Greencheck.nl

We face climate change, we face plastic pollution, we face many problems caused by the use of fossil fuels, but also many problems caused by humans that use those fossil fuels to make other things, to mass produce, industry.

Industry is visible, you can see it, but it has no real identity to us, it’s a bunch of pipes and blue lights at night. You hear humming and see flares. It smells weird. The above picture could be of an installation who’s waste polluted dutch waters for years, because one company took in all the waste and pretended to pump it onto a barge, but in fact dumped it in the water next to the barge. This happened on a non descript terrain in a sparsely populated area by people that lived private lives. That did not want to be known.

Truth : Industry does not care about human lives

We read in the news that German chemical factories are once again polluting the Rhine, which ends in the North Sea and supplies the dutch with drinking water. They used to pollute the Rhine much worse, but then they where forced to clean up, but now new chemicals are being produced that do not fit the restrictions. It is an endless process of running after companies that just dump their waste through the route of least resistance.

Golden rule : Be boring and inconspicuous

The people in the polluting industry are not world news. They are smarter if they remain inconspicuous. High pay of CEOs is less in companies that want to offer no grip for resistance, critical judgement or even agression. If you earn 200,000 Euro in Europe you can have a nice life, with your family. Only in highly competitive jobs, like in banking, something many people can do, you see that pay rises to insane heights. This is also a result of the fact that there is no oversight on contracts, or very little. We worry about banks, and we should, because they finance industry that may as we speak introduce another chemical or product that will damage lives for decades if not centuries to come.

tbc

The internet is an open network through which computers can connect. Each computer has an addres, its IP address, which usued to be 4 times a number between 0 and 255 (ipv4), now it is an 128 bit address (a bit can be 1 or 0) that can look like this 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:1319:8a2e:0370:7344 (ipv6). If you look up the Google.com website your computer goes to a special server, a DNS server, asks for the address above (say 64.233.160.0 ) Then goes sends a message to this address, which is like a sound, that has to go through a maze, first room 255 doors, take door 64, second room 255 doors, take door 233, third room 255 doors, take door 160, last room, 255 doors, take door 0.

Behind door 0 is our computer. It listens to what happens at the door, it opens the door when you arrive with your message, it takes the message and depending on what it is it does something with it. The message can be send to a server, like the one from Google, and read “give me search results for bikini”. You can find out that message yourself by typing bikini in Google, you read the address bar when the results show up, it will read like this :

www.google.com/search?q=bikini&oq=bikini

So that’s the message you send through the door, the reply that Google send you is the page you are looking at. This is how the internet works, and you can basically type any computers addres, by name or by IP, and send messages to them. The internet is open that way, and the amount of messages send across it daily to all kinds of addresses, be it your mobile phone or PC or server or refrigurator is mostly unobstructed.

We don’t realize how many machines are connected to this same open internet today, even as the numbers are increasing. They are not only PCs, tablets, mobiles, but also watercookers, gates, factories, waterlocks, bridges, trafficlights.. All these machines are increasingly linked up to the same network because the parts are cheap and the protocols used are wll known. This is increasing the vulnerability of our infrastructure, factories, universities and even government to hacking. Even if you cut off computer networks from the outside world, a small real life hack (so someone breaking and entering and hooking up a Wifi hotspot or ethernet link where it shouldn’t exist) suddenly expose your hardware to extreme remote control.

The internet can let people who are on the other side of the planet control your computer

An insulin pump that is exposed on the internet, and a patient database in a hospital that is exposed by hackers, could combine in the administration of a lethal insuline dose to a patient with undesirable political affiliation.

We read about ransomware, which is software that is accepted by computers that locks up data and only makes it available again if the right password is used, which can only be bought with hard to trace bitcoing. These kinds of acts are now common, and large institutions are paying $100.000 to not be disrupted.

Once you delve into the world of hacking and what has been happening a picture emerges of tower blocks full of programmers in China, of ransomware criminals in Russia working for Putin. The black market in worms and trojan horses (software to get other software on your PC) is triving, and countries like the US operate multi year programs to hack systems of enemies (they destroyed Irans nuclear centrifuges through a software hack). It is as one of the journalists specializing in it calles it “a war nobody sees”. It is no longer a game, the internet can be weaponized.

