The batteries were tiny ones--the old motorcycle battery and one from a UPS--so they were "by the pound" rather than the standard $5 apiece you get for car batteries. I don't care; take something somewhere to get rid of it and get money for doing so? Where do I sign up?
AutoZone, of course, accepts used oil. The used oil is probably reprocessed into some kind of fuel or something; that's why they accept it "free of charge"--waste oil is still pretty useful stuff. Worst case, you can filter it and burn it in a freakin' diesel engine.
...but this time I didn't take the empty bucket with me. One I'd emptied it into their tank, I dropped it into the trash barrel right next to the thing. Fuck it; I don't need more than one waste oil bucket because what happens--inevitably!--is that one is partly full and the other is completely full of oil, and when they're both full I only take one to AutoZone and the other sits around for 178 more months just waiting for a careless bump or something to slosh oil all over the floor. Screw that: from now on, one container!
Ha ha fuckin' ha!
I'm hoping they'll have another county "hazardous waste collection event" soon, because I've got a bunch of antifreeze to get rid of. Antifreeze is the worst: you can't dump it because it's toxic; you can't dump it in with the oil because it's half water and won't mix; and no one collects it because used antifreeze is pretty much useless for anything.
I'll put transmission fluid and small amounts of gas and even brake and carb cleaning fluid in the oil bucket, because most of the chemicals in those non-motor-oil compounds are usually present in used motor oil--albeit in lower concentrations--and it hurts nothing. But it has to be something that will mix with the oil.
* * *
This is the same nonsense that keeps coming out and it has not changed one whit in 40 years. Longer, actually. The whole "ooh New York-London-Paris-Tokyo in half an hour!" crap has been peddled by futurists since Goddard's first anemic little rocket took to the skies over New England.
In the 1960s they were saying that we'd have these things in "forty years!" and guess what? We don't!
"Jean Botti, innovation and technology director at EADS, said: ‘It is not a Concorde but it looks like a Concorde, showing that aerodynamics of the 1960s were already very smart.'"
This guy needs to be hauled out of his leather executive chair and beaten with a copy of Willy Ley's Travel In Outer Space repeatedly until he stops being such an arrogant git. The only reason he's even got a leg to stand on with this idiocy is due to all the work that aerospace engineers of the '40s, '50s, and '60s did...and mostly they did it without computers.
AirBus apparently thinks that companies like SpaceX and [whatever Burt Rutan's outfit is called] are going to sit around fapping while they amble towards hypersonic, extra-atmospheric flight. Guess what? They won't! It's not going to take any forty years for people to realize that taking an hour to get to the other side of the planet is a good thing and scramble to get in on the ground floor.
"We don't have the technology"? We've had the technology for fifty years. Sure, if you're bound and determined to blast a hole through the atmosphere with brute force--both on the way out and the way back in--then sure we need all kinds of exotic new technologies, because moving through air much faster than Mach 1 is like flying in a blowtorch.
But as far back as the '40s writers like Heinlein were talking about getting vehicles into space and back with nothing more exotic than mild steel and aluminum alloy; and Heinlein was an engineer--he knew what was possible and what wasn't.
...this could easily turn into a 50-page rant, and I have things to do, so I'm abruptly changing the topic.
* * *
There's gold in them thar...uh...sidewalks! Big surprise: in a part of New York City where jewelry has been manufactured for decades, you can actually make money by digging in the sludge.
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A "green energy" two-fer:
California wind farm killing endangered birds.
"[Scira Offshore Energy] says the farm will power the equivalent of 220,000 average households and save almost 500,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.
Remember; when someone involved in the construction or management gives you an output figure, you have to divide it by 5 to get the real-world output. This means that the wind farm they're putting in will power the equivalent of 44,000 homes, and will "save" almost 100,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year.
Then there's this caption under a picture of seals: "Ecological risks: Seals at Blakeney Point nature reserve on the North Norfolk coast. Some have washed ashore dead since work on the windfarm started". Have you ever spent a lot of time near the shore of any moderately sizable body of water? Particularly one with wave action or a current? Dead stuff is always washing ashore. I'd wager that dead seals are always washing ashore--wherever their habitats are, I mean--and there is therefore no information in that caption. How many seals? How is this number different than the time before the wind farm construction began?
Look: I think wind power is stupid and a waste of resources--and ultimately won't save so much as a stalk of grass--but if you're going to make a point, make it or shut up about it. Showing a picture of a cute seal and saying "ZOMG THERE ARE DEAD SEALS!" doesn't do anything but frighten old ladies.
(Then again? Judging by how they react to things, I think a lot of liberals are old ladies, at least on the inside.)
* * *
...and I bet this is because of a bunch of old ladies complaining, too. WTF, whenever I've been in the hospital, getting an eyeful has been good for me.
Esp. when the nurse bends over and you get a nice look down her blouse....
Old ladies. I'm telling you.