Posted on 08/18/2012 2:34:37 PM PDT by null and void
Talk about flushing good money down a drain.
It must be nice to have so much money you can afford to throw it down the toilet.
Bill’s full o’shit.
This contest was over long ago - the co-winners were OS X and Linux.
Window 9 Beta program is now open.
Coming from one of the richest men in the world, that concept is ludicrous. Seriously, his own corporation pays people vastly different amounts of salary based upon their worth to that corporation.
I have no problem with trying to find novel ways to improve the basic well-being of the developing world. But there typically is no magic bullet. What it takes is a market-driven economy to produce the wealth for what we in this country take for granted - clean running water, flush toilets, good roads and a reliable food supply. There are no shortcuts to that. You have to build a society with enough wealth to support such.
Apparently we are now again up against The Klinton Toilet, Part No. Two !!!!!
oh crap!
The age of runaway stupid technology, coupled to dumbed-down common sense....blueprint for disaster...
Semper BS!
*****
If you build it, they will...er...go...
This is what the bored rich think up while contemplating life sitting on their gold thrones in 1,000 sq foot bathrooms.
Exactly.
All of these “winners” sound like they’re using tens of thousands of dollars of technology. How would that ever be available to all of the billions of human butts in the Third World (or should I say Turd World)?
This will be salvaged and dumped. No common sense.
No mention what a toilet generating hydrogen and electricity costs ... $20,000 each? Just curious.
BTW with 3 or 4 billion I can make a toilet that will light a good-sized city but I wouldn’t let anyone crap in it. ;-)
Soylent Brown?
"Wanna Burger?"
Sounds like a "solar toilet" is a bit like a combusting toilet that depends on intermittent sun power to do its job. Like, DUH, I'm going to wait till the sun's out to take a dump. The others have wonderful, flowery descriptions that are notably unaccompanied by any drawings or specs showing how they actually operate vs. conventional flush toilets. The lack of real performance information says volumes about ineffective they probably are. The "reporter" was a dolt for not getting it and obviously lacked a good editor.
We need to see a lot more before we can call any of these devices better than conventional flush toilets. Methinks they're mostly greenie monstrosities.
I think it was at our church where there was a poster that had a little kid in Africa saying something like “You poop in clean water?!”
The areas where these folks live are on the margins of usefullness. (Was it that comdedian Sam Kinison yelling for them to move?). But, for whatever reason they don’t move. Any technology that folks can come up with would have to be cheap. And even then it is way more than they can afford.
I recall a thread on FR awhile ago on how some guy in India caught rats for a living - they smoke them out. With a $25 device he was able to catch twice as many rats and send his child to school so he won’t have to be a rat catcher.
But - he still only got the device through some grant program. He was able to pay it off over time. But to think that a $25 device could improve someone’s life so much is hard to believe.
It is the same with the new stoves (rocket stoves). Cheap ($50 or less), fuel efficient (fuel that used to go in a day now lasts a week), and healthier (way less smoke) - but still out of reach of most of the folks that need them.
I imagine the same with these toilets - even if they are at $50 a pop it would be too much.
But hey - at least it’s Bill’s money, and not coming from the government. Although I imagine there are similar programs that we pay for.
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