The open internet is like an open gate

Net neutrality is a different topic from what we are talking about here. Net neutrality means that different consumers do not get different access to the same servers within a network of a country. To some providers it makes sense to reduce the bandwith of some customers, because they are low value and increase that of others, because they are high value. A bit like keeping the homeless out of a shopping mall. The problem with that is that people pay for access to the internet, and the ones that want to block access do not own the interent. So the shops in the shopping mall that want to keep out the homeless do not own the grounds outside their shop, that is public space! This is another discussion. What this post is about is international warfare through the internets.

To protect a country it may become necessary to vet the traffic coming in. To filter traffic which is energy intensive, so attacks and worms and other hacks get less chance for succes. Of cours this is already going on. Hackers and cyber criminals take over servers in the cloud or elsewhere to do their bidding, for some attacks that is essential, the MDOS attacks basically storm the door of a server until it drops out of its hinges then the protocol breaks down and the server becomes unprotected (highly suggestive, a bit like people).

It seems inevitable that more barriers will be formed when it comes to access over the internet. An internet passport will be hard to avoid. Artificial intelligence can also play a role and is now being used to recognize suspicious patterns in traffic. Those can be countered with AI systems intent to penetrate through such defences. The task of filtering traffic is hard, and even the certificate systems, used to determine if traffic is from a reliable source, have been hacked. Any security officer of critical infrastructure will want to take the local network offline, but what do you do with the traffic lights, bridges, gas pumps, water pumps etc. ?

Every connection a VPN connection?

VPN (Virtual Private Networks) have been used for a long time, and are still used, even though it proved hackable and hacked several times. VPN creates a secure interaction, where each message send and recieved between computers on the internet is checked against certificates (usually in the hands of third parties). The advantage of a VPN connection between me and my workplace for instance is that nobody can eavesdrop on the interaction, no data can be stolen as it is encrypted as it travels from door to door, and only I can establish the connection, so the reciever, my company, also knows its me and not somebody else.

Most websites create a kind of VPN when you access them now, if the site url reads HTTPS:// (the S stands for Secure) your connection to that webserver (websites are messages from webservers) is exclusive to you, all your communication is encrypted and unreadable for outsiders or intercepters. Google wants you to use HTTPS:// for your website because it also prevents hacking of such websites, for instance making you order more stuff than you want and shipping it to the hacker’s address. VPN and HTTPS are good starting points of securing the interents better, in simple terms, ALL connections will have to be secure.

Every connection will be a VPN like connection

The only drawback of that is that constantly encrypting and decrypting all traffic is energy intensive and time consuming. Even though Moore’s law is not dead (another 100x inprovement to go) it is a burden, so you rather have a system where some traffic can be free and some is restricted to secure protocols. We’re not discusisng quantum computers being able to crack all these protocols for now, or Samsungs new algorithm that seems to be as quick. It seems inevitable that whoever owns an internet connection will have to get a liscense or passport which gives him/her access to some or all of the available address space. From the moment you want ot buy stuff online you need to be secure at all time or some hacker will reach your PC at night, because you let a worm in that activates, and this hacker may install software that scans your passwords to access your money or hijacks your PC for evil purposes.

An intelligent monitoring system can quickly detect users that behave differently, ones that scan IPs for example, but it is not easy to monitor traffic because a data package is usually only what it is. when it travels through a wire you can not see it, when it is transferred you can only read part of it, data is somewhat like light, a photon travels millions of years through space, unseen only to be registered at its destination. We live in an increasingly insecure world, so it seems internet licsences and passports will have to become commonplace soon.

What goes through the mind of a person that has experienced natural reality and has learned that it has hard limits. You can not hold a lighter under a match for long, it will burst into flames. You can’t sit in a pool of gasoline smoking a sigaret, you have to have a deathwish. We have had experiences of all kinds that teach us where the limits are in our behaviour and our environment. We respect those limits.

