• onthepharm.net: INTJ
• rianjs.net: INTP
• blatantconsumerist.com: ESTP
• polyscience.org: ISTJ

I ran a couple of queries on specific writing I've done, and again, it's all over the map. What I consider my "best" writing seems to go back and forth between INTJ, INTP, and ISTP. So again, no conclusions to be drawn. :p

Fun way to waste a few minutes.

I'm going to set aside my inner cynic that someone will actually read this, and talk about what has been worrying me as a concerned US citizen. I know that there is only so much an administration can do to solve the myriad problems we face, and that trying to tackle too much at once is a recipe for universal failure. Therefore prioritization is obviously key.

My primary overarching concern over this country has been any lack of a long-term strategy. I don't mean for one specific area like the economy or healthcare, but I mean *any* kind of long-term strategy for *anything.* Thus far, it seems as though we've been shifting aimlessly from one priority to the next, dictated to us often by market prices of various commodities and shifting popular wants.

That's no way to run a country.

This list is not in any kind of prioritized order because I think all are equally important at the end of the day:

1) Education: The US has been falling behind in the ability of our high school graduates to afford and go to college. This is happening even as the entry-level requirement for many jobs is having a college degree (even though the particular job may not actually warrant it).

Almost universally, my college professors have publicly lamented the fact that high school graduates are not prepared for the intensity of the material that they face as freshmen in college. As a smart, in-touch individual, I know for a fact that my math was not up to par, and I went to an excellent public high school and graduated in the top 10% of my class. Our state colleges and institutions do a spectacular job, and we should continue to invest in them, but if a student is incapable of succeeding there thanks to a poor secondary education, something is wrong. Accountability in secondary schools is very important. Maybe we need better ways to measure student performance, I do not know. Something must be done, however, because we are falling behind countries like India whose high school students are better prepared for college than ours.

The gap between boys and girls continues to widen. While we've done very well by our girls in the last 20 years, our boys have languished. Education should not be a zero-sum game wherein one sex succeeds at the expense of the other. We have neglected boys and focused all of our efforts on girls, and this is neither fair nor desirable. Both sexes can succeed together, and our educators need to remember this, and not just recommend a visit to a pediatrician or psychiatrist for our boys because stimulant ADHD medication isn't the universal diagnosis and answer.

2) Healthcare: The US lacks any kind of long-term healthcare strategy or vision. While I believe that some form of universal healthcare coverage is both necessary and desirable, President-Elect Obama should stop saying that every person will be able to get health coverage like members of Congress have because this is not possible, nor is it desirable. When and if universal coverage happens, there will still be two tiers of healthcare. A basic, public tier, and a second private tier that citizens may opt to use if they desire to pay more. Please keep in mind that I say this with no malice toward the currently uninsured. My dad had a heart attack this past spring and waited 36 hours before going to the ER — because he knew that he would end up $50-80K in debt. (And he did.)

Secondly, politicians need to stop conflating the idea of universal health coverage with universal health access. The two are not the same. Just because you are covered doesn't mean you can see a doctor. We don't have enough doctors and physician extenders (Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants) in this country to see everyone, and going to the ER is not the answer either: they're already overcrowded.

Massachusetts is experiencing this now. While we are often looked to as some kind of model for the rest of the country, the reality is that our system is far from perfect. It's costing the taxpayers boatloads of money because healthy people that can afford to pay are NOT signing up at nearly the rates that the unhealthy poor are. After all, if you're healthy, you don't need preventative care, the colloquial thinking goes, and even if you do, it's cheaper to pay out-of-pocket to see a doc than it is to pay a high monthly premium. In Massachusetts, the accounting math isn't working out as expected because of this particular adverse selection catch-22. Complicating the financial problem, there are not enough primary care physicians in this state to see the massive influx of new patients which highlights the second point I made: coverage does not guarantee access. That means they go to the ER, which is inherently more expensive than an ambulatory office visit.

