The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Today is blog action day. This year, the topic is the environment. The idea is for bloggers to write about the environment to see what can be accomplished in one day.

My topic is Al Gore. You see, Al likes to talk about global warming and doing your part for the environment. That's all well and good, but it does not mean that you can do harm to the environment in another area because you're making a stink about global warming. There is a picture floating around of Al Gore in his office in from of 3 30 inch monitors and watching a big plasma TV. As a computer geek, I can't even phathom the need for 3 30 inch monitors, let alone a big plasma tv running as well. The cost and energy waste there are enormous not to mention the materials in monitors. One might be thinking, well luke you have a lot of computers. Very true. Many of them would have ended up in a dump instead of being used longer in my care. I have tried to donate them with little luck because they are not new enough. One can surf the net on most of them. Also, I don't make documentaries on saving the environment and then get a picture of myself running as much as 800 watts for no apparent reason. How did I compute such a high number? Well first you have 3 30 inch displays. My recent LCD at 20 inches uses 50 watts. We'll assume a 30 inch wich is treated as two monitors by the computer (probably a Mac Pro). So a conservative estimate is 75-100 watts per display. That's as much as 300 watts just in monitors. (high end) Then you have his plasma tv which appeared to be at least the size of my tv. I know my tv uses like 150 watts or more. I forget the exact number. Plasmas use more power than LCD or CRTs in many cases. We'll assume 200 watts. That brings us up to 500 watts. Finally, you'd need 3 video cards to drive 3 30 inch monitors running in dual head mode. Any gamer will tell you that a video card adds a lot of power consumption to your PC (or Mac). That means his PC might be consuming 300 watts in video, but certainly it's using 500-600 watts totay. If we're nice that's 800 watts. This does not take into account for speakers or other devices in his office. He most likely has a printer somewhere, maybe a cable box, etc. Cable boxes use 10-15 watts according to my recent reading about kill-a-watts.