Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

That’s what a guest said when he saw me viewing a youtube vid on firefox with adblock, noscript, privacy badger and refcontrol plugins.

Just to humour him, I copied the link, opened chrome and clicked paste and go, now, you have to be aware that this was the first time I have ever gone on youtube with chrome.

“Fuck me” I said, “Now that is fucking broken… and fucking crap…” as the amazon pop up ad obscured the bottom quarter of the video frame we were trying to watch, and ads started auto playing in the top right corner of the browser window.

Barely had the words got out of my mouth when two interstitials pop up semi transparently over the rest of the video frame, and of course the excuse matey gives me is “all” I have to do is click the little X at the top right corner of these intrusive pieces of shit.

“I’ve got a better idea” I said, and closed chrome.

I literally had no idea how bad youtube had got, no wonder advertisers were running away in droves, and it has sweet fuck all to do with someone saying “fuck her in the pussy” somewhere in something they upload.

My own business I use a paid subscription to Vimeo, I create my own vids in H264 1080p and they get uploaded and played at 1080, no artifacts, no ads, no interstitials, nothing, you go on my “channel” and all you see is what I created and uploaded, and the only link anywhere to anything not created or uploaded by me is a small vimeo logo and link bar at the top of the screen, which is fair enough.

I literally have no idea at all why anyone would use youtube to upload to, except it’s fucking free.

But I can say pretty much the same thing about a lot of stuff people pay for… the old argument with the BBC TV here in the UK was you paid for it so you got no ads, ITV and then Channel 4 did not get revenue from the licence money, so they showed ads.

Now I see people *paying* for shit like netflix and BBC iplayer, and they are still treated like freeloaders who need to be marketed to in case their cock falls off.

All I can say is we appear to be moving into a time of insanity, which is a lot more dangerous than a time of oppression, because with oppression at least you know the bastards are out to get you, with insanity everyone around you is a fucking dangerous loon who can bring you down.

Google’s business model is insane, tesla’s business model is insane, apples business model is insane, amazon’s business model is insane, all the politicians from the local level on up are insane, all the policy makers, all the financiers, and all the fucking lawyers.

And of course all the fucking people.

My grandad lived through the thirties as an adult, one of the few things I can ever remeber him saying about it was it was a decade that got ever more manic and insane, and more and more crazy / taboo / risque things became if not commonplace, certainly easy to find and indulge in.

The once staid and respectable daily mail has full colour full feature pieces about dildos and vibrators next to stories of sexual deviancy and victimhood, asian sex gangs, 14 years olds dying of drug overdoses, thousands of under tens being reported for sexual crimes in school, babies of three and four being indulged in gender fluid fantasies, and all the rest of the fucking shit.

Increasing numbers of allegedly rational people are talking about shit like planet nbiru (sp?) is coming, or the latest wonder serum (probably just cat vomit and food colouring) or unearthed alien machinery.

The TV shows that people are watching are now so insane they make Buffy look like a fucking documentary, and I’m more than just mildly irked that coincidentally with my own waning sex drive (well, waning is a bit of an understatement, the flame isn’t out but the wick is burned right down and the flame is guttering) we are entering an era when fucking 9 year olds will have had at least four threesomes and one gang bang under their belts, though I can’t really complain.

It’s better than having the IQ of a bonobo monkey on acid, which just about sums up everything else out there.

Thank fuck I have my toys and my intellectual pursuits.

One would have thought that Trump’s recent “shock and awe” statements towards lil Kim and the Norks would have firmly sealed the lid and buried the coffin that contained any hope that Trump was any different to anyone else.

Of course surveys says 60% of polled americans believe the norks are a direct threat to the continental USA…

In what may at first seem to be a totally irrelevant detour, the current and ongoing squeeze, still can’t fault the bitch, hasn’t even glanced in the wrong direction much less put a toe there or a foot there, and is doing a damn good impression of someone who thinks “there” is a toxic radioactive wasteland of pain and misery.

Me being me I was always the guy who would “loan” a loser a 20, sometimes you get surprised, 99% of the time you don’t, what you do get is proof absolute, and I like that, it’s the moral binary filter for me, it sits easy, and I’ll sit easy and drink my cocktail while you drown 6 feet away, no doubts, no qualms, no heartache.

So about a year ago, because sewing and mending is generally a good thing anyway, I bought a sewing machine.

Me being me I did my research, I figure if you’re going to buy one, buy the best, so a couple of weeks later a £950 Pfaff Ambition 2 arrives, then a bunch of extra feet and accessories, and scads of Gutermann threads and Schmetz needles and so on.

Yesterday she bought some fancy fluffy fleecy material, it’s got a name that I can’t remember, and all her research online tells her that this material is an absolute fucking bastard / nightmare to sew, literally hundreds of web sites and you tube sewing / crafting channels all say the same thing.

An hour later the item in question has been cut and sewn, properly, all the edges serged before the main assembly stitches etc, and her reaction?

Well, it isn’t a case of she doesn’t understand what all the negativity online was about, she doesn’t understand what any of it was about, it could have been bog standard polyester / cotton as far as she could tell, it was as simple as it could be, there couldn’t have been less problems or issues, because there were none.

Which makes it hard to understand the online echo chamber of universal negativity.

I was asked to explain, so I did.

You couldn’t sew, had basically never sewn, your mother suggested you buy a 120 quid singer machine, I said no, over ruled her, did some research and I bought a 950 quid pfaff… and a bunch of accessories and threads of similar quality.

You still couldn’t sew, you still basically had never sewn, but now you knew for a fact (or rather I did, and I told you) that all you had to learn was how to sew, you did not also have to learn how to accommodate the peculiarities and limitations of any particular machine or thread etc.

Since then there have been opportunities where I have said ok, make two, one with this thread that is 25% of the price of the gutermann, and one with the gutermann, do not ask me why, just do it, because this is the only explanation I will give you as to why the stuff that is four times cheaper to buy isn’t four times cheaper to use.

Two hours later she can explain to me better than I can explain to her what the differences were, doing it my way you are not fighting the machine and the thread and the materials and everything else to produce what you want, all those things disappear and you just concentrate on what you want.

Now, like I always was, she can’t walk into a shop and not look at the threads and seams and so on, and having looked, you can’t persuade her to buy, it’s all orders of magnitudes lower quality than what she can now do at home, and it doesn’t matter if you are in primark or marks and sparks, it’s all “down there” quality wise.

Now she understands why I can say “this towel is 40 years old, this pillow case 45, this tablecloth 50, this shirt 20” and it isn’t just because I care for them, it’s because they were made to last, and the sewing is a big part of that.

So, back to the echo chamber that said x material was a fucking nightmare to work with and sew….

Most people will draw a common split between those who have done something and those who have not, eg those who have never driven a lorry and those who have… A and B

Some people (me) will draw another split, between those who can *really* drive a wagon, and what they can do in a well designed and specced and maintained wagon, and everyone else. B1 and B2

So really it’s not A and B, and B1 and B2, it’s A and B1, and B1 and B2, and right away you can see how both earlier comparisons were fallacious, everyone was comparing the wrong things, so everyone was getting the wrong results, even those who were getting actual results of their own, as opposed to those who were just repeating what they had been told.

You can also see that only those with first hand knowledge of B2 even knew it existed.

And yet B2 is the gold standard that everything else should be measured by…

B2 knows that the USA has been at war with the norks for 60 years, and back then it was the USA that was the aggressor, and for their part when the USA packed their bags and went home, the norks refused to sign the peace agreement, why the fuck should they, we didn’t start it, it was these assholes from half a world away who came over here and started it.

I have had “arguments” in the past with people who did not know that;

1. the three countries bordering north korea are south korea, china and russia
2. to get from vietnam to north korea you basically have to drive north, and cover half of china, before getting to your destination.

Of course these are the same people who lack clue #1 about just how high tech south korea and china are, at best these places will be credited with making shitty copies of stuff to be sold for 4.99 in walmart.

Hell I know people in IT who both pride themselves on knowing such things and whose very job depends on knowing such things, why flatly disbelieved me when I told them the chinese fastest computer in the world was 100% home grown, cpu’s and all… they were convinced it had to be imported Sparc or x86 or something massively paralleled, so even if t was technically faster it would be inferior by some other metric and bigger and heavier and more power hungry than anything in the west.

But never mind, let’s rattle sabres with a country bordered by russia and china and south korea, because this despot in a country so advanced it is a big black blob when seen from orbit at night is a danger to all in the western world, and we know he is threatening us all with nuclear Armageddon because he said so himself, we are told.

You know, fucking ISIS were a shower of shit, they were supposed to terrorise the west until 2019 at least, and they fucked up and are becoming as relevant and mainstream as fucking Rin Tin Tin, so we need a new boogieman real quick.

