Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

Having had one suck of the tit of trader speak, it’s time for another, and this is mark to market.

The idea is a thing is actually worth what you get when you sell it, not what you think it is worth, but there are all sorts of twists and tricks to this.

Down at the level of the single working guy / self employed guy / small business guy, it’s pretty easy, you are worth what you got paid last week, but that was last week, next week you may be on the scrapheap, so you’ll be worth what you’re paid that week.

It’s pretty hard for the single working stiff / self employed / small business to get too distant from mark to market, because what you earn or sell is what you are worth, and generally speaking you put yourself to mark to market 52 times a year, or more if you are a small business guy, every single sale is a mark to market.

But even here we have some glaring problems, how do you mark to market some stiff in a safe government mcjob? Is it their last month’s salary?

I’ll say no, by the simple fact there is no competition, you have to screw up badly to lose the next months wages, but the self employed stiff or small business owner can do everything right, and still not make any sales, because, competition… he has to compete to get the customers’ dollar, the government mcjob fella doesn’t… it’s ga-ron-teed…

I have heard politicians claim they are market to market, that’s how they get elected, my response was boy I wish I could promise everyone everything they ask for, then deliver on none of it while feathering my own nest, and still get paid… I’d be sued into prison for fraud if I tried that shit.

Suddenly I don’t understand things, or there is a big picture, or things are complicated, oh if only it were that simple, and anyway, its not down to me, I can only try to do my best.

Yeah, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

But, the harsh reality is, people like me whose worth is marked to market a few times a week are in the minority, and even then, that only tells me what my work was worth *last* fucking week.

See, last fucking week, I did something completely fucking insane, at least by the lights of the first 80% of my life, I passed on some teen cunt… but thankfully I did it in a way that it seemed to her like she passed on me… rejecting da wimminz is more than enough for an FRA nowadays, there are three of them in todays paper, and the only one the paper gives a fuck about is the “hero” po-po that got falsely accused.

But, the fact is I passed, on something I would have gone to *great* lengths to chase years before, so the whole “mark to market” while it does tell you something, it only tell you shit in the rear view mirror.

What will an hour of my labour, or some teen cunt, or a ten dollar bill, be worth *next* fucking week.

I say all this because I have had an email from the states…

The email itself is not from anyone I know or have talked to in the past, it was sent on behalf of someone who I have talked to in the past, telling me of his plight.

Apparently some time in March he got a knock on the door from the po-po, as it turns out he hasn’t been charged with anything, and he isn’t going to be charged with anything, not in a court of law anyway, there is a back story that I am told is complicated, but not relevant, but it does make some of the crazier parts of the story less crazy.. well, to yanks mebbe.. because what happened after the knock on the door and the arrest on *suspicion* of selling drugs, was po-po seized all his shit, proceeds of drug dealing or something, and he isn’t getting it back, none of it.

So this correspondent is telling me that this guy could have somehow survived all this, not easy, but he’d have found a way, except one of the things that was taken by the po-po that he ain’t never getting back is something that looks a lot like a USB stick, and a laptop.

The thing like a usb stick held over 40 bitcoin, and the laptop held the only way to recover them if the stick ever got lost or damaged (I don’t know much about crypto currencies, so I’m just repeating this stuff) so bottom line is this guy is out over 40 bitcoin, and at the time of writing 1 bitcoin = 6076 dollars us, so 243,000 bucks vanished, just like dat… never coming back.

So the writer lent this guy 300 bucks and *his* passport to get to a port where he signed on as a deckhand on some cargo boat, he gone and he ain’t / can’t never go back, adios columbia.

Don’t expect to ever hear from him again is the message.

The riddle backstory is something about an ex and alimony and hiding assets and a new boyfriend and the new boyfriend’s brother in the po-po and some story about that bastard having everything tied up in crypto, so it turns out that the thing I *have* been hearing about bitcoin, that it is out of central control, just ain’t so, all it takes is someone with a badge and a gun who can sweat you on a fake drugs charge and literally take all your shit while you are waiting for your lawyer in a cell.

Mark to market on quite a wad of bitcoin is 0 cents.

I talked her long ago about archiving shit to the cloud and telling no fucker, I dunno if that is even possible with cryptocurrencies, if it is, last week was probably a good time to do it, and destroy any traces of anything that ever connected you in any way to crypto.

Not only did it not do this guy any good, it basically ended his life.

I’m reminded about the story about the guy with a merc with fingerprint starting, in times gone by a carjacker would have stolen the car and the keys, the merc guy lost his car and his finger.

Mark to market is last week, when you had a cool quarter of a mill in crypto, this week you’re broke and fucked and on the lamb, because you had crypto, or because someone thought you did.

Closing message from the writer is things are getting ugly, and I won’t be hearing from him again either, because he says po-po can see the writing on the wall and their non existent pensions and so on, so now little groups of po-po are running their own private pension plans, and it’s all over… apparently…

Be careful out there.

Latest figures (in the UK) show that violent and sex crimes are rising faster than anything else, we are not quite at the point where headlines tell us that “local boy drowns in river, after being sexually molested by trout…” but, we are getting there.

Of course it is all about money and funding, nobody is going to cut funding into stabbings or rapes, so stabbing and rapes take more and more hours per incident to investigate, and of course waiting until 2017 to report an alleged incident in 2002 is no roadblock to this.

You got burgled, your vehicle got stolen, you got mugged, tough shit.

It’s an old saying amongst city traders that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, it’s a saying that is never really analysed though, which is a shame, because what it is really saying is that shit can stay crazy long after you ran out of the ability to continue to bet that crazy shit would be reined in….

I suppose I sort of did have the money back in the *very* early 90’s to “get on to the housing ladder” but I looked at houses that were going for 40,000 and thought they were wildly overpriced, 25,000 would have been nearer the mark, so between than and the lack of a burning desire to get a mortgage I never bothered, now those same houses are 275k, 285k, 295k.

So that’s 27 years of proof that shit can stay crazy right there, and there are plenty of other examples, “family law” started getting “reformed” in the seventies, so there is 45+ years of shit staying crazy right there, US MIC and the Norks, we are up to 60+ years of shit staying crazy, Federal Reserve, 104 years of shit staying crazy.

So the upside of all this is if it lasts much longer than a year, you aren’t really going to have a way to bet against it and come out ahead.

Of course this doesn’t mean that there is a way of going with the flow and coming out ahead either….

Lets look at the latest shit from Catalunya, go to the banks (that just relocated their HQ’s out of catalunya) and draw all your money out, why not, it is your money…

well, it’s not.

not in law.

When I pay money into a bank account in my name I *deposit* funds, and I become a *creditor* of the bank, my money is gone at that instant, and it becomes the bank’s money, that’s the LAW… see that shit about crazy being able to outlast you..

Of course we all know what the word crazy means, or do we, because inherent in the definition is the assumption that being or acting crazy has immediate negative personal consequences, but, as we can see from real life, shit can stay crazy long long long after your ability to bet against it and win expires.

So maybe we need to redefine crazy, because if shit can stay crazy long after your ability to bet against it and win expires, you aren’t the one taking a minority opinion or a marginal opinion, you are the one taking the way out there fringe opinion… think on that…

The house that I did not buy in 1992 for £38,950 because it was wildly overpriced would be “worth” £275,000 today, of course if I had stayed there I could have paid off the mortgage by now and would own it outright, but it would still be “one urban semi detached house” and if I sold it, that is all I could buy with the money, I would not suddenly have traded up to “one urban detached house with 3 acres”

Arguably I have lost money in the interim paying rent, arguably I didn’t, because I didn’t have 25 years of property maintenance and taxes to pay either.

So we are no nearer to a definition of shit be crazy whether it would have been better to buy that house back in 1992 or not, or, are we?

Arguably history isn’t linear, you cannot go back and change just one thing, so maybe if I had bought that house in 1992, I would not have met my own personal ex psycho skank ho, but does that mean I would not have met *any* psycho skank ho’s… after all, the penniless tramp rarely gets mugged for his rolex, so I look at contemporaries and yes, a significant portion of them never got to stay in the houses they were buying and owned, the only bits they got to keep were the mortgage and upkeep and living costs of the resident.

