Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

I have, for my sins, watched Elon Musk talk at some length on subjects of his own choosing, and while the MSM maintains that he is an intellectual genius, because, all billionaires are smarter than everyone else donchaknow, the word/phrase that springs to mind is “dumb dweeb”.

The guy is apparently richer than croesus and smarter than einstien, but has several beliefs that can be best characterised by saying “X is a problem, amazing new technology will solve this problem, it only takes money and effort to develop amazing new technology, so lets rock…”

There is precisely zero investigation of why current technology is failing, and what a replacement technology must look like before starting, and far from being concerned with physical laws, most of the effort is centred around legislative laws, and how to game them.

Down here at the shallow end of the corporate pool I have had conversations with government tax flunkies, I say things to them like “is it illegal for me to buy a thing for a dollar and sell it for 50 cents and make a loss?” because of course they do not run businesses, but they know all about it so feel entitled to tell me how to run mine, and I should be doing things differently and making money and paying taxes to pay their wages, and of course they do not have an answer for me… they can’t answer questions like “Is it illegal for me to be a “bad” businessman and not make profits, provided I obey all the rules and file all the appropriate forms and taxes?”

My accountant is current with all the current laws and regulations, and of course he is also registered as a practicing accountant, so he can file accounts for me, but he is a long way from the old accountants that I was apprenticed to as a school leaver back in the day when desktop 4 banger calculators had just come out… that guy used to tell me stories about innovative but legal tax dodges the world over, and his policy was if his clients paid *any* taxes, he wasn’t bloody good enough at his job.

His own particular pride and joy was a guy making and servicing and calibrating weighing scales who suddenly got a testing and calibration job that would have suddenly made him a fucking mint, and suddenly paid a fucking fortune in taxes… the solution was to buy a new set of certified calibration weights for the lab… all custom made from 99.99% pure precious metals, suddenly the company had a vast new non taxable fixed asset, and I’m talking many tens of thousands of pounds sterling back in the late 1970’s, when a nice detached house could be had for 4 or 5 thou.

*my* accountant is incapable of coming up with a scheme like that, and when I related the story to him he reacted in horror, despite the fact that it was and remains perfectly legal, my accountant, like all modern accountants, if afraid of what the government revenue flunkies think of him, they could put him out of business, he says.

It’s much the same with the new toyota J200 vs the old J40 I learned to drive on, nobody today has the balls to go against the rules and regulations and make a citroen mehari, back in the day in the USA there was a regulation about a nascar weight on the starting line, a couple of bright sparks decided to make the weight by having a car that was basically 400 lbs lighter than the rest of the field, and then they added 400 lb or mercury inside the tubular chassis, and a valve that could be opened once the car left the start line… the regulations were changed and cars were weighed at the END of the race..

So today we make cars engaged in a vicious circle of conflicting regulations, it’s got to have 2000 lbs of airbags and marshmallows in case it hits someone, but it also has to get 400 mpg, so VW tweaked the testing, and no, it was not illegal, and yes, everyone was doing it, but instead of saying fuck you everyone is doing it and we will continue to do it until the regulations are changed, they caved and sold a couple of junior guys up the river who got prosecuted for something that actually wasn’t illegal, just shady, which is OK, because basically 99% of everything now is a retrospective thought crime, and probably a sexual one at that, and yes, you will be persecuted for it.

Of course now it is the great and mighty being persecuted for malicious after the fact allegations (just like so many men down at street level have been for a couple of decades now in secret family courts and police stations) that no it really was rape / abuse / perverted etc, they are up in arms… and wondering why nobody down on the street has any sympathy.

My dad used to say the price for a dog licence should be a thousand pounds a year, and that was back when a thousand pounds was a lot of money, his reasoning was anyone who truly loved and cared for dogs would pay it, so now many many years later the new chancellors budget has added up to a thousand pounds to the price of a nasty new polluting diesel, because, green, innit.

NOBODY who had their eyes on a new E320 diesel merc is going to say fuck it and buy a nissan leaf now… in fact there is a local guy doing a roaring trade chipping and DPF deleting new diesel cars, come the first MOT in three years time he can put it back for you for the day, or you can just chop in your leased car, nobody gives a fuck.

But hey, new diesel panel vans are exempt from this new tax, I guess that is a different sort of pollution.

Nobody who I talk to can tell me why the various components in a diesel exhaust are harmful, except in an idiocracy “it’s got electrolytes” way, nobody understands the link between compression ratio and efficiency and oxides of nitrogen production, but they all want efficiency AND no oxides of nitrogen or other nasty stuff AND a car made of marshmallow etc

Nobody who I talk to can tell me why nasty polluting waste engine oil ploughed into the ground makes such a great fertiliser for certain plants, or why grandad used to pipe the old lister exhaust into the commercial greenhouse and get better crops.

Nobody can explain to me why toxicity is pretty linear, if you know the toxicity and the body weight pretty much the same amount of anything toxic per kilo of body weight kills pretty much 99.9% of everyone, but when it comes to carcinogens or pollutants or radioactivity, it’s all a bit random, one kid who has never smoked dies of lung cancer at 16, the old boy down the road who has been smoking unfiltered woodbines every day for 70 years is still good to go.

Nobody can explain it, but it’s fact, and as Vonnegut said, you start challenging people’s beliefs, watch out.

But now in nearly 2018 we must be close to “peak absurd beliefs” and shure as shit ain’t shin-ola a lot of those beliefs are going to hit a hard wall “real soon now” TM, because the gaps between beliefs and reality have never been so large.

When you have retarded morons like must who literally believe that the only way to beat the AI apocalypse is for human beings to augment their brains and bodies with cybernetic implants, otherwise they will be out competed by the AI……

DNA doesn’t give a fuck about intelligence, or humans, or anything else except itself, and the thing almost nobody gets is DNA is an ***entire*** ecosystem, take the bacteria that eat decaying flesh and plug them into an augmented AI system so that their oh so sexy robot avatar can sit next to musk and these other loons on a studio couch somewhere, and tell them that human beings are the most / only important thing, and all they will have to say is wow, a teensy tiny portion of my food can talk, how cute…. and then the robot AI bit dies from lack of maintenance or power, and the bacteria carry on as normal.

Mankind did not INVENT plastics, mankind DISCOVERED them, same way he discovered oxygen and so on, and only a loon would suggest that in a million years there will still be plastic bags and drinks bottles clogging up the earth, because, you know, it isn’t biodegradable, it is immortal and immutable for all time.

I have people tell me about toxins and poisons and shit, some of them know what cyanide is, none of them will believe me when I tell them to go eat a burger and their gut will produce more cyanide to go with the normal levels that are in there, because cyanide is toxic and it kills.

Everything like paedophilia is bad or good, there is no grey area, and once you establish that paedophilia is bad and nobody could possibly argue that it is good, all you have to do then is raise the age of consent, the higher it is, the more “civilised” the country, the lower it is, the more primitive and backward and corrupt the country.

And really, who but a dirty fucking paedo would argue that the age should be lowered?

Or object to it being raised.

Or object to new taxes on diesels, or new subsidies for “wind”, because, brawdo has electrolytes, it’s what paedos crave.

I can go out now and buy a 50 gallon drum of diesel, I could buy 100, so there is no “fuel shortage” and more than there is a bread shortage or circus shortage, and I am already older and healthier than 99.999% of all humanity that ever lived before me, sans a few outliers like St Boniface who lived to 79 years old 1,400 years ago, and the fact is 79 is no great feat nowadays, I can introduce you to people in their mid nineties who live alone and do all their own cooking and cleaning and washing and shopping and have no outside help of any kind, lots of them, not just the odd freak outlier, so how does that jibe with all this modern nasty evil pollution / radiation / toxic shit?

It doesn’t.

You going to go with observable fact, or hype?

 

Maybe it’s because I’m an autistic, pedantic engineer, but it really annoys me when people use words wildly incorrectly.

An ICE uses gasoline or diesel as a FUEL, but it runs on thermal (heat) ENERGY, and that ENERGY is liberated when the FUEL is oxidised / burnt.

An EV uses electrical ENERGY to run, if that comes from a battery of caps, there is no internal fuel source, if it is a fuel cell, then the fuel cell oxidises FUEL (probably hydrogen) to create electrical ENERGY.

Solar ENERGY is not a fuel.

Wind ENERGY is not a fuel.

Hydro ENERGY is not a fuel.

coal / gas / oil / nuclear FUELled energy stations produce electrical ENERGY.

This shit is important, and everyone glosses over it, including commenter toyotathing, by stating that fuels are nasty and dirty and polluting, and energy isn’t.

Traditional vehicles don’t really run on fuels, it’s the energy that makes them run, the point is that they create that energy on demand from fuel.

EV’s do not create any energy, they only store it, they eliminate the fuel to energy conversion process, which is a two edge sword that one the one hand eliminates the nasty by products of burning a fuel onboard, but on the other hand also eliminates the simplicity of handling fuel for storage and refuelling purposes.

EV energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is more than likely going to be burning fuel, though it may be nuclear reactions and not chemical ones boiling the kettles that spin the turbines that make the electrical energy.

Solar and wind power all come from the sun, our local star.

Hydro cam come from solar or gravity thanks to the moon, our local satellite.

The sun of course is just a big inefficient polluting nuclear furnace with no containment, very messy.

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we need to get all these things straight, and not be using FUEL and ENERGY incorrectly.

