One of them, AB920, requires the utilities to compensate a homeowner whose solar array or small wind generator produces more electricity during the year than the customer uses. Until now, if a homeowner’s panels produced more energy than the home used in an entire year, the utilities got the excess for free.
So I did a time study where I calculated on average how many pages of a paper I could read when I had a movie on in the background versus when I didn’t. I found I could read at about 80 percent efficiency.” So the distraction was worth it; it meant he could go on reading for much longer stretches.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.