So we are back to shit staying crazy longer than you can bet against it and win.

But we are also saying that shit staying crazy and betting *with* the flow isn’t necessarily winning either, it is just deferring the losses.

Weinstein was just deferring his losses, until 2017 it made perfect sense to be a fat perv in a position of power over da wimminz, and as late as summer 2017 it still made sense, and had done for well over 20 years straight.

You see the parallels here.

Because old harv wasn’t the only one, every fucker was doing it, and as ollie stone said, every fucker *knew* every fucker was doing it.

If the Clintons had *not* done corrupt deals with russian nuclear energy firms, that would have made the Clintons the only people on the beltway who were *not* as corrupt as fuck, and that would have made the Clintons as well known as Melvin Q Peabody, the famous hollywood mogul who never once abused his position of power, of course, he never got *into* a position of power either…

I do not do drugs any more, and have not for 30+ years, but “smoke weed every day” is something I can still relate to, because while smoking this shit may be crazy, at least it is a crazy I can get a handle on, this other crazy shit, blows my fucking mind man…

And there we come to the truth of the definition of shit be crazy and shit can stay crazy long after you can bet against it and win.

Betting against it, whether you win or not, is the act of making a rational appraisal of something, and finding no rational reason why it should continue.

Going with the flow is the act of accepting that something is irrational, not making any attempt to understand it, and not making any attempt to appraise it, especially when you see the odd loon who does do such things lose their fucking shirts.

So, getting back to the whole “markets can stay irrational” thing, we come to the final part, which is you staying solvent, which really means your ability to stay in the game as a player.

Well let’s define “player”

I know someone who is 18/19 years into a 25 year interest only mortgage, their youngest child is just in double digits but still in junior school, so just about the time that kid leaves school, the interest only mortgage will end… where is that adult going to be?

It’s a fucking HUGE unanswered question, we have not quite yet got to the point where the first takers of interest only mortgages gets to the end of their term, so we don’t actually know what will happen.

Will the bank act as landlord to the tenant and allow them to continue to reside there, and if so, what will the “rent” be, because they are struggling on the interest only repayments which are a lot less than the market rents, a *lot* less…

Will the bank do a perpetual car lease thing and hold them liable for all the work needing doing to the house to bring it up to pristine saleable condition?

Will the bank issue them another mortgage?

Will the bank extend the terms of the current mortgage?

You see the problem, we are trying to appraise something rationally, whereas the answer probably lies within the realms of not attempting to explain or understand anything, or make any rational choices, because….

That’s certainly the attitude of this person, the same attitude weinstein had, and the same attitude we have to pretty much everything in the west from sociopolitical to economic to engineering and infrastructure and technology to everything else.

the smoke weed every day guys are self medicating their stupor, every other fucker is on a permanent natural high and they ain’t never coming down man, not if they can help it.

Put cheech and chong in charge of fucking *everything* and it will probably be more rational than everything we have known in the west for the past 70 years, and finally we come to a *true* understanding of the sentiment that the markets (and everything else) can stay irrational long after you ran out of the ability to stay with skin in the game and on your back.

As most of you know, one way or another I make a crust running light industrial lasers, and pretty much this means stuff made using highest quality chinese components, which are as good any anything except the very best european components, but at a literal fraction of the price.

Just as laser and inkjet printers have “print engines” that are a combination of software in the pc and hardware in the printer itself, much the same sort of thing is true of lasers, where it differs is there is no “Canon print engine” for lasers.

What you get is *probably* going to be RDWorks for any plotter based machine and EZCAD for any galvo based machines, I say probably because it is usually the default option for everything from lightweight hobby lasers up to light industrial stuff.

Forget any ideas about useful help manuals or amazing video tutorials, it’s like Autodesk users, they appear fully formed out of the ether…lol… but training / learning is an issue, it is not really addressed, so you get some people like me who can and do use the stuff commercially ever day who just use keyboard shortcuts and stuff without thinking about it, and others who start clicking menus and wondering what the various options mean and do, and if I alter this will it alter the job or break the laser?

There is a guy on youtube with a channel going by the name of something like sarbarmultimedia, I haven’t checked the spelling, he is a retired guy who allegedly worked in engineering who bought himself a cheap chinese hobby laser, and his channel is dedicated to it, and to the software that came with it, RDWorks.

The channel itself and all the comments therein show that lots of people who did not materialise fully formed and fully skilled out of the ether find the channel incredibly helpful and useful.

At this point we could mutter aphorisms about “the blind, leading the blind” and “in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king” but it’s distracting, the facts speak for themselves, to lots and lots and lots of people, this guy is an incredibly helpful and informative resource.

My problem is that most of what he says is crap, 95% of this guys problems have sweet fuck all to do with RDWorks, even though he titles his videos the RDWorks learning lab, 95% of this guys problems are based on the fact he bought a bargain basement hobby chinese laser, instead of spending the extra cash and buying a proper light industrial machine.

Yes, you can make changes in software and have observable effects in the finished product, but like JPEG artifacts, you wouldn’t have any of that shit in the first place is you had a proper sensor and electronics package that output RAW images.

For my sins I reached out once when I saw one of his more egregious errors early in his series and pointed out that the problem was mischaracterized, the problem wasn’t the use of a toothed belt, the problem was cheapo lightweight toothed belt + cheapo nasty sticky slides + cheapo nasty steppers + cheapo nasty stepper controllers + cheapo nasty machine XY frame, you can’t “fix” that in software, and you can’t “compensate” for it in software (unidirectional passes, slower speeds and feeds etc) unless you identify it correctly, just blaming the default settings in the software itself is missing the fundamental problem.

Of course I got told I was an elitist asshole and don’t let the door slam my ass on the way out.

Fair enough, no skin off my nose if you all want to follow the one eyed king in the land of the blind.

The ISSUE here is we have a lovely real world concrete example of the problems with a so called knowledge based economy.

If sarbar rebranded his channel and called it something like “tweaking rdworks to compensate for buying a shit chinese laser” with a tagline of various experiments and mods on said laser I’d have a lot less issues with it.

So anyway a few weeks ago someone sent me a link, sarbar has done a video that is basically a copy of a video I did a couple of years ago, or rather it is an attempted copy, me, I just did the video and let it speak for itself, because all I was demonstrating was that 40 watts of beam power on either a 2.5″ or 4″ lens will eventually pierce a 4″ / 100 mm thick block of acrylic, to debunk the idea that you absolutely had to have 200 watts of beam power to do anything “useful”.

So sarbar has done a copy video in a much thinner piece of clear acrylic, it looks about 60 mm, and he doesn’t bother piercing it, and the void is all over the fucking place because his optics and shit and because his beam profile is shit, and then he studiously ignores that and starts speculating about the processes going on when the beam sublimates the acrylic… which you can see in my video, and btw mine were shot at 1080p and because I pay for vimeo you can view them at 1080p and no adverts so everything is clearer… no monetisation and ad revenue there for me…

Now this piece is starting to risk being a “sarbar is an idiot” piece, and it isn’t, the guy is feeling his way around in the dark, experimenting, getting answers however good or bad, and providing lots of people with what they consider to be valuable help, so no, I’m *not* saying sarbar is an idiot, sarbar is doing a damn sight better job than anyone else out there (including me) when it comes to RDWorks video tutorials.

He is doing a good job.

He is doing it himself, and I strongly suspect that he would not want my help or input, even were it offered freely, so I come not to malign sarbar, nor to praise him, but to use him as an example.

There is also a lot to be said for the validity of those who would say I was an elitist asshole, there are those who could afford a proper light industrial laser, they just do not want one, they want a cheap hobby one (parallels here to certain readers and 3d printers) and so what they want is to learn how to get the most out of the cheap hobby one, not how crap their cheap hobby one is compared to a proper light industrial one.

