Programming - This One Weird Quote

A seeming lifetime ago I shared with a friend a quote that I remembered reading - and it changed nothing major. Some quotes are like that...

But the friend did change their email signature. This XKCD cartoon just reminded me of that. And yep this is going to be a bit of a short article.

So the quote runs something like: "Every program can be shortened by one line of code, and every program contains at least one bug. That means that any program can be reduced to one line of code - that doesn't work." 

After that, their email signature ran:

--

(name of friend)

Bug Coder Extraordinaire

That's it, really. That quote often came to mind when I was trying to figure out why my ESP32 was producing an infinite-length web page before rebooting. I now have a corollary to that maxim:

"Every program can be shortened by one line of code, and every program contains at least one bug. That means that any program can be reduced to one line of code - that doesn't work. If you attempt to eradicate the bug by removing one line of code, it'll never be the line with the bug in it."

I'm also trying to figure out where that quote came from. It's a bit like the "My machine, it will not boot" verse that I recalled from some time earlier and couldn't find a single reference to online so I decided to save it by writing it out. And I've just searched for it and once again can't even find it on any of my blogs. Time to salvage it again I think:

MY MACHINE, IT WILL NOT BOOT

My machine, it will not boot 

I "rm *" while "su root"

The lights will blink, the fans will whir

But I can't get init to stir. 

I've got no backups, nothing - for,

I used the DAT for music store.

It's time to leave this awful place

Before their lawyers build a case

Another job's been offered me

They want me to admin NT

"Admin NT?" I asked the man

"Of course I will! Of course I can!"

So now I sit, and babysit,

This creeping crawling piece of sh*t

NT's installed, how fscking cute.

And my machine, it will not boot...

-- Courtesy of me having the memory of an elephant for anything but serious stuff

I really truly don't know where either the quote or the poem originally came from, but I hope they made you at least smile. 

Now to the serious bit. Please share the hell out of this post and my others. There's a family health crisis and I may not always be able to post as often as I'd like to, but I don't want to lose readers. Your share will help keep up the number of readers and hopefully give them a smile too. If you can manage a donation that would also help. 

Ciao and be happy!

Supercomputers Are A Load Of Crap

To begin with, there's something I need to tell you. My family has a pretty serious health crisis. The "our next year is completely going to be about survival" kind of crisis. Sorry. Hardware projects are going on soft hold, woodwork projects are going on soft hold, garden projects are going on soft hold, and blogging is going on soft hold. 

I mean that. I'm looking at the latest cucurbit-qubitatron teraflopsical quantum computer on some tech site's web page knowing in my heart of hearts that it's already superseded. And the next one might actually even work. In the sense that someone could run a spreadsheet on it, really really fast. Whatever.

So when I say supercomputers are a load of crap, I honestly really mean it. In the days of yore (OMFSM was it ever 1984? Forty years ago? Well fk me dead.) I remember being in so much awe that a Commodore 64 or and Amstrad 464 could run a spreadsheet or word processor that I'd have had to code by hand for my old ZX80, and load from my cassette player every time I wanted to run it. 

I was in so awe, much big eyes! for that first 386, the 486, the first Pentium I owned. Don't know what I'm talking about? That just proves my point innit? They were powerhouses for their day. And each reigned supreme for a matter of a year or two, sometimes only a matter of a few months, before the next superprocessor came along. 

Silicon Graphics came along with a few superb workstations that amazed, I've never actually used an Apple of any kind, and the CRAY-1 from the previous decade was still one of the most amazing supercomputers I knew about, because it was a first, and it had a new successor the CRAY-2. 

It's almost fifty years after the CRAY-1 and now I've used little single-board computers from the PIC8F series through Arduinos and ESP32s and RP2040 boards. That last on, it's the same processor family as the Raspberry Pi, the little single board computer that's the size of a pack of playing cards. CRAY-1? You're outta here! Yeah, I cried a silent little tear over that. 

But there's a lesson in that. 

Everything is capable of being improved on. E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. I just recently posted on one of my other blogs about how far AI and tech in general will improve in the future - if we let it. 

I'll be posting pretty soon (crisis permitting) about how we've gone from just knowing that CO2 is A Bad Thing for the planet and "sequestering" it in the ground to trying to scrub it out of the air with really big vacuum cleaners with great HEPA filters and are now to the point where we can now convert it into useful chemicals and materials and even clean-burning fuel. 

I've also seen EV batteries go from lead acid to lithium to - well, read on. From a range of a few dozen miles and a life of a few thousand miles before needing to be replaced to a a few hundred miles of range and tens of thousand of miles before needing replacement to the fabled million mile battery with a range of a thousand miles per recharge.