Google street view works in Vladivostok and Seoul, not Pyongyang or Shenyang, which doesn’t align well with the alleged geopolitical situation, it should only not work in NK, or it should not work in both russia and china, but as we can see from the attached image, there are all sorts of places where google / CIA aren’t welcome, India, Pakistan, China, Burma, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, Cambodia and NK, and all sorts of places where it does, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, South Korea, Philipines, Japan and Russia.

Yet there is no mention of this anywhere of note.

The closest thing I have read anywhere is the great firewall of china, everything else is just pop pieces about various backward countries that individually hate us for our freedoms and google access…. and even in the great firewall of china stories I never read anything about my ability to contact a manufacturer in china and order a CNC linear slide directly from them to be sent to me.

As I type this I’m tracking an item from china coming to me, via the dhl website, so despite the great and vaunted chinese firewall data and comms is in fact passing through it seamlessly and instantly.

So what *is* the great chinese firewall… nobody in tech does not know what a firewall is, and nobody in tech thinks a firewall is a bad thing, it’s a fucking essential thing, so why is it bad when *some* countries do it, but not others?

Being a *real* old hand at the whole It thing I can tell you this, the whole argument always boils down to;

“How dare you influence your users thought proceesses by deciding who can access your users, to influence their thought processes!”

and

“My network, my rules!”

And that’s 99.999% of all arguments I have ever heard in 37 years working with IT…

99.9% of sociopolitical ones too, come to that.

The real change is we are moving into an era where strife is being formented in high tech / manufacturing areas of the globe, and that was always the split between wars that were just police actions in bum fuck nowhere that didn’t affect life “back home”, and wars that affected stuff everywhere.

Hitlary, had she won, wouldn’t be doing any different.

http://www.devonlive.com/row-as-torbay-council-buys-tesco-superstore/story-30473214-detail/story.html

and

http://www.devonlive.com/torquay-tops-national-league-for-bankruptcy/story-30473227-detail/story.html

I’ll save you the link, basically Torquay council is on the way to borrowing 300 million quid, so that it can “invest” in commercial properties up to 100 miles away let to companies like Tesco.

Meanwhile the same council has a 5 million funding gap between income and expenditure, and the only other thing it can think of doing is raising council tax on residents and businesses.

Readers of ZH will be familiar with the plight of Detroit and other places, and might be tempted to think that this sort of thing is an american problem, but as the above shows, it isn’t.

The more money people have passing through their hands, the more they want to pass through their hands, because some of it always sticks, one way or another, and it doesn’t really matter to those in control, because no matter what happens, at no point are they personally going to be liable for the debt, they are literally spending other people’s money.

The fact is that such behaviour should not just be illegal, it should be subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment pending trial, and yet it is all perfectly legal and above board.

My own personal problem as a businessman / entrepreneur / employee is that I have never been “driven”, I just like playing with shit and if I can earn a living doing that, so much the better, but if it starts looking like actual work…. yeeeewwww…

So I’m tentatively looking at premises, and bottom line on the numbers is I can get 797 square feet of ideal / prime space for £212 a week all in, 26.6p per sq ft per wk.

Put simply, I don’t have that surplus now, so it’s down to whether the new equipment going into the already overcrowded workshop can generate that extra revenue, and then some.

It should but it might not and if things work out I’ll have a month with the new equipment before moving in to a new place to test the waters, and there lies one dilemma, the other one is I’m not really looking for the next stage of expansion so I can turn into a tech billionaire.

I want to earn more money so I have more free cash, but I also want an extra 800 square foot man cave to play in, hence having the extra free cash.

The difference between me and many others is I’m not prepared to borrow 1 penny to do it, why should I, when I already own everything I have outright, why would debt suddenly appeal to me, because unlike the local councillors, that debt will stick to me.

But, presently, I’m in that vacuum place, I can run the numbers all I want, and they can seem as reasonable and doable as I like, but the numbers and a buck will buy me a coffee, the numbers themselves are worthless, because they are all imaginary and projected.

If you look at my business model and invoices I issue, basically there are a whole range of items that I can put on the bill, but most of them are like the councillors, it is just money passing through my hands (materials, shipping and so on), basically what we would call turnover, with the exception of billable machine time, that’s the revenue source, what we would call profit or income.

The issue with “turnover” from the above example is there is basically no “profit” in it, it’s just a necessary evil that you have to do to be able to charge billable time, which is where the “profit” or income is.

I’m not saying I make a loss on the “turnover” items, but they aren’t a “profit centre”, and they do actually consume time to do.

Tesla for example makes a loss in every single department, *except* the US equivalent of “carbon credits” which is basically a state subsidy for eco-bullshit.

This is a *real* trick to pull off, not the making money on carbon credits thing, but the losing money in absolutely every single department thing, and not vanishing in a cloud of angry debtors wielding pitchforks… it’s the sort of trick usually reserved for the likes of Detroit and Torquay councils.

I’m sat here refusing to borrow money (assuming I could) and refusing all ideas about sharing my new man cave to cut costs, they are sat there borrowing millions to “invest” it in other areas.

This is a very real and very interesting dichotomy, to these people “business” and “finance” mean things that are utterly alien to me, and I’m sure my definitions are utterly alien to them.

And there is a simple tell tale, you won’t find Musk fucking around in the corner of a Tesla factory playing with high tech toys, and you won’t find Torbay councillors standing on property rented to Tescos walking around with a weed whacker and gardening tools.

Their tinkering is all done on computer screens, No Man’s Sky meets the Excel Spreadsheet as they grind their way through another multimillion dollar deal, all that phyzz shit lying around somewhere is just a necessary evil, it’s would be so much neater to play with Libor or Bitcoin.

But, I digress.

The real point here is that our entire monetary system is broken, in a sense I can see the point about wanting to move away to a cashless society, because the advent of electronic cash made old school cash just a subset of the electronic, much like my “turnover” items are a subset of the business as a whole, but the problem wasn’t the electronic cash per se, the problem was that there weren’t any controls on it worth speaking of.

Bitcoin is touted as being salvation for one reason only, it is controlled in the sense that there is a finite amount, in every other way it is as worthless as our current electronic fiat currency.

My problem is that I must live and do business in those worlds, using those bloody currencies, and as such they have an inordinate effect on my and my business.

My problem is that, in my own personal opinion, my distrust of them is such that I am entirely justified in avoiding every single debt instrument that I can, which limits me to electronic fiat cash.

To be honest with you I might as well be trading in 7 year old kids ready for fucking, instead of Pounds Sterling (electronic fiat version) because I have no interest in the medium itself, it’s just a lubricant for the machine that I call my life, and as I add to the complexity of that machinery and add another 800 sq ft man cave, I need more lubricant to pass through my hands and that machinery.

For those purposes widely accepted promissory notes for 7 year old anuses would work as well as £ symbols in ebanking, if they are accepted by all then they work for me, the actual promissory note itself holds no value for me.

Which in itself exposes another flaw in the system, money doesn’t “do” anything, it never did, not even when it was all phyzz silver or gold or pressed latinum you ferengi twat.

So nobody would ever work for it, unless they had to, because the baker and cobbler and butcher all only took gold…

Back in the mists of time the making of a small town was a charter or permission from the king to set up a market in town to trade shit, of course trading there meant paying a slice, and paying it in coin with the king’s head on it, so pretty much trading could only be done in the king’s coin… no market charter, no trading, enforced by force.

We are really no different now, some time ago I reached the point where my own off the books “Honest John” accounting system would no longer suffice, the threshold was passed where official scrutiny prevailed.

Sucks for the state, because I was honest enough and lazy enough that like everyone else I know when I am screwing the system, and when I am screwing myself, so I can always stay on the side of screwing myself, and its worth it, because I don’t have any hoops to jump through or paperwork to keep, and as long as I have a tenner in my pocket I am happy.

But when you get to that threshold you are no longer trusted, no matter what, and so you’re presumed guilty until found guilty (like the po po, they will never look for exculpatory evidence) and your only real option is to pay an accountant a thousand pounds a year.

Just like the po po when you demand a lawyer, the state boys hate you, because they missed their window of opportunity, anything issued by the accountant is accepted, and for my part since I’m paying for a fucking accountant all this shit that I never bothered claiming for is going into the mix.

Fuck you.

Of course now they are really out to get you (you are the prey, after all) and another layer of the pleasure that got you into running your own business is stripped away.

Now every where I go I have to ask for a fucking vat receipt, and it’s a pain in the ass, because NO automated machinery likes to print them… why not? well a VAT receipt has to contain the vat charged, the registered vat number of the business, the registered name of the business, and so on, and that makes the receipt physically longer, and when your company prints out 10,000 a day at one store that means its worth the saving….

Because it’s not *law* that you have to print a vat receipt if you charge vat, just that you have to record it internally.