So we may know scientists. The problem is many people don’t, they don’t know that most scientist are very much aware of what is true and what isn’t. They are constantly checking, they don’t believe because they know reality can confuse them, they measure, check, measure the tool they use to measure, then measure 1000 times then say “Ï see that in 90% of cases the result is XYZ”. They are carefull, treat their topic as something of great value that resist being known. You have to empthize with them for taking that care, because they do it for the greater good they believe in, or because nature seems to tell them NO, and they want YES, or because it will cure people.. Money is usually one of the last things on their minds.

If you can follow and believe the following logic :

• CO2 increases in the atmosphere
• CO2 absorbs heat radiation
• The Earth can no longer radiate out heat as much as it could
• Heat builds up in ocean and atmosphere
• The Earth warms
• The average temperature rises
• Life can only exist in a certain temperature range
• Many parts of the planet will get too humid hot for life
• Growing crops will become next to impossible
• Survival for humanity will become next to impossible

And

WE CAN DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT THIS

And

PREDICTION MODELS ARE RELIABLE

What is a sane person to do? The halls of politics are populated by people that do not wish to give up any luxury, in fact they seem to strive for as much luxury in their own lives and are selling out anyone that doesn’t oppose them. Politics in Holland is largely disfunctional because it is run by corrupt people who seem to have lost hope.

The dream you have ambitions for in 20 years will not come true

A sane person with courage would give up anything that increase the problem, and if it was really impossible would find solutions to whatever still increases it, and then would start to fight it. Many people are sane in that respect. The larger part however is NOT.

Getting rid of economic forcing

The biggest obstacle that restricts us from action is our economic predicament, mainly, usually our obligation to pay for our mortgage and rent. We need to consider failing to do so just like happend in the sub-prime crisus in 2008. The bank does NOT need your mortgage money. There should be an undestanding that if you are willing to minimize your CO2 footprint and fight climate change, you are given title to live where you are now. The big risk is you can’t stay there because of the calamity. So you live for free but you serve the climate fight.

Stopping unnecessary CO2 emitting activities

You car a car tuning company? Stop it. You are a web design company? Stop it, You are a nail studio? Stop it. You are a holiday planing agency? Stop it. Stop activities that cause CO2 emissions, stop activities that are not needed. Big companies are not exempt. You sell sugary drinks? Your name is Coca Cola? Stop it!

This is where the topic of this post clashes with normal rule of law. Rule of law is undermined right now by the right pro-fossil demogogues.

Starting necessary activities

The necessary activities are performed by many companies at the moment, but the judgement of which company is doing good and which isn’t is not up to anyone trying to maximize economic value. There is very little true planning of emergency activities. There is talk of CCS and Hydrogen etc. but these are again delay strategies of the fossil fuel industry. Energy has to be allocated to finding out how to do things automatically, how to build the necessary robots, how to apply them to grow biomass where it is hard now, how to build cheap desalination mechamisms.

Patents are certainly in the way of wide adoption of beneficial ideas. There is a new way to fuse Hydrogen into Boron to generate energy, it could mean small safe fusion reactors, but the idea has been patented. There is a way to use Prussian Blue to make Potassium and Sodium batteries, they would be very cheap, but what happened is that a bunch of possibilities have been patented and you can’t really buy cheap Sodium or Potassium batteries. There needs to be a rule that bans patents on necessary technology.

Flying causes about 2% of global pollution. Just like everyone the airline industry claims it has a marginal effect on the CO2 concentration. The simple fact is that everyone has to cut emissions, emissions have to become strongly negative as soon as possible, so any emissions should be reduced and eliminated, that that may mean eliminating some activities in the short term. Here an example of how to go about it..

So who should fly? Who absolutely has to be able to move from A to B at the speed airtravel allows, between continents across the globe. Everyone will say “Me! Me! Me!” but of course that isn’t true.

Tourist : Nope. No need for airtravel to just be somewhere.

Businessmen : Nope, in 99% of cases nope. Make a video or phone call, do business on your own continent. The CEO of a company? Maybe to avoid eavesdropping on conversations. They should use specialist secure communication methods. They can afford clean energy powered transportation too.