Materials that are made from exotic and difficult to engineer like Kevlar originally was, to stuff ten times stronger than Kevlar that can be produced in a medium-high-tech bathtub. Solar panels have gone from pathetic little things that failed in the full heat of the sun after a few months and produced under 100 watts to panels (like the one I use to keep 12V on in the shed and a source of mains voltage for some equipment so I don't need an upgraded breaker for the workshop) that clock in at 240 watts and will probably outlast me. 

And quantum computers are already in the shadow of The Next Big Thing. We're so good at continually improving and even on improving the speed at which we make improvements that there will come a point where the line goes vertical. 

There are also rumours that we already live in a simulation, and perhaps when that point is reached when we create The Last Big Computer, it'll be capable of reversing time and running the simulation on itself so that we can bring its existence about. 

---

Not going to beat about the bush, unless I can manage some kind of asymptotic increase in productivity myself, I simply won't be able to post as many articles. Fewer articles means fewer social media notifications. Fewer of those means fewer visitors to the blogs, and that means fewer people patronising these pages and less money to pay to keep things rolling along online. It's a death-spiral, people.

Unless you can, you know, maybe donate using one of the links below, share this article or the link to Ted's News Stand, and that way maybe I can keep my own money and pay those things out of patronage. It's a dream I have...

If this was a video I'd be saying "Make sure to like and subscribe, and be sure to visit my Ko-Fi page!" 

Set Up A WiFi/Wireless-N Repeater

If you have one of these cute little plug-in WiFi repeaters, then here's the skinny on getting it going.

If, like me, you picked it up at an opp shop (thrift store) and had no idea how to set it up, I can save you an hour of frustration with network and wifi scanners and pressing reset buttons to no avail. I figured it out, as I said, in an hour that included a lot of swearing.

I should have been smart and googled it, but I figured it was such a ticky-tacky POS that it'd be nigh on impossible to find info on the thing anyway. Yeah. I'm that kind of stupid sometimes. 

WiFi / Wireless-N Repeaters

See image. These are all manner of little gadgets that look similar to the one pictured. I reckon they may all use the same internals. Sorry for the crap photo but I just realised I had no picture of my own of the gizmo and . . .  - anyway - here it is.

Wi Fi Repeater, typical

And yes you can find a quite a few instructions and videos online. But for the main purpose these things are generally bought for, the setup is pretty easy. The hardest thing (as I found out) is when you get a secondhand one that someone else has set up and then sold with their configuration in memory. 

It means that the repeater is looking for an access point that's in someone else's house and will never just work for you out of the box. 

I'm not (totally) stupid and I pressed that reset button several times, for varying lengths of time (none, as it turns out, longer than 29 seconds when the reset period is 30...) all to no avail. Then I found my network and wifi scanners and and a wireless network I didn't know and couldn't connect to it. 

Finally I did hold that button down for long enough and this is the sequence of events you need to follow: 

1. Power on.
   Plug it into a power point near your main wifi router for the setup. It's cool, it won't lose that setup if you unplug it to move it.
2. Hold Reset button 30sec until lights blink off.
   This is my crucial mistake - it takes a l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g press of the button, but you'll know it's worked when the lights along the right hand edge turn off for a few seconds. 
   LET GO OF THE BUTTON NOW. 
   Sorry, I got a bit squirrelly there. 
3. Connect to the new WiFi network that comes up.
   You'll see some variation of "WiFi-Repeater" or the like come up when the device has reset completely. That can take a minute or so. 
   (Protip: You can also plug an ethernet cable into your laptop and the repeater but I used an Ideapad with no ethernet jack, and wifi worked just fine.)
4. Point your web browser to 192.168.10.1 
   As I found out, that's the IP address mentioned on most of the sites I've subsequently checked, which is why I think all the devices from all manufacturers have the same guts inside.
5. Quick Easy Setup.
   The easiest setup is to click the "Repeater" button on the screen that comes up, examine the list of WiFi access points and networks that comes up, and tell it which one is your Wifi network AP to repeat. 
6. Take a bow. 
   There's no fanfare, just unlug it, put it wherever you need it, and then log into the network it creates and be transparently routed to your network. 

There are of course gotchas. 

The further you put it from your main AP (Access Point) the less usable signal it will receive so the slower your connection will be. I've found that no more than 25 metres is okay as the receiver in the gizmo isn't all that sensitive. Mind you, that's also through three walls in our place. And similarly, ity only extends the range by about the same amount. But your mileage will vary depending on your layout and your primary AP's capabilities. 

In our case it made the difference of -86db without a repeater and around -60db (the closer to 0db the better as far as signal strength - RSSI - is concerned, -86db is less than a bar, -60db was about two and a bit bars out of four) with it - and that was enough for us. It sounds like such a little difference when expressed in decibels (db) but every 3db gained is something like a doubling of the received signal so it's actually a good gain. 

