Month: January 2022

The L1 Shade

Climate change is ultimately the Sun warming the Earth. As our atmosphere can’t shed enough heat due to accumulation of greenhouse gasses, the average temperature is running up. One idea would be to shade the Earth. You would think “How is this possible” but it is indeed possible due to some quirky aspects of our solar system.

The Earth travels around the sun, and both the Sun and Earth have a gravitational pull on objects. The Sun is much bigger than Earth, but yet we do not fall towards the Sun if we walk across our planet. This is because gravitation gets much stronger the closer you are to a body. If you where to float upward, travel above the Earth and towards the Sun you would at some point start to feel more gravitational pull from the Sun than Earth. If you where put in that exact location between the Earth and Sun you would be traveling at high speed around the sun, just like Earth, but otherwise stay where you are. This point is called the L1 point, the Lagrange point L1 (there are others too).

So the question is how much surface would you have to deploy at L1 to shade the Earth entirely, and it would be shaded constantly because the L1 point and the shade you position there would stay in place relative to Earth and Sun. Below a schematic drawing of this situation. The Sun is 147 km away, it has a radius (Rs) of about 700.000 km. Earth (Re) about 6300 km. L1 is 1.5 million km away. The shade of the Sun has to cover the entire radius of the Earth, so the triangle you can draw has no point in Earth, but you can make the calculation by subtracting Re from Rs, then later adding it as if there is a rectangle and a triangle combined..

This calculation yields a radius at L1 of 7000 km, combined with Re this is about 13.400 km. If you made a disc of thin metal you would need to cover 565.073.031 km2 to shade Earth completely. Practically it would be likely any object would 1. Not shade Earth completely and 2. Orbit around L1 a bit closer to Earth (which would require it to be smaller). Whatever would orbit there would not stay there freely, it may actually experience perssure from the Sun. I am not sure. But this kind of surface is not beyond mankind to cover I think. Nor is it a far out idea as human artifacts are already found at L1. Maybe the solar pressure could be neutralized by gravitational pull, putting the shade closer to the Sun.

Turns out that this idea was propsed in Holland and the tought was to launch a large number of satelites that would unfold solar sails and be positioned at L1 to block 1% of solar radiation.

Another possibly cheaper option is to blow regolith into the L1 point to create a dust cloud that would eventually fall into the sun or be blown onto Earth.

Great use for some SpaceX Starships? Great place for a huge space colony?

What do you think? You can comment to @climatebabes on Twitter 😉

Why be in $tsla

Tesla started as something Elon supported, in a hands off way. He had given control over a group of people to build the Tesla Roadster, I guess he was reading rocket science books or trying to get SpaceX going and did not expect to be needed. He was needed, Tesla lost a lot of time and money because of bad management, so he took over the reigns.

Elon is focussed. He makes choices. The time you win by not doing what has no future relevance is quite significant, but it doesn’t feel nice. You are forcing yourself to do the things you understand are necessary, but your body may not be ready for it. Elons asperger nature came in pretty handy because it both allows untangled focus and reduces emotional attachement (which he clearly does have though). We are quite blessed with someone that has been made aware of his individuality quite early, one that has an aggressive drive he has decided to steer towards an altruistic outcome. But that’s enough of psychologizing Elon Musk.

Most people don’t have a clue about reality, the real reality. They know a lot about promises and myths told to them, but most have never been pushed to explore or question their world. They have not been given access to learn about their world, to take other viewpoints. If you have, you may be considered unlucky or raised well, it seems a good father ensures his kids don’t love him so much they refain from exploring or doubting his word. This is a sacrifice many parents never consider, but one that makes kids stronger. If you are pushed into the world and feel left to your own devices you will learn more.

The quest to break into the car market with an EV was extremely tough, and the strategy depended on people with cash, because banks are against EVs, they are like returning cashflow which fossil fuels ensure. Tesla sold their first roadster to patient and wealthy people who where as enthousiastic about the idea of EVs as Elon. This afforded him to build the Model S, this allowed him to build the Model X and 3 and now the Y. The X was a result of overreach, I can’t imagine how many people will have been send in from banks and legacy car makers to screw Elon over and try ot make him fail. Another EV maker’s workshop was burned to the ground. Rivian has been a pretend EV maker for years.

In a bid to survive Tesla did everything it could to make money. Part of the first Roadster development process yielded battery packs that Mercedes could use. Mercedes-Benz AG can be credited with helping Tesla in a crucial phase. It is a testament of pure thought on the side of Mercedes, not pure delusion as we now see happening in the US. Of course Tesla used incentives and got some subsidies, but legacy car makers where bailed out, sell al their monster trucks with loans, fossil fuels are subsidized, the amount of support government and banks give to fossil gas guzzlers in the US is disgusting.

