Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

As regular readers will know, I’m an engineer by trade, and I have some high tech toys of my own, and therefore some high tech contacts.

I can tell you about a company that builds and sells high tech equipment here in the UK, I can name the company, people within the company, the entire product line, and I have been pretty much everywhere through their HQ facility.

None of that matters, only one thing matters, they are having serious ongoing issues with bought in parts and components failing QA on the point of assembly.

To the point where 4 to 6 week build schedules are running 7 to 8 weeks, and anyone in any kind of production will tell you that that is all kinds of bad for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is throttling your production rate by 25%.

The thing is, anyone in any kind of high tech production will know exactly what I am talking about, and it is a problem that is getting worse with time.

Let’s be brutally honest here, it even affects giants like Samsung, just look at the Note 7 exploding battery debacle.

Go to a full olympic sized swimming pool, take a shot glass, dip it in the pool to fill it, and put it to one side, that’s about the ratio of li-on cells used in mobile devices vs used in cars, except in a car it won’t be a pocket or a hand that is burnt.

There is a high tech item that I myself am buying that is running two weeks behind schedule because of these same QA issues, thankfully in my case it is all made from things that *can* be fully scanned and tested by QA before it ships, so it just means delays and at least I am assured that when I finally get my hands on it, it has been fully tested first.

This is one of the tacit hidden secrets in the motor industry, only those marques with fully equipped test cells that test *everything* on the vehicle on a rolling road prior to it leaving the production line have any sort of remaining name for quality and reliability, everything else is a fucking crap shoot.

One of the real hidden secrets in modern manufacturing is when you start making everything with a CPU and sensors controlling it, instead of using that processing power to highlight problems and put them back into the remedial line for fixing and rectification, increasingly that computing power is being used to compensate for and mask those fucking problems.

Of course different production facilities face different issues, in the early days of silicon wafer fabs it wasn’t unknown for sites to go bust trying to nail down elusive problems that beset yield.

But even at the low low low end of someone going to a local hardware store to buy plywood to make a dolls house or bird house, some of that material you buy is going to be crap.

While many will be commenting that a rise in the minimum wage from 9 buck to 10 bucks will send businesses out of business, almost nobody comments about the production and yield issues faced by anyone buying in goods or materials.

Back in the day when British Standards and ISO paper trail certification was brought in, some people had an inkling and tried to bring in some system to rectify it, but, it doesn’t.

if a laser assembler buys in 10 galvo scanner heads and only 8 of them meet specs when assembled in a machine, it doesn’t help to be able to paper chase all the way back down the assembly and component line to identify what went wrong, because the fact is that in real life 99% of the time there aren’t the processes in place to be able to rectify it, cheaper to say awww shucks and ship out two new ones and say sorry, and then reclaim back from your supplier, and so on down the food chain.

The problem with this model is the labour at each stage and the production capacity at each stage is lost.

And that is lierally like burning money, it never comes back.

Just look at AvE’s teardown of a juicero, all that shit to do a job that could have been done just a well with hydraulic pressure or a pair of pinch rollers, and at 5% of the build cost.

And of course if it is all proprietary shit, it’s not like you can go to another supplier for a standard off the shelf part, don’t like denso bearings, go buy a fag bearing…

So basically in 2017 we live in a world where one of three things happens.

1. You buy a product that is *thoroughly* tested for QA compliance and it only ever gets signed off and shipped when it is right and to spec.
2. You buy a product where a *sample* are tested, and the rest are taken on faith… if the sample passes, they all pass.
3. You buy a product where *some* compliance and tolerance tests are made, but nothing is actually fully tested, that stopped at the production prototype stage.

Going back to the Samsung Note 7 debacle, scrapping and recalling the *entire* production run and model range is the most expensive possible and least desireable possible option for a manufacturer.

Even if 30% of them were shit, it would be easier and cheaper and better to recall that 30%, happens all the time with motor cars and washing machines and so on, so the ONLY POSSIBLE reason you do not do it is you *can not* do it.

The problem is that lots of industry insiders tell me that this is an ever increasing problem, and nobody apparently knows how to fix it, or at least, they do not know how to fix it and stay in business, because the fix costs money, lost of money.

Enter the iphone 10, over a thousand bucks, for *meh* features that most of the android world has had for 2 years, but the bendy iphone did the damage, so apple did the only thing they could do, which was tighten up on QA throughout the production process, and now they have a US$1,000+ phone.

And the reactions from many “safe” sales customers the world over is “fuck that”, I’ll wait until the price drops 20%, or I’ll buy something else, or I’ll keep what I have.

Yes, I want a quality item, I just do not want to pay that much for it.

Now, this is a REAL big fucking problem for mass manufacturing of consumer items, there is literally no comparison at all between a shirt factory that has to make a shirt every 30 seconds to stay afloat, and a tailor, who makes shirts to order.

I used to make and build bespoke PC’s and server for people years ago, business wasn’t great, I was never going to retire, but it was steady, because there are a steady minority of people for whom the latest dell isn’t what they want, they know this for a fact, because they tried that shit 3 years ago, and have regretted it ever since.

Apart from one PC that got used as a football by UPS on the way to the client, I never had a single warranty claim of any kind, ever, yet, I’d buy components much the same place as everyone else.

But I soak tested every single machine for 48 hours before shipping it, and I took care with the component selection and matching and assembly… I *did* have a couple that failed at the soak test stage.. the customer never saw them.

I’ve been building PC’s since 300 mhz slot 1 pentium days, I have *never* been able to replicate industry figures for hard disk failure rates, but then I’ve never treated them as cavalierly as everyone else does, including mike dell et al.

I still *plan* for HD failure so it doesn’t kill me as / if / when it happens to me, but the fact is I doubt I have had 4 ever, I have 5 spinning 24/7 in a nas box so it’s not like I never spin the things up either.

Which again brings us back to robotics in assembly, the great white secret hope in assembly plants world wide, not to cut wages bills, or eliminate bolshy staff, but to try to address the burgeoning problem with QA.

You can trivially program a robot to never use more than 1G of acceleration / shock when assembling something.

The places with all the reject components at QA stage are in class 1 from the 3 point list above, and they all have staff who are skilled and conscientious, yes, real sorry your shit is going to be a week late buddy, but you will get exactly the quality you ordered and paid for, and not one iota less, and not masked by cpu intensive software calibration to make it seem as good.

And none of them are into volume production.

 

I want to look at some of the practical aspects of electric vehicles, while ignoring the electric vehicles themselves.

Here in the UK gasoline and diesel are bought at the pump by the litre, there are many “independent” retailers and some 88% of the price you pay at the pump is duty or tax of one form or another.

If we call it 37 kWh per gallon (imp) and £1.15 per litre then x 4.54 = £5.22 per gallon and £5.22 / 37 = £0.14 per kWh and as I have always said many times elsewhere when you compare disparate forms of energy they all cost you around about the same in unit price per kWh, and this is of course no accident… if diesel was £0.80 per gallon I could run my old lister start-o-matic and sell electricity back to the grid and make a profit.

A 50 kWh battery is becoming the new norm for electric cars.

Here in the UK we also have a 240 VAC @ 50 Hz mains supply.

It’s AC so it’s not quite as simple as DC, but for the purposes of this post we can call 1 ampere at 240 volts AC equivalent to 240 watts, so a little over 4 hours to get 1 kWh at a 1 ampere rate.

So 4 x 50 = 200 hours to fully charge a 50 kWh battery, except it isn’t, there are losses, so we will call it 80% efficient as a process, including thermal losses in all the electronics and electrical conductors, and losses in the chemical charging process, and 80% is a pretty favourable figure, so 250 hours to charge a 50 kWh battery at a 1 ampere rate.

So 25 hours to charge a 50 kWh battery at a 10 ampere rate.

Here in the UK we have the best domestic plug and socket design on the planet, but what few realise is that the sole purpose of the fuse in the fused plug is to protect the wire, nothing else.

In theory it is a 13 ampere plug, so in theory you can draw 13 x 240 = 3,120 watts, in practice you might want to consider that a temporary peak rating rather than a continuous rating, I tend to be a bit “properly engineered is overengineered” so I tend do go one size up in cable wiring and so on, and still be cautious about current draw… because I tend to base my calculations on voltage drop at full load so when I wired up the shed at the bottom of someone’s garden 35 metres of 4.5 mm2 cable was used inside MT ducting and that shit will carry 13 amperes all day and all night with minimal thermal generation and voltage drop.

Anyway, 25 hours to charge a 50 kWh battery at a 10 ampere rate.

That isn’t practical, it needs to come down to 8 hours, and we can’t shrink the battery, so all that remains is to treble the power draw, so now we are at 8 hours to charge a 50 kWh battery at 30 amperes @ 240 VAC @ 50 Hz

Now we come to the first practical issue, we cannot use a domestic plug and socket because of the 30 amperes, nor can we use the domestic downstairs socket wiring loop, we have to run a new cable from the main breaker and consumer unit, and it is going to have to be 10 mm2 and it is going to have to have its own circuit and breaker maybe 40 amp.

So now we are rewiring part of the ground floor of the house, and it has to be done right, so conduit as well, it will be going through walls so holes to be drilled, and it will need a new earth down where the socket goes and *ideally* a separate local CU/breaker box in the garage just above the new 30 amp industrial socket, which needs a switch too, you do not want it live all the time, so a nice 30 amp breaker switch too.

We are probably easily at £250 in materials here even if I DIY myself, and lets be honest, it’s not a very elegant system, because there is nothing in it to prevent the cooker and electric shower and everything else in the house being turned on, and tripping the main 40 amp breaker from the meter tails to the main CU.

