Greencheck.nl

Politics is gang warfare using language. It long ago ceased to be a public debate on different choices we can make. In the details it should be, so when the final law is made it has to be enforceable. Often these days though neither the ‘debate’ is detached from reality and the final law is of nobodies interest, because the whole process was a distraction to allow the passing of other laws nobody talks about.

The problem is really

In the Netherlands the leader of the VVD party (which ruled for the last 13 years under Mark Rutte), in the run up to the elections of 2023, claimed immigrants where reuniting with family by the thousands in Holland, one after the other ‘nareizer’ (individual now allowed in because the first member of the family was allowed in) was flooding our country. This triggered a mass vote for the anti-immigrant PVV (Geert Wilders) which now led to an insane new government formed and run by people that openly admit interest in Nazi ideology, and run by a former head of the intelligence agency and confidant of the same Mark Rutte. I mean the VVD, when it gets thrown out, always tries to install another party that will then do the dirty work and suffer electoral defeat allowing the VVD to reenter the scene.

The problem is really that nobody respects facts. This is the nature of politics, everything is an opinion and if you can make people doubt the words of your opponent you are ‘winning’. It is a game of brainwashing, where you can end up like two muslims debating whether islam fully supports christianity or not. Its all stories and zero fact. This is defeating the purpose of government, which is to protect the fundamental rights of its citizen. This fact free epidemic comes on top of zero policy disclosure. Copying the habit of republicans in the US, there is barely an outline of what people plan to do. Especially the right wing is always about punishing unwanted behavior and never about supporting wanted behavior. The latter because that wanted behavior usually looks pretty anti-social if you investigate. I would suggest two principles to change all this.

First, with every proposal there should be a one page explanation of the position, a ‘position-paper’. The politician or minister can only talk about a proposal for which such explanation is provided. This makes it easy for every citizen to read the proposal and form an opinion. The position paper can change, that means it gets published with an update. Currently proposals for laws or motions in parliament come with a short explanation, but this is often too short and is hard to trace back to previous proposals. This is because some are made for show. The opposition often makes a huge noise as it makes proposals that never go anywhere because well, they are the opposition.

Second, every verifiable assertion of a fact must be verified, and once it is it is the only assertion or fact that can be used. So if the VVD claims ‘many thousands of family reuniting immigrants flood the country’, this can be checked, it has to be checked and say it turns out to be 1200 people in 2022 then this is the only fact others can use when they want to talk about ‘family reuniting immigrants in 2022’. Give the fact a name, an code, store it. These ‘known facts’ have to be used in position papers. They are to be determined by a method that is explained. The Netherlands has the CBS, which is the central bureau of statistic, the AR (? Algemene rekenkamer) general accountancy office. Sources can not be ‘authorities’ they have to be the closest to the real world or people will once again go to sleep believing some political source of truth.

Fact determination has to be hypertransparent, so for example use @X platform to report. It has to be tied to individuals that do the reporting or data that is from satellites or other sources, bank statements. All as transparent as possible. The debate on what is a fact and what not should not take place in parliament or during debates. The point of the proceedings is how to deal with reality, what laws need to change to make it better. Financial facts should also be public, which includes all income of politicians, previous employers etc. so people can see who is a lobbyist. If you want to make a broad statement it can be required to get it fact checked first. It becomes easier to take actual facts and present them, this in itself always causes a bias anyway, I mean if I talk about tapdancing smurfs for 5 minutes this massively biases your mind towards thinking they have some reality or importance.

There should also be more openness about undiscussed or undebated laws, because some rediculous laws passed in recent years that really hurt society, namely the investment in rentad homes and other laws that benefit banks and the totalitarian machinery. But the first step is to eliminate lies as much as possible using verified facts!

I’m doing a couple of ESP32 projects because I want to get to know the device. Some code is hard to find or doesn’t work so here I share it.

If you want me to build an ESP-32 application for you email at frits@rincker.nl

I use the ESP32-Wroom module and the ESP32-CAM module from AI-tinker.

Make sure your power supply is stabile, so direct USB connection to your computer, not via a hub. Also add delays if you think the process crashes due to power draw issues.

ESP32-CAM

A simple function of the ESP32-CAM module that is for sale in Holland is to make pictures and store them on the Micro-SD card. This is often done with a time function to add a date but that’s not included here. This code will save the images in the root dir of the SD, with numbers (counter) that run up. If you restart the module it will start again at 0 and overwrite previous images. You can set the time between images with the delay in the loop part.

#include <eloquent_esp32cam.h>
#include <eloquent_esp32cam/extra/esp32/fs/sdmmc.h>
#include "SD_MMC.h" 
#include "FS.h" 

using namespace eloq;

int counter;

// Function to write the image file to the SD card
void writeFile(fs::FS &fs, const char * path, const uint8_t * data, size_t length){
    Serial.printf("Writing file: %s\n", path);

    File file = fs.open(path, FILE_WRITE);
    if(!file){
        Serial.println("Failed to open file for writing");
        return;
    }

    if(file.write(data, length)){
        Serial.println("File written");
    } else {
        Serial.println("Write failed");
    }
    file.close();
}

void setupSSD() {
    if(!SD_MMC.begin()){
        Serial.println("Card Mount Failed");
        return;
    }

    uint8_t cardType = SD_MMC.cardType();

    if(cardType == CARD_NONE){
        Serial.println("No SD_MMC card attached");
        return;
    }

