Fast Company just published an article on Mango Financial and the retail prototype we designed with them.

The Mango Store, which opened in Austin in April, reimagines the entire banking experience for this market. Rather than treat the unbanked as transient customers, Mango aims to forge transparent, long-term relationships. Clients pay a one-time $10 fee that lets them “cash” as many checks as they want by loading the money onto debit cards (backed by a local bank). More sophisticated services, such as international money transfers and bill payment, cost extra. Even so, Mango’s operating costs — and, by extension, its fees — are significantly lower than other alt-finance outlets because it uses its own technology (developed by Mpower) and offers a multitude of services (including Web and mobile-phone apps). “It’s a smart strategy,” says Jennifer Tescher, director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. “If Mango helps its customers grow financially, it can stick with them as they climb the ladder.”

But first, it has to get them through the door. Tescher likens the store to “a cross between an Apple Store and a high-end yogurt shop,” which could confuse patrons. Yet once customers are inside, Sosa says, the warm, spacious interior is designed “to educate customers and encourage them to stay awhile.” Here’s a look at a few notable features.

Brad was trying to sell me on the idea of using a calcium chloride water feature in Red Bluff to control humidity a few weeks ago, and now it looks like some researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and used this very idea in what they claim is a radically more efficient method of air-conditioning.

Evaporative coolers are a lower-cost alternative to A/C in dry climates that don’t get too hot or humid — say, Denver, but not Phoenix or Miami. Water flows over a mesh, and a fan blows air through the wet mesh to create humid, cool air.

In humid climes, adding water to the air creates a hot and sticky building environment. Furthermore, the air cannot absorb enough water to become cold.

In Phoenix or Tucson, the evaporative cooler can bring down the temperature, but not enough to make it pleasant inside on a 100-degree day or during the four to eight week moist period known as monsoon season. The cooling bumps up against the wet bulb temperature, the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled by evaporating without changing the pressure. The wet bulb temperature could be 75 or 80 degrees on a mid-summer Tucson day. Typically, evaporative coolers only can bring the temperatures about 85 percent of the way to the wet bulb level.

So, for most of the country, refrigeration-based air conditioning is the preferred way of keeping cool.

…

The DEVap solves that problem. It relies on the desiccants’ capacity to create dry air using heat and evaporative coolers’ capacity to take dry air and make cold air.

“By no means is the concept novel, the idea of combining the two,” Kozubal said. “But no one has been able to come up with a practical and cost-effective way to do it.”

HVAC engineers have known for decades the value of desiccants to air conditioning. In fact, one of the pioneers of early A/C, Willis Haviland Carrier, knew of its potential, but opted to go the refrigeration route.

Most people know of desiccants as the pebble-sized handfuls that come with new shoes to keep them dry.

The kind NREL uses are syrupy liquids — highly concentrated aqueous salt solutions of lithium chloride or calcium chloride. They have a high affinity for water vapor, and can thus create very dry air.

Sounds like the technical challenge was designing a system which would make the liquid desiccant portion of the system low-cost and reliable.

This is a map of which counties people are moving from and to.  The black lines are people moving to Austin.  The red lines are people moving away.  Good place to be building…

Construction has begun on the Red Bluff Residence.  Well, not exactly construction; before we can begin building the house we must remove the abandoned oil pipeline that runs through the middle of the site.  Over the past two days, construction crews have been mobilizing for this potentially toxic task, and today they’ve managed to pull the pipe out of the ground!

Workers in HAZMAT suits seal a portion of the pipeline

Soil samples being collected to for contamination testing.

Pipeline being moved for cutting into segments

Worker preparing to cut a section off the pipe for disposal.

Hopefully the contamination tests will come back negative…

From Worldchanging:

As it stands now, most emissions data focuses on the production side of our consumer society. For example, the factory that makes your gadget in China contributes to China’s emissions count. When that same gadget is shipped to a UK consumer it does not count towards the UK’s emissions count. Barrett showed that the result of this approach has led to what he called “carbon leakage.” He said that as countries become more and more service based, with demand for products and services met by imports rather than production, the overall amount of carbon leakage goes up.

…

The truly startling revelation from Barrett’s data on the growth of UK greenhouse gas emissions from consumer goods and services was the degree to which strategies for “greening” consumption have failed:

• “Green products” have less impact in reducing emissions than most people think. The growth of green consumption has not reduced emissions.
• Gains in emissions reductions from technological advances have been wiped out by increases in consumption as people demand higher levels of affluence.
• The UK’s 50-70% of gains from home energy conservation are lost when they’re redirected for other resource consumption, by people buying other goods and services with the money saved.

…

The big question then is: How can we drive systemic lifestyle changes broadly and more effectively than by telling people to stop consuming, or to consumer “greener” products? Barrett said that some economists are exploring one possible solution: a move toward a future of “steady state economics,” in which a high quality of life exists with no economic growth, since economic growth has (so far) driven growth in material consumption.

So many ‘big’ issues in so few sentences…

This is the first time I’ve considered the fact that if the houses we build use 50% of what a ‘typical’ house uses (let’s say $100/mo), what that really means is that the owner of our house has an additional $50/mo to spend on consumer goods.  Consumer goods which were probably made in dirty chinese factories and then shipped across the ocean to be eventually buried in one of our land fills.

The second big point that is casually tossed out is ‘steady state’ economics.  This is something I’ve been wondering about ever since I watched these thought-provoking videos about exponential growth.