Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

August 6, 2014

Trust me, I’m an expert.

Filed under: Android — Tags: — wimminz @ 10:48 pm

There is an article here, about the latest vulns in the Synology NAS boxen.

The gist of it is, the Synology NAS boxes have a vulnerability in their internet facing side, and the author, a security professional for hire, also wants the company to tidy up their act, eg making the box so you are forced to change default passwords at setup etc.

Me, I don’t have a list of clients, all of whom I am charging top money for my time and advice, but that doesn’t change my thoughts.

My thoughts are, what the fuck are you doing putting a NAS box on the internet, and what the fuck are you doing thinking that the answer to this obvious problem is to add yet another internet facing service to the NAS box, in this case a firewall?

It’s Hi-Fi separates time, anyone, even a home user, who gives more than the slightest fuck about the security of their network and everything on it, should be running their own firewall / router between the internet and their network.

If you need to access your NAS box remotely over the internet, hey, that’s what VPN is for dumbass.

If you need to host a wordpress website and a twitter feed and a bunch of other shit, that’s also the job for dedicated server, or hosted content, in this day and age, the whole thing is as cheap as chips, one old laptop with a cheapo SSD will do all that good stuff, and keep everything separate from the NAS.

I can take my *work* laptop from the day job home, and let it access the wi-fi LAN, or directly plug it in to the gigabit LAN, and guess what, it can’t access the NAS boxen that are on the same network.

To be sure, they can see them as devices, and get served a web page that does nothing but allow them to download the windows server connector software, which as soon as you try and run it will ask for a username and password, both of which already have to have been created on the NAS or it simply won’t work.

In my case the NAS isn’t even on VPN, I keep thinking about it, but I have never had a pressing need and always managed without.

So, on the one hand, I can sort of see the argument the guy is making, and indeed that Synology and others are making, that customers *want* all these bells and whistles, and this guy is saying fine, just do them *properly* which costs money, which customer won’t like when the cost of the NAS box goes up.

But…..

“Properly” means not fucking doing them at all, on the same box, properly means what I said above, buy a separate fucking firewall, let *that* be your firewall… duh… and so on.

I dunno, it’s people’s alleged thought processes that I don’t get any more.

Y’all know I have been banging on lately about CO2 lasers, well, this person gets in touch, pimping their product, and yes, it is good, but SIX fucking times as good as a high end Chinese job?  No fucking way, but the bastard *is* six times the fucking price…

And it CAN’T be justified, sure, there are several areas where things are a bit better, but, it has to be said, not a lot, as the high end Chinese stuff is using imported American lenses and imported Korean ball-screws and such, which are all as good as anything fitted to the six times the price shit.

But wait, the six times the price shit has a fucking ceramic laser head, not glass, not metal, ceramic…. http://www.iradionlaser.com/ … and guess what, all the promo video talks about is how ceramic is better than metal for a laser head as ceramic is inert and so on and so forth, well, guess fucking what, GLASS is fucking inert, it’s also a fraction of the fucking price to make a glass laser head…. you know, we’re in the realms of de-oxygenated copper Hi-Fi cables, you cut and engrave with a focused beam of coherent light generated by exciting some C02 gas and some trace elements…. there is fuck all connection between what you make the bottle out of that holds the CO2, and the beam itself… it’s not like a MDF speaker box makes a better sound than a neoprene one… it’s completely fucking different.

But guess what, iradion is in a legal battle with synrad, lawyers trousering money and the fucking costs go up.

BTW, this is 1.2 x 0.9 metre bed, so not desktop, but not exactly large industrial shit

So you look at their fucking prices, UK pounds sterling, 60w £37,000, 80w £40,000, 100w £43,000, 120w £46,000, 200w £62,000…. anyone think they are following the Epilog model and charging per fucking watt…. I do.

Oh, you want a water chiller, that’s another £3,300… for a fucking water chiller, for a machine that dissipates at most 750 watts…. fucking Chinese will bundle one for free, after all it’s no more than some industrial peltiers and a pond pump at heart…

I can, to all intents and purposes, buy a same size and power and capability machine from the Chinese for less than 8k, and these fuckers want 46k.

From the business perspective, 50 working weeks in the year, say 4 hours cutting or engraving time per day 4 days a week – 4 x 4 x 50 = 800 working hours a year.

Say I charge out machine time at 40 quid an hour, say I buy the Chinese machine today for 8k and my imaginary identical twin brother buys the other one today at 46k

4 x 4 x 40 = 640 quid a week, x 50 = 32k a year, / 365 for an average of £87.67 a day…..  let’s call it £88….  this is gross earning mind, it assumes electric to run the thing is free, and my labour to run it is free, and so on…

8,000 / 88 = 90.9 days so come the 5th November 2014 the Chinese one is paid off.

46,000 / 88 = 522.73 days, so come the 11th January 2016 the other fucker will be paid off.

Out of me and my imaginary brother, guess which one of us will go bust.

£10/12k is TOPS for a European made 120 watt laser, people will pay the 2 to 4k premium for a locally made quality product, but that’s about it, but SIX TIMES THE FUCKING PRICE…

and no, you don’t get to trot out the tired old shit about vastly lower production and labour costs…. they have got sweet fuck all with you screwing with a perfectly good basic design for the product so you can go all high tech proprietary expensive bullshit just in the name of product branding differentiation.

There just are not the man hours in assembly, worst case scenario is one man could build one machine in a week, all by himself, that’s 50 a year, 50 x 46k = £2.3 million, so you could employ a German technician on top fucking wages and not notice it.

****THIS**** is why the Chinese are, and will continue to, eat our fucking lunch.

The next machine up from the expensive twats, it’s big enough you have to call it industrial grade, you couldn’t site it in a shop or soho workshop or car garage sized space.

So all that per watt pricing means it has to be more expensive that the lower models, right…. right… 60w £55,000, 100w £65,000, 200w £85,000, 400w £120,000

BTW, the cunts haven’t even mentioned VAT (Value Added Tax) ergo it’s a safe bet that’s not included, so add 20%…

These machines, if I want a demo, I have to go to osterreich, they don’t have one here in the UK to show me…. but what’s a European junket for someone considering splashing a tenth of a million quid on a fucking 200 watt laser… right…

The Chinese will sell me a kilowatt fibre laser with a bed 3 x 1.5 metres for less than that, and that will cut 10 mm steel…. and that’s not the big stuff… for the £120k budget we are (with the Chinese) into the realms of 6 axis robot arms with 1.5/2 metre reach, holding a 2kw fibre laser in the end, fucker will cut AND weld, and positioning accuracy, hey, 0.03 mm

EAT

OUR

FUCKING

LUNCH

I taken *straight* back to an early motorcycle trip to Greece of mine, this would have been mid to late 80’s, and basically the entire motorway across the north of Italy from east to west was bordered by industrial estate, and *lots* of them were making what were then called industrial robots, and most of the rest were using them, I remember coming back to the UK and looking at our industrial heartlands and thinking “we’re fucked”… just the industrial capacity on that stretch of road exceeded the entire UK capacity, at that time, by my judgement.

The image above, of ONE fucking Chinese factory, compared to the expensive osterreich fuckers, who are basically building to order and carry no stock to speak of…

See, the Chinese, they can tell me the beam “dot” size at the focus point, while the ostriches can tell me the Chinese shit is vastly inferior… but they can’t tell me their dot size.

A 50 watt laser focused to a spot 0.4 mm in diameter will give you a “power” of 400 watts per square mm, or 40 kW per square cm…. or 400 MW per square metre, they reckon the sun on a clear equatorial day will just about put 1 KW per square metre…

If you are putting energy in faster than it can get out, the temperature under the spot will rise, raise it enough and the material melts, raise it still more and the material sublimates, which means it goes straight from a solid to a gas.

Leaving aside the question of laser head efficiency, if we put a power meter into the beam itself and measure actual beam power, then 100 watts is 100 watts is 100 watts, whether it is generated by ceramic unicorns or old school glass tube.

If the beam quality is similar, and again, a good glass tube has good beam quality, then it’s all down to mirrors and lenses, and if they are all good… you’re getting the same power per square mm… so what the fuck are you paying six times the fucking price for?

It’s back to the top of the article, and the Synology NAS box that does everything else too, apparently, and that is why it is so fucking expensive…. much *more* expensive than the old school Hi-Fi separates approach, eg a Draytek 28xx firewall / router, a HP micro-nas, an old laptop with SSD running LAMP.

Eat their fucking lunch.

Remember 15 years ago when we were all in awe of the fucking Koreans, there we were rolling out 2 mbit asymmetric DSL connections to the home, and the fucking Koreans were rolling out symmetric 10 mbit fibre to the home for the same monthly fee, yes, we were in awe, and jealous, but what the fuck could they use it for eh…

Roll on 15 years and the fuckers totally dominate flat screen and mobile tech, and they now have far far more bandwidth, talking to a Korean student in town yesterday, she can’t believe what a fucking backward country she is in, her grandma back home has a 50/50 meg fibre circuit to her home, the halls of residence she is in, 50/50 shared between 100 students, 2 floors, 50 student bedsits a floor… I’m telling her there are still, literally, to this day, sites in Cornwall literally within 2 miles of where the transatlantic fibres come ashore that have to make do with a DSL connection that can barely make 750k as primary and a horrible latency satellite link that will do 1.2 meg as backup and http channel…. and this is a business employing 30 people…

Had to show her photos and shit before she would believe me…. she started giggling about the United Kingdom of North Korea…. cos, let’s face it, we are fucking 3rd world compared to these industrious bastards who just get shit done in the east.

Trust me, I’m an expert… we’re fucked….

 

August 3, 2014

What is a whore?

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: — wimminz @ 3:42 pm

It’s an interesting question, and if you answer it glibly with “a woman who fucks for money” you’re missing the point… all wimminz fuck for money, or something that can be exchanged for money.