Remember, 40 amps is enough to run everything in a standard house, simultaneously, now we are adding a 30 amp load…

So we can get a bit more sophisticated and put the 30 amp system on a timer, 10 pm to 6 am, bottom line is it can be made to work.

And we just, “accidental like” stumbled across the sole reason for Tesla to sell the power wall, it’s basically a trickle charge tank that fills gradually 24/7 and dumps into the car on demand at power rates that the domestic wiring can’t handle… it’s a good idea, but you add another 80% efficient system into the circuit so now you’re down to 64% overall efficiency in kWh extracted from the mains to kWh charge present in the EV battery.

Because we also just “accidental like” stumbled across the other problem with all this, we can make this system work, for ONE EV PER HOUSE with a 50 kWh battery.

To run TWO electric vehicles per house, we have an issue, because the basic supply and CU (consumer unit) isn’t rated for that sort of power, even if we put it on a timer to run overnight.

So while the supply to the house itself can take the power, out wiring job just got more complex, essentially we will need a complete separate supply and CU from the domestic circuit, and this bitch is going to be an 80 amp circuit from the meter tails to the garage / charge point.

Your DIY £250 parts bill just turned into £1,000, plus you’ll need a certified by the electric company sparky to wire the 25 mm2 tails from your new CU to the existing supply…. and you’ll be running either twin 10 mm2 circuits to independent CU/Switch/30a sockets in the garage, or a single 25 mm2 to the twin CU/switch/30a sockets.

If you have a single EV and draw 50 kWh per night @ £0.15 per kWh then you are drawing £7.50 a night, call it 6 days a week and you have 6 x 52 = 312 days, and 312 days at £7.50 = £2,340 per annum.

OK, you aren’t buying anything at the gas pumps at £1.15 per litre.

What you did do though was add 50 kWh of baseload to the electricity grid overnight, and this is just one house with one car.

5 million cars doing this is 5,000,000 x 50 = 250,000,000 kWh per night, or 250,000 mWh per night, basically you are adding to the grid baseload by 25,000 megawatts for 8 hours every night, that’s 25 gigawatts for 8 hours every night.

And this is ONLY 5 million electric cars.

Now, if you are wondering about actual UK grid numbers, wonder no more, and go here

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

So, as I type this at 1 pm, on a saturday, grid load is 31.4 gigawatts…

45 gigawatts is capacity, and daily peaks often run around the 40 gigawatt mark.

Baseload generating capacity comes from hydro, nuke, or coal/gas, that’s it, there is no solar at night and wind while useful isn’t baseload, unless you want to go back to the days of sailing ships and everyone is 3 days late going to work because their tesla was becalmed.

Currently we only have 8 gigawatts of nuke capacity, so even running all the nukes at max exclusively to charge electric vehicles we are still woefully short of the 25 gigawatts we need for JUST 5 million EVs

So basically that means the coal and gas fired plants are going to be redlined all night every night.. not good for longevity and planned maintenance.

Tree huggers will tell you that connected EV’s are just batteries that can feed back into the grid, and that is true.. but…

But….

But.. so far we haven’t gone anywhere near the level of tech required for that, so far we are only talking about “dumb” loads on the grid to charge our only 5 million EV’s, you may as well start over again if you are going to talk about feeding in to the the grid, because you need extra breakers and safety systems and grid certified pure sine wave inverters that lock sync to grid clock frequency, WHICH VARIES EVER SO SLIGHTLY FROM MINUTE TO MINUTE.

Shit just got *really* expensive, and it raises yet another problem, demand exceeded capacity so 50% of grid connected EV’s just drained their batteries to charge the other 50%, and all this extra shit is extra layers of 80% efficiency being added on, 64% drops to 51% etc.

Speaking as an engineer, efficiency doesn’t matter a fuck to the lone guy out in a field or on a boat, so what if your system is only 50% efficient, you don’t care, you are still getting power where otherwise you would not.

When it comes to the large scale though, the inverse is true, you live and die by fractions of a single percentage point in efficiency, going from 82.3% efficient to 82.2% efficient can ruin your whole fucking week, when you are talking large scale, it is literally hundeds of thousands of wasted dollars pouring through your hands every hour, and that shit adds up *real* fast.

Which means, amongst other things, from the grid perspective they have no choice but to treat inverted feeds from EV batteries the same as solar and wind, it’s not baseload.

We just, all “accidental like” tripped over the third big revelation, you cannot manage a grid like this unless you can manage the loads, and hence so called “smart” meters.

Like everything else in life it starts off “voluntary” and before you have many more grey hairs it’s fucking mandatory, like seat belts and crash helmets, for “the common good”… and it’s pretty fucking easy to enforce, electric is 16p per kWh with a smart meter or 32 p per kWh with an old fashioned dumb meter.

Now the grid can decide that none of the EV’s in Bristol get to start charging at 11 pm, it will be 12 pm instead, and the EV’s in Sheffield can go on grid feed mode from 10:30 pm to 11:30 pm while one of the grid turbines is down for peridoic maintenance and inspection.

Meanwhile those running the grid and generating electricity, you know, greedy corporations, can continue to run pretty much the existing infrastructure for a while longer, and for example Hickley point C (now under construction) will add 3.2 gigawatts, it’s one of eight new stations being built, so 8 x 3.2 = 25.6 gigawatts… just enough to provide overnight baseload charging for 5 million EV’s

What a fucking coinkydink… because 5 million EV’s by 2020-2025 is one of those government think tank numbers.

With 100% new vehicles being EV by 2040, which is just about the right sort of timeline, public acceptance and opinion wise, if you are going to start building 400-450 gigawatts of new nuke power plants by 2040, just in time to run all those EVs, cars and trucks and buses and all.

Given the water cut numbers for Ghawar and all, it’s actually probably sensible, and I’m actually a fan of nuke power, and roll on fusion power… but….

If all this reminds you of the inception of things like Standard Oil and the Railroads in the US, then you’re not far wrong.

Please note, as promised, I haven’t talked about actual EV’s anywhere here, I have talked about the practicalities of the electric power generation and distribution systems required, and NONE of this shit is going to be done along engineering practicality and best practices, ALL of it is being done along the lines of robber barons and corporate hegemony.

Even the one huge remaining practical problem can be solved at the stroke of a pen.

I live in a house with on street parking, and the road in front of me is an A road, my font “garden” is literally wide and long enough for me to park my motorcycle and store two rubbish bins, and out front on the road is residents parking, for which I have 2 permits for 2 cars.

At the stroke of a pen “street furniture” goes up, in UK law those providing “infrastructure” such as BT or cable TV or power grid, do not need planning permission to install street furniture, nor does the council to install parking meters or street lamps.

At the stroke of a pen everyone with on street parking can find a charging post put every car length along this road, and in management synergy you can theh combine residential parking permissions and car charging and vehicle licencing and insurance and everything else, because smart meters and smart cards are not just for houses and phones.

If I am a nice law abiding citizen with a registered domicile and with a legal and insured vehcile and I myself am legal, why, then I can plug my EV into the post in front of my house and both park and charge at the same time.

Easy to put a sensor into the post too, oi, central computer, there is a vehicle next to me that isn’t plugged in, it isn’t even registered to this address, hell, it doesn’t even have an ID (shades of idiocracy… UNSCANNABLE!!!)

Best of all, none of this shit is mandatory, no new laws required, just friendly nice helpful environmentally safe companies providing a valuable service for those who want it.

Whaddayamean you don’t want it… UNSCANNABLE!!!

Of course, it is technically possible to make a 1950’s english electric milk float style EV, but nobody will, every single EV will have MIPS to spare, and it will be used…. look at the new SAFECAR thing being voted in without a peep in the states, no safety standards, the onboard computers do everything, and I mean everything, if the fucking thing can drive itself it can sure as fuck scan every cunt with a phone with bluetooth/wifi/nfc who walks past, and it can sure as fuck report where it is and who is using it, and it can sure as fuck coperate with the smart meter in the smart charging post and the smart utility company to manage profits H^H^H^H loads and demand and so on.

There is NO OTHER POSSIBILITY that what I state here to be actual fact and actual plans that are actually being put into place, all I am doing here is joining the dots.

My only conjectures are that things that could be done will be done, because my life experience tells me that this is so.

You and I, we can sit down and discuss for example my father, and my grandfather, when grandad started driving it was like walking, you bought or made a pair of shoes, and they took you where you willed, and the very idea of licencing was ludicrous, never mind road rules or anything else, sure, there was in theory some shit that applied in far off places like London, but where he was, nah.

Dad was the same, drove for years since he was 14, it was the british army that gave him an actual paper licence, he never sat a driving test in his life.

Me, my dad taught me to drive at 12, ok it was overseas, real culture shock to come back to the UK and be told I needed all sorts of licences and permissions and other bits of paper to do what I had been doing for years, what’s that, you’re sixteen, forget it kid, you can ride a moped and that’s it…. me having ridden motorcyles, driven cars, driver 4 wheel drives, driven old foden arctics, driven boats… you got to be fucking kidding me.

“Smart meters” are the answer to the dumb gas pump, CCTV in filling stations and paying for your fuel in plastic is just a half way house on the road of convenience, full blown CPU’s running full blown OS’s and code in *everything* is the way forwards, and all that shit only makes sense if it all talks to everything else.

And dumb fucks, *especially* dumb fucks in technology, can only moan about why would I want an internet of things toaster, duh…

The Ti disable chip in almost all inkjet cartridges is why, you are not the fucking buyer.