I get that 100% and I am on board with it 100%

My issue is this, when I attempt to do some thing myself on a cheap hobby scale, I try to factor in and identify and separate the issues that are 100% solely down to the fact that I am using some cheap hobby tool or method, as opposed to the issues that would apply to anyone trying to do the same thing, because to me that is usually where all the problems arise and all the quality disappears.

I have seen some *lovely* work produced on 300 buck cheap as you can get chinese “K40” lasers, simply because the person involved accepts all the shortcomings of the hardware and tries to accommodate them and work around them, rather than trying to “fix” them in software.

If you have an old mill or lathe with ACME screws that you have CNC’d up and thrown a copy of Mach3 at (been there, done that, got the tee shirt, many times over) you’re a complete fucking cunt if you try and compensate for the backlash in the system by going into Mach3 and trying to map out the backlash and leadscrew profiles.. trust me, you have either tried and know *exactly* what I mean, or you haven’t, and don’t see why it should be a problem.

Faced with the option of curing it by spending time and money buying ballscrews to replace all the acme shit, I said fuck it, and set everything up to always retract to one side and then machine in one direction only, same as old school turners compensated, and I got/get good work out of 50 year old machinery.

Old / skilled manual machinsts eliminate backlash by this method… the machine is still worn and sloppy, but their skill and working practices mitigate that.

Software cannot compensate for either operator skill, or sane working practices.

This then is my issue with the likes of sarbar and the so called knowledge economy.

There is a majority subset of that economy that DOES NOT WANT to learn the correct factual truth about something, they WANT the approximated shortcut, they are not trying to do a thing RIGHT, they are trying to do a think subjectively BETTER or EASIER or just feel slightly more enlightened or in control.

There is only a small minority that want to learn and do it right, and once a month I will get an email from someone asking me how to do X in RDWorks on such and such a machine, and sometimes my answer is you can’t, not to commercial quality, but usually it is something they did not know, yeah, config, page setting, you can set the adjust distance to anything you like, so if you always want two object offset by *exactly* 11.375 mm set that as your adjust distance, align them with one another, then select one and tap the required arrow key once et voila, yes this included rotational angles etc, use ctrl+arrow key.

But anyway, back the the so called knowledge economy and the failing and weaknesses of same.

Software is a tool, be it ever so funky or crap, you can either sit there and complain that it is a bug ridden piece of crap that crashes for a pastime, or you can learn study and master it, so you will experience only 0.1% of the “problems” that the guy sitting next to you does who is trying to do the same thing with the same software.

So we are at the gap between actual knowledge, and “bodging” and as any skilled tradesman will attest, for 99% of the world the bodge is the way to do it, and skilled tradesmen are seen as being skilled bodgers, not skilled tradesmen.

Which means that the so called knowledge economy is 99% the bodge economy, and 1% the knowledge economy, and like sarbar and I, never the twain shall meet.

So now we have to identify when it matters.

As mentioned before, we have readers here into cheapo desktop 3d printing, it is unabashed and honest bodge economy, and being brutally honest trying to apply the true knowledge economy to it would probably kill it, outside of the subset of the very few trying to push their desktop 3d printer to the limits.

It all starts to fall over badly when you go out and buy a commercial grade product, and it is really a bodge product, and nobody is the wiser…. that shit ends careers and economies and lives and civilisations.

Which brings us neatly to Kobe steel, which has been forging steel quality certificates for 40 years, which will not surprise ANYONE who worked on 1970’s japanese motorcycle frames, and found that the speed of the hacksaw through the steel varies randomly… so we called it shit steel.

We got ignored, and everyone else just pointed at the certificate as proof that it was good steel (ref previous stories here about Sheffield steel and the smelter who used a glass plug from the glassworks down the road to tell when to pour) and nobody gave a fuck, and if there was a problem when we computerize and automate it, why, we will fix that sarbar style, we will NOT go anywhere near addressing the issue that software cannot compensate for operator skill or sane working practices.

Suddenly we have opened the door to a literal whole world of problems, I do not fly any more, if I did, one of the planes I would avoid like the plague is the 787 dreamliner, tesla is allegedly having the same issues with model 3 production, apple is having them with iphone production, grenfell tower had it with cladding, and the beat goes on and on and the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper.

So, to sum up.

I have nothing whatsoever against sarbar or his followers, because nobody is claiming to be industry standard and commercial quality, it is strictly hobby fucking around at home in their own time, and more power to them one and all, they are having fun.

I’m distinctly uneasy at the notion exemplified by sarbar and 99% of the population, that the differences between what they are doing and what constitutes proper engineering practice and knowledge are not that great, or are at least related, yeah yeah, my 900 quid hobby chinese laser is a distant cousin to the 500,000 quid bystronic… no, it fucking isn’t, it is more closely related to a cheese sandwich…

Kobe steel, to give just ONE example, makes the ENTIRETY of BS5750 and ISO9000/9001 etc utterly redundant and useless, now you either have a product that contains steel that was independently tested and verified and certificated, or you have mystery metal with a certificate that says it is something else.

Seems all those old Sheffield steel makers complaining that they could not compete against the foreigners and still make quality steel were right.

We did not modernise the machinery of industry, and we did not prize the operator skills and working practices of those in the industry, and we needed to do BOTH to stay alive.

Doing one or the other is to fail, only a matter or time, and historically the operator skills and working practices were the first fucking thing to be discarded.

So now it is 2017 and we are facing a robot revolution, the problem remains the same, the person teaching the robot has to teach it the skills and working practices above all else, the people making and buying and installing and programming them are all about how they negate the need for operator skills and working practices, and sick days and maternity leave and strikes and boredom.

It’s not a robot revolution, or an AI revolution, or anything else, it is the last gasps of the so called knowledge economy, as the model has spread so far that it can no longer rely on true knowledge to bridge the gaps in the bodge cheap economy, and things are starting to fall through the gaps.

The glue in those gaps is seen as the problem.

The truth is that everything worthwhile and serviceable ever made by mankind was an alloy, comprising of a mix of basic product material, and operator skills and working practices.

This is why in my own small business, I may never set the world on fire or make a million, but I will never be OUT of work, nor will the diligent and skilled plumber, electrician, welder and fabricator, auto engineer, etc etc etc… we will all always be able to earn a crust at least.

There is no other possible explanation for the constant hype about the dangers of AI, the other shoe falling is something happening in the physical world, and it being blamed on AI, so no actual human beings to blame, stat?

Yeah, the iranians hacked the norks and fired a nuke missile at that cunt duterte, luckily we were able to prevent a major calamity by airbusrting it at 30,000 feet, apart from a little EMP to hong kong and gaungzhou nobody was hurt.

Six months later infamous most wanted iranian H^H^H^H^ syrian hacker A1 g0ry74M gets iced by seal team zero and his body falls out of the paveway over shark infested waters, but it’s OK, we salvaged his laptop, complete with wikileaks / putin / assad documents, before the laptop itself could cross the threshold to sentience and start playing sending out penis enlargement spam.

All mobile phones now must mandatory install this anti AI monitoring app to stop it happening again, ditto PC’s and set top boxes, don’t worry about alexa and google home, we got that covered server side.

Paedophilia legalised, at least it’s red meat, we are now going to spend all our resources chasing sick fucks who fuck robots.

….. no carrier….

I learned 40+ years ago that most people, especially those in power, are utterly terrified of anarchy, and by terrified I mean a raging morbid uncontrollable phobic reaction.

For about 20 years, for my naiveté, I assumed this was just because they did not know what anarchy was, because they always seemed to be talking about something that wasn’t anarchy, but was dog eat dog until the last dog died of its wounds, and then eventually the penny dropped, the definition of anarchy didn’t matter, anarchy was just a catch all name to mark the end of the current power system.

Of course incumbent in all this is the realisation that those who benefitted from the current power system know that when it ends, there are going to be a lot of dues to settle, because the current power system is unjust in the extreme, so there has been a whole load of spreading around of “you benefitted from this…” memes pushed on to people.