I have known wimminz who prided themselves on being sluts, because, in their own words, sluts don’t charge… fair enough as far as it goes, which isn’t very far when you get down to it, because sluts don’t fuck for free either, there is always some sort of cost, even if it is intangible at first.

Loyalty… now here is an interesting way to look at it, a whore has precisely 0.00 loyalty, it’s all about the money honey, and you can have as much of her time as you want, provided the meter keeps running, and nobody makes a higher offer.

A whore’s loyalty is like the cafe’s loyalty, as long as I give them money, they will give me coffee, but, they will give coffee to anyone with money, and even if I am not there, they are still selling coffee to others, coffee that I could drink.

About now some slut gangbang girl will come along and point out that a woman can in theory at least take as much cock and cum as a hundred guys can dish out, so why should she go without just to please someone who cannot satisfy all her possible needs.

Well, bitch, I’ll answer that question the day the cafe asks me for *all* my fucking money, so I can have the same amount of coffee I drink there today…

So, the whore has precisely 0.00 loyalty, what of the slut?

Does she have more? Possibly, in the sense that the cactus has more water content than the desert around it, but you still won’t be growing any potatoes in that soil.

What else can we say about the whore, well, unlike the wife, there is no future lost income if the guy who fucks her thinks it was a crap fuck, within the limits of the size of the market, she can always get other customers, but of job security there is none.

But back of all of this it keeps coming back to that loyalty thing, and it is the total and complete absence of any kind of loyalty that has always lain behind the negative connotations of the whore.

Lots of people can be bought, or bought off, so it is not purely that, but it is that the whore can only ever be rented, never bought, and it is purely that.

I have elsewhere on here a graphic that says “All women are filthy lying whores”, and it isn’t really talking about the old adage that even the wife is getting paid for it, but it is really talking about the fact that even the wife has zero loyalty, and that’s the crux of it… not the money.

However, much like a 10 year old street thug in Cali, there is a certain rustic charm and dignity in it, I got no loyalty mister, but you can hire me for an hour and I’ll call you El Presidente if you like.

This places them, on the moral scale, above those who also have no loyalty, but masquerade as someone who does, and I pledge thee my troth.

The whore has 0.00 loyalty, but greater than 0.00 honesty about what they are.

Again, this is invariably trotted out as a reason why whores aren’t that bad, hey, they are more honest than my ex wife… yadda yadda…

Again, it’s not actually true, *while* you are paying her, a whore will tell you exactly what you want to hear, oooh baby, you’re so goood at this…

So you only get the honesty when you ain’t paying, and want a freebie…

It’s not the exchange of money.

It’s not the honesty or lack of.

It always always always comes back to the loyalty, of which whores have 0.00.

Now, at the risk of invoking Dawkins, just because I say something truthful and derogatory about one class of people, that doesn’t mean that all that exists, in that universe or this one, is that single truthful and derogatory comment.

Nor does said universe comprise solely of the single truthful-ish but utterly misleading statement that a slut doesn’t charge, so that makes her better than a whore.

If the slut has 0.00 loyalty, then she is just a whore who doesn’t charge.

If the slut has greater than 0.00 loyalty (on a scale where 9.99 is absolute, we are talking 0.2 at best when we say greater than) then for all *practical* purposes she is still a whore that doesn’t charge

And this is just two words, slut and whore, there are hundreds of others.

It gets confusing, until you realise that back in the day or patriarchy and marriage 1.0, there were just two categories, you had wimminz who were pledged to one man, and wimminz who had sampled several cocks, the village whore might not actually have charged, but she was still the village whore.

So Julie knows she is really a whore, but doesn’t like that and all the connotations, so she isn’t a whore, she is a slut.

Meanwhile Jackie knows she isn’t really a whore, but she isn’t a slut like that Julie, so she is Feisty, and the beat goes on, and before you know it, the “wife” is the minority, there is the “wife” here, and over there 999 different varieties of “not wife”.

Calling Jackie a slut upsets her just as much as calling Julie a whore, it’s a veritable minefield, if you give a fuck about such things…

Whores of course have cunts, but sluts and feisty skanks and unicorns and ponies and everyone else female has pussies, another veritable minefield, if you give a fuck about such things.

So what is a whore? A whore is a wimminz with 0.00 loyalty and some honesty, provided you aren’t paying them.

Everything else that isn’t a now extinct wife 1.0 is a wimminz with 0.00 loyalty and 0.00 honesty, whether you pay them in cash or in other more existential ways…. give it any label you want, skank, slag, slug, tramp, etc

Maybe that “All women are filthy lying whores” ain’t so wide of the mark after all, and again, as I have said before here, always use the word cunt, never anything else.

Wife 1.0 might have had a “pussy” or some other sentimental nickname, everything else has a cunt.

Whores have cunts, so if all wimminz are filthy lying whores, then all wimminz have cunts too…. QED.

Of course, calling a wimminz who does not self-identify as a whore a whore, or referring to her cunt as a cunt, is not generally likely to get you access to said cunt, sure, there are exceptions, but not generally, and the more this upsets them, the more of that dishonesty they are likely to have, so it’s a good litmus test.

Living in de Nile, that’s what they are, talked about that before too.

So are you, if you have any ideas about slurping out some whore’s well used cunt, no, your feisty girlfriend who you are both being monogamous with each other, she has a pussy, so you’ll eat that…. ugh.

For “Jack”, who has been pursuing this wimminz on OKC, and who was falling for it all.

For “Jack”, who came over to my place, used my PC for a bit and asked me, when he right clicked on an image in Firefox, what the fuck this “search image on Tineye” is.

For “Jack”, who, when I told him, brought up his new girlfriend’s page on OKC, and started right clicking and searching on Tineye.

For “Jack”, who found her as a result of this on a swinging / fucking site, completely different profile to the OKC one of course.

For “Jack”, who went through the rest of her images on the swinging / fucking site, and found her as a result on an escort site.

For “Jack”, who walked in my door all loved up, NAWALT, and who walked out calling her a fucking whore, but struggled, looking for a more powerful word…. dude, there isn’t one, whore is plenty good enough.

Did she charge you? I asked him… god no, he says, mind you, I suppose I paid, bought drinks and dinner and shit, hey man, I said, you got the discounted deal, but the discount was countered by the greater level of lies and deception.

https://www.tineye.com/

 

 

August 2, 2014

The midichlorian revolution.

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: — wimminz @ 3:05 pm

You’ve probably guessed, from several posts, that I have a hard on for the subject of ignorance of basic immutable physical science, laws and limits, and the consequences this has for society as a whole.

You’ve probably also guessed that there are no sacred cows, from the recent post on various sci-fi staples, I don’t give a fuck what the story is, if it ain’t based on hard physical laws, then it ain’t science, it’s fucking fantasy.

It really doesn’t matter what field of life or science or hopes or dreams or aspirations or work or play or love or family or anything else you are dealing with, it all comes down to the same thing, which can be paraphrased as;

“Income 100, expenditure 95, result = joy…. Income 100, expenditure 105, result = misery”

I have given this lots of labels, “stall speed” and “steps” for various levels of technological situation, but it’s all the same thing….

…so let us indulge in a little bit of science fantasy for a moment, the head of Samsung, and no, I don’t mean the fucking phone division, I mean the whole fucking thing, from cargo ships on down, opens a time portal to 2000 BC somewhere, and emerges to the people there, on the other side of the portal he has an entire heavy / light / techno industry as his beck and call, so he turns to the people and explains what he can do, and they sit and discuss this with him for a bit and come back with a list of what they want.

The list doesn’t have the alphabet, decimal numbers, standard weights and measures, maps, medicine, metallurgy, agriculture, or anything else, it doesn’t even feature a high tech village complete with electric power, freezers full of food, wardrobes full of clothes and a fully staffed hospital and medical centre.

Oh no, what they want is a fucking dragon, a unicorn, eternal life and copy of the necromonicon.

In disgust he gives them a crocodile, an ostrich, a baggie full of acid tabs and a printed copy of 2 girls 1 cup, steps back to 2014, closes the portal and then forgets the whole idea as a waste of fucking time.

A perfect analogy of what would happen today if a species that had had space-faring ability for the past 60 million years rocked up in orbit and offered to help out.

With the benefit of hindsight, I myself fucked up, I should have founded some kooky religion in which the adherents gave me all their money and in which I was the only one allowed to fuck anyone, and I could fuck everyone, no limits…. it’s what the cunts *deserve* after all.

It’s a bit like the dating / fucking sites, the rode hard and hug up wet and surplus to requirements 40 something skank is perfectly entitled to ask for all sorts of unreasonable things from the men considering contacting her for a fuck, you must be handsome, you must be 5 foot 11, you must have a great body, you must have an 8″ cock, and know how to use it, and your tongue too, and so on.

She is *perfectly* entitled to ask for all these things.

She just isn’t entitled to have her wishes fulfilled.

Indeed, you got to be a bit worried about anyone who can live on this planet for 40+ years and who *still* thinks asking for dragons and unicorns and shit is going to have any result other than complete and utter disappointment…

And, no, claiming that there is a difference between wanting an alpha male and wanting a pet unicorn is just yet another level of delusion.

See, yesterday, I got a “rearranging the deck-chairs on the titanic” missive from my line manager, some *gargantuan* fuck ups were made, but not by me, oh no, all I did was make some laconic SNAFU comments, which playing a *pivotal* role is sorting out said fuck-ups… my reward? A missive from said line manager about said SNAFU comments.

You know, where “teamwork” is them dropping you in the shit because they can’t be assed and they are incompetent anyway, and then “teamwork” is you not seeing this 600lb gorilla in the room.. oh no…

Number of fuckers in the same corporation who appear to suffer under the delusion that missives from lines managers are invitations to converse, me, I just reply with a double click “ack” squawk, anything else is superfluous, and annoying to the managers.

Of course, the ack squawk isn’t ideal either, ideal is a humble and grovelling apology, and praise and thanks for the enlightenment and instruction, but seriously, fuck you, you’ll have to up my salary by about 10,000% to get anywhere near that.