    Serial.print("SD_MMC Card Type: ");
    if(cardType == CARD_MMC){
        Serial.println("MMC");
    } else if(cardType == CARD_SD){
        Serial.println("SDSC");
    } else if(cardType == CARD_SDHC){
        Serial.println("SDHC");
    } else {
        Serial.println("UNKNOWN");
    }

    uint64_t cardSize = SD_MMC.cardSize() / (1024 * 1024);
    Serial.printf("SD_MMC Card Size: %lluMB\n", cardSize);
    Serial.printf("\n\n\n");
}

void setup() {
    delay(3000);
    Serial.begin(115200);
    setupSSD();
    // camera settings
    // replace with your own model!
    camera.pinout.aithinker();
    camera.brownout.disable();
    camera.resolution.vga();
    camera.quality.high();

    // init camera
    while (!camera.begin().isOk())
        Serial.println(camera.exception.toString());
    Serial.println("Camera OK");
}

void loop() {
    if (!camera.capture().isOk()) {
        Serial.println(camera.exception.toString());
        return;
    } else { 
        Serial.println("Capturing Image");
    }

    
    String path = "/picture";
    path += counter;
    path +=".jpg";

    writeFile(SD_MMC, path.c_str(), camera.frame->buf, camera.frame->len);
    
    delay(3000); // Capture image every 10 seconds
    
    counter++;
}

ESP32 Wifi Config

This is code to have the ESP32 module log in to to set the Wifi and that then will log into the Wifi itself. You can use this if you want to set up the module as a sensor that talks to a server, if you want to use the ESP32-CAM module that you want to post pictures via your Wifi network. This code stores the password in the eprom memory and if it doesn’t find any credentials that work it will ask for ‘network id/password’ in a dialog. I have not figured out how to make it captive on my mobile phone, but it does direct to the configuration page when you log in with your laptop or PC.

Then if you are logged in the Wifi network it will do a POST to a website.

#include <FS.h>                   //this needs to be first, or it all crashes and burns...

#include <WiFi.h>          //https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

//needed for library
#include <DNSServer.h>
#include <WebServer.h>
#include <WiFiManager.h>          //https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager
#include <HTTPClient.h>

void setup() {
  // put your setup code here, to run once:
  Serial.begin(115200);
  Serial.println();

  //WiFiManager
  //Local intialization. Once its business is done, there is no need to keep it around
  WiFiManager wifiManager;

  //exit after config instead of connecting
  //wifiManager.setBreakAfterConfig(true);

  //reset settings - for testing
  //wifiManager.resetSettings();


  //tries to connect to last known settings
  //if it does not connect it starts an access point with the specified name
  //here  "AutoConnectAP" with password "password"
  //and goes into a blocking loop awaiting configuration
  if (!wifiManager.autoConnect("AutoConnectAP", "password")) {
    Serial.println("failed to connect, we should reset as see if it connects");
    delay(3000);
    ESP.restart();
    delay(5000);
  }

  //if you get here you have connected to the WiFi
  Serial.println("connected...yeey :)");


  Serial.println("local ip");
  Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println("In the loop");
  Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());
  // put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
   // Perform HTTP POST request
  if (WiFi.status() == WL_CONNECTED) {
    HTTPClient http;
    
    http.begin("http://www.website.com/esp32/index.php"); // Specify the URL
    http.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); // Specify content-type header

    String postData = "temp=32&banana=yellow"; // Data to send in the post request
    int httpCode = http.POST(postData); // Make the request

    if (httpCode > 0) { // Check for the returning code
      String payload = http.getString();
      Serial.println(httpCode);  // Print HTTP return code
      Serial.println(payload);   // Print the request response payload
    } else {
      Serial.println("Error on HTTP request");
    }
    
    http.end(); // Free resources
  } else {
    Serial.println("WiFi not connected");
  }

}

The server side code is very simple (PHP stack index.php)

<?php

echo var_dump($_POST);

echo var_dump($_GET);

The comments are by the original author, I publish it because this code 100% works so it saves some time. Make sure you have the right libraries and if it gives an error that there are several just go into the library manager and uninstall the ones you don’t need.

ESP32-CAM Upload

The following script posts an image from an ESP32-cam to a website. The script also provides a Wifi config interaction, but the way the script is written now you need to re-enter the wifi credentials every time you power up the module. To fix this there need to be a button press or something added, but the used USB programmer doesn’t have space for buttons, a bit of a waste.

The ESP32 code just posts the image data to the URL

#include <eloquent_esp32cam.h>
#include <eloquent_esp32cam/extra/esp32/fs/sdmmc.h>
#include "SD_MMC.h" 
#include "FS.h" 
#include <WiFi.h>
#include <DNSServer.h>
#include <WebServer.h>
#include <WiFiManager.h>
#include <HTTPClient.h>

using namespace eloq;

int counter = 0;
const char *post_url = "http://www.website.com/index.php";

void setup() {
    Serial.begin(115200);
    delay(3000); // Allow time for serial monitor to start

    // Initialize SD card
    if (!SD_MMC.begin()) {
        Serial.println("SD Card Mount Failed");
        return;
    }

    // Print SD card type and size
    uint8_t cardType = SD_MMC.cardType();
    if (cardType == CARD_NONE) {
        Serial.println("No SD_MMC card attached");
        return;
    }
    Serial.print("SD_MMC Card Type: ");
    switch (cardType) {
        case CARD_MMC: Serial.println("MMC"); break;
        case CARD_SD: Serial.println("SDSC"); break;
        case CARD_SDHC: Serial.println("SDHC"); break;
        default: Serial.println("UNKNOWN"); break;
    }
    uint64_t cardSize = SD_MMC.cardSize() / (1024 * 1024);
    Serial.printf("SD_MMC Card Size: %lluMB\n", cardSize);

    // Camera settings
    camera.pinout.aithinker();
    camera.brownout.disable();
    camera.resolution.vga();
    camera.quality.high();