To reform healthcare meaningfully, you need to do it in a multi-phase manner:

1. Attract the best and brightest back into medicine. That means making the idea of practice attractive which means real, honest-to-God tort reform, not lipservice. When a physician is paying more to medmal companies than s/he is taking home, there is a very serious problem. Talk about a disincentive to practice.
2. Along those lines, we need more primary care physicians. That means paying them more. Right now, the RVRBS is stacked in favor of specialists, and members of the committee are appointed for life (stupid idea). PCPs do more patient visits than specialists on the order of 8:1, but they are not represented in anywhere near this ratio in the RVRBS committee. That means that procedures are over-valued and cognitive specialties (primary care, rheumatology, endocrinology, etc., etc.) are undervalued because it is difficult to measure the relative value of a cognitive visit. As a result, medical students are gravitating towards specialties which pay more, and the free market is not allowed to compensate for the relative lack of PCPs because the way reimbursement is calculated is fundamentally flawed. In the long-run, this means more expensive healthcare because patients will be seeing specialists instead of PCPs, simply due to lack of PCP supply.

Senator Obama has advocated investing in technology, which is very necessary, but electronic medical records and other efficiency concerns are not a panacea, either. The entire system is broken from top to bottom and improving efficiency in a superficial fashion will NOT solve the huge, underlying problems. A study recently published estimated that only 50 cents of every dollar spent in the name of healthcare is spent on patient care. That's a bigger problem than mere technological inefficiency.

3) Energy independence: Senator Obama has promised energy independence, and his message has not changed since his 2004 DNC keynote speech. Right now, our government is listing from priority to priority. Gas prices go up, and all of a sudden the public is clamoring for the government to "do something." Prices go down, and people stop caring, but we know that petroleum supplies are fixed and demand is effectively infinite. That means that eventually prices will go back up, and we need a long-term solution. Keeping the country's eye on the ball is the government's job, because it's clear that most private citizens cannot or will not.

Command and control government regulation is sexy and it makes it look as though government is "doing something" about our dependence on foreign oil, but a more progressive Pigovian tax is probably a better way to accomplish the goal of getting our automakers on-board with the next generation of propulsion than is mandating fuel efficiency and carbon emissions standards. Even if the money is returned in the form of an income subsidy, modifying demand is more effective than trying to legislate supply.

We need government intervention because energy independence and a healthy environment cannot be achieved by individuals acting by themselves — bless their hearts. It needs to be broad and bold in scale and impact. Replacing the light bulbs in your house and planting a few trees might be part of A solution, but it's obvious that it's not the ENTIRE solution.

4) Iraq: Iraq is the only US priority that seems to have a strategy under the Bush administration. While I believe firmly that the Iraq war was "dumb," like Senator Obama, we cannot simply leave and end up with a power vacuum in that nation. We messed it up, and now we should be on the hook to fix it. I am reminded of the lessons from the 70s in Afghanistan which allowed us to defeat the Soviets covertly, but ultimately paved the way for the Taliban because the US "wasn't in the business of nation-building". Money for war, but not for education and infrastructure-building. We can see the disastrous long-term consequences of these policy choices that we are dealing with even today.

5) Outsourcing and Globalization: O&G will continue under any administration, and we should not try to stop it. In the long run, it is good for our economy anyway. However we cannot forget the workers that have lost their jobs. Suggestions run the gamut for re-training builders and makers for the healthcare and technology sectors, but we cannot ignore the fact that people are not cattle to be herded in one direction or another. Many of these individuals don't want these jobs because building and making things is part of who their identity. They don't want to be nurses, phlebotomists and IT technicians. And they shouldn't have to be.

Instead we should gently nudge them in the direction of infrastructure repair (which needs to be a priority in the new administration) and the new renewable energy economy. With a focus on renewables and infrastructure repair, President-Elect Obama can employ the tens of thousands who have been laid off in fields that are not dissimilar to where they came from, which will keep them happier and more productive.

(Of course, if these people want to change careers completely, they should have these educational opportunities available as well, which ties into my thoughts about education.)

6) Public Service: The best and the brightest need to see government as a worthwhile place to spend their energies. The politics of the last decade has been toxic for self-actualized smart people, and they haven't wanted to go into public service. I know Senator Obama knows this, and simply by being open-minded and obviously intellectual, he has done a lot to change the stereotype of politicians and public service. For that, I am grateful, and I can honestly say that I am considering public service as a long-term career whereas under the Bush administration, such an idea would have been laughable. I know that there are many other smart people in my generation who feel the same way. For that, I am thankful.