YOU may buy one or two EV’s every few years, to a power generation company, their customers are the guys who manufacture and put 5 million new EV’s on the road every fucking year, THEY talk to each other, YOU do not figure.

Everyone asks what comes next after the fiat money property bubble.

I have ALWAYS maintained that ENERGY PER CAPITA is everything, and have said many many many times, 25 kWh per person per day, that’s basic civilised lifestyle.

EVERYTHING is about energy, and the EV revolution is all about energy, and therefore all about money and power.

For THESE people all the advantages of a gallon of diesel are disadvantages, electrons pushed down a conductor have NONE of the disadvantages of a gallon of diesel, and it gets amazingly double plus good when you can exert extremely fine control and tracking of those electron flows by other electron flows in data streams controlled by CPU’s running software, it’s a fucking wet dream.

Within 6 months you EV CPU will have enough data on you and your usage patterns to allow grid companies to predict six months in advance how much power you will be wanting between 11pm and 7 am on the 13th June 2020.

The only thing we are missing then is the smartest guys in the room, or a hurricane, or lithium whiskers, or stuxnet for scada/canbus, or something, but whatever it is, there will be profit in it, lots and lots of profit.

We aready digitised and virtualised the fiat currency you will NEED to participate in this new energy economy.

Again, all “accidental like”.

All we are missing from the plan is the smart street furniture being remotely addressable on a street by street basis, and then to broadcast as little as 3 metres wirelessly, shut down, or limit power expenditure to drivetrain to 5 kw or 5 mph

Feel free to get out and walk, the shit, EV’s and all, can still track you and your phone walking past.

Most of the building blocks are already in place, the remaining ones are being built as we speak.

What effective measures are in place to prevent abuse, even if it is all 100% “voluntary”

What crime do you believe you will be charged with, should you vandalise or otherwise interfere with any of this infrastructure?

I’ll give you a clue. Terrorism.

At this point, it won’t matter if you are a neo nazi or a raghead or a britain’s got talent fan.

Not that it *has* to be a Huxley distopian future, it doesn’t *have* to be that way, there are ways out if you yourself choose to be a technocrat, as opposed to a user or a luddite.

That it is coming, and as decribed here, that, IMHO, is no longer a subject for debate, there are simply too many connected pieces already in play, to make a profit and survive any large business will have no option but to embrace and extend.

Such is the real nature of technological revolution.

Now you know how all the horse and steam power guys felt when electrictrickery came in… and the wireless telegraph, and the tesla synchronous motor, and the electric light bulb.

Adapt and survive and prosper, or do not.

Some things become so commonplace that they are just accepted, but quite why they are just accepted, nobody really knows, or talks about, or thinks about.

Let’s take Amazon, and online tat store where you can buy anything.

Except, you can’t.

This was prompted by someone telling me this morning that for the first time they decided to use a main street supermarket online shopping thing, since their car is off the road for a week waiting for a short piece of wiring and proprietary terminations for the multifunction indicator / lights / wipers etc stalk on the steering column.

Apparently they could order all sorts of stuff, including nurofen and booze, but they couldn’t order a kitchen knife, even though the local superstore that would be fulfilling the order has a whole aisle full of knives and pots and pans, you basically can’t buy anything sharp online… but you can buy drugs and booze.

Amazon will sell me a sharp knife, and booze, but not nurofen.

It reminded me of something someone said to me a while ago, you basically cannot buy viagra / cialis etc from a reputable online retailer, and why not, because it is no more lethal than aspirin / paracetamol / codeine etc which are available over the counter, you can readily overdose on paracetamol and booze bought legally over the counter, you’ll wish you died if you do, and you will you died quicker, but you can do it and despite it being regularly abused, you can still do it at will.

So why can’t you go online and buy erection pills?

The only convincing argument I have ever heard for this sort of thing is “well, it costs 0.07 pence per kilo to make, so until the patent expires we’re sticking to the channels that allow maximum revenue, and avoiding the supermarket shelf by the checkout like the plague”

I say the only convincing one, because all the other arguments have glaring holes in them that you could drive a bus through, and corporate greed doesn’t… simples.

And suddenly, places like Amazon and Tesco are no longer amazing futuristic fantasy lands where anything is possible, suddenly they are a cross between coca-cola land theme park (nuka world) and the company store in a mining town.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t any deals worth doing, there are, last week or so I bought the ballscrew linear motion rail I talked about in a previous post, it was a deal worth doing, but like any good company store amazon still got their pound of flesh, from me and from the vendor.

The vendor was chinese, the item was shipped from a bonded warehouse in France, at first I thought this was an amazon fulfilled by amazon sort of thing, but no, I dig a little deeper (easy enough when you have an invoice from someone in china and someone who can speak cantonese) it turns out that several chinese entrepreneurs have taken over huge warehouses in france and made them bonded (bonded means technically that shit hasn’t been imported and isn’t liable for duty/taxes until it leaves the warehouse) and then opened shop to chinese businesses, why hold stock in Shanghai 3 weeks away from europe when you can hold it 3 days away from the point of sale…

which is why the first stop on my imported from china by DHL package was Le Havre in France, not Shanghai.

As someone who has known a few people who have jumped through hoops and bought their own EAN barcodes to list their own shit for sale on amazon, never to sell a single item, because basically it got buried and you would find their item on page 347 of results, this is of course a direct response to, and a direct affront to, “fulfilled by amazon”  because generally speaking bonded warehouses are not small operations.

But what these chinese guys are doing isn’t just bonded warehousing, it is bonded warehousing, stock control and distribution… “fulfilled by chinky”

Amazon is just the storefront and payment gateway.

If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, it fucking should have, because we are now one step away from starting up alibaba.co.uk and alibaba.fr and alibaba.de.

And alibaba ain’t fucking amazon, it’s much, much, much better.

Go on, go to the home page, and right there is a RFQ or request for quotations link.

Type in sidenafil and you get many many choices, from 1 kilo baggies up to 500 kilos a time, in bulk powder form.

Powder no good to you, then buy a fucking pill press, hundreds to choose from from a couple of grand on up.

Want to buy an electric car, there are fucking pages full of them…. if that doesn’t suit you then you can buy all the components separately.

And at a stroke the biggest impediment to doing business with china or doing business on alibaba vanishes, because the legal transaction and your legal currency never leave your own legal country… it’s not like it was 10-12 years ago when I was importing aftermarket laptop batteries direct, nobody doubted you could wire money abroad, but could you get product back that was any good… and what do you do if things go wrong….

So what does this mean for us in the west?

Well, as we already discussed, we in the west know all about corporate greed, and we have a system that supports it, so you’d *think* hundreds of millions of new potential customers in china would attract the western corporate greed types like sharks to blood in the water…

… and it did…

… and pretty much without exception our sharks found themselves being eaten alive by their sharks, and our sharks ran away screaming about copyrights and IP and other shit.

EEV blog link

Say what you want, we *love* to talk about competition and capitalism here in the west, but, we don’t really mean it…. if you want to know what these words really mean, go to china or hang out on alibaba for a few hours.

Really, take a look at that eev blog link above, a 7 buck item.

To all those who say all chinese shit is crap, I see you, and I raise you Linux.

Take linux away from being virtual code and make it physical goods, and let everyone compete openly and you have china today, yes, there *is* a lot of complete fucking dreck out there, but the evolutionary trend is upwards.

What many fail to see is that 99% of the stuff we already buy came from places like china anyway, but the middlemen and corporate greed means the stuff we see on our shelves is several generations out of date all the time.

By the time all this comes to pass and you can buy *locally* from alibaba and chinese bonded warehouses *routinely* you’ll start to see a real revolution and real evolution in technological change.

Amazon will be toast.

Or, the chinese could just buy amazon, and fleabay, and dhl, and a bunch of other shit, from their stock of yank t bills, and call it chump change.

That 7 buck DELIVERED component tester should make you shit your boots, if it doesn’t, you do not get it.

You don’t get that there are thousands of competing items to it, and they are all evolving all the time, so fast that the January 2017 version is old hat in September 2017, meanwhile fluke are working on another version of their 5000 dollar network tester, the sort of tool that in my years of experience you only came across on a government site and even there there was only one guy who knew how to use it properly, the rule being for field engineers that no bit of kit aside from the company laptop should cost more than 50 quid, and suddenly alibaba is full of choices of CAT5/6 structured cabling testers at that price point, and however much you want to diss its specs and features and accuracy compared to the 5000 buck fluke, next years model will be better, and probably 5 buck cheaper than this years 60 buck model.

I know someone using chinese odb2 car scanners and diagnosis, he buys a new one every 12 months, and every new one has even more features and utility, and in his own words, a complete new set of kit every year is cheaper than the software licences for a year for the old western shit that he was using, and the old western shit locked him out of all kinds of things… he can actually buy odometers from scrapped motorcycles and reset them to the correct mileage for your bike, no more having to go to the factory and pay a 300 buck premium when your fancy new instrument cluster dies…. he waves the chinese thing at me with a manic look on his face, points at the odometer and says just one of these jobs a fucking month makes this thing worthwhile… I can’t even dream of doing this with the factory official shit, I’m locked out of everything… and I’m reminded of the john deere software shit going down.

At present in late 2017 there is only one barrier remaining to the chinese.

I made the choice to buy a UK manufactured fibre galvo laser for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is *not* that it is arguably 25% better across the board than anything the chinese can make for half the price or less, because it is possible to buy a chinese job that is near as fucking dammit as good across the board.