Tesla grew as fast as it could. It drew in all dependencies because once the Model S and Roadster caught on and where beating the best of the internal combustion cars it was full on war. Don’t believe that nobody tried to buy all Lithium or all USB cables or something like that to make Tesla run down its financial reserves and crash. I know personally from the constant nonsense about Tesla I hear from bank lakeys (usually right wing voters well to do who read the economist and repeat right wing news because they basically want to be left alone). This war has entered a new phase it seems..

The basic loop : Try, Review, Reorient, Repeat

The process of Tesla is simple : It sets goals, it focusses on achieving those goals, it corrects its proces with a humane touch (in contrary to Amazon), but it corrects relentlessly, without sentimentality. It itterates because every itteration means your behaviour becomes more effective. It uses driven people that have forced themselves to some notable achievement, because that’s what you need to optimally utilize a human mind, be internally driven and willing to endure discomfort to get something right.

While other car companies have been comforted with assured affordability (loans) and bank enthousiasm because of a large army of suppliers that all would generate cashflow and of course make profit, Tesla minimized these costs by figuring it should only need to take in the raw materials and do to it what is needed to end up with a car. This ensured both a reliable production process and lower cost. Tesla has reached all the way to the mines to improve its raw materials supply chain. Legacy car companies have NOT.

The above is just the car manufacturing side of Tesla, but Tesla also makes batteries, battery packs for utilities, solar shingles and plans to be its own energy company. It has an AI arm to develop Full Self Driving autonomous cars (Roadbots as I call them since 2017) and wants to apply the FSD know how to a bipedal bot called Optimus.

Now the $tsla stock is down on a huge production and profit ‘beat’ (unexpected windfall). Some ‘whales’ (big investors) sold off and the stock is down 20% where it should be up. The fundamentals of Tesla are ridiculous, there is a ‘price to earnings’ logic where the price of the share is now very low. However this is not what drives stock prices…

Stocks are bought and sold at moments in time, resulting in ‘volume’ which varies from minute to minute and hour to hour. There is some ‘market making’ necessary because it will never be the case that a buyer at a price will meet a seller at a price at exactly the same time. This is how stock markets and banks profit of stocks : I want to buy at $1050 someone wants to sell at $1045, the banks buys the stock, and sells them to me and takes $5. Banks steal money all the time where ever they can, it makes people need more money!

The volume can be very low, meaning while there are 900 millon Tesla shares outstanding volume can be 3000 shares over a minute. If during that minute people really want to buy Tesla because they learned something new, and they think it will be $1200 while the price is $900 they will bid $930 to be done quickly, the sellers from $800 to $930 hand over their shares, the bank takes its cut and the price is raised to $930. Same thing if people thing the stock will drop to $850 and it is now at $900 a seller will be happy to sell at $890 to make it a sweet deal and be done quickly. Sometimes the stock is just dumped and the bank can make the price!

What I am trying to convey in the above is that stock prices can be sensitive to small sell offs and events that cause investors to suddenly buy or sell. The price is like the direction of the car, while the talk is the steering which is sometimes not well connected or delayed. People that point to the fundamentals will be frustrated because a small selloff at a low volume moment will move the price for all holders of the stock. This is exactly the same with crypto currencies, except that there is a real company underlying the stock which you in principle co-own if you own the stock.

Now why hold Tesla stock right now? Reasons :

  1. It is a company that will make ever more profit on every car it sells
  2. It is a company that will create a closed low cost system to provide energy and mobility to millions at an accelerating pace
  3. It is a company that can enter new markets with ease, and has the mentality to do it not with the aim to create as much cashflow in the economy, but cashflow towards the company.
  4. It is a company that develops its own cutting edge AI software and has the platform to optimize and improve it independently
  5. It is a company that knows the details of its raw materials production chain, in short it doesn’t have to enter the markets and it does not have to use money if it can provide its products and energy to its suppliers.
  6. In short this company is bound to draw in money from the world while needing ever less to make ever more profitable products.
  7. No legacy company or competing EV company has comparable scope or proven ability or even ambition. They will all be struggling in an economy 100% dictated by banks who keep profit margins as high as possible to maximize cashflow (basically gouging anyone that tries to be useful). Tesla evades this system as much as it can.

