Month: December 2022

Nitrogen, its the common name for several nitrogen compounds used in farming. Ammonium Nitrate is one of them. There’s a whole discussion going on about the massive release of ammonia by intensive farm animals, as the cows and pigs break down protein (nitrogen compounds) and release urea (CO(NH₂)₂), into the environment. This overnourishes plants and poisons the ground water.

Hiding in all this obfuscating language is energy, a hydrogen based fuel, ammonia NH3, a powdered fuel (fertilizer) all because the banks want to keep profiting of the cashflow of fertilizer generation from natural gas, because they like the cashflow from Soy shipment from brazil, because they like the cashflow from meat production in Holland, even though we export 6 out of 7 kilo of meat we produce.

To make sure the urea doesn’t get reused its mixed with manure, to create ‘digistaat’ a very wet manure that is then put into biogas reactors where it functions in another cashflow charade : Making methane from manure. This is not happening in those biogas tanks, what is happening is the digestion of sugar in both manure and a large quantity of added biomass. ‘Over production’ of the intensive farming industry, white listed to be added. The sugar is turned into methane, the methane can be turned into fertilizer. I have called this the revalorization of methane. But the overproduction is done for the pleasure of BANKS.

Because most crops are grown to feed cattle, we can identify a pyramid of dependency where the intensive crop farming will defend itself against becoming more organic because it is necessary for the meat industry, but all the while the driving force is the cashflow and gas consumption the methods of farming and system of increasing the value of crops by turning them into meat creates. The valuable urea is meanwhile dumped in the ground water and an environmental and health hazard to people. Screw people! Cashflow is more important!

Now we have a diesel shortage. It turns out that both urea and fertilizer are essentialy hydrogen fuels. The are Nitrogen/Hydrogen compounds. Ammonia burns a lot like diesel, you can use it as fuel almost without changes to the engine. What about fertilizer?

“Cars already on the road can use ammonia as an additive without modification (up to 10%) and flex cars could be, according to Fleming, easily modified to use ammonia in conjunction with ethanol, allowing for a mixture of 85% ammonia.” (source)

I have not tried it but I would think you can just add ammonium nitrate to gasoline. According to the chemical formula it will not combust or explode on its own. We all know it likes to explode, so does gasoline. An engine is the perfect place to explode fertilizer!

2NH4NO3 + 3C7H16 + 14O2 —> 2N2O + 6H2O + 7CO2 + 16H2

(source GPT3, of course this needs to be verified to be sure)

I wonder if anyone tried this. Ammonia does not burn as easy as gasoline, but maybe in the mix it does. If you know anyone that has tried this or wants to try it, let me know!

A Tesla Semi electric truck can tow about 80.000 lbs (pound). That is about 30 car weighs worth. In theory you could load 30 cars onto one Semi and haul it 500 miles or 800 km through Europe, which is about 1/3ths the way to Italy. A single car trailer only has a 5 car capacity, so you could tow about 5 of them behind one Semi, towing 25 cars. They would have baggage aboard of course.

You could use a small cabin right behind the semi as the passenger compartment. This would have to have 100 seats at least. You would get a road train that would stretch for at least 50 meters. But it would be efficient and bring people to their holiday destination with a lot less energy wasted than when they would drive their ICE cars.

It seems we’d need to design special trailers, because many assume to be single trailer situations..

The emissions from trucks are 20% of total emissions, and they are very dirty. It is thus very important to replace those trucks with electric vehicles

So one trailer for people, 5 for cars, regular stops every 3 hours or so, charging near Turin or Switzerland (hydropower?) and arriving in Italy, South of France or Spain safely and rested. Do we still need rail?

Wait, what? Another war? We don’t need another war! This may be your first response to the title above. That title is however more the core of many of today’s cultural conflicts, and I will try to defend that view in a few paragraphs below..

Villages are small, by definition, people know each other, the pace is not very fast, there is a language everyone speaks, there are annual festivities everyone attends or is part of. You can go to France or Belgium or Holland and find many towns, villages which still have this tradition. The people often need each other to make the situation work. This creates a mentality and a culture that is usually more uniform, and you are expected to join in or be an outcast, which is an untenable situation in a small community. The principle is “We are all the same, we follow the same rules”. In the towns around Paris you find the same people in the cafe in the morning to get a cup of coffee, they then go do their farmer jobs. In other places community is sought in the evening. This is still happening all over the world. If you want to break down the mentality it is:

• We are all the same
• We follow one set of rules
• We don’t like people that deviate
• Together we make the village work

When life is very practical, when it just consists of work needing to be done, all very obvious, which is the farmers life mostly, then if you talk about anything else you must be confused or lazy or trying to take a break or something. This is a gross simplification, but this logic is also found in companies which cultivate the same mentality. It is also found in religions.