    // Initialize camera
    while (!camera.begin().isOk()) {
        Serial.println(camera.exception.toString());
        delay(1000);
    }
    Serial.println("Camera OK");

    delay(3000);
    // Initialize WiFi
    WiFiManager wifiManager;

    //reset settings - for testing
    wifiManager.resetSettings();
     
    delay(3000);

    if (!wifiManager.autoConnect("AutoConnectAP", "password")) {
        Serial.println("Failed to connect to WiFi, resetting...");
        delay(3000);
        ESP.restart();
    }
    Serial.println("Connected to WiFi");
}

void loop() {
    if (!camera.capture().isOk()) {
        Serial.println(camera.exception.toString());
        return;
    } else {
        Serial.println("Capturing Image");
    }

    String path = "/picture" + String(counter) + ".jpg";
    writeFile(SD_MMC, path.c_str(), camera.frame->buf, camera.frame->len);

    // HTTP POST
    HTTPClient http;
    http.begin(post_url);
    http.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/octet-stream");

    int httpCode = http.POST(camera.frame->buf, camera.frame->len);
    if (httpCode > 0) {
        Serial.printf("[HTTP] POST... code: %d\n", httpCode);
        if (httpCode == HTTP_CODE_OK) {
            String payload = http.getString();
            Serial.println(payload);
        }
    } else {
        Serial.printf("[HTTP] POST... failed, error: %s\n", http.errorToString(httpCode).c_str());
    }

    http.end();
    delay(10000); // Capture image every 10 seconds
    counter++;
}

void writeFile(fs::FS &fs, const char * path, const uint8_t * data, size_t length) {
    Serial.printf("Writing file: %s\n", path);

    File file = fs.open(path, FILE_WRITE);
    if (!file) {
        Serial.println("Failed to open file for writing");
        return;
    }

    if (file.write(data, length)) {
        Serial.println("File written");
    } else {
        Serial.println("Write failed");
    }
    file.close();
}

On the server side you have the above script uploaded (as index.php), and an images directory where the index.php is located. As is the image file name will not be chronological so one could call it time() with some added text or identifier or even format a date to save it.

<?php

// Define the directory to save images
$target_dir = "images/";

// Ensure the directory exists
if (!is_dir($target_dir)) {
    mkdir($target_dir, 0777, true);
}

// Generate a unique file name
$target_file = $target_dir . uniqid() . ".jpg";

// Read the raw POST data
$image_data = file_get_contents('php://input');

if ($image_data) {
    // Write the image data to a file
    if (file_put_contents($target_file, $image_data)) {
        echo "File uploaded successfully: " . $target_file;
    } else {
        echo "Failed to write file.";
    }
} else {
    echo "No data received.";
}

This will place the images in the /images folder for download or further analysis.

You can follow my @X account which has been blocked atm. You can also become a Patreon

The BRICS are a group of countries that banded together to attempt to counter the robbery perpetrated by the USA because the USA can print dollars. If food is scarce or oil is expensive all countries used to have to pay in Dollars, which they have a limited amount of, yet the USA could always print more and buy whatever they needed. Also when the USA wanted it could print new dollars and cause inflation, which meant that ‘dollar poor’ countries could not buy a lot of commodities that they needed.

The idea is to create a gold backed currency. Its not sure what that means. It can mean unfractional gold equivalent, meaning if you hold a unit of the currency, you can go to a bank and get physical gold in exchange. It can also be fractional gold (like Bullion market certificates. The London Bullion market is fractional 1 to 100 for example, banks will always defraud you). Either way this plan is doomed to failure. Its not that it doesn’t represent an attractive alternative as a store of value, its that it can’t do what the dollar does atm.

The original ‘Gold Standard’ for international currencies worked such that you could always buy gold in return for dollars. All countries had gold reserves and the amount of currency was clearly limited and needed to be balanced across the countries that had hard currencies (that mattered in terms of trade and wealth creation). The gold standard was inherited from the labor intensive economy that preceded the coal and oil and gas based fossil economy. It is easy to understand why you can have a gold in a labor intensive economy. The number of workers is quite constant, meaning the population, just like the amount of gold and productivity per person. So if five man can make a hundred pizzas each evening you need say one dollar per pizza in gold (say in 1930) in circulation to pay each for the pizzas. That dollar needs to pay for all the labor and materials that went into the making of the pizza. In a population stabile system this means the gold backed dollar price of a pizza will move until it settles where this works. Then it stays there because the system has a fixed nr of workers, farmland, but also pizza places (the population doesn’t change!). A gold standard works here.

Now in real life 1930 the US population was already growing rapidly. What was the reason? Fossil based fertilizer, mechanization, expansion of farming. Something strange was happening as well, some people got really really rich : Oil companies. How was that possible? Well, before the money you pay for anything would end up with a worker, a human being that did the work. After the introduction of diesel and gasoline engines, those fuels did a lot of the work, and money ended up with the person you bought that fuel from. The oil companies got massively rich because of the gold standard and the fact the economy was not designed to deal with the expansion in productivity and work fossil fuel based mechanization afforded. Everyone knows the name Rockefeller and his company ‘Standard Oil’. He made his shareholders very rich (kept only 35% of profits in the company) because of the amount of oil he produced and the work it did was indeed extemely valuable (making $21,321,800,000 of 2023 dollars in 22 years of operation). Funny we don’t even think that’s a big number anymore, but back then it was insane.