Which brings us to hydrogen FUEL cell technology, providing electrical ENERGY for a hybrid (not pure) EV.

Borosilicate glass cannot even contain low pressure gaseous hydrogen, just ask anyone who owns a laser tube, over enough years it will all permeate out, over a few years enough will permeate out to screw up the energy pumping with the co2 etc.

Not even a stainless steel pressure vessel will contain 100% of the hydrogen put into it… it will permeate out over time.

Hydrogen has other issues, it’s naturally gaseous, liquefying it under pressure takes an awful lot of energy, as in, it will probably take significantly more energy to liquefy a litre of hydrogen than you can get out of a litre of hydrogen, plus, a litre of hydrogen contains full all energy compared to a litre of diesel or benzine, plus, you also used a hell of a lot of energy cracking water into hydrogen in the first place.

But, you *can* call it a fuel, and in theory you can burn it in oxygen and get bugger all out apart from energy and water, nota bene, bugger all != nothing…

I don’t buy into fuel cell hybrid vehicles for one simple reason, ethanol / biodiesel powered ICE is easier and cheaper to do.

Fuck emissions, at this point in the discussion, they are not relevant.

So we have a choice, thermal energy or electrical energy, either one will power a vehicle, but thanks to semiconductor technology and digital electronics, we can exercise incredible levels of control over electrical energy, thermal energy, not so much, you can effectively open or close a valve or turn a wick up or down.

So the problem then becomes converting fuels into electrical energy.

At best it is a fairly inefficient process, and the smaller and lighter and more responsive / performance oriented you want the converter to be, the more inefficient it is going to be.

Take the trunk away from a tesla and add a few hundred kilos and you can fit a space craft style solid state nuclear > electric power cell, good for 20 years at maybe a kilowatt or so, so 24 kwh per day, it’s going to limit your range, but you’ll never need to recharge per se.

A fixed speed diesel electric genset in the trunk will do the same job, bring it up to 3kw capacity and your tesla range will essentially be unlimited, until the fuel tank for the genset needs refilling.

BTW 3 square meters of 100% efficient solar panels in the tropics would pull about 24 kwh per 24 hours, and peak at 3 kw at midday.

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As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile weighs 40% more than the model 1998 dorkmobile, you do not give a fuck about energy efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile has a 0-60 time, even if it is 60 seconds, you do not give a fuck about energy efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile does not have a hub motor, and no brakes because the hub motor takes care of that too, you do not give a fuck about efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile has a manufacturing energy equivalent budget of 30,000 litres of diesel at 49 kwh per litre = 1,470,000 kwh = 58,800 days @ 25 kwh per day which is a good number for per capita civilized energy budget, which is 161 years, you don’t give a fuck about efficiency, by definition.

Now, a streamlined electric bike / scooter with a 1,400 watt motor, limited 30 mph top speed and 15 kwh of battery and minimal weight, now we are talking…

The problem with li-on is the 18650 battery spec, it was great for laptops, but to get any real capacity you need millions of them, and they all need containing and wiring together and thermal management and everything else… if instead of 18 mm dia and 65.0 mm long they were prismatics, say 100 high by 50 wide by 200 long, per 3.3 volt cell, you’d be starting to get somewhere.

Tesla making slightly bigger 18650 is fucking pointless.

I learned to drive (at 12) on a J40 toyota land cruiser, with a whopping 78 bhp bulletproof merc diesel, weighed around 3,400 lb, or 43 lb per bhp, the current j200 is knocking on 300 bhp and weighs in at around 6,000 lb, 20 lb per bhp and twice as many lbs to boot, you see the fucking problem, the 1960’s version was far superior.

A fucking fuel cell isn’t going to fix that.

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Honda experimented on turbos with the pig, aka the cx500, the marketing shit at the time was they started in the hardest thing to turbo, a v twin, to perfect the turbo, the fact that the cx500 was watercooled was of course neither here nor there, fnaar fnaar.

Fuel cells aren’t new, they have been tried in buses and lorries, because they were big slow old boxes, ideal test beds for a fuel cell, but, we keep coming back to the same shit problem, hydrogen makes a fucking shit fuel to catalyse into energy, it only keeps coming back again and again and again because of the bullshit about distilled water out of the tailpipe.

the problem is not to fix the fuel cell and hydrogen fuel manufacturing, storage and transfer problems, the problem is to stop trying to make shitting unicorns and rainbows an indivisible part of every fuel / energy problem that you look at.

EV’s are NOT fucking environmentally friendly, and I do not care if you have a nissan leaf or a tesla roadster, my 20 year old diesel volvo is more environmentally friendly, the ONLY way you can make it less environmentally friendly is to lie through your ass about EVERYTHING EXCEPT tailpipe emissions, when you look at the whole enchilada including all manufacturing and scrappage costs, and divide it by total vehicle miles traveled, the 20 year old volvo diesel wins hands down.

This doesn’t mean I have anything AGAINST an EV, or a hybrid fuel cell EV, I think there is real potential there, but only IF we drop all the bullshit.

We already made and developed benzine and diesel powered fuel cells, it was perfected and then dropped around 2015, they were NOT cheap, but they did work and they were reliable, 10,000 hours constant run times, (2 years 24/7) but they were dropped.

CAPEX and OPEX, per kwh produced they are a fucking expensive way to get kwh, and old 1950’s Lister CS 6/1 startomatic beats it hands down across the board.

A few years ago in the UK petrol cars were shit, so lets everyone buy a diesel, now diesel cars are shit, lets everyone buy a petrol, I suspect the next one with new IC engine vehicles outlawed by 2020 is petrol and diesel are shit, lets everyone buy an EV.

None of the “xxx are shit” were ever true, it was just a way to make the old obsolete so the new could be sold.

I’ll refer you again to the j40 toyota vs the j200, or the series 2 landie vs the new thing, or my 1950’s startomatic to the fuel cell ones, and in almost every case, the older versions were leaner and meaner and more efficient as a result.

Foruma 1 cars must weigh less than 1,600 lbs by rule, two per old j40, four per new j200, and those fuckers the drivers can walk away from 200 mph crashes, so they aren’t exactly the citroen mehari which weighed around 1,300 lbs, or a 2cv come to that, a car that did 62 mpg 50 years ago…

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FUEL v ENERGY

A car that burns 100 kwh of FUEL at 30% efficiency to produce and consume 30 kwh of ENERGY isn’t actually less efficient than an EV that consumes 30 kwh of ENERGY to go the same distance.

The only difference is the EV burned the FUEL remotely at the power station, probably only a few percent only more efficiently than the ICE vehicle… and then there were the transmission losses between the power station and the EV, and the charging losses charging the EV batteries, so there is probably fuck all in it.

A 78 bhp 3,200 lb J40 toyota is always going to beat a 300 bhp 6,000 lb J200 toyota at efficiency though.

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Summary, electrical ENERGY is really easy to control in amazing detail, so there are plenty of good reasons to want to work with it rather than thermal ENERGY.

The conversion of FUELS to ENERGY is always pretty inefficient.

The conversion of ENERGY into FUEL (eg making hydrogen) is about the only thing less efficient than converting fuel into energy.

Going for EFFICIENCY everywhere you can afford to, and ECONOMY everywhere else, beats everything else.

No EV or hybrid or fuel cell does this, that is not what they are about, this is NOT to say that the technology might get there one day, but in 2017 that day is about as far away as commercial fusion, eg “maybe in 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 years… maybe more….”

Confusing fuel and energy will kill you, at the very least economically, if not literally, and real soon now… TM

I could tell you that the town that I live in has 6 car parks, and the council has plans to convert at least 3 of them into something else, student flats, shopping areas, flats over shopping areas, whatever, it’s incidental because the real purpose is to discourage cars coming into the town centre.

People up and down the country could read that and think I was talking about where they lived…

To these councillors, walking, riding a pushbike or taking a bus are sufficient, after all, all the shops goods in are teleported in at 2 am, and nobody ever buys anything but a latte to go, and cars are evil.

It’s a “green” thing.

The councillors themselves get elected in local elections, of course only the idle and feckless ever run for election, everyone else is out working, so the process is “democratic” but before we even started everyone who has a job and who isn’t a feckless twat is already self excluded, so we need to bear that in mind for a moment.

When it comes to voting itself turnout / participation is low / low / low, so again it may be democratic that candidate X gets 52% of the vote, but not many voted.

When it comes to the voting itself, it’s people who vote, Jim’s butcher shop doesn’t get a vote, Val’s veg shop doesn’t get a vote, Steve’s newsagents shop doesn’t get a vote, even though the three may form a corner at one end of a shopping street, Jim and Val and Steve might get a vote, if they want to take time off work to go down and vote, they are far too busy trying to make a living to go and stand for election.

So it’s democracy, but local shops and businesses again do not get to participate.

In effect you have a rather small minority of the feckless idle and stupid who stand for election and who vote, et voila, we have local councillors, and their decisions and choices then have the force of law… and remember, these are still basically feckless idle and stupid people, so it’s easy for the local superstore to get planning permission, they are easy to manipulate.

The LOCAL economic heart of the town gets ripped out, to be replaced with pedestrianized snipers alleys populated with national chains of tat, after all, they are the only ones who can afford the rent and business rates charged by the council and the new landlords who built the steel frames modern monstrosities.