To my mind the entirely fake and state sanctioned and sponsored “useful idiot” terror attacks are just examples of this “you benefitted from this…” “proofs”, here is proof all these raghead muslims hate you, even the ones born here, because you were born with the silver spoon in your mouth as a child of the MIC.

Now get back in line bitch.

The fact is that however many billions of years old the earth is, and however many tens of thousands of years old humanity is, true world spanning cultures require a maximum 7 day journey time from any point on the planet to any other point, and information requires a maximum 24 hours from any point on the planet to any other, because everything else is like trying to fly a plane with rubber control wires, by the time you have had time to react, shit has moved on to the point where your reaction is out of sync.

In this light true world spanning cultures came about in the 1930’s with the advent of the aeroplane and the telex.

In this light, there has only ever been one, the one that started and grew in the USA in the 1930’s, and which just kept growing until the 1980’s.

Prior to the 1980’s there were few people anywhere on the planet who were not aware of the power and reach of the USA, and prior to the 1980’s there were few people anywhere on the planet who would doubt any claim made by the USA, no matter how grandiose it was, I have mentioned before, my dad, an engineer who saw the green machine land in Cornwall and make roads and sewers and everything else as a mere trivial thing on the side, who had tools (I still have a variable pipe die 1/2″ to 4″ he “liberated” from US army engineers) better than anything we had here, who ship anything anywhere in 24 hours and do pretty much anything, if you had told him in the mid seventies that the yanks were going to build a road bridge between the USA and Europe, he’d have said wow, and waited to see how they were going to do it…. because as good a definition as any of the USA back then was a huge thing that could literally do anything that was physically possible, and then paint it in primary colours.

The USA hadn’t just put men on the moon, they had put a fucking four wheel drive vehicle on the moon, and they had done it from a standing start in ten years, and this was all very very recent history prior to the 1980’s.

This was “Empire”, back in the days of the british empire most of the world may well have been pink, but the reality was out grip was tenuous at best, the USA MIC Empire was the real deal, the first one ever in human history.

It was only made possible by technological change, but, technological change did not stop, nor did this “First Empire of Planet Earth” adapt, it stuck to the 1930’s playbook, and thus ensured its own demise.

Starting in the 1980’s the world was treated to lessons, the Empire was not infallible or unbeatable, and as the Empire tried harder and harder to grip jelly, ever more and greater examples came to pass for all to see.

By the end of the 1980’s everywhere outside of the USA people were talking out loud about the USA and its people not being unbeatable, of course this was entirely unseen and unknown within the continental USA, but there came a day late in the 1980’s when the former british empire sent a single vessel to the same port that the mighty US 6th fleet was in.

The vessel was a destroyer, a relatively tiny vessel, and it was carefully chosen for its name, because the whole point of the exercise was to promote tension, and so one day the US 6th fleet is joined in port by HMS Beaver, an american slang word for cunt.

Unknown to the americans, the crew of the beaver have been told that provided they don’t break any local laws that cannot be smoother over by a cash settlement from the pursers safe, and provided nobody gets seriously injured, feel free to mix with the yanks and have some fun.

They have been told this because there were questions raised in admiralty house, for the first time ever, about the quality of personnel in the First Empire military machine, so what better way to find out on the quiet.

What they found scared the crap out of them, so much so that international policy altered, and in the soon to follow “Gulf War 1”, the role of the Royal navy was cut right back, enough to be a player, with much grumbling from the First Empire, but not enough to be more than a bit part player.

Around that time, before Gulf War 1 had really started in earnest, I was offered a job (my engineering background) rebuilding much of what was about to be destroyed, unbeknownst to the recruiter, I had already had a conversation with a retired german diplomat, who had told me it will not be like when britain or germany or anyone else went into africa or india or anywhere else as an empire.

He had a very interesting and pertinent definition, you don’t go in to bomb shit, kill shit, shoot shit, until you have shown you are the baddest guy on the block, he said you go in and bomb shit and kill shit and shoot shit until you have imposed your own currency and it is accepted by all.. so do not go to Iraq to work rebuilding and get paid in US dollars, unless US dollars are the new national currency of Iraq.

He said the only time you should ever go anywhere and work and get paid in another currency is when the government *and* peoples welcome you there to work. That is called being an ex pat.

So I refused the job.

And nearly 30 years have passed, and the world has seen more of the same, more importantly the world has seen what happened when New orleans got flooded, that was the worst PR disaster for the First Empire that ever happened, sure, hurricanes and so on can happen anywhere, but when you can’t respond and rebuild at the end of your own motorways on your own mainland home turf….. contrast the new orleans rebuilding with the japanese tsunami rebuilding.

Outside of the mainland USA many of the sniggers are, that technologically and economically backwards, black at night, north korea is maybe one of the only countries left small enough for the First Empire to take on and not get humiliated by, and even then, maybe they would be better trying their luck at the Gambia, or equatorial guinea, or maybe one of the cook islands….

That the First Empire is in rapid decline is not in doubt, former “little sisters” like israel know the days of relying on big brother First Empire to protect then no matter what they do are numbered.

So we are back to the beginning, and anarchy, and what comes next.

What comes next is acceleration, as long as the First Empire has any power left, it will use it to try to slow or stop the slide, it will grip jelly tighter.

Just as the eastern front bled hitler dry and cost him the war, nato is repeating the same mistakes today, wasting vast resources on a border with someone who is not the enemy of the people in the west, and causing scarcity and shortages everywhere else nato might want to be, and as we all know nato is just the unofficial wing of the First Empire.

Here in the Uk we will often talk of the “dark ages” after the holy roman empire collapsed and left, but the fact is they were anything but dark, and the european renaissance did not grow out of stony ground some hundreds of year later, what the dark ages were (timeline maps of european states and borders on youtube are illustrative) was “anarchy”

Anarchy scares the living crap out of power mongers and control freaks.

The roman empire took a scant 50 years at best to disappear, if we mark 1980 as the start of the decline of the First Empire, by 2030 the entity know as the USA and MIC will be gone… and  we here have laws now coming on to the books dealing with electric / IC car sales by 2030, a scant 12 years away… see berlin wall etc etc etc

It’s really getting hyped, even a recent article in the register where one of the resident wanks went to parliament to discuss it, and of course they all get it utterly, utterly, utterly, wrong.

1/ define AI

First off we should really define AI, and I can save you and me 50,000 words by saying that nothing in the pipeline, nothing in production or development, and nothing on the horizon even comes close.

AI just means a created intelligence as opposed to a naturally occurring one, and one of the most humble tasks any biological, natural, intelligence does is locomotion, so we are down to driverless cars again, except, no, we are not, because while the odd elephant gets stuck in a waterhole and the odd lemming runs off a cliff, 99.9999% of the time all motions are 100 autonomous, including deciding which direction to go, when to refuel, when to rest, etc.

Tesla autopilot does well on certain roads, but no animal does well on roads because it is an arbitrary artificial experience, autopilot soon fails when things get out of bounds, and it is easy to make things go out of bounds, but these same things that make tesla autopilot barf make the roads more natural and more navigable for animals, eg natural intelligence.

So you want an AI to walk from here to aberdeen, but you want a dumb software robot to ride the rails from here to aberdeen.

If an external agent can sit there and “tell” the AI to get these parcels delivered prior to 12:30 when partial refunds have to be made, then the AI ain’t an AI…. the man in the van does it because he doesn’t get paid for delivering parcels that are late, and he  needs money to live, that’s an example of an intelligent being, being treated like a robot, but intelligence = risk / reward and decision making.

Nobody actually wants that, nobody actually wants to get in johnnycab and say “the railway station” and johnnycab takes you to the sewerage works, because johnnycab wants a break and a charge and the power is cheaper down there today, fuck you and what you want… you’ll pay more in an hour for a last minute dash to the station

So, ergo, nobody is actually taking about AI.

They are talking about robotics and automation.

The two subjects aren’t even remotely related, but hey ho.

Tesla autopilot is robotics and automation.