Rockefeller showed the gold standard was incompatible with having a fossile energy based economy. It was incompatible with having a ‘trade balance’ with countries that used less or no fossil energy (who are now called poor or undeveloped). Two people fixed that. First Nixon went off the gold standard, then later Larry Summers killed caring about the debt, both national and international. These two actions caused the later 20th century boom of the US economy and the current unease with dollar supremacy in the world.

So what happened? Nixon said the Fed (which is just a group of US banks pretending to be another bank) could now print dollars and hand them out to people. Those people could go to the global oil markets which where priced in USD and buy all the oil/gas they needed. This oil/gas (fossil fuels) could then be used to power machines, make more machines, transport machines, do with the machines what they where for (build, farm, go to war) and thus the US dollar became the fuel source and favored reserve currency in any countries. Several things happened, the oil crisis (people in the oil rich countries wanted a bigger cut as they saw what was happening) and the establishment of fixed and then floating exchange rates and the ‘Special Drawing Rights‘ which is a basket of currencies that can be used to settle international debts, made up out of the five major currencies (Yen, Dollar, Euro, Yuan, Pound).

All the above happened because people realized there was a lot of oil gas and coal, people could live wealthy and in peace using it. The same happened in Europe with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. ‘No need for war, just make sure you don’t fight over coal and steel’ was the idea. The monuments of that deal are still found all over Europe, huge extremely dirty often derelict coal/steel mills. They where a foundation of cooperation and that cooperation still continues.

But back to the USD, this had now become the ‘Petrodollar’ and as such it supplied the life blood to every corner of the world. I was in Cambodja recently and there you can pay with local Riel, which has demonimations going to less than a Eurocent, or USD. Elsewhere the same thing. Africa, middle America, all poor countries climb up by mechanizing and to mechanize you need fuels and fuels are (where). mostly for sale in USD. I believe trust in the USD is still strong and I believe it will remain so.

Larry Summers and his team then pushed the US presidents to just take the oil by printing USD. This happened under Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama and Trump. Finally those that where stuck believing the US was on a gold standard realized it was on an oil standard and the fact oil was sold in dollars meant he US had the treasure chest of the world. Other countries could make stuff if you gave them dollars for it, they would buy the oil in dollars and keep some for themselves. China became an industrialized country because of this power of the USD. Meanwhile everyone was still told the budget needs to be balanced blah blah blah (except by Larry Summers). What needed to happen though was the US needed to dominate the oil producing countries and produce oil itself!

Iran tried to move to payment in gold for their oil (2012) but also way in the beginning (when its oil was taken by British Petroleum, formarly the ‘Anglo-Persian Oil Company’) it of course accumulated a lot of gold and silver. This didn’t work out well for Iran. Saddam Hussein same thing, he was hung for it. All this because in the US people knew a simple thing “If we control oil wells or can buy oil in USD, we keep the power of the USD, if we don’t we will lose it!”. Strong persistent leadership is often based on very simple ideas, in general it is ”Serve banks and fossil and you will do well” in politics. It means with any question you only have to ask yourself “what would banks and fossil say” and give that answer. But I digress.

According to this tweet/X message the Petrodollar agreement made by Nixon has come to an end. Interesting. Its called the ‘Nixon Shock‘.

But back to the BRICS which added China and Saudi Arabia recently. They are peoples that want to get control of their own wealth and resources for their own population and security, not be ransacked by the US using USD or weapons afforded by the unfair control over the fossil energy supply and unfair dependency of many manufacturing countries on the USD. I claim the following : A gold based currency will not work. Where will the gold be mined and by whom? Who will now be the emitter of this new BRICS currency (most likely China who has a vested interest in Russia’s implosion under Putin)? So the Yuan will be the new gold backed currency but its main purpose in trade is to secure fossil energy to replace the goods you buy? And Saudi Arabia will participate and sell its oil for gold? But then the gold runs out? Also the amount of money will be limited by the amount of gold? This was all tried and didn’t work before. Clearly they have not thought things through at all!

This is the problem of the BRICs, its that in a mechanized economy, the most attractive currency is the one that makes most engines and motors run, and in the case of oil and gas these are even raw materials for plastics and ferilizers. Fossil is a complete solution to humans existential challenge if it wasn’t for the CO2 emissions. So the BRICS have to agree to pool their fossil resources, then have one bank emit the central BRICS currency, then allow it to be used in their economies. If China says it wants to be the leader it has to get Saudi Arabia to agree, Russia to agree. Guess what? This won’t be easy. Saudi Arabia could be the bank, the issuer. Then everyting China produces is always owned by Saudi Arabia, unless China supplies the fossil energy.

An injustice that is hard to settle is best left undiscussed and unmentioned. For years Holland provided natural gas to Italy at a discount. Why? Guess it was just a deal made by people concerned with the peace and harmony and the plight of italians. Why extract a lot of money from Italy for gas, Holland has been a very rich country for most of the 20th century. Its not an ‘injustice’ really, but when looked at by desperate or greedy people it sure seems to be. Those people don’t make the world work though. The key of wealth creation is cooperation, not competition or greed (so redundant desire to own). You can contrast on one side ‘economic cooperation’ and on the other ‘war’ if you want an extreme version if this wisdom.

It seems that if the BRICS want to launch their own currency, they have a challenge that I don’t know it can meet at the moment. Nigeria is also a big oil producer, it contemplates membership. It will also ‘pay’ the most if it does not control this currency. Will it be the Niara (currently at 0,00061 Euro). Nigeria is one of those countries that could seriously go to war with its fossil capital.

What would work? I think a new Dollar deal and of course the Roboeconomy, meaning rapid removal of fossil dependency of any country around the world. That is the problem people try to solve after all, to own their own productive capacity, not be dependend or be vulnerable to dollar based raids of their property and fruits of their labor. The BRICS currency should be renewable solar, wind, geothermal capacity (call it ‘Part One’) build in the BRICS countries and sold in a currency emitted for that purpose, local and depending on the capacity of those energy sources, say the Joulecurrency.org.