Which brings us to “auditing”, tesco and the like print so many receipts it is physically impossible for human beings to audit every single one, so basically the systems are certified and the electronic records are just accepted (bit like the volkswagen emissions tests) and that’s that.

In many ways, even though I have no interest in the promissory note itself, trading promissory notes in 7 year old anuses would be preferable to pounds sterling, because money is evil.

When I am made God, the only valid currency will be phyzz, and it will be metal coin, and it will be doped with refined uranium and plutonium, nobody is going to want to hang on to it, and nobody is going to want to amass a horde of it, and at a single stroke money will do what it always should have done.

Of course it is possible to code a half life and a critical mass into electronic virtual fiat currencies too, oh deep joy… and usury would be a multiplier on the half life…. and of course critical mass is based on any physical system, not virtual accounts within a system

365 day half life

640k critical mass (should be enough for anyone…lol)

usury = half life / 1 + (10 x usury rate)

critical mass range / sphere 1 metre (no virtual accounts)

Failing that I’d pass a new law, anyone SIGNING or APPROVING a credit deal (both lender and borrower) is personally responsible for life for 1% of the total with interest in the case of default, and you get left with nothing, not even the shirt on your back, and any one or any thing giving you succour (yeah I’m bankrupt but the wifes 2nd cousins Chihuahua ain’t, and his trust fund owns this mansion) gets included automatically.

People who can be easily persuaded en masse that they need a new car, can be easily persuaded that paedophilia is good / bad, that Trump is good / bad, that global warming is good / bad.

I have recently been in contact with the proverbial un-named source from the daily fail, who freely admits that over the years several of my pieces have formed the “seed” for a story they ran, yeah, call me scoop, well, maybe not, because we had quite the conversation about his job.

He likens his workplace to the national enquirer, run any story you like, as long as it grabs attention and sounds plausible, so while you can’t actually write that Elvis works in a chip shop up the road and sodomises chinese kiddie sex dolls, you can write about a guy who “claims” that Elvis etc etc etc, with the bulk of the piece going on the Elvis angle, and only a brief mention of the guy making the claim, which is just as well, as the guy may be fictitious.

He will look at you as if you have grown two heads is you suggest that there is an agenda, well, duh, of course there is a fucking agenda, even in the ancient good old days of investigative journalism there was an agenda, he will say, because human bias determines who you will investigate in the first fucking place.

He has a valid point.

I don’t think I have ever written a single word about baby strollers.

But at the base of it all is the knowledge that people can be easily persuaded, it’s just marketing after all, and confusion is good for marketing… nobody needed to read a review in 1954 to determine whether or not the Sears 16 oz claw hammer was any good or not… and so whether to buy it or not.

In fact, facts are the enemy of this, which, he explains, is why some of my stuff formed a “seed”, he laughs incoherently at the idea any of it could be actually *used*, can you imagine an article where we did a calculation on volume of free water in the oceans, calorific value of sea water, energy required to raise sea water by 0.1 degree, and limits of accuracy of the recording thermometers? More incoherent laughter.

Any marine engineer will tell you a cubic foot of seawater weighs 64 pounds, displacement baby, it’s not scientific accurate but it’s fag packet accurate and good enough for 99% of calculations, and once you learn it *properly* by application you can never unlearn it, or see anything about seawater and not have it floating around in the back of your head… that’s the death of marketing baby.

Here is a concrete example, and it follows on from the last two tesla crap things.

I’m at heart a marine / hydraulic / mechanical engineer, and I can’t forget any of that when it comes to buying a vehicle, so yesterday I’m talking to a young kid who is asking me about graphics cards, I tell him straight, #1 consideration is your budget, if you have £100 to spend it doesn’t matter a fuck how cool a Radeon vega with 4096 streams is, you can’t afford any RX580, you can’t afford any RX570, you can afford a mid range RX 560 or a mid to high range RX550, and that’s your choices, and being practical about it you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between the two, so concentrate on slots and ports for compatibility with your other hardware and then whittle it down, 4 gig 512 stream 550 or 2 gig 1024 stream 560…. and no, don’t ask me to choose for you, because you will blame me the first time to compare dick sizes to some other dweeb.

So when it comes to cars I bought an old volvo diesel last time I wanted a car, renault engine, mitsubishi body, 600 quid, everything works, sure, it’s 15 years old, like I give a fuck, the “everything works” is the only thing I give a fuck about.

I don’t cheap out, last mot amongst other things it got 4 brand new boots, and not the cheapest imported chinese ones I could find either, but not super performance top of the line crap either, just 4 bloody good tyres.

Of course at £600 there is no leasing or hire purchase or anything, you own it outright, which is where I start to part company from the majority, who must have a new (3 years old or less) car, to my mind, you haven’t bought a new car unless you paid cash for it, so at a stroke 99.9999999% of everyone who buys a new car isn’t buying a new car, because it’s NOT THEIR FUCKING CAR, I actually only personally know one person who regularly buys a new car every three years for cash, and that’s technically a case of the company he owns can either pay tax or buy a car, so he buys a car, depreciates it at 50% a year (compound 100% value goes to 50% value, goes to 25% value, goes to 12.5% value) and sells it on every three years, but then his company makes plenty of money.

everyone else is fucking delusional, like the kid with the graphics card, the differences are in their head, and that’s all that is real to them, the real differences are unreal to them.

Having put all this aside, I’m going to close on the Tesla.

Tesla don’t give a fuck about range either, or the environment, or anything else, because to an engineer it is BLATANTLY obvious that the tesla ain’t made right.

Which doesn’t matter, because everything is MARKETING, Tesla sell an IMAGE of an EV, they do not actually make or sell a great EV.

Much vaunted Tesla batteries aside, dig down and there is nothing there, it’s just bog standard 18650 li-on cells like you find in everything, but grown a bit bigger for some minor technical advantages, which is ok as 18650 was made for portable devices, not cars, they do not use big custom prismatic cells which they should, more like the big 12 volt lantern batteries you used to get.

Tesla electric motors, more “meh” there is nothing there you can’t find in any high end CNC kit, what they could and should have done would be to use some of that money to develop hub motors with all electric full regenerative braking , yes unsprung weight can be an issue if you care about performance, but if you are building an EV car you shouldn’t, 0-60 in 12 seconds is more than enough, to be honest 0-60 in 20 seconds is fine, you’ll still burn off any trucks and buses out there, you know, vehicles built for ECONOMY…

So basically it’s a bodyshell and interior and a fancy pants autopilot.

If the autopilot alone was good enough then that would be all Tesla ever needed to make, just licence it to Bosch to be fitted in cars worldwide, sit back and count the profits.

Same could be said for hub motors.

Same could be said for decent batteries, as in, banks of smaller ones, none of this shit about changing out a whole battery like it’s a wall clock.

Tellingly, none of these things are things tesla is doing, what tesla is doing is the opposite, making a “cool” EV that can beat a 500 bhp mustang in the 1/4 mile, and an autopilot that works well enough to fap before you crash and die.

Any IT “road warrior” will tell you, for years and years and years one of the tools of the trade was the IBM then the Lenovo stinkpad T series, it’s *the* business laptop for those who need to work and who need a solid reliable and fast mobile computing solution, which is why three sides of the case was always various ports.

Never ONCE saw a tech turn up with a macbook or acer or surface of anything else.

Can’t recall the last time I saw an advert for a stinkpad either, they’re a bit like the panasonic toughbooks, if you need one you already know all about them.

If you *need* an electric vehicle you know all about Smiths, who have been making EV’s continuously for 90 years (take that tesla) to englishmen who don’t know the name, you do know electric milk floats, and smiths were one of the biggest players.

Well, you would have done, because they moved to the USA in 2011, and have since ceased trading completely, quelle surpise.

And they won’t be coming back, because here is where the smart money is..

http://freightinthecity.com/2017/07/daimler-starts-european-small-series-production-7-5-tonne-electric-truck/

London congestion charge? No problem.

Commercial vehicle ideally suited to cities for similar money to a top of the range Tesla? No problem, except for tesla, who had to drop the prices of the X and S models before joe public became aware of the emergence of this stuff.

Commercial EV charging? No problem, you already have a fucking yard / compound, 3 phase electric on site, and everything else.

So that’s Mitsubishi (remember I mentioned they did the body on my volvo) and Kawasaki going into light trucks in EV, and doing it right.

six off 420 VDC 14 kwh battery packs per truck, 100 km range, 4,500 kg payload, no range anxiety, no refuel anxiety, no congestion charges, no mechanical issues, no waste oil or filters to dispose of, and the loudest thing will be the “attention, this vehicle is reversing” shit.

Merc make one now, guess what, it basically uses hub motors, and Merc / Daimler / Fuso / Mitsu / Kawa are all sharing spit at this level.