Politicians : Maybe, because of privacy issues. Our political area is increasingly controlled, so no candidate can even enter without having been vetted for his/her ideology. Luckily there are not many.

Artists : Maybe, some, but they don’t make up the bulk of the travelers.

Surgeons : Also specialists, specially talented or experienced people that can’t work remotely you may want to let fly.

A good test of the rules is that the volume of flights crashes to about 2% of the present volume. Another good test is that nobody dies because of the rules. If nobody dies, you can make the rules stricter. Of course you should avoid any casualties.

At the same time the development of solar electric and battery electric flight has to be stimulated. Hyperloop development should be subsidized. Sail ships, hydrofoil ships. That’s what real climate action would look like.

Around the world we see a reduction of wealth due to the rise of right wing ideologies. The conservative side of politics is often aligned with the groups that secure fossil fuels and defend the country, more so than the side that thinks more freely. The result is that the entire food chain that depends on fossil fuels, from oil companies, banks to industry and even consumers, cooperate to take resources (money) from groups that do not have strong representation or can’t represent themselves. These are care givers, educators, people who rely on social support (pensioners, invalids), live in low rent houses and have little control over their lives.

This predation on fossil resources in the shape of money will continue until fossil fuel either runs out or stops being the dominant energy source in society. For brevity we bunch fossil with nuclear, because without enough fossil resources you can’t build, run or decomission (fission) nuclear power stations. The discouse is very predictable if you just imagine two sides : One that wants to make life better for all, and one that wants to survive another day in the free market arena.

Currencies have no mandatory value, so they can’t express burden or benefit

The way people think about realizing projects in a free market is not sane though. It is crippled in a very fundamental respect. The idea of cost, say $1 million or $1 billion expressing a specific burden on us or anyone, which is what the expressions are meant to do, is mistaken. After all a dollar is but an empty contract, it really has no value. Compare with the Euro, a Euro has to be used to pay taxes, but has no intrinsic value, meaning nobody is forced into a trade with you for your Euro and there are no resources your Euro gives you access to by law (except existing undetained by the tax collector).

If you live in the EU and you are a bank, and you need money to borrow to a client, right now you pay next to nothing. In Venezuela you will probably pay a high interest rate. How can that be because what you do as a bank is identical, you go to a monitor, type in the amount, the underlying (promised) asset and the number appears in the account. Why wouldn’t that cost exactly the same everywhere? It is because the resources which the money should buy are not equally abundant, and in response to that, and because banks can create money at will, the money system is unstabile in terms of what say one liter of gasoline costs.

Money has no value, but people can believe it has. This belief is fair if the money is used fairly, so for example if a farmer needs farm hands, he can get money from the bank (no value) then hire farmhands with the money, the farmhands bring about the growth of crops, and the farmer sells the crops for the money. In this tiny system the farmer will accept all the money back from the farm hands as they buy the crops, and the money can be returned to the bank. Notice that if you ask the farmer “What does it cost to work your land” he can say “money” but he would be wrong, because he got that money at no cost. He can say “part of my crops” and he would be right. What would be paying for his workers? Not the money, because they return the money to him, it would be the crops, the solar energy stored in them by biological processes. He is not paying his workers, he is powering them. The only role the money plays is as a token of the agreement that he will deliver part of his crops in return for the money.

Money is not power until someone trades power to own money. This in our society is not a voluntarily but a forced proces. Armies protect and control fossil resources for us

The above example shows money as a tool for cooperation, with a bank that plays no significant role. It demands no interest. The farmer could make the money himself, and people did for the longest time and still do write I-owe-you’s notes of debt to each other. Today money comes with its own workers, which makes it super confusing. Money buys fossil fuels, fossil fuels can do a lot of work, they are power. So if you have money, the people that own fossil fuels will part with it, they supply your ‘worker’ and you put the ‘worker’ in your car fuel tank to make it drive you around. Money is power. This makes banks that can print money extremely ‘powerfull’. Of course that control over those fossil fuels is not by accident, it is enforced, an unfair trade is made, because we return our money to banks, but the fossil fuels are gone! This is all very mysterious, but the key idea to grasp is that our money too is POWER, and is POWERING our lives.