It's horses for courses. We have a network provider's free router and like all of them it's made for apartments, with a low signal strength so that the adjacent eight apartments don't all have to try and overcome your WiFi signal. In a separate house, that makes a lot less sense because from our front room to our rearmost room is about the same as from one wall of an apartment through the opposite wall and the opposite wall of the adjoining place. There's no such limitation in suburban houses but al;l the domestic routers are the same, really really weak.

And there are also a lot of cool things I've missed out in this quick tute - but now you know you can reset your repeater anytime and try out the different configurations, which include some very useful ones. 

Situations

I have an AP in the garage, which is also my workshop. The ideal way to get a signal out there would have been to just to buy a more powerful commercial AP (and some of which can actually form "beams" to concentrate the signals where it's needed) but I don't have the spare several hundred - and up to thousand - that one of those beasts can set you back. The wifi repeater gizmo above fitted right in between the main AP and the garage - but it hasn't the power to punch through the metal walls. 

Also - an AP can be put into Bridge or Repeater mode but it's not a well-executed technology as domestic routers are made for the hoi polloi muggles. But you can feed your network into one using an ethernet cable and messing with a few settings. I had to use a "virtual network cable" because we can't put holes in the walls of the house or the garage, but I did get it going. I can now shut the door and be in a completely metal-enclosed garage and still have Internet access. 

I'll make another post soon in which I explain how a person on a tight budget (preferably under fifty bucks) can make that happen. WARNING: It involves a LOT of opp-shopping and scouring through local garage sales and buy/swap/sell pages.

So I'll see you in another post soon! For now, please share this article, check out my (newspaper icon above) list of other posts and maybe sign up to the newsletter, or - most important way to help - hit the Ko-Fi cup or Paypal icons and make a donation to help me with the online costs and maybe some of the hardware. You know you want to...

Social Media Isn't In My Wheelhouse

And I won't lie - I'm a cynical yet addicted social media overconsumer. At last count my passwords file contained well over a thousand entries. (It's a password file that I've had for a VERY long time. . .)

And yes, some of those passwords are for local net logins on various network things like the broadband router and stuff like that, or purely functional sites online like accounts with stockists and suppliers, news and media subscriptions, etc. 

I guess that over half are defunct by now, lost to the bitmist of time, bad decisions by management, and so forth.

Notstalgia

But a lot (200 at least) are for still-active social media and messaging sites. On almost all of those sites, I have a main account, an alt account, and sometimes a persona account on. Without that file, life would get awkward pretty quickly - and it occasionally has, when I realised that I might maybe possibly perhapsly have forgotten to update a changed password or record a newly-created account. 

Password changes happen regularly on important accounts and sporadically on less important ones, but  I domake sure to update those as well. (Mostly... Don't ask...)

I never remove defunct and deactivated sites, nor sites I've abandoned when they weren't of use, either because of vaporware, freemium limitations, and the like. Nor just because some sites were execrable from the get-go, or became so after a few years when they lost their way - what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" - even if I'd deleted my account(s) there. 

Because one day some digital data anthropologist will be going over the petabytes of data amassed by primitive Netizens like me or you and marvel at how we put up with the amounts of corporate social media encrapification that we put up with.

Look at my record, for example: I have accounts on things like Powwow and Odigo and a few dozen more I can't even remember, that came along and were shit from the get-go or became enshittified quite quickly, or just died from lack of engagement. Some, like Plurk, are still limping along, some, like the one that had a name something like "jetify" or something, have vanished without a trace online, and believe me I've tried finding them. 

Why Aren't They Now?

Why aren't many of those services around any more? What about Yammer, Plerb, Hictu? Jaiku, Pownce? Why?

I think I figured it out. There's always been these grim attempts by social and microblogging and messaging services to grow their userbase - and then brick them in. Wall them off from all the other services. Mine! Mine, all mine! There's nothing outside my walled garden, user! Keep all your rvenue potential with meeeee! 

That stubborn lure 'em in, fence 'em in,. keep 'em in behaviour has completely effed social anything. Each service I can think of started off free, they listened to what their users felt would be good features, and were responsive. Until they weren't. Usually that happened when their backers started wanting a return on their investment, or in some cases, when the lone wolf developer decided they needed to start making *real* money, or were bought out by already-established already-encrappified companies. 

And people stay with a particular platform because they don't keep a password file. Because setting up a new app or online account's really hard for many people, and is a big issue for many. Social medias of all sorts have lost sight of the fact that there's still a large sector of their potential users out there that are old and not computer-and-Internet-literate. I've found out that I'm quite firmly in the miniority among my age group, many of my contemporaries still have just one email account (generally on Google or Hotmail - and don't get them started on this new "outlook site thingie" if you value your last nerve) and an account on Facebook and that's that.

And yet with a bit of deshittification, other social media companies could totally have all those users. 