What was 100 years ago the local fire station and council offices opposite the old church, and old brick building about 150 foot long and 60 foot deep and two stories high, is now a takeaway, a betting shop and an estate agent, the council now lives in a pair of huge 6 story concrete and glass cubes up the road, with perhaps 150 times the volume and 200 times the staff, all leeching off the citizens and businesses.

Tens and tens and tens of millions of pounds flowing into the council coffers every year, I am not going to call it “revenue” because that implies they have to do some work or some trading and invites confusion with terms such as turnover and gross and net profit margins, whereas this is none of that, it’s just money coming in from stuff like taxes on your house, parking for your car, tax on your business / place of work, etc etc etc

And this is all legal, as in it has the force of law behind it.

So what of the empty shops and premises (and all the “charity” shops count as empty in my book) what happens to them?

Well, when you own 10 shops in a row and you are charging 40,000 per annum rent for each, having 5 of them empty is no reason to drop the rents on the empty ones to 10,000 per annum.

£40k x 10 = £400k, but £10k x 10 = £100k, and with accounting and property rules, and probably your own commercial mortgage, reducing nominal rent = reducing property “value” on paper = declaring yourself bankrupt = not happening.

Meanwhile Jim Val and Steve who own those three shops on the corner and get no say in anything are getting squeezed harder and harder.

I actually knew a chap who had a shop that sold material (dressmaking / curtain / cloth etc) on rolls, I dunno, 450 square feet, a front window that got smashed every year by drunks that the council did nothing about security wise, and they were raising his rent from 39,000 to 41,000 a year, it went up every year, assuming he was open for trading 50 hours per week that’s £15 per hour, EVERY FUCKING HOUR, just for rent, add business rates, add customers with cars being penalized by the council, add light and heat, add stock….

… add the completely alien to the council concept of a profit margin on trading where even on a fat 20% markup (lots of businesses dream of a 10% markup….) you have to sell 5,000 worth of shit to make 1,000 gross profit, so suddenly he has to have the till ringing at the rate of 80-90 quid an hour, and he sold cheap material, I used to buy polyester at 1.25 a metre, a few metres at a time.

He quit, it’s another “charity” shop now…. the place is already saturated with takeaways and betting shops so there was no interest for that, perhaps the only two ways for premises that size to make the rent… there is already a laundromat across the road.

But all these changes are for the better, it’s a green thing, we are getting rid of the evil automobile, and we are all lining our pockets very nicely from doing this important work, thank you very much… and we *must* be doing something right because we have such luminaries as waitrose and john lewis and next and matalan and landmark securities and lloyds bank and vodaphone and apple and everyone else “investing” in our exciting new pedestrian wonderland.

Not one of them is a local firm.

Not one of them is a manufacturing firm.

Not one of them is doing anything except extracting money from the local economy in exchange for a handful of minimum wage part time jobs.

But no matter, they pay the rent and rates that keep the council coffers full… and the councillors and the rest paid.

The local council does a “deal” with tesco and allows them to build a new superstore on what was green belt land, and then the council claims credit for “creating 150 new jobs” in the town.

Meanwhile everything hollows out like an old tree rotting from within, it still looks pretty impressive in summer with a crown of leaves and an impression of stately permanence, but it’s only one winter’s gale away from being sawdust and mulch.

No saplings growing out around it to replace it, because that has been concreted over for pedestrians.

In an insane asylum, the reservoir is no longer being filled but there is still water coming out of the taps so party hearty like it is 1999.

And for all the faults of the old individual units on 2 way streets that were anything from 70 to 700 years old, at least they WERE individual units so there was scope for sapling businesses to move in and take root, now there are only steel framed glass fronted edifices starting at £500k per year rent that only a national chain could even consider financing moving in.

I predict that in years to come large swathes of the new pedestrian precinct will be sold by one party to another party for the sum of one pound, and that will continue until someone blinks and someone else can leverage the liabilities associated with these “assets” away, either by scrapping planning rules and regulations, or ripping up all the pedestrian shit and allowing vehicles back in.

Contrast this to an industrial estate such as I am on, and it is largely defined BY the road structure leading to and from it, roads designed expressly to permit entrance and egress of arctics make for easy access to private vehicles, and the fact is most of the pavements are at least six foot wide too.

And then you look around and see who is moving in, nandos, kfc, sporting goods, gymnasiums, two cafe’s, high street electronics shop, pushbike shop, 5x motorcycle shops (used to be three in the high street in town) and surely and steadily it is turning into everything that the old town centre used to be, minus the “live over the shop” accommodations that used to be there, and that too can be cured with a stroke of the pen in planning permissions.

The more astute would look at this and mutter to themselves that if national chains of consumer shops are abandoning the new car hating pedestrianized city centres and moving out to the car friendly industrial estates (which are largely bereft of heavy goods vehicles evenings and weekends) NOW, then we are already well past the point where the first writing was on the wall, and anyone with any sanity would have started to retrace steps.

Indeed the history of the modern city centre is always that back in the day it was the contemporary equivalent of the industrial estate of today, so all we are seeing is history rhyming again.

Things have just gotten a bit bigger, 150 square metres on a 450 square meter plot is the new 20 foot by 30 foot and accommodations up over in the days of the horse and cart.

The hilarious thing is that the old pre pedestrianised city centre WAS basically built in the era of the pedestrian, and the odd hand or horse drawn cart, the new industrial estate city centres are laid out on a much larger scale entirely, often in places that were once a cattle market or railway yard, outside of town, but which are now the new mecca.

And as far as revenues, there ain’t much to tax in the new industrial estates, no parking permits for residents because there aren’t any, ditto housing taxes, and no services to provide, there aren’t any buses or drop in centres for the transgendered homeless, plus it is still classed as an industrial zone so fuck you very much, and a lot of the tenants are really big, you can afford to lose a department store from the high street, you can’t afford to lose the new amazon warehouse or the regional ford showroom and service centre or the bus company depot and workshops, the boot is on the other foot.

So we will get (like many things, europe lags the usa by a few years) regional and city councils going bankrupt, unable to pay their own wages and pensions, much less fund transgender toilets for ethnic minority midgets.

Bankruptcy is like that reservoir that ain’t being filled no more but the taps still work, when the cash stops flowing out of the taps, everything changes real quick.

If the council gets for example 50 million a year in taxes from local homeowners and business, and the writing is on the wall that the council is going to go bankrupt in six months, ain’t nobody going to pay the council, the body that is going to sue them is going to cease to exist before the lawsuit can ever get anywhere near a court, and you have the equivalent of a bank run.

And several thousand former council employees find out the hard way the essential difference between free money stolen by taxation, and money that has to be worked for as a profit on endeavour and labour.

The last piece was warning you about proper registered companies v being a private individual or sole trader.

This piece is warning you about town/city centres, the whole green / hate cars / pedestrian thing, pretty much doesn’t matter what your business is, if you are just around the corner from a fast food outlet and a car dealer and a gym and a food outlet and a electronics place, your customers are yards away, and increasingly all those places are abandoning city centres and moving out of town to industrial estates.

The last ones to leave the town centres will be the big department store chains that all sell clothes and home furnishings and other tat made for cents in the dollar in china or india or wherever.

Nota Bene, Malls are NOT industrial estates.

 

Disclaimer, I have driven wagons in the past for money.

Disclaimer, I have been a certified marine and hydraulic engineer in the past for money.

Disclaimer, I am old enough to have picked up a lot of experience directly, and heard an awful lot of things one step removed from others, eg I never owned a fleet of wagons, but I worked for a guy that did.

So, the tesla twuck, it has to be said with a lisp, as in, it HAS to be said with a lisp, because even if it wasn’t vapourware, it isn’t a truck.

Daimler is making one now, it’s not vapourware, and it is a truck, meaning it has a proper ladder chassis and that is basically how it is sold, all variations on a theme from there based on standard parts and dimensions, container carrier, flatbed, curtainsider, box, often made by separate companies such as boalloy and all basically standard parts.

Because the primary purpose of trucks is to transport shit, and so 99% of everything is either going to be based around 10/20/30/40 foot containers or euro-pallets, or standard 250 cube boxes that just fit in standard wagons.

If you run trucks, you care about the following, in no specific order;

• can the body design handle the loads you envisage paying your way? And yes, even tractor trailer with 5th wheel there are factors that *heavily* influence the trailer and loads possible.
• can the drivetrain be maintained economically without too much john deere esqu vendor lock in?
• does it comply with legislation where you want to run it eg max weight per axle, a very different thing to max weight.
• how much fuel does it use in money terms, do not forget a diesel filler cap on 50 gallon tanks has no ongoing costs.
• how much do tyres cost per 10,000 vehicle miles
• how much to insure and otherwise certify and make legal.

There is *lots* more, but those are the high points, for the tesla twuck, let’s look at the answers.

1. not even mentioned, the most significant part of a truck, not even mentioned.
2. no, shined away with some bullshit about a million mile guarantee, well a million miles ain’t nothing special for a wagon, and there are *plenty* of cases of wagons with a million miles on the original engine and drivetrain
3. not even mentioned, but a distinct lack of axles there so it’s probably going to be an issue
4. claimed 2 kwh per mile, for vapourware, and I’m gonna go right out on a limb here and call total bullshit, a toy twuck might do that, a working truck loaded never will
5. tyres, tyres, tyres, tyres, o-60 times for trucks hauling 60,000 lbs, puhleese, dunlop will buy shares, and you’ll be changing tyres every time you stop to recharge, and I call bullshit on the 2 kwh per mile because the tyres alone on a loaded wagon will consume more than that as they rotate and deform under load, tyre heat comes from somewhere people, and that’s rotating in free air and they still get hot
6. the unknown always costs more than the known.

