Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

There are some things I have learned in life;

1. The most significant changes in anything usually happen in the final moments of the event in question in a catastrophic manner, think ships sinking or runs on a bank or the slide into war or even a business going bust… 99% of the action takes place in the last 1% of the time.
2. Nature itself and therefore humanity abhor both a vacuum and stasis, nature likes change and churn.
3. 25 kWh per person per day is the breadline for a modern technological civilisation in a temperate climate, that includes food accoms heat transport tech the works… it also presumes you have already in place the appropriate physical stuff to supply that energy budget to… a 220 volt AC supply won’t keep you warm and alive unless you have an enclosure to bring it to and an electric fire to put inside that enclosure… this isn’t a theoretical availability in market terms, this is what 99.999% of the society have to have actual access to as a fucking minimum… think stall speed in an aircraft, fall below it and everyone on board takes the plunge.
4. There are no new lessons to learn, only old and forgotten lessons to re-learn.
5. You cannot un-ring a bell, or take scrambled egg and convert it back to eggs and milk and butter, once a new technology becomes intertwined with society, it costs more to separate it out again than it does to keep it going.

It is tempting to point at my car and say “we cannot go backwards”, but it would be wrong, because there is an implicit assumption that “my car” = “internal combustion engine” when the reality is “my car” = “personal transport module”

In reality I could give up “my car” and replace it with an electric vehicle, there are 86 currently available on Ebay UK, and 77 of them are either hybrids or toy racing cars put in the wrong category, so it is down to buying a brand new Smart ED for £18k or one of the new japanese jobbies such as a Leaf for £30+k… not really a valid proposition.

Then there is charging it, currently (sic) I’d have to open a window in the house, run an extension lead outside and across the pavement and plug it in that way, health and safety from the local council would be down on me like a ton of bricks.

So the problems to electric car adoption are the up front capital costs, which means £18k or £30k, which in real PRACTICAL terms means at £1.40 a litre for diesel means 2,800 (imperial) gallons of diesel for the smart or 4,700 (imperial) gallons of diesel for a Leaf, my current shed gets around 4/5 gallons per fill up and unless I am doing a run it gets filled up once a week, and since electric cars do not have the range to do a run… so 2,800 / 5 = 560 weeks motoring, which takes us to 2025 AD, or 4,700 / 5 = 940 weeks motoring, which takes us to 2031 AD.

Even this ludicrous proposition assumes that;

1. either of these cars will still be running and in once piece in 2025/2031
2. the batteries supplied will still be working in 2025/2031
3. no other technologies come on line by 2025/2031 to supercede them (batacitors etc)
4. I somehow surmount the running an extension cable across the pavement to charge and do not have to move house to get a driveway, or pay extra for an overnight parking / charging slot.

and all of these are VAST and very unsafe assumptions to make…

This is electric cars, but it gives is the CORRECT mindset for some futurology.

Back when I was a boy, there was an expression, “Hong Kong punya” which basically meant cheap crap made in Hong kong.

SOME early japansese stuff was quality, the Sony Tapecorder 500 thermionic valve reel to reel tape recorder (which I still have and which still works) and the Hitachi transistor radio with 14 transistors (itsaid this on the front) which ever survived going over the side of the boat into the south china seas at a beach… that and the early Minolta 35mm camera

Apart from that you bought Grundig, Rollei, Roberts, Quad, and t’were all fucking expensive kit. I still have a 1960’s era Rolex in stainless, and it carries more credibility than a 2012 patek phillipe, because back when it was new it really was something special.. and that air of true quality still holds to it, rather like a 1930’s Bentley parked alongside a 2012 one, sure, the 2o12 one does everything a lot better, but the 1930’s one oozes class and style.

We are back in those days, where the market has been saturated with cheap crap, there is nobody else to sell to and nowhere else to go for cheaper labour.

Given that the current social and economic models are based upon the “Hong Kong punya” method of commerce, we are in an end game, again, where lots of the huge brands that exported worldwide will come crashing down and factories will close, taking with them everyone in the supply chain, and the only things that will sell are genuine value and genuine quality.

When it comes to monetary shifts I have seen and lived through a few, I have seen currencies broken away from the gold standard, I have seen decimalisation here in the UK, I have seen the transition from one currency to another in various places, not just the Peseta and Franc and Lire and Drachma to Euro, and I have seen currencies rapidly devalued against others, by rapidly I mean by 40% overnight, and when that happens all work and contracts in progress stop.. dead.