I bought a UK manufactured machine because *some* of my potential customer base have that as a tick box in *their* production paper trails, was the machine that did this process built and tested and calibrated and certified in the UK or Germany or Sweden, yes / no… and no is no deal.

It’s purely a paper trail exercise, but it means extra work that I can get, because nobody breaks the paper certification trail, and some of that shit ends up as components in quite exotic and expensive shit.

After the alibaba.co.uk (we already have the local to the EU bonded warehouses coming in) that last hurdle can be trivially overcome by assembling and testing that shit here in europe, and then it’s fucking game over.

 

Or from the latin the seventh month, OCTober being eighth, NOVember ninth, DECember tenth, talking to a 40 year old a week or two ago who did not know this.

Came about because of a discussion about what they did know, apparently, because everyone knows it, do I look fucking stupid?

September literally means the seventh month, yet it is the ninth month, how do you reconcile that with your claim that you know shit because everyone knows shit… did you think the dinosaurs used the same calendar as us then?

Did you not know that things as fundamental to society as culture and calendars have changed through time, and in many ways are still changing, it was only a couple of years ago that the length of one day per year was altered every so slightly.

I used to like to wind up astrophysicysts (sic) by asking them since we could calculate the event horizon of a black hole and therefore circumference, what was a diameter, since you talk about schwartzwild radius, after all, Pi is alleged to be a universal constant, and black holes are in the universe, so please tell me what circumference / diameter = for a black hole.

One or two would say actually that is a *fucking* good fundamental question that relates to our entire concept of space time geometry, most would tell me that I could not possibly understand the math, should they try to explain it to me.

Practically Pi works anywhere here on the surface of the earth, and practically our current calendar and time system works anywhere here on the surface of the earth, so to all intents and purposes, they are universal.

However both existed before being codified and quantified by man, time passed, and geometry existed.

Apparently it is no longer good enough to take thermometer readings, I can sit a sea level and place my newly made tube into boiling water and make a mark on it, and into ice and make another mark, and subdivide the difference with 100 other equally spaced marks, or 180 if you prefer, but no, this is not acceptable, all these historical sea temperature numbers now need to be “adjusted”

Similary one would have thought that if N1 = total number of working age people in a country and N2 = total number of people in full time employment and N3 = total number of people in part time employment and N4 = total number unemployed, then N1 = N2 + N3 + N4, but oh no, we have “seasonally adjusted” numbers for N4, and the skank ho pumping out womb turds on the state isn’t counted, nor are the layabout “disabled” and all the rest of the shit.

The question wasn’t are you blind or deaf or stupid, the question was do you drive a railway locomotive for a living, because we are trying to work out how many do vs how many passengers there may be, I do not want to know your reasons for not being Casey Jones, I just want to know if you are, or are not.

But, the problem is, some people just won’t be told, even when it demonstrably costs them money…

I had a customer last week, wanted something done in marine ply, which comes in two varieties, one to a British Standard that comes with a BS kite mark, and one to Lloyds spec with comes with a kite mark and a lloyds stamp.

Only the lloyds is good enough for boat building, the other one is good for all exterior use.

The british standard says anything over 3/16″ has to be at least 5 ply and use waterproof glues and not contain knots etc.

So I quote the guy for materials and he says it is too expensive, he’ll get the materials himself, so he does, and it’s some shit from indonesia and it certainly ain’t marine ply, it ain’t even normal ply, it’s lagged in fire retardant, so it doesn’t cut on a laser.

So he tells me to go out an buy ordinary builders ply and do the job, so I do, and he is whining about the wasted materials, and I tell him to get his money back, and he can’t, because they said no, fuck you, and he accepted it.

So I have done my bit of the job perfectly, but overall he is unhappy, because of his bit of the job, but nothing is his fault and no lessons will be learned so the unhappiness has to be shifted on to me.

GOOD / FAST / CHEAP, choose any two… bwahahahaha, spits dummy out, no, I want all three.

so choose any two then becomes choose any one, but not from that list…. the cheap indonesian shit + the cheap builders shit cost near enough the same as the marine grade, but now the job has been done in cheap builders shit, which I can break apart with my hands, so it’s arguable that even putting the “gets wet all the time” aspect aside for the moment, the shit may not even be strong enough.

get this, it’s a fucking prototype of a thing, and it is going to the client, so if they like it, they will order 50 more.

what do you think the chances are?

It’s a bit like the guy down the road, he has a fancy car, drives it hard from cold and generally abuses the fuck out of it, but every saturday he spends 3 hours washing and waxing and detailing the fucking thing, so it *looks* beautiful, but beyond the paintwork and wheels and interior it just gets rode hard and hung up wet.

If all this seems sort of random and disjointed it isn’t really, it’s all about nobody knowing the innate nature and history and usage of anything, and the thing is, most of them like it that way, and will fight and resent you if you try to tell them otherwise.

which brings me to the three guys I met last week, they were all very crifto and understated and flying under the radar, and there was a tense moment when one of them said something and I said something and so on, and suddenly one of them said something very neo-nazi white-power, and they just look at me, I just grinned, I got my own beliefs boys, I don’t care what yours are, and I don’t care if you like mine, but me and mine are the only ones I give a fuck about.

The moment of tension passes, and they start opening up and talking, and fuck me, talking about their neo nazi beliefs is like talking about the shit tank discharge port on a 747, there is a *lot* to these guys and they are all busy educating themselves as hard and fast as they can, all sorts of practical skills and old fashioned knowledge, not a fucking whisper about planet nbiru or any of that shit…

What is interesting is a comment one of them made that I promptly forgot until today, he said that a credit reference agency had been hacked, heard it on “neo-nazi-(dark)net” he said, I’m not sure what I really thought when he said it, sort of yeah well everyone is being hacked lately, and that’s just the stuff that gets outed, and sort of dismissed it as there was an ongoing conversation, then today we learn it was Equifax, and it was big, and ongoing for months, and the scope was enough to perform identity theft on at the very least tens of millions of customers.

I sort of dismissed it by saying who cares, I don’t have any credit or debt anyway, and all three of them said same here, and the conversation sort of drifted on to other things.

See, the local bike garage that does my MOT’s, they rent the premises off my pet motor mechanic, who is literally next door, and my pet motor mechanic is actually a friend, and has quite the exotic car collection on the quiet, and on the quiet it is, he is a quiet guy, but everyone local with class who has a classic car knows him, and uses him.

But they see me as some middle aged born again wannabe, got a harley that I can’t ride and don’t ride, it’s a garage queen, you can tell from the odometer, so they are polite and all, and nice and pleasant and all, but, I can see it in their eyes… know what I mean.

Now in the case of the garage, I don’t care, they are 500 yards away and the price is right for an mot once a year, but I do observe that they do not observe that I get on well with their landlord, and someone who gets on well with their landlord is not going to be the sort of person they have me pegged as, but, they don’t see it.

The neo nazis, in a way I also don’t care what they think, and made no effort to make them think one way or another, but in a way I hope they got it right, when they looked at me, not *too* right, but not too wrong either, as in by all means come calling when the wheels fall off the wagon, but come politely.

It all reminds me a bit of Kim and the Nukes of Nork (great name for a band) in that nobody really seems to be concerned if they are reading the other guy wrong, or if the other guy is reading them right, it’s all a big game and they hold most of the cards, so who gives a fuck.

Kim had an english and swiss education, the sort you only get when daddy is a king or a shipping magnate, so it’s a dead cert he spent his formative years in the company of those who pull the strings of politicians the world over, and at that point it doesn’t matter if he is smart or stupid, he grew up alongside these people, and they him.

It’s the same sort of mistake Netenyahoo (sic) and tail wagged dog allies made with Syria and Assad, everyone overestimated their own hand and role in the game, and under estimated the other guy.

Now the saudis are courting russia and the chinese, because their erstwhile best buddies yewessay and double secret best buddies israhell are starting to look like johnny depp in a truckstop fist fight, the makeup is running, they’ve spoken all their cool lines, and the other guys are still stood there holding tyre irons, and they aren’t backing down.

Back to the beginning of this spiel, people who don’t know the meanings of anything any more, people who forget that the british royal family was mainly german, and only changed their name to windsor because of the nazis, or, to be factually correct, because of the english people, who would have deposed them if they didn’t distance themselves, in appearance at least, from the bloody germans.

the war ends and everyone is best mates again, seems the bloody germans weren’t so different from the bloody english after all, in fact they had more in common with each other than the bloody poles, bloody belgians and bloody french, who stood in between the two.

a sentiment that was often expressed by old adolf himself, and many bloody englishmen, before our glorious leaders and bankers drew us into a war that nobody wanted.

one of the never quoted little snippets of fact is that in the 72 years since the war ended, nobody has ever found even one shred of documentary evidence that adolf was lying when he said he had no plans to invade der bloody britishers, nor even the bloody french.

he *might* have stopped at reuniting the germanic peoples, or he *might* have stopped for a bit, then carried on later, which is the argument many make, but the fact is we will never know.

we will never know because others forced his hand, and if there is anything that this piece is about, it is the fact that history is replete with examples of people who had their hands forced by the actions of others, and bereft of examples of people sitting back and letting the other guy get on with it.

Let us not forget that the crusades were a response to the expansion of the muslim empire into western lands, and one thing humanity is never short of is scores to settle.

The last 60 years is little more than an accounting of various peoples writing out future IOU’s for such scores, thinking that they would never come due.

So another way of looking at history is not so much who has been shitting on who, big time, but who has been called all sorts of nasty names, but nobody has actually tried to shit on them.