In robotics and automation you do not want “intelligence” at all in any way shape or form, what you want is a series of “bounds checking” boxes, no, I cannot rotate my 6th axis 120 degrees, well, I *could*, but if I do the 120 cm long light saber I am holding in my gripper will slice be in two between axis 1 and 2…

Some folks know this shit as a CNC crash…

I got all kinds of software here, some of it is fairly high end and specialist, and I used to work in IT, and you know what I have never seen?

I have never seen software that I cannot trivially and repeatably crash.

Most of it trivially, so trivially that just attempting to open or load a very large file kills it, I can kill every single separate piece of laser control software that I own to control my lasers by attempting to load a 425 megabyte DXF file, I have the exact same file also as a 220 meg ai and 911 meg tiff original, hell, illustrator 64 bit doesn’t crash, but it won’t load it, on a 64 bit machine with 32 gigs of quad channel ram and all ssd…

So we introduce bounds checking, I’m sorry dave, I can’t do that…

So now we have kuka and fanuc workplace robots that check if the dumb human has put their hand between the gripper and the part the robot wants to pick up, and this forms the trade demo, I’m offered coffee and ushered around to the rear of the stand when I start muttering about clingfilm or 100 lb nylon fishing line… prace bets now that the bounds checking will neither look for it nor see it…

2/ having defined AI, we see that it isn’t even on the horizon, so all we are really talking about is big data and bounds checking.

Asimov has a lot to answer for, and so does every other scifi writer who came along and started doing robot stories, or AI stories, or robot AI stories, because everyone thinks they know what they are talking about, and they don’t, especially the so called fucking experts.

My new brother laser printer is a robot, bounds checking and environmental controls means it is pretty flexible, 180 gsm A4 or 22 gsm A5 makes no odds, it can feed em all from within it’s own controller environment, 4 oz of contact adhesive added to the lower paper tray, not so much… but barring malice or stupidity, it’s pretty much there as far as unattended service.

The problem is like the contact adhesive in the paper tray, it’s much easier to break systems that depend on bounds checking than it is to add yet another patch to cover yet another exploit or weakness, because after all the whole purpose of bounds checking is to limit options to a known and fixed finite set.

Fuckbook knowing that secretly you like to suck cock at the gloryhole at the blue oyster club is NOT anything to do with AI or anything else, it’s just big data number crunching and statistical analysis, the fuckbook app you never use on your smartphone that was preinstalled with the os know about contact lists and cell tower ID and triangulation, it’s forensics, no more and no less.

Too bad if you do not actually go to the blue oyster, you use the entrance from other other side of the block to go to the 1st floor premises same time every week to buy your ounce of grass, or to watch football with the lads, or to have acupuncture.. hell I know a guy who checks into the same motel every two weeks on a saturday afternoon to soak in the bath for a couple of hours, he only has a shower at home… (he actually gets a hugely reduced rate in exchange because he is always gone by 5pm)

I don’t have a problem with fuckbook sucking everything up and determining that the guy I know sucks cock in a motel room every other saturday, I *do* have a problem with anyone who reads that metadata on a computer screen and assumes it is the truth, because they read it on a computer screen.

3/ the real issue

I did once find myself in a place analagous to the el reg twat, discussing the same subject, I was given the bum’s rush when I asked them to first define intelligence, and queried their first response, that clearly we are all intelligent, by saying prove it, I see no sign of intellect here, I see people sifting through jigsaw pieces trying to find the right pieces to build the picture they have already formed.

By far the best quote / example I have ever heard came from the fanuc tech guy who was only there so the robots performed as expected for the sales droids out front, his pet wish was one of the mate series, with a gripper and a tool tray that held a dildo and a knife and a cactus, just get the cunt who thought they were even qualified to hold an opinion on robotics or automation or even AI and strap them down in front of the mate, if they are right all they get is a gentle sensuous anal probing with the dildo, if anyone else can freak the bounds checking they get a cactus or knife inserted randomly at 500 mm/sec with around 50 kg of force.

well, it was playing on the mp3 jukebox…

I will maintain that apart from the obvious ageing processes, and apart from the obvious knocks that life can throw at you, I haven’t changed, nope, not a fucking bit.

Watching me at 7 years old for a week would give you a damn good insight into watching me now for a week straight over half a century later.

Of course we are always told that “t’were different, back when I were a lad” is all bollocks, your perspective just changed, and all that, and of course perspective is all important.

The internet itself is full of memes of things routinely did as kids back then, and how did any of us survive to our teenage years, much less adulthood, and while amusing, they all also miss the point.

So, for those of you who are younger, here is how things were 50 years ago, as a child, and yes, it is a personal list and a personal anecdote, but compare it with pretty much anyone knocking on 6o or older and they will corroborate everything I have said, and then sit down and think of the implications of that, and some of the things on this list.