Fantastic.

Fulltext.

1. We have elevated America's status in the world. This was very important to me when it came time to choose, and this map (preserved here against link rot) played no small part in my choice. Globalization is here to stay, and Americans need to think more about what's going on outside their borders.
2. We have broken the final racial barrier in this country once and for all. (I look forward to the day when we have a female Commander-in-Chief as well.)
3. We have undermined real terrorist — as opposed to made-up terrorist — ideology in the Middle East and elsewhere by demonstrating that a black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama can be elected leader of the free world, showing much better than words could ever tell that we are indeed a nation that looks deeper than skin color; a nation that sees past a foreign-sounding name.

Senator McCain's concession speech was graceful, and I hope that this election did a lot to heal the wounds inflicted by the last two cycles that were further deepened by lawsuits before finally being ended prematurely by the Supreme Court, in the case of the 2000 election. I sincerely hope that we don't see any more elections like those for a long, long time. Senator McCain, despite his disaster of a campaign is, and always will be, a very classy man, and a man to be admired and respected. It is a pity that I could not vote for him. (I was too young in 2000, and he wasn't the best candidate in 2008.)

I voted for Senator Obama for many, many other reasons than the three I've mentioned above, not the least of which was the innate curiosity and equanimity with which he has approached everything from real politics to his day-to-day campaigning. More surprisingly, his message has not deviated over the years. Go back and watch his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention (part 1, part 2) and then go watch his acceptance speech at this year's DNC, and then watch his victory speech from a few nights ago.

His message hasn't changed in the last four years. That kind of consistency speaks volumes about a person and their convictions. No other candidate since I've been walking this earth has done anything even remotely similar. Every other candidate has been characterized by trying to find their voice and their message, but not Senator Obama. I like that.

Today Senator Obama gave his first news conference as President-Elect, and I watched the whole thing. It wasn't nearly as flashy or practiced as the speeches linked above, and this is to be expected: the audiences are different. What I was particularly interested in was the message, and it's not very similar to his campaign messages, except perhaps with more detail and less polish. Beginning at the 6 minute mark, Senator Obama begins taking questions from the reporters there, and it's clear that he intends to honor his campaign promises inasmuch as he humanly can in terms of policy, but more importantly, the promise he made about frank and honest communication with the public. This is in stark contrast to Bush in 2004 where he ran a campaign based on the premise of keeping America safe from terrorists, but instead went after gay marriage and aggressively tried to privatize social security after he won.

Back to Senator Obama's news conference, which I have embedded below. If you're not interested in the details, skip ahead to the six minute mark and listen to the questions, and the thoughtful and direct manner with which Senator Obama tries to answer them. This is a huge departure from American politics as usual, and it's this kind of behavior that leads me to believe even now, that Senator Obama is, and always was, the real deal. It's these kinds of subtleties that thrill me as a voter, and more importantly, as an American.

"There are no real or fake parts of this country," he said, a reference to a Sarah Palin speech in North Carolina in which she said she was happy to be in "the real America" and praised "the pro-America areas of this great nation." Obama continued: "We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this nation — we all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from. There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq and patriots who opposed it, patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women from Indiana and all across America who serve on our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a red America or a blue America — they have served the United States of America."

From Slate.

Still trying to figure out what to do with my life, though. However I'm starting to narrow it down, and I get the feeling that starting my own business is going to be one of the things I do regardless of whether or not I continue my education at the graduate or professional level.

Options on the table for after graduation:

• MBA: Relatively inexpensive, and not especially time consuming. Unlimited upside, and would teach me skills I don't currently have. Could go anywhere from here.
• PharmD
• Get a job: Thinking technical writer of some kind. Preferably medical stuff.
• Start my own business: Many options on the table here; I have two in mind specifically. One with David, and one more along the writing side of things, but that would require getting about three other people to go along with it.
• A combination: MBA + small business; PharmD + writing business; writer + small business; writer + writing business.