Nobody has actually shit on the USA, or Russia, or China, not mainland style, but Russia and China haven’t spent the last 60 years shitting on others, and now more and more players are getting up and saying you know what, fuck it, and fuck this shit.

Kim and the Nukes of Nork, the Syrians, the Argentinians, the little guys that nobody really liked, but most people admired for not ever giving up against the gang of popular bullies, and now we have Galicia and Basques talking about quitting spain, the scots want out of the uk, it’s spreading everywhere, brexit frexit italexit grexit, and it not fringe splinter loonies any more.

large numbers of people are saying good riddance, let the fuckers go

large numbers of people are saying let us the fuck go, we already voted, now fucking do it

increasingly smaller numbers of people are saying noooooo, keep the status quo.

“the shot that was heard around the world”

this is what putin was talking about with the norks

Half Life 3, “beware of unforeseen consequences”

A simpler way to describe systemic failures is to tell you to picture a row of dominoes toppling each other over as they fall… you, or someone, only tipped the first one over…

https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-piece-by-piece-d7f5547f3929

 

So this is a guy who has a business bank account with HSBC, and they froze it, presumably because someone thought he was funneling drug money for Daesh, and what happened next is everything started collapsing.

He still doesn’t get it, because he says the answer is HSBC are shit and he should have had a separate bank account so that the loss of use of one didn’t impact him.

He’d still have had to alter all his subscription payment details for everything, and there is the fucking real problem, software that stops working as soon as the debit / credit / bank account associated with it stops working.

To be sure, I pay my monthly rent for my home via a standing order from one bank account, so if that bank account went tits up, I’d have to set up another standing order from another bank or draw cash and pay said landlord.

This is a world away from what he describes, which is alerts going out electronically that otherwise valid debit cards are suspended, and so all kinds of software stops working (hello crapple) and all kinds of other software starts ticking.

I’d say this guy should sue the ass off HSBC, except they have more lawyers than he has, so good luck with that.

But HSBC isn’t responsible for him and his business being wide open to systemic failure, he is, and a secondary bank account will not prevent that.

For example a secondary bank account is no use if all your software is associated with a primary email address and that is no longer available as that account was associated with the primary bank account.

What we are essentially discussing here is “the cloud”, vs my business where all the software that I use runs locally, it does not need a net connection to install or work, and I have copies of all of the installers so I can reinstall them all onto bare metal should I so choose.

It’s one of the reasons I still have for example Paint Shop Pro 8, to be fair I have other photo editing software, ACDsee ultimate 9, etc etc, and it is the exact reason I do not have fucking Photoshop or Office 365 or Google docs or OneDrive or any other of that crap, it’s just asking for systemic failure.

Space the dominoes so far apart that any one of them can topple, and it can’t touch any others, and you have eliminated systemic failure, don’t get me wrong, it’s still a pain in the fucking ass that could take a week to sort out, but sort it out you could.

Yeah, the guy is right, it’s fucking atrocious that it was only bad PR that got his case sorted, still leaves everyone else affected out in the dark, but like I said, he still doesn’t get it, because two separate bank accounts can be frozen as easily as one… I know someone who had four separate bank accounts frozen when their government mandated a bail in a couple of years ago, you just revealed an extra hidden domino a little further up the food chain than your first domino.

****MICROSOFT**** can disappear off the face of the planet tomorrow and all my microsoft software and operating systems will continue to work, PSP8 will continue to work, Rhino will continue to work, etc etc etc… and yes, I do keep a current image of the latest suse and a few other linux clones lying around, just in case like, as well as copies of every microsoft OS from 9x on up.

It’s called avoiding systemic risk.

HSBC and many others have been gutting their in house IT for decades now, and they aren’t the only one, so there is no excuse for anyone even remotely involved in IT to think that *any*  bank has a robust internal IT structure.

The fact that this guy gives shout outs to paypalsucks and massacard speaks volumes to me about the parlous state of affairs.

As does the “ok I’ll do what it says on the screen and phone this number…” I’d have been in the local branch every day with my accountant and a police officer and a live streaming web cam demanding the account is closed and my money was given to me in the form of a bankers draft… it wouldn’t head off any money laundering / drug dealing investigation or liability, the paper trail is still there.

Suspending an account doesn’t make sense, the paper trail *is* the evidence, it does not need to be frozen in carbonite, and even if they money itself goes “missing” polly peck style, the evidence is still all there.

This is of course all assuming that HSBC is solvent and this isn’t some scam to cover up an internal cash flow problem.

This guy’s entire fucking business model is fucked, and he can’t see it, he can only see the one domino that fell, and this is someone who codes for a living, and still can’t see progression.

The guy is complaining about his mortgage and not being able to pay employees, all he has to do is tell them all he is investigating suspicious activity and until further notice his mortgage payments and staff wages are frozen.

Why not, if the arguments given to him were valid, they would be valid to pass on to his mortgage company and staff, if they are not valid to pass on, then they are not valid.

It brings us back to the old adage, if it can be taken from you, it is not yours.

But that needs a little refinement, because as we see here, not everything requires squads of jackbooted stasi to kick your door in and load up a truck with your shit.

So, if it can be *trivially* taken from you, with a single mouse click, it is not yours.

But even this does not address systemic risk, such as this guy and many others face.

Sure, in this case HSBC were a bunch of worthless lying fucks, but that does not change the entirely separate issue that HSBC are not responsible for this guy choosing to run a business rabidly exposed to systemic risk and failure.

That’s what HSBC lawyers would argue, and I would agree with them.

Anyone want to take any bets with me that his IT business doesn’t have verified bare metal PC world new hardware back up and running in 4 hours backups, or a decent redundant pipe to the backbone so that a single JCB or backbone routing failure can’t take him out?

There are 10 types of people in this world, those that see systemic failure, and those that do not (old binary joke) and those that do can’t ignore it.

It wasn’t an aberration, a typo, a joke, it wasn’t a covevfe or whatever, Musk has been banging on about AI / skynet / terminator for weeks now.

Which puts him firmly on the same level as everyone expecting planet nbiru to arrive next week, the level where you have a stark choice between;

• A – Being a person who is too dumb and too ignorant to make any intelligent observations or speculations, eg a fucking asshole.
• B – Being a person who believed in fairytale shit, eg a fucking lunatic.

Pick one.

It doesn’t matter which one you pick, the jury is no longer out, which means everything he touches is going to turn to shit.

To be sure, it’s part of a world wide malaise, NASA scientists with plans to cool down Yellowstone, it’s about on a par with geologists with plans to build a faster than light starship.

Does anyone remember the NMS / MSX 16 bit computers?

I had one, made by Phillips, it ran Windows 1.1

It was the Tesla of computers, lots of quite clever ideas packaged together and hyped to fuck around the beginning of 16 bit computing… I bought one instead of an early atari… read the computer press today and you’ll read a lot of articles by people who clearly never used any of that shit back in the day about how the Psion / MSX / Spectrum / Atari / C64 / crapple ][ / Dragon / etc are the DNA of modern computing, proving that they neither know anything about evolution or computing, because all of these things were interesting failures, dead ends and cul de sacs on the route to what did come to pass.

Tesla will be the same, a future footnote in the history of EV’s somewhere on a par with the Jowett steam car today, some future Jay Leno type asshole will have a mint model x somewhere in a shed alongside a twingo and an old english electric milk float.

Musk himself it is claimed is a great engineer, yet he has never shown any of the traits of even a mediocre motor mechanic, and his success is down to a series of fortuitous business deals, zip2/compaq buyout xcom / paypal / fleabay buyout, with the common thread throughout of Musk wanting to be a CEO, and nobody else wanting Musk to be a CEO, so Musk shares more in common with Jobs than he does with Wozniak or Gates, in other words he is a fucking idiot with grand ideas who screams at other people when they fail to make his grand ideas work.

The differences between Musk and Jobs and most of the other similar natured assholes out there, is one way or another they got rich enough that people would put up with the screaming in exchange for the paycheck.

So now that musk has hyperloop up to 200 mph, the Chinese have announced plans to build a 2,400 mph version, and they have done the math, even if the western press has to search to find some chinese asshole who would breathlessly predict, in shades of Stephenson’s rocket, that human passengers would be unable to endure such ludicrously high speeds.

The guys riding the Saturn V upper stages to the moon went at 10.4 km/sec, which is 37,440 km/h, which is 23,400 miles per hour, so 10x faster than the chinese hyperloop, but none of them died of the speed.

I knew someone who met Buzz Aldrin, he told me that Aldrin said it was one of the things that pissed off all the Apollo crews, people only talked about who walked on the moon, or who walked on the moon first, nobody talked about all of them being the fastest humans that ever lived.

Down here on the surface escape velocity is 11.2 km/sec or around Mach 33 so the chinese hyperloop doing mach 3.1 aren’t even fucking close, though they will feel a weight loss if travelling a great circle route.

But, if they can do that sort of speed in atmosfear, it will be enough to ignite a scramjet on the track, but far more interesting than all that is the precision and control needed to run maglev at those speeds, fuck making bog standard 18650 LiOn cells slightly fatter, they’ll be playing with high temperature superconductivity and magnetic containment and steering to make it all work, and so the “drive” technology of the chinese hyperloop will have far reaching effects that blow anything Musk ever dreamed of out of the water, after all, the only difference between a linear electric motor and a radial one is one is curved into a circle and the other one is not.

