Water Again, Again.

Let's stick two extremely clever ideas together. One is the use of tide or wave power to generate electricity, which we've proved works but I imagine one of the main issues would be the cable to connect it to the shore. It's almost as if these sea-based power generation solutions were a custom fit for sea-based living estates. . . Hmmm . . . I'll come back to this. 

Also read this article about a concept to condense the sea mist and pipe that back to shore. It's just a concept at the moment but it's not a big stretch to imagine it in operation. It would need a pipe back to the shore, and could be anchored quite rigidly in place just offshore. And a ruptured pipe is a bit less of an issue to sealife than a ruptured power cable. Armoured undersea cable is bloody expensive. 

Which brings me back to the synergies I can see. I imagine that the water condenser would need energy to make a cooling surface for mist to condense on and be captured. So such a plant would need both a cable to take energy to it and a pipeline to take water back. Leaving us with the armoured electric cable issue. 

But suppose - just suppose - that the water condenser was anchored fairly rigidly just offshore. It has wave/tidal generators in the base, supplying power for itself. It only needs a wireless link back to shore to carry commands and data, and a waterpipe. We know how to make good water pipes that don't even cost one tenth of a similar armoured undersea cable, and a break situation would be far more survivable for oceanic life than 440,000V. 

Of course, one could in theory use a second pipe and get away with less expensive armouring on the cables, and that way we could send both freshwater AND electricity back to shore. These things could live just a few hundred metres offshore in many places, and form wind-calming channels between them as a bonus for small watercraft to tie up for recreational fishing and diving. At 210m long by 100m tall that gives a 210m section under the water to generate electricity, which I believe would be quite a considerable amount of energy. Probably enough to operate pumps onshore to pump the water onward as well as recovering the water vapour and condensing it. 

But here's another thought: Why stay close to shore? You could set up grids of these stations with wave/tidal energy generation, large freshwater tanks to use as ballast to prevent excessive movement - and put floating living modules in between the grid spaces. All you'd need to grow food is fresh water and a source of fertiliser such as poo. On land this would be called aquaponics, so maybe on the seas they'd call it terraponics. You'd have seafood (the structures themselves forming environments for fish), vegetables, fresh water, and electricity to spare. 

Forgive me my lack of imagination
in naming this concept.

There have been designs and dreams of floating cities, and some enterprising people have built themselves floating islands and live on them, growing their own food, generating their own electricity.

Now imagine floating larger small villages almost completely self-contained, built around freshwater condensors and tide/wave power generators, and so with a surplus of electricity and fresh water they could use electric craft to make trips between the floating cities and the shore, or just have a train of supply boats to stock local shops and eateries, and take back whatever the Marine City produces.

What sort of things? Well, fresh water, fish farmed in farm pens under the structures, aquaponically grown vegetables. Seawater contains materials that can be extracted/refined. So - quite possible.

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This May Rank Along With Yahoo

#TWEXIT

What do you do when the majority of your activist (and thus loud) customer base expresses distress, dismay, and disgust with your business decisions, and they start campaigning against you? If you're Mr Musk, you double down. And double down, and then double down some more.

Only - when your doubling down is actually an 80%-10% downsizing each time, it won't be long before that last person standing will be cut in half. And it'll be him at the rate he's going. 

In the Back To The Future series, Yahoo seemed such a good bet that it got a cameo "timesider" trading tip. Today the company's a husk of its former self, for some less than stellar decisions. Some companies don't even have a shadow presence any more. 

Where Twitter is going to fall on this scale is anyone's guess. 

I only heard this on the radio this morning in passing so I'm not sure yet on the details, as I find out I'll update this paragraph. One of Twitter's long-time partners have said that they'll withdraw support for the site because of Musk's policy of reinstating people who've been banned for hate speech and persecution, fomenting strife, etc.

Musk: "Let that stink in."

As far as the news would seem to suggest, a significant percentage of Twitter's advertisers have paused or totally withdrawn their advertising. Fair enough, Musk doesn't have to pay as many staff and contractors now - considering that some estimates place the current original employee and contractor workforce at less than 10% of the pre-purchase payroll - but his SpaceX engineers aren't really going to be able to work out what's going on and where all the buttons are. 

And while I noticed that SpaceX and Starlink seemingly bought (or were given) advertising space on the platform, it's hardly going to keep Twitter afloat financially if he has to rob Peter to pay Paul. 

Another shenanigan was to stack the news feed with weird, irrelevant, and unknown items. Because they served to push the "Trending" stuff further down, trending stuff like "RIP Twitter" and "The End of Twitter" . . . 

None of that's going to keep the site alive and operational. He needs people to sell advertising, to do some PR to cover over the almighty stuff-up he's made of it to date, and - most importantly - to start fixing the bugs that must be accumulating by the hour. He needs tech support people to help Twitter users with their mounting tally of errors. 

And - answer me honestly - would you work in the toxic environment he's created? 

The Bluebird is on life support and
the FailWhale is hovering, sensing
that its time will come again...

To be fair, these techniques have, as the article states, worked for Musk in the past but it's not winning him many fans, and right now there are a dozen or more Chinese EV manufacturers eating his lunch in that market, there's a competitor in the satellite Internet industry, other companies are now making inroads into the rocket market. 

He may have pioneered these industries but each has now become stuck in its paradigm, and much of that was shaped by his panic-mongering and demanding (HIS IDEA OF) perfection, and so is now stuck in particular ways of doing things, so that others can now take the best parts of his innovations and add their own twists. 

So he makes (quite expensive) Tesla cars, using gigapresses and robots? Someone else is making them the old fashioned way with less new-tech investment needed, no fancy self-driving or 27-point camera coverage - but great durability and range - and prices nearly half of what a Model 3 or Y cost. 

Remember when Hyundai made the now ubiquitous (and still on the road, many of them) 2000 Excel? These little cars were cheap, ran on the sniff of an oily rag, and changed the mix of cars on the road in Australia forever. They also decimated sales for many other small economy car manufacturers.

Half a dozen rocket companies have sprung up and aren't tied to Merlin and Kestrel design requirements, and are thus able to produce innovative motors that will probably see Space-X facing competition quite soon now

Similarly, messaging sites have sprung up over the years and many fallen by the wayside, but some (like Mastodon) were created precisely to offer an alternative to single-point-of-control messaging sites. Specifically, Twitter. Because Eugen Rochko, a young Russian who moved to Germany, realised that almost all centralised social media and messaging platforms were vulnerable to a narcissistic sociopathic control freak (oooh Mabel, imagine that!) and so he set about creating alternatives. 