Years ago my dad knew a guy who amassed a fucking fortune during the last war, during the war, a time when habeus corpus went out the window and everything was locked down, right?

No, turned out that everyone was so distracted by “the future” and worrying about it, guys like this were not running a horse and cart through the system, but entire bedford lorries, fully laden, and I was reminded of that in last week’s gargantuan fuck up at work, at least three distinct individuals in at least three distinct departments in at least three distinct corporations, all of whom had direct and immediate hands on responsibility, plus whatever crew of QA and pen pushing box ticking types there were, plus whatever logistics types, all of whom are of course six sigma and five nines and certified up the fucking wazoo, managed to monumentally fuck up the rather simple task they had, and it simply isn’t possible for any of them to have missed this, if they had made even the slightest level of checking, so all that remains is a quick fuck it, the next guy down the line can sort it….

So, on another site last week, I met a guy, ex-services, and boy, he had it nailed, and now I am stealing his phrase.

He nods, makes a wiping dust off his shoulder motion, and says “Satellite management” as in, each manager is a satellite, much like the thousands of satellites in orbit around earth, each doing their own thang, and totally unconcerned about the others, save for one thing, that they don’t crash into each other.

Priceless, in its accuracy.

And yet, my fellow wage slaves get missives from their satellite line managers, and think this is an invitation to chat, or that they can go to said manager with issues, and get them dealt with, and so on, and so forth.

My line manager gave me the job because he was told to hire a guy to cover my region by his manager, he did that, and chose me because I, in my personal interview, raised least red flags to him, I get maybe on average one brief missive every 6 months from this guy, ack squawk, I’ve got to be low on his list of squeaky wheels.

Which kinda brings us back to the beginning, if everything you do is to avoid hands on change, within the laws and limitations of the real world, then what can you possibly expect except increasing chaos and entropy, given that 99.9% of what we now call society is entirely un-natural and man made, what can you possibly expect except that it fall apart?

See, the works mobe is dying, so you have to ring the assholes, and they ask a whole load of asshole questions, like, are you actually using the fucking GPS / wifi / bluetooth, cos, you know, that fucks the battery, yeah yeah fuck off and lets get through the poxy menus, so OK, we will send a replacement Samsung handset, well, not quite, they send the FRONT of the fucking phone, I have to retain my SIM card, obviously, and I have to retain any microSD card fitted, obviously, but, a fucking 400+ euro phone, and I have to retain my fucking battery and thin plastic rear cover????

WTF is that all about?

Probably the same micro-management bullshit that says I’m not allowed to root the company phone, fine, that’s 2 hours overtime on a Saturday to rebuild all the settings and apps, because I can’t do a one click Titanium restore to literally identical to the old one.

So I am at this site, and it’s not because she was female, early thirties with a good bod and a nice face, but it is because the bitch is *pleasant*, greets me by name (my third visit to that site) and offers me a coffee and all that jazz, so I go the extra mile, instead of fuck ya, I done what I wuz told ta do, cya.

Meh, I got a ton of patch cables in the trunk, grab two, run one from the router to their switch, run one from the switch to the PC, change a couple of minor settings in the PC after checking ipconfig /all

She’s in awe, god, you must have so many degrees and qualifications (not just because of the 2 patch cables, but what I did before) and all… I just laugh at her, no babe, all the assholes with the qualifications and certificates are sat in offices, fucking up my day job and yours.

Me, I just have experience and a brain… she nods…

But, no lesser a man than Einstein noted that people keep on doing the same pointless shit and keep expecting a different outcome, so unless I myself wish to don the mantle of insanity, I have to accept that people will never change, so none of this can be taken as a how to, or an if only, or a do this to get that result.

It’s more of a survival manual.

But, importantly, not a survival manual (again beloved of writers) where you, the lone hero, is the only one un-infected, because there are no un-infected, not even you, or me, we are all made of the same stuff after all.

More of the survival manual that reminds you, every single say, that you are an alcoholic living in a world of free booze, and the only way to survive is to refuse to ingest the same shit everyone else does.

Look around you, shrug, ask the question, “is this really all there fucking is, just endless this shit?”

ack, squawk.

July 30, 2014

It’s science Jim, but not as we know it..

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , — wimminz @ 9:03 pm

So, a staple of science fiction, the incredibly strong materials…

It fucking pisses me off…. here’s why.

Basically, we already know all the elements that can exist or occur naturally, sure, there is conjecture about some transuranics, and there is conjecture that somewhere in there is an island of stability, eg once you make said elements, they stay made, instead of immediately spontaneously decaying towards lead.

We also already know pretty much all there is about chemical bonds, HCCH (Acetylene) is so energetic because of the triple bond between the two carbon atoms.

Elements chemically bonding into substances and materials, yeah, we pretty much know all there is to know about that too, at least in structural terms

Sure, there *might* be an element with an atomic number of 360 (number pulled out of my ass, 30 x Carbon 12) which was both chemically and radioactively stable, once you manufactured it… but it will weigh literally 4 to 5 times as much as lead per cubic foot, and no doubt costs to manufacture would be so eye wateringly high it would make inkjet ink look at cheap as tap water, the only possible uses for such a material is if it were *so* strong you could build a space elevator out of it that could raise the titanic in one lift, or so refractory you could use it to line a fusion bottle rocket, in short, it would have to have some almost magically unexpected, but THEORETICALLY physically possible properties.

Which brings me back to just about every single sci-fi book I have ever read, and even the greats like Niven and Asimov have each conjured up more than one such mythical material.

Now, the absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence, but also, as Locard said “physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent” (with the caveat that there is a huge gulf between actual physical evidence, and a claimed expert interpretation of what that evidence means…)… so there can be stuff we don’t know about yet, because we haven’t looked hard enough or in the right places or in the right way…

So sure, there is a vast chasm in between the green and blue bold text above, but, this is the real world, whatever fits in between, it has to obey the same laws as everything else, and not contradict either the green or blue statements, which, in total, means that even if we do not know what DOES or MIGHT exist between the green and blue text, we sure as shit CAN set some absolute upper and lower boundaries on all sorts of properties of these imaginary materials.

To be sure, there is another way, you can take some semiconductors and apply just the right sort of electrical power to them and they transform into electro-luminescent panels, so there might theoretically be some way to design some material that contains materials science and engineering, so it has a STRUCTURE, and there might be some way to energise that structure so that once energised it had properties that were way out of proportion to what it had before.

But making something 3 mm thick that can repel a bullet strike better than a 6 mm steel plate? Possibly, but you’re already pushing physical law, subatomic physics, chemical bonds, strong and weak molecular forces, so how about a 3mm thick material that can repel a strike better than 300 mm steel?…. no… fucking…. chance…

It defies physical law.

Then, in real life, it’s all roundabouts and swings, diamonds are as hard as fuck, but an oxyacetylene torch will burn them trivially, as easy as a butane lighter will burn tobacco…. Diamonds also shatter easy, put one on an ordinary anvil and whack it with an ordinary 18 oz ball pein hammer.. diamond dust…

…yet in SF land not only does the wonder material shrug off high velocity rounds, it also shrugs off lasers, high temperatures (thermal lance temperatures) oxidation, reduction, chemical reaction of any kind with common substances, etc etc etc.

It’s bullshit, all total utter bullshit.

Niven’s Ringworld is not merely a particularly egregious example, it is so far out there it is world record bullshit, 100 metres of scrith is as resistant to neutrinos as 100 light years of lead, and as for tensile strength, well, it is at the very least on a par with the strong nuclear force, but not over distances of 0.000000000000001 Metre, oh no, over the billion kilometre circumference of the ringworld, a single artefact…

Magic monkeys and unicorns flying out of my ass in formation while singing Jerusalem in perfect Klingon is untold orders of magnitude more probable, likely and realistic.

Yeah, we could possibly one day build an actual honest to god spaceship 750 metres long, which as ocean going ships goes is about 1.5 supertankers, and, EXACTLY like the structure of the Burj Dubai, it could, on the “lower” decks at least, carry significant mass while the whole structure is accelerated at one gravity…

But 25 G?? it would collapse as quickly as the twin towers did, literally, at free fall speeds, and yes, 25G is survivable, in theory, for a human, just immerse them in a liquid capsule and breathe liquid too, yes, that is science fiction, but it is not unreasonable science fiction, Project Orion, you ever wondered why it never got past theory, because you couldn’t build a spaceship big enough to support it’s own weight and absorb a steady series of nuclear blasts below it to drive it in to orbit.

Both the Russians and Yanks built nuclear rockets, run a reactor *real* hot, only cooled by the supersonic gases fed into it, which were heated and irradiated by the naked (lighter that way see) reactor core, to form an exhaust jet and thrust.

It was in nuclear terms as dirty as all fucking get out, but what killed it was you just couldn’t get the thrust, not even to fly an long range plane, much less make escape velocity in a 100 metre cargo ship.

A naked fusion rocket flame might do it, might…. can you imagine a place, a port, that had say one 100 metre cargo ship land from and return to orbit every other day, 365 *fucking*mahoosive* naked fusion rockets per year, at that one location or “port”, and without even bothering to even guesstimate the orders of magnitude of energy involved, you just *have* to be looking at each landing and take off liberating energy on a scale best measured in things like “Hiroshimas”

Hell, if Canaveral got the job you’d probably get a tan from the flame in Alabama and be able to hear it in Texas…. Pripyat/Chernobyl would look like a health spa to folks in Orlando.

Hey, no worries, we’ll just invent anti-gravity perpetual motion machines that violate every law of thermodynamics, who needs a fucking fusion reactor, just build a hydro dam and pump the water back up to the top by anti gravity, cos otherwise the anti-gravity device would require a power source equivalent to the reaction jet device, and you can’t get CERN in a family runabout… too big and heavy see.

