For Those Afraid…

… that a potential, currently unforeseen retirement from the state legislature by Phyllis Kahn would result in a shortage of completely daft, dotty ideas in Minnesota politics – fear not.

Alondra Cano is ready to step in, without breaking a sweat.

“If people want to go to the Y and exercise, well why aren’t all those bicycles and all those treadmills connected to a grid of energy where we’re ourselves generating our own electricity instead of trying to get it from somewhere else?” she asked.

Cano suggested pedal-based peanut butter as a possible alternative to a facility the city’s water department wants to build in her ward. She opposes that proposal, which goes before the Minneapolis Planning Commission next week.

She says the site, which is currently home to a roofing material warehouse, could be put to much better use.

“We have to really unleash our imagination and not be afraid to experiment with new models,” she said.

And this isn’t Ms. Cano’s first entree into the world of Kahning her constituents.

Given Minneapolis’ voters, I see a long, fruitful political career ahead for Ms. Cano.

16 thoughts on “For Those Afraid…”

As the story (and commentators) say, power generated by a human on a treadmill is incredibly miniscule. Maybe she needs a man to explain basic electricity to her. And I don’t mean a Minneapolis hipster art-history man.

Not only is the energy you get from pedaling not that significant–though it might power LED lighting in the health club, if not the A/C–it’s also worth noting that there is a reason that peanut butter is generally made within 100 miles of the field in which the peanuts are grown. Transporting all those shells and such simply takes a lot of energy.

I actually kinda like the idea of hooking up rowing machines and such to power the grid, but I am guessing that yet another difficulty is that you’d pay thousands of dollars in capital to connect it and get only tens of dollars of electricity each year. Plus, you’d have to call an electrician every time you wanted to move an exercise bike.

Alondra has taken the blue pill and entered a world powered by human bodies.

that a potential, currently unforeseen retirement from the state legislature by Phyllis Kahn would result in a shortage of completely daft, dotty ideas in Minnesota politics – fear not

It’s what we call “bench strength”.

Well, hell, Alondra! Why don’t you jump on one of those pieces of equipment and show us how it’s done?

No one can naturally be this retarded. She must have went to grad school

oh it gets better

“I stand with our community and the hundreds of Minneapolis residents who believe we must stop environmental racism. I’m in full support of the green-jobs and sustainable economic development vision that Phillips families are tirelessly organizing for.” – Alondra Cano

as suspected;
“Cano has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts with a concentration in management, Chicano studies, popular education, and the politics of identity.”

Heh. I spotted Alondra as a potential DFL legislator a while back. Any seat will do. Maybe if Jeff Hayden resigns for instance. I get her emails and in one recent one she invited people to hear the Minnesota United Soccer folks because, allegedly, “Soccer is very popular with immigrant and progressive communities.” So poor Latino and Somali immigrants should front for Bill McGuire’s tax grab (Along with a few Europhile hipsters? Yeah, right.

A Gilligan’s Island fan from way back, it would appear.

Charlton Heston pedaled an exercise bike to charge a battery so he could read books, in Soylent Green. Wonder what other movie ideas Alondra believes?

I’m thinking that Ms. Cano probably got the idea from REM’s “Shiny Happy People”, actually. Don’t give her credit for a historic view more than ten years, Joe. :^)

This is related to the old Milton Friedman story about a ditch digging project that wouldn’t use machinery, preferring to use men, picks & shovels because it created ‘jobs’. To which Friedman replied that if ‘jobs’ were all they were after they should just get more men and give them spoons.
In fact there is an exercise equipment manufacturer I’ve worked with that has the technology to capture the energy generated by the user of the equipment to charge a battery to power the lights and CPU on the equipment. Unfortunately, like the sun and wind, the equipment is used in such an unpredictable manner (heavy use in January – virtually never in Summer) that it was difficult to keep the unit ‘powered’ enough to keep the unit charged. And the fitness clubs didn’t like the up-charge for the system or the required added maintenance.