Who the hell knows. I feel like I'm starting to settle — there aren't quite as many possibilities up in the air at this point as there were 6-12 months ago. I like the idea of getting my MBA because it's relatively inexpensive, and it provides a good fallback point should the side ventures go awry. I have enough work experience to go right into it without needing to get a job first, which is fortunate. Thank goodness for in-state tuition…

I would also like to start writing for Ars again. Not daily writing, but something like a monthly feature article about something I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about. I have an outline for my first article already written. I just need to flesh it out which I hope to work on today.

NaNoWriMo

November is almost here, which means NaNoWriMo is write around the corner. (Tee hee) I've been writing character outlines off and on this week for a story that's been kicking around in my head for a few months now. Given its "supernatural"-esque flavor, I've been doing some new thinking about how people with extraordinary abilities might fit into and interact with an ordinary environment. No, not like Heroes, which is getting progressively lamer with the time-arc plotholes that are used WAY too often as Deus Ex Machina mechanisms. F that crap. You start messing with time travel, and you've created a recipe for a world of hurt as a writer. The possibility for plotline chaos increasing exponentially and just makes things… messy.

I'm trying to come up with some history that I can use as an invisible framework, and also thinking about words themselves. Take the word "telepath" for example. That's a relatively new word. What might someone with that ability have been called 300 years ago? What about someone with telekinesis? Before the "tele-" prefix, what did we have to describe spooky action at a distance? Witchcraft, obviously, but I think that's too blunt a word to be useful or interesting. And in a world with a rich history of physical and mental "superpowers," witchcraft probably doesn't apply because the supernatural would cease to be supernatural and instead would be entirely ordinary…

So these are some of the things I've been thinking about. I've participated in NaNoWriMo three times now in the last seven years, and I'd like to do it again, and I think I'm at a point in my life where this is a realistic possibility. I'm pretty excited, but I need to start working on a plot outline if I am to be successful.

It autocompleted with what's available on the remote machine.

That's pretty fricken cool.

I have my doubts about the real usefulness of some of the top items, but the CFL bulbs are the real deal. While I would never pay $14 for one of them, we did get about three dozen of them on sale at Building 19 for something like 17 cents each about two years ago. We noticed a significant drop in our electrical bill right away on the order of ~$10-15 a month. Bonus has been that we've had to replace one(?) bulb during this time, so we still have quite a few of them stashed away. One downside is that they don't seem to last very long in New England weather extremes, so we use a regular incandescent for our one of our outside lights.

[Completely unrelated, but what's up with the crappy graphics Amazon uses for their navigation? Honestly, Amazon, just use text. It loads faster, and looks nicer.]

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

There are other ideas floating around, that might be of interest to private individuals, too. Wind turbines floating on neodymium magnets resulting in ultra-low coefficients of friction that generate electricity spring to mind. Even the smallest gust of wind could offset electricity costs for your home. Applied on a larger scale, these turbines could be installed next to stretches of highway where the wind created by vehicles speeding by generates power for the grid. The ideas get progressively more sci-fi and less based in reality, but all have research and/or working prototypes to support them.

Ultimately, I expect a handful of green power generation strategies to become prominent, based largely on a region's geographical needs. A landlocked country has little use for generators that harness tidal forces, and a country without large amounts of sunlight will have little use for a solar grid and might be better off with a network of small, personal, near-frictionless turbines to produce a great deal of power. This will have the secondary effect of changing power companies' dynamics. Private individuals and businesses may end up selling a significant fraction of the electricity that they generate back to the power company, as already happens on a tiny scale.

Rather than being a sunk, overhead cost, electricity could provide a smaller, secondary source of income in some cases. This is good for the overall health and robustness of the power grid itself. Rather than a centralized source vulnerable to operator error, equipment failure, or even an unlikely terrorist attack providing us with all of our power, a grid of consumers becomes a grid of hybrid supplier-producers. This has an effect on the dynamic of the producer-consumer relationship, too. The consumer has more power because they're doing more than just consuming. They become more of a partner in the relationship.