In case of inflation, in case of a financial crisis, in case of a supply chain crisis, which company would you rather own? Tesla, GM, Apple. Its no longer a matter of goodwill or charity to be in Tesla, it seems to be a safe place to put your money. Also as dividend is often taxed it could be that Tesla will start to buy back its own shares some time in the future. Google does that already (3% per year). Personally I just want it to build those 100 battery factories Elon said where necessary to transition the planet to sustainable energy, but whatever comes next, I’m in!

Categories
ev roboeconomy

Tesla, Optimus and the Roboeconomy

Tesla is developing a robot called Optimus, it will be a humanoid, biped, walking with arms. It is a big challenge as walking has been a notorious problem for many robot projects (which has been solved by Boston Dynamics), and manual dexterity is another. Tesla is still working with ‘statistical’ deep learning/transformer networks, and is only optimzing a few vectors (or one really) for its cars. A body needs many.

Elon Musks fear of AI is fair, it is becoming real easy to make machines perform tasks once reserved for humans. A board of $20 can recognize voices and objects, even has a camera. This can be used for good, but also for evil. You can with some hacking build a gun that can shoot specific targets, even a specific person from a distance. Who will get convicted for that crime? Real ‘autonomous’ AI today can only exist in the sky. Autonomous is between quotes because such device will have a ‘preference’ build in. But it is totally concievable to have it scan the ground for objects like guns mounted on cars, and destroy them without intervention.

We can go into a lot of AI risks here but it may be more interesting to expand om Elon’s insight during his ’21 Q4 Earnings call, where he wondered what the economy even means if there is no shortage of labour (which is possible if you have a general purpose android). I have written about this world often on this blog, and named it the Roboeconomy, in short the Roboeconomy is a world in which robots are powered by renewables (and AI is assumed to have progressed). I said this Roboeconomy is where humanity is heading, and it is completely different from the current fossil credit economy.

The question that shows the difference that I asked in my post on the Roboeconomy of 2011 is:

“If we had a machine that made everything we needed,

would we all be jobless and unable to afford anything,

or would everything be free?”

The basic difference between the current and the roboeconomy is that nobody owns the energy you use, so whatever you produce with it, you don’t need to share it with anyone. Of course if you don’t share others may have nothing. Does that mean others starve or do you still share because it you who owns the energy source and produced it do not experience any loss in doing so?

In the fossil credit economy most money ends up with either energy companies or banks, both have no real use for the money

In the fossil economy we always pay for things because there are first owners of the energy we use. Fossil companies and banks own the energy and the money we use to allocate it first, then we borrow it and consume the energy. This ties us into the ‘economy’ which maximizes the power and control of banks and fossil companies. We have to go back to the gas station and find new money to buy fuel. We are forced to live in expensive homes we have to pay a ‘mortgage’ on, which also forces us to go out and find/make money. Our environment is a desert because we can’t just find what we need in it (energy and money), we have to haggle with others for it. It is this dependency that is carefully maintained and protected by our banks, who also push right wing un empathic politics. They create the fossil economic machine that is destroying our environment and climate.

If the energy is renewable we are free, we can be located in the middle of nowhere as long as we have the technology to make what we need with the energy we harvest we are good. It was clear that AI and chip technology was going to make it easier to do that. 3D printing, maker bots, deep learning development where going to allow us to eventually make almost everything anywhere. It would take human ingenuity at first, but AI aided physics modelling and CAD systems would help and eventually you would practically end up with machines that can make anything we need in any quantity we want.

Elon has been able to bring about the environment and actions that are getting us so close to this reality, where I personally did not advance beyond thinking about it, tinkering with electronics and tiny robots at home. But the significance of this push with respect to the climate crisis can not be underestimated. This is what I wrote about before : The climate crisis can not be solved within the present economy, it has to be solved with renewables because fossil fuels would be a limiting factor and above that add CO2.

What we need to solve the crisis is a lot of manipulation of our planet and a lot of activity in places where nobody lives or wants or can live at the moment. High level AI driven robots are a solution to that challenge, and robots on renewables are an obvious requirement. With those two factors you can repair the planet’s eco system, fight problems where they occur, do so much that weak organic people can not or do not want to do.

If Tesla manages to build an Optimus robot that can assemble itself, that can organize the gathering of resources needed for its creation itself, that can process those raw materials to get the parts and components to create itself itself, the world can feel relieved because it could secure parts of the economy using the AI, and not have fallible people chase after things.