So I call total bullshit on the twuck, as a fucking minimum you want individual tyre pressure and temperature monitoring (this is 2017 people) and realtime reporting, because that’s your bread and butter right there, and there is NO FUCKING WAY you make it even possible to feed so much torque through the tyres that you start talking about 0-60 times you’re out the door before you even came in… .. friend of mine just had all new boots on his scania tractor rig, that’s be £5,270 fitted, if he ran his own trailers that would be another £4k for a twin axle or £3.5k for a triple.

Next thing you would want is a kick-ass GPS, proper truck gps are already pretty good, won’t send you under low bridges or down narrow roads or over stuff that can’t carry your weight, but tesla is supposed to be techno, so the fucking last thing you want is a fucking autopilot lifted from a model x….. no autopilot is fine, but a gps that calculates a route based on inclines and distance and junctions and so on to give a minimum energy solution, that would sell, but the twuck does not have that, just the autopilot.

Nor does the twuck mention air, back in the day we used to make trucks with a clutch on the compressor so it only ran when the tanks needed air, then we went to systems that were always on and just blew off the excess, now we have more hybrid systems, but it HAS to have air braking, and it has to have air, so it has to have a compressor, and the sizes are legally mandated for various uses, no mention of it at all.

This one really troubles me, with wagons the air handling system isn’t some peripheral or accessory like the alternator in your car, it’s a core part of the design, daimler electric trucks make a point of telling you that the air handling is all standard, it doesn’t just do the brakes, it does many other jobs too, from shifting (which you could eliminate in an electwick twuck) to air ride suspension / levelling to actuators to raising axles (the opposite of air ride in many ways) but it’s glossed over in usual tesla style.

And then more vapourware appears, a 500 mile range 200 mph new roadster, I feel like I have just taken acid and I am watching a Moller Skycar crowdfunding deal…

The harsh fact is, my illegal in the yew ess aah 70 quid 15 year old 2 litre 4 banger diesel eurobox which reliably returns more than 50 miles per imperial gallon of diesel at 70 mph is probably a thing of envy for many USAians looking to save a buck on transport, but compared to a diesel wagon hauling 90,000 lbs plus its own weight at a steady mandated 56 mph down a mandated curvature and incline motorway, my old diesel car is a fucking gas guzzler extraordinaire when you start looking at miles per gallon per ton.

The only thing that really beats it is anything that goes on water.

Trains don’t… in theory they could, in practice they don’t, except for some edge cases with very long pulls of ore wagons.

Sure, fuel is a *big* thing, but the reality is even here in the Uk with some of the most expensive taxed fuel on the planet at 1.15 per litre for diesel = £5.22 per imperial gallon, a fully loaded arctic pulling 40 tons can expect anywhere from 8 to 12 mpg depending on the road, so fuel is only 65p – 43p per mile, at £12 per hour including employers contributions etc etc etc the fucking driver on a low wage is costing an absolute minimum of 21p per mile, 2x drivers or driver + mate = diesel cost, and that is here in the UK with our crazy fuel prices.

tesla twuck claimed energy consumption of 2 kwh per mile at current UK electric prices is 40p per mile, IT ISN’T ANY FUCKING CHEAPER than a new volvo, and there are plenty of real world examples of drivers getting 24 litres per 100 km, loaded, overall, urban and motorway, (truck industry insiders know this shit like the back of their hand) which is 5.28 imp gallons per 62 miles, which is 12 mpg.

48 kwh in an imperial gallon of diesel, so 4 kwh per mile, but its a heat engine, lots of thermal rejection, NOT THAT ALL THAT HEAT IS WASTE, some surplus heat is a good thing and useful, keeps lubricants flowing nicely and carrying additional heat away… but buying diesel at the pump it only costs you 10 p per kwh, not the 20 p per kwh that electric costs, ( we haven’t even mentioned reefers) so the tesla twucks claimed 2 kwh per mile is all a bit meh.

WHEN or IF there are say 500,000 combined tesla twuck fleet miles to be analysed, which is how it works with say a new volvo or merc etc, then maybe fleet operators will consider buying into it, based on those numbers…. before those numbers are available, there isn’t even anything for them to ignore, it’s just vapourware.

But the only saving we are seeing is a marginal one at best on energy costs per mile… meanwhile every truck operator on the planet knows they can go and buy a brand new alloy 100 gallon tank for 750 bucks, and add a minimum 750 miles range to the wagon… try that with fucking battery packs…. or replace the old one… we used to run twin 100 gallon tanks on the fords.

My mate who just spent 5k on tyres for the tractor can expect 50,000 miles out of them if he maintains them well and doesn’t get on any poor surfaces, that’s 10 p a mile right there, half of a cheap drivers wages of 21 p per mile and a fifth of the average of 50 p per mile for fuel.

Start doing hard acceleration and not monitoring tyre pressures and temps aggressively and tyre costs can easily treble, quadruple, quintuple or even more, and at that point you’re like some use cases where tyre cost per mile exceeds both fuel cost and driver cost per mile together…. plus of course there is a direct link between tyres and fuel economy.

Please note, we haven’t even gone anywhere near that vast costs and losses incurred (contract penalties etc) when you lose a tyre and stop rolling, older experienced owner and fleet operators care about tyres more than all except the most anal of motorcyclists, yeah, you never see anything about this in any of the interminable you tube truck driver pov videos, because none of them are proper operator/drivers so they never ever talk about their tyres, or suspension.

So what are we left with as far as the tesla twuck reveal?

http://moller.com/

His flying saucer / drone looks more credible, and just as relevant to actual haulage operators the world over.

The only thing missing from the tesla twuck is a dodgy kickstarter campaign, but then he already has that from the state and lunatic investors.

“It kills me to sleep alone”… somehow I don’t find this statement at all inappropriate for the tesla twuck CEO etc

 

It’s all very well to watch what is going on now in Saudi and talk about sand niggers, it’s not so much, it’s about a state grabbing money however it can.

One of the lessons most lost to history is the extent to which the state will go to in order to grab money, and, it’s coming back….

This is greg’s story, in his own words, unedited.

I own(ed) my own house (outright valued £80,000) and I did a ltte bit of work “on the side” for a couple of years, nothing ridiculous. I got made redundant (58) and I couldnt get another job. No, I didnt sign on (too proud) but I kept looking for work while working “on the side”.. I claimed nothing. Pretty soon another 3 years had gone by and I was 61 and still jobless and still working “on the side”. Oh I had put money away for tax and NI but had no idea what to do or how to pay it. I never even realised that I was supposed to tell HMRC. I’d never evr heard from them since I was 17… So here I was, I was working for myself (I was totally clueless)… I then figured things out after stumbling across tax sites on the web and I decided to go the route of “self disclosure”. Got myself a tax specialist and I was TOTALLY open with them and with HMRC. I gave them all paper work bank statements etc, and I held nothing back. I receieved 70% penalty (ouch), and every “fine” in the book. Paid the £65,000 (the amount of lost tax by one payment from my bank)… but they wanted another £45,500 in penalties. So I lost all my life savngs (and wifes savings), lost the house and was declared bankrupt. They said I should be grateful that I was not going to jail… Oh, I am. Would I self disclose again? Is there anything in it for someone to self disclose? The reality is there is no amnesty, there is nothing. Its not exactly the return of the prodigal son and hey, nice, thank you for saving up all that tax…. Bit late but thank you – NO! that’s not how it works !

So, in case you missed the highlights, by the time he was 56 Greg owned his own modest house outright, and at that point he started doing “odd jobs” here and there for others, at 58 he got made redundant from his long term job, did he sign on the dole? did he fuck, he just did a few more odd jobs, after all, he already owned his house so his outgoings weren’t too bad… three years later he is still doing the same thing, doing odd jobs, not claiming the dole.

Then, someone told him he should tell the state about it.

So he did, and he did it properly, hired an accountant and everything.

Next thing he knew he owed the state £110,500, which wiped him and his wife out and made them homeless, but, he was told, he was lucky he didn’t end up in jail….

But wait, it gets better, very recently the state has been granted FULL access to all sorts of shit, not just your bank accounts which they had anyway, but payal, ebay, amazon, etsy, gumtree, fuckbook, you name it.

Now you do not have to shop yourself, your online footprints will do it for you, all for free.

For now the threshold per annum is about one new iphone x, god help you if there are four in your family and you sell on your old phones for 250 quid each, you just turned into a “business” (even if you are already in full time employment), according to the state, and since you did not tell them, a deliberately fraudulent tax dodging business, here come the extra penalties and fines.

And it is going to get worse, a lot worse.

Lots of people ask me why, with my own small one man business, I went to all the trouble of making it a proper company (In law a company is an individual entity, a bit like a person) and of course all the expense, hell, even my accountant and tax dude says I should have stuck at being a sole trader.

I just smile at them and say yeah well.

The fact is you either hide stuff behind a separate legal entity like a company, or it is all in your own name, and the only occupation that is safe in your own name is being a welfare lout, everything else is fair game.