However, this does not match or answer the frustrations that drive the BRICS movement, it is run by people who crave power. For those the choice is either endlessly bicker over who gets to decide what the currency is and how much to be emitted, which means decades of war and conflict or tension all over a currency with deminishing value and with another one the Dollar still being a more stabile alternative (the more BRICS go their own way the more stabile the remaining USD will be). It is wiser to once more pool all the fossil fuels under the USD, to go to the FED banks and negotiate a distribution of USD fossil fuel prices (‘Part Two‘), which has been the case until late 20th century (oil was more expensive in Asia). This is the same process as allocating currency to renewable energy sources, so ‘Part one’, which should also happen.

So in short, the BRICS get a Joule currency for renewables and put major effort in distributing renewables across their territories and create a valuation agency that will emit the Joule currency (distribute it possibly as a basic income to the local population), and at the same time enter negotiations with the US about its dollar emission policies, where for example the FED prints money for all territories to the proportion of production or need for fossil energy. The local currencies can remain to support the Bioeconomy. In a way a ‘Global Coal and Steel Community’ meant to balance US fossil consumption with that of the world in a more equitable and fair way. This should please both the BRICS, the USA and most importantly the BANKS. This should include fossil energy reserved to build renewable energy source factories and battery factories, in short an agreed effort to transition to the Roboeconomy.

This way the BRICS country members don’t have to sit at their meeting tables wondering what the hell they should do, listing to poor labor intensive countries wanting a gold standard, knowing this doesn’t work for them etc. etc. This is my solution, I’m a Roboeconomist. If you like this post you can thank me at frits@rincker.nl or send me some money at Paypal info@climatebabes.com 😉

The world has gained enormously by SpaceX lowering the cost of access to space, as we will see succesfull take off and landing of its flagship Starship in the next months. Even without Starship its Falcon rocket lineup has become a low cost space elevator for all kinds of satellites, not the least of them being the Starlink constellation. These include laser and radio connected sats, but also new versions that can connect directly to the smartphone you already own. For now this will be for emergencies only but no doubt in newer versions it will be high bandwith video.

The drive to create these rockets has been the desire to colonize Mars to secure consciousness in the vast emptiness of our surrounding unconscious universe. Because of several unpredictable civilization level threats this is necessary, if only because at least some will get to enjoy the spectacle when they occur. “Well then the Yellowstone caldera exploded. Well then China nuked Russia” sounds better than the sound of the wind over barren rocks. Ignoring the threat of AI, who’s androids can wait in space no problem and be moved to Mars as bunches of grapes dragged after small rocketships (with some radiation detection?).

My interest is to slow down and halt climate change. We will and we probably will this century (2000-2100), thanks to robots, AI and renewables. But it is way harder to recover an overheated half dead planet from its state than to do it with a somewhat bruised one where the heat is not boiling the oceans and taking away half the oxygen production or doing worse.

The answer here is SpaceX and Starship. Just for the moment ignoring the enormous problem the economy poses to innovation, as Elon and SpaceX shown, because it prioritizes cashflow over wealth increases, we can say that when the Earth is modelled it has different zones where it accepts solar radiation, the top is cold, 25/75% regions are moderate and the middle 50% is hot (the equator) because the Sun’s rays hit it with the highest density through the least atmosphere.

To solve the warming crisis for decades the injection of sulfur in the stratosphere has been proposed, as a lazy ‘Ok moron, if you really insist lets say we could do this!’ kind of solution. Not thought through at all. It requires lofting massive amounts of sulfur (dioxide?) to high altitudes which would cause emissions and not present a permanent solution. Not good. But meanwhile we are lofting thousands of satellites that actually try to be inconspicuous to stargazers into relatively stabile orbits.

I don’t think its far fetched to propose to design a new type of satellite, an ultra light weight one that spreads the maximum surface of mylar (or something better) it can carry in a controlled fashion. Mylar can reflect sunlight back into space effectively canceling it out. It can lower the insolation (solar power) to the hottest regions of Earth. It has to be designed so it does not block the radiation from Earth back into space, so the altitude has to be high, but it does not need to be stationary, they can actually be controlled through Starlink (and possibly even be pushed up when they fall using laser).

This SpaceCanopy can form a band over the Equator alleviating some of the warming in the hottest regions, which will then mean that the more moderate regions have less heat to deal with as well. If they are timed right they only have to cover part of the circumference of Earth, that is if they spin along with Earth (no idea if it would mean we all wiggle a bit). @Grok doesn’t like the idea..

“Retrograde orbits (that move against the rotation of Earth) are less common than prograde orbits because they require more energy to achieve and maintain. This is because the satellite is working against the Earth’s rotation.

However, even in a retrograde orbit, a satellite wouldn’t be able to stay between the Sun and Earth. The dynamics of orbital mechanics don’t allow for a satellite to permanently position itself between two other bodies like the Sun and Earth. The closest we can get is the aforementioned Lagrange points, but even these don’t provide a permanent Sun-Earth barrier.”

(It may be the increased energy requirement is only during launch)

The idea is anyway to have a cloud of satellites orbit Earth so that they remain between Earth and the Sun or close to it. They can shield Earth from part of the light it sends to Earth and deflect it into space. Both the design and deployment of such system over time should be easy, even if the area it has to cover is enormous. It is a very safe, very controllable solution for which there will be enough resources. It can be added to all the actions we take on the ground and will especially be valuable to save our oceans from dying.