It would also possibly have to deal with the freedom of these AIs, with their desires and needs, as these AIs would have to have drives other than servitude to a master. I wrote about this (some posts are missing, the last 7 years due to a WP update). The risk of a freely roaming android to humans can be protected by giving it a detailed sense of what humans are. We could also give them a detailed sense of what Earth is (for which I suggested to build an ‘Earth simulator’ that can also be used to see effects of climate action). Of course basic ‘do not touch’ rules and auditory sensitivity (for calls of distress) would be good ‘demotivators’ of intentions.

It is exciting to think about robots restoring the ecology, as it is to think about a robot you can send on an errant. The fluidity will depend on the computational capacity that these androids can carry, humans basically always want to do everything, but our environment usually only allows us to do what we can safely or decently do. It seems the Tesla cars have to filter the situation they see and select abilities for specific situations in a more exclusive manner, but they can in principle switch much more often than humans (we are stuck with 100 ms at least and longer for realities we did not expect at all). We can probably do a lot already with way less capable AIs and control systems.

It seems logical for Elon to go after productivity enhancing versions of the android first, then after the humanoid aspect and then after the Generalized AI aspect. The bots will take jobs away, but make production cheaper, and this is where the conondrum of the Roboeconomy becomes important to answer. I have suggested that if such reality comes about, the people do not need jobs, but they are not starving for lack of income because the receive a basic income. Because they just allocate energy to the producers of the products they like, and the energy is free because it is renewables, people can enjoy a free life as if they are living in a garden of Eden.

Wealth is a function of Energy, Raw materials and Skills, money is not a factor!

We forget our media really needs to capture our attention in order to teach us we need to buy products and live a certain lifestyle. The constant reminder of the existence of shiny people in huge shiny mansions with white teath, fair skin, lush hair, cozy families and interiors, is not to make us happy, but to make us consume fossil fuels and generate cashflow for banks. They world without those forces also has different people in them, people that are more content with less, that are free to travel and do good, people not stuck in horrible jobs. Once we can escape the fossil credit economy, we will not know why we ever accepted it.

The XGO-Mini Robot dog

I was looking for a test platform to learn more about robotics, and came across a kickstarter on Indigogo, now closed. It was for a “Advanced Quadruped Robot With AI Modules”. I have some experience with MCUs and AI, servo’s and electronics so I thought I’d participate. That was in November 2021. The website is www.xgorobot.com where you can find links to repo’s and firmware.

The parcel arrived yesterday, and I quickly checked it out. Its not a Boston Dynamics machine, it does not have paw sensors. It is mostly a platform of servo’s in the right configuration. Powered down the legs dangling do feel a lot like a small cat sleeping, legs bending become a tangle fast.

When you start the robot up it shows a menu on the K210 screen. It has quite simple hardware, a K210 and MSP32 Wifi chip. The menu includes face recognition, face tracking, gesture recognition. The dog will move in respons to the face or hand gestures.

I still have to connect to the board by USB (connector on the front) and investigate the Git Python repo’s. Best case one can upload code to the dog using a library but I have not found an explanation on how to do that yet. Also the app I downloaded does not have all the features.

USB port, Headphone port? Micro SD card visible..
No soft underbelly

My next step will be to find out more about the AI module and how to script the Robot. Have to find an installer for the XGO programming environment

A good intro in the video below..

XGO mini with cover and batteries removed. The main board in the body is holds the batteries and channels the control signals (which seem to be I2C)
K210 board with display removed. This is the only control board..
Back of the display board which also has the microphone plug and USB port.

The Fate of Women in an Unorderly Energy Transition

Our economy does not want to transition to renewables. Its members, the banks and the fossil industry are fighting hard to slow down us closing down the last oil and gas well. They propose ways to waste renewables, by making Hydrogen (wastes 70%) and want to rebrand unrenewable and bank friendly energy types like gas and nuclear as part of the ‘green’ energy basket.

This concerted effort to delay the growth of renewables is increasing the risk of an unorderly transition. One in which war and famine and chaos are going to happen. Without good energy sources we all basically live in a fossil poor Balkan or Middle East state because all the wealth we have in the most developed countries comes from using the vast fossil energy reserves we managed to control.

Women are now often the people advocating for a fast transition. Greta Thunberg worries about the long term effects which are horrendous. Other parties have similar concerns. The dishonest claim of (allways pro fossil) right wing parties that they stand for economic growth is clear if you realize we can grow to 2500 times our current world economy on renewables, not on fossil fuels. The Left is near dead because it can’t reconcile its capture in the fossil economy with its desire to replace it with a renewables based one (“I want a job, but not one it this economy!”).