People who know me in real life know that I am not a deceitful person, I am not a rogue or a con man or a fly by night type, on the other hand, I am a private person, if I sell an old phone for 200 quid that is my business and no other fuckers, except for the guy I sold it to, it is certainly no business of the state, well, that is my personal opinion, a personal opinion that is now at odds with the state law…

So I moved everything across to a legit company, which being legit costs a fair bit each year, but on the other hand it is a separate legal entity to me.

Many of the laws that apply to private individuals like me do not apply to corporate entities like my company, and when I say “my” company even that is a bit misleading, it has rules too, for example I can’t simply draw 500 bucks for hookers, I must either pay myself wages or loan myself money, sure, I can make that choice, nobody can gainsay that choice, I still get the 500 bucks for hookers, but I have to do it that way and record it in the books as one or the other.

But it cuts the other way too, if the state decides that I have to explain the 500 bucks that landed in my private bank account, and why I spent it on hookers, whatever the company does or did is an unrelated issue, the state can wait for the year end accounts to be filed by the accountant, and good luck arguing with them.

Greg’s company would not have been liable for Greg’s debts to the state, and his debts to the state and bankruptcy may have disqualified him from being a director of that company, but company directors can be changed, the company sails on.

There is a guy down the road from me who owns three companies, one of them owns a business, that he is employed at, one of them owns a house, that he rents, with wages paid by the first company, and the last one owns a classic car and motorcycle collection, which he is employed to maintain and drive.. but wait, it gets better, all three companies are owned by a shell corporation that sits in another country entirely thousands of miles away, he himself doesn’t have two pennies to scratch his ass with.

The guy in question was the one who told me a few years ago to fuck all that shit and get myself a proper company, and when anyone asks why you are bothering just say yeah well…

See, off the top of my head I can’t think of a single country that has not indulged in some sort of mass state wealth collection at least once within the last 100 years, and I don’t mean the usual punitive taxes and inflation devaluation and shit, I mean stories like Greg’s, but told thousands of times in any one region… either all the precious metals were taken, or the property was taken, or the land was taken, or the bank accounts were taken, and by the way, you can count yourself lucky you did not end up in jail.

I can remember it happening to my dad in 1971, that was all the cash in the bank, I can’t remember but he can remember it happening to his dad in the 30’s, all the precious metals went first, then the iron and steel, and then some of the property.. he can remember his dad talking about it happening to HIS dad in the 1890’s, so without even going outside my own family on the paternal side, I’m the only one who hasn’t been fucked by the state they happened to be in, and that isn’t an omen I care to ignore.

Remember, the law in pretty much every country says a proper company must file legal accounts every year, the law says sweet fuck all about that company either making a profit or turning over any money year to year, and the fact is you can do all this for less than it costs to run a smoking habit…

The proverbial “boating accident” will land your ass in jail, or leave you literally on the street with literally nothing but the shirt on your back.

The proper company doesn’t have to do any such thing as have boating accidents. Companies are taxed on profits, not assets or turnover (just ask google or amazon, amazon uk paid just over 4,000 pounds sterling tax last year in the uk) .

10,000 bucks borrowed from my company is a genuine debt for me as a private individual, if I want to prove I personally have no assets.

Don’t get too fly, if your company buys a 1000 buck banger and rents it to you for 500 bucks a month off your wages for sure it will lower your personal tax threshold, but it will show as a profit on an asset or the company, and it will show the state you are being fly.

Much better to have to company pay you the legal minimum wage in the first place, it lowers your personal tax threshold and so what if the company employs minimum wage staff who are unproductive…

But the fact is that aside from the yeah well, the penniless guy with the three companies owned by the foreign shell company, did make me think about things, and nothing I have seen since leads me to any other conclusion other than we are in for another round of state sponsored theft by any other name.

Getting another passport and fucking off to some foreign climes is often neither practical or possible for many, but every single fucking one of you can get a proper company set up, even if you are one of the few personally disbarred from ever owning a company, your brother can do it for you.

While my dad, and my grandad, and my great grandad all had an ass raping from the state, none of the fuckers got wiped out, none of them had all of their eggs in one basket.

if you are *just* a private individual or worse still a private individual who is also a sole trader, take a good long hard look in the mirror, you are the textbook definition of having all your eggs in one basket.

Now look at the state, it’s looking increasingly like a mugger about to pounce on the low hanging fruit like you.

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Now, I wasn’t even going to write this post, so it only existed in my head, and it has existed there for some time, and the post as it was ended there.

The reason it is actually being posted is something that happened the other day.

I know someone who has had a car vandalised, I know someone who has been ripped off, I know someone who was attacked by a drunk, in every case it was the same old story about when seconds count the po po are minutes or hours away, and when they eventually turn up, they aren’t interested.

I know someone who owns a company, someone kicked off in their reception area, so he called the po po and said “Acme Ltd here, we have someone being violent and abusive in our reception area, please send someone immediately”

The first po po car arrived three minutes later, two more arrived over the next ten minutes.

The perp was taken away in cuffs.

Yeah, not just the tax departments of the state that treat companies better than individuals then….

 

For reference I am mid/late 50’s now, but as a boy, things that could only have been found in a printed on paper “wank mag”, and I do not just mean dirty pictures, but also text stories and subjects and so on, are the daily staple of many mainstream “media” outlets such as the daily fail website.

Be it the rights of primary school children to be any gender they choose, to practically anything else you can shake a stick at.

Back when I was a kid a psychopath was defined as someone who didn’t care about “people” eg. there was no family or tribal or group connection, a description that applies to pretty much 99% of the population now, and of course with insanity all around us and the trend being ever upwards, well, why would you *not* indulge your darkest desires?

Notions or “right” and “wrong” have long since disappeared, now it’s down to what can you do and not be punished for, and of course, to be punished, first you have to get caught and detected and so on, and even then, if every one else is doing 35 mph in the 20 mph zone, why the fuck wouldn’t you?

Why wouldn’t you fuck some post pubescent but below the age of consent but well up for it because they were raised on a diet of personal tablets and phones with pornhub access kid?

It’s not like you’d be in a vanishingly small minority any more, it seems that everyone is doing it, and it seems to be something filtering from the town down in society at that, and it seems that whether you did or did not do it, nothing is going to make you immune from being accused of it in 10 or 20 or 30 years, so you may as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.

When I was a boy one of the immutable cornerstones of western civilization was the OBSERVABLE FACT that in 99.999% of cases, the simple act of being innocent of something was sufficient to remove you from ALL consequences of such a thing.

If you had nothing to hide, you really did have nothing to fear.

That was then.

This is now.

I have said for many years that “everything that you are told is a lie” and while it is still true, sadly we have moved so far beyond that point that it is a statement that while being true, is also wildly misleading.

“everything that you are told is a fantasy” is where we are at now.

Lies are simple misdirection or misrepresentation, the dog ate my homework, I did not steal your 5 bucks, john did, etc etc.

Fantasy is aliens stole the homework, a russian state sponsored drug cartel stole your 5 bucks and frames me for it, and john in an agent of putin, etc etc

A lie is something that may be believed because there is a lack of evidence to show otherwise, or be disproved when evidence later arises.

A fantasy is something that is apparently expected to be believed because there is no way there is going to be evidence to show otherwise, how the fuck can anyone prove I was not abducted by aliens and anally probed?

As a boy I would have been soundly beaten and punished for telling a lie, this was so effective that on the one hand I cannot actually recall a single beating, I’m sure they happened and I’m sure they were painful at the time, I just cannot recall a single instance, so they can’t have been that bad.

As a boy if I had indulged in fantasy it kind of went one of two ways, if the fantasy was “healthy” like pretending to be a cowboy or indian, well, no big deal, same as pretending to be a shopkeeper or train driver or astronaut…. there were plenty of elements of that roleplay that worked and taught you shit, I can distinctly remember being a shopkeeper once, and once only, I set my stall up on the landing and dad said ok boy sell me a tiger beer, (this wasn’t in the UK, you can now get a nasty clone of tiger beer here in some supermarkets) so I handed him some generic thing, and he said that isn’t what I asked for, I asked for a tiger beer… of course I didn’t have any, he did, so I said I could go and get one from downstairs, he said that was his, was I planning on stealing it or buying it, I said I’d buy it, so he sold me a bottle for a dollar from my piggy bank, so I went to sell it to him and he said what’s your profit margin, so I said ok a dollar fifty for a tiger beer dad, he said no thanks, I have two cases downstairs… only paid 20 cents a bottle.

I was down a buck in pocket money and had a bottle of beer I couldn’t sell and didn’t want to drink… mum took pity on me and bought it back for 90 cents, I was around six at the time… will never forget it… can still picture it, the carpet, the cardboard box shop, the junk and the bottle of beer, it had a rip on the label over the “r” in Tiger.

If you pretended you were an alien or your brother tom or someone of the opposite sex, you didn’t get a beating, you got disgust, and “don’t be so fucking stupid boy, you need to grow up”

It was around about that time that I decided that future games would be limited to “army” or driving a steam loco or being a pilot or maybe being an engineer like my dad, because I had just had an epiphany, turns out it was wrong, that was not how dad earned money at work, but it was a damn sight closer than anything that went before which went along the lines of someone giving him money because he went to work, because here was an element of him actually MAKING money on a deal, so obviously him going to work was some sort of similar ish deal… nobody was “giving” him anything in exchange for him turning up and nothing else, there was clearly something going on to do with being smart and brains.

I wanted my elder brother’s train set “when he died” I guess someone had died and I got introduced to the idea of inheritance, but I wanted my dad’s brain when he died, not his car or boat or anything else… hey, I was six, I didn’t think things through, there were too many concepts that I had never been introduced to, so “inheriting someone’s brain when they died” did not seem too ridiculous.