Youtube

I’m going to quote directly from half way down this page;

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/supercharger

This is the UK specific official Tesla website., unedited quoted text below in red

Charging costs are approximate. Charging cost estimate assumes Supercharger cost of £0.20 per kilowatt hour. Fuel cost assumes 32.7 MPG at £1.14 per litre. Cost may vary depending on the vehicle location, configuration, battery age and condition, driving style and operation, and environmental and climate conditions.

So…

£0.20 per kWh, well, it’s not an unreasonable sum for a company buying in bulk.

If a gallon of gasoline is 34 kWh equivalent (the exact number depends on the specific blend) then the cost per kWh is also easily reached.

We’ll take Tesla’s numbers of £1.14 per litre, 4.54 litres per gallon, equals £5.18 per gallon, divide by 34 kWh = £0.15 per kWh

32.7 mpg? well I just completed a 550 mile run at a mean speed (checks gps logs) of 72 mph, not a “auto makers max economy” speed, in a 15 year old diesel car, and my actual miles per gallon over that journey was 52.02 mpg

But wait, back to the tesla web page and graphic, what’s this £90 supercharger (small print AFTER a credit) cost v £238 fuel cost, and whats this, based on 1,500 miles driven.

Well based on my real world trip yesterday 1650 miles will cost me £180 in diesel, not £238, and given the 3:8 claimed ratio (after credits and rebates) tesla supercharger v pump gas, AFTER a credit / rebate the tesla supercharger would have cost me around £100

I didn’t have to sit around for 30 minutes a time either, I left at 5 am and I was back home just after 2 pm, not bad for a real world 550 mile trip on real roads in the UK, adding 2 x 1 hour breaks (supercharger 30 minute charge is only a partial charge) would kill that.

I didn’t have to pay £45,000 for a car to do it in either.

Implicit in all these calculations is the notion that 99.9% of the time you are going to charge your tesla at home, for free, just plug it into the wall, move on quickly and don’t look at the bills.

What is certain is YOU won’t be buying electricity any cheaper than tesla, and YOU won’t be getting any rebate from yourself either, so the claimed / calculated £100 tesla cost excluded the full charge you had to do at home to commence the journey, and the full charge you had to do at home after the journey to “refuel” the car ready for the next day.

However all of this is neatly glossed over, after all, the sole purpose of the tesla supercharger network is to persuade people that an all electric car can roam further afield than say 25% of claimed max range…

Buy a Toyota (or any other brand) vehicle and things are easier, right there in the specs is the fuel tank capacity in litres, and various number for litres/100 km equivalent for urban/city/motorway economies, the Mercedes has a much bigger fuel tank than the micra, but it drinks it faster too.

No IC vehicle manufacturer lists “range”, not even bloody motorcycle manufacturers, who perhaps should, the 2017 triumph bobber, a 1200 cc motorcycle with a 9.1 litre fuel tank and a visordown test where the tank went from F to E in 74 miles, and the dash claimed 41.6 mpg.

I’m not stupid, I have a 1700 cc harley but at least it has a 19 litre gas tank.

But with electric cars it’s not battery bank kwh capacity and kwh per km in various use cycles, oh no, it’s “range”

I absofuckinglutely guarantee that all the sophisticated electronics in any modern EV can give you three decimal place accurate numbers for kwh per km, but, I have *NEVER* seen this mentioned anywhere.

But, we’ll go back to the triumph bobber, 9.1 litres @ 7.48 kwh/litre = 68 kwh

41 mpg = 9 miles per litre, so 9 miles = 7.48 kwh so 0.83 kwh per mile, and this is for a naked motorcycle.

Interestingly this figure is for energy consumed, there is zero breakdown of any kind for things like mechanical efficiency, pumping losses, road resistance, wind resistance, so we don’t know exactly where the energy is going, but we know how much is going to do a specific job.

Do the same numbers for my 15 year old diesel volvo and we have mean speed of 72 mph over 550 miles and 50 litres of fuel, diesel is 11 kwh per litre so 550 miles @ 72 mph for (50 x 11) =550 kwh, so 1 kwh per mile as opposed to the motorcycle getting 0.83 kwh per mile.

All perfectly reasonable numbers to any mechanical engineer.

Tesla model 3, standard 50-55 kwh battery back, long range 70-75 kwh battery pack, standard range 220 miles, long range 310 miles, so standard is 220 / 50 = 4.4 amd 310 / 70 = 4.42 so tesla is claiming 0.25 kwh per mile.

If we say that an IC engine is a thermal engine with 33% efficiency at converting heat to motion is fairly normal then at a stroke the motorcycle becomes 0.83 / 3 = 0.276 kwh per mile and the old diesel volvo shed becomes 1.0 / 3 = 0.333 kwh per mile

Suddenly there are numbers that aren’t a million miles from the tesla, and, again, this is all extremely reasonable to any even remotely competent mechanical engineer.

The rolling efficiency of the tesla isn’t anything special, the ONE trick it has is no trick at all, electrical motors are more efficient than heat engines…

And then we are reminded *why* the early electric vehicles (and steam vehicles, my dad used to own and run one commercially as a young man) were killed stone dead by the IC engine, the efficiency of the motor unit is just one factor, just one of many that go to make the whole.

So in effect 100% of Tesla’s USP applies equally well to any other all EV vehicle out there, by eliminating the heat engine you eliminate inefficient processes.

Electricity at a purported £0.20 per kwh from a tesla supercharger isn’t a cheap energy source compared to gasoline at tesla’s reported £1.14 per litre, because a litre of gas is 7.48 kwh and 1.14 / 7.48 = £0.152 p per kwh (I have talked elsewhere extensively about how all energy when priced per kwh is more or less equal in cost)

Tesla supercharger £0.20 per kwh and tesla model 3 0.25 kwh/mile means a quid’s worth of “fuel” will get you 20 miles, presumably at 30 mph

A quid’s worth of “fuel” in my old diesel shed will get me 10 miles at 70 mph.

So cost per mile on “fuel” only is at best half of an old diesel car.

Got a fleet of 1000 cars each doing 20,000 miles a year, that’s a *lot* of money.

*if* that is the only significant factor at play, and it isn’t.

The average car forecourt fuel pump will transfer 1 litre in 1 second, so ballpark 10 kwh/second, so 5 seconds to fill a standard model 3 from E to F, and 7 seconds to fill a long range model 3 from E to F, well round both up to 10 seconds, so excluding customers walking around, paying, buying drinks, 1 gas pump can refuel 3600 / 10 = 360 “tesla battery quick top up charges” in the time it takes one tesla supercharger to top up quick charge one tesla battery. We’ll include the walking around and divide it by 10 for 36

So a 24 pump (with three fuel selections on each) forecourt will keep the same amount of vehicles on the road as 24 x 36 = 864 tesla superchargers.

Suddenly even with tesla supercharger advantages, you need literally the entire service station car park to be converted to tesla supercharger stations.

At 50 litres a refuel one 30,000 litre tanker carries fill ups for 600 cars like mine, so in effect the fuel tanks under the ground at the gas station are like massive energy supercapacitors.

at 600 kwh per minute or 36 megawatt/hours per hour, one single gas pump is a room temperature superconductor… one that routinely has an EEV (electric equivalent) rating of 36 megawatts, by definition a tesla supercharger is going to be 40 kilowatt, and the home stations are 11 and 22 kilowatt.

Even with “so cheap s to be effectively free” fusion power plants, which we will *never* have because profit, so best case scenario is £0.05 per kwh but how many terawatts do you want? We face massive problems without supercapacitors of energy density beyond anything we can even dream of today, and room temperature superconductors (and meters and switches) that can be made to be as utilitarian and safe and cheaply as the humble gas pump.

This then is the *TRUE* achilles heel of the EV revolution, Musk *claims* the plan was always to make a crazy EV, then make a high end EV, then make a consumer EV, which the model 3 claims to be, but ain’t, it’s at least 2.5 times the price it needs to be.

However, the EV itself is a thing that can only have any success at all as long as it is only used by a tiny minority.

This is equally true of the vociferous cycling cures all zealots that infect urban planning nowadays, it only works if only a tiny minority use it, as I said yesterday it falls flat on its face as soon as you attempt to make it mainstream.

I do not actually know how much a tesla 50 kwh battery costs, how much it weighs, how much volume it occupies, I do however know these numbers for 5 litres of diesel.

I also know the “C” rate for a fuel tank… hey dude, don’t fill your vette so fast, you may overheat it and the whole thing will explode.

Basically NO battery technology (internal heat generation during *rapid* charge / discharge cycles) that will fit in a car can cope with multi megawatt flow rates, some future supercap *might*, but we do not have one today or anywhere on the horizon.

Basically no electrical technology (internal heat generation etc) that will fit in a car (safely, alongside passengers etc) can cope with multi megawatt flow rates, some future superconductor (and associated superinsulator) might, but again, there is nothing even remotely on the horizon.