Focus on POWER if you want POWER

Now a hand made wind turbine, where calories of humans where burned to build a device that can deliver power, is a thing of value. Holland was one of the early users of wind power, each wind mill some 5 KwH, to grind wheat, flatten tabacco, saw wood beams and pump water. That power meant value to trade. Just like the sails on a trade ship meant it could bring goods from source to consumer, commit arbitrage and create a global market. Stocks in the VOC, the Dutch East Asia Company, had value because of the POWER in those sails, because the men where expendable, the plantation owners ruthless (just like the Indonesians themselves by the way). The money was gold and silver, it had a constant volume, its value determined by the combined power of the working people.

Focus on where the power comes from
when you want to get something done

So there are two options : The first is to think of money loosely as a tool to get things done, not making any distinction between the power source you use, so you can pay a contractor to dig a pit, and you don’t care if he blasts a hole, uses slaves, gets the community to dig or uses an solar electric or diesel digging machine. You pay for the work, it gets done. This is easy and of course made easy and promoted by banks who know that the fossil energy producers still have an abundant supply.

The second is to think in terms of power. How will you power the change you want to make. This means that if you want to build a car factory with robots, you may want to build some wind turbines first, or solar parks. Then you can do the construct the factory with electric equipment, no diesel cost, you can power the robots with wind electricity, and be productive without going into debt or dependence on power arriving from somewhere else.

Renewables are forever

The golden ticket is to know how to generate power from as little power as possible. You start with a seed, grow crops, use the biomass to power machines to make your windturbine and solar panels, use the electicity to build hydro dam etc. and from there the power grows, and you can create more and more wealth with it. Then you will have both wealth and power and a future in which you can continue to expand the power and wealth to be shared and used to keep life safe on Earth. This we call the Roboeconomy.

Nederland kampt met woningnood. De geplande ontwikkling van nieuwe woningen gaat veel te langzaam. De factoren die hiertoe aanleiding hebben gegeven zijn divers, van banken/beleggers die woningen van de markt houden, leegstand tot de stikstof crisis. Snel bijbouwen is lastig, D66 en CDA komen nu met het plan voor 10.000 woningen in het zn. Almere Pampus, maar die toch wel logische realisatie zal nog jaren duren.

Een veel snellere oplossing is het uitbreiden van ligplaatsen voor woonarken. Dit kan eenvoudig aan de rand van Amsterdam, de kade van het Haveneiland en IJburg Zuid zijn prima plaatsen waar snel een grid van flonders kan worden neergelegd voor een groot aantal drijvende woningen. Die kunnen in de buurt of bij Harlingen (waar ook mooie werven zijn) worden gebouwd door gebruik te maken van bestaande pontons, woonarken en nieuwe bouwsels. Er zou een variatie kunnen zijn waarbij super eenvoudige woningen in de loop van de komende jaren worden vervangen door betere woningen of zelfs nieuwbouw in hetzelfde gebied.

Het bouwen van drijvende woningen gebreurde al in Amsterdam, en er zijn door inzet van avontuurlijke bouwers mooie voorbeelden. Twee of drie verdiepingen op het water is helemaal niet vreemd. Nederland moet ook zijn toekomst onder ogen zien, een die zeer nat zal zijn door het veranderende klimaat. Een groot deel van het westen zal teruggegeven moeten worden aan de zee. Er zijn twee opties : Nederland houdt op te bestaan, of we gaan meer water onder onze voeten tolereren.

Natuurlijk zullen banken en de makelaardij zulke snel uit de grond gestampte woningen lelijk willen maken en neerzetten als “noodwoningen”. Elke vierkante meter woonoppervlak moet in NL nu eenmaal voor de hoofdprijs verkocht worden. De oorzaak van onze woonschaarste in een notendop!