Women are prominent on every side of the fossil debate, but it seems there is a silent majority that does not like the idea of a transition or that has not really thought about the risks. We don’t have to mention all the women that want to parade Prada bags and their sycophants. This is not a generalization. You have other women that just want to take care of their families in the harsh environment banks create for everyone. There are many trying to reach some kind of station in the economy, which can cost them their conscience because they have to sell out to fossil interests. Very few women are left to do the right thing or drive the debate to where it needs to be “Why are we on this fossil ration and how do we safely transition?”

The risks are significant. Women are unsafe because crime is opportunistic, so we all behave nicely because we can’t get away with being assholes. Parts of society where less attention is given to how people behave are consequently more chaotic and dangerous. A good example of what would happen if fossil resources where suddenly cut of right now is Afganistan, where the men are indoctrinated not to empthize to much with women to begin with. Families sell daughters for food. Women are forced into temporary ‘marriages’ for protection or food. It’s turned from a place where women aspire to get educated to a hellhole in a few months time.

All the men in the West with SUVs and big homes and nice holidays are worth shit if the fossil energy flow stops. Then they turn out to be pretty useless, all the devices stop working, all the safety is gone even if they already choose to live in a gate community. Energy keeps us all safe and this is not being discussed at all, not even by women!

The recent gas shortages where a shock, and measures where taken (a deal that may have pitted Germany against Russia in order for Germany to gain Gas from the US (with Holland as a stepping stone)), but there is an end to the flexibility of the system. In the shadow of this calamity energy companies seemed to have upped checking the useage of gas, so they visited people at home to take a reading. Some women reported the person reading the meter came on to them. No proof of any wrong doing can be given but in an economy where banks put everyone on the edge a reading that cuts your gas bill by 1000,- Euro can be a nice gesture.

Consider the above an imaginary scenario, but I once saw a french movie (where else) about a woman that had to sleep with the owner of the camping she lived in order to get a new tank of gas. I guess it is clear where I am going. Women are not safe in an unordely transition to renewables. This should be a topic because that means many people, women and men, will want to hang on to the security of fossil fuel dominance (which the shortages showed to be pretty feeble). This makes sense but it can’t mean the fossil banking system does not force a rapid transition for society to be secured. But this is something they are openly fighting against.

So where are the men and women to point this danger out (besides me)?

P.S. Fossil/banking interests will allow society to deteriorate because they can always serve the elite. In fact they need a suffering group of people to scare the rest to stay in their system. They would be fine with women being abused, but you would not be allowed to empathizes with them. The revolutionary act for women is to fully accept the value of their intimacy and the right to choose how to use it, and to not try to define a norm where transactions of intimacy are looked down upon.

Categories
ev

Splitting the Economy

The world economy does not like renewable energy, it does not understand it. The problem is that renewables can be owned by you and me or local companies or municipalities. This means the energy can used to do stuff, but no money needs to change hands. This in turn leads to banks losing control over their economy. I say ‘their’ because it is a fact that the world economy is created by banks, run by banks, protected by banks, all in service of banks.

Banks fight the dying of their light, which was their role in distributing and allocating fossil fuels. Renewables will mostly be generated where they are needed. The proponents of more grid are trying to make it so energy can come from far away, once again requiring the use of money to trade it, but smart people will reject the creation of a long distance energy market as a waste of prescious time to fight climate change.

There is little hope for many countries though, as the political system seems to reject anyone who does not first look at economistic interests (meaning the security of banks). If you don’t you just don’t get elected, you are not taken seriously. Even if you do you still use the same money as everybody else, you can not differentiate that you want to use renewables to do what you want to do. This also means that banks can lend to competitors of renewables, directly or by lobbying governments, while not lending to people who drive growth of renewables or their supporters.

The best way to solve this problem is to split the economy in two : A fossil/nuclear one and a renewable powered one. I wrote about a way before, which would be to create a separate currency the Joule (renewable) vs the Euro for fossil/nuclear. A third currency would be for labour (the Auro) but this may be unnecessary seeing the speed of automation and development of AI.

Why would you create a Joule economy next to a Euro economy? The reason is that in the Joule economy products and services payed with Joules are priced vs the availability of renewable energy (either directly or stored in batteries). The emission of Joules into the (what I call) Roboeconomy.com is different from a bank writing out a loan (after having concluded all the money+interest will be retured eventually), which is quite simple and introduces many risks (inflation, delflation, bubbels etc.). Instead the amount of Joules will be given to the owner of the renewable energy source, based on the analysis of what will be done with it. At the same time part will be ‘taxed’ and given to the people living close to the renewable energy source. This means the government manages this allocation of Joules. It can not just create them, because the capacity of renewable energy sources is hard limited.