If we had commercial fusion, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and bottling the hydrogen and shipping that around the country would still beat EV into the dirt as a power distro method

AT BEST electric vehicles can rid us of the 2/3rd power losses to heat of heat engines, that’s *with* hard future SF supercaps and superconductors… imagine a supercap 40 feet long and 10 foot in diameter that can store 300 megawatt hours of power…. because that’s what a 30,000 litre fuel tanker carries…. imagine a superconductor you handle with bare skin and so light a small child can wield it that can carry 36 megawatts.

Lacking this encouraging EV uptake is like encouraging cycling uptake, you better pray it never gets beyond a tiny minority uptake.

Lacking this EV’s are like bicycles, they are an extreme niche case.

What *should* scare the crap out of you is the *very* possible future where in 2020 *anyone* can buy a chinese mass made EV with 100 miles range for US$10,000.

“Second vehicles”… you’re old enough to remember or you arent, most households that had a vehicle had one that did everything or served the main purpose, the plumber who had a work truck, not a car, and him and the mrs would ride the work truck to a picnic on a saturday.

A 100 mile $10k EV would become the new second car, left to charge overnight at 3 kw, left to trickle the rest of the time, 0-60 of 12 seconds is fine, and then we’d see the impact that alone would have on electrical infrastructure and urban planning, and it would be nothing less than fucking catastrophic, because all of a sudden all those 5 mile shopping trips and commutes to work will come in at 0.25 kwh per mile, or at tesla’s £0.20 per kwh around 5 pence per mile, which blows fucking urban bus fares out of the water, and being brutally honest with you kills the cyclist model too, 90% of them will abandon cycling for the convenience of an enclosed EV k car that costs 5 pence per mile once you have bought it for $10k

And then overnight baseload for the grid (habitually a time for maintenance and so on) is ramped right up so grid and gen plant maintenance goes for a shit, and there is fuck all solar being generated at night, so only the few wind farms will be doing anything for it in the green sense.

And buddy, if half the world is walking around worrying about being affected by microwaves and emf and other shit, you’re in for a shitshow when 75% of the cars on the road in town are 100% manual drive $10k EV shitboxes, good luck when they all start sporting wifi hotspots and so on.

Legislation mandated that all modern cars have to have ODB interfaces, just imagine the fun you can have with that on an all electric EV that is basically a PC/CNC controlled machine, yes ossifer, my ev shitbox absolutely does not have arduino based hacks that increase motor current by 30% and remove the rpm limiter, no ossifer, that absolutely is not siphoning kit (shitbox to shitbox electric stealing cable) , no ossifer, that’s not wardriving the wireless firmware man in the middle device there to reverse the drive motor direction and invert steering wheel output so left is right, hey, here is a generic iron utility key (taper square shank) why pay for power when I can park next to a lamp post, and the thing I steal is both invisible and impossible to identify once stolen….  yeah man, I pass the charge through a bentonite filter to remove the red electrons so the state doesn’t know I’m running argi duty electric in my private vehicle.

And you think stolen cars scrapped for parts is an issue now?

So, for EV’s to be a raging sucess and the sucessor to IC, we need, absofuckinglutely need, three things.

1/ massively increase electric generating and distribution capacity, effectively doubling anything we have today as a minimum.

2/ supercapacitors, real sci fi ones, not the crap we get now

3/ superconductors, room temp ones.

and all of  the above have to be commercially reliable and priced too.

Failing any of these, especially failing BOTH 2 and 3, means the EV isn’t anything more than a total fucking disaster waiting to happen.

Remember, the ONLY thing EV brings to the table over IC is efficiency, no thermal losses instead of 66% thermal losses, nothing else, so

Just been on a road trip up and down the length of the country, in motorways service station where there were between 3 and 6 electric car charging stations, there are rows at least 12 or 15 long of new tesla charging stations, resembling a dyson fan in red and white, being installed.

Does the Tesla take the same plug as other e-vehicles? Or is it Apple proprietary bullshit, and if it is, how is it helping to save the planet.. sorry sir, you’ll get the wrong shape electrons, quark, strangeness and charm.

I can’t think why, unless every tesla sold in the uk goes on a simultaneous road trip on the same route, maybe then they need 15 charging stations per service station.

I look forward to the cliché horror films where the murderer with chainsaw shuffles and closes the 100 foot gap to the victim in their tesla car at about 1 foot every ten seconds, and the tesla refuses to boot, or the dumb boyfriend cries that the batteries are flat…

Certainly given local highways planning departments and motoring standards in general, it won’t be hard for the tesla autopilots to be the best drivers on the road… but then stevie wonder on meth would be as good as some of the ones we actually have on the road, so it isn’t saying much.

Scores of drivers here took literally two hours to make two and three mile journeys, and of course all the “cycling first” assholes are proclaiming that the problem is cars, s’funny, nothing at all to do with pavements on some roads literally growing 30 feet in width, arbitrary one way systems, arbitrary pedestrianisation systems and so on, so roads that could take acrtics and two way traffic and car parking either side 30 years ago are now one way and barely wide enough for a VW golf .

That and a general “fuck you” attitude that sees people blocking junctions and turnings and ignoring lights and generally creating a gridlock where we *could* have had at least 5 to 10 mph traffic.

Still, it’s nothing a few more speed humps won’t cure.

I did see one electric car, a blue beemer i8, looking very superior as he cruised past my shitbox 600 quid volvo (that did a 550 mile round trip at a steady 70 mph for 50 quids worth of diesel) at 5 mph more than me, except in the time I had that thing in view it depreciated more than my car cost me, and I refueled (which is 800 miles range) in 5 minutes, which he cannot do.

I’m struggling to see intellect anywhere.

99% of everything I can see and touch and use and rely on was the result of the industry of white men, yet they have all gone, turned into retarded vain and stupid creatures that can only consume, not create.

The crew fed weapon was a direct response to the fact that the *problem* with individual weapons is the vast majority won’t use them to deliberately kill the opponent, but the crew fed weapon dilutes the responsibility to the point where all can participate, and shift the burden or morals to the others.

The exact same things is true of 99.99% of institutions in modern society, the “justice system” of po-po and lawyers and judges and advisors and counsellors and experts and so on are no more than cyphers in a crew fed weapon systems, and they all went rogue soon after they were created.

Love Trump or hate him, nobody with an IQ higher than room temperature in an igloo can be in any doubt at all that US politics has descended into balkanized anarchy, it’s not a coup or civil war, there are far too many competing factions for that, this is rats feeding on a corpse.

Let’s antagonise both Russia and China for the win…

Meanwhile everyone is talking about how the chinese economy is empty, it’s a potemkim village, it’s all fake…. how many full containers go from china to the yeww ess of aaa every week, and how many full containers go the other way, now tell me who was the fake economy.

All kidding aside, I actually think the tesla 3 *could* be a good car, it *won’t* be, because it is being built by tesla and it’s US$30k and nobody even knows if they can make 2,000 a week.

If it *is* any good by the end of 2018 the chinese will be making a knock off that’s 90% as good for 15k, and they will make 2,000 a day.

Because there’s the rub, modern cars have to be designed to be built largely by robots to be profitable, and the more components you have the greater the cost, and one of the best ways to reduce components is to go all electric….

And since we all willingly decimated our own local industry, the chinese are the only one left who can do it better than anyone else, they already build everything from an iphone though german cars to us passenger jet planes, a fucking electric car is a piece of piss.

And the UK’s new “only zero emissions by 2040” laws come in to force just 22 years in the future… my four vehicles are 16, 16 and 15 and the oldie is 36 years old, and to me they are all “modern”

In days gone by I owned and ran a 1961 BSA with magneto ignition, drum brakes and kick start only, 56 years old now…. the changes from that to a ducati diavel are unbelievable.

Since the old chairman and his little red book went away, china has basically been run by a panel of men who are either scientists or engineers, they have more in common with the old white men who built modern western society than anything we have alive today.

We in the west are rapidly approaching the status of wogs in the Congo jungle in 1870, and it is us doing it to ourselves, the chinese would rather we didn’t, because wogs have nothing to buy firewater or steam engines with, but if we do, it won’t take them down with us.

So my local city will look like Beijing in 1960, pushbikes everywhere, pushbikes pulling ploughs and harvesters, pushbikes pulling 40 foot containers, pushbikes sporting 120′ jib head cranes, pushbikes cleaning streets and carry away wastes, well, maybe not, just pushbikes and minimum wage subsistence jobs, so the pushbikes themselves will be old iron bone shakers, not a shimano or mag wheel or shred of lycra in sight.

I’ve looked at 3D printers, and given their current limitations, I’m trying hard to find a use case that justifies purchasing one.