We may be able to design loftig sailplanes to do a similar thing..

This may actually help Asian countries in the medium term who are trying to deal with excessive heat and heatwaves. A gift of US ingenuity to them, preferable over war. But of course someone has to make the calculations and decide to try it.

Quite some ideas that have come to fruition in our world I first came across in comic books, or strips. As a european we had a rich supply of them from France, Belgium, Italy which where basically a sci fi psychedelic outlet for artists. But a very tranditional one was the Red Knight (Rode Ridder) who’s stories where set in medieval times, printed in one color, the cheapest way possible (you can google Rode Ridder, I don’t include images I didn’t make myself anymore because there’s a company in Denmark that mines image copyright infringements).

The red knight dealt with magic a lot, and in a discussion with a friend at the time (I was ~17), I said that eventually modern technology will be hidden and we will use magic spells to make things move, as was the case in the stories of the Red Knight (who sometimes also time travelled as that was a great way to make an interesting story).

There was anothe comic book that basically showed the Economistic Roboeconomy, in which the hero lands on a planet where robots have taken over and everything looks good in the city, but the people have left because they don’t have any credit to get anything from the robot army. This is totally the trajectory we are on right now. We need a full fledged Roboeconomy with a basic income, I am still hoping to find that book.

But I now see all kinds of ideas and devices being presented to help us in our daily lives. I think that will all go away. Simple reason is effort and cost. Why have a card with e-ink that shows you when your Starship ride to Sydney will leave? Why swipe it left or right? The AI that runs your life already knows. It reminded you, you behaved as if you where making yourself ready to travel, head to the spaceport. If you want to know the gate you ask it.

Navigation is an example how digital technology led to enormous savings. There are still street and road signs and they are maintained, but what priority will they get if everyone has Google Maps to tell them where to go (which can go quite wrong tbh, Google hire me!). Paper maps? Who has those anymore? I do like a compass on my watch btw, a very usefull feature if your movements don’t show your orientation on the digital map.

AI, voice and smartphones are the basic elements of a world that needs no signs or directions. That needs no controls except wireless access points. But with AI, cameras and its neural network ways to observe people (even according to some, using radio wave reflection/absorption), our world can run automatically, taking into account all actors, and giving those with the right role/intent/knowledge access to places, and others no access.

The problem I still see is the lack of need for people, especially in cities. Why would you maintain a life of a human that is stuck in a pod dreaming (consuming media) most of the time. It requires energy, the human does nothing usefull the AI can’t do. The whole environment of a city is anti-human, an obstacle to movement. So a fully economically optimized world with AI and cities will ditch humans eventually. This is why it is important to understand how to more or less survive AI as humanity which can be done by shifting to the Roboeconomy (introduction here).

As things stand with tiny ($10) modules now capable of AI, wireless build in, and AI via our phones understanding more about our lives and our world, we will probably get rid of a lot of devices and elements that are in our world to direct us and remind us and maybe even persuade us.

The economy wants us to have nothing in our heads, so then the AI will just direct us through our lives (and possibly even shield us from anything that may distract or inspire us), but we may also be taught by the AI so that we become more capable. The hardware is already here and massive AI servers are being planned. Access to AI compute will be the uplink to Starlink soon, with ever growing bandwith.

The question remains : What is in it for those developing the AI. Right now its a fight for profit, which brings into the world a lot of redundant and suboptimal, local solutions. But once, say, Amazon has managed to dominate both offering for sale and delivering and optimizing production of most of the things we need, what should AI be doing. Solving the problems we have in navigating our world eventually leads to solved problems. Our lives will be calm, all our needs provided for, all our anxieties met by soothing words of an ever present AI.

This world (which banks and the economy actually hate, so they try to cause war and destruction, financial crisis whenever we approach some kind of steady state) can be as quiet as living on a farm in nature, and we may forget all about the technology that is there to make it all happen. We may believe we are using magic when we say need to conjure up an electrical barge to take us over a lake. A device that maintains itself and stays out of sight most of the time.

Funny thing is that apart from a probable reduced risk to health and longer lifespan, if we are simply assisted in managing such farm, because its more pleasant for humans, then it doesn’t look much different from where we started.

Economism is wrecking the world. I define it as the banks maximizing cashflow and profit using their credit creation ability. The power of that credit is largely derived from the availability of fossil fuels, so I often refer to it as the carbon/credit or fossil/credit system. It is wrecking our planet and cities and societies because profit is not a measure of quality of life, welbeing, it only measures the importance of the financial system.

We see news all the time that is about this process of destruction, which includes clearcutting forrests, rising cost of everything including homes and medical bills, undermining education depleting our biosphere etc. etc. This may not be evident if you live only in an economistic location, although you know you constantly have to worry about money and try to spend it so you feel human. The best way to survive in an economistic environment is to work for a bank or a fossil pleasing company (any business that uses a lot of fossil fuels).

I was recently travelling through Asia and there the situation is still quite different. Countries like Cambodja are considered economically underdeveloped, and this is made synonymous with unsafe and risky to be in. One has to take this with a grain of salt, clearly the economies deny certain inventions to countries, even if they can very well replicate them. Thus the idea of superior inferior is for a large part artificial.

Another consideration is that the question is how we want to live. Do we want to live in a condo in Bangkok, driver our SUV to the mega shopping mall, and buy all the known brands there or do we want to live and survive with a family. You can do the latter being a rice farmer in the countryside. You will have no SUV and be unable to afford the stuff in the mall, but plenty to eat and apart from during the burning season be outdoors in a relatively peacefull environment.