And of course with the many thousand engineers and staff and contractors that Musk fired, it's almost inevitable that a few of them will bear him malice and desire to create mischief' so to speak, and no doubt a few of them will have already contributed to the Mastodon codebase, meaning on top of all its other advantages, it'll gain even more attractive features in the very near future. So very soon it may make as much sense to be on Mastodon as it did to be on Twitter in the last five years. 

What Can We Do?

I've done it. My accounts are still there on Twitter but inactive except when I need to contact the last three or four people that are hold-outs on there. I've already reconnected with most of the other people I know on Mastodon. The paradigm shifts a bit more slowly for some, but as Twitter gets worse, it will shift... 

Make an account now, just to be on the safe side. (I've put a tiny guide together you can refer to.) Use that guide, it even shows you how you can add all your follows and followers from Twitter with nothing more than few mouse clicks. But this needs both sites to be up - and Twitter may or may not be around in its current form very soon, so I say do it now. 

As to that... Musk may well have a Whole New Plan for Twitter and be already busily putting it all into action as I write this. And if Twitter switches over to any new programming, all these tools that we currently rely on to make a painless collection of all our friends may stop working. (How many of your Twitter contact's email addresses or phone numbers do you know? If Twitter crashed could you re-contact even 5% of them? Are you all right with that?)

So even if this all turns out to be BS, even if a cloud of Bluebird Twitter faeries descend on the platform and make it the bestest thing in all the world - all you'll have lost is 20 minutes of your time, and you'll have a backup in case history repeats.

Don't just use Mastodon because I've said it - have a look around there are others to try, Element is a messaging app as are Signal and Telegram, and there are a few social-network sites like Diaspora and Friendica which are more Facebook-like, and it makes sense to have more than one source of contact with friends and family, right? Ask your friends now where they're thinking of making a backup connection, reach a consensus and all go there.

Many Aussie tweeters have gone to the Mastodon aus.social server, but I'm on the mastodon.online server - with something like Mastodon it doesn't really matter, which is why I like it. With federated stuff online, you could even be on Diaspora and we could still follow one another and keep on chatting. 

It's a bit like those walkie-talkies that are in the cupboard in the hallway - one day you might find no mobile coverage, and then they're a good fallback for checking in with Mum a few streets away.

Use hashtags #TWEXIT and #LetThatStinkIn to raise awareness. Share this post and posts like it, that will raise awareness. All messaging systems are ephemeral, social networks break. 

And awareness drives informed decision, and perhaps for many that informed decision will be to move to a messaging service that one man alone can't screw up.

Water Again

Still Easy To Waste

Back before I could spell "litre" (apparently) I asked this question. Still asking, by the way . . .

A large proportion of the Aussie population have an energy provider that provides an online account and usage tracking page. This is a pretty under-used facility, because data and information equals power. No, not energy, just the power to monitor your household's energy usage and adapt / alter / test and swing your energy usage to your advantage. 

According to an industry insider I hear a rumour that there are ways to monitor that direct off the meter using - I don't know exactly, not that power monitor thing that we keep getting bombarded with spam to have installed for free, but something already in the meters. 

Before I drop this sidetrack, let me just say that using our provider's account usage tracking, we worked out that leaving the AC on overnight at a reduced setting and then increasing it by day was cheaper than turning it off and having to recover all the thermal losses. And that our hot water system is one of the first things I'd speak to the landlord about if there was a chance... Three bucks a day, over a quarter of our bill... 

I reckon one reason our 'smart meters' aren't quite smart enough to allow us to access them via wifi and have an instant read of our power consumption is because if we had such fine-grained information we could use a LOT less energy, and then where would those greedy sons-of-hogs-at-the-trough be? 

Now Back To The Question

Which is: Why can't we have smart water meters? They can be powered by the flow of water when you turn on a tap, and would provide critical information for households wanting to save money - and more importantly, water. 

It almost seems as if we're not allowed the tools to resist consumerism, doesn't it? As if the destruction of the planet IS the point, instead of the saving of it. 

---

You may have seen here and there that I'm really really into doing something about - everything - that's going on around the world in the areas of climate change, waste accumulation, fossil fuel pollution and its companion, decarbonisation, renewable and sustainable energy, small scale recycling, and letting you and everyone else that I can reach know about all these things. You can help by sharing the heck out of my articles like this because the more people see it the more people will talk about it and the more people talk about it the more people will DO SOMETHING about it - be that email their local government member, email a CEO like the CEO of AGL and tell them you don't want any more of their pollution and greed, sign petitions, and maybe go to a demonstration to let the whole world know how they feel.

Heck, they might even read about plastic recycling and do guerilla plastic recycling at home. . . Or recycle their food waste into their vegetable garden. All sorts of anarchy could result. 

And all it takes is for you to share the link to this article on your favourite social network, or text it to a friend. . . Or even donating so that I can keep the servers running and domain names paid for with some of your money instead always my pension. . .  Not kidding, this costs me hundreds every year. And I pay it out of a pension that was recognised as being well below the poverty line 20 years ago and has gone backwards since then. I could really do with the help. 

So yes, please share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here and find out here why it's important. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop. Thank you for being here and reading.

Daddy, Why Did Energy Prices Crash The Economy?

Rabbits, Son, Too Many Rabbits.

In China Australia, and most of the planet, apparently.

Did you know that rabbits aren't rodents? They're in a different class, Lagomorpha Leporidae. They breed indiscriminately, and can devastate ecosystems and even whole countries. And everyone looks at any individual bunny and says things like "Naaaww cute!"

Only a small subset of humanity looks at them and sees the wholesale destruction of plant life (soon followed by the animal life that depended on those plants for their own survival) and soil erosion that those cute bunnies cause.

And only another small subset of humanity looks at them and says "Oh wow I'm hungry and eating these things actually helps the environment so - here bunny bunny bunny. . . "

(The last paragraph actually refers to a recent post by Extinction Rebellion where they playfully (?) suggested that eating one ultra-rich person would make a bigger dent in global warming than stopping your meat consumption and use of petrol-engined vehicles for the rest of your life. Here bunny bunny . . . 😼)

I digress now to this:

Original Post and Commentary Re-post and this selected comment from the OP:

Cr Xxxx Xxxx (long string of identifying info omitted) 

"It’s a shame (region omitted for de-identification purposes) wasn’t included. Negotiations would have been interesting and I do miss playing with the big guys."