Drijvende woningen kunnen een basis hebben op palen, betonnen ponton of stalen ponton. De bouw kan in werven plaatsvinden waarna ze naar hun plek worden gesleept. De configuratie van een wijk kan dus naderhand worden gewijzigd om bv. ruimte te maken voor binnevijvers en waterparken

Het idee van een woning als spaarobject gaat langzaamaan niet meer op, zelfs als een woning apprecieert, de geldwaarde in de toekomst zal niet zomaar kunnen worden omgezet in koopkracht, aangezien die gebaseerd is op fossiel krediet, iets dan nu aan het uitsterven is. In Amsterdam is de waarde van leefruimte bepaald door het gemiddelde inkomen van de potentiele bewoner, dus hoog, en het speculatieve rendement wordt beschermd door niet bij te bouwen. De banken beheren een schaars goed en houden het schaars (net zoals ze dat met geld doen). Het is tijd om daar tegen in te gaan omdat het de sociale cohesie en het functioneren van de stad aantast.

In het algemeen zien we het Markermeer als groeigebied. Er kunnen honderduizenden drijvende woningen op worden geplaatst, in combinatie met een zonnecentrale van 18750 Hectare die genoeg stroom genereert (25,000 MW) om alle andere centrales te kunnen sluiten. Niet alleen woningen maar ook jachthavens en vogel gebieden kunnen worden geintegreerd in deze visie. Dit helpt ons niet alleen de kennis van drijvend leven te vergroten maar verzekert tevens ons pensioen, want energie is nodig voor de creatie van welvaart. Laat IJburgbaai het begin zijn van de stap op het water en uit de huiswaarde schaarste. Het fossiele/krediet bank systeem loopt toch op zijn laatste benen!

The now eagerly promoted hydrogen economy gives us the opportunity to make a point about the current fossil fuel market. Because people are not yet used to Hydrogen as a ‘commodity’ and its origine is easy to imagine it lays out our argument about the so called ‘carboncredit’ system in a way that is easy to grasp, so here goes nothing :

Everything you wanted to know about the hydrogen economy, but were too busy to research.

A summary based of my work @LiebreichAssoc

Part 1: Path to emission-free Hydrogen at 1$/kg

— Gniewomir Flis (@gnievchenko) February 18, 2020

We read a tweet that says “Path to emission-free Hydrogen at 1$/kg “. This seems a normal expression of the value of one Kilo of hydrogen in the market. But there is a glaring assumption we don’t see as necessary, namely that the cost of hydrogen is expressed in USD. Why would you do that? You may say “well you have to trade the hydrogen how else would you do that”. Well, to begin, we all know banks can print USD at will, so what the above implies is, and this is wat people seem to be oblivious of, that All hydrogen is owned by banks.

Your response is “No man, the Hydrogen is sold for USD which are used to generate it!”. This may certainly seem that way, but imagine for a moment a world in which there was only hydrogen as energy carrier. In that world we would make solar panels with hydrogen, we would drive trucks with panels on hydrogen, we would melt nickel and make hydrolizers using hydrogen, we would make electric cables with hydrogen. That world is not difficult to imagine, it is a world where you replace fossil fuels with hydrogen, so much like the world we live in today.

How then would you pay for Hydrogen, if what you needed to create the Hydrogen was only Hydrogen? The only way you could pay for hydrogen in USD is if someone somehow sold Hydrogen for USD. But why would you need USD? You would not! The Hydrogen producer could simply own a Hydrogen storage facility, from where you can distribute the gas to whoever needs it. It could also create a Hydrogen current, the “H2”, and lend it out to whoever wanted to start a business or needed something build. Then those people could allocate their H2 credit to producers and subcontractors who would deliver goods and services for them. Those subcontractors could not do it with USD, because they could not buy Hydrogen for USD!

For those with a quick mind you will now have understood that energy (carried in H2 or raw) is its own currency. It is hyper ‘liquid’, everyone has a use for it. This makes it easier to see that we now live in a world where credit is mainly Carbon credit. Our money is a way to allocate fossil fuels to producers of goods and services. It makes it easy to see that to keep accounting Wind and Solar energy in USD is a bit of a fraudulent activity that banks want to do, but that the owner of the solar or wind or hydrogen plant should NOT want to do. This is because it draws those energy sources into a system that can set an arbitrary price for fossil fuels, a system in which the USA can always print money, so always can have everything for free!