Next thing you know you’ve got fucking tie fighters and x-wings pulling fucking acrobatic stunts in a vacuum, and system wide space battles that have battle commanders on bridges with screens that display everything, even the stuff light hours away across the system, in real time… hey, we’d better just invent hyperwave too…

Fucking Star Trek had a lot to answer for, they had to have some plot device for getting from the ship to planet surface and back again so Kirk could fuck green bitches up the ass, and there literally wasn’t the budget to build a prop shuttle-craft and hangar bay, so hey, we’d better invent the transporter, beam me up scotty.

Fucking slaphead Puh-card uses the same technology, when he asks for a cup of earl grey, in the process doing enough mass energy conversion to make the Tsar bomb at 50 megatons look like a children’s sparkler, nobody bats a fucking eyelid, I know, we can point our phasers at the dilithium crystals and recharge them that way, and then  we can get warp speed, wow, it just might fucking work kraptain, well, it worked in *last* week’s episode asshole…

But hey, you gotta give audiences what they WANT… right….

The rule of thumb is it takes about 10 kWh to get 1 Kg into low earth orbit.

The second rule of thumb is it costs you about 10,000 times what the energy in the first rule of thumb costs.

So, out 100 metre cargo shuttle is going to be similar to a similar cargo ship, that’s about 1000 TEU, and 1 TEU is basically a 20 foot container, which is basically up to 24 metric tons.

So, if it takes 10 kWh to get 1 Kg into LEO, it takes 10 MMH to get one Tonne into LEO, 24 MWH to get one TEU into LEO, and 24 GWH to get our 100 metre cargo shuttle to LEO

If a KWH at commercial rates is 10c (US) then a MHW is US$100 and a GWH is $100,000 and 24 GWH is $2.4 million, but, remembering our second rule of thumb, that will actually cost you $24 billion.

That is one very small cargo shuttle, a mere 1000 TEU, the Maersk line ship Emma carries 11,000 TEU, cal it a quarter of a trillion bucks between friends.

This isn’t a port, this isn’t even a schedule, this is a one off, one shipment one way.

A small-ish port, call it that amount per week, call it a 10/12 trillion bucks per year.

Hey Houston, we got a problem, total WORLD economic output is around 90 trillion bucks, so basically if the entire planet co-operated as one and renounced all military spending, we could run one small space-port with one single shipment per week, in volume terms, about 4% of what the single port of Rotterdam handles.

As a basis for a serious go at building a lunar colony, yeah, 11,000 containers a week (remember, they have to hold *everything* you could or will possibly want) will get ya there.

As a basis for an economy that would support even one single country the size of Holland, errrr, nope…..  you’re talking more like the canary islands, not real country sized shit.

Parallels to 18th century colonialism, vast sums of money only the most wealthy economies on the planet could even consider, thrown at it year after year in the hope of a payoff 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line…

Society and people today, no, fucking, concept….

All the vast sums spent today getting shit into orbit, 99% of that shit is satellites, and that means something about the size and weight of a domestic washing machine.

That shit wouldn’t keep the Pitcairn islanders afloat, much less the big island of Hawaii, which is the starting point for a lunar colony complex enough to be on the way to self sustaining…

 

 

July 27, 2014

What the B said

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , — wimminz @ 12:27 pm

Ode to the Dave Clark 5

OK, so, commenter B on the last post.

His last comment / reply raises an issue I can’t let go, both because it is at the crux of the argument, and because the point he is missing is at the core of what I was saying about X (not *my* X, but X in general) and yet he appears completely blind to it, so maybe I didn’t explain it clearly last time.

I’ve put his last comment, unedited, in green text.

An actual cat engraving vs. a theoretical flux capacitator. No contest. “Yeah, I could totally bang models, while your girl has all kinds of flaxs.” Well, she’s real and the models exist in your imagination.

So you adhere to the any output beats no output model do you?

Dozens of people avidly updating twitter / fuckbook beats the guy considering writing a novel or blog but who hasn’t got around to it?

I’m not saying it doesn’t, on some levels, but those levels are the ones concerned only with page impressions and footfall and user’s eyeballs

Three customers lined up is great. Until money changes hands, it’s the theoretical flux capacitator from above. How long did it take to get those customers lined up? How many more are out there available to you? Until money changes hands, it’s the flux capacitator. You need some cheap way to test. Like maybe using someone else’s kit, renting by the hour.

You’re preaching to the choir re the money changing hands and it ain’t real until it does, and I explicitly talk about that in the post too.

How long did it take, I dunno, no time at all, because it came up in conversation, and they all started reaching for their wallets…

How many more like them are there out there? I don’t know, but there only has to be “enough” to make a living.

You seem obsessed with me needing some cheap way to test, like renting someone else’s kit, and studiously ignoring what I am saying, that doing that will teach you things, but not the things you neeed to know, because the two things are not similar enough…. NONE of the three potential customers of mine would even consider giving me a penny under those circumstances.

If your 3 customers are willing to wait for you to make up your mind about buying X, they’re willing to wait a week for China (probably.) They’re meeting their needs SOMEHOW right now.

No, you seem to have a blind spot about this, the two things are *not* comparable merely because they both involve a delay, you are doing *exactly* what I talk about, seeing the big picture, and *completely* missing all the fine details, all of which make it a total fuck up from the big picture perspective.

24 hour turnaround from a shop running $250K kit? No fucking problem. How about multimillion $ kit? Just so’s you don’t think I’m bullshitting you, the place I used to work in would do that, and they were running a cutter that cost a couple of mil, plus benders, plus the welders and sanders and a third party painter across the street. For another example, I can think of at least 3 places within an hour’s drive of me running EOSINT M280 laser sintering machines in cobalt chromium/wax 3D printers and furnaces for casting, whose whole model is 24 hour global turnaround. Orders come in in the morning, by evening they are on the plane going to Japan/wherever. Maybe Israel is more advanced than the UK in that sense, but I doubt it.

You make the same assumption as above again.

I hope you add enough value to justify the proposition, and the best way to test is to rent kit for a bit.

And you trot out the same core theorem that you won’t let go of, that I must test small scale, despite the fact I have been explaining such tests cannot test the things you need to know, because it is not the same, so let me explain some more.

For starters, you don’t know what “24 hour turnaround” means, maybe you are just young, and you are using the new marketing shit speak, but 24 hour turn around most certainly does NOT mean whose whole model is 24 hour global turnaround. Orders come in in the morning, by evening they are on the plane going to Japan/wherever because what YOU are talking about is from the SELLERS p.o.v…

When I, and older guys, talk about 24 hour turn around, and incidentally it is what I do in my non-day job as it were, is that 24 hours after the CUSTOMER pulls the trigger on the job it is all completed, signed, sealed, delivered, installed, up and running, service resumed, and indeed if necessary shipped to THEIR customer.

For my X, this is one of the reasons they want to throw money at me, at present all they can get is *your* version of 24 hour turnaround, which is useless, so they simply do without, by the time your version of 24 hour turnaround is done and the job eventually arrives the proverbial boat has been missed.

It’s not about being willing to wait a week for china either, because that’s cheaper, quite apart from the unacceptable delays, there are two other vital factors, again, *far* more common than people like you assume.3625646090813857763

One of these is proprietary information, copy paste, there is your proprietary information, gone and copied and no longer your own, and for many people, their proprietary information and designs and so on *are* their business, they cannot even conceive of letting that data out of their sight and control, a total non starter, and nobody, not even the locals with 250k shift production facilities, are prepared to have the customer hand over a USB stick, plug it in machine, do production run, remove USB stick and hand back to customer, wipe machine memory in front of customer.

One of the other issues is materials quality control, not everything in the world is cast 10mm acrylic, not all pieces of wood or leather or cloth or so on are the same, not even close, and I’m talking about taking two random pieces out of a pile of apparently identical pieces in the stores, so it isn’t just selection of materials but also quite often orientation of materials prior to cutting, none of this is on offer either locally or abroad.

*NONE* of these things are amenable to “testing”, there is no way to test them, do them, or do not do them.

The fall back position for these people is they are either doing without entirely, or doing it themselves by hand and it takes forever entirely, there is no middle ground.

Ah but, people like you will say, why don’t they just buy their own fucking X if that is all it takes, but the fact is, they do not want to, they do not want to branch out on new equipment, new skills, new this or that, and for many of them, where would they put it, because it absolutely *cannot* go in their existing premises, either because they simply do not have concrete street level flooring with double wide access, or because it would totally destroy the whole ethos and ambience of the shop, and so on.

Indeed, this is where, in my night job as I call it, most of my work comes from, people with computer problems,and whether it is a business or a personal computer, they all contain private and proprietary data, and to these customers you simply cannot overstate the importance of;

1/ knowing that literally only 1 guy is ever going to even physically touch their machine, let alone go anywhere near their private and proprietary data.

2/ knowing that they can have it done just they way they like it, not the default factory reset, etc, you know there are a *lot* of people out there who will pay me an hourly rate to do things like migrate their data with windows easy transfer, even if they could figure out how to do it themselves

3/ knowing it is a 24 hour turnaround, as in proper 24 hour turnaround, not the shit you were calling 24 hour turnaround

B, please do not think this is me having a personal attack on you, but, you do exemplify, almost perfectly, things I have talked about so often in the past, for example I have talked about the one thing businesses CANNOT track and monitor, no matter how high tech they get, is how many people just walk past the shop, would never go in, and why.

There is a *lot* more of that out there than anyone in mainstream business would have you believe.

There are few more competitive and more cut-throat and less profitable enterprises that anyone can go into than building fucking PC’s, I still sell hand built to order PC’s, why? Because I offer things nobody else can, much less will…. I also make a profit per PC that the likes of dell or crapple can only dream about.

If you’re sat there thinking WTF is he on about, there is nothing that one asshole can do that dell or lenovo or whoever cannot do bigger faster better, then by definition you are missing the point, and my class of customers, *completely*.

They, as a group, do not even exist on your radar, and you, by definition, do not exist on theirs.

Again, not something you can “test”, you either cater to them, or you don’t, it’s binary, there is no almost or nearly good enough or close enough.