That was the entire comment. "Everyone else is tapping Oxley over and we're missing out. All us little people - on whom the solar farm is going to have minimal to zero impact - are missing out on the huge profits to be made from renewable energy." and somewhere in there's a subtext the Councillor wasn't expressing: "And we're gonna need some extra money to keep up with rising energy prices. Why are energy companies so greedy? Sheesh. . ."

Seems a shame that someone considers it to be "playing with the big guys" when what they mean is "doing over everyone in Australia." Seems a pity that this person considers themselves to be one of the  "little guys." Seems like people really are so greedy and petty, and base their entire lives on greed and feeling self-important.

What price EVs Now?

Seems the energy companies to are smelling blood in the water. All these people who are going to want to charge their EVs because they want to save the environment! "The least we can do is CASH IN, GUYS!  Oh and yeah, of course raising electricity prices is going to run people that just want to air condition their homes broke but - it's income. Sheesh..."

Which in turn will remove the perceived advantages of EVs as far as travel costs are concerned, and so slow EV adoption. "But in case anyone thinks we're not serious about getting you all to switch, returning the petrol excise again and raising the price of oil. What? You want some incentives? Tough luck, no carrots, just all stick. Use some of the pay rises that aren't coming through, or better yet, trade those veggies that the farmers paid you in lieu of money. If you can find a dealership that would be as stupid as you and get paid in barter. Sheesh. . ."

So the story is that the Aussie government reduced the amount of petrol excise (tariff) because oil companies raised the price of oil because Putin and Ukraine and you know anything at all is an excuse for the oil companies to screw their customers a bit more before the inevitable collapse of their business as demand for oil dries up. They may as well collapse with rich CEOs and management, hey?

In effect the oil companies put prices up so high that the Australian government was paying them for - for - well, for being total arseholes. And now that the excise will be put back on in full again, the oil companies will respond by putting prices up even more. Energy companies will put their prices up because they've installed solar farms that will amortise their costs in under a year but prices will stay high because when you screwing a population you may as well just keep going rather than not buying that extra mansion and the fleet of fancy top-end cars. Don't stop until the pitchforks come out!

A Better Approach

. . . might have been to subsidise the heck out of EVs, but the previous government was ideologically opposed to doing anything for their own populace that might affect their cosy snuggly relationships with big corporations, and so they put the money where it would do the least amount of good overall, leave the cause of EVs stranded for as long as possible, and (in case they didn't survive the election which I'm pretty sure they knew they couldn't, given that the populace has been better informed in the last few years than ever before) make it a hassle for the subsequent government to recover from.

So the Morrison government created as much confusion and difficulty as possible so their good buddies could continue to screw us, and of course they ALL piled in and did just that. 

I urge you all to consider that, the next time any public issue comes up that involves giving any of these bastards a break, and instead, let's keep the bastards honest whether they want to or not. Push them into it, hard. They truly deserve it. 

So the government now has unwound a load of fees for electric vehicles to speed up people being able to afford them. The fuel companies (and their close associates the energy sector) are combining to keep people to broke to think about an EV just yet, by a combination of energy related costs. 

What should happen is that instead of paying money into propping up the greed of the oil companies again, the government should instead raise all fees on internal combustion engined vehicles (ICEVs) to prohibitive levels except for tradespeople and agricultural use, and offer large subsidies to people IF they sell their ICEV at the same time. Alter the vehicle registration structure such that ICEVs become expensive to transfer the registrations of, and place the majority of that burden on the purchaser. 

This'll make it cheaper and easier buy an EV than to buy an ICEV. For truly low-income people who require a vehicle and need to purchase second-hand. 

Look - I'm not a policy-maker or someone with political aspirations - I just don't want to see a bunch of wealthy entitled utter bastards make themselves even more rich off the disaster they've created. So I'm asking you to get activated. Get angry. Don't let some other utter arsehole's desire for wealth make your life poorer for it, nor the lives of the generation growing up right now. Get out there and keep those bastards honest! 

I can't

I can't let this article end without urging you to action. It's never been more needed than it is right now, and right now we have governments that are beginning to sense which way the wind's blowing and willing to listen.

You may have seen here and there that I'm really really into doing something about - everything - that's going on around the world in the areas of climate change, waste accumulation, fossil fuel pollution and its companion, decarbonisation, about renewable and sustainable energy, small scale recycling, and letting you and everyone else that I can reach know about all these things. 

You can help by sharing the heck out of my articles like this because the more people see it the more people will talk about it and the more people talk about it the more people will DO SOMETHING about it - be that email their local government member, email a CEO like the CEO of AGL and tell them you don't want any more of their pollution and greed, sign petitions, and maybe go to a demonstration to let the whole world know how they feel.

Heck, they might even read about plastic recycling and do guerilla plastic recycling at home. Or recycle their food waste into their vegetable garden. All sorts of anarchy could result. . .

And all it takes is for you to share the link to this article on your favourite social network, or text it to a friend. . . Or even donating so that I can keep the servers running and domain names paid for with some of your money instead always my pension. . .  Not kidding, this costs me hundreds every year. And I pay it out of a pension that was recognised as being well below the poverty line 20 years ago and has gone backwards since then. I could really do with the help. 

And Actually:

I have a thing to add, weeks after starting this article. 

Regarding energy pricing:  OT1H, but then OTOH - One says that renewable energy is in for a "billion dollar shock" and tries to say there'll be expense after expense 'upgrading' things. The second says that energy companies that are using renewables are seeing billions of windfall profits from the cheap energy.  WTF?

Either there are ‘billion dollar windfalls’ and lower prices or there’s billion dollar bullshit about the cost of ‘wires’. What a load of shit, I say. 

Which is it?

And don't let's forget that I said energy companies are going milk the shit out of everything in order to make money while they can still pretend their bullshit is relevant or even true. Pretty soon they're going to have to face the fact that they're just going to become purveyors of wires, and every person and their dog will be able to generate enough energy to cut those wires and give them the finger. So yeah, they're going to gouge every cent they can before the party's over. 

Anyway - back to the feeding frenzy . . .

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So yes, please share this article and my other posts on other blogs, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts. Share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here and find out here why it's important. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop. Thank you for being here and reading.