99% of thingverse seems to be “you need a 3d printer to print parts for your 3d printer to make it work still / better” or “you need a 3d printer to make models that you wouldn’t buy if they were 99c and free shipping on amazon prime”

I realise there are other cases, I could whip up a life size model of my cock, oh wait, better buy a creality, none of the others have a build volume big enough, fnarr fnarr

What I am saying is not that there are not valid use cases, just that I *personally* cannot see one, not right now, and 99.9% of the 3d printing I have seen and heard about is post purchase self justification, I bought a creality so I can make a cable support bracket for the creality that didn’t come with a cable support bracket, even though most of the parts are 3d printed.

What this means for people who haven’t bought a 3d printer, is 99.9% of everything is noise, if there is a valid signal in there, it has long since been drowned out.

Lets look at YouTube, I saw it when it first came out, and sure enough fucking cat videos were amongst the first things uploaded, then Google bought it, then a handful of whack jobs made obscene amounts of money on it, then “because the advertisers rebelled” Google / YouTube clamped down on the monetisation side.

Let me tell you what I think *really* happened.

1/ google found out youtube was a fucking money pit, and not even the kind of money pit you can write off for tax purposes as a loss leader and still be happy to run.

2/ google found out that big business’s love affair with all things digital when it comes to advertising was heading for the divorce courts, proctor and gamble alone are cutting 500 million from their future digital advertising budget.

3/ people like me found out that no matter what we did, no matter how many times we clicked on don’t like the channel or don’t like the video or already seen the video or all of the above, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the recommends that pop up on the youtube home page, ergo google cannot detect the 947th time an identical video has been uploaded by some asshole, and cannot detect that despite telling them 999 time by clicking, I don’t want to see any channels featuring wannabe celebutards and their latest car, and cannot detect that despite telling them by clicking 999 times, I don’t want any fucking arab shite, or how to apply makeup shite, or top ten list shite, or general shite where the thumbnail doesn’t appear in or come from the actual video, or have any relation to it, or reality.

basically google can’t recommend anything except the same old same old zero content clickbait shite.

Because that’s all there is, there isn’t any decent content, and what there is, that 0.1%, is simply drowned out to the point you’ll never find it.

Are you sensing a common theme here?

I’m due another “free” phone on my contract, overdue actually, we have two perfectly working Note 4’s here and one perfectly working Note 3 for emergency use should one of the 4’s shit the bed.

The problem, there aren’t any new phones I want, they are all this new long and slim form factor, even the new not yet released Note 8, and it won’t have a removable battery, and there simply isn’t anything else on offer.

There might be, some huwai or something, but again it’s the 0.1 % and you’ll never find it on my carriers website, so I’m downgrading for the first time ever since the S1 to a sim only deal.

I stated with them then because they were the only network that offered;

1. they own their own cell towers and infrastructure
2. unlimited data
3. unlimited calls
4. unlimited texts

it wasn’t cheap, but it was the best, and I stayed with the rotating “latest samsung note” flagship phone bundle because I liked them, but no more, I’ll be downgrading to this

Same problem youtube faces, same problem 3d printing faces, same problem all sorts of shit faces….

it’s much the same story with my home broadband, uncapped 200/20 meg and a landline phone for 50 quid a month, the wankers are always ringing up trying to get me to sign up for one of the “amazing” TV bundles, it’s an extra 20 quid a month for nothing that even remotely interests me, nor are they remotely interested when I point out that the “free” (that I am really paying for) superhub is so shite that I have to run it in modem only mode and then run a proper draytek firewall / router / wifi ap…

try and fuck me over too much and I’ll drop back to the 100/10 meg service and phone for 32 quid a month, I started out on acoustic couplers at 300 baud so trust me, I can make 10/1 meg work fine, I have no need to download a dvd size mpeg container in 10 minutes or less, overnight works, I’ll live…

As it is I’m busy spending the capital I have saved in the bank buying as many tools and other shit as I can, no fucker going to include my savings in a bank bail in, or wipe them out with a currency crash, two scenarios that are increasingly likely here.

Nor do I have any great incentive to move from the humble but cheap dive that I now inhabit, though I have seen a *definite* drop in asking prices for rental properties around here, not enough of a drop, but put it this way, I am seeing *some* properties on the market for monthly rents that I have not seen advertised for a few years at least.

Nor do I have any great incentive to upgrade anything in the motor pool, everything is 15 or 16 years old and so far 100% reliable and pretty cheap to maintain and fix and run, though it was tempting to blow a wad on a baldwin motion c3 vette a while back, it would have been a money pit and a target, you can’t eat a vette or make money from it or sell it piecemeal, you can with tools.

Guy I know has just bought 5 pallete loads of mobil 1 in 5 litre jugs for that very reason, fuck putting the money in bitcoin or gold or the bank, and he can sell that shit 1 gallon at a time for what he paid for it, if not more.

Every “tech” tool that I have that relies on “tech” parts or consumables just got renewed / upgraded, so I can expect at least 3 more years life before the next refresh cycle, it hurts writing a cheque for 2.5 k, but not as much as not being able to in 6 months, or having to write one for 7 k in six months, and what the fuck use is money in the bank, you can’t eat it.

Speaking of “money” as in “cash money”, pure coinkydink that the notes and coinage are going through a refresh cycle and much of the stuff that is still legal tender today won’t be in six months time, eg pound coins, five pound notes, and then ten pound notes…. imagine being sat on 25k worth of obsolete currency.

I’m not that old a cunt, but I can remember my dad getting “bailed in” abroad once, sure, your money is safe in the bank, you can spend it any time you like, in local currency, you can’t take it out of the country, or exchange it (even if you could the rates are plummeting) or do anything with it, but it’s all still here, still safe.

27 years ago the place I was working work stopped overnight, gulf war one kicked off and overnight the exchange rate between the US$ and the local currency shifted 50%, most business was ultimately done by people who worked in the US$ so they turned the taps off overnight and it took all of three days to trickle down to the cigarette sellers and knife sharpeners who only dealt in local currency anyway, so it’s a lie to say nobody alive really remembers this shit… plenty alive in Greece do today, and that was only a couple of years ago.

I’ve got a cubic foot drawer stashed away in a remote place full of all sorts of prescription drugs, painkillers and the like, not enough antibiotics for my liking, and forget that use by date shit, most drugs are perfectly viable and over 95% of original strength 20 years down the line, just keep em cool and dry and dark.

I’ve got a minimum stash of 50 toilet rolls, 20 kilos of sugar, 10 kilos of coffee, several kilos of rolled oats, 60 or so tinned food, got to get a decent water filter in…

Anyway, enough of that dick swinging prepper shit, it’s not prepper shit, I’m just buying stuff now while the going is both good and cheap, on the basis that I’ve got the money and I don’t believe it is ever going to be cheaper.

Which brings me back full circle to a 3d printer.

I can see the use, possibly, but it has to be a disassemble-able repairable 100% metal head and extruder, and it has to take *any* type of material, and so on, and suddenly it’s not a cheap proposition any more, and if you have finite resources, which we all do, there are better things for *me* to spend money on.

YMMV

I may not be “like” every other sheeple out there, but, I’m human, so I’m not that “unlike” them either…

… so (macron’s latest missives aside) what holds true for me, holds true to some extent for others too, and for me it seems like the world is tuning into a crazier and more fucked up place every day.

I’m not just talking on the global geopolitical scale, but also on the domestic one, shit be going more unravelled every day, or so it seems.

And if it seems like that to me, then to some extent it is going to seem like that to everyone, and that is dangerous shit, for the various values of everyone that are not like me, because they won’t react like me.

They will see that crazy shit and think to themselves, whole world is getting fucked up, why should I be reasonable and get fucked up too, may as well be unreasonable along with everyone else.

And like all things in life what seemed like a gentle and gradual downward slope of no import yesterday turns into a yawning chasm today as you slip off the edge of the exponential curve.

Certainly it’s one of the staples of fiction that you can never tell a sneaky bad guy from a good guy, well, maybe it is my autistic engineer’s brain, but I never had the slightest problem telling the two apart, my problem was always that I would “deal” with the bad guys (or girls) in exchange for something else that I wanted, even if that thing was just a quiet life and the odd bit of sex.

Not that I have ever done anything *really* wrong, in a “You’re gonna go to hell for this, only question is how long before you get caught” way, but every time I have either done wrong or dealt with a bad guy or girl, I’ve known at the time that it was going to end in tears of some sort, that, “this ain’t right or the way things is supposed to be” feeling that you ignore and go ahead anyway for some other short term gain.

I don’t forgive or forget the psycho skank ho ex in any way shape or form, but I’m honest enough to admit she never kidnapped me at gunpoint, along with the usual “I *could* have walked away at any point” there were a few chosen instances where the whole walking away thing was basically handed to me on a plate, and I didn’t take it…

Not that I forgive a hungry lion for his nature, or his hunger, or for seeing me as lunch, but, in a Texan “if it happened to you, it’s your fault” sort of way, if you don’t put a 45-70 into that fuckers head as soon as he looks at you, it’s your fault.

