It would be helpful if our hot water heater produced black balloons

I keep going on about how hard it is for well meaning people to make good decisions without accurate feedback, and this video has a nice way of visualizing the problem. Now if I could just get all our appliances to make balloons like that…

Coin operated gas meters were common in the UK for many years, and in some ways it would be nice to return to something like that. It would make you think a second before automatically hitting that light switch when you enter a room, and it would certainly encourage you to turn the damn thing off when you leave. We still haven’t gotten a bill from all the utilities we’re connected to here in the UK, and we went months with absolutely no feedback on our energy consumption. If there’d been little meters on everything, we would have very quickly learned where the big energy sinks were. As it is, we’ll probably never really know.

It’ll obviously never happen, but I can dream.

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the pointer.

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