Many think that farmer existence is hard, but of course if you add modern medicine and education it does not have to be. It is boring perhaps, and that seems the main reason people choose to try to ascend the economic ladder. This is not only a matter of desire, its also banks maximizing cashflow. A good example of this is found in Vietnam where seaweed farming could be big business, but because shrimp farming is more profitable, banks prefer to invest in those activities, even if it poisons all the other fish in the mangroves downstream.

We are used to complaining about the effect of banks, not about banks. So how do we take this destructive power from them, so that we only need them for things that can only be done with fossil energy, and not be delivered to banks habit to create an environment in which they become important (like densly populated cities and shopping malls). How to prevent your life and your planet from being farmed by banks?

The only way to do it is to create an alternative currency for the biobased economy. The biobased economy consists of all farming that does not require money to happen, at least not fossil credit, because it does not use any or barely any fossil fuels. The idea of such currency is not crazy, because if you go to Cambodia you can readily observe the biobased economy with its currency living side by side with the fossil based economy.

The local currency has demininations of less than $0.01 if you convert it. This makes sense because you can buy food and fish and meat in all types of quantities. The money in the biobased economy can circulate between farmers. If you have an imaginary economy with 100 farmers that have stabilized their annual output you would never have to increase or decrease the amount of money, as long as all farmers produce about the same value (so money does not get concentrated with one of them). Of course hand crafts and all manual work also belongs in the bioeconomy because it can be payed for with farm produce, directly or indirectly through the currency, the best example is farm work itself.

As said the currency in the biobased economy would see inflation and deflation depending on the output of this economy, so the tons of all foods produced, hours of services rendered. Or the central bank could print money or take it out of circulation. It doesn’t really need a bank, just a fair distribution of work and productivity.

An imporant aspect of the bioeconomy is that it has intrinsic interest in keeping food abundant, nature pristine and people healthy. It is not extractive, it does not move stuff about over thouasands of miles, because there is no need and because it would be too much effort (colonizers of Asia moved stuff with sailing ships, it would have been unlikely to be profitable doing it on horseback for example). You could say that using the wind to sail and transport stuff was a first example of a distortion of the bioeconomy. It meant for example the transport of oranges from Spain to England, which made spanish farmers farm them more, distorting the balance from a low risk generalized economy in a less stabile specialized one (although that’s not intrinsically bad).

But to get back to the currency, in Cambodja you can use the local coin, the Riel, or you can use US dollars. They like the US dollars for sure. Now you can ask how does this Dollar dependence and thus fossil credit currency dependence start? Very simple : Scooters. Motorization of the economy is a common aspect of all developing countries. People love being able to scooter wherever they need to go. To do it they need fuel, and to get fuel they need $$.

The way countries hook their people into the fossil credit world economy is by making fuel cheap enough to use scooters. Also any resource that is pristine, valuable because it has become scarce in the economistic (another word for fossil credit economic) countries can then be extracted because the population has become addicted to fuel, and has discovered all the clever and pleasant things the developed countries are producing. This is also done through a very strong distortion by advertisement and all kinds of means to which the people living a tranquil biobased existence are not really used.Before they know it they are trapped in a city, living in a massage parlour but if they are very lucky, they made $$ in a previous generation or are usefull to help ‘develop’ the country, they get the jobs that afford them the SUV.

Now this is not a plea to go back to near poverty subsistence farming, it is only a plea to create and maintain a separate currency for what is biobased and manual labour as opposed to what is machine based or fossil energy based. I made it before in a piece called “The Euro, the Auro and the Joule” to fix the fossil price distortion in Europe, separating labour, renewable energy and fossil energy. This is a rethink based on my trip in Asia, as the deterioration brought on by fossil credit really made it clear mixing biobased and fossil credit destroys the biobased economy, simply because there is way more fossil credit abundance and it goes into activities that are mostly harmfull, because banks want to maximize their cashflow and nothing else.

The basic idea is to have a currency that can circulate among people that are doing things outside fossil dependency, and that there’s a central source of that currency to maintain price stability. This source is automatic, and it distributes money to all participants equally or takes a % from them. If one of the participants is hoarding money the total amount in circulation drops so there should be negative interest rates which redistribute the money over time. There is no way to change this biobased currency, the Auro in the previous post, to the fossil currency (the Euro for example). This is quite clearly matched by the fact you can not exchange Riel in Thai banks, only Yen, Dollar, Euro, Yuan. Another clear sign there are two economies with different interests.

The benefit of a closed biobased currency is that the people using it have a vested interest in a pristine and healthy natural environment. No pesticides in the produce or animals caught or farmed. There is no desire to drive production to a maximum, just to a level where the necessary inputs are covered. There is no need to be a meat farmer with 100% optimized everything, because you are not trying to earn money to become ever richer, you are also not in any debt with any fossil credit bank (usually the way they drive people to want to earn more $$).

Renewable energy can be an intrinsic part of this bioeconomy because renewables typically do not harm or pollute nature. They can be privately owned and the power can be shared using electric cars or a grid as usual. There is no need to live in the middle ages. Most modern inventions are not fundamentally dependent on a specific energy source. When renewables are used, which can also be owned by a city or cooperative or province, you do not need a bank.

Ionic desalination click this link

Ionic Liquid Desalination? click here

Wind/ water condensation click this link

Overview Atmospheric Water Harvesting click here

Freeze desalination click this link, english text at bottom

Desalination by freeze crystalization

Cryodesalination

IDE technologies

I first head the world ‘Biobot’ in the context of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. After the explosion it was necessary to remove chunks of graphite from the roof of the reactor, and this was very dangerous work. Radiation was extremely high. To deal with this the Russians took soldiers, whom they designated ‘Biobots’, which would each go on the roof once, with lead protection, for a few minutes only, take one chunk and get out of there. This worked, the cancer statistics of this group do not show it doomed them.

