What would you do for simple gas to cook, or heat your home during the winter? Would you be willing to fill a giant bag full with natural gas and carry it into your home, at the risk of, well, exploding? Because that’s what villagers in the Shandong Province of China are doing.
The villagers come to the oil extraction facility to fill the massive gas bags because they’re too poor to afford other means of heating and cooking gas, and they aren’t allowed to connect lines to the oil field. So instead they carry around the giant bags of explosion. According to people who live in the area, they last for about five days before they have to be refilled.
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Inside one of Shane Dussault’s backpacks is a laptop, a small bag of tools, a bag of electronics, and an ultra-absorbent compressed towel the size of a washcloth. In the other is a kettle, food supplies such as olive oil, fruit, cheese and bread, and a bag of toiletries. His other three possessions are a down mat, a sleeping bag, and a “bivy bag,” which is a large Gore-Tex sack.
Shane is a U1 Philosophy student at McGill, and has been homeless since July. He lives on campus, using its facilities like most of us use different rooms in a house. He eats his meals in student lounges and does push-ups in the library. He showers at the gym and stashes extra socks in convenient hiding spots. He won’t say where – he guards his possessions closely.
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I’ve put together some Ikea furniture in my time, but nothing close to an entire house. I’m pretty confident I could make it through Ikea and Ideabox’s Aktiv house with minimal cursing, though.
Fortunately for prospective home owners, the Aktiv doesn’t arrive in a massive pile of flat-pack cardboard boxes. It’s delivered in a couple of chunks by semi.
The house is a joint-effort between Ikea and Ideabox. The companies’ designers integrated Ikea kitchen cabinets, appliances, flooring, bathroom appointments, and built-in closet systems into the prefab one-bedroom home.
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General Motors said Friday that it is temporarily suspending production of the Chevrolet Volt following disappointing sales.
General Motors told the Associated Press Friday that the company will shut down production of the Volt from March 19 until April 23, idling 1,300 workers at its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant.
GM sold sold 1,023 Volts in February and 603 in January, and fell short of its goal of selling 10,000 Volts last year, the AP reported.
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One careless download of a 1080p high-definition movie from the iTunes Store over 4G could eat up your entirely monthly plan and then some.
In fact, if you could achieve download speeds at the theoretical maximum 72Mbps of LTE, you could blow through a 5GB plan in just under 10 minutes, and Verizon’s largest 10GB tier in about 20. Real-world speeds of course are actually going to be somewhat lower, but we’re still talking about the potential to obliterate your entire expensive monthly data plan in much less than a single day.
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