By the time these people come to *my* door, they have deliberately walked past every other commercial door out there, and I can sit here and say yeah dude, I have a kick-ass website for that, and though I say so myself, I think I do, and my marketing budget, it’s zero.

Word of mouth.

There are *enough* people out there that do not fit “your” definition of commerce and customers that they meet enough of other similar people that it generates enough work for me.

The gap I discussed between the macro view and the larger picture, it is a fucking chasm, and yes, it is full of people who want 500 bucks worth of work on a 250 buck laptop for 20 bucks labour with a 3 year warranty, but, that chasm is so big, there are lots of other people in there too, people who will discuss a set of components with me, order and pay for them themselves, and ship them to me, and pay me 250 bucks to build that machine, and they get an attention to detail and level of skill that the monkey assemblers at dell etc can only dream of, and again, if you think *anybody* can build a PC that well, you don’t understand what a PC could and should be, when silence and performance and reliability come first, component selection was dictated by air flow through the case, as in the route of the air flow and besides, to them, it’s worth the 250, because they know 100% it turns up in their place, plug in, and it just works, perfectly, nothing to set up or tweak or anything else.

If you have ever owned a *proper* tailor made suit you’ll get where I am coming from.

The modern high street tailor made shit with laser cut cloth and fancy sewing machines, it’s a 2 dollar crack whore compared to the bespoke hot teen virgin made just for you.

Because people don’t understand X

Because people don’t understand you can’t do macro *or* the big picture.

Because people don’t understand what “service” means.

I don’t think for a moment your views are what they are because you are in Israel, and I won’t make any cheap jokes about your view being different if you were in Palestine, because you would probably have the same views in Italy, or the US, or China.

But, I have spoken before about how those views you have were once utterly alien in all those places, what the USA did 70 bloody years ago, long before computers or cnc or mig or anything else, building liberty ships in 2 to 3 weeks from laying the first piece to launching, *that* was fucking service.

Your “24 hour production turnaround” in an environment where being brutally honest you just make sure the tool changers are full of sharp tools, and the materials bins are full of material, and the swarf bins are emptied, and a job comes in and basically effectively just gets added to the fucking queue for the office laser printer……  really, you think there is *anything* even fucking *remotely* impressive about that, that reeks of “service” or “customer care” in anything even approaching what those words used to mean as standard?

Yeah, in a world where “WE always answer the phone within 3 rings”, means it gets answered by a fucking machine, please select 1 for assholes, 2 for cunts, and 999 lines to deal with sales and orders, and not one single option to deal with problems or complaints….

But, please don’t get side tracked thinking this is about me, or *my* X, or B, it’s the broader picture, and where all those things fit in, or don’t.

Whether I personally do or do not end up buying *my* X, it doesn’t change *anything* out there, and that is what we all should be aware of, and dealing with, the reality out there.

July 26, 2014

The angle of dangle

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: — wimminz @ 2:26 pm

A moment of hilarity before normal service resumes.

Ok, so, was talking to a mate today, and he said something, he said that traditionally in his life he always did well in recessionary time, and did badly (for work) in good times, and since he was getting no work, he assumed these were good times.

I disagree about the good times, but it was an interesting comment…

Let’s look at it from another angle.

There is a tool I want to buy, let’s call it X.

  • X costs several thousand pounds
  • up until now, I have managed perfectly well without X
  • I have a day job, I don’t *need* X to generate income.
  • On the other hand, I have a day job, so I can buy X, even if I don’t use it.
  • The line above depends on how secure I feel in my day job.
  • The big variable of course is day job or not, can X actually generate any income.
  • The line above is just because I can see uses for it, does that mean others will part with their money to have something done by X
  • straight back to the second point, I managed without one, so have they….

It’s complex, and I can so easily see X become a fabulous toy, TBH, a bit like the CNC mill and lathe, that is just fabulous, crapple fanboi creaming his pants phabulous, but which in reality hasn’t been used in anger once in the past 12 months.

It’s really a fairly fundamental question about the very nature of business, what is business, what is trade, what is craft?

The things that I can see that X would do for Tom, Dick and Harry, who become potential customers 1, 2 & 3, well, to do business, customers 1, 2 and 3 have to also feel that X is so good that they are AHEAD on the deal, doing what they do, by outsourcing the thing that X can do to me.

Which is a variable.

Which is *massively* variable, and that variation depends largely on what kind of people Tom, Dick and Harry are….. are they gung ho man with a plan organised and eager and up with a sparrow’s fart motherfuckers? Or are they waiting for business to come to them?

You see the problem, motivating a potential customer for X to exploit X in HIS business, is a whole other ball of wax from providing a potentially great service TO a potential customer via X

Indeed, am I? Because if *I* sit there passively waiting for business to turn up, and no, I have a fucking excellent website dude does NOT cut it, then X is going to be yet another toy that sits there.

At this point the economists will divert you into a discussion of Maslow’s needs and hierarchies.. vomit.. it’s a great way of describing something and utterly missing the point.

My business CANNOT be motivating or encouraging or supporting my potential customers, if they can’t be assed to get their own shit in order, my assistance isn’t going to make a difference, they will still go bust, I won’t get paid for what I have done, and I will get the blame for all their mistakes.

So, let us go back again to what is a recession and what is a boom…

In a boom, it’s easier to persuade people that me + X is an interesting deal, something they should use, something they can resell as part of their work, because in a boom there is plenty of slack to take up the bit where they don’t get all gung ho about their own business.

In a recession, well, nobody is going to venture anything, because they still aren’t gung ho about their business, and me + X, well, that is all very well, if THEY had the customers, but they don’t…

Should I buy X, or buy a fucking harley…lol…. you see, the question is which one gets most use, or, the other option is don’t buy either, keep the horns pulled in, and hope that this job lasts, or, if it ends, I don’t find myself wishing I had X, because I have customers for it, but I can no longer afford it.

It’s the age old quandary…

For X to make a worthwhile profit such that X can genuinely be called an investment, then X needs to be used for a sufficient number of hours per week.

Let’s say 1 hour a week will pay for X itself, and let’s say an additional 10 hours a week will keep ME alive if X becomes my sole source of income and this job dries up.

So now I need to get regular work for X, which means regular customers, but there is a limit in time and expenses to how much marketing I can do, and indeed what sorts of job that X can do that I should punt for, after all, each job has to make me more money than I expend getting that job AND doing it.

I can, quite literally, sit here and think of amazing things that I could do with X, that surely customers out there would want. I can even see me seeing those customers face to face, and showing them a demo product, and them saying wow, that is fantastic, *great* idea.

But, none of that is a SALE. A sale is when you have done the job and been paid and the money is in the bank and you are ahead on the deal… and that last step is a doozy.

Because to go from potential customer to customer, you have to get them to agree to the point that they actually have the money to pay you, and then decide to do so….

LOADS of ideas are great, and I mean that most genuinely, but getting the other party to flash the cash, that is all that counts… to paraphrase the old yank saying, a great idea and a buck will buy you a coffee…

IN a sense, that is what the clip at the beginning is all about, some devs who test games before they get released, if you think the game is buggy and crap now it is released, look at what it was before the devs caught the biggest and most obvious bugs….. nevertheless, the game started as a “great idea”…. implementing it is a motherfucker.

Implementing it often makes it a lot less great than the initial idea led you to think.

Taking a step away from that for a second.

I bought a macro filter for the Canons…  pics are links to full size.

Deathstar head, note the minute depth of focus.

IMG_0205

Screw on ribbon connector, again, note the minute depth of focus, only the far side of the screw socket is in focus, so basically forget this shit unless you have a tripod or some other method of steadying the shot.

IMG_0207

Pulling back the mag a bit… focus shifted to the right rear of the read/write arm

IMG_0208

Now with the macro filter removed.. vastly improved depth of focus.

IMG_0210

You can see quite clearly, macro filter, not true macro, the object is about 6″ from the lens, and the zoom on the lens acts as part of the macro zoom level.

It quite clearly illustrates the concept of trade-off, if you want up close macro detail, it’s a lot more effort and you lose vast amounts of depth of focus, so unless the object is flat and perpendicular to the lens, you are going to have to make a virtue out of that whole photographers depth of field thing…

If you want a nice big field of view with most of what interests you in focus, you’re going to have to lose vast amounts of up close macro detail.

There is an obvious analogy there to business planning re the pros and cons of me buying X.

And this is quite the separate matter from the unknowns, in the unknowns, we don’t know what we are going to photograph, that is hidden inside a box with Schroedinger’s cat, in this example we know what we are going to photograph, but we still have to deal with the issues of looking at the larger picture, or looking at a small part of that picture in detail.

The larger picture is every potential customer I may have for X, the detail is each individual customer I may have for X.

I can’t skip the larger picture and go straight to the detail, I may well miss something vital, nor can I look at the larger picture and skip the detail, I may still miss something vital.

Those “GREAT ideas” I mentioned above, they are the detail, because invariably each scenario deals with one thing X can do for one hypothetical customer.

This is how wimminz set up shops selling bespoke cup cakes.

My day job, classic example of seeing the larger picture and just discarding all the detail.

Neither approach is right, and both have to be, before we can even seriously consider the prospects of buying X, or Y, or Z, or anything else.

“I’ve got a kick-ass website dude” doesn’t cut it, nor does any other piece of marketing.

The cash register going “ka-ching” as you ring up a sale is all that counts.

It then becomes an interesting human dilemma.

Are you one of those people who sit there and say “Oh yes, if only I had X, Y and Z advantages, I’d be all over that shit and making a fucking killing dude…” or are you one of those people who will look at what they don’t have, and see what can be done to get around that, is there another way.

Which makes it all very interesting, are you selling what X can do, or are you selling what YOU can do with X, because if YOU have no imagination and dedication, what’s to set you apart from your potential customers, or competitors, or anyone else?

I’m always reminded of this asshole kid and their asshole parent I met yonks ago, back then the WWW was fairly new, and Encarta on CD was brand new, and for those of you who don’t know, Encarta was basically an encyclopaedia on CD, and you navigated around by clicking hypertext links in the text body, or typing what you wanted to find in the search function.

