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Okay, this is not much of a post but I found this and thought it was cool. And of course, I wanted to share it with all of you. So...I hope you enjoy it. You'd better.

You hear a lot about deregulation. Deregulation of electric utilities, deregulation of telecommunications, deregulation of the airline industry. Although the word may have lost it's luster for some, with all the companies, industries, and politicians constantly pining for deregulation, you might wonder – why should we have any regulations at all? After all, the United States is a capitalist, market-based society. Markets are very good at generating wealth. Why not let the market solve the problems?

If I were a libertarian, I would give a big 'hip-hip hooray' and finish the article right here. But I'm paid by the word, so I'll go on. Regulations are rules set up by the government that tell businesses what they can and cannot do. It sounds like an affront to freedom, democracy, and apple pie, so clearly we need a devils advocate.

We could look at examples of warm, fuzzy regulations like food safety inspections, environmental regulations, child labor laws and the like, or we look at cases where how deregulation has failed. Right now, though, I'd like to illustrate how a working, free market can lead to problems that only some kind of regulation can fix.

Let's say that scientists discover that the emission of particle X causes statistically significant increases in the cancer rate. Particle X spreads over a wide area so it's not a particularly local problem - the researchers say that decreasing emissions by 50% worldwide would reduce cancer in the U.S. by 20%.

For this illustration, particle X also happens to be a byproduct of many industrial processes. To make this an ideal example let's also say those same researchers have discovered that particle Y is a perfect substitute for X and causes no harm. particle X and Y are equal in price, abundance, availability, and all other attributes except X is harmful and Y is not.

How will the invisible hand guide firms toward replacing X with Y? By itself, Y does not present an immediate advantage to firms - there's no cost savings, so it does not provide a competitive advantage on that level. In fact, there will be some cost involved in switching machines and supply chains from X to Y.

This is a market, though, so there are both sellers and buyers. Rational customers will want to reduce their chance of getting cancer, so they might demand that firms start using Y.

Let's say there are three large firms in this case. A Ltd. decides the cost is too high, so it does not stop using X. B Co. decides to start using Y, and advertises this to consumers. At this point, the path seems clear - people will stop buying from A and switch to B, unless perhaps A lowers prices to cope with the lower demand. Unfortunately, there is a third firm, C Inc., which decides to forgo the cost of switching but advertise that they have switched.

What? That's not fair? Keep in mind this is a completely free market, so we won't have any laws to prevent this sort of thing. It's unethical? Keep in mind that the CEO of the C Inc. has signed a contract giving him a fiduciary duty to increase shareholder value - he could argue that passing this opportunity would be a violation of their trust.

In this situation it's clear C Inc. has the competitive advantage. Consumers will flock to B and C's products equally, until C lowers their price because of their lower cost structure.

The key here is that consumers have a lack of information. In any market, there's a good chance that the seller will have more information than the buyer - the seller already has the item and they know more abut how it's made. What's worse, many sellers are specialists with domain knowledge while many consumers will only have general ideas about any particular kind of product.

It gets worse if sellers are able to organize into large organizations. They gain additional economies of scale when it comes to information. Think of it this way - imagine it takes 8 hours of research to be knowledgeable enough about digital cameras to judge quality and price. If 100 people go to a store to buy a camera, they will each need to spend 8 hours. The store, however, can have 1 person ad headquarters with the knowledge and 12 sales people with 1 hour of training in cameras, enough to not sound stupid. The person at HQ sets prices and types up fact sheets, while the salespeople sell. In this scenario, each person will bear 8 hours of cost while the company only spends 12 minutes of study time per transaction.

So in this example, government regulation can help in two ways -

First, by laying ground rules for a marketplace. Laws that criminalize fraud or require truth in advertising will give C Inc. an incentive not to lie - avoiding fines and jail time. It is these ground rules which really make a market possible in the first place.

Second, by helping to bridge the information gap between buyers and sellers. Regulations like safety and quality inspections and reporting requirements give consumers the opportunity to have information in the first place. Once the information available to newspapers and consumer advocates the buyers can gain a bit of that economy of scale as well.

And by the way, deregulation makes Star Trek impossible.

I'm a big fan of wind power. No, it's not a magical solution to all energy problems. Wind turbines are a worthwhile component of a cleaner, more efficient energy grid.

As large-scale wind turbines become more popular, cost is going down and efficiency is going up. As far as I can tell, the main argument against the big windmills is that they despoil the landscape. It turns out they don't really kill that many birds.

