And they are fake flowers.

Never forget.

After four fall-offs, the process usually comes to a halt on its own?

Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.

If you consider that:

• cost of distilling bakes in the thermodynamic and energy costs of raising the temperatures of the wine to separate the alcohol
• the price for the pure alcohol is fungible with the market price of any other liquid fuel or alcohol on a per-energy equivalence

This seems like it’s a net energy negative process where the total amount of energy available to the society drops where you do this. This is exactly why it loses money.

Basically:

• you buy some energy some place
• wine producers take product they already made that has no market value and use the energy input to make something they can sell, using up that original energy
• the energy coming out is lower than what you started with in step 1, but you sell the energy for less money
• this loses energy AND money, but the government subsidies make the money side not a problem

This cuts wine makers in on the deal in a way where the market makes this feasible despite the underlying thermodynamic losses.

NOTE: the grapes and wine that were originally grown, the harvesting, bottling etc also have thermodynamic and material costs that are totally external to this analysis. The farm itself bought fuel when it made the wine, that’s all not ibcluddd into the ethanol calculus. When you consider the total investment with a wider boundary you can start to cost many additional resources like time, water, wages, insurance, financial interest and on and on.

I used to buy about 800 pounds of salvage electronics a week which I would then resell. I’ve seen and evaluated many brands of used older electronics.

For a blender, I’d recommend a Vita-Mix (5200 / 5500), then KitchenAid. Third tier would include Breville or Ninja.

We use a Vitamix 5500 here. A few benefits of the simple design are that the lid has no moving pieces or hinges or locking mechanisms… It’s just a flexible rubber dome that doesn’t crack if you drop it. The blender jug has the blender blade and a very large sealed bearing. You can swap the entire item out as a future service. The motor bases are extremely high quality. I can’t recall seeing any that were ever broken. They seem to rely on solid state electronics and big mechanical switches nstead of fancy displays and microcontrollers and LEDs – most common points of failure on the competitor’s products.

The biggest issue with most blenders is that they are overcomplicated. For example, a ninja blender has detection switches to ensure that the jug is correctly locked to the base and the lid is locked to the jug. If a tab or pin breaks it disables the blender. They could have just designed the shape so that you can’t have the jug halfway installed instead of adding electronics that fail when they get wet or damaged… Bad design choices.

My only warning for Vitamix is to avoid the white color motor base. That color will take on UV damage and turn obviously yellow over the years.

I would not hesitate to buy a well used working Vitamix in the used market. I have seen many units from the mid 1990s and up that run like new.