Things I Love, Things I Hate

I love that in the Federated Fediverse that Mastodon paddles around in, a protocol called ActivityPub allows me on Mastodon to get all the posts of someone who has their account on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey, which are each different in function but can communicate thanks to AP. I love that. 

What I don't love is that in order to find those people on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey, I have to go and create an account on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey so that I can find those people in the first place.

ActivityPub creates a really brilliant and engaging system where my social horizons can expand beyond the platform I've created my account on. And then the lack of a directory where my social profile can be used on all the other federated sites means that while I'm dimly aware there are those other sites on the horizon, I can't get to there from here as it were.

And just like walling-in the individual social media sites killed  their opportunity to share users across multiple platforms, now there's all these grimly competing federating schemas out there. And ActivityPub doesn't really work with BlueSky's "decentralised" structure. And MeWe has hooked up to another federated network via SocialWeb and Amplica and . . . - *screams silently*  you get the point

You'd think they'd have bloody well learned interoperability by now wouldn't you, and designed such multi-federation in? Imagine logging into Mastodon, then opening MeWe and it uses your same account with a two factor checksum, then going to BlueSky and still using that same account. But no - AP is the best federation protocol! Don't connect to SW! 

To make matters worse, there are things like Mastodon clones out there that use ActivityPub but don't connect to the Fediverse... Their idea of "federated" means they used a protocol that's designed to create a huge social network to - wall their users into only their servers ... 

I sincerely hope there are people out there who are writing "connector" services that will interconnect all these competing federation schemes and user directories and allow me to opt-in to using one account and maybe some two-factor authentication scheme to streamline my online social media. I wish I was smart enough to create it. 

Epilogue

Hi. My name's Ted. I'm social-network-overbooked...  And I know there are many good federation schemes out there - but will MeWe (for example) ever add ActivityPub federation? Or is there some third party connector I can already use? It would simplify things for me - and presumably hundreds of thousands of other social media users if we could start getting our social media the way we want rather than be dictated by ten different platforms controlled by a dozen different corporations fighting to exploit us for their gain. Isn't it time that social media became actually social rather than parochial, antisocial, secretive, and controlling?

Is Everyone Talking About MHD?

It just seems that there's a lot of buzz around the subject of "just one moving part and that's water" technology. Ricky explains. 

That's the presenter of 2 Bit da Vinci talking about MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics) in an over-simplified "explainer" kind of way. And, as always, dumping a bit on DIYers (and yeah they were the "Fabulous Fakes" that always seem to want to promulgate bullshit for the few pennies in views but there are also a few ) and urging us to leave it to the "experts" aka corporately-financed projects. 

Here's a video of a con artist doing nothing like MHD, for several reasons. And just for balance, here's a video of a citizen scientist showing the right way a very basic MHD drive can be made

Concept (and Concerns): 

Electric motors work a conductor carrying a current, and placed in a magnetic field that's at right angles to the current flowing in theconductor, expeiences a force in the third right angle direction. In an electric motor we generally arrange things so that the force the conductor experiences acts to turn the armature of the motor around the axle in a circular motion. But you can also lay the wires of a motor flat and place the magnet on top and then the magnet will move along in a straight line over the conductors. 

Or, you could use water (which unless it's perfectly pure, contains impurities that allow it to conduct current) and apply a magnetic field horizontally - say, from left to right, pass an electric current through it verticallv (i.e. at right angles to the magnetic field) and the water itself will experience a force in the direction fore or aft and start pushing along in that direction. Or, to put that another way, the arrangement of current injecting plates and magnets will move in the opposite direction to the water.

If you attach the magnetic and electric bits to the underside of a boat, the boat will start moving one way while the water will move the other way. You get "water jet" propulsion, at a rate determined by the voltage applied, magnetic field, and how much current is able to pass through the water.

Do this in distilled pure water and you get - nothing. Introduce some conductive impurities (such as salt) and you get some oxygen bubbling off one electrode, hydrogen off the other, and some chlorine. But you get movement, too. 

So that's the principle of MHD. But you also get some other things:

As anyone that's ever done an electroplating experiment knows, metal will be expelled off the anode and deposited onto the cathode. And if you've ever done that experiment, you'll also remember that a load of "crud" falls down, too. I'm not too familiar with the exact chemistry and anyway I believe it depends on the electrolyte (the water and whatever impurities are in it) and the metals used. The point to me isn't so much what it is as that there IS some crud produced. Where does it go? Into the water that you're travelling through. And from there, into the creatures living in that water. 

If you're the only ship on the ocean using a powerful MHD drive, the effects would probably be negligible. But there are already thousands of ship movements across the oceans every day, and the effects would soon add up. 