Of course the flipside in modern society is fucked if you do, cos you’ll go to jail for life for murder, and fucked if you don’t, because that fucker will wreck your life, just because it can.

Which is why the unravelling insanity on the world stage at large is interesting, because the fucked if you do gets more and more “maybe’s” stuck in front of it.

It’s like the previous thing about the kiddie sex dolls, cunts DO NOT think things through.

1/ They want to make kiddie sex dolls illegal to own *now*

2/ They are talking about pre-emptive measures to make android sex toys illegal before they are even practical.

Well, you just invoked the whole concept of the willing mind and willing heart and consent, you can argue that fucking an animal is wrong because the animal can’t consent, I do not really agree with you, sure, the animal can’t give consent like a human can, but it can express its displeasure quite easily, so what we are arguing about are the rights of a creature that does not have a human like intellect or the ability to converse in some intelligent manner with other human beings.

“Well, the donkey liked it, and so did I” doesn’t wash with these people, their whole argument is basically that because the donkey doesn’t have a human like intellect or the ability to converse intelligently with other human beings, it cannot consent.

Then they will point to the mentally retarded, cross their arms, and sit back, safe in the knowledge that they have made an iron clad argument.

So, back to the kiddie sex dolls, we know cartoons of cartoon kids indulging in sexual activity are now illegal, as are cartoons of cartoon humans having sex with cartoon animals, so it’s pretty simple to expand that logic to say that the fake pseudo genitalia on a child sex doll will be equally illegal, and therefore fucking said pseudo fake genitalia is also illegal, and basically this is the argument that is going to send the sad fuck in yesterday’s story to jail for a very long time and the rest of his life on release on the sex offenders register, even though he never touched another living or formerly living creature in the commission of this “crime”

So while we are at it, we will future proof this shit, and make sex androids illegal too.

So fast forwards 15 years and 5 minutes after some cunt buys a hermaphrodroid 1.0 and gets it home and orders it to strip, it has no fake orifices, so he tells it to give him a hand job, next thing you know he gets arrested and sentenced to 9,999 years, and the hermaphrodroid gets destroyed, it’s budding AI intellect on a par with a cat or small dog having no say in the matter, or questions of sentients or individual rights to existence.

It’s fair, I guess, I did not choose to be made with a penis or a brain, and yet I get punished for both, why shouldn’t a sex droid be punished for something equally out of it’s own control, it’s very design and creation?

And if we are banning inanimate non sentient constructs because they might be used for sex, what about the poor bastard in the paper last week who is in love with, and has sex with, an old jaguar car?

I doubt it is 16 years old, and I doubt it can consent, so will it be made illegal and destroyed, and will he be sentenced to 999 years in jail?

What about me surfing wank porn on a 6 week old computer, it is below the age of consent and can’t consent anyway, so will it be destroyed and will I get 999 years in jail?

If I buy a silicone gun shaped to look like a 7 year old ruger blackhawk in 44 mag does that mean it’s just a gateway to me buying a 50 cal and offing the po-po en masse from 1500 yards out?

We already HAVE fucking laws that make fucking 7 year old children illegal, but, in this insane 21st century, that isn’t enough, we now need new laws, apparently, to make fucking any inanimate man made object that resembles a child illegal, and on a severity scale close to the real thing.

There are nearly 1000 kids in the uk being prescribed drugs to delay the onset of puberty, because they aren’t sure what gender they are yet, in the news last week was a photo of one such “creature” that was born a boy but calls itself a girls name and which has been taking said drugs for several years, it is now 17, one year over the minimum age of sexual consent in this country, is it legal to fuck this “old child?” why, yes it is…

If only the guy who fucked the sex doll had instead fucked an adult child of medically postponed puberty… in the eyes of the law, that is clearly better than fucking a sex doll.

Can I get Monsanto put in jail, because a gene they designed for a tomato plant they produced blew in the wind and infected a free range organic tomato plant 6 fields away that I ate, and which then got incorporated into my body, or can Monsanto have me destroyed for having their underage intellectual property in my body while I have sex?

Where does all this lead?

It leads to anything and everything (except human beings, for now) being illegal to use for sex, it doesn’t matter that it is my body and my property / inanimate object that I purchased or made, it’s a fucking crime citizen, literally.

It leads to anything that can be used for sex being made illegal.

Exhibit A – a silicone sex doll made in the appearance of a 7 year old child.

Exhibit B – a random 7 year old child plucked off the street.

In the quest to make the punishment for having sex with Exhibit A on a par with having sex with Exhibit B, since Exhibit A is itself just a manufactured thing, you are reducing Exhibit B to having no more value or significance than a manufactured thing.

You are taking the very humanity out of the thing you claim you are trying to protect.

That very humanity forms tha basis of 99.999% of the protection and defences that Exhibit B currently “enjoys”, not many humans will deliberately rip off a child, most humans will click on a computer screen to buy a £99.00 item mispriced at £0.99, and they won’t give a fuck if that online store or listing does a child vendor out of 98 quid and a penny, that’s the fucking kid’s look out, hell, I taught the little shit a valuable life lesson, go me…

As the recent distasteful media circus surrounding the terminally ill kid and the great ormond st hospital vs the parents shown, your kids are not your kids, they are the property of the state.

Your sex doll is not your sex doll, it is the property of the state.

Your liberty is not your liberty, it is the property of the state.

What better way to make something the property of the state than to dehumanize it, what better way to dehumanize it than to put fucking a doll on a par with fucking a child.

What better way to make sure that kids everywhere get regularly fucked before they reach puberty, hey man, it’s only a kid, it’s not like I fucked a sex doll, and anyway, these kids, you don’t have to put a heater in them to get them up to body temp before fucking them.

What better way to destroy society.

Me, I can’t see much in it worth saving any more anyway.

No man, we don’t take greenbacks or euros or bitcoins here, but I’ll give you 750 grammes of 3D printer materials and machine time for the little girl, no, not that one with snot running down her face, that one there, the skinny one that will fit up the chimney with this brush.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4746234/Former-churchwarden-faces-jail-child-sex-doll.html

Basically these are sex dolls made to look like children.

Now you can call it sick, you can call it wierd, you can call it fucked up, but, who gets hurt if you fuck one?

They aren’t even illegal (yet) here in the UK, but that doesn’t stop the various “child protection” “charities” from agitating for them to be made illegal, and sooner rather than later, because they are concerned about advances in robotics, and god forbid you fuck a child sex android.

So far it has all been justified as a “gateway” thing, you know, one toke on a spliff one day and a few months later you’re mainlining heroin… and people like the poor bastard in the story above, we are being told, also have “obscene child pornography” photos.

You wanna bet, if the doll is labelled as “obscene” and the so called judge in the trial refuses an attempt to have a separate hearing to determine whether or not the fucking dolls themselves should be *made* illegal, then QED taking pictures of the naked doll’s sex organs will count as “obscene child pornography” and nobody will question whether the alleged pictures / evidence actually feature a live human child.

And apparently you can get this shit on Amazon?

Who knew, been an amazon prime member for years, so, checks amazon for “sex dolls” and sure enough they do sell them, didn’t see any kiddie ones, and if I did then frankly they are as tacky as a “normal” one, but then so is half the shit on amazon.

Meanwhile the “hacker” that took down British Airways globally for a few days got a couple of years in chokey, and this sad fuck is pretty much guaranteed to get more than that.

Mark my words, we are getting to a place where it’s a less serious crime to fuck an actual 7 year old for the price of some sweeties than it is to fuck a 3 week old doll of a 7 year old that cost you a couple of grand or more, and let’s face it you’re probably less likely to catch an STD from the doll, going by other official guvvmint figures.

FUBAR

I have a proper belt driven compressor out in the workshop, but I had cause to purchase a “quiet” one as well, the definition of quiet being you could put it in an office or living room and it wouldn’t annoy anyone.

The leading “british” brand is bambi, 450 quid for a fridge compressor that costs all of 50 quid on a tank, and yes bambi sell replacement compressors for 275 quid, need more air? Well just add more fridge compressors at 275 quid a time, by the time you have four of them on a big tank (£2.5k) you’ll have enough air to intermittently run an air ratchet etc… and cos fridge compressors are oiled you’ll need a de oiler as well as a water trap if you’re planning on spraying or anything.

Not that anything about the bambi is british except where it is assembled and painted green and white, and the duty cycle is max 50% or max 30 minutes in any one hour…

My application I don’t actually need a lot of air, but I do want dry and oil free air, it’s basically 2 bar pneumatic rams to open and close a machine door, so a “fridge compressor” based machine would have more than enough oomph, but at 450 quid a pop I’d have been better off making one, about 350 quid better off.