So while no single master stroke of technology is going to save the world from global climate change, or rescue our economy from its dependence on foreign oil, there are a number of initiatives that, in aggregate, are having a real, profound effect on our economy. That effect will only become more pronounced as time goes on, and these technologies that are mostly in the lab make their way slowly into the real world. It's important to note that while being green is trendy and gets a lot of press and has considerable mindshare, particularly among the youth, it's not this trendiness or mindshare that's going to create lasting change. It has certainly sparked social change, which is good, but as always, it is the bottom line that will be the driver for bigger and better things. It will be economic forces that determine whether we continue our destructive tendencies or move towards a more renewable future. My money is on green, because that's the direction the invisible hand is pushing us in. Green is, quite simply, how we do more with less, and create new markets while we make our way in that direction.

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Plastic, another petroleum product, is a problem in the making as well both in terms of making more and recycling what we've already used. Recently, a 16 year old Canadian high school student conducted a series of experiments designed to isolate organisms that might degrade plastic bags. After collecting soil samples at a local landfill, he spent 3 months culturing them solely on a diet of polyethylene film strips. He narrowed it down to four types of bacteria, and grew each on agar plates, and discovered a new species of bacteria that eats plastic bags more ravenously than Pseudomonas, the only known plastic eater to that point. Burd found that only 0.01% of the microbes' body mass was released as carbon dioxide, allaying fears that his technique, if implemented on a wide scale could increase the amount of greenhouse gases released during recycling. It's estimated that these plastic bags will take between 50 and 1,000 years to break down on their own in a landfill. And microbes have been shown to do the opposite as well: taking toxic styrene and turning it into a biodegradable plastic called PHA. Both processes have economic implications, and each seems to be another tiny nail in Malthus' coffin.

There are other initiatives being worked on, primarily in academia, that will have huge implications for our business and environmental future. Generators that sit in the ocean or river and harness the power of tidal forces. There are some problems associated with this method of electrical production, such as how to store this energy meaningfully, but these problems have analogs with other types of green energy production, like wind power. With enough interest, investment, and work, they'll be solved.

Other ideas surrounding the harnessing of the oceans include thermal energy converters. It's thought that the amount of solar energy captured by the ocean is equivalent to 250 billion barrels of oil per day. That means that each day, the world's oceans capture the energy equivalent of 33 years worth of the US's total oil consumption. Obviously capturing the entirety of that energy is impossible and undesirable, but any company that comes up with a way of efficiently harnessing just a tiny fraction of it stands to make billions. Quite likely they will find themselves in an oligopolistic or even monopolistic position, too, as the barriers to entry will be huge, and the absolutely large minimum efficient scale of production will prevent new firms from entering.

"Green" thinking is also driving microscale R&D. Electronics companies are looking at solid state storage as a means of cutting down on power consumption in the datacenter. As more and more of our computing and storage moves to the "cloud", more datacenters are required. Datacenters are expensive to cool, and it's quite difficult to achieve an inexpensive, efficient, useful power density as well. That means that a large scale reduction in the amount of electricity consumed by individual server components will mean that useful power densities can be lower, or more servers can be crammed into a smaller space.

The largest consumers of electricity in the server are the pieces that move, specifically the hard drive. This movement has the secondary effect of creating waste heat which must be compensated for with adequate cooling lest the entire datacenter overheat. So even a small decrease in power consumption in that one tiny segment of that one specialized market will have domino effect across many secondary industries. It's similar in scale to the standby power dilemma mentioned above. And when you see companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google moving close to hydroelectric dams to build their datacenters, or moving to Siberia to save on cooling costs, you know these concerns aren't pie in the sky. There are real economic forces at work that are more powerful than the constraining forces associated with having to build fiber infrastructure out to these remote areas.

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Being green makes good business sense, much of the time. While you obviously wouldn't want a hospital run directly on solar power, it does make sense to build solar arrays in the right places, and wind farms in perpetually windy areas, and then hook these up to the existing power grid. In that context, running the hospital on solar power doesn't seem like such a bad idea anymore. In medicine, we manage chronic pain by coupling a long-acting opioid with a short-acting, rapid-onset opioid. The long-acting agent is used to control baseline pain, and you never use short-acting opioids to manage baseline pain because of the greater duel risks of overdose and dependence. These agents are used to breakthrough needs only. In power generation, the metaphor is analogous: renewable resources provide your baseline power, and your coal- and oil-based electricity kicks in only when necessary. Thankfully, exothermic reactions lend themselves to relatively rapid cycling and are therefore suited to "as-needed" use.