I have seen the devaluation of currencies.

I can remember Roses Lime Marmalade going from 1 shilling and 6 pence, or 18 pence in old money, which is 7.5 pence in new money, to 9 pence in new money literally overnight with the change to new money.

I have seen the loss of Manufacturer’s Recommended Retail Price which meant that the 1lb jar of marmalade in the corner shop was no longer the same price in the supermarket down in the town… and look what that did for the tesco’s and the corner shops.

I have have lived off the grid, no mains power or running water or telephones.

I have seen the introduction of the STD trunk dialling phone system (all operator placed calls for long distance before that), and tone dialling, and the introduction of the microprocessor, transistor and indeed electronics.

I have seen the change from the right to be paid in cash every Friday, the change where having a chequeing bank account actually said something about you, the change from the maximum mortgage being 3.5 times your gross annual salary…

I have seen enough of people and politicians and businessmen and military types to appreciate that when the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, the longest standing democratically elected politician in the world, Jean Claude Juncker says “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.” he is stating a fundamental truism and problem with the modern western world.

So, predictions for 2013 and onwards.

2013 will be the start of the change, when we come to the stark realisation that in many areas what was true yesterday simply will not work tomorrow, and suddenly we will have to start working with what we actually have that is still working, and not some esoteric models of what should be working.

Essentially unlimited access to the latest greatest newest hong kong punya via the mechanism of essentially unlimited personal credit of one form or another (pay nothing but a monthly fee and a new phone every two years is credit by any other name) is going to just stop working.

Essentially unlimited access to housing credit (20+ year interest only mortgages and liar loans plus 8x earning multiples etc) is going to just stop working.

The present financial system and the present value of the banknote in your pocket has to change, not in an incremental way, but a large step change, we have absolutely no alternative but to go from here, to a place where;

• The working man has a realistic prospect of paying off a mortgage in 20 years…
• The bulk of the kWh value of every product cannot be tied up in the energy required to ship it from the point of manufacture to the point of consumption.. eg hong kong punya clothes and food and trinkets…
• The current status quo regarding resource wars etc shifts to the new steady state.
• The overburden of parasitic state workers is reduced by 75% or more, which means MASSIVE swings in the employment landscape.
• The cost of transporting meat to and from work every day is eliminated for all non essential roles, the plumber has to travel, the worker sat at a computer does not.
• The costs of producing and distributing both energy and data are addressed, we need to double or treble national grid baseline generation and distribution capacity to make things like electric cars viable, and we have to bite the bullet and call symmetric 25 mbit/sec (not “up to”, but actual) a fucking minimum standard for every household, or at least for 99% of all households.
• We have to address efficiency across the board, from the thermal efficiency of our homes through the electrical efficiency of our lights and computers to the efficiency of transport.
• We have to abandon, utterly, short term solutions, whether it being a company abandoning R&D in favour of shareholder dividends, or the stock market itself, if you buy stocks in anything you should be forced to KEEP them for a minimum of 5 years before you are allowed to sell them.

At one extreme we have the old Russian model, where toothbrush manufacture, down the the smallest design and manufacturing detail, was controlled by the state, at the other extreme we have algorithm driven high frequency trading where a piece of software can literally wipe out a company, an industry, a resource or a region as fast as the human eye can blink (Enron etc)

In our disdain for the Soviet model, we have gone to the other extreme.

It is not time for A reset, it is time for many thousands of things that together make up our modern western society, all of which are interlinked, to reset.

2013 is when these rests start, and like all dynamic processes, it starts so slow almost nobody notices, then it escalates and escalates and 99% of the apparent change happens in the last 1% of time.

2013 is not, for my money, where we will see that 1% peak activity, my bet is 2013 is the lower slopes of that hockey stick curve, 2014 or maybe 2015 will be the cusp, but then I could easily be wrong, it could come before summer 2013.

It is not if, but when.

The “when” will be when the Juncker’s in politics and finance and industry and military are no longer saying things like;

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.”

but are instead saying

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected if we do not do it fast enough and well enough.”

The problem is, the gap in perception between those two statements is vast, and everything I have said above fits in that gap, with room to spare.