On top of that there'd be an electric and magnetic field generated, and quite large ones at that. These might begin to affect marine life that uses electric and magnetic fields to navigate or perhaps even communicate. So yay us. We stop polluting the air and oceans with fossil fuel burning and carbon particles dropping and the noise of the engines disturbing animal communication and senses, and instead pollute the oceans with electrolysis crud and huge warps in the natural magnetic and electric fields.

Could It Be Done Though?

Yes. Sort of. Instead of permanent magnets, let's put electromagnets either side of the drive channel. Now we can reverse the direction of the magnetic field and the electric current really really quickly, maybe thousands of times a second. The overall effects of the magnetic field cancel out and won't be felt as far away. There'll still be a very loud and annoying howl in the magnetosphere and electrosphere around the craft, which will maybe cancel out.

But more importantly, think about the metal ablation from the electrodes. With a high enough frequency there's a chance that the particles won't be able to travel far from the electrode before the next current reversal drags them back onto the electrode. There may well be some particles lost and floating away into the sea but it would be a lot less than if direct current was used. 

Because the magnetic field and the electric fields will both reverse at the same time, the physical force on the water will remain going in the same direction all the time, so the one thing we want from an MHD drive will still take place and the boat will move in one direction consistently. By properly designing the way the drive works, it may be possible to confine much of the electric and magnetic mayhem inside some kind of "drive tunnel" under the hull, and by providing a place for electroplating crud to attach to (some kind of sacrificial material the length of the drive tunnel) one could probably also prevent most of the chemical byproducts from escaping.

For use in freshwater, one could perhaps use a continuous chain arrangement to add some ionising agent to the water at the beginning of the drive tunnel and extract most of it again at the other end somehow before recirculating it. 

Things like this might minimise the pollution and damage that even something as clean-running as an MHD drive. But...

One additional problem would be that it'll require a lot of electricity to move a larger ship, and it would probably be impossible to store enough energy in batteries for any kind of useful shipping range. So you'd need to generate power on board somehow, and that would mean a fossil fuel or nuclear  generator. 

The Musk-Xit Agenda

If you haven't been following Elon Musk's abuse of a small blue bird then congratulations, you have a good life. For the rest, let me make your day a tiny bit worse. Sorry. 

What's Going On?

We all know several things - EM has a bit of a hard-on for the name "X." He's just trashed 16 or so years' worth of branding and progress to erase Twitter and rename it to "X." Now don't get me wrong, I thought Twitter had become a bit of a cesspool years ago and only spent time on there because I had a handful of friends who were on it. But it's hard to make sense of Musk's actions if one doesn't look a bit below the surface... 

I've heard quite influential media personalities refer to Musk's "childishness" and "pettiness" but hear me out - what if he isn't? What if he's working very hard towards a goal?

What Could Be The Goal? 

Well, let me start at the beginnings. in 1999, Musk and several partners founded and developed x.com, an online bank that then merged with another company and became Paypal, which Ebay bought. For all the time since then, x.com redirected you to Paypal, as of now, it redirects you to the "Xsanguinated" carcass of Twitter. There's a clue there. A clue, but probably not the ultimate clue. So sorry, it's not going to be good. 

Remembering several things here about the reluctant purchase of Twitter by Musk, he overspent hugely on the purchase. X is now bleeding out millions a day, which is unsustainable. The only reason(s) I could think of was that Jack Dorsey's (Jack being the founder of Twitter if you're aware of that fact) insistence on Musk honouring the sale had pissed Musk off to the point where he was determined to destroy all of Twitter's cachet and reputation as a way to get even for being so ripped off before pulling the plug and squatting on the domain name just to rub it in.

Then he began to destroy all the safe foundations that Twitter had taken all that time to work out, and that despite saying he was for free speech. Then followed all sorts of right-wing fuckery, and it became obvious that he was actually only for abusive hate speech and division. In short, a voice for authoritarianism. He also began to - to be honest - rant and dribble on a bit, semi-coherent quite hate-filled speech, and I thought maybe he wanted to support Trump back into office and make the world more RW.

I'm still of that opinion. Only with some far darker goals envisioned, now.

Back To X.com

Space-X returned to Musk's love affair with his X site names, and maybe the runaway success of Paypal stung a bit too. But while he was the altruistic soul that redirected that domain to Paypal while it suited him, he's not so much of a philanthropist now...  

And he's made a claim that Twit.. - that X would be the way forward to an 'everything' app.

He's aiming to reinstate X.com as his original money-spinner, piggy-backed onto The Messaging Service Formerly Known As Twitter, and I'm willing to bet it'll soon feature an Xpay, an Xbook, an Xbay, Xcars, Xplay, Xplus, Xmazon, XTV, and a host more. Think I'm stupid? Check back with me in a year. Now I don't think he'll be inordinately successful with it (although, knowing that people in large mobs are basically just that, herd animals) but you never know. I'll put a reminder in my calendar... 