Both of these two declared it “crap”.

The reason it was crap, was that it didn’t give them ANSWERS, type “what is 22 divided by 7” into google and it gives you the fucking answer, and a bunch of links to pages that give you the answer…. NONE of those links explain the answer.

e.g. multiplication and division are just iterative functions of addition and subtraction, add in moving decimal places and adding zeroes, and you have long division and long multiplication, 11 over 7 or 22 over 4 should not then require further questions, you already know how to WORK THE ANSWER OUT for yourself.

99.9% of your potential customers, or business partners, or suppliers, or competitors, are going to be like that, they just want the fucking answer.

Suddenly, we have an entirely new question.

If I buy X, will I then be able to answer those repetitive and boring questions with zero effort on my part, and charge a fee for doing so that is low enough they will keep coming back and asking more questions, and can the “subject matter” of questions that I can “answer” with X be wide enough to promote that?

But sooner or later you come back to that place where you have a list of unknowns that being brutally honest about, no matter how gung ho you are, you aren’t ever gonna fucking know unless you bite the bullet.

So biting the bullet becomes the big question, in my case with my X, biting the bullet means I have to do 2 chargeable hours worth of work with X every week, that’s break-even in the commercial sense, and any home hobby use then becomes free.

At present, my hesitancy is down to one thing, sure, there is loads of hobby stuff I could do NOW, but am I likely to exhaust that list of interesting and cool things to do, in, say, six months, if so, at that point, all that is left is the purely commercial aspect of it.

The angle of the dangle is equal to the heat of the beat when the throb of the knob is constant… but there are no constants in life, except for gravity and entropy…. and mebbe planck length…lol

 

July 23, 2014

The mathematical curve of keeping a clean soul.

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , — wimminz @ 12:33 pm

Also know as, Star Bores 12, the prequel.

DMJ’s fault, he said I should have called the X Hard thing this, but…..

See, the thing is, there are all sorts of things that you can actually more or less graph numerically.

Nota Bene, I said graph numerically, not model numerically.

Graphing is recording *only*, modelling is extrapolation, and curve filling and smoothing…

You can use X hard etc to graph your descent into a living hell, or your climb out of it, but the trouble then is you start to associate the numbers with the result, and think changing the numbers will help.

OMG my fucking penis is only 150 mm long, if only it was 175 mm long I’d no longer be so boring average and I’d get more girls…… goes and buys penis pump to try and change the numbers, hoping the numbers changing will change the real world result.

Yeah yea, laughs cynically, nobody actually believes that shit, you’re right, not even the hundreds of thousands of men worldwide who have actually bought penis pumps, they didn’t actually believe that shit any more than you do… but they still bought them…. hope springs eternal, or something…#trashtag

That’s the problem with maths, it’s a fucking ABSTRACT language, it’s not real world, at best it can be used to describe some real world stuff… how many thousand feet of 2×4 to build a house, then you need a cut off saw, morticer, nail gun or hammer, basic carpentry skills, etc etc etc etc etc, and still even excluding all that shit you’ll still come up with a different number of feet used than you calculated.

Vospers / Thornycroft fucked this one up, and they aren’t the only ones, a navy wanted to buy some patrol boats, the had to be this size and do this and carry this, and oh, they have to have this minimum top speed, so they built two demo boats, and top speed was about 5 knots under the requirement, which in boats that plane since hull dimensions and form was pretty much as per plans it means total weight or displacement was greater than expected.

I told this story to a trainee shipwright, who laughed, see, his apprentice / qualifying piece that we was working on at the time was a clinker 3 man rowing skull, when completed it looked fucking beautiful, as a row-boat it was crap, it weighed over a hundredweight too much, lots of things his plans didn’t account for, and he spent *hours* trying to work it out, was his wood thickness’s at the higher end of the tolerances and so on… in actual fact most of the discrepancy was down to two things, the volume of varnish that the wood soaked up before getting the layer of coating on the surface, which is the bit he used for varnish volume and therefore weight calculations, and the weight of copper fasteners vs steel ones, he used steel in his calculations, pretty close, but a bit lighter than copper per cubic inch, but stronger than copper, so copper fasteners individually weight more than steel ones.

Even having worked it out, the math itself didn’t allow him to correct the problem, (same as Vospers) too late, and while it eventually told him where the extra weight had come in, it doesn’t do the design changes you need to get the weight back down… all that math does teach you is that being a ABSTRACT language you need to build a fudge factor in to translate between that abstract language and the real world.

By the time you’ve been making that thing for 20 years, you will have cut that fudge factor back from 15% to 0.75%, not because the math got any better, but because your skills did, and I don’t mean your skills in making each individual component weight exactly what the math says either, you’ll never do that, I mean your skills in the overall bit light here, bit heavy here sense.

I’ve had this argument with displacement boat designers, it’s a fucking DISPLACEMENT boat, the issue isn’t the fucking weight, which is what you are trying to tell me, when you tell me you need X, Y and Z electrical systems to run 48 hours without a charge, and I tell you that needs a battery bank of this dimension and this weight, and then they tell me that weighs too fucking much, usually by a factor of 5.

The problem is the *proportion* of the weight you are prepared to assign to the battery bank… sure, lead acid batteries + brine = chlorine gas, not good, but in weight terms, lead acid batteries make good ballast, so why have lumps of inert metal in the keel, why not get two shots for one, ballast and battery capacity, then you only have an engineering problem to solve, separating the lead acid batteries from the marine environment… shouldn’t be much of a challenge.

One guy I know took that and ran with it, traction cells in the keel, sealed in and vented above decks, it was a fairly large job, similar to engine removal, to get them in and out, he went from a design that specified 500 kilos of concrete poured into the spaces in the steel box bilge keel, and 2 x 120 Ah 12 VDC batteries for domestic and 1 x 120 Ah for engine starting to one with 12 x 40 Kg each traction cells, each one 600 Ah @ 2 VDC, two banks of six in series, so two independent banks of 600 Ah each for domestic, and one 100 Ah starter, 120 Ah domestic to 1,200 Ah domestic, ten times the fucking capacity, of course being deep cycle traction cells to all practical purposes every Ah of real vs rated capacity was worth two from a single truck battery, he said later he basically no longer used the main engine to charge domestic batteries, they had enough capacity for a 10 day cruise, just shore power em back up, so he saved a fortune is diesel, and a lot of glazing wear and tear from not running a 40 BHP diesel to spin a 12 V alternator to charge a domestic battery up.

He defined a desired goal or solution, without also defining a whole slew of limitations and caveats that all had greater priority, and sure, he got his math problem sorted, but he also got unforeseen challenges while implementing it, and unforeseen benefits from implementing it… as he said, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, just not the same way…lol

That old engineering adage about “You have to build one in order to learn how to build one”

Which is where it all falls down, I don’t get to live this day, much less this life, so that I can learn how to do it better and then press the re-wind button and start all over again.

I dunno, Bill Murray, ground hog day, didn’t actually watch the film, but what was it about, him re-living the same day so he can get ONE piece of ass…. there’s a million things I could do, and that would come somewhere near the end of the list.

The mathematical curve of keeping a clean soul is a bit like the mathematical curve of me coming home from school each day as a small boy and keeping the grass stains off my clothes.

Not going to school wasn’t an option, going to school naked wasn’t an option, going to school and not playing wasn’t an option (and anyway, they all have consequences of their own) so all the maths could really do was tell you how you were doing, are you doing better this week than last, the maths doesn’t give you a practical way of doing better next week, but analysing what you did this week vs last week might.

And it all keeps coming back down to that old one of I don’t know what I should do, everything I do do turns out wrong.

Well, yeah, there are no right answers, there are no always winning plays or strategies, all there is are approaches and attitudes, you can’t get your car from here at point A to there at point B 10,000 miles away without wear and tear and fuel consumption and possibly damage, and you can’t know what lies ahead, but you *can* start out at mile 1 and drive in such a way as to minimise wear and tear and fuel consumption and damage, or you can drive it like you stole it, you just can’t get away from what did from mile 0 to mile x, where x is wherever you are now.

What you can’t do is get to mile 10,000 with no wear and tear, damage or fuel used.

The mathematical curve of keeping a clean soul, you fucking CANNOT, your soul is going to get stained, the maths helps, after the event, to identify what strategies caused what stains, and to use that to try to minimise future staining.

It’s like a Star Wars film, OK, now we’re stuck, so we have to make episode 1 into episode 4, now we can create some new shit, ok, now we’re stuck, now we have to do something else… nothing can undo Star Wars 1977, nor can anything capture again what it was, at that time, at that place, when the 4th film was the 1st, and the whole universe was new, as was the story and characters and ships and everything else.

July 22, 2014

Git-r-done

Filed under: Wimminz — wimminz @ 9:31 pm

I wanted to write this yesterday, but I couldn’t, being the babbling yesterday represents an underpinning to this post…. by itself, yesterday’s post doesn’t make a whole heap of sense, as background and foundation to this one, it makes a lot more sense.

To-do lists, broadly you can split them in to two parts, one part has all the shit that you *should* do, and “will get around to one day” but which doesn’t really matter, because it doesn’t impact your day to day life much, and because putting it off doesn’t make the problem any bigger.

Then there is the other part, the stuff you must do, got to do, the stuff you say matters to you, the stuff you say is important, the stuff that does impact your day to day life, the stuff that gets tougher to sort the longer you leave it.IMG_0204a

Following on from yesterdays post, those who fail to get X Hard are the same people as those who fail at the second / other part of the to do lists.

They’ll happily tell you that something matters to them, but they won’t do fuck all about it.

Even though there are clearly things that they *could* do, even if those things are only partial or remedial solutions, rather than complete ones.

Git-r-done types, they do get X Hard, and they get that shit done.