Texas billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is seeing why it's valuable to invest in renewable sources of energy. Not only is it good for national security, but it makes good business sense to invest in renewables. With any non-infinite resource, the market is subject to the forces of supply and demand. When supply drops, the price goes up. If demand increases because India and China need their share of the world's petroleum supplies, prices for the US consumer go up, as well as the ancillary costs associated with anything that needs to be transported. As the amount of available petroleum decreases — as it's steadily and inevitably doing — these forces increasingly affect the way you operate your business. For a company like National Grid, eliminating the twin problems of scarcity and competitive bidding are good for the bottom line.

Civil and structural engineers and architects are hopping on the green bandwagon as well. The first of them jumped on because it was hip and different, and enabled them to leverage a different kind of brand image to achieve financial success. Lately, though, buildings that are built to be more energy efficient make economic sense. In Sweden, Jernhusen AB is harnessing the body heat of thousands of commuters that pass through Stockholm's main railway station. The firm believes that the system being designed can provide about 15% of the energy needed to heat the 13-story building being built next to Central Station. This system isn't even particularly radical. It's going to cost about $47,000, and will only require a few pumps and some pipes, since the ventilation system is already in place. I think it's a safe bet that a 15% annual energy savings for a 13-story building will more than cover even the short-term costs associated with it, particularly in a city only ~1,000 miles from the Arctic Circle like Stockholm.

Since every mechanical system wastes energy in the form of heat, recycling waste heat is also becoming more popular. Estimates of the amount of energy lost in the form of heat — expressed in terms of electricity — from smokestacks in the US alone is at 50,000 megawatts, more than half of what this country generates from its aging nuclear fleet. Initiatives to turn this waste heat directly into electricity are already underway, and can be built on small scales that make it worthwhile for these industrial companies to invest in.

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Being "green" is a badge worn with honor by companies and individuals alike. Just like consuming organic foods, it's as much a yuppie status symbol as it is a lifestyle choice. At least it used to be. Venture capitalists are on the lookout for interesting green companies these days because there's lots of money to be made by reducing energy consumption, cutting back greenhouse gas emissions, and generally doing more with less. From a very high, forward-thinking level, it seems bizarre that we haven't been doing this right along: if economics is the study of human behavior in a world where there are limited resources but infinite demand, it makes sense that we would want to do more with less.

If it requires 50% less electricity to run an efficient datacenter, and 50% less gasoline to get from point A to point B, then that means we can house twice as many servers and end up with the same electric bill, and travel twice as far without burning any more gasoline. So every halving of the resources required to do something results in a net doubling of whatever you can do with that resource, all things being equal.

This model is easily applied to things like fuel efficiency and other commodity consumables, where small increases in efficiency result in immediate, apparent cost savings to an otherwise ignorant consumer. However there are other, less intuitive places to look where small savings aggregated across millions of people results in real macroeconomic benefit.

For example, there is a push right now to get rid of or improve "standby" modes for most electronic devices. This is what is widely considered the "off" position for most things, but in reality is actually the low-power mode wherein a device is not performing its primary function. The clock on the VCR and the microwave. The "breathing" the LED in your Macintosh computer does while it's asleep. Your laser printer while it's on standby waiting for a print job. Same for your fax machine.

A single device can suck up as much as 30W of electricity every 24 hours. Multiplied across all of the consumer electronics in your home, multiplied by the number of households in the United States, and you quickly realize that this is a boatload of wasted electricity. In fact, in the lifetime of a single electronic device, this savings is estimated to be $10. This is one of the reasons that President GW Bush directed the entire federal government to buy low-standby-power devices back in July of 2001 (PDF). Uncle Sam buys a lot of electronics. That means tens and possibly hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars saved by one superficially insignificant initiative.