• Inflation – for most of my early life this had nothing whatsoever to do with the price of a basket of shopping, instead it dealt with a contraction of expansion of the total amount of money in circulation… such a simple thing, but if you import half a million immigrants and the money supply stays the same then either the money has to move around faster or you need less of it to do the same things (prices falling) – back then inflation wasn’t good but deflation was bad, money moved around slower and you needed more of it to do the same things (prices rising) – of course all this went away with the new economic models.
• Policemen (priests, teachers, etc) – you could walk up to *any* policeman anywhere and ask them the time, for directions, even for change to make a phone call to your parents from a call box, of the course the policy then was policemen served mainly in the towns and areas that they were from.. – of course there were exceptions to the rule, but they were exceptions to the rule, by and large anyone in authority and pretty much any adult was deemed trustworthy, *especially* if they had a trade, be it taxi driver or shopkeeper or bus driver or builder or fisherman, I only really realised how much this has passed when I went to spain in the mid 80’s as a young adult and saw how it was there then, kids could run around wild because every adult around had a general “protector” role towards all kids.
• the next ice age – I know it sounds weird to those weaned on man made global warming and carbon taxes, but as a boy the only possible climate change on the horizon was going to be colder, not warmer, and that had huge implications for agriculture and industry, because the UK was on the same latitudes as the hudson bay and the aleutian islands, and everything depended on the atlantic conveyor and jet stream
• debt – pretty much the only kind of borrowing anyone did, or could do, was to borrow money to buy a house or land or a small business comprising the above, apart from that for 99.99% of people it was pretty much impossible to borrow money, you either had the cash or you didn’t… credit cards didn’t exist, overdrafts were something shady business men used, and that was it, so of course if you were a retailer you sold for cash, if it was an expensive item like a watch or sofa or motor car, you wrote a cheque and waited for it to clear.
• cash – it was law that every worker had the right to be paid in full, in cash, every week, some folks in the city and some folks like mine who worked abroad as ex pats were not paid cash “wages”, they were on a thing called a “salary” that was paid into the bank once a month, but it was very much the exception, not the rule… so they just went to the bank to draw cash, or wrote a cheque, or, quite commonly, just signed a chit at the shop in question and the shopkeeper could take that chit to the bank and be paid from your account….. everyone knew everyone…
• weapons – as a boy of 12 I could go into a shop in the UK on my own and walk out with an air pistol, a catapult, a knife, no permits or any such nonsense, I could also go to the local chemist and buy stuff (it was encouraged, you were using your brain and learning) like sulphur and mercury and iron filings and copper sulphate, of course iron filings and sulphur and a small strip of magnesium and of course a box of matches was a perennial favourite with young boys, no store bought stink bomb ever came close…. most people you knew had at least one shotgun, probably two, one is 12 ga and one 410, and quite a few would have what was then a 25 year old ex war firearm, be it a webley or browning or luger, and maybe a dozen rounds of ammo, now and again you’d know someone with a rifle, and it was always a bolt action 308 of some sort, again with maybe a couple of dozen rounds…. there were back then “permits” for these sorts of things, but they were a lot like dog licences, in theory every dog had to be licenced, in practice maybe 1 in 10,000 was, and nobody gave a shit.
• identity – this one has really changed, and I’m not going anywhere near gender identity shit or any of that crap, I’m talking about who you were, one the one hand nobody carried any, driving licences and stuff were things that lived in a drawer somewhere at home, on the other hand it comprised, day to day, of what you did for a living, where you were from, and who knew you… back then nobody would have given a fuck if you said you knew someone like Bill Gates, the only thing that carried any weight was Bill Gates stopping to talk to you in the street, if it was Reggie Kray it cut the other way of course, nobody doubted that Reggie knew you, and most would avoid you as a result.
• hard knocks – there literally wasn’t a proper adult around who hadn’t been in the last war (most of the cities still had the remains of buildings that got bombed out 30 years previously) even if they hadn’t served abroad, so if you started trash talking about how tough things were or how tough you were 75% of those in earshot could outdo you, and prove it, which made them all very compassionate people, but also made them extremely intolerant of weakness (moral and spiritual as well as other kinds) because whatever sob story you had, they had had it worse, so on the one hand they would buy the tramp a drink and a sandwich, and on the other hand beat the living shit out of anyone who decided to get drunk and piss on said sleeping tramp.
• tools of the trade – if a man was respected, a man’s tools were fucking sacrosanct, even thieves would get a beating from fellow thieves for stealing a man’s means to work, and the tools would be returned forthwith, there was a special ire for getting rid of all the steam engines on the railways, but it only flew at all because the new diesels were better tools, allowing everyone to work better, but even so, getting rid of old tools that had served well…. I met guys dead of old age now who had special reverence for a gun or knife that the carried through the war and which they credit as a tool for saving their lives, that ain’t nothing compared to guys who used other tools for longer, if you could reincarnate my dad now I can guarantee that nothing would make him happier than seeing that tools he had as a boy apprentice are still in my possession and use… nowadays most tools are mere commodity items, nobody gives a shit about them and nobody respects them, be it a company vehicle or a knife.. I still have both buck 110’s I ever bought, one in daily use.. tools, in the broadest sense of the word to include bridges and irrigation systems and so on, used to be held in the highest respect, and I really cannot begin to explain that adequately to most… the luddites throwing their clogs in machinery, the modern equivalent is going to mecca and taking a dump on abraham’s meteorite, I shit you not.
• schools and “bullying” – I come from an age where punishment was corporal, and that means physical, parents had hands and belts and wooden spoons (how I laugh now, if ever there was a weapon of punishment that was unable to inflict any damage it is the wooden spoon) and schools and teacher had a cane or a leather strap, nobody lived in fear of the class or year bully, or his gang, ( the king film christine, and the scene with cuntingham in the school workshop ) because the power disparity just wasn’t that fucking big between the bully and the wimp of the year, the real power disparity came between one year and the next (at the time in the uk your first year in secondary school at 11 was “first year” up to “fifth year” at 16 for O levels and if you stayed on for A levels it was lower and then upper sixth) and the only saving grace in being a first year was next year you’d be second year and able to get some payback on the new first year, en fucking masse, by the time you rose to 3rd year you yourself referred to the 1st year as “crappers”, because they crap themselves when bullied by the older years… on top of all this of course were the masters.. an even mix of academics and ex services, you lived in fear of the ex services guys, not because they could beat you to a bloody pulp, but because they drag the whole class on an extended cross country run until you all puked, then run you some more, then back for showers that the hot water had mysteriously run out on, then a late lunch that the cooks had kept back but mysteriously couldn’t keep warm…  meanwhile the whole class is reminded to thank messrs Jenkins and Browne, whose escapades are responsible for the whole class being beasted, and I know you will all love to do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and so it would continue until Jenkins and Brown turn up covered in bruises, not too big or too dark, but plenty of em… and girls schools were just as fucking vicious, if not more so, many a grudge was settled with hockey sticks, all accidental like, as 20 girls pile one one trying to get the ball… by the time you left at 16 most of the latent thuggery and propensity for violence had been moderated due to the fact that you mob will always kick your ass, unless you are bruce lee in some chop socky film of course, and even old bruce would succumb to a morris starting handle to the back of the head out of the blue…. ain’t a single kid today would survive a single 60’s school term…
• dumb insolence – I was a past master at this by the age of 12, you’re stood before someone in authority, say a headmaster, and asked who took the crook out of the statue of Joseph in the hallway, (fuck me, religious statuary in a school…) and replaced it with one of cook’s sausages, if you’re like me you soon learn that grassing up the guy that did it is bad, admitting it if it was you is bad, and entering into any sort of discussion with an authority figure (who probably already know damn well who did it) is going to end badly because they will infer what you are trying not to say, so you sit there and yes sir no sir when they ask if you can hear them and nothing else and look carefully at a point on the wall and take whatever licks you have coming, and hate all the bastards for it, until you meet one of said bastards in later years, and head from the horse’s mouth that they were immensely proud of you, being one of the first to really get the lesson and stick to it 100%… WTF???!!!! .. I thought the “dumb” was not speaking and the “insolence” was not obeying authority?? Oh no, it’s code for “character” but if they said that, you’d never learn the lesson…
• understatement – back then you’d think you knew someone, and then one day something would come out completely unexpected out of the blue, and it was always some ability or talent, the lady from the post office who could stick weld like a motherfucker from her time in the armaments factories, the local priest who could speak malay and urdu from his time in the jungle evading the japanese after Singapore fell three days after his boat landed, the local bus driver who could do field surgery on the kid who fell and impaled himself on some railings and pierced an artery, and saved his life long enough for the ambulance and fireman to arrive (all real examples) – nowadays it’s the exact fucking opposite, 90% of what people claim to be able to do they are worse than fucking useless at, and they are piss poor at best at what they claim to do for a living
• Flash Gordon – nuff said

I was gonna say “about twenty years ago” and then I stopped to think, I’m not sure, but I think nearer fifteen is the right number..

… anyway, this guy I knew, his kid died, od’s when the condoms in his gut rupture, nobody knows anything for sure, who why where how any of that shit, the kid is dead… I basically haven’t spoken to the dad since, don’t even know if he is alive, but I do recall hearing about a year later that a lot of the nothing going on was because at some point the drugs in the dead kids gut were part of a po-po sting operation.

If figured then if the po-po can deal drugs and call it a honey trap and a kid dies and nobody says shit, it was only going to be a matter of 20 years or so before kiddie porn was on the menu for po-po

Little did I know that a scant 15 years later it’s become so routine for po-po to run kiddie porn sites, that when usenet groups that dealt with movies and mp3’s started getting kiddie porn spam my initial reaction and comment that it was obviously going to be some fed honey trap trolling entrapment scam not one single person raised an eyebrow.

I won’t mention locations or even countries, but 30 years ago in a certain country, and not some bum fuck nowhere country either, it was sort of well known in the right circles that most of the dope that came in passed through the hands of the local customs, they were in fact by far the biggest importer of dope.

I don’t actually have any personal desires to fuck small kids or import drugs or make bombs, though I did in fact do a lot of drugs when I was younger, so I suspect the parallels will be valid across these three endeavours, and many more besides.

Back in the seventies I don’t know how anyone could get busted for dope, with the sole exception of being searched and they find one ready rolled tucked away in your shirt sleeve that you forgot all about, hence my one drug bust and 20 quid fine at the end of the seventies.

I did enough grass and blow and acid and speed to sink battleships, but I don’t know how anyone could actually get busted for it.

I say that because the only ones who got busted dealt with and bought from or sold to informants who had themselves been previously busted, so if Jesse got busted you avoided him like the plague, and everyone who talked to him or who he talked to, because sooner or later they were all going to get busted too…

But I knew things were getting bad when the local patch club got rounded up and thrown into chokey on remand ( I was already there on some other pathetic charge ) and at that point they figured out that is was their own president who got busted some months before and hadn’t told anyone… they walked a week or so later when the prosecutions star witness decided he couldn’t remember anything, a good way to keep his friends and family’s feet attached apparently, then the rumour went around the star witnesses long term live in bitch had disappeared, apparently she got busted two months before him, and hadn’t told him.