This could be a Good Thing but so far not one such Good Thing has actually been Good for the users and customers - Facebook has become a terrifying behemoth that damages people's mental health, their fiscal health, and the health of the entire Internet. Google shifted from a motto of "Do No Evil" to one more like "Fuck You, We Can And We're Doing It" - to the detriment of every human alive on the planet today and also of the entire Internet. Murdoch News was okay when it was a few newspapers but is now a Dark Side that's infected all the media. Banks were convenient when they allowed money to be safely transferred, but became a Number One drain on the entire working population's income when they got too greedy, too ready to make loans based on knowing the debtor would default and the banks make double incomes, and especially when they became "too big to fail..." 

Then there's authoritarian surveillance operations. At the moment all the three-letter-acronym agencies that routinely spy on all our communications already need to do that via largely backdoor methods, and need to jump through a few legal hoops before they can tie your physical self to the email address behind the username that said the Benevolent Dictator Trump is a small-dick fuckwit. 

But with X, the whole point of it will be to tie you to your account so that the Xuber you ordered can come to your front door, your order from Amazon (or Xmazon - why not rip off the original market disruptor yourself?) can be dropped at your door, etc. It becomes a trivial operation to trace "trumpisasmalldickfuckwit@anonymous.Xmail" back to the original account holder. 

And therein lies the danger. While a large number of "anonymous" users exist on the planet, it's difficult to exactly track back. If the population of a whole country or series of countries are all on the same de-anonymised service, the few anonymous activists will stick out like the proverbial canine's testicles. 

And That's All A Problem Why Exactly?

Let me introduce you to a company you may or may not know, China's Tencent. Tencent owns Wechat, and Wechat is The One App in China if you want to chat, buy stuff, let people pay you electronically, pay someone electronically, order a cab, find a bargain, book theatre or movie tickets - anything. I urge you to read those two articles. In China, there isn't ANYTHING you can't do using Wechat, QQ, or one of the tencent subcompanies. And you can bet Musk has seen this and realised it too. 

Something like this would bounce him so far past Jeff Bezos and Amazon that it would cement his place as the richest person ever. If any of that sounds okay to you, consider that Elon used almost fifty billion dollars to buy Twi.. - X. It seems that he had that much wealth floating around, and rather than spend it on something that might help the planet, he spent it on this platform. Fifty billion dollars would have launched enough solar and wind energy to stop 90% of fossil fuel use dead. 

It would have catapulted EVs into number one spot. But oh yeah - Tesla is boring to him now, it's been lapped by bad cheap Chinese EVs that are coming out at half the price of a 3, and are slowly becoming legal in every country in the world so there's no longer any incentive for Musk to bother with that. 

He could have used that to set up a series of giga-factories to turn out inexpensive efficient housing that could be deployed to combat homelessness and make it easier for climate change refugees - and feed them each one square meal a day for the next ten years into the bargain - but he chose to buy Tw.. X instead. 

That tells you that despite already having more than enough wealth to fix the world all by himself, he's not out there for any reasonable purpose now. I repeat - there is not one single good or sane reason that one needs to keep scrapping for money when one is that wealthy, meaning that our billionaires are mad and evil. Not one of them escapes this analysis. And certainly not Musk.

Now For The OTHER Other Reason That This Is Bad

The one other thing that Tencent and Wechat and QQ and even Aliexpress have in common is that they all have to allow the Chinese government complete access to their customer data. They're already instituting "social rewards" systems where compliant people get preferential treatment on public transport and accommodation and so forth, while low-scoring individuals get to walk everywhere because they find that they can't board buses, planes, and trains, hotels will not accept their payments and so they can't stay in them, and no bank will give them a loan due to their low social score. 

The government makes up the rules for giving those social scores. One day you may get 25 points for holding open a door for a woman, but then two weeks later some government official has decided that that's a derogatory act and you find yourself copping a minus 250 points hit to your social points, and trams won't let you board on your way to work, next thing you've lost your job, and so forth. 

So. 

Still think Musk's a petulant man-child with custard for brains? Or can you see how he may very well be one of the most dangerous things to happen to the free world? 

Please use the links in the little mini-banner graphic above or wherever you see it, to support my writing and work. Every donation helps me to pay for fees involved, subscriptions to news services so I can research more. Speculation like this may sound wild but ask yourself - are you really so sure that it is? 

Please share this post far and wide, add it on your messaging service of choice, on your social pages, and any other groups you may be part of. Share it to news sites and letters to the editor. 

The Price Of Progress

.. And Clean Air

So I'm (as you may have gathered from past posts) entirely for EVs - but NOW please not some unspecified time in the future when we've killed the planet - and if someone was to offer me even a cheap tiny EV to give away my petrol car, I'd do it in a heartbeat. 