So I went on to amazon and paid 129 inc shipping next day delivery for a chinese made 2 stage oilless direct drive job with pistons with synthetic rings, this is it in the pic above in a messy room with a brass zippo perched on the cap for scale.

Power: 750W
Frequency: 50Hz
Voltage: 220V
Speed: 1400rpm
Tank Capacity : 24L
Noise level :67db
Working Pressure :8BAR/ 116psi
Air Supply: 95L/Min
CE Approved.
Dimensions:605×310×605mm
Net weight:18kg
Connection size: 1/4″ BSP
Suitable hose:5*8MM
It is Oil Free compressor.
Start instantaneous power: 1650W.

Yeah, it’s not the kind of thing you buy to leave to your grand kids, takes about 1 minute 50 seconds to go from an empty tank to cut off at 120 psi and is silent enough you can talk on the phone over it and the people on the other end can’t hear it, and it’s 129 quid delivered so arguably I could have saved 29 quid making a fridge compressor one, if my own time is worthless, and this was delivered next day ready to go.

No brainer.

On a different track I returned yesterday around 6:30 pm after the lightning and thunder and turned on the big series 7 samsung monitor and pc, which is now about 9/10 years old, and it didn’t come on, soft click power button flickers soft click power button flickers etc.

Aww shit, I suppose I could go on to amazon and buy a new 4k 55 inch LG, but, that’s 800 quid and hassle, and I begrudge spending that kind of money, I spent a grand on the 48″ samsung ten years ago, it should last longer, so a quick google and sure enough click of death and bad caps, so carry it into the bedroom to lay it face down on the nice soft duvet (no point bruising the screen for nothing) and remove the back cover and sure enough.

Bad caps, not a very good pic but good enough to show they are swollen and one has a tiny leak stain at the top.

Now, this isn’t a diagnosis, I’ve just identified a possible culprit visually, but it’s worth investigating before saying fuck it and throwing your hands in the air and ordering new kit for 800 quid.

So off down to my local Maplin store just after 7 pm, happily they are open until 8 most days, and some 35 volt 1000 puff caps are duly purchased, (standard on the sammy were 10 volt 1000 puff, but while I’m at it, may as well up the voltage headroom a wee bit) I can only see two on the board and I was sorta expecting four, plus what the fuck so I buy four from Maplin’s, at a whopping 19 pence each, which is profiteering because they are only about 5p  really but I have no issues whatsoever with paying a premium to anyone willing to carry loose stock.

Get back, pull the board, pull out the antex iron, desolder and remove, put in new, solder, snip leads, install the board, plug in the mains lead and test, we have liftoff.

Clean the fan and replace the back cover, reinstall samsung in usual situ and reconnect cables to PC etc and power up.

Elapsed time maybe an hour and a bit.

Elapsed expenditure for repair 38 pence.

because I had the tools, because I had the attitude and basic soldering skills, because my first reactions wasn’t to throw my hands up in the air and say fuck it and spend 800 quid on a replacement (which of course assumes you have the money lying around to replace the item in question, and no better use for said money)

Of course the current squeeze, who witnessed all this, is in awe, TV’s are things that die and then you sell the car and eldest child to buy a new one, and sit around in misery and darkness for 48 hours until it arrives, and then everyone lives off bread and conflakes for six months because of the ongoing hit the TV purchase caused.

They are absolutely NOT something you walk in, it doesn’t work, you go awwwww bastard and put it on the bed and open it and find something wrong WITH NO TOOLS OR INSPECTION EQUIPMENT and then drive down the road a couple of miles and come back a bit later with 38 pence worth of parts, which you solder in and then it fucking works, that shit is pretty indistinguishable from magic.

So we have two entirely truthful and factual tales from the last 48 hours from my own personal life.

1/ I bought the cheap chinese compressor because it was so cheap I couldn’t really compete on the DIY route, and because it’s good enough, even though I know damn well it’s not built to last, it’s still well worth it and a sensible buying decision.

2/ I bought some cheap 19p per pop capacitors to “have a go” at something that being brutally honest I have already had 10 years of good use out of, good going for a flat screen telly, I could be annoyed and discomfited that it was dead after 10 years, but I couldn’t really complain, so the risk / reward for having a go was negligible, and to be honest it could still die next week, I found *a* problem, there could be other components on their last legs too for all I know, the flipside is the devil you know, I have been soak testing this unit for 10 years now, so I do not have any reason to assume that it won’t last another ten….

So……………….

Bambi are clearly making a huge markup on the hardware, they could just buy in orazios and paint them and rebox them, I’m not knocking them, but the business model doesn’t work when you are competing against the chinese at their own game, I could have bought THREE of these orazios for the price of one bambi.

The only possible reason to even consider the bambi is if you have genuine reason to believe it will last five times as long as one orazio…

On the other hand you have the 48″ series 7 RGB LED backlit LCD samsung that I paid a thousand pounds for ten years ago, I *know* it’s good quality, the proof is sat right in front of me, and has been for ten years, do I believe the LG I might have had to buy as a replacement would last 10 years too? Well, I’d *like* to think so… but…

I still miss the old broom wade 3/4 hp vertical 2 stage v twin compressor that I bought ten years ago for 20 quid and fixed by cutting new gaskets for the heads for 50p, it weighed at least 180 lbs and was incredibly quiet and smooth for a belt driven job and I basically gave it away for 50 quid when the psycho skank ho ex went nuclear.

I’ll miss the samsung when it eventually dies in the same way (hey, at least I don’t have to live with paying someone a tenner to take away only to hear a week later they fixed it for 38p…) because basically it just did what it said on the tin with no fuss, quietly and competently, year after year.

I won’t miss the orazio, and I wouldn’t have missed the bambi.

And this is how the west was won and lost.

We aren’t making any shit that is expected to last at least ten years (yes, I know there are exceptions, but this should be mainstream, not the exception) which you can make all sorts of bullshit Keynesian arguments about.

The trouble is, we aren’t making any cheap crap “good enough” either, all our locally made “good enough” crap is three times the price of what it should be.

Never before in human history has it been as easy, technically, as it is now in 2017 to make a fridge style compressor that should be good for 50 years of 24/7 use with no maintenance.

And it could be done for 250 quid which is what bambi charge for a replacement pump unit.

https://www.bambi-air.co.uk/products/view/budget-range—silent-air-compressors

What’s missing from these “quality” items ???
(standard one year warranty on the pump and three years on the receiver… big fucking deal)
go on, follow the link, take a look…

Yup, same as the cheapo chinese orazio.

Biggest most obvious glaring mistake is a total and complete lack of anything even approaching a decent intake air filter, and yes the orazio is getting one fitted, (it does have one as standard but it ain’t up to much) I’ll eliminate at least 75% of the wear on the synthetic piston rings by eliminating all the particulates from being drawn in and embedded in them, a 10 micron inlet filter is a lot more use than a 10 micron outlet filter, if it can’t get in it can’t get pumped out.

Try as I might, I cannot see *anything* to differentiate between the so called “quality” so called “british made and designed” bambi and the cheap and cheerful orazio, certainly not anything to justify a 300% price difference.

For a sale price of 200 quid delivered I could show the chinese how to make the orazio a bambi killer. (not that it isn’t already, I bought one)

1. good quality replaceable automotive style intake filter.
2. PWM soft start and stop motor
3. standard fitted good dryer and two pressure regulator for twin output, one low range for HVLP guns and one high range for dusters and light air tool use… and all on a sturdy bracket please…
4. standard tank pressure port for receiver capacity extension / twinning etc
5. cable tidy (2 cleats) for excess mains lead
6. big sticker on the side with an arrow pointing at the drain valve saying “DRAIN AT LEAST ONCE EVERY WEEK, YES, THIS MEANS YOU, YOU CUNT.“

I’d have bought it in a heartbeat, and so would everyone else trawling amazon for a cheap / quiet compressor for home / office / hobby / light ind usage.

Bambi sales would plummet to zero overnight.

Bambi should already be making their own compressors rated 24/7 for 50 years, fitting proper intake filters, then they’d have been an orazio killer and I’d have bought one… even at 400% of the price of the orazio.

Orazio sales would have plummeted to basically everyone who had a 150 quid and needed a compressor.

Out in the workshop I have one 15 metre air hose, one 10 metre air hose and one 5 metre air hose,, basically I can string them all together and go out to the street and run air tools or pump tyres, the 3hp belt driven comp (home built) is on wheels but it is also a big heavy old bitch and it does need a proper 13 ampere extension lead to run.

The orazio is only 4 to 5 times the price of a shitty pocket emergency 12v car unit, but it is small and portable enough to pick up and carry, draws 3 amperes wet, and a 5 gallon receiver @ 120 psi is enough even not plugged into the mains to inflate any non commercial tyre, and 1 hp is enough to run intermittent air tools like an air ratchet or the odd bit of windy gun.

No brainer.