I pulled up a mate of mine about this, he is starting a new business, taken an office, and he is sat there in jeans and a tee shirt and crap old computers, I’ll give the fucker his due, I spent two hours telling him what was so obviously fucked up about that, and 24 hours later he’s done all the big stuff, ordered new equipment, turned up in a shirt and tie, by the end of the week he should find himself sat in a far more professional and businesslike environment, and that should feed back positively into how he feels and operates.

OK he needed a kick up the ass to do it, but if he does it all, git-r-done, X Hard just got a fuckload easier for him, massive karma discount on everything…

*Everything*, not just he will feel more professional, he will get shit done faster and better with new kit (eg USB3 speeds vs USB2) he will have more positive public image, he will find it easier to sell because what he has to sell looks good, which will itself frighten away the chancers and assholes who would have wasted his time if he had sat there with old PC’s in jeans and a tee shirt… and on and on and on.

By being a person who doesn’t put up with slow and poor service, he becomes a person who will not deliver slow and poor service, the two are inextricably linked.

It’s Drano for your brain too, you get your head all cleared out of tolerance for that sub-standard shit, instead of sputtering and spluttering and misfiring at 1,000 RPM suddenly that bitch is on cam and on song and howling, putting down the power.

I got a related confession to make too, me not smoking, that fucking engine runs hot and sweet and on song, and I get sooooo pissed at world + dog…lol…. me smoking, meh, fuck it, chilled… that’s what adding drugs and reducing oxygen to your brain does bro…

Git-r-done, yesterday I had a USB3 2.5″ enclosure box die on me while at the aforementioned mate’s, not a biggie, the SATA SSD inside was fine, but annoying, cheapo electronics, so today on to Amazon and buy not one, but two replacements, delivered tomorrow…. there just ain’t no point fuckin abaht wiv it, you know what you need to do, just fucking do it.

It’s like my day job today.

Sure, I know the provider’s contact numbers, sure, I can do a sh int desc to confirm what is WAN and what is LAN, I can probably guess that the lone ADVA box with the red status light is the MPLS circuit, I can probably guess that the ONEA circuit number and provider circuit number, though different, refer to the same circuit, I can probably guess from the lack of empty ports on the switch that we aren’t doing a migration today, just and install and speed test, and I can probably guess that despite the lack of fucking patch leads in the box they want me to patch the router to the ADVA box…. and indeed when I touch base with the provider’s engineer we can confirm most of this shit between us.

But I shouldn’t fucking *have* to, it means I turn up with an address and a box and know literally fuck all else, so it takes me 15 minutes to unbox and rack up and power up and work shit out, during which time all I can say to the customer on-site is dunno, dunno, dunno.

It makes me look like a cunt, and I am not one, and it makes my company and the provider look like cunts, and they are, and then my efforts serve to make them look less like cunts, hell, they obviously employ and send out a competent guy who knows his shit well enough to work stuff out.

git-r-done it fucking ain’t.

X Hard with moderate values of X but significant values of karma surcharge it is.

What is the fucking point, so some fucking useless bint in an office can save the hassle of hunting this shit out from the electronic files associated with the job, and fucking copy and paste it into *my* fucking work schedule and email notifications?

That ain’t git-r-done, that’s can’t-be-fucking-assed, and that’s some-other-cunt-can-pick-up-the-slack.

And that’s what I was trying to impress and motivate on to my mate, no room for that slack in your own business, you got to run a tight ship from day one, and expend effort every single day to ensure that ship stays tight at all times.

Slack is where the fuckups creep in.

Today’s job might *NOT* have been amenable to reasonable deduction and assumption, there might well have been things that absolutely had to be done or things that were not the usual way of doing things, and we / I would have had no way of knowing.

IP addressing is *important* shit. (and yes I know, the 192 range ain’t routable, but this is examples)

ACME NOC (Network Operations Centre) IP 192.168.0.2

ACME HQ, a global multi-billion dollar corporation, IP 192.168.0.10

ACME NY office, IP 192.168.0.11

ACME Gaza bunker IP 192.168.0.12

I’m sent to Gaza bunker site with a new router, WAN side is supposed to be 192.168.0.12, but someone somewhere fucks up, and the config sets the WAN to 192.168.0.11

What happens?

Well, at the ACME NOC, instead of the router in NY saying HI, NY HERE, 192.168.0.11, and the router in Gaza saying HI, GAZA HERE, 192.168.0.12, they both say 192.168.0.11.

ACME NOC now doesn’t know which 192.168.0.11 is the real one, so the radius server kicks them both off the fucking network.

Gaza with 1 part time employee just took down NY with 7,954 full time employees and an HOURLY turnover of US$195,000.00

oops…

Git-r-done ain’t just I don’t care what u do but u go get that shit sorted right this instant, git-r-done is git-r-done and git that fucker done ***RIGHT*** bucko.

Gotta have a tight ship to git-r-done, with low values of X Hard and low values of karma surcharge on it, otherwise, well, things can and will go wrong in ways way out of all proportion to the effort you or some other cunt DIDN’T put in.

July 21, 2014

X-hard

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: — wimminz @ 10:17 pm

No, not the new viagra..

Where “hard” is difficulty, or effort, and “x” is a variable numeric value.

Making a coffee right now is about “0.1 Hard”, making a domain name and CMS website template is about 0.5 Hard, making a custom acrylic waterblock on the CNC mill is about 7 Hard.

This is, of course, for me, at this time, what may be 1 Hard for me may be 50 Hard for you, or for me if circumstances change, and vice versa.

From the above, making 5 mugs of coffee is the same as making a domain and website, Hard is like your money, it is iterative, and finite in supply.

===================================

Got this bitch, she could have had me, and it would have been 25 Hard, but she fucked up that opportunity, it is no longer 50 Hard, it is a lot more, say 5,000 Hard, that’s a bitch if all you have is 5 Hard spare a day.

Fuckers will tell you, give me another fucking chance man, well, it was 25 Hard and you couldn’t be fucked to do it, now it’s 5,000 Hard and suddenly you’re going to do it? I don’t think so, and if I let you try, and you fuck up, it’s going to be 100,000 Hard next time.

Only got 5 Hard spare a day, tough shit, means you are going to have to shit can *all* that other shit in your life, and use your entire budget of 50 Hard a day, all day, every day, for the next 2,000 days, that’ll be 5.5 years of sustained daily effort bitch, with not a single day off, and not a single day of less than your maximum output of Hard.

=======================================

Yeah, but, I ain’t ready, or maybe there is someone better than you out there… and this is how Hard ain’t like money, MacD’s don’t refuse to take your money and sell you a burger just because you’ve been eating at BK, with Hard if you spent 5 Hard ten times at BK, you walk in to MacD’s they don’t have a tab with 50 Hard owing on it, they got one with 500 Hard owing on it, spend that 500 Hard in MacD’s and maybe you’re back at square one, like you never eat at BK… maybe…

Hard is not dissimilar to Karma, in fact they are so closely related, that Karma is the multiplier or tax on Hard, good karma gets you a discount on Hard, bad karma gets you a surcharge.

The X in Hard can get so big you stand no chance of every paying it off.

The X in Hard can *easily* get so big that it outweighs the utility of that thing to *you*.

At 25 Hard, I was the bargain of the fucking century bitch, at 5,000 Hard, I was an incredibly good deal, at 100,000 Hard, I’m just the best deal you will ever get a shot at, at 5,000,000 Hard, better stock up on pills and vodka, cos there is no happy ending.

Actually genuinely realising what a fuck up you made, that doesn’t get you a discount on Hard, it just gives you a shot at making those payments…. and maybe cuts the karma surcharge back down a little too.

X Hard will kill you, kill your soul too.

Had this chick once, we were gonna make a go of it, transpires she had sex a total of 7 times with 2 different people at one point, she knew she fucked up and wanted a second chance.

Hard said sure, but from here on in I own you sexually, and *after* you have found a minimum of 3 people that I find sexually attractive, and I have had sex at least 10 times with them, all of which *you* arrange and do your level best to ensure that *I* have the best possible time, then we can at least consider opening discussions about “us”, up to you.

Hard sat there and watched her, no hysterics, no tantrums, no tears, just a bouncy castle that someone turned the fan off, and it deflated, and settled, and shrank, and shrivelled, and collapsed.

Fact is, she *could* have pulled it off, *could* have paid it off, but didn’t, why would she, when the orders of magnitude cheaper options of not fucking it up in the first place (hey baby, lets go have a foursome) were already too expensive.

Not too expensive as in couldn’t afford them, to expensive as in she was a cheap fucker, why pay 5.99 for a burger at BK when MacD’s have them on offer at 0.99, then she blows 75.00 on the rest of the night out…

X Hard, it’s all about character really, someone who can’t see the value in a ground floor opportunity certainly inst going to work to pay full whack for that same thing, much less work all hours and go without many other things for that same thing.

And I’m not talking consumerist shit like the new iphone6 here, I’m talking shit like another person’s trust, or respect, or faith, or good name, or indeed money or property.

X Hard where x is low-low-low and they still won’t pay it, no coincidence at all that this same person will go for a night out and blow 75.00, and not repay the 50.00 they owe you *first*… even if it takes a 25.00 taxi fare to get to you to repay the 50.00.. because even spending 10.00 on frivolity when they owe you 50.00 is fucking unthinkable to them…. not… they will spend it on the night out, and some time later tell you they feel “bad” they haven’t repaid you yet, not that there will be any monies offered when they tell you this …

X Hard is, as I said to a mate earlier, me making the fucking effort to be putting on a fucking shirt and tie after a clean shave every working day, despite the fact that I work in the field, alone, and never see my bosses… because if I don’t bother one day this week, before long it will be one day every week, then two days a week, then three, then fuckit…. see people of wal-mart.

X Hard is hard, I know, basically I am a lazy procrastinating motherfucker, if my mother or father was here they would tell you, when I was a small boy, 6 or 7, doesn’t matter what it was I was told or asked to do, my response was “I’ll do it later” and the reply was “No, you’ll bloody well do it now boy…”

As a young man I fucked up a lot of exotic machinery, just because I didn’t fucking maintain it properly, just rode it real hard and then moved on to the next thing.