Nowadays I look around me and see a population comprised on 99.9% of people who have never moved much beyond what I was at six, very few real world concepts have ever crossed their paths, and those few that have, well, they could be easily avoided by invoking some fantasy shit.

My name is rover, I identify as a great dane, as such tax laws do not apply to me, and I can shit in the street with impunity, I am actually a russian great dane, and my master is putin.

I will probably get more human pussy than I did back when I was a human male……..

As many of you know, I’ve done a fair bit of work in IT, and I am sure all of you have heard stories of the IT department being called in by someone powerful and senior in the company, their computer isn’t working, IT guys asks if the monitor is turned on as the first of a series of standard questions, IT guy gets the outraged “do you think I am stupid etc” speech, IT guy physically goes to desk, monitor is powered off, IT guy turns it on, silent awkward dance, awkward silence in room, eyes do not meet, silent departure from room.

See, that was never me, I always made a point of saying “You know that thing you were saying about do I *think* you are stupid…”

It didn’t go down well, I’d interrupt the blathering… listen, it isn’t about whether I think you are stupid, it’s about *you* thinking *you* can talk to me like I am a piece of shit because *you* think you are smarter and more important than me…

The first time it happened in any venue the IT director would call me in for a chat, as soon as it was obvious what it was about I’d say I didn’t see a problem, not my fault the company employed ignorant and arrogant assholes who were too stupid to use a computer and too arrogant and rude to deal respectfully with those who were employed to nurse them.

Maybe I’d get called in once more because an internal engineering email was 100% succinct and on top and professional list of bullet point making whatever case it was I was trying to make, invariably it was a wimminz who complained, obviously it wasn’t written in comic sans with flowery gifs and smiley faces and hulloo, how are you feeling today shit all over it.

About then it would stop, I was the Neanderthal who simply could not be brought into the 21 century, but, he is good at fixing shit, so just keep him away from staff.

Customers were usually happy, after all, they just wanted shit fixed, except the ones who “blamed the last guy out the door” at which point they would discover that the last guy out the door had putty logs of everything he had done including arp being up etc etc, smartphone photos of patch cables being correctly installed and blinkenlights showing solid links / sync / whatever… so the claim “your engineer unplugged the point of sale tills from the router and didn’t plug them back in” was kinda blown away by a timed and dated photo of said patch panel, and the other photo of the other guys on site from the till maintenance company… photo graphic and file log proof that the customer in question is either;

• a liar
• stupid
• both of the above

pretty much guarantees instant silence and end of subject from manglement, but it took “where is my fucking apology for being accused of something I patently did not do” to stop manglement from forwarding such complaints to me to see what I had done wrong.

Basically all the above is why I quit the job eventually, the money wasn’t great but the job was a piece of piss and I worked from home and it was all good, apart from dealing with my own fucking company, it eventually got to me to the point where I had to quit.

I said then forget films about future zombie apocalypses, the fucking zombies are here now, and they run IT firms and the customers of IT firms and so on… I also said at the time that typically for zombies they all inhabited places that would be easy prey to hordes of zombies, huge chrome and glass structures with open plan offices and automatic glass doors and glass walls and shit.

Ironically being back in engineering we have our own place on an industrial estate, a place that will be desolate come the zombie apocalypse, and a place that is basically 20 foot high block walls with doors with steel shutters over them and steel beam construction for the rest, zombie proof as it gets pretty much.

Here in the UK we have planning and use laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_use_classes_in_England

They are rubbish at determining what sort of place would be good to hole up in a zombie apocalypse, but they get quite interesting when you dig into the detail.

For example if I task you with setting up an IT fixit service, it’s easy enough, same if I task you with setting up a mobile phone shop or hairdresser, it starts to get interesting if I start adding, OK, now I want the IT fixit service to be 24 hours.

Neither the A2 nor B1 classes say anything about 24 hour operations, so how about if you have bunk facilities and showers and onsite cooking, as we had back in the day doing motorway recovery, it wasn’t residential as you did not permanently reside there (class C3), but it wasn’t just “9-5” either, as it happens I know a guy who has a unit on an estate and parks a small stealth camper van out front, the camper van is road legal, he moves it from one parking space to the other and back again, he has permission from himself to park it there legally, and he doesn’t sleep in the unit itself, so he isn’t breaking any laws… it’s interesting because several people thought he might be, including some from the council, but as it turned out he was not doing anything wrong at all.

I bring him up because he also made a zombie apocalypse comment, his relatively weak stealth camper van is no problem, he just opens the big shutter doors, drives it inside, and closes the doors again…. shit eating grin..

He fell into this zombieland existence by accident after a messy divorce, she took the house and everything (the usual allegations of domestic violence to exclude him from his own home, and btw she needs the car too) so he ended up sleeping on the couch down at the unit, a unit that was rented in a business name, a business started with his brother, simply because he had nowhere else to go.

The next day he went to the local camping shop, also just off the estate his unit is on, and got an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag for the back of the van, and went to an electrical place on the same street and bought a fridge freezer (all on the company account, as his cards had been maxed by the ex) and filled it with TV dinners for the office microwave.

As he says at the time, he was just thinking of the next few days, because he did not know what else to do.

That was 5 years ago, last week he asked me to help him unload and place a 20 foot portakabin, the stealth camper is dying, business is still doing OK so he needs a new company van, and it turned out him sleeping quietly and unobtrusively in his van in the car park didn’t really bother anyone, not even the landlord who owned the two blocks of 4 units per side of which 1 was his.

So the portakabin is for the “night watchman”, and it harkens back to the bunks and shit back when I was doing motorway recovery, it’s not a residence, nobody lives there, and there is no law that says night watchmen must stay awake all night, of course he is the nigh watchman, and the other 7 people on that bit of the estate are all on board…. business insurance is expensive, you either know what I mean or you don’t, but you can easily pay thousands per year to insure a small unit, and it turns out having a resident night watchman 7 days a week reduces that quite a bit.

He’s got 2 dogs, and he does indeed do his rounds, once around 9 pm after he has, as he says it, had his shower in the unit and his scran (food) and locked the unit up and prepared the “night watchman’s cabin” as his patrols a route that takes him to a nearby pub, and again around 11 pm when his route takes him back from the nearby pub, a bit of online gaming then another patrol that happens to coincide with the dogs taking their evening shit, and back to the night watchman’s cabin.

And be it ever so humble and spartan, hell, it’s  no different to a cabin on a ship at sea or a rig or in a desert somewhere, it’s spartan but quite livable.

I’ve known the guy for years as a customer and semi mate, and always wondered when he was going to get a “proper” life back, so I only learned a lot of this detail when helping with the portakabin, but none of that is the punchline.

The punchline is after a bit the penny drops, and he turns to me and says dude, you’re doing the same thing, aren’t you?

That’s why he opened up, he thought I was doing the same thing (my unit is on the other side of the same estate) and he thought it because my front office and reception area isn’t just a counter and some shit, it’s more like a front room, nice old comfy sofa, decent coffee on tap, big screen on the wall (my reasoning was why not, it’s my place and I want somewhere to chill and be comfortable when I am not actually working, plus, customers seem to like it…) so he thought I was doing the same fuckin’ thing…

Seems there is a very quiet community of people doing this shit under the radar, it’s not against the law if you do it right, it’s just so much less complicated to avoid the attention and enquiries in the first place, and now I am looking at places that I know that have similar “homely” front office and “staff” areas and I’m asking myself if I too have been missing what has been going on under my nose?

It makes the whole “zombie palace” or “bug out bolt hole” thing so much more interesting, I mean, I am ON a fucking industrial estate, and I still haven’t actually seen it for what it is properly, sure, the odd open 24 hours nighttime distribution depot and so on, but still….

Most of the zombie shit I am aware of is talking about heading to shopping malls or military bases or small towns with gun shops and pharmacies, nobody sees industrial estates as anything other than a place to maybe go speeding at night and practice your drifting…

I’m sat at home, as I type this, looking out of my glass windows that are barely three feet off the ground, doors that for all their central locking open inwards so just kick the shit out of it and it will give, exteriors that are anything but hard to scale 20 foot sheer walls of block and steel sheet cladding, and I’m thinking, SHTF zombie apocalypse social unrest blah blah blah, never was under any illusions about how vulnerable my home is, I just never really saw my unit as a bolt hole.

An industrial estate isn’t the sort of place hordes of looters will gravitate to first ,climb over the 8 foot steel fence at the back of my unit, cross the railway line, climb over another 8 foot steel fence and you are in the back yard of a local commercial bulk cash and carry, pallet loads of baked beans and toilet paper and flour, carry on across the road to the fixins shop that sells 4″ spikes (over 4 inches a nail becomes a spike) and every size of bolt and fastener you could wish for, 2 doors down is the steel stockist, everything from sheet metal to wire, and nowhere on the estate is there giant TV’s or big stereos or running shoes or booze or cash (that stuff is all on the estate 4 miles up the road) and thinking about it every 5th site here has at least one 5,000 litre diesel bund out back.

You ever get that feeling you just woke up late to the party that everyone else with a brain knew about years ago? I’m feeling that right now.

As has been mentioned here before, with another hat on I am the owner and operator of a small business.

