Letters to the editor for Saturday, Oct. 24, 2015

Obama, Congress and conniving cohorts

An open letter to President Obama, all of Congress and all of their conniving cohorts.

What you are doing to destroy the United States of America is not only criminal activity, but morally wrong, for which, at some point, you will each be held accountable for your actions.

Question: Is what you are doing really worth an eternity in hell?

Mary Santomauro

Stagecoach

Don’t waste ice when filling cup

Over the years watching someone at a fast food place fill a cup at the soda machine with ice and then dump a significant portion of it out has always aggravated me, but I had never taken the time to do the calculations.

Late last week I watched a person fill four giant cups with ice and dump out about half of each of them. This is a drought issue because fresh water is being dumped to the sewer, but perhaps equally important is that it is being dumped to the sewer immediately after a lot of energy has been added to it.

If the tap water flowing to the machine is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius, then 15 plus 80 (fusion) calories of heat absorption is needed to get each gram from tap water to ice. A 32-ounce drink cup is about a pound of ice at about 3/4 full, so the 95 calories per gram is multiplied by 454 grams per pound, or 43,130 calories when you are advised to keep to a diet of 2,500 calories per day. That means a pound of wasted converted ice to the sewer uses about the same amount of energy it take to keep your body running for more than 17 days.

Ponder that during this drought period with high energy cost. Check the math and the numbers! I put a glass on a digital scale with cubed ice and crushed would be over a pound. I knew it wasteful, but it is much worse than I expected.

Ray Bacon

Executive director of the Nevada Manufacturers Association