Tuesday, 4 July 2023

 A long time gone....


It's been a while since I was here, basically the world has become so unbelievably stupid I couldn't decide what to write about, I still can't.


I thought about discussing why it was that  Rowan Atkinson, given that he says he has an electrical engineering degree, has taken so long to realise that electric cars are not a solution to any known problem. It's been obvious to me for years.
The battery tecnology is simply not good enough, requiring enormous resourses, huge fossil fuel use, and creates dangerous pollution to mine and refine the materials. Then the car must be large and heavy to carry the weight, to the extent that building it has created more CO2 and pollution than a small efficient petrol car creates during its build and use for tens of thousands of miles. Add the fact that in optimum conditions only about half the UK's electricity is from so-called green sourses the other half is fossil fuel generated while on a still winter night virtually none is 'green'. the saving in pollution and CO2 is minimal.
Meanwhile their practicality is limited. Millions of homes can't have home chargers, charging is slow, range is problematic in cold weather, the batteries can be unstable and catch fire, the car's cost is appoaching twice that of a small conventional car, they cause more road and tyre wear, and they suffer massive value depreciation because the batteries deteriorate over time and replacement costs half the price of a new car. So who would buy a 7 or 8 year old one when a well kept conventional car can last over 20 years?


So I dismissed that topic as too obvious and thought about wind turbines. Again lack of cost effective battery technology makes them of limited use. Just like the cars they need materials that are expensive and dangerously polluting to obtain. Along with the millions of tons of concrete base, fibreglass blades that have to be replaced, are not recyclable and are denuding the rain forests of balsa wood trees for their internal bracing. The turbines need to be in use for over a decade before they produce an electron's worth of 'green' energy and much of that is wasted because there are no suitable batteries to even out the vagaries of the wind. 

Neither are they cheap to build or maintain, especially at sea. They exist on subsidies added to all our bills, with another hefty subsidy to be added next year as the grid system needs extensive replacement to accomodate any more of them. In any case the grid needs half it's power to be reliable and consistent or it would be unstable, 'green' electricity is only half of that, while electricity is only 20% of the county's energy use. So all these expensive windfarms and massive grid costs only represent 10% of our total energy. The believers witter on about 1000's of 'green jobs' - yes which means 1000's of salaries for maintenance and construction which will have to be paid for with more levies on what are already some of the highest electricity prices in the world and creating severe economic problems. It's the cost economics of the madhouse.


Moving on I considered the next threat to our mobility and prosperity that none of us voted for: ULEZ zones, LTNs and the like. The road I live on used to be a toll road, I think it was about a penny per sheep if you wanted to herd them through the village. But sometime in the 1800's a decision was made that travel and trade were more important than making profits for landowners and corporations and most tolls were scrapped. Apart from a few private bridges and to pay back construction costs for new 'convenience roads'  (and the immoral extension of tolls at Dartford after the crossing was paid for) roads were essentially toll free. Trade flourished. Now towns around the country have decided to turn back the clock and make entire cities into a toll road system. It didn't work before and it won't work now, business will simply close or move out and the city's economy will die.


Then of course we have the banking scandal of people the banks don't like being debanked without even a basic current account. This is devestating for the victims in our modern economy and in my view should be immediately made illegal without a court order. I fail to see how banks working together can legally misuse and extend regulations against fraud and money laundering into a personal vendetta against individuals whose beliefs they don't like. Surely they are breaking both commercial anti-cartel laws and their own regulations? How, in the case of the vicar, a banking 'regulation' can be allowed to overide religious belief discrimination laws is beyond me. I hope the banks and the individuals who allowed it to happen are sued for every penny the victims can extract.


I could go on about the never ending plague of potholes, the failed NHS, the hopeless driving test agency, the useless local planning departments, hotels full of immigrants, councils who stretch and miuse every power they have to fleece motorists and taxpayers, the invisible police service, child grooming, stealth taxes, net zero nonsense, or almost any other factor of the current utterly disfunctional UK. It's pointless, they won't be fixed because the WEF puppets in government want things this way. 


So down to small scale issues. Why does Google think I spend so much time in Oldham? The Mrs and I have tracking on our phones for each other and she has the offspring tracked on hers. It's useful when meeting up for family activities, picking up at the station and such like. Then a while ago, checking whether to put the kettle on as Mrs was due to returne from a local meeting, I found she was apparently in Oldham. The next day she checked and found she was now home but I was in Oldham. According the Google tracking I have been in Oldham much of the past fortnight. I just checked again - and sure enough I'm in Oldham along with my GPS blue dot on the Google road map! It's 50 miles away from where I'm sitting and  at least 25 years since I once went to Oldham for a concert. Mrs should be arriving in London on the train but Google has lost her again. I can only conclude that Google, like most other things in the modern world, is totally fucked (Techical term!). It's bound to get more fucked as systems get more complex and interrelated while programmers seem ever less competent. So what about a social credit banking system? You must be joking, they can't even build a victorian technology railway line from London to Manchester, what chance for a computer system to track 70 million people's habits?