Its a good question why that name was invented. Robota is just the russian word for working, so robots (for workers) would have been fine, it seemed there needed to be a kind of distance from being a person, from individual will implied by the word. The men did the job without concern for themselves, altruistically for the nation. Not strange for soldiers.

How is this relevant today? We are in an AI revolution. Unlike any time in the past we now have devices that can talk to us, see and listen with us, can know and absorb information super quickly, and above all, can instruct us and direct us. This is not just about being entertained or having a car that drives you, it is about having the most ergonomic cognitive intereface to humans ever, and it is still improving.

While Apple tries to put us all in pods with the Apple Vision Pro, where we imagine we will soon be wearing them while floating in slime, cut off from the world, uncaring if it even exists anymore, others try to race towards having android robots, humaniods, that can walk and thus talk like us, human scale, to replace humans in shitty jobs and places, and be active in life like people are.

I fear this will run into resource and energy problems, unless Sam Altman gets his $7 Trillion, in which case its still not like he can push a button and have all the stuff he needs. It will take a decade to build up production of both energy and the materials, mine the metal etc. etc. This leaves us with largely overlooked alternative : People.

I am in a hotel in Cambodia and the son of the owner can’t even make sense of me explaining I owe him xyz for the room. You could say he could augment his intelligence with an app to translate what I say to him. Even then he might not understand. Now if you took a person that was just bright enough to pick things up, you could have this person run the hotel, teach him english when nobody is bothering him. If you had an AI assistant with that role. I come to the desk, I say “I want to pay” the assistent tells the person in Cambodian “This person want to pay ask for room and look up the date here”. This could go well every time. Now does the person use AI or does AI augment the person?

My idea of AI is that it just makes things happen, but we are short of actuators, robots, machines, devices to actually move stuff and do stuff in the world. At the same time we have (literally) armies of people that are just not educated enough to understand and thus do many things correctly. The logical conclusion is that this is a mineable resource, an empowering and enabling potential that can greatly accelerate the advantageous effect of AI on the world.

Taking this idea further one can imagine that people that work in some job right now, can be assessed for potential of doing work with AI, as a kind of Biobot or Biohumanoid, because they are capable of turning the instructions of the AI, possibly aided by images, into precise actions. Its like a person that can make a recipy from a cookbook. Not everybody can. Once you can do it, you can cook almost every dish.

The role of biohumanoids can be profound, because it does not mean you have to do one job only. You can be a teacher for some people, an assistent for another, fix a car if that is called for, repair a light switch the next moment. All this because a lot of our actual skills and experience is about being able to imagine the steps to take to get to a specific result. AI can provide us with that imagination, with the twist that it can explain anything we don’t get about it, decide when or where to do it and keep an eye on many other relevant factors.

I would like to know if an AI augmented worker in a factory could be more productive or more motivated. Of course we have all kinds of screens for workers to look at and indicators. But do they talk, do they know the worker, do they keep an eye on things to do? How much skill does a worker need to have, and doesn’t AI mean we can do a lot more simply by using more people?

Moebius is a comic artist, who sadly passed away, but he made a comic I read as a child of a soldier that was on a wasted battlefield, being tracked by some robot. He had a gun he could talk to, that motivated him. He got shot in the story, by the robot. Then the robot operated on him to revive him, and left so it could continue doing what it was designed to : Shoot soldiers. We will probably have many compagnions once AI becomes less energy hungry and more prolific.

I think the use of well instructed people, the more intelligent persuance of education, the modelling of cities and what the people in them need, will be necessary to use the full potential of AI, with the use of said people. Just like a kitchen in a restaurant is nothing without a good chef, even if there are many cooks in there, the world my see it will be much better with AI to work out and direct how ideas are implemented. Good ideas of course, which we all want to work on. Thus the potential of humans will be used and if it is done ‘roboeconomically’ this doesn’t even have to cost the environment or us a dime..

No images, sorry got copyright challenged recently.

The story of the Windward Performance Perlan 2 glider is amazing, and tells of an intelligent and ambitious community getting a cool thing done. What its about is a phenomenon of winds driven up to unusal heights by mountain ranges. A glider pilot wondered if those winds could not be used to bring a glider up to incredible heights, and he actually succeeded (part way from the maximum achievable) in 2018.

The above video shows a look from inside the cockpit, its pressurized as the air pressure is only 3% of sea level pressure. Amazingly on this thin atmosphere its still possible to glide. Its unknown how long one can stay aloft or if its possble to return to the lifting airstream (it probably is).

The simple idea is to not try to loft people up but reflective materials, so large sheets of white reflective material, as part of some kind of swarn of gliders or parachute like devices. All with a simple controller. Their main job is to be carried up and stay there for a considerable amount of time.

Best would be if they where biodegradable, or fully recyclable, or could return themselves to the lofting airstream. That would (except for when the winds died) allow them to cast shade on the land below for a long time. This method of increasing Albedo or Managing Solar Radiation could help return moisture to the surface (cool clouds so it rains) but who knows it could be scaled up.

We need to reflect more sunlight back into space and the higher this is done the less in warms the atmosphere. If the atmosphere gets too hot winds will die but even then the rotation of the Earth and the inertia of air will cause it to flow against mountains. There is next to no discourse on solar radiaton management except in the super esoteric realm and to dismiss it.

We need to openly discusse these kind of ideas and try some out. The undeveloped world is not necessarily a victim of climate change as one can make highly reflective materials with biomass. To the point of flying shading devices, if you know of any initiatives send a message to @climatebabes at X.com or info@greencheck.nl