Rainwater Collection

Pity It's No Longer Safe

This is glad and sad news all at once. And indicates how quickly situations change. The Western Sydney University (WSU) team that developed what seems to be a pretty good, automated, multi-stage filter and disinfection system that would have raised the treated water that came through up the water safety pyramid to level with or better than mains water. 

SIDE NOTE: It's sad that the water safety pyramid in that article is not quite right any more.

Thanks to PFAS, rainwater is further down the pyramid now and probably worse than groundwater.

Now, though, it's been shown that there are PFAS compounds in rainwater - everywhere in the world. And PFAS probably wouldn't be filtered out by that setup because they need activated carbon or ionic filtering to remove. 

This is me, standing in PFAS in our front yard after
a few days of heavy rain. Not to worry, hey?

Yep, even that lake that appears in the yard is these days (apparently) contaminated with PFAS compounds. Yep, those are very clumsy cheap-ass wellies so the water's at least 100mm deep there. And yep, my vegetables grow in that. 

But that brings me to the point - almost ALL our mains water is sourced from dams around major cities. And all those dams are filled from rivers and streams and they in turn get filled from - . . . .  rain . . .

Given that the average city needs megalitres of water, the filters (charcoal or ionic) to remove the compounds would necessarily have to be very large, and have you seen any huge filters around your city water supply? 

So probably the mains water supply isn't entirely innocent of PFAS, and the water supply from the WSU filters will probably be about the same. And the way o to deal with PFAS is to filter them out using a charcoal filter jug or inline filter. 

Thoughts.

So I guess my advice to you is get a charcoal filter for your drinking and cooking water at least. PFAS has been linked to reproductive issues - and you don't have to be actively reproducing to have issues with your reproductives . . . 

Anyone living rural and / or off-grid with rainwater take note of the UV sterilisation stage of the WSU filter setup. Bacteria growing in rainwater tanks cause a multitude of health issues. Look up how to make sand and charcoal column filters for at least your drinking water, dedicate a solar panel to a UV irradiator, and you'll have water at the mains water supply end of the pyramidor even above that.

This Is The End

... of this article. But it's nowhere near the end for me. It takes several days to find a topic to write about, properly research it, and then write and schedule it. I don't have any assistance and I don't have the kind of income that allows me to use a scheduling service like established writers can. I also spend some of my limited pension on keeping servers and domain names going, more on parts for the R&D I do making the machines for recycling waste. You can help me by sharing this article or the link to the newsletter I put out, or more directly by making a Paypal donation here. Failing that you can also go to my Ko-Fi page and set up a monthly donation. (It's like Patreon without all the bullsh*t.) Everything you can do, will help me keep going.     

 

The Real Cause

"Inflation"? - Greed!

I'll keep this short. Some ASSHOLE has weighed up their profit against your entire life and the decision they came to is "screw you, I need at least 10,000,000 times more than you'll own in a lifetime, commoner!" and set their profit margins accordingly. 

That's all. I won't even do my usual ask for sharing and support, because I'd rather you just let that article above sink in. 

Cheers!

 

Lead With Inflation

State Of The Place

This time I've drawn everything from TND - The New Daily. 

Inflation In Oz

The news is meh or less - inflation is rampant according to this article and in this, they like ALL media are too scared to say it - this "inflation" is nothing more than corporate greed, opportunism, and total disregard for the wellbeing of their customers. We will never have anything approaching wealth justice and equality until we burn every one of their management/executive edifices to the ground, strip out the ideas of free market, capitalism, and predation, and replace that core with a newer one.

Ask anyone (if any are still alive) about the Great Depression. Ask anyone about the last Recession. They'll tell you one of two tales, either the situation was dire due to Depression/Recession, or they just say "we had to tighten our belts but we got through it." The former will have been the ones that were also relentlessly bombarded with the situation by a sensationalist media, the latter more likely to be the type to turn to the sports and social pages or even *gasp!* not even take in the news at all. 

Media orgs aren't immune from this need to strip out their rotten cores and replace them with a new management. They too dance to the tune of money, money, über alles. They need sensationalism over journalism, because clickbait works online and in the media, and actual news is deemed too dry. Their best interests are served when they support the edifice that the money flows from.

The Opposition In Oz

Nothing shows that capitalistic system in action like this article from TND. The LNP Coalition (and frankly I'm surprised they are still 'coalescing' after their utter debacle at the last election) has nil, zero, zip, zilch, nada interest in the wellbeing of ANY member of the populace that isn't shoving money up the Honorable Members' various orifices. 

There was a time (and not that long back) when such government styles attracted bricks, molotov cocktails, and protests in the streets that ran for weeks and were attended by a percentage of the populace to be reckoned with. And a mere two centuries back, people who were exploited by their landlords / bosses would often settle those matters with a small and personal crowd, and real clubs and pitchforks . . . 

I'm not advocating for such base violence, but certainly I am an enthusiastic proponent of making our feelings known through emailing politicians, signing petitions both physical and online, and even going to see your local Member and speaking with them about whatever situation you feel needs redress. Many local Members actually will hear you out and, if they see enough public support for your point of view, adopt it. 

Write to your local politician/CEO/owner/landlord/councillor if something seems unfair to you, and get your friends to also contact those people and support your view. This is one of few recourses left to us other than unimaginable ones, and if the government moves to shut down these last bastions of free speech as the previous government has shut down peaceful protest then they'll be regarded in the world as a totalitarian regime - and indeed, they will have become one and made themselves a target - and leave us no other peaceful options.

With That, The Governments In The World

"COVID is over!" - "Uh - no, COVID has peaked!" - "Oh look! - MonkeyPox Virus! Lucky it isn't serious!" 

What's your favourite piece of epidemiological epistemological ineptitude? Truth is, that if EVERY Government in the world realised it, there's one easy way to actually make all these diseases go away - another lockdown, for a few weeks.

The reason the lockdowns didn't work last few times is that not EVERYONE was locked down - banks kept on charging interest and expecting to accrue interest and collect loan repayments, landlords were not told to halt rents, companies weren't told to make essential goods, resources, services, and utilities available free for the duration of the lockdown - so these were asymetrically applied lockdowns. And that's just not on when there's a worldwide pandemic that threatens everyone, and is still killing hundreds of thousands of people. 

But it does show you how weak and gutless governments are in the face of their economically superior bosses... 