Mach 3.1 on maglev is also a ballistic weapon platform with twice the velocity of anything a smokeless powder will do, see your .50 cal 49 gram hornady at 1,750 mph and raise you 100 tonnes of 144.00 cal train doing 2,400 mph… I don’t even want to think about the muzzle energy… 20 bullets in a kilo so 20,000 in a tonne so 2,000,000 in a hundred tonne train, so 18 kilojoules for the 50 cal and 50+ giga joules for the train.

Some cunt in Oklahoma will still try to make a handgun to fire it… lol

But if you needed any other metric to note that tesla was doomed, you only have to read about the workers complaining about conditions and pay in the factories, it should be robots from one end to the other.

If Musk or *anyone* else at Tesla was a real engineer then one of the first things they would have built in would be “follow my leader” and DGPS parking and retrieval and movement, just assemble the battery frame wheels drivetrain and a basic electronic package and the cars become their own production line, within the confines of a production facility, or a tesla sales room, or an owners property and garage, amazon robots should NOT blow away tesla cars for basic functionality.

The thing is amazon robots are built from the ground up to be an amazon robot, tesla cars started out as a concept with a chevy / ford IC car design in which they started crossing out all the things they didn’t like, and designing electric alternatives to fill the blanks, and then added an autopilot on top of that.

There is NOTHING in the tesla autopilot that you could not retrofit quite cheaply to any modern IC engined auto trans fly by wire vehicle, which is many of them.

The fact is they don’t, and they don’t because 95% of the sensors and patents are owned by Bosch.

Nobody buys a Bosch car, they buy a merc or a beemer or a volvo, but most of what makes the car work nowadays hidden away behind panels is Bosch or someone very similar.

Basically Bosch and Yamaha are your two real practical buy it today choices if you want to buy in electric motors for your bicycle factory, to make yourself an e-bicycle factory, and that shit just works out of the box.

CANbus yeah man no problem built in standard protocols, want a bunch of sensors that just plug in too? No problem man, so now you can go out and convert your bicycle factory to a e-bike with ABS factory.

Now here is the thing, one thing the proponents of EV’s all agree on, 95% of 95% of people’s journeys are 20 miles or less, so EV’s are fucking great, let’s go hug a fucking tree.

Well any argument that you can make FOR the EV, be it a tesla or a Nissan leaf, the e-bike wins hands down and blows you out of the water….  but but but I have me and three passengers… no matter, FOUR fucking e-bikes still blows you out of the water.

I actually *can* see myself buying or building (thanks bosch / yamaha etc) an ebike for myself in my future, so 30 mph and 250 watts is the current legal limit, age 14 or over, no licensing or limitations, me I don’t give a fuck, I have a 1700 cc harley so I can just go out and buy a proper electric scooter or motorcycle, say from yamaha or bultaco or many other well known brands or even a zero… the 2 wheeled tesla equivalent in terms of features and range and price point….. but being honest 30 mph and 250 watts is good enough, especially for an engineer than can make it 35 mph and 500 watts cos no fucker is going to know esp with the hidden feature / bluetooth/RF fob in pocket to enable full power, all my local in city journeys are 4 miles each way or less, most of the roads are 20 mph limit, some are 30… one bit of one is 40 but you can only do that at 2am, rest of the time there is traffic.

30 mph is a mile every 2 minutes, so a specific 4 mile journey is 8 minutes, in a car at 2 am it’s ten minutes, in a motorcycle it’s 6 or 7 minutes, in traffic an electric bicycle would be 10 minutes tops… in a car its 35, even a tesla or leaf, on a bike 15…

Course, maybe Musk doesn’t like the fact that Bosch call their level 3 connected car project Skynet (no.. seriously… and idiots tell me ze germans, zey heff no sense of humour…. germans have *great* senses of humour, it’s just different, and it seems to me as an auslander to lean heavily on satire rather than word play) So I dunno, maybe Musk read about that and did some bad mushrooms and then played a little wolfenstien, but he’s still a fucking tool…. and in future tesla will be remembered as well and as fondly as the MSX 16 bit computers and windows 1.1.

Gerald Ratner.

“our products are crap”

This is musk’s ratner moment.

 

99.999% of people, even after they have what DC electricity is, explained to them, will only know of or encounter two sorts.

1.5 VDC primary cells like AA, C, D etc.

12 VDC secondary lead acid batteries in their car.

So, DC is “safe”, hark back to edison and tesla/westinghouse etc.

In my trade as a marine engineer 30 years ago working on stuff that was old then, I would *often* come across huge banks of traction cells (big slabs of battery shaped like a slim pack of business cards) each one being 2 VDC, made up into big parallel and series connected banks that often ran to about 110 VDC.

It was instantly fatal to fuck with it, metal spectacles, metal watch straps, metal rings, and of course spanners and other tools, would result in horrific injuries and sometimes death, and then there was the voltage and current itself, with DC you get two seemingly random choices, depending on *which* muscle groups spasm and lock up when the power hits them, you either get thrown clear and suffer torn muscles and ligaments, or you get clamped on and the torn muscles and ligaments and all the rest of you start to cook, literally.

In later years in IT I’d see similarly huge DC battery banks in telephone switch exchanges, but the voltage was much lower, usually 48 VDC, still enough to very badly injure you, and possibly kill you… so not *as* dangerous as 110 VDC, but not “safe” by any means.

Bus bars would be slabs of solid copper bar, 2″ x 1″ and up, and it was common to space the +ve and -ve bus bars by enough distance that you couldn’t put one hand on one and one hand on the other by accident, so +ve down on side of a battery bank and the -ve down the other side 10 feet away or more.

Live superheated steam and heavy rotating machinery were other things that were treated with similar levels of respect, fuck with it and die, make a mistake and die, lose focus or attention and die, and if you don’t die and do live, you injuries might be so severe and painful you wish you did.

Now, in 2017, we are getting EV’s on the road with three times these DC voltages, and similar current delivery capacities, and if 110 VDC is possibly fatal, 350 VDC is fucking lethal.

It’s all very well to say “it’s contained” and that “safety precautions” have been made, but the people making these choices and decisions and designing this shit didn’t grow up working with 110 VDC and the injuries and fatalities it created… I did, I personally knew first hand;

1. one guy, we’ll call him Fred, his metal frame spectacles fell off, shorted the terminals on a big 110 VDC bank being charged by a 2 cylinder Gardner diesel and DC genny, tops of the batteries blew off taking all his face and both eyeballs and both ears and much of his neck and throat, he lived, with some hearing in one ear.
2. another guy, we’ll call him Tom, stainless steel rolex watch strap completed the circuit between a cable he was handling and an improperly shorted battery cage frame, his hand came off, though the stump was mainly cauterised.
3. two other guys, call them Dick and Harry, both had a hand clamp on and the power went through their bodies, killing and cooking them at the same time.

Three of these four incidents happened within 100 feet of me, people who weren’t there attempt to be grisly as say they assume it is the smell that stays with you.. it isn’t, it’s the taste, that shit gets in the air and you breathe it in and taste it.

All batteries are basically chemical storage mediums, it’s chemistry at work inside the battery, and you can pull an isolator all you want, that chemistry is still there, wanting to work… just gimme a fucking circuit bitch, any circuit will do.

So yeah, I’m sure Tesla et al can design an EV that doesn’t cook the unwary when then a rear light cluster is changed out, but what of firefighters and recovery guys and anyone else involved with an accident damaged vehicle?

As someone who worked recovery for a while, I can tell you one of the first things you did with a mangled wreck was check the engine compartment, if you saw diesel injectors, you relaxed, if you saw spark plugs, you started to get cautious, if you saw LPG plumbing, you started to get very very cautious.

As someone who worked in motorway recovery, and who was also a time served marine engineer, I can tell you now, if I was still in recovery, my policy would be I’m not touching your fucking wrecked EV, not with anything less than a grab claw on the end of a HIAB anyway.

I had occasion to look inside the guts of an EV late last week, it only just occurred to me today, those big beefy DC power cables weren’t armoured, not properly… in the boats the SWA cable was itself run in thick wall steel pipe duct. and it was already tucked away behind an outer steel hull and some inner steel bulkheads… in a telephone exchange the busbars were contained within a very robust reinforced concrete building with some brick exterior cladding…

In an EV it’s all behind biscuit tin gauge metal and monocoque pressed construction.

If there is one thing I know in life it is that “projected” and “real” are never the same thing, those euro ncap crash tests and videos can look as impressive as fuck, then in real life you get to a job and it don’t make no odds if the car was no stars or five stars for crash protection, 40+ tons of lorry and cargo just went through it like it was tissue paper.

The only way you can make 100 series connected 3.4 VDC cells safe is by making 25 separate banks of 4 in series with physical breakers in between, so that all the breakers open simultaneously with the airbag, and in a way that they can’t be closed or shorted .

Won’t be happening before the fatalities start to mount.

Don’t take my word for it, go talk to someone with hands on experience of working with high voltage and current DC systems… they’ll all say the same thing, for any voltage or current combination, DC is more scary than AC, and when you add in secondary cell high voltage DC, it’s really not something to trifle with or under-estimate.

 

The image on the right is a cheapo stepper controller, bough from amazon with prime so bought and delivered for just under ten quid.

So, with no more ado.

From top to bottom

• ENA –
• ENA +
• DIR –
• DIR +
• PUL –
• PUL +
• B –
• B +
• A –
• A +
• GND
• VCC

I’m going to assume you have some sort of breakout board or arduino or something that is going to generate your direction of rotation and movement pulses, I’m going to assume you have a suitable 12-24 VDC PSU, and I’m going to assume you have one stepper motor, up to around NEMA 23 and up to around 1 NM torque and 2 phase (that means 4 wire) though you can run a 4 phase if you bond the phases together in parallel.