Shame, as they had a good deal going, people would give her money, and he would give people drugs, she never carried, and he never had any money, and only a very select few (your truly) ever got invited into his house to get some laid on and skin up… and no, I never knew or suspected either.

But anyway, that is all by the by, the point is that for the longest time there were two classes of people involved in drugs, those who kept their fucking mouths shit, and those who got busted and turned into grasses.

It got a bit crazy towards the end with everyone accusing everyone else of being a grass, hell I was accused myself, then I find out he got the idea from his chick, and she had a brother in borstal (youth prison) and the po-po got to her through the brother, and she was the grass that got the guy that accused me in the shit… I still remember that conversation, he called me a grass and blamed me for getting busted, I said I ain’t never been busted dude, you have, don’t talk to me again… he had that look in his eye when I said that, he knew what I was sayin’

So I suspect that when it comes to kiddie porn or importing guns or making bombs or any of that shit, the same things hold true, there are those that have had conversations with po-po, and those who haven’t.

I suspect the other commonality is that it is those who have had conversations with po-po that make the headlines and get in the news, funny how all the raghead muzzie terrorists in europe turn out to be known to po-po innit…

The other thing about the drugs days was everyone in the mouth fucking shut camp did lots of drugs, and paid for them with their wages, and everyone in the po-po grass camp, did lots of drugs, and paid for them with all manner or criminal activity from dealing drugs to breaking and entering to theft etc etc

I think that is another fucking parallel too.

Which brings us to a conclusion, and that conclusion is that if you want to end the drug problem, making it legal ain’t really the shit, the shit is making it illegal for po-po to run networks of grasses, because they are the cunts that cause all the trouble.

I’m not trying to say that the keep your fucking mouth shut kiddie fiddlers and gun importers and bomb makers are *nice* people, I’m just saying that 99.9% of the problems caused to the rest of society are caused by the po-po’s special friends.

Maybe that means the others only fiddle with their own kids and sell guns to and blow up their own kind, and maybe that ain’t right, but hey, that’s a significant improvement on what we have, right?

Shades of the same shit with the weinstein thing in tinseltown, and oh look, there he is at hitlary’s birthday bash as a close friend, all the fucking toxic troublemakers turn out to have a history as long as your arm, and lots and lots of associated who are just the fucking same all the others who are *allegedly* cut from the same cloth, no history there at all, except perhaps some behind closed doors shit with their own kind that never gets beyond rumour, and they never seem to be seen with the first lot.

All the A, B and C list tinsel town bitches are fucking silent on the subject, because they already spent enough years grassing and entrapping others, or they are loudly denouncing him, despite long and fruitful association with the guy.

Then there are the ones that aren’t being quoted anywhere on the subject, because they don’t even put themselves in a place where they might have to say “no comment”

Hey ho…

I’m often asked why every day I take 5 minutes (or less) to skim through the daily fail website, given my obvious attitudes to things.

The answer is fairly simple, I do it to see what TPTB would like me to care about today, in effect it is a cheat sheet of things that should neither concern me, nor are likely to contain a shred of truth.

If we rationalise it as “The Daily Propaganda” then it is something they will want the masses to read, but which everyone should glance at, because it doesn’t just tell you what “they” want you to think, it tells you what lots of people will think, and unless you live on a desert island, that matters.

In reality when you have what we have today in the west, just a few individuals controlling most of the media across multiple media types, there are strong analogies to trying to grip and handful of sand harder and harder, and the harder you try the more slips through your fingers.

In the past week I have overheard conversations from those who a scant five years ago would have regurgitated everything ad nauseam, to the effect that the head of the medical council only cares about making abortion easier, that the head of the prosecution service only cares about making rape easier to convict, that the head of the police service only cares about making the police above the law, and so on…

A few years ago I would have heard about how all these strong wimminz were amazing and had so much on their plate not to mention plenty of people trying to bring them down, now, because of the media, being on message and all that crap, they have all turned to one trick ponies, and yesterday while waiting for someone (he was one street over waiting for me, the joys of crossed wires and poor navigation) my smirk got the better of me, so this woman made a comment to me instead of to her friends.

“Did you know..” I said, “.. that it is now illegal, and an arrestable offence of either actual or grevious bodily harm, to smack a child, such as you just did?”

eh? what?

I explained to them quite clearly that as the law actually stands today there are some weasel words about “reasonable chastisement”, and if a ***judge*** decides that what you did falls within that, they you get to walk, but the automatic default position is that it is always illegal to smack or strike a child in any way under any circumstances, and you will be arrested.

They were, frankly, astonished, and started muttering about a police state and you can’t be right, even though they checked via their smartphones and saw I was right, the fact is they had no idea…

The rabbit hole goes a bit deeper because if the parent is angry or scared, and the hitting is done as a punishment, then it falls outside the definition of reasonable chastisement.

Of course it is all done to protect the childruuun..

Who would vote for a law that said you could kick seven bells of shit out of kids, after all..

I can now go out and talk to policemen who will freely admit that they have no idea at all about 90% of the laws out there, there are just so many, and so many of them are contra intuitive, thankfully there are enough staples that they can make the monthly arrest quotas without straying into any of the unknown areas.

There is a local guy now in court because he took his young boy to the doctors because he had a bruise on his ass, when questioned he said yeah, he smacked the kid earlier in the day for breaking a vase, but he did not cause the bruise, next thing he knows he is arrested as the doctors called the police and reported him… got a friend whose daughter slipped on a playground slide and bruised her cunt, the daddy was of course in fear of even being told about it, much less looking at it, mummy asked if I should take the kid to the doctors, my advice was not unless you want life as you know it to end today… thankfully she listened to me…

It would be interesting to go around a hard clinton state or a hard trump state and ask people in the street, real people who drive buses and fix cars and haul refuse and sell coffee and so on, how much of the russians hacked the elections and kim is rocket boy and the vegas killer was a lone crazed white guy narrative they actually buy.

If my observations are anything to go by, a lot of the answers will depend on who is asking, and if the person questioned feels that they can speak relatively freely or not.

Most of the people on the street are far more concerned with much more mundane and pertinent stuff, the next bills due in, how many days to pay day, how much is left in the bank till then.

I know actual real people, *working* people, who have made such choices as the car stays on the driveway unless it is the 10 mile drive to work and back, and yes that ended the relationship with the girlfriend who lived 8 miles away and didn’t drive, and no the heating isn’t going on this year, not if I can help it, and there is fuck all in the fridge and fuck all signs of anything changing any time soon.

To people like this the daily fail content is as relevant as a lifestyle magazine, and as insulting… ah yes, GB£3,000 for a tap on my sink that can spew boiling water, and the breakdown slides ever downward.

I know houses that contain families that once would have been called family homes, how when you go in there the reality is they are all individuals concerned with themselves alone, and none of it for the common good or common causes, and these are the good ones…

I dunno if I am grateful or sad that my libido died some time ago, cos there sure as shit is a lot of potential for exploitation of one kind or another lying around.

In closing, back to the wimminz outside the Aldi and the illegal to smack your own kid thing, one of them had a 7 year old there, he knew I was right and instantly said so, how do you know this stuff, mummy asked, oh, teachers tell us all this stuff all the time, was the rely…

Generally speaking when it comes to chemistry if it includes the carbon atom it’s called organic chemistry, because every living thing contains carbon (and hydrogen and oxygen).

The problem is that just because carbon is the *basis* for life as we know it, that doesn’t mean carbon *is* life, carbon is just another element.

Chemistry and Physics sort of meet at the border between elements and compounds, so for example iron (Fe) as an element is pretty hard to destroy, and pretty easy to recycle, but a compound like acetylene C2H2 is pretty easy to destroy, so pretty hard to recycle.

The elements within acetylene, carbon and hydrogen, are pretty hard to destroy, and pretty easy to recycle.

The definition of recycling meaning to get back to square one.

See with acetylene you get H-C-C-H and the two out bonds are single bonds, and the central bond between the two carbon atoms is a triple bond, so lots and lots of energy can be released by breaking that bond, which means lots and lots of energy has to be input to make it.