What's Wrong With Contemporary Governments

I'll point to this as a prime example, although we've had quite the same experiences here in Australia and I'm sure in every other country. In regard to this article, I'll pull bits of one longish quote:

“. . . if you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth . . . ? When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets . . .  you have no choice.”

Pssst. I have one bit of advice for him - if you and your family and company and people you associate with are all innocent, then there is nothing that can incriminate you or any of them. That's what being honest is like. 

At Least People Are Good

Twenty years ago some people set out to prove that - hmmm... Actually, I no longer have any idea, do you? - but that they'd kill people for it. The violence that we abhor, writ large. Another reason to end a system that produces such huge wealth disparities. Anyhow, the Bali bombings themselves are now etched into our memories, even if Jemaah Islamiyah's purpose is inconceivable to me and no doubt quite a few of you.

But it did bring out the hero in many. And now that event is going to be made into a mini series, and I hope the series sufficiently shows that. I'm looking forward to people seeing it and realising that all that violence ended up achieving nothing, but that the hero people in the aftermath achieved greatness. I refuse to acknowledge the utter dregs of our species that perpetrated this, I'm glad I can't think of any of their names and even happier that I actually even had to look up the name of their organisation, so utterly has it sunk into obscurity. 

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In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

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Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

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You can also donate either directly or here or at my  Ko-Fi page  for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.

WATER Is Unsafe

Rainwater Is Now Unsafe

Quick note for the old memory files. PFAS (the forever chemical that seemingly knows no bounds) in rainwater is now measured in unsafe concentrations in rainwater everywhere on Earth. 

I'm going to presume that distillation is still good, but it's a bit of a blow if you were figuring on being a survivalist. After all, the rain cycle drives all water flowing on the planet. and while the article makes a distinction between developed and underdeveloped countries: 

"Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.”

- I can't. I refer to this and this and it seems that it's not easy to remove PFASs from water without major filtering. So how is the water I drink (and which fell as rain - contaminated with PFAS - and then collected in the water supply dam) any less contaminated than the rainwater? 

Have you ever seen a 4 hectare-sized activated carbon filter in your town's water supply? Or a warehouse-sized ion separator gizmo? I sure as hell haven't... 

We do use a filter jug to make clean drinking water but now I might have to make enough for cooking as well . . . 

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Good Use Of Airdancers

A New Use For Tube Dancers

The tyre, car, and tile sales places along the roadsides will be stripped bare by rampaging berry growers, you mark my words! 😸

This on Linked-In that I found and reposted is interesting. I like that the ag robots are being used to the max, there's no point having these little tractors sitting in the shed for 75% of the year, after all. And I'm also a bit annoyed that I missed this point in the LI article, so I'm going to expand on that here. 

Agbots are more and more becoming a thing - they drag harvest trailers from the orchard / field to the processing and packing shed, some are in use for controlling weeds between the rows, and I'm sure they have more functions that I'm not aware of. 

So on that basis, adding an airdancer as a scarecrow makes sense, but it'll also increase the number of agbots being manufactured. On that, I do rest a case, that being that we're using more and more of the planet's scarce - and definitely not bountifully endless - resources. And we'll be doing it so everyone can have blueberries all year round, not for some profound planet-saving reason . . .

Sad CrAIyon art says "bai healthy soil."

I say this on a day not long after the day of this year the number of resources we're taking from the planet has exceeded the capacity of the planet to supply them for this year, for about the 50th year running. We're in effect living on overdraft, consuming what tomorrow's generation will need - and won't have. In fact, we are that generation. And the next one will be even worse off if we don't slow down and leave a bit more for them. 

Technology To The Rescue?

Technology is one of the reasons we're in the situation we're in now. But our survival imperative is the reason for the technology. Bear that in mind. And in a way we can actually blame our DNA. 

"DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."

– Richard Dawkins

If DNA could find a way to just mingle, mutate, and multiply without a corresponding life-form, it would. Our survival imperative is put there by DNA to ensure it's survival imperative. But. . . What we do with that imperative is how we master the DNA. 

The first neolithic male hominid that picked up a stick to beat another male hominid up in order to get to the female, was obeying DNA's survival imperative: "Spread my genes out into the world! Make ME the One And Only DNA on the planet!" In the process, that protohuman also invented technology, in this case a technology of conflict and war. 

But the female, heavily gravid and needing more nourishment, became the dependant of Grog The Stick-Wielder, and when his Stick failed to bring down any birds no matter how fast he swung it, she probably clucked her tongue, grabbed the stick from him, and used it to dig up a few yams or onions, thus inventing a peaceful use for the technology. 

But competition drove both inventions, because Grog and Georgina were also competing with many other hominids for the resources they could easily reach, to ensure that their combined DNA would survive. (This raises the question, is DNA's Ultimate Purpose to just keep breeding variations, stabilise on just ONE genome, or become something else entirely?)

"Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce."

- S. Jay Olshansky

As well, let's not limit the competition between DNAs to just humans. After all, the bit of the DNA that makes humans, humans, is tiny - somewhere between 1% and 7% depending whom you believe.

Maybe the ultimate aim of the game is to be the last DNA sequence on the planet, but without a host? Whatever. But DNA created family. And villages, clans, countries, religions, politics, love, hatred, fear. 

That suited when we had little communication around the world, little travel between countries. We had to protect "our own." And now, we can speak to another person anywhere on the globe. We can go there and be with a person we're attracted to. We can see the damage we're doing to the planet, and as a result we're also becoming less rapacious and greedy for all the resources. 

We could say that DNA is becoming aware, but that's not quite true. The intelligence that DNA has given us has become aware, and so - slowly - our approach to our use of the resources is changing. Birthrates are down due to infertility we've caused to ourselves with microplastics and chemicals rendering us less fertile. But there's a double whammy in effect here, with more and more people choosing not to have children. 

More and more people are choosing not to consume meat. People are becoming environmentally conscious. Imagine this: three to two centuries ago we got agriculture to the point where we could comfortably feed our population at that time - but didn't. Instead we chose to industrialise and mechanise so that a chosen few could benefit from a surfeit of food, housing, consumer goods, automobiles, and entertainment.

Even among 'ourselves' we established a strict hierarchy of paucity and surfeit, workers and exploiters. In order to, you know, get just ONE genetic string ahead of the rest of the field. But finding compatible partners (and remember that it's basically been our DNA that predisposes us to identify and want a compatible DNA mix) across race and geopolitical boundaries has changed things. 