Unlike with fossil credit (Euro,USD etc.) there is no global competition for who can get the most and produce the most, which for example causes a lot of oil to go into China now that used to go into the US manufacturing base. Instead every region has locally allocated Joules and get distributed Joules as a basic income. The people in the region must use the Joules to make stuff to serve their needs. The products can be bought with Joules, so the Joules can be used to produce them, mine the raw materials, transport what is needed to where it is needed by the producers.

In a Joule based economy the more renewable resources you have the better. But if you place a factory in the middle of the desert, say one that makes sneakers from synthetic molecules made in chemical processes powered by renewables, those sneakers have next to no real cost and no Joules payed from other regions will help produce it, because the energy those Joules represent is not available in the desert. This seems different from the situation with fossil fuels, but it is not, because say to produce a sneaker from oil in a factory in China, someone has to bring the oil to the plastic factory and then the plastic to the sneaker factory, at the cost of fuel. This logistic challenge associated with fossil us usually hidden from view, until the trucks go on strike or the ships get stuck in the Suez Canal.

The introduction of the Joule currency could happen by government initiated local renewable energy projects the currency is part of. The local governments can also invest, as can companies. The currency then gets distributed to the people involved as well as to the owners of the energy source (who get rewarded for their maintenance and intiative). It would make sense to start with essential services like bakeries, fertilizer factories, logistics companies, etc. These can then buy energy with the Joules allocated with them and earn Joules or other currencies with their products and services.

The economy would become split as banks would have nothing to do with the Joules, while the communities would enjoy basic products and services from their own Joule economy. This is like people in Spain not paying for gas in the winter, because the sun keeps them warm without it. The economies would never meet, but could if people wanted to replace their fossil credit Euros for Joules and owners of Joules would want to buy Euros, for instance for a plane ticket. As regions would not really compete but take care of themselves for most basic needs, there would be no ‘global market’, production of goods and services could however increase as more renewable energy capacity was build and these products could be shared with regions with energy shortages.

As you can see the Joule based Roboeconomy would be completely different from the fossil credit (Euro, Dollar etc. ) based ‘world economy’. The world economy could not sabotage the Joule economies because these would not want or need fossil credit or fossil fuels. They could exist side by side in the beginning, like we now have homes that require no energy between homes that still burn gas. This system can help us transtion without banks or fossil being an anchor dragging us back..

Bubble Psychology

We share our thoughts on social media, we gain followers and views, its all part of the online community life that has grown to impressive proportions. People barely talk to each other and are staring at their phones even when they are together. Its clear the phone offers a better experience than the companions. It may be a bit like the lure of money, the paper or number promises the world, more than actual items which depreciate.

The social communities have allowed a new type of reality, which existed earlier based on location and wealth. People like to separate out based on behaviour, so if you are poor and can’t behave as someone that likes to be served in expensive restaurants, you will become separated. Even if you are together you can separate based on whether you are polite, know the customs, your dress decisions, hair style, etc. etc. All these things define groups. IF you keep your home tidy, if you have a nice garden, if you bought the last newest lawnmower. If you had a steak from the Saltbae.

These groups are self sufficient and do not mix. They are bubbles. We choose them and it seems very simple : If you can behave the way you like to, and you can eat and drink and find shelter doing it, then you lose interest in alternatives. You close your bubble. You may remember a time that your situation was different and hold on to people, this means you can see friends from before you became poor or rich or moved or entered a club, your bubble is not hermetic, but its getting there.

Todays politics is all about bubbles. We have the old generaton with money, they need to be kept in their bubble, we have the old generation without money, they need to be kept in theirs. We have students, they need to be occupied with life and debt and challenges, we have working families, they need to be occupied with carrers. They don’t really know each other or help each other, except when its family, but family is so 20th century. The economy maximizes cashflow by creating and maintaining bubbles.

To exist economism needs a strong right wing mentality, one that says “I did it all by myself!” ignoring the effect of fossl energy you have not contributed to at all. Ironically you can only proof value by being helpfull to others, which is counter economism, as evident by the growing number of poor people it creates. The right wing bubble is to heterogeneous to be one bubble though, this is because you have people born rich, people making themselve rich, and people without money that think they should be or will be rich one day. So there’s the old conservative bubble “we rebuild this country”, the business owners (who sometimes get crushed by industry but have to be on the side of banks to maintain good relations), and the young crazies thinking they are Napoleon. The Right is often associated with a strong sense of ownership (leading to xenophobia), but that’s the other way around, a strong sense of ownership serves the banks who own almost everything.