There are some dip switches at the top that set current limiting and microstepping, if in doubt start at a low current like 1 amp and start at 16 microstepping.

Steppers motors can get warm or even very warm, but never hot.

Stepper motors should sound smooth, no vibration, if there is vibration or harmonics you have a setting wrong.

Connect one phase of the stepper across the A terminals and the other phase across the B terminals, just make sure you get the colour coding right, see image on right.

Now one wire from your “pulse” output to PUL +, and one wire from your “direction” output to DIR +, and a common ground for PUL – and DIR – to your ground (GND should do) connect PSU -ve to GND, PSU +ve to VCC, and you’re good to go.

Pretty much all steppers are 1.8 degree which means 200 steps per revolution, at 16 microstepping that means 3,200 microsteps per revolution, if you run a 5 mm pitch ballscrew directly coupled to the stepper then 3,200 / 5 = 640 microsteps per mm of X travel along the ballscrew.

At 640 steps per mm I can get 1,000 mm/min out of a real cheap NEMA 23 4 wire stepper, that’s 16.7 mm/sec

1,000 mm/min x 640 microsteps per mm = 640,000 microsteps per minute.

640,000 microsteps per minute / 3,200 microsteps per revolution gives us 200 rpm at the stepper to get that max 1,000 mm/min out of a 5 mm pitch ballscrew.

A 10 mm pitch ballscrew would give us 2,000 mm/min at the same RPM, but half the precision / accuracy per step.

200 RPM is, being practical, all you are going to get out of a cheapo 4 wire stepper connected to anything, sure, you may get 600 RPM running it free, but when connected you do NOT want to miss steps, or put up with noisy / harmonic motions, I’m talking “sweet spot” and the sweet spot is going to be around 200 RPM for this stuff.

“This stuff” assumes things like 100 kHz signal between the “computer” and the controller above, eg cheap, sure you can spend 900 quid on a PCI-E driver card that will talk to controllers in mHz speeds, but it’s not relevant here.

Get it all right and it sings sweetly, runs smoothly, and steppers never get more than warm to the touch.

I’m using one of these and a 12 VDC PSU and a cheap NEMA 23 stepper on a linear slide with a 5 mm pitch C3 ballscrew, in theory the ballscrew is ground to 30 micron (0.030 mm) accuracy, and in theory my 640 microsteps per mm gives me 1.5 micron accuracy, so in *theory* I can get 32 micron repeatable accuracy out of this and rapid speeds of up to 1,000 mm / min, and I have an 800 mm travel on this so 47 seconds from one end of the slide to the other, for a 400 quid linear rail and a 10 quid controller and a 15 quid PSU, and a PC running Mach3.

32 micron we are talking about the focus dot size of a metal marking fibre galvo laser (which in reality ranges between 15 and 50 micron depending on the final f-theta lens)

So call what I have 450 quid, theoretical 32 micron accuracy with a travel of 800 mm and a full excursion time of 45 seconds or so.

Want 5 micron accuracy over the same distance with the same speeds?

Expect to pay 5x as much.

Wants 5 micron accuracy and 60x those speeds?

Expect to pay 50x as much.

The fact is that today in 2017, and this is the point of this article, control a reasonably good precision and excellent value 400 quid ground 5 mm pitch ballscrew linear motion table from amazon with a 10 quid stepper controller from amazon, and pretty much out of the box get 50 micron or better accuracy, repeatable accuracy.

50 micron is two thousandths of an inch.

older more mature readers will know that 2 thou is good enough for 99.9% of everything, with some specific exceptions, all mechanical diesel injection pump for example.

Being able to do this at the touch of a button on a screen for less than 450 quid…. that’s fucking awesome. Flash Gordon awesome.

Because it means 20 positions per millimetre, and a 800 mm travel means 16,000 positions, I can say “go to X0” and it will, to within 0.050 mm or better, I can say “go to X550.75” and it will, in 32 seconds, to within 0.050 mm or better, I can say “go to X250.55” and it will, and it will do it all day long, with the stepper controller set to 1 amperes and drawing 12 VDC, so PC aside I’m using 12 watts of power to do this.

The linear rail can carry 80 kg, and even at the low “stepper runs luke warm at best” 1 amp 12 volt supply, a 16 mm diameter 5 mm pitch ballscrew will crush your fingers so badly you have to go to hospital for significant surgery.

This is fucking peanuts, money wise, for what you get and what you can do.

The only downside is you MUST either have or be prepared to learn, some basic CNC skills, such as Mach3, and learn about things like steppers and microstepping and pulse durations and so on, but it’s not actually that hard, it’s just complex.

I have never had or used an arduino or pi, I am always tempted but time etc, but I think it is a reasonable assumption that anyone who isn’t daunted by buying an arduino and a couple of shields and knocking up some gcode could do the hardware side fairly easily, once they read something like the Mach3 manual, (103 page pdf) even if they don’t have Mach3, it’s a good foundation for CNC.

• A cheap but usable and practical stepper controller is now a tenner a pop, so for a 3 axis machine that is 30 quid for 3 controllers, or 40 for 4 if you do a dual X axis system for rigidity.
• A cheapo 2 phase NEMA 23 (NEMA 23 = 2.3″ hole centres for mounting) 1 Nm stepper is again around 15 quid.
• Even a cheap ballscrew is better than any other kind of threaded bar, even precision ground acme, if you’re building a disposable 300 quid 3d printer then fair enough, use threaded bar or ground acme, but 450 quid gets you 50 micron or better repeatable accuracy over 800 mm of travel, and 1,000 mm/min, nothing beats that but 5 micron accuracy and 1,000 mm/sec, but it’s nearer 25k for that…. not 450 quid.
• DO NOT be swayed by the belief that you need some uber speeds, unless you are in production engineering 17 mm/sec is enough for most things, while 50 micron repeatable accuracy is arguably good enough for *anything* the DIYer will want to do, and a decent ballscrew stage should last many many many years.
• DO NOT be swayed by people and products that *claim* the same “theoretical” accuracy, go 64 microstepping and use a 1:4 reduction and generic cheap 5 mm pitch threaded bar and I could CLAIM 0.1 micron theoretical accuracy, and shure enough Mach3 or whatever would make the move to X117.4565 mm… put a fucking glass scale DRO on the bastard and you’ll be lucky if you are within 500 micron or 0.500 mm of that.
• DO NOT be swayed by stuff that is not RIGID, it doesn’t matter what you tell the tool to do, if the framework isn’t rigid the tool will chatter and wander and effective material accuracy will fall off a cliff, even though the stepper / linear side of things is retaining it’s claimed accuracy.
• DO NOT forget basic engineering and math, a 900 mm long 16 mm dia steel ballscrew (for 800 mm of travel) has a coefficient of thermal expansion, and the difference between an ambient winter 5 degrees C and a summer 20 degrees C is enough to exceed the accuracy of the device itself.
• For linear motion speeds of up to around 300 mm/sec I’d consider hywin rails over pukka ball linear rails, they are much cheaper and just as good down at that end of the scale.. more resistant to damage too…  twin hywin rails in parallel give great rigidity for less money than a single round rail.

Buy this shit while you still can in 2017, most of it is only so good and so cheap because it is made in China, which means you’re at the mercy of exchange rates and geopolitics, and there is nothing there to suggest that 2018 is going to be a whole lot cheaper than 2017, quite the opposite in fact.

If you’re in the UK and want slightly better quality stuff but still reasonable prices, but want to buy locally, I’ve used Motion Control Products for years, and have steppers and controller and stuff from them that is going on 10 years old and still works like new.

In closing, if you’re not sure, and wavering, consider this…

A “used” acme etc linear motion jobby is worthless even if it only has 2 hours hobby use on it… a “used” C3 ballscrew linear motion jobby with a few hobby hours on it retains 95% of its value, so all you’re looking at is a 10 quid stepper controller and a 15 quid stepper motor, if you already have an arduino.

If you have a PC you *MUST* have some sort of breakout board of box to talk to a stepper controller, MCP (listed above) do a parallel port breakout for 25 quid, if you do not have a parallel port you can get a USB2 to parallel converter specially for mach3 for 80 euros, there are other option such a smoothstepper etc and on upwards in price.

An arduino running a shield and gcode is NOT the same thing as a PC running Mach3, but they will talk to the same sort of hardware to produce motion, so it depends on what you want to do with that motion… if you do not want to input various parameters and cut a keyway or mill a pocket and generate the gcode and then control the machine all in one program then you do not need mach3, an arduino can run a stepper well enough to drive a plotter axis for example.

YMMV but IMHO you won’t learn shit worth knowing by starting out taking apart printers and floppy drives for steppers / servos etc, and arduino or a pc and a shorter linear rail with ballscrew could come in less than 200 quid, and becaue it would have some useful precision and repeatability and rigidity and power, you could learn one hell of a lot from playing with it.

 

 

Imagine that the real world is mapped exactly into 3D software files, just the thing for an autonomous vehicle, now imagine that in addition to the world itself being mapped, everyone in it is mapped and tracked to an accuracy of say 100 cm.

So right now the 3D model of my town includes my street, my house, and the floorplan of my house, and it has a model of me, sitting on the sofa in my front room, typing this on the giant TV screen monitor with a wif keyboard and mouse.

Now imagine we introduce some holopigs, holographic or cyber cops, and they can roam this virtual world at will.