While it seems that violence is on the rise, I think that perhaps our perception of it has become more acute, and is driving a trend towards less violence. Our population has doubled in fifty years, but I wonder if violence has doubled, or if we've just enabled violence by technology to do more damage? 

Technology is making it possible for us to see more of the violence around the world. 300 - 200 years ago the situation in Ukraine would have come to us a month behind, with a grainy lithograph or photograph and a few paragraphs of text. Today we can see the destruction in realtime. 

We can (and many do) go there and see it first hand, and send images and video back to the rest of our friends. We can help out by donating a drone or chipping in to a fund for that purpose. Should we desire and have the skillset, we can even pilot that drone. These are things technology can do. Also, make rapid advances in cleaning up the planet, removing some of our pollution, recycling what would otherwise be wasted resources, growing more food, distributing it faster a further. 

And it gives us a truly global awareness of the planet and what we've done to it. I only hope that this awareness will sweep across the world faster than the attempts of the remaining throwbacks to take advantage of the confusion. 

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In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

So please - take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers. 

Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

Or maybe contact me via the webform; Or email me;

You can also donate either directly or at my  Ko-Fi page  for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.

Soft Rocks - How Were The Pyramids Made?

Pyramid Schemes

Skimming LinkedIn and this article sailed past. Lovely thought but oh I had so many questions at the end of it. The LI article is two paragraphs and points you at a video - this one - which is pretty much no help and not really proof or anything. 

I have so many questions.

For a start, the rocks of the pyramids have been studied and their area of origin established. Agreed? The chemical composition is a known thing, the chemical composition of the rocks at the origin site another. 

The "geopolymer" referred to is something unknown to us now. But it can't be a magic 'ex machina' thing and has to follow some rules. One of those is the polymerisation that creates links that are unlike the internal structure of any rock. Therefore, the rock the pyramid is made from would have looked like a polymer not like rocks from some random rock quarry some distance away.

The only way this could happen is if someone came up with a magical formula to create an exact copy of the molecular structure of the original rocks. That would really have to be magic. 

So perhaps they used powdered rock from the quarry and somehow melded it back together without resorting to polymerisation. How that would happen is an open mystery but a 20 tome blob of glass probably wouldn't create enough heat to somehow melt it back together, and then the internal structure of the created rock would be very different than the origin rocks. 

And lastly, this kind of imputes that they somehow first powdered those original rocks for transport. Again, unless they had some kind of crusher mills the like of which we still don't have to this day, then this would have been harder to do than cut blocks at the quarry, transport them, then fine adjust and fit them.

I'm going to say this is well and truly busted unless some hard evidence of advanced tech surfaces.

This Is The End

... of this article. But it's nowhere near the end for me. It takes several days to find a topic to write about, properly research it, and then write and schedule it. I don't have any assistance and I don't have the kind of income that allows me to use a scheduling service like established writers can. I also spend some of my limited pension on keeping servers and domain names going, more on parts for the R&D I do making the machines for recycling waste. You can help me by sharing this article or the link to the newsletter I put out, or more directly by making a Paypal donation here. Failing that you can also go to my Ko-Fi page and set up a monthly donation. (It's like Patreon without all the bullsh*t.) Everything you can do, will help me keep going.  

The Mis-Scanned Apple

ShopNotLifting

This is not going to be a pretty post. There will be ranting and swearing. Probably a lot of it.

Have a read here. I sooo had another go at the Big Duopoly several years back but can't locate the particular article nor even what blog it was in, but it was about the early days of self-checkout, and Coles wanted the local constabularies near their supermarkets to attend and catch people committing fraud by swiping the wrong things at the right prices, so to speak. 

You can see why that might have stirred me up a little, right? They were cutting out the wages of around a dozen checkout operators per store, along with said checkout operators, realised they'd probably made a terrible mistake by letting people swipe avocados at potato prices. . .

And at that, you might have expected that with all the savings they were making, some prices might have eased back a bit, right? But no - prices went up because "losses." And then they realised they might have to pay the store security more to patrol the self-checkouts, and so they ask our police that we pay for out of the public purse to save them having use their security. So - screw us by taking away checkpout operators, screw us some more by not passing any of the savings back to us, and then screw us by tying up several police in each suburb that they operate a store in.

Yeah. Triggered. 

And now here we go again. Woolworths was one of the companies (along with pretty much every other business) that worked hard and long to create the gig economy we're now working under so that people are earning less than ever before, inflation is rising daily and so people have less money and the idea of underscanning becomes pretty appealing. 

"Fuji, red delish, or gala" - here's an idea - price them realistically you bunch of mangy money-grubbing maggots. And get more checkout operators, they'll know this stuff and check it out accurately. It's a problem you created for yourself and now you're moaning about it? 

We've been allowing them to do this. For decades I've been blogging and writing articles about Keeping The Bastards Honest, a phrase I stole unashamedly from Don Chipp of the Australian Democrats back in 1977 because they're no longer using it but it's more relevant than ever, and nowadays not just against an opposing political Party. 

For the last forty years the food duopoly of Woolworths and Coles has had pretty much free rein. If you didn't sell your produce to them, you just didn't sell it. If you didn't produce enough to meet your quota, you just didn't sell it. Once you and all the other producers were in the contract trap, the contract prices shrank. 

As a customer, you went to a "super" market that had a wide range of products and paid a reasonable but not extortionate profit for it - and forsook the small corner groceries, fruit and veg greengrocers, butchers, and bakers. Once those had been priced out and closed their doors, prices went up, the range and variety of products shrank, and the prices (and the profits) went up again.

Then corners were cut, and suppliers of tinned and bottled goods were squeezed in their turn, finally dropped and offered them a bone to make "supermarket generic brand" versions of their best sellers, then sold those. The range of varieties available to us shrank again. 

Are you seeing where this is heading? Eventually you'll get only generic brand of the most common staples, priced at premium, and all those other bothersome manufacturers will have been driven into the ground... 

Look - it takes money to break into a field where another company has a headstart. My schoolfriend's parents ran a F&V store that could compete with supermarkets of the day. But the store went down the tubes just like all the others, and the parents have long passed away taking their expertise with them. 

Now, if Stevie wanted to resurrect the parents' F&V, he'd have to compete with Coles, Woolworths, IGA, Foodworks, and ALDI. And learn the trade all over again, and build contacts and suppliers and transport. He'd need to have some cash behind him - but he's been on gig wages for two years now and, well... 