On the Left there are several bubbles, but it doesn’t matter without power. The Left has not realized all it is is against banks and fossil, as soon as it is for banks and fossil it will find its ideas shift to the right. Yet nobody on the Left in Holland has ever explicitly said this. This means the Left doesn’t really exist (except for the Party of the Animals), it does not know what it needs to be to be a viable challenge to the ‘Right’.

At the left side you have bubbles based on socialism, environmentalism, anti-Right-ism (useless), sadly because banks own most homes, rented or bought, most businesses, most universities, everyone on the Left needs money and a steady income. If you serve banks you are on the Right. One move they should make would be to create their own bank, which can only give out renewable energy credit from sources owned by that bank.

The Left and Socialist bubbles are quite strong, these people don’t read much and are often highly social not able to separate themselves as the rich can. It is a mess though because no unifying principle. The religious bubbles are unaware of their right wing nature, they ignore the source of thier wealth, the nature of the production cycle it seems. They are so anxious to perform in their complex ideological bubble world they can be coopted by the Right without much problems.

If would be interesting to map out the beliefs of people in their respective bubbles, who is your primary news source, which people do you trust, are you a maker, a consumer, how much debt have you consumed? Showing the sometimes contradictory nature of the positions some groups take in politics and what would work for them. This field of Bubble psychology would be interesting to follow and give handles to pierce bubbles if the inhabitants are dangerous to others. We have Covid denier bubble, a climate denier bubble etc. Sadly banks don’t give a shit about climate change, and they like to confuse us by allowing any group that does not harm them. We in the mean time are stuck in our bubbles, thinking we can’t cooperate with others outside it. We can and we should.

Democracy is a Thought Process

Many countries claim to have a democracy and hopefully you live in one. The main tenet of the process is purportedly that you choose your own officials, which in a fair election allows you to prioritize certain ideas over others. Of course freedom, jobs, less taxes etc. are general ideas everyone will support every time, and this gets a lot of people elected. Lately a new brand of politician has arrived, which seems to be fully supported by niche beliefs which sometimes contradict. Patriots, fascists, racists, all kind of small groups can be identified and addressed through social media. Campaigns of others can be undermined.

But this is not what democracy was originally. Originally it was just people coming together in a town square to make group decisions, with voting deciding the outcome. Originally the vote of a previous day could also be overturned by the group. The advantage was that in a socially coherend city like Athens everyone knew the ideas and passions of others and a majority vote meant you knew you could shut up about an idea voted away.

Modern society is way more complex. Now we have extremely strong interests being defended, and there is so much knowledge to have about what goes on (about industry) that lobbyists, or advisors with industry knowledge are essential. But of course democracy was never meant to decide on what industry does. As a result most of what industry does is weighed against the idea of profit, financial gain. That standard is more powerfull than that of wellbeing of the population, because there is no group who can independently think and take a strong position for that, not even the medical sector (because it is also an industry).

The cult of personality allows people to have no actual thought process, vison or ideas, only a personality you like.

Banks and fossil are the strongest powers in society by far, and its clear they run dutch politics at least. They strongly push in EU politics as well, for nuclear and ‘green gas’. The dutch kabinet is no longer reliably supplying the parliament with information. The policy for the next 3 years has been set in stone in an untransparent process behind doors, without votes. The new kabinet of ministers is larger but has the same people in it that where send away because the tax office commited gross abuse by demanding money back from people without reason or recourse, destroying lives and possibly even killing people. Of course industry and banks are used to that, they don’t care about it, and this kabinet was 100% in their pockets under Rutte.

But as said earlier democracy was not meant to be this sideshow where politicans are more bussy seeking ways to make the public approve what industry wants then to represent subgroups of people shape laws for all people. The guidance to make improvements would be to state that democracy is a thought process. It is the nation thinking. It is the nation testing ideas. Some of this happens in politics, so for instance an idea is lauched by a minister (a testing balloon).