There's this growing eagerness to start turning charging stations into money-earning civic features and it's good that companies are taking the plunge and planning them. And as far as making them into features, they really need to get their sh*t together and actually plan the damn things to cover their costs. Because of two reasons. I'll get to the more important one in a second. For the moment let's stick to actually making money from them.

First, they don't exactly have a consistent brand like petrol stations do. If I saw an "AGL'N'Go" or "Red-E Recharge" or "Origin Outlets" anywhere I'd not think of EV charging. If I saw:

Solar panels?

that sign I might think solar panels or off grid but not a place to charge my mobility scooter. You?

But How Does It Earn?

By that I mean, how does it make money? The whole selling point of EVs when you come down to it is that you get further on your dollar because electricity's cheap. You get X number of vehicles past your SuperDuperStupiCharger every day because Y number of people have to drive past doing Z miles going about their day. 

In the good ole days, they'd pay S (for shitloads) dollars for petrol. But nowadays, they're still doing the same Z miles but the cost per mile has to come down significantly or they'll actually plan their travels and charge at home or find a cheaper charging station. 

So how do you as the SuperDuperStupiCharger station make money? It takes time to recharge, sure. But not enough for you to show them a full-length movie or serve them a full cooked grill.  That takes longer, they'd have to be asked to shift their vehicle as soon as it's charged so you can get the next one connected - it's all not gonna happen is it? ("WTFSM? I have to get up from this mixed grill, move the car, then come back to a cold plate someone's probably spat in while I was outside? Take that whole idea and shove it!")

Similarly, if you put your SuperDuperStupiCharger in a shopping mall, the other shops will love you but they probably won't pay your bills. And you'll have cars at the charger bays taking up the space and the owners of it using the opportunity of free parking to go for a long shopping trip in the mall ort a full tailored suit fitting or whatever. So that'll get cars in, but you won't get the turnover you need to cover rent. 

You should figure on a presence time of 15-20 minutes per customer. Nor will you get full occupancy all day every day. So what can you offer that will bring in more income? 

I was thinking about that as I read the latter half of the article. An attendant and a lounge? And make your money how exactly? But my idea is fairly simple. What can I do in 15 minutes? I can phone a friend. That's not going to put dollars in the till. I can order a Quarter Pounder meal. But that just feeds the McD's franchise, as otherwise you'd have to build a burger joint of your own. But vending machines? Now THERE'S a thought!

Make a small sheltered area and absolutely line the walls with vending machines. Nothing too high value, but think thirst, hunger, boredom. And Japan has some of the world's best vending machine ideas. You can have a pizza cooked for you in that time, or a rice or noodle bowl meal, a pasta dish, desserts. In addition to the inevitable salty snacks and chocolate bars and ten varieties of soft drinks. 

NOW an attendant makes sense, to clear rubbish and patrol for people with coat hangers. Because vending machines are a relatively low cost investment, you've already got megawatts of electricity to the place, and the conventional vending machine sales companies will come and fill their machines for you. The others if you own outright you can fill them yourself or have a company that looks after them. And suddenly your SuperDuperStupiCharger is looking a bit healthier in the bank account. 

But you'll need to hurry, or have a lot of future planning in mind...

That Inconvenient Second Part

Don't forget that the SuperDuperStupiChargers you're installing will become almost obsolete in fairly short order. You have maybe ten - maybe only five - years to recoup costs before your SuperDuperStupiCharger station becomes a monument to Ancient Tech. Trust me on this. Cars are already charging faster, going further on a charge, and the trend is going to be to a car that will go for a month between recharges, probably using a totally different battery chemistry. 

So you really need a plan for that contingency. Yes, people with older EVs will still be driving them in ten years' time, but there'll be fewer and fewer of them. At that point you need other things to bring people in the door, and that's where good planning would pay off. I can't help much with that. But as people increasingly go to longer-duration vehicles, There's also a trend towards bikes and micro-lease vehicle shares, there's a thing to try. As time rolls on, add a section for short-term hire of bikes, scooters, mobility/shopping scooters, and personal EVs.

So know that it's a time-limited opportunity but it's also time to carpe the hell out of that diem and get into something like this. If you come up with a franchise idea from this, do remember me hey? 

Before I go, here's a recent article about how well we're doing at getting off the fossil fuel tiddy. The answer is "way too slowly." But theses things all tie together. Bear with me.

Getting Away From Fossils

If you read the article, it was at a dinner party in May 2022 where a point was raised that with a Labor government and so many green-leaning parties holding a lot of the voting power in the government, we were sure to get to our crap reduction targets much faster. And yes, that's true. But also not.

See, there's a balance. The LNP was on that balance right out there with the big corporations and industrial complexes and cartels wanting to just basically suck the planet dry for the sake of a fictional form of wealth called "money." 