There aren’t any acetylene wells. It’s not a naturally occurring substance in *that* sense…. though there are natural processes that produce it in small quantities.

Speaking of wells, that sort of brings us to oil, another compound, not an element… and yes, you can make hydrocarbons in a lab, so the question becomes, where did the oil come from?

The truth is nobody actually knows for a fact, most of the worlds oil reserves are at a depth that significantly exceeds the maximum depths at which any fossils have ever been found anywhere on the planet, ok, the counter argument is plankton don’t leave a fossil record, and oil is from that very primitive “bug soup” era of planetary development, and that might be so, or it might not be so, it might also be so that conditions might arise spontaneously to create it, after all, the “bug soup” did not create oil according to the theories, the bug soup just sank to the bottom of oceans (presumably to depths where there was no 0xygen) and then millions of years of “earth processes” covered it an compressed it and converted it and so on, so the bug soup is no more than an ingredients list, so by definition the claim is that it is the only possible source for the ingredients list.

There is just that troubling little problem that most of the world’s oil is too deep to be a fossil *as we know it*, even the recent discovery of the world’s new oldest fossils in greenland was basically made on the surface, not six miles down, where we are finding more and more natural gas and oil (basically related chemical compounds based on the elements carbon and hydrogen)

Which brings us back to my earlier statement that we do not actually *know* where natural oil and gas hydrocarbons come from, we have some pretty good theories, but we don’t actually *know*

This doesn’t mean that oil is an infinite resource constantly being produced deep within the earth by natural processes, we just do not actually *know* for a fact that it isn’t produced by some natural abiotic process deep within the earth.

Either way it is a reasonable assumption that in the past 100 years we have been consuming it faster than it is being produced, but even that is still an assumption, there could be oceans of the stuff 10 miles down, that’s an area we know less about than the surface of mars.

However the fact that otto diesel pioneered an engine running on peanut vegetable oil should convince you that at least as far as the chemistry goes, there is nothing special or exotic about oil / hydrocarbons / organic chemistry.

The only real significant fact is that while recycling elements such as iron is a lossy process energy wise, recycling chemical compounds is an *extremely* lossy process energy wise… so starting with ready made hydrocarbon soup is *vastly* more energy efficient than starting with the bare elements.

Perhaps the simplest organic compound is CH4, four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom, so simple even the bugs in your guts can make it as a byproduct of digestion, put shit in a tank and draw off the gas and you have a methane digester, and you can run a motor off the methane, or you can use it as a building block for your larger hydrocarbon chains.

Anyone who has worked with a gas axe knows oxy-acetylene torches kick ass, oxy-propane is for limp wristed fags, but anyone who has worked with oxy acetylene knows that despite how fierce the flame is, there really ain’t that much of it in one bottle.

Start at methane and work your way up through ethane and propane to butane, and you’re getting closer to something that is easier to keep liquid at room temperature and atmo pressure, you’re not there yet, but you are getting closer, and around about gasoline and diesel, you are up near the apex of being easy to handle and dense (a liquid) and having a lot of energy per weight / volume, and then it starts to tail off again towards coal and ultimately diamond (diamond will burn, just not easily)

So a bit like H2O (another compound) having a sweet spot in liquid gas solid states and life and so on, hydrocarbons have a sweet spot in an oxygen rich environment as chemical fuels.

At this point it doesn’t really matter where the come from, all we need to know that burning them in oxygen for energy is hugely easier and hugely more efficient than trying to input energy and reverse the process.

So pretty much all chemical reactions that involve burning something in oxygen are great at releasing energy, but they are pretty much one shot processes in that you can’t afford to reverse them.

Contrast this with a battery in an EV such as a tesla, it’s pretty easy to reverse *that* chemical process and put the charge back in and revert things to their previous chemical state, but, it’s still a *long* way from perfect… my new nimh AA cells claim 2100 charge discharge cycles, that is a ***looooong*** fucking way from a lossless reversible process… so while the number of atoms of each ELEMENT in that cell aren’t going to change over time (apart from hydrogen outgassing porosity) it is the COMPOUNDS that never quite get put back they way they should be each time, and as such the battery ages and dies.

So we have elements, and we have compounds, and compounds have chemical reactions, and chemical reactions with oxygen that liberate a lot of energy are great at liberating lots of energy, but to all intents and practicality they are one shot processes, and we have other chemical reactions that are pretty much reversible, that can be used to store energy, but the comparison between the two types of chemical reaction when measured per volume or per weight is hopeless, do you want lots of energy is a small weight / volume, or do want a mainly reversible process, pick one.

So, any non nuclear electricity generating plant providing electrical power to any and every EV is basically all just chemistry at work, that’s all it is, it’s just chemistry.

I do not want to knock chemistry too much, because chemistry can be some amazing shit, but it can also be some really mundane shit… lighting your farts CH4 + O2 = H2O + CO2.. this is not the new wave of the cutting edge science future come to save us as a species.

If we get away from chemistry and compounds and steer towards physics and elements, well, it’s all pretty standard shit by now, we pretty much know all the viable elements now, we pretty much know all of the basic alloys and compounds of said elements and their properties, ain’t nobody going to accidentally spill a drop of mercury into a furnace and make star trek transparent aluminium that is also harder than diamond and stronger than spider silk and more temperature resistant than titanium.

So there isn’t any sci-fi unobtanium physics and materials science around the corner that is gonna save us as a species any time soon.

So what we are left with is SCIENCE, as in REAL FUCKIN’ SCIENCE.

Real science tells us that one way chemical reactions burning shit in oxygen are a great way of producing energy, and that more or less reversible chemical reactions in sealed vessels is a reasonably good way of storing energy, in other words, one is a FUEL, the other is a BATTERY.

Every vehicle has mechanical losses, rolling resistance, air resistance, etc etc, so it takes X amount of energy to go a mile at V speed.

Substituting a FUEL for a BATTERY doesn’t change that.

What it does, as opposed to the IC engine, is it introduces another “lossy” conversion stage, another lossy CHEMICAL process, between the chemical production of energy by burning a fuel in oxygen, and pushing that vehicle down the road.

If the whole process including the energy generation centrally is chemical, then the whole process is significantly less efficient *overall* than burning the fuel in the vehicle.

Nuclear (non chemically) generated power, sort of starts to make sense… nuke generated power and next gen supercapacitors, starts to make real good sense.

Significantly LESS efficient overall chemical processes, doesn’t make any fucking sense at all, and it brings us right back to the start, an overall less efficient process is Ok if it is more convenient than a more efficient process, AND if there is no shortage of the chemical compounds being converted to energy.

My eneloop nimh batteries, says on the pack, charged at the factory by solar power, yeah, ok, that’s another story, ROEI for solar cells is not so great, takes a lot of energy to make them, but it’s kinda green, kinda, now imagine if they were charged at the factory by a coal power plant.

Yes, I know, coal, another “fossil fuel”… and anyone heard of marie curie, pitchblende, every single nuclear power plant on the planet would be shut down immediately and permanently if they released half as much radioactive waste as any coal power plant, because coal is relatively full of radioactive materials.

How can dead trees be so full of radioactive materials?

A fucking nutcase I knew years back (lizard overlord shapeshifter body snatcher type) made more sense than anyone else at a science symposium when he suggested that the only way that this could have happened is if all the planet millions of years ago was carpet bombed globally from orbit with nukes.

Because those radioactive ELEMENTS (uranium and thorium) within coal sure as shit came from somewhere, then you get into the real science, and down at the trace level there is uranium and thorium in almost every bit of rock you can pick up, and it was all made in stars somewhere, which iron itself being the common end product, and if that isn’t proof that elements are pretty indestructible, nothing is.

Tesla and other electric cars are driven by chemical reactions at least as much as any IC powered vehicle, moreso if the power to charge them is generated in a non nuke power station.

To call them “electric” cars is misleading, to say the least.

They are chemical cars, same as my old diesel volvo shed.

Takes more than just a bit of the shine off them, don’t you think….

Science/facts/education, bad for sales, bad for the economy.