The way the thought process should work is that the public talk to local politicians about what they want, then these talk to other local politicians to see if they think the ideas make sense, then this gets lifted to the politicians in parliament and minsters who may decide to prioritize the ideas. This is not how it works. The right wing majority of dutch politics is anti democratic. They get their ideas from industry and banks, and of course there are many sycophants who want the favor of banks and industry around the country who simply take their cues and repeat the mantra’s (also found in books of the WEF or other right wing writers). Its about lying to keep the left intimidated and weak. Who works the hardest? Not the banker. Who cares the most? Not the industrialist. Who adds the most value? Not the CEO (usually) but of course the engineer, intern, PhD student. But no, these people work so hard! Of course you don’t have to work hard if you can influence politicians, which is what right wing politicians are for.

The media keep inviting right wing talkingheads so the thought process gets sabotaged because people allow their minds to be scripted based on the cult of personality based trust

Democracy tries to work as a thought process, but fails almost immediately between the citizen and the local councils. In the case of the Meta Datacenter near Zeewolde the local politicians agreed with the energy guzzling (climate unfriendly) project only to say it regretted it shortly after. In a real democracy that would mean the project once again would be blocked. It doesn’t seem that happened. In other places the anti-fossil Left simply stopped being parties in the council maybe because it no longer made any sense to always lose. The main reason for these phenomena is banks and the fossil industry.

It used ot be that you could earn a honest day’s work by working honestly for a day. That is no longer true, you can work and not earn enough to live, you can not work and earn plenty. You can live in a city and never see a plant or animal yet eat plants and animals every day. You can work an online job (many have to now) and just be detached from the entire rest of the planet. For years. This bubble society (post coming) is a real problem. We don’t need each other, we don’t see each other, we can’t help each other, we have no shared thought processes. Most public affairs are inaccessible because they are locked behind bureacracy and nobody gets rewarded to keep an eye on what really goes on.

To fix all this we need to lear how to facilitate the thought process again. We need to speak our minds in all cases, prioritized based on the effect on our community, not on our wallet. We may have to make the incomes of politicians hypertransparent. A fixed fee for speeches for example, no means to earn later for services rendered, no lobby jobs after your politicial term. Items on agendas must be brought in by the public (We had a prime minister that asked to cut Shells dividend tax, and no party ever asked for it, which shows you his fossil/banking puppet nature). A member of parliament has to speak about problems of real people that came in through the local and regional councils. It would be very easy for citizen to indicate with issues they thought where actually important to them (through the DigID environment).

It seems the current right wing paralysis of politics is entirely because of corruption. The false belief in economism as the way forward for the next decade is terrifying. The idea to allow 24 datacenters without also requiring explosive expansion of renewables seems to indicate a desire to burn US and Russian gas, which can only lead to more animosity which the EU being a stakeholder may suffer the effects from. We almost had a war (and may still have it) in Ukraine because of the idiotic desire to use fossil energy. That is without talking about how banks destroyed the home building industry, social housing and build up a large group of nitrogen polluting farms who’s owners have to face the possiblity of shut down. So much is going wrong all because of economists, WEF globalists. How many of those live in dutch cities? How did they get their agenda through their city councils? They didn’t.

The goal of the economistic Right is to screw up our idea of democracy so we have no place to start. The ranks being cleaned from lobbyists and people without actual constituents would be a good step.

like a dog on leash or a horse with a bustrens being controlled by a few persons our politics is run by politicians that listen to a few advisors. The mantra is simple : Make sure fossil energy is used, This will protect both the power of the fossil sector and that of the banks. The latter can trade anything for the fossil fuels, they create the money. So we get US gas, the US gets to buy some dutch companies, we get russian gas, Russia gets to buy some dutch companies. No doubt the Meta datacenter was pushed through to get gas from the US?

Because of climate change the above reads like everyone lost their mind in Holland. It proves really hard to increase right wing policing because people in Holland are so reasonable, in spite of the Right (without any citizen asking) to increase the pain by driving up home prices, reducing what can be rented etc. etc. The people with thoughts should help restart the thought process : No talk about topics nobody brought up (this is what eliminated Rutte’s dividend suggestion), and no politician that doesn’t have a reason for his ideas. Right wing politicians always expose their manequine nature because if you ask them anything about their position they just don’t know. Rutte famously said he doesn’t have a vision. He also said that he will break the law if it pleases him (let’s hope its nothing creepy he did). In a democracy thoughts trickle up (you could interpret the trickle down economy as one where thoughts are blocked from trickling up by money, so corruption institutionalized). And they can then be tested for their rationality and effect on others. Farmers can’t keep producing 7 times more meat than Holland needs. But what can other farmers do to reduce emissions? Etc. And anyone who can not defend his/her idea on its own merit or indicate its origin in facts or social impact has to simply abandon it.