That's basically the neoliberal, free-market, capitalist, right wing platform wherever you find them on the planet. Take the planet away from the hoi polloi one shovelful at a time, turn it into money, take that money away from the hoi polloi to render them powerless and easier to kill when the time comes to get rid of dead weight, and then live happily ever after with all your equally rapacious brethren.

Until they figure out that you actually have some of that wealth and want it for themselves . . . 

Okay okay - they don't literally think their actions are murdering fellow human beings. They're not THAT bad, after all. No, the people who die in poverty deserve it because they're from a sub-human species known as "the hoi polloi," the poor people who obviously woudn't know a trust fund if they tripped over it because their parents could never afford one for them. 

And THAT last paragraph says it all. The hoi polloi is the mule, the animal, the noble savage that's nevertheless a savage and not really human like US. 

Also - don't think the Rapacious aren't as human as you and I are - it doesn't take much to tip a person from slave to the person with their boot on the neck of a slave. I'm deliberately using quite emotive and controversial terminology here because I can't stress this enough. We're all capable of it. We just need to realise it's a losing game even when you think you're winning.

There are a few truths out there. Yes, the planet will recover, with or without us. But I know which one of those scenarios I prefer . . .  And you know, there are signs that this will happen. Take this blog post - I'm one voice that may have been a bit lonesome 20-30 years ago but I've seen the exact same hyperbolic curve in the coverage, frequency, and insistence of the science and calls for action to shut fossil fuel down as we see with every other thing that goes mainstream viral. 

The thing is that while (as the Georgia Guidestones were at great pains to tell us) the Earth probably would be in "perfect balance" at just half a billion humans in population, that isn't going to happen willingly. Is it? But part of the upsurging interest in climate change has resulted in "quiet quitting" parenthood as I pointed out a few weeks ago.

Here are a few thoughts on this, though. I'm going to start with the fact that much of life has some inbuilt triggers that we don't see until the triggering event. No-one suspected that grasshoppers can be triggered by overpopulation or a particularly fruitful season into becoming locusts. 

Biologist John Calhoun made mouse habitats that became famous. For all the wrong reasons. I won't go into the details but there are parallels that could be drawn. Also, overpopulation triggers may be far more subtle than swarming or becoming sociopathic psychopaths. (Although... Hmmm...)

Let's not get to this stage...

I think we do have a trigger and it's been triggered, but the reasons aren't simple. Mouse Hells were small microcosms where it was easy to see that the population was crowded. But open the space up and those pressures reduce and the triggering stops. 

Similarly we may possibly have environments that trigger Mouse Hell behaviours in some large and densely-populated cities around the planet, but of course the planet isn't one big city. What has changed is that we dug up a lot of the planet and turned it into machines to make other machines and then - Internet. I've noticed how much more aware of our "global village" and the different parts and people of it the Internet made me even after just a few years (before the 2000s even) of chatting, swapping photos of local happenings, watching videos people made. 

So this has coincided with the rise in climate awareness, ecological awareness, and the trend to quietly deciding not to continue the skyrocketing population trend. 

And another factor that's contributing to this population decrease is that we've mucked the planet up too much in the meantime - lead and PFAS pollution is now pandemic around the entire globe, and between that and the many many MANY food additives we've been exposed to, chemicals in textiles and paints and the machinery we drive and use and operate, in our houses - they've all combined to contribute to a very noticeable and marked decline in fertility.

So our population will reduce quite sharply anyway. But what we are going to have to fight for is that the Rapacious aren't the ones to enforce it by selecting who goes and who stays. The Rapacious Right are also xenophobic and intolerant and their idea of this would be genocide, and we need the genetic diversity. The age-old drive to maintain OUR particular DNA and OUR particular genotype is probably not going to be the best survival strategy. A shallow gene pool is never good for survival. 

So the two things that really really need to break are capitalism and money. And I think the reason AI is getting such a bollocking is that it's actually the way to break those two things, because once you have (and we WILL have, because again, we are experiencing an upswing in awareness and we're pushing the change to sustainable energy) cheap/free energy you can recycle enough material to make manufacture anything. You can even mechanise the production. 

To make this happen needs us all to get involved. It's not even difficult. Become an armchair activist. Write the occasional email to your local MP or Minister for Whatever. When you're chatting to friends, involve them in a conversation about climate change; clean energy; capitalism; universal basic income, or what-have-you. Become THAT person. Send them the URL to this article, or other articles about these sorts of topics. Help me defray costs so that I can perhaps even hire a search engine specialist that can get more views on these pages. Get my newsletter and get all my news in one email every Friday. Chat to me on Mastodon.

Just don't let the RR have an easy time of it - Keep The Bastards Honest! And don't let our planet become like this: