Saturday, April 23, 2005

Youve Got Mail!

The paper mail had been insipid lately. My subscriptions have moved over, but nothing new in the past few days. Mundane bank statements (I wish they'd just put them online, and not add to the dead trees) and regular utility bills.

Today, a most unusual item in the mailbox. A letter from, of all places, the state of New Jersey. It had the typical packing of a check (tear off two sides and the top portion etc.). I am not even expecting a refund on my state taxes, so what could it be? Turns out, it is a refund! Neato...woo hoo! The government isn't so bad after all. At least until I remember that interest rates on my floating rate student loan went up 25 points. Death, taxes and debt are inevitable.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

sorry for the unrelated comment...but I am sort of skeptical of this cliche of using online stuff in order to save trees...like advocating online newspapers or bank statements for saving trees....I am also an advocate of online statements...but only for the convenience...as for trees...well trees are renewable fairly easily for one thing, and for another...online material doesnt really save anything....as a rule of thumb (I heard this somewhere and it does sound like a reasonable ballpark number) ... a 2MB trabsfer over the internet would roughly burn power worth a pound of coal on an average

Sumeet

Ajay said...

Interesting statistic, Sumeet. I agree - it sounds about right. The convenience is another reason to prefer online-only - filing them or disposing them is a pain (you want to shred them as they contain personal info..etc.).
Another place where this arithmetic comes to place is all-electric cars. I see no point in plugging cars into the grid, if the grid is also burning fossil fuel unless you can make it significantly more efficient. Fuel cells though further out might be more promising and hybrids right now are an elegant solution.

Anonymous said...

Most of the banks now send online statements instead of paper st.You may want to check with your bank