ordered, my third dilemma, kind of. It’s the good old free market. The change was so complete, so impressive, I could have sworn and assumed when I started writing that this was a government program, when in fact, it was the exact opposite, good old Chinese free market in action perhaps (forgetting the devaluation of the Yuan that makes all that manufacturing possible in the first place!). As I read however the plot thickens, as the Motorcycle was banned in about 90 Chinese cities, according the Wikipedia’s electric bike entry, but not scooters. So we have this combo of Government and free market, but the Chinese have definitively stated through purchasing that they like these things.
So the Wall Street Journal Blog brought up all the conventional wisdom problems of this situation, so I might as well just speak to their criticisms now. What I have learned is that these big changes that affect climate change tend to be two steps forward, one step back… at first. Everything being said here has been said about the electric car and hybrids in the US, and we keep moving forward. It’s the same with wind turbines.. they do kill birds and bats.
However, you can add a noise to a silent vehicle ( I think Tesla has.. it sounds so Buck Rodgers, or maybe it is just the brake discs rotating in the brakes, which you can’t hear on other vehicles over the engine), maybe we could make these for people:
http://atomictoasters.com/2012/11/what-ever-became-of-deer-whistles/
 and you can regulate speed.. ask Smokey and the Bandit.. maybe China needs to find it’s inner Burt Reynolds. I think the first traffic cops were born within days of the first cars 110 odd years ago (imagine that, 110 years of auto dominance!).
The Ni Cad battery argument was made often, strongly, and perhaps correctly about the Prius (the allegation being that they were made under such horrible industrial conditions in some Siberian mine and factory that they negated the gas savings of the car in meta analysis), and it forced Chevy and Tesla and Nissan to go for Lithium Ion, much cleaner to make, and now Prius is Lithium too… that was maybe a 5 year curve…. and now we have a solid improvement with the lithium for planetary and local health. And sure Chinese power plants are awful, trust me. I just heard from a Chinese friend over a big bowl of squid soup that the government has openly said they are moving as many polluting industries as possible to their east coast to take advantage of he prevailing westerlies.. I just cruised the Chinese coast, and the pollution was awful, the sky a yellowish grey.. made me not want to eat the seaweed in the soup (the only thing I did want to eat on some level) since they farm it on these big bays right underneath said coal plants, but there are signs of hope that that might someday change:
http://e360.yale.edu/digest/china_doubles_pace_of_renewable_energy_installation_in_2013/4020/
This is where we find ourselves in the original dilemma again of the strength of centralized authority in China, but in this case, it will be a good thing. Anyone who knows anything about China knows that when this government makes a decision, it starts to happen, no matter how invasive.. this one goes in the good category. China is taking this very seriously.

 They have to. Their people are dying from these emissions, but now at least, less from point source pollution that settles in every street and chokes you as you walk to the store to get some sea urchin chips or water your orchids.. Shenzhen is materially better.. I don’t want to argue the same old joke of a line in environmental science that “the Solution to Pollution is Dilution” but shooting it up into the atmosphere at this point,under more efficient generations schemes from coal perhaps, but increasingly natural gas, bio, wind and solar, do make these electric bikes a step forward I am pretty sure, it not now, soon in the future, and the conversion of technology and mindset have occurred. The rest becomes just hard work. Plus, half of them must be made in Shenzhen! it’s like local food..carbon costs of delivery are almost nil!
So on my wild night partying with a bunch of drunken sailors on the streets of there was none of the rancor you usually associate with China, just calm.. it was calm, and for a bunch of sailors, we were happy to be back on land, because maybe, just maybe, the stress of modern life might be abating in one little corner, like a child falling off to sleep after a crying fit, making people more likely to want to walk instead of drive, and since that little corner is literally the world’s factory, it will spread from there. They are waiting for it in South East Asia, perhaps even India, trust me!
The Scooter is Dead?! Long Live the Scooter!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRfbL6memSs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu598EhI7LU you guys are bad ass!
http://www.splashnewsonline.com/2011-10-22/vespa-lebrities-celebrities-on-scooters/
oh and yes, a dog riding a scooter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c75zy-2S8wU
thank you you tube, you make all my dreams come true.. like Chinese Manufacturing… sigh… why leave home!?