Meanwhile you and I, we are sat here in the real word, utterly unaware that holopig is stood next to us, watching what we are doing.

Sounds fanciful? Awful? Impossible?

Not so much.

Autonomous cars and Amazon delivery drones might need a 3D model of the world, but there is all sorts of other data that does not need a 3D world, for example financial data.

Holopig exists and trawls through all your financial data, his clones holoamazon and hologoogle go through ALL your fucking data, and they are just as invisble to you and I as holopig.

Holopig is not just invisible to you and I, they have all the trappings of a poltergeist too, they can do stuff that affects us here in the real world, and we cannot communicate with them, much less reason or argue with them.

Holopig is the apex predator in the virtual world.

Hilariously I took a break from this for a couple of hours to complete work on a linear motion jobbie, and see that fuckbook now has a 3d map of the world with every building over 15 feet high, and they know who lives where.

so not just holopig and holoamazon and hologoogle, but holofuckbook too, which is really holocia, which is cyberspook, holoholopig, turtles all the way down man…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4845278/Man-bought-child-doll-sex-spared-jail.html

It says

Speaking after the case, Hazel Stewart of the NCA said: ‘The importation of child sex dolls is a relatively new phenomenon, but time and again importers are also guilty of associated offending against children as with Hopkins.

Yeah, except Hopkins didn’t offend against any children, he had some naughty pictures of kids, we don’t actually know that any of those pictures showed abuse, it could just be kids in the bath stuff for all we know… was my dead dad a paedo because he took a pic of me at 2 and a bit bollock naked on a beach? Am I a paedo for still owning that pic?

And fuck me, Hopkins has a bloody good imagination, if that freaky bald thing with the wierd feet is something he thought he could hump…

So do the CPS, if they think it resembles a child, all it needs is a fucking banjo and away we go a duelling.

Still, holopig knew what he ordered before he even got it, and holocia also know everyone in his social / family / contact circle, so they are all under suspicion now.

Funny how this shit is never used to track down aloha snackbar ragheads innit… course holopig is virtual pork so it would be rayciss to send that after the muzzies.

 

I have been asked by some I know to reasearch the EV thing, esp given the UK new law that all new IC engines are gone by 2040 or whatever.

So I have, I’ve spent basically four days watching and reading and researching everything I can find.

1/ Every single electric car spiel starts with ” Spend 30k on a new electric car” and then they talk about ways to make this affordable, whether it be personal leasing or personal loans or whatever.

At £1.15 a litre you could instead spend £3,000 on a great used diesel car and have £27k left over for diesel, that’s 27,000 / 1.15 = 23,500 litres, and at 10 miles per litre that’s 235,000 miles of fuel…. more realistically the 27k will pay *all* running expenses inc insurance and maintenance and fuel and everything else for say 12/15 years.

So on a basic business accountancy perspective the only way it makes sense is if you have the stark choice of spending 30k on a toy or giving the 30k to the taxman as tax on income / profits…

In the UK the Golf diesel was a popular fleet car, I used to have one, but I would do 30k miles a year in it, and there really was not time in the diary to spend more than 10 minutes once a day fuelling it up, I had to be in Bristol for 10 am  and Camborne for 3 pm and Bodmin for 4.45 pm, which google says is 6.5 hours of driving and 358 miles, even tesla supercharger means one of those 3 stops gets left out, and since for operational reasons that often CANNOT happen it means an extra field guy and an extra 70k tesla on the road.

The ONLY TIME IN MY ENTIRE LIFE where a 30 minute stop every 125 miles or so was acceptable was riding a fucking motorcycle in the middle of winter with freezing or sub freezing temperatures, and I’d spend the 30 minutes stomping around to restore circulation slurping hot coffee and smoking desperately….  and even then it wasn’t acceptable when you were on dispatch, only on the way back on your own time (dispatch was paid per mile, provided you got the shit there on time, then it was sweet fuck all, but that’s another story… if I’m not getting paid for it, I’m not delivering it)

So basically you can’t get past the whole “First, spend 30k (plus) on a new car”, and the argument from the other side is of course, there are no second hand electric cars, they are all too new a technology, so of COURSE you have to compare apples to apples and compare the new golf to the new e-golf….

Again, I’m not convinced, there are as I type 605 electric cars for sale in the UK in the “used” only category, and the cheapest “proper” car (exc twizy etc) is a leaf, it’s a grey 2013 with 22,516 miles, and it is priced at £4,995.

Now, £5k for an electric car is *much* more like it, but wait, what’s this, there is a SEPARATE lease for the battery, and that’s the pic above, and yes folks, there are fucking MONTHLY sums of money, the cheapest is £70 a month, and you are only eligible for that if you take a 36 month deal and guarantee to do less than 7,500 miles a year, that’s 625 miles a month, that’s 8.92 miles per quid of BATTERY lease, this DOESN’T INCLUDE THE FUCKING ELECTRIC at 20p per kWh, it’s £1 per 9 miles to LEASE THE FUCKING BATTERY, and my old 2002 volvo shed does around 40 miles @ 60 mph on £1 worth of diesel.

So the car is £5k, which is “reasonable” in money terms, the actual energy used for motive power works out at around one half to one third of an IC vehicles because none of it is waste heat down the exhaust pipe, so again 20p per kWh to charge the 24 kWh battery is “reasonable” £5 for a “tank full” and a 100 miles range is “reasonable” and yes it would work out at 5p per mile which is “reasonable”

The 11p per mile to lease the battery is fucking outrageous, the (always read the small print) surcharge of £7.50 per 100 miles if you go over your 7,500 miles a year equates to an extra 7.5 pence per mile, so between 11p and 18.5p per mile in battery costs, plus 5p per mile for electricity (notice how all the pro electric car guys never show the actual cost of a recharge at an ecotricity stand…) so we are looking at £0.16 to £0.235 PER FUCKING MILE AFTER YOU BOUGHT THE FUCKING CAR OUTRIGHT FOR £5k

My old volvo shed does around 45 mpg average on diesel, 55 on a run, we’ll take the low figure and call it 45, that’s per gallon so simple math says it’s 10 miles per litre, and at £1.15 a litre which is the current price simple math gives us £1.15 / 10 = £0.115 per mile.

So basically if you lie through your fucking ass and ONLY count energy used per mile, while ignoring all the drawbacks like range / refuel speed / cost / etc etc etc yeah, you can claim your £0.05 per mile is soooooo much better than my £0.115 per mile, hell, it’s HALF my energy cost per mile.

Of course if I stole my diesel fuel, my running costs would plummet, and the fact is, that is probably more honest than everything everyone involved in electric cars is doing, with one of the cheapest options that are actually possible today in the UK, and actual yes, can do it today, option, I have to spend £5k on a car and then my per mile costs will literally DOUBLE to £0.16 per mile to £0.235 per mile depending how many miles I’d be doing… currently the volvo shed is doing 460 miles a WEEK, the basic leaf battery allowance is 625 miles per MONTH.

So the cheapest possible option actually possible in the UK today I have to spend £5k of capital and DOUBLE my costs per mile to £0.235, and at 460 miles a week that is £108.10 in electric car costs vs £50.60 in diesel, so £57.50 extra per week…. for FAR FAR FAR less utility, last week I did non stop 258 miles each way at a steady 70-75, left with a full tank and a drink, drove there and back non stop with a 15 minute stop “there” to load up a laser tube, drove non stop home, filled up again the next day.

At this point there is only one conclusion open to me, there are no exceptions, every single electric car out there, and every single person out there promoting or in any way involved in electric cars, is a fucking con / liar / swindler / shyster / etc.

Talk of what is coming is like saying buy a fucking tesla today because nuclear fusion power generation in a suitcase is coming tomorrow, but only if you buy a tesla today.

The CLASSIC trick of sales shysters across the globe, the pub / corner auction starts and you see a line up of a wide variety of things, there is one wow factor thing there for everyone, whether it be a clock radio or a camera or a fancy socket set, all reasonably / cheaply priced (but it’s junk, but that doesn’t matter) but before we get to that I only have these 100 pens, cue spiel about amazing NASA spec ops pen, I could get 20 quid for these, I could get 10 quid for these, I could get 5 quid for these, but I’m selling them to you my friends for 2 quid a pop including the beautiful presentation case, now wait, wait wait, just a minute, I think I have enough pens for everyone, and I will sell them in just a minute, but, if you do not have a pen, you cannot bid on any of the other items, now, who wants a pen?

And £2 seems reasonable for a great quality biro pen in a case that you haven’t been able to handle, and besides you want the 50 quid camera for 18 quid, so you buy a pen.

it’s only £2, after all…

I knew one of these guys, (this is going back 20+ years) he told me,

I sell pens………………………………………………………………

I buy them in bulk for 40p, and sell them 100 at a time for 2 quid, £160.00 profit, 1 hour’s work (I was earning £40 a week back then) everything else is just for show to sell the pens, sure I’ll sell some of that other junk, but I’d rather not as I have to buy something else to put on display that is equally enticing and that I can actually make a profit on if some mug buys it…

I have come to the conclusion that the pen seller back then was more honest than ANYONE involved in the electric car business.

So my take on the electric car thing, if you have one you are what is known as a mug, mark, target, loser, etc. If you are anyone else involved in any way with electric cars, you’re a fucking crook.

post script.

Not that I am a borrower or a lender, I’m just wondering, aloud like, if the guys selling you the lease on that leaf battery pack will advise you that it will affect your over all credit rating and ability to take on other commitments such as a mortgage or car loan etc?????

That would be like all the guys selling cars on personal leases then, a big crickets…