Being technical in accounting terms our book keeping is done on a “cash basis” which isn’t an *exact* translation of “pay at the till before leaving” but the fact remains that as a business I do not do credit or terms of any kind, and I get payment before I ship / part with the goods in question, so it’s a lot like your local shop or petrol station.

I do not do due after 30 days or pay at the end of the month or cash on delivery or anything else, and in this year of 2017 with ebanking where I get an SMS within 60 seconds of a deposit being made in the bank, that means no SMS, no goods… I don’t care about your BACS taking 3 days to clear, I’ll get the SMS when the money is added to my account.

Until that point, I haven’t been paid, and you do not get your shit.

What I am seeing more, and more, and more of, is businesses that have;

• only one person who can pay invoices, and they aren’t in today
• a policy to only make payments every wednesday or whatever
• an accounts department that processes things in order, and no great rush about it
• an accounts department that can only make payment via BACS printed in purple ink on a camel’s left testicle
• an accounts department that only knows how to deal with “Net30” terms, eg 30 days credit.
• an accounts department that only knows about their own policies, nothing else exists.

Of course the accounts dept have fuck all to do with the guys who first came to me for a quote and who then made an order, many of whom have some sort of deadline, I’ll speak on a wednesday and they want to know if I can arrange collection the same day and if I can make delivery the next monday.

I say yeah, sure, no problem, here is your invoice, the courier will be by within 2 hours to collect.

So two days pass and it is now friday and the job is pretty much done, but I have not had my SMS, so I email them a heads up, job is done guys but no sign of payment (I should make it clear that I have an entire page on a top level link on the website devoted to payments and terms and so on) … oh shit… and we get to one of the bullet points above.

I politely shrug in email and say “no dollah no fuckee” and sometimes it turns into phone conversations with the guys who placed the order, who are ALL on my side and totally get the concept that I have to pay for my diesel before I can drive away, and nobody has negotiated or signed any credit agreements with me, not that I would offer such a thing, and we are back to the bullet points, and them having to chase their internal accounts department.

Allegedly it usually is a variation on “the 25k order with 3k penalties we need to ship by wednesday is being held up because you won’t pay the fucking guy 500 quid who has done the work we need done to finish that order on wednesday” and by the way, he invoiced us last wednesday…

I actually know some of these companies quite well, and the fact is there isn’t a cash flow problem that the accounts department are trying to mitigate, it’s just increasingly “how they do business”

Nor do I want to give the impression that these are all multinationals with offices in Riyadh and Hong Kong working in oil and gas or aerospace, one or two are, but others are just local small businesses like mine, who maybe have a book keeper who comes in (not even physically, maybe virtually) one afternoon a week.

For all of them the reasons to use me are the same, we’re small and local so the supply chain is short, lead time is minimal, and we are cheap.

I give a lot of shits about the quality of the work of course, but that is a bonus they don’t get to be aware of for the first order when they place it.

But whereas I used to butt up against this issue once every three or four weeks, it’s now up to about twice a week, because even repeat orders with the same company who are delighted with everything, the accounts department will not change the way *it* works.

I have one of these guys who has learned, he phones his accounts department the minute he sees the invoice, and says he will stay on the phone with them while they process the payment, and if he has to hang up that call and payment hasn’t gone through, the next call is to the MD to say production is delayed thanks to the accounts department.

Others are less proactive, and only start screaming at accounts when they learn that the job is done waiting to be shipped, and on hold waiting for payment.

The issue here really is that to the accounts department, it isn’t money they handle, it’s just stuff, which puts them on a par with production and engineering, who just move stuff around, which makes them at least as important as production and engineering, which also means they can’t be seen to trivialise anything and make it seem as simple and fast as “hang on a mo, clickety click, ok that’s all done and processed and paid”

And it reminded me of a conversation I had with a banker many years ago about the 3 days it took a BACS transfer to clear, even though the transaction itself took milliseconds, because he stated that if the transaction itself was done in milliseconds, nobody would value it anymore, it has to take time to have any perceived import or value.

I’m sure there are many parallels here, lets say brexit, oh horrendously complex, will take years to negotiate, when the fact is you could probably tie the whole thing up in 72 hours if you wanted to, but then you’d wipe out all the alleged perceived import and value in your negotiating process and yourself as a whole.

House conveyancing, will and probate, court cases, yeah, all takes weeks or months, because where else is the perceived import and value?

The print newspaper and small ads scene went the way of the dodo because of this, and for all his orange rambunctiousness and idiocracy, I think Trump gets this with his tweets.

Banks *are* shifting towards instant everything, and I think we all vastly under estimate how big of a change this is, because it makes so many cultural delays seem like what they are, faux attempts by the incumbents to add fake percieved import and value to what they do.

“tap and go” contactless payments change everything, so does ebanking, my landlord sends me a text saying he has a water bill for 200 quid, I log in to ebanking and 60 seconds later send him a text back saying he has been paid, paid as in he can spend the money now, wherever he is, because it is showing as a balance in his account.

I’m old enough to remember walking into the local american express office as being the fastest way to pay GM/detroit diesel in the US for allison gearbox parts to be shipped by air freight that day to parts foreign, because all other methods took a week before they’d ship.

You paid a premium for that back then, both for the money transfer and the parts themselves, but you saved 7 days downtime, so the only question you asked was how much?

Now fast forwards to 2017 and I know of two local shops where you cannot pay any way other than contactless tap and go or smartphone tap and go, and it sounds all hipster bollocks and everything else, but, as the manager says, he can run stock on a 48 hour basis, and he can order and pay before 4;30 pm and he will have a delivery the next morning, because the supplier got paid the instant he made the order… do not discount that side of the hipster bollocks equation.

All the talk of automation and the AI apocalypse, no man, it ain’t robots with arms and cylon eyes replacing the guy slinging burgers or the shelf filler at the supermarket or the pizza chef…

It’s the “AI” and automation that I used this morning, at 10.02 am an email from a customer telling me the invoice I did largely automagically online with quickbooks has been paid, the email arrived two minutes after the sms telling me the same thing, I can spend that money now if I choose, so the robot and AI is the one replacing the accounts department in my business.

Sure, it’s a very specialised and narrow AI that does accounts, and another similarly limited one that does banking, but, so what, it WORKS.

Sure, it has weaknesses and potential problems, but the shit it is replacing has the same weaknesses and plenty of real problems to go along with the potential ones.

For an “economy” like the Uk based largely on so called “service industries” this is the death knell.

PayPal was never allowed to operate like a real bank, but it made a great experiment for the banks to observe, one step removed.

Now we have what happened yesterday in Saudi, literal multi billionaires wiped out in a microsecond, no long drawn out “value added” delayed process involving lawyers and bank staff and so on, cliclety click, job done man.

 

 

 

Some twenty years ago a local girl called Kate Bushell was killed, I have mentioned her here before, and Genette Tate, her killer was never caught, at the time plod spent a lot of time suspecting her father, now the local news says on the 20th anniversary they are going to spend a million quid re-opening the cold case, and by the way, they have a new clue.

The fact is that back then, it was a local event, eg within ten miles of me, and yet, I actually know very little about it, I do not know exactly where she was killed, it wasn’t really reported, I do not know exactly where she lived, it wasn’t really reported, and I do not know her exact route from where she lived to where she was killed, it wsn’t really reported… all I really knew was she had been knifed.

For all I know, I could have passed the exact route that she took from her home to where she died, and I could have done so within a few minutes of the incident, so even if I didn’t see it happen, I might have seen something, even if as is most likely it was something that could exclude something, yeah, there was a green ford in front of me and no he didn’t stop and drop anyone off or pick them up…

I don’t know how to run a murder investigation, it’s not my field of expertise, but I do know it is going to be all about data, and forensics of course, but we’ll come to that bit later, but data mainly, even if it the kind of data that probably excludes a green ford, just as the data from whoever was behind me probably excludes data about a yob on a murdercycle, but the fact is I have never known if I was within a few miles of the incident or not, along with 100,00 other people in town, or if I was 40 miles away in another town at that day and time… plod made lots of appeals over the following weeks for witnesses to come forwards, but the fact is I never got enough information to even know if I was one, besides, it seemed like plod had spent the first few weeks concentrating on pinning it on the dad, seems the kid went out walking a neighbours dog and when she was late dad went out looking for her and found her body, so naturally plod put him in the frame.

I don’t even recall if there was any sexual motive or assault, or if it was just some random nut job who saw jesus in a cloud and decided to kill the blond kid walking past with a dog.

I dunno what happend to the dog, or even what sort of dog it was.

The media of course was only interested in showing a picture of a cute blond kid who was 12 years old and would never make 13 and how amazingly awful it all was, hang on while we recap the story and show her picture again.

So fast forwards to today, and I suspect that 990,000 of the 1,000,000 that plod are ging to spend on this cold case isn’t real money, it’s money they would be spending anyway on wages and vehicles and offices and shit.

If my ability to know whether I might have been a material witness of some kind 20 years ago was pissed away 20 years ago, good luck pissing in that particular well 20 years later, 20 years, lemmesee, that’s oct/nov 1997, lemmesee, umm, umm, ummm, umm, I think I was working for the post office then, or was I driving a wagon by then, I’m not sure.

But wait, remember I said about the new clue, and no, it’s not one of the local retired and couldn’t solve it first time around but hired back again as a consultant stood in a photo in the local rag holding a kitchen knife, that may or may not resemble the knife that was used to kill the kid, not that it was ever found, oh no.. this is a much better new clue.