After seeing a few in action in Mackinaw, Michigan and on a trip to New York, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. They're actually pretty graceful – the new ones are so large that they don't need to spin like a propeller to generate a lot of power.

In any event, if the biggest problem is a matter of personal aesthetics, wind has a leg up on, for example, burning coal. So to those opposing the turbines, I have to say the argument against is pretty lame.

I've toyed with the idea of installing solar panels on my roof, but at my latitude, it's hard to justify. But what about installing a personal wind turbine? Rather than a familiar windmill-style turbine, a vertical axis wind turbine might just do the trick.

It looks like it's possible to build a small one, but I'm not sure how well the design (or my skill) would scale. I did run across a company called Mag-Wind that produces a really cool looking rooftop mounted vertical turbine . In addition to the advantages of vertical turbines, they claim that situating it on the ridge of a pitched roof offers additional benefits.

I'm not really sure I can buy one, though. The only dealer I can find is on Ontario, Canada. Maybe I'll drop them an email. I would be a little less skeptical if their site has photos of a working installation.

There are a lot of companies out there selling personal, home-sized or farm-sized wind turbines. I guess I'll have to do some more looking, and then a bunch of angry math to see if it's affordable—I'm not as worried about making a profit in the long term as I am being able to afford such a cool tech toy in the first place.

Of course, we could always cover the world's deserts with solar panels.

Are you one of those people who cares about things like energy efficiency and global warming, but you don't go around hugging trees? If so, you're in a tough spot – other than opting for a reasonably-sized car, there are very few things you can do to personally make an impact.

Add compact fluorescent (CF) light bulbs to the list of ways you can make the world a better place. Fast Company recently had a great article about how if every household in the United States replaced just one regular bulb with a CF bulb, we'd save enough power to run a city of 1.5 million people. Slashdot followed with some great commentary.

There are two really big problems that make it hard to be an environmentalist right now:

• Associating yourself with knee-jerk, pseudo-scientific “environmentalistsâ€? who believe in healing crystals and other claptrap, and
• Finding things you can actually do that don't do more harm than good or require a huge, expensive sacrifice.

This is the real deal. I've been using CF bulbs since I got my own place a few years ago. They plug right in like regular light bulbs, most of the time you can't tell the difference, and the prices have gone down too. They're available at all the major retailers, and your power company has probably been recommending them in that literature they send along in your bill. But surprisingly few people seem to be using them.

Some pamphlets and web sites recommend simply replacing regular bulbs with CF bulbs as they burn out, but really you're better off grabbing a bunch tomorrow and switching them out with any regular bulbs that you use often. You can keep the old bulbs around as spares – these things will make a dent in your electricity bill immediately, so why wait? Retailers often have sales where you can pick up a 4-pack for less than $2 per bulb.

Most bulbs will give you a lifetime savings estimate right on the box, and in my experience they are pretty accurate. As a geek who stays up late with a lot of computers running, my electricity bill rarely hits $50 a month, even in the summer.

There a few things to keep in mind:

1. Cheap, off brand CF lights are often crappy. Sometimes you'll run across people who have sworn off CF bulbs because they bought one that buzzed, flickered, or died quickly. There's a very good chance they bought a cheapy random off-brand CF bulb. To be safe, the big three (Philips, GE and Sylvania) are pretty reliable. I haven't had the best experience with Lights of America bulbs, but that's just anecdotal evidence.
2. If you have a dimmer switch, you need a special CF bulb for dimmers.
3. Watch out for lamps and fixtures that are a tight fit – you may need to buy an extension to get the CF bulb to fit, or just continue to use the old bulb for that particular lamp. Also, lamps that completely enclose the CF bulb may shorten it's life.
4. If you have a room where color is very important, you might want to stick with conventional incandescent bulbs. Any new bulbs you buy now from a reputable manufacturer will make use of three colored phosphors to generate while light, somewhat like a television screen. The new ones are actually pretty good at rendering color most of the time – if you have seen fluorescent lighting that looked orange or pink, stark white, or made people's skin look like corpseflesh, chances are you're seen an old or cheap off-brand bulb that used just one phosphor.

On that last point, you really only have to worry if color rendering is extremely important. The bathroom might be a good place to keep conventional bulbs. In addition, an art studio or a room used as a gallery are probably exceptions. The best thing, really, is to just try it out.

Interested in learning more? In the near future I'll write a little more about how CF bulbs render color and which ones are the best.

Also, in the coming weeks and months I'll point out other ways to save money and save the earth (or at least the parts of it we want to drink and breath, the mantel and molten core are in no real danger).

Got any tips? Write about you experience with CF light bulbs below.