In every blog post where I've railed against the Big Food corporations I've used the NatDems rallying cry to ask people to vote with their dollars and buy from anywhere but the supermarkets. Every dollar you spend there enables the things I mentioned above to happen. At the very least you should avoid the duopoly and shop at IGA, Foodworks, ALDI. At best, buy more from markets, farm gate stores, the few remaining F&V and butchers that are still holding their own. 

I've used "Keep the bastards honest" to exhort people to do just that - if there's some person or organisation doing something wrong - call it out! If there's a threat to free speech - fix it! We wouldn't have the garbage crisis we now have if people had called it out 14 years ago. 

Footnote:

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers. 

Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

Or maybe contact me via the webform; Or email me;

You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.

Plastic Statistics

How Big Is The Waste Problem? 

ADDITION OF LINK NEEDED! PTEC3D What's the state of plastic recycling? 

Let me put it to you this way: If you're not frightened then you're a pretty special kind of person. That is all. 

I won't keep you from that article for long, except to say that I'm one of the very scared people. I've put forward an article that has a possible solution (not mine, just some news I came across) to the
---.--->PET plastic<---.--- issue, which is one of the biggest sources of waste plastic after plastic bags. 

We're on this slippery slope and we need to act now.

70,000,000 PET bottles a year. Untold tens of millions of  PET food containers. Over five hundred billion plastic bags a year. And we're not talking all the rest of the plastics yet.

But I'm doing something about it and so can you.

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers. 

Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

Or maybe contact me via the webform; 

You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.

Taking The Heat (Off The Planet)

 Beaming Heat Out To Space

Earth's fever is down to two things - One, greenhouse gases, yep. And fossil fuels, two. Both can be argued to be sides of the one coin, and it can also be argued that we're the ones that flipped it.

Fossil Fuels And Warming 

OKAY OKAY I know this is done to death and boring but no - it isn't. Our lives 99% depend on people knowing this, and the young generations' lives will 100% depend on everyone knowing this and being on the same page. Choose your future. . .

Fossil fuels come from . . . well, fossils. The carbon cycle starts when plants use sunlight to split carbon out of CO2 in the air. That carbon is, in effect, the energy that the plant absorbs from the sun, stored as the plant's body. Plants are solar panels that take sunlight and turn it into carbon and are also their own battery, that stores that carbon. 

When an animal eats the vegetation, they're just charging up from a solar battery. When an animal eats another animal, they're charging from a power bank. When animals use the energy they've absorbed, they exhale CO2. Which the next generation of plants crack back to carbon and oxygen using solar energy.

Some plants don't get eaten and die naturally, and they take that carbon-stored solar energy into the soil. And when the animals that 'charged' up by eating other carbon-based stuff die, they take energy into the soil. And basically that's what carbon sequestration is. Burying old solar energy. 

We burn it (in the form of coal and petroleum products) in fires and smelters and steam engines and vehicles and power stations to make electricity, and burning recombines the carbon with oxygen to make CO2. The trouble is that in doing we're doing damage twice. The energy stored in fossil fuels is extra energy - it was buried down deep and its turn to come back to the surface isn't supposed to be up yet. 

And secondly, once CO2 gets aloft in the atmosphere, it traps heat that would normally have been radiated out to space. (In fact, the technologies I'll be mentioning are actually connected to this.) Heat increases, and that's bad because aside from driving planetary temperatures up and making life difficult or downright impossible for various species, there's also a lot more energy being stored in the oceans and the air.

Weather is driven by that heat energy. Each passing day, the overall temperature of everything goes up by a miniscule amount. It might be 0.01C per day or 0.000000001C, but it's currently only going ☝ up. The tiny increments seem ridiculous, but they add up. In the last half a century they've added up to 0.9C, almost a whole degree.

Something like a 0.9C temperature change in a bathtub full of water is only tiny bit of extra energy - but there's a lot more water than that in the oceans, and they're a whole 7,053,400,000,000,000,000 times bigger than a bathtub between them. 

(That's a rough guess, bathtubs contain around 50 gallons, the oceans apparently hold around 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. It's science. I could work it all out but frankly my eyes are sort of glazing over already.) 

It's enough to say that the oceans gain a lot of heat energy every day. That creates wilder storms, changes wind and water flow patterns, causes droughts and storms and fires - climate disasters just like we're seeing already.

So that's the situation. We can't wind back the centuries, can't put all that CO2 and carbon back without needing even more energy and releasing even more heat. We need to do something - and actually a lot of somethings - to stop this self-reinforcing cycle. What we can do is the topic today.

How To Get The CO2 Out

Power Generating Plant

It's the obvious target isn't it? Just switch off coal and oil fired power stations.

Just for interest, since setting climate targets for decarbonising (stopping the use of fossil fuels and switching to clean sustainable energy and taking tons of carbon out of the atmosphere) we've hit about . . . around about . . . ummm . . . none of them actually. 

So - just switch off coal and oil fired power stations. . .

And replace them . . . with . . . what? That's the problem. Our energy demands keep going up and up as we face hotter weather and so we need more energy-hungry air conditioning, and even though solar farms and wind farms are virtually being thrown up around the world at amazing speed, our energy demand is easily outpacing the rate at which we add capacity.

That's not to say that we should give up. Each new clean energy source we build is another miniscule shift in the right direction. The world gained this energy one miniscule shift at a time, and so this works.

Also, and going back to those oceans: People don't get how BIG the planet is and it takes a lot of energy to shift its overall temperature and will take a lot of effort to shift it back. I'll get back to this a bit further down the article. 

Transportation

So - get all vehicles off the roads then. Replace them with hydrogen and battery electric vehicles. Up goes our energy demand to manufacture those cars, and then after that, up goes demand again to keep those vehicles charged and running. 

(To their credit, EVs charging off the energy grid are still more efficient - and cause less carbon pollution - than combustion engined vehicles,. mile for mile and year for year. But they are still an energy hog.)

I'll tell you that I think one day we'll just lease vehicles on microleases, you want to go somewhere you tap an app, an EV appears, you go to your destination, the vehicle disappears to go drive someone else - no parking fee, no maintenance costs, just Pay As You Go. 

To be balanced, there are also some other problems with this. First you can never keep anything in 'your' car and (fore example) I like to keep a first aid kit, fishing line, and fold up shopping cart plus some solid shopping bags in the car. 