Apparently they have discovered “orange fibres” on her body and on a fence near the scene that don’t match anything the kid was wearing… fuck it man, 20 years later and we only now hear about it, hell, could have been orange fibres from a hi vis vest worn by someone attending the scene in an official capacity at the time.

Could have been orange fibres from the pelt of the dog she was walking afghan hound or something, we aren’t told the breed, it wasn’t relevant…. yes, it fucking WAS… trust me, I’m more likely to remember “some bloke walking a dobermann” and no, it could have been a chick walking the dog, but it was a dobey and definitely not a lab or collie or anything else, but no, nobody needs to know what the dog was, hell, maybe the dog was a suspect like the dad at the time, after all, the dog was at the scene….

So now realistically we are at a place where barring some new testimony from some guy who emigrated that afternoon and only returned last week and never heard about it back then but walked right past her that day, the only hope is DNA, and that is only a hope if there is any, which there won’t be if “all” that happened is some nut job stabbed her at random…. barring coincidences like his iranian passport falling out at the scene 9/11 style…

Which brings us back to forensics, and as the father of forensics said, the essence of forensics is there is always evidence, even the absence of evidence is itself evidence of a sort, but whether the forensic evidence is absent or present, your scenarios must adequately explain ALL of it, or your explanation is shit.

It is entirely possible, especially if it was some random nut job who saw signs in the clouds, that the forensic evidence is minimal, there may literally be nothing but a body with knife wounds, and once the killer walks away with the knife, you’re left with a body with knife wounds and nothing else.

It doesn’t take 1 million quid to trawl through a database and find every nutjob who was walking loose in the region at that time, adam smith, no, he was in mental hospital, jim jones, no, he was in prison, steve meyer, no, he was in rehab, fred bloggs, hmm, he wasn’t in prison, or rehab, or the nuthouse, and he did see a doctor not three miles away the day before trying to get some scrips for the voices in his head.

Course, then you have to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt” in court, something you might have done 20 years ago, but have sweet fuck all chance of now (even if the perp is still alive and hasn’t OD’d in the past 20..)

So what the fuck is it all about, I ask myself.

You know, aside from the family who obviously want answers, but really wanted them 20 years ago, what is the fucking point, and why go large about spending a million quid? Easy to get that, cut back on all the bullshit FRA cases and arresting people for hate speech for wearing a poppy in remembrance and that shit.

And then my door went while I was on the crapper, so I ignored it, and lo and behold something comes through the letterbox, oh yes, of course, local council elections again, and no doubt someone wants to be seen as being strong on crime and civil justice and all that, so a three month campaign of cold cases for plod and saving trees and park benches and creating 14 million new jobs in town.

These worthless cunts (politicians / lawyers / plod) have presided over the destruction of the family and the demonisation of men for so long it has finally come home to roost in parliament, want that white man out of a job, want his job, want a job, just accuse him of something sexual, so hopefully it will soon be percolating down to local politician levels, and maybe when enough of them are running scared someone will do a plea deal, and remember than actually, 20 years ago, the police chiefs / local councillors / local judge’s batshit crazy son / daughter / cousin disappeared all of a sudden like, you know, it’s not like the electric chair is gonna bring some voters dead kid back to life, so why not just send them off to cousin jacks place in portugal for 20 years, why ruin my own career.

I had an uncle, long dead now, he became a local councillor, and then suddenly managed to get both planning permission for a large filling station, and no compliance inspections (so runoff spills and leaks went direct to the local stream, saved thousands…) and next thing you know he is raking it in, corruption and shit ain’t a top down thing that starts with the clintons and works its way down, it’s everywhere and always have been, you either see it or you’re blind to it, and if you see it, you either go along for the ride or don’t make too many waves with your non participation.

And that’s the real reason crimes like the killing of Kate Bushell don’t get solved, if it really is a random nutter thing it’s hard enough anyway, but when you put solid detective work last, behind corruption and career building and being seen on telly and more funding for your department and more overtime for you, well, there is fuck all chance.

Had a few messages about the gigabyte brix / celeron 3150, and some of them contained links, and the upshot is according to all the perceived wisdom out there, it’s a totally crap CPU and worse value for money than a new i7

I dunno, for starters in my opinion it’s pointless to even compare a soldered system on chip device like the 3150 to a separate fit and remove at will high end cpu, the clock speeds and cache sizes do not explain the vast gulf between the 3150 and my own now older socket 2011 i7, so how does comparing crysis frame rates or arbitrary benchmarks help?

It’s like buying a vehicle solely on the basis of 0-60 times, a bog standard 600cc motorcycle will make every car out there with a very few exceptions look sick, but what you really wanted was something that transported 7000 kilos or something that transported 30 people or something that could pull a plough.

Your PC as a whole is too slow when some component or some peripheral either has an empty buffer waiting for data, or an overflowing buffer waiting to process data, that’s it, there is nothing else, until you get to certain use cases where machine A will render a 4k video to certain settings in 30 minutes and machine B will do the exact same job in 120 minutes, and even then only when that extra 90 minutes means the job missed the deadline, and even then you have to look at why the discrepancy, did one have 2 gig or ram and the other one have 16 gig, did one have 4 cores and the other have 16, and did the app in question have the ability to use the extra cores and memory, etc etc etc.

Provided teh (sic) buffers are neither empty nor overflowing, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if the cpu spends most of its time at 30% instead of 3%, it doesn’t matter if ram is 75% used instead if 25% used, it doesn’t matter if you have 4 cores or 16, it doesn’t matter if you have 1.5 ghz core clock or 3.0, all that matters is whether the buffers are neither empty nor overflowing, because that’s all that limits how responsive the machine is to keyboard and mouse input and screen display of same.

If a machine is bought to run MS Office and manage a wordpress site, it doesn’t matter if it sucks at playing crysis, and if the machine is bought to play crysis, it doesn’t matter that no more mundane task like the odd bit of emailing or web browsing can use more than 3% of cpu.

I have a home built NAS box based around an asus H81 and earlier 2 core celeron 1850 and 8 gigs of ram, a bunch of 6tb WD reds and drivepool,  it doesn’t matter it is allegedly weedy or underpowered, what matters is on read and write it can saturate my gigabit LAN, so it can’t get any faster…. sure, put it in an office with 20 users sharing resources and it will experience latency and people will find it no longer keeps up, but IT ISN’T IN AN OFFICE WITH 20 USERS, so why the fuck would i buy or build a machine that could cope with that??? I have uses here that you’d never get in an office of 20 machines…

But the fact is that benchmarks are a expression of a need to “rate” a thing, and then we use that “rating” to compare, so in reality the 900 lb gorilla in the room is this very fact.

If like me you have decades of experience in engineering and IT, you don’t need no fucking benchmarks to compare nuthin, even if it is a thing that you personally have no prior hands on experience with like the celeron 3150, all your other prior experience allows you to make a bloody good guess.

If you do not have the experience, then the “rating” is what you will use, and by definition, you will have no way of personally verifying that “rating”, because if you did, you’d create your own, which is what I did with the celeron 1850 NAS box, there is no linpack or geekbench calculations going on, there is MY benchmark for MY usage applications.

Which brings us to the second problem with “ratings”, not that many people would agree that Bo Derek was a “10” for me she was a 5 at best, and of course I never met her in real life so you can add or subtract at least 4 to that score, which does not mean she is not a 10 for someone else… not all people are the same, not all use cases are the same.

“Ratings” attempt to deal with this by having different ratings systems, but still, none of them are mine, and my system now rates at 7,000 on one set of scores and 11,000 on another, far from helping this issue, this just confuses it as much as me saying Bo Derek was a 5 at best.

Now we are at a place where we have many “ratings” to choose from, but since we cannot create our own because we lack the knowledge, we can’t make a valid choice between the various “ratings” either, we just added even more vagueness and unknowns to the problem.

So on the one hand we have “ratings” and on an entirely different planet a million miles away we have what that thing will actually do in the real world in different situations for different users, and as time passes those two planets get ever further apart.

So what has this got to do with anything apart from shitty weedy celeron CPU’s?

Well, it’s got everything to do with everything.

VW diesel emissions, S&P and Moody’s, currency exchange rates, stock valuations, foreign policies, social policies, legal / employment / health issues, economic policies, are “the russians” “good” or “bad” and how about the jews, or the saudis, or the yemenis, or the argentinians?

It’s all “ratings”, and the one thing you need to take away from this more than anything else in life, if that someone who buys and specs PC hardware based upon ratings by definition knows sweet fuck all about PC hardware, and you can substitute PC hardware for anything else you like, and the song remains the same.

AAPL is now AA+ on S&P 500 global rating, so is the US$….

The F35 is awsome, the iphoneX is awesome, amazon web services / cloud computing (someone else’s box) is awesome, none of these people know what the fuck they are talking about, if they did, they would not be using ratings… QED.

If you care about your life, you are far far far more likely to make a correct choice if you go down the route of “that wimminz blog bloke is a technical fucking genius” / “that wimminz blog bloke is a fucking clueless newb” than if you go down the route of listening to anything anyone who used “ratings” of any kind has to say…. because you can know for a fact that none of them have the slightest clue about the subject matter.

And no, do not give me that fucking bollocks about oh no, THEY know, they just have to package it as a rating so that THEIR customer / clients / users / readers can get the TL:DR version…. that is just giving a “rating” to the people giving the “ratings”