Cities are different. They are too big to create a stable community. You live in a place that is quite anonymous, its rented or bought but then the doors look much the same. If you go out into the street there are masses of people that you don’t know and you have no interest in. You compete for jobs, opportunities, you don’t care if others behave differently. In cities there are many that have created a community, but it is more vitual. So a religious group has a church, they come together there, that’s where they are the village, and there they find their equals and live by the rules. Others go to cafe’s or music venues to find their ‘kin’, and one person can be part of many ‘villages’ at the same time. Say a student that is part of a band and also plays basketbal is part of several disjoint groups, where each have completely different mentality and priorities.

Its not to say a person in a village can’t be part of different subgroups as well, but its all a bit more stale and he/she will be known in all groups.

My thought is that we constantly have wars between villagers and city dwellers. We constantly see a group of people that says “We are all the same” and then another group that says “Nope, I am different and like to stay that way”. You could say Putin likes his country to be a uniform village, but Ukraine is not interested, it likes to be part of the pluriform West.

The division occured to me when I contemplated religions. Some have come from a desire to be uniform, others from a desire to make a pluriform society work. If you want to have a uniform society you punish people for deviating. If you want to make a pluriform society work you don’t. Older religions are village religions, they developed before big cities existed. I would say the innovation of Christianity, to not be super judgemental all the time, but to forgive could be seen as an innovation, even though the cities where not big at the time.

Every time you hear a person say “we have to treat xyz this way and no other” and its about some issue in society, its a group that has created an internal village dynamic that has gone to war with the complexity of city life. The diversity of humanity and society in the world does not fit one size.

When protest broke out at Foxconn this week, I tweeted

“If China and Iran and Russia correct themselves and punish the abusers and allow the protesters to be heard they will evolve into better states. Nobody would have stolen from them, they would not be enslaved or servant of any other nation, they would simply be better.” (on Twitter)

Totalitarianism is the pinnacle of village mentality. One law, one behaviour, one leader, simplistic, unnecessary uniformity which evokes resistance that then needs to be suppressed. China is actively working on it with their social scoring, and I have written about how this will petrify China and make it incapable to come up with new ideas to deal with new challenges.

Luckily the Xi government relented somewhat. The way the Covid ‘police’ was charging in full protective gear with transparent shields like roman soldiers looked insane. The people where very honest and frankly sweet, saying they had born all the harsh measures. People burned in their homes because the Xi government sealed their doors with iron wire or by welding them shut. It is good the protest had effect.

As a city dweller I don’t care about much of what people do or say, but I do care about them if I can. I don’t expect anyone to tell me what is right or wrong or how I should behave, and I don’t tell anyone else (maybe my upstairs neighbor if he makes a lot of noise). It can go to the extreme, where people really don’t care for each other. I think that is a job for the local government to make a city work like a village just enough so people feel good, but not so much that they start telling others how to live.

Of course people like to be with like minded others, so that’s why they live in certain neighborhoods, suburbs, closed communities. The point I tried to make here is that its about one’s expectation of others. Some expect uniformity where its not necessary or logical out of mental habit. This drives resistance which is then seen as even a bigger problem. Of course a hard line villager knows that his/her way works and may not want to try anything else, or want others to try anything else. That is where the problem starts. There is more than one road to Rome.

If it comes to religion I think theres a benefit to the relatively mellow attitude of Christianity, but even that religion has been abused by totalitarian minds. In the US the intolerance towards female reproductive freedom is almost medieval. Where did it come from? From large uniform communities that do not care for people that deviate from their norm.

In the end there’s not much one can do about people so used to uniformity that they see it as the one right way to have a society. The only way to deal with it is get away from them or perhaps accept to change. With some religions accepting means giving up a lot. No religion has any fundamental right to determine how anyone lives, but sadly people will try to enforce indoctrination. The war will continue until there are either no more cities or only cities.