And if the person before you was infectious with, oh, say for argument, something like COVID, then you might become ill. Or if you leave your purse or wallet in that car, you have little hope of getting it back. 

But I firmly believe that not owning a private car will be necessary. Think of the suburbs, how many acres of driveways are there? And on those driveways sit private cars. For 95% of the day, every day. Rusting, dripping the odd oil, but not being used. This means that you could theoretically use 90% fewer cars if we shared them. 

And THAT is why car and fuel companies don't want us to get the sharing EV mindset. They're multiple industries that are currently taking in trillions of dollars - and creating this problem in the first place. They're sitting in the catbird seat, they're successfully taking money from us for fuels and energy and vehicles, and then they're successfully making the recovery our problem so that they don't have to spend any of that hoard. On top of that are whole industries built on top - sales lots, showrooms, garages, petrol stations, and so forth. As I said, it's going to take a LOT to shift the energy equation back into the black.

So, we're seeing adverts for the 'convenience' of owning one or two vehicles apiece, the 'freedom' the vehicles supposedly afford us. 

Some of our biggest generators of CO2 are:

Generating electricity, of course. It's a nice low-hanging fruit that means minimal disruption to our 'convenience-based' way of life. 

Air travel, shipping, road transport, agricultural, mining, and public transport. Getting more problematic.

Personal transport such as cars and RVs and 4WD not used for work purposes, motorcycles and scooters. Difficult choices.

Petrol engined lawn mowers and line trimmers and hedge trimmers and the like. 

There's also a huge amount of materials and work involved in changing all of these over. The ecological cost of digging ever more material up, the energy costs associated with the manufacturing processes. 

How To Get The Heat Out

Aircondition less. Yeah I know it sounds a bit glib and pat, but what if you could get the heat out without needing as much energy? Several technologies are coming to the fray. One is a material that beams heat straight through the atmosphere and out into space. There are two links in the last sentence because it's getting wide recognition and thus it shouldn't be long before we see it able to clear heat to infinity and beeeyooonnnd! as Buzz would say.

The next one generates electricity from heat rather than light, and the developers are seeing it as a way to successfully extract more energy from insolation. (Insolation: the incoming solar radiation.) And that's topnotch because it makes use of more of the solar spectrum and gets more energy out of the same acreage of solar panels.

And there's a third candidate that wants to do a thing I can't help but consider to be somewhat problematic, and that's to 'generate electricity from solar panels at night'. But I hasten to add that I'm just not sure - I don't have all the facts.

Okay - the heat mirrors. They're a bit tricky to make - now. But anything like this starts out tricky, just ask any innovator. The first internal combustion engines were cranky, erratic, and prone to all manner of spectacular failures. A few years later they had more or less reliable cars powered with the technology, and Henry Ford was producing cars en masse not long afterwards. 

So these are mirrors. But it seems from the description that it retransmits the sun's heat back up at a wavelength that is more able to pass through the air without heating it. So that's a bonus, it reflects more heat out than remains behind.

And these mirrors are also a passthrough element. Put heat in and they retransmits that just the same way. Run cooling pipes against the underside, and it'll suck that heat out, cooling whatever you're running in the system. Use it like an alternative to airconditioning, need to use conventional airconditioning less. And as with everything, someone will figure out how to integrate it into airconditioning units directly, leading to multistorey buildings becoming far more efficient. 

Direct rising warm air flwoing up the side of buildings up and under the panels and the heat in that air too will get sent to space and cool air will fall down, cooling the famous 'urban heat islands' that are our cities. 

If every city makes a conscious effort to put as much of the urban landscape and buildings under heat mirrors, they'll use less electricity to keep cool. 

Next, the device that can extract electricity from heat with almost double the efficiency at which solar panels extract electricity from sunlight. These work better at higher temperatures but luckily we already have great heat pumps, and they can concentrate the heat to these devices. 

Moreover, as the article points out, we can easily use solar energy to heat stuff to extreme temperatures already, too. It's the principle behind many of the solar farms you see with a single tower at their centre. If you wanted to store the day's heat in molten salts or some other means, you could run it over these TPV cells and they extract heat, turn it to electricity, and you have a solar power system that runs day and night and through cloudy weather.

Now we come to the one thing I'm not so sure of. I'm fine with recovering waste heat from existing processes. I'm even okay with storing the day's solar energy and using it to do work another time, generating heat in the process. It radiates away during the night, right? And with the heat mirror we can dump some excess heat day and night to balance it out, right? 

So this bit from the article gives me doubts:

"We get energy from the sun — it arrives, it warms up the Earth but then the Earth actually radiates the exact same amount of energy back out into space," he says.

That's a balance, right? And because we have excess heat, we already know the balance has changed - in the wrong direction. So why would we want to capture it and store it instead? I'm just not sure. Maybe the heat mirrors will help me get over this doubt.

Thoughts

We have technology, we have resources. What we don't seem to have is to use some of those resources to fix the planet, for what seem to be quite trivial reasons. Maybe we need a good wake-up call, well what do we call successively hotter temperatures, worse fires, worse storms, worse flooding, worse droughts? What do we need, dammit? 

And that also brings me to another thought. You may have heard of the Fermi Paradox - scientists, faced with the growing proof that life was probably not an isolated and rare phenomenon, wondering why, if so much life must exist, we haven't seen signs of it yet? (For example, meteorites have been found that have life chemicals embedded in them - how much more proof do we need? Are we really so unwilling to accept anything outside our range?)

And that led other scientists to propose that there's a "Great Filter" event that stops life at some critical point of its development. I think we may be at ours. . .

And also, if that's the case, that industrialisation and resource exploitation are the Great Filter, then one way we should be able to identify any planets that have advanced life on them would be to see if they're emitting more heat than they should be. . .

Conclusion

If we don't act, then Great Filter or not, we're pretty much going to be Filtered anyway, within a generation. Any survivors will get thrown back to a level of civilisation that existed several thousand years ago. Albeit a puzzling one with a lot of puzzling things around them. 

Action is called for. YOUR action also. Time to bite the bullet and start making repairs and reparations. I'm happy to start and in fact I've been doing so - reducing my footprint, writing like mad to make people aware, working on means to recycle plastics and other waste materials and keep the out of the waste stream, and writing - did I mention the writing? I do a lot of that, it takes up 75% of my entire week to conceive, research, and write articles.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; Or take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information in your inbox for free; Or contact me via the webform or directly email me; Or donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there..