Eventually I learned the lesson, X Hard plus a karma surcharge is what it cost me to run everything, plus most of the fuckers I knew wouldn’t buy *anything* off me after I had owned it…… I *know* you ran that Z1 at 10 pounds of boost @ 12k RPM regular as clockwork, we could hear it wail up the hill from the village 2 miles away.. … and it is with rich irony that from that day forwards I learned to spot people like my former self, and refused to ever buy anything off them…

X hard rears its head in business, work, finances, even fucking housework FFS, X Hard ain’t a million miles from Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL, because X Hard isn’t about the specific numeric value of the X, so much as acceptance of the fact that the numeric value of the X is a rising curve, because only once you truly accept and acknowledge that, can you yourself become a decent person, from the perspective of every other fucker on the planet, and how you treat their X Hard on behalf of you.

I was on site at 3 pm today, some stupid cunt sent the wrong part, shit, we need to send another one, it’s gonna take 5 hours to get there, you want the overtime dude?

No, I don’t, because the “in office hours” cunts are useless enough, so even if they send the right part this time it’s gonna be 9pm, which means me dealing with the “out of office hours” guys, who are even more fucking useless than the in hours guys.

eg, if you weren’t a cunt, you wouldn’t have fucked up and sent the wrong part, and because you’re a cunt, I’m not doing the overtime.

No, it is not hey dude, take the fucking money and run, X hard and karma, that is the same as saying be fuckbuddies and mates to the skank bitch who didn’t take me when X Hard was only 25, take the fucking pussy and run.

X Hard says things are either right or wrong, because the people involved are either right or wrong, and willingly associating with wrong uns rubs off.

9-to-5, that’s one thing, overtime, that’s another, you only do that if there is no cunts involved, because then you get appreciated, and reciprocity.

The bitch who coulda had me at X Hard 25, not worthy, and nothing will ever make her be, and no kind of association with her can ever benefit me, long term, they payoff can never even cover the outlay, not even in ideal circumstances.

I’m not just talking sex, or companionship, or lending her 50, or anything else, I am talking about EVERYTHING, X Hard is a litmus test for EVERYTHING about that person.

You gotta expend a little X Hard yourself for each person you meet, that’s the way it is, every person is a different casino with a different roulette wheel, so you place small X Hard bets that don’t matter to you if you lose, and you sit back, and you watch.

If you treat it as a bet, you’ll walk around thinking you are a born loser.

If you treat it as a small and cheap test, you’ll walk around like the winner you are, fucking parasite free…. it’s a medication worth taking each day, hel, it is your daily offering to X Hard, to keep YOUR karma giving you massive discounts on your X Hard, and not massive surcharges.

This post is a lot of massive rambling bollocks, but I know exactly what I mean, and I figure, so will you, if you are worth shit and know the value of X Hard, by whatever name you choose to call it.

To me, personally, X Hard is the way I unload individuals from my brain, instead of spending too much time thinking about them, I just unload them and don’t give a fuck about them…. something I can’t do by an act of will alone, just because I know I should, I can only do it by using X Hard, because that allows me to totally disrespect and dismiss them first…. you’re fucking worthless to me, and I don’t give any kind of fuck about worthless, what happens to you, what you do, what you think, what you feel, what could be, or anything else.

July 20, 2014

Rejoice, for the end of the world is nigh…

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , — wimminz @ 11:47 pm

(see, I was right all along)

There is a natural human tendency, especially when you get older, to see things going to shit, and to extrapolate to total calamity and disaster.

This does not mean that every naysayer is always wrong, if I look at my own life and start counting up specific predictions that I made, often contrary to what everyone else was saying too, a surprising, almost astonishing, number of them came to pass.

I’m not talking trivial stuff either, multimillion pound objects that fail spectacularly, people maimed and killed, that order of stuff.

This doesn’t mean I have the sight, or that I am smarter than anyone else, so why was I right, when they were all wrong.

If I sit here and analyse these instances, the all had something in common, the thing could be a chaotic system like sea state, or weather, or design stresses in composites, or ageing in dam structures, or an extended undocumented working life of a machine.

These are all different, what the instances all had in common was that in every case, the bod in charge, and the entire army of worshippers, all stated categorically that they had taken all these chaotic things into account.

I took one look at them, shook my head, and said I wasn’t happy, too many possible variables eg the proverbial seven year wave that no allowances had been made for, there was simply no way that the level of confidence expressed by those in charge was justifiable.

Now, I’m not talking about “perfect storm” scenarios, of which arguably Fukishima was one, though that itself exemplifies extreme scenarios of Murphy’s Law, it was more a case of “perfect forecasting” being claimed, we know this ship won’t take Storm Force 9 seas on the open ocean, but we ain’t ever gonna be out in anything stronger than a Gale Force 7, so no biggie.

The other thing all these incidents had in common was this, up until this point, all these people, their experience hadn’t strayed far off tried and tested paths, sure, as time passed each project in their career paralleled the tried and tested methods, and a greater distance from the tried and tested path that the last iteration, but they had never really taken a walk into the wilderness as it were.

They all genuinely felt that their faith in their own calculations was entirely justified, and their attitude to me was that I was just a hater, or just jealous, or just wrong and wouldn’t admit or, or just not as smart and qualified as them.

After the event, if I was a pariah before, now I am about as welcome as the ghost of Jimmy Saville in a kindergarten… I made a “lucky guess”… or something…

No, I was fucking right you cunt.

Flight MH17, we’ll know the truth about the same time we know the truth about 9/11, or the USS Liberty, or anything else where the event itself has been subsumed to the mileage that can be got out of that event.

They are after all, trivial events, on the scale of human fatalities.

On the other hand, events like the Arizona droughts and water table, New Orleans, flu pandemics as of 1918, or a reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles, these things are on a grander scale, and no matter how much mileage you try to make out of them, there is enough empirical real world evidence out there that you can start to draw a picture.

In the movie Convoy the character Rubber Duck said something along the lines of “I’m not leading them, I just happen to be out in front” and this is also the danger of labelling all doom-sayers as being of the same cloth and the same church.

Sure, lots of them are singing the same song, and it is fun to take the piss out of the end of the world is night types when the sun rises on them the day after they predicted the rapture.

But that isn’t all of them, no Sir.

That’s like saying all Australians are convicts, whereas the truth is lots of people didn’t just *choose* to go there, they made a huge effort to go there, I personally think it is one of the big mistakes my folks made in the sixties, coming back to the UK instead of emigrating to Oz, to the then brand new place called Cairns.

I mean, WTF, “preppers” are doom-sayers, but speaking personally I fail to see the logic, if you believe things are gonna get so bad you need to be a prepper, well, it’s like the movies with the haunted house, and the ghost says get the fuck out or I’ll eat you soul, so the assholes move in…. you know, if things are going to get that bad, get the fuck out first.

Or, at the very least, be Rubber Duck, out in front, just you and what you can carry.

Over this weekend, I have “done” three laptops, where “done” = wiping them and putting Win7 on them, it’s boot into BIOS, make some changes, pop in usb stick, let batch script run, come back later and do some input, come back later and do some more, 5 mins + 5 mins + 5 mins for each one, while sat here drinking coffee, smoking, scratching my balls.

At basic, that is 3 x days living wage, subsistence level, I just earned, to me, that is being a prepper, not storing up for the zombie apocalypse, but getting so you have fuck all and can live on fuck all, and walk away with fuck all at a moment’s notice.

There will always be someone who needs something, and as long as they have something to trade for what they need….

One of the questions on OKCupid is “In a certain light, would nuclear war be exciting”, my answer is of course, no, it fucking would not, and there is the thing, for all the many, and they are many and serious, faults that society and civilisation has today, got to be said, it’s still pretty cushy, if you can drag yourself away from comparing yourself with the Joneses, so it is not with glee that I look upon the prospect of a collapse or reset or WW3.

Sure, the tactic is to be able to survive better than anyone else, but again, like those I talked about at the beginning of all this, I have wandered off that particular path before, I took one look at it, shook my head, said I wasn’t happy, too many variables.

I’m still here, so clearly I survived each time, but I’m not fool enough to think that any of that is to to how good or how well I took every possible chaotic factor into account, if anything, it’s the opposite, I didn’t mean nonchalantly against the machine about to fly apart, thinking it was perfectly safe.

When I saw chaotic events, I became chaotic myself, no established patterns or routines, I was like a dog with a 60 second attention span and a dim long term memory for the abstract, hell, to this day people still say I shovel my food down, and it is true, 5 minutes from picking up and plate (my one meal of the day) to emptying it is a leisurely meal for me…. it’s not that I can’t or haven’t done the 8pm to 1 am extended meal in the restaurant, I just gravitate towards the former.

I’m not cynical, I am experienced, we have far too many cunts, with far too much control and influence, all getting to that point far enough from the beaten path where they are exceeding their abilities, and venturing into the areas where chaotic systems take the upper hand, something they all have NO experience of.

I wish it were not so, but it is.

I wish is was a world where I could be a fantasy warrior, able to snap his fingers and choose amongst twenty luscious teen girls to warm my bed each night, but I don’t buy that.

I wish it was not a world where nobody gives a fuck about anyone else, and my survival is my immediate utility to them, I have to be useful enough to trade something with, and for whatever reasons, not worth stealing from… easier pickings elsewhere.

It’s a world where, quite literally, a guy who thought he was in control was completely unaware of the fact that I was contemplating his death, for the utility his wife could offer me once he was out of the picture, and it would have been so easy, and his life worth so little, but the utility she offered me, it was insufficient to outweigh his life… you know… I’ll burn more energy catching that food than I will get from eating it, better sniff around some more…. I bugged out and laid low off the radar, and two weeks later I was outta that country, literally with the clothes on my back and fuck all else.

Heard much later, he didn’t make it.

Twenty years have passed and now that country is back in the shitter, except it’s worse this time.

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