What this post also hopes to demonstrate is that banks are not impartial when it comes to moving away from fossil fuels. They are existentially linked to fossil fuel cashflow. They have gotten the exclusive right to sell it and they want to keep doing it! They make you want USD by showing you it buys the world, and it does not want you to understand that its underlying value is based on centrally distributed energy carriers or sources. That is why wind farms have to be highly financialized and far away out to sea, not close to you where you can understand that if you owned the turbines, your electricity would be free and yours to sell.

This post should create an itch of understanding, something that escapes most people, who simply think “money buys everything”. They are wrong, energy buys everything because everything is made with energy. Money is something that is monoplized by a banking system as a smart move, and we need to wake up to how that monopoly obstructs our attempt to have a happy future!

We sometimes hear “The energy sector is only X% of the economy”, the above should also help you understand that the energy sector is 100% of any economy. Even in ancient times : no farmers, no economy!

You may not know it, but Jeff Bezos is thinking about building orbiting habitats. Bigelow Aerospace is as well and we suspect Elon Musk has been thinking about it too. The rocket Bezos is working on will run on hydrogen, so it will lauch cleanly and on a fuel that can be readily generated. SpaceX banks on Methane which is a bit dirtier but it also wants to generate it using renewables. Combined with reusability this opens up space a bit like transcontinental flight did with the world.

Gravity is an issue though. Human physiology has evolved to work best a 1 G (Earths gravity). Orbiting in the space station is no pleasure, you return feeling like boneless chicken. Mars is a bit better, but still people are even wondering if there needs to be some kind of system to simulate 1 G (1 G is one Earth Gravity) there. The best option we think is Venus, but that planet is a ‘fixer upper’ you can only habitate when floating in baloons in 73 Celsius acid atmosphere (still completely doable).

But what about those orbits? The Moon orbits Earth, you could orbit the Moon or Mars or any other planet. Then you’d be experiencing zero G so that would suck, but there is a solution already propsed by the imfamous Wernher von Braun (The Nazi loved by the USA Jawhol!).

By rotating a sufficiently large tube around you will generate a force that feels a lot like gravity. Wherner proposed a spaceship where this effect would be generated in a narrow corridor. This was also seen in 2001 A Space Odyssee. That vision was based in part on the enormous cost of bringing mass to orbit. Also we can now almost count on the ability of building from the Moon, from which launching is much easier. We think the orbiting habitats can become very large.

If Earth becomes a hot cauldron due to fossil industry domination remaining unbroken and climate warming in a runaway process (starting as we speak), a good place to be would be in space orbiting around Earth. Using the Skylon planes it would probably be possible to fly in and out of orbit so work on the surface to fix the atmosphere could happen as people found refuge in orbit around Earth and the Moon.

Once you develop a space habitat with a larger diameter, say several hunderd meters, which you rotate at sufficient speed, the centrufigal force will feel a lot like real gravity. Not sure how birds would fare, they would have an amazing experience of floating in the air once they reach the center of the ‘tube’. Not sure how the atmosphere would behave as well, clouds in the center of the ‘tube’ diameter would not rain down!

We know SpaceX is dedicated to reaching Mars ASAP, and that’s certainly smart, but preparing a place to stay closer to Earth may also prove viable and attractive, and require development. And then there’s habitats on Earth, but that’ s for another post..

In Europe Hydrogen is a thing. H2 is touted as a smart fuel and a lot of money is spend to inject it into media content. It is obviously an attempt by the gas sector to prolong the use of natural gas, promissing carbon capture and storage with hydrogen generation. The mantra is H2, Nuclear, Natural gas.

It is frustrating for these people who have to repeat their braindead idea, especially for the bought university professors who’s opinion is still respected by many. Even as the right wing (always fossil lakeys) governments propose rules to reduce the growth of the EV market, it grows by leaps and bounds. Even as the grid developers have ignored the effects of solar generation and EV charging and pretend there are no solutions (grid batteries).

This is because the victory of battery-electric vehicles is unavoidable. It is just cheaper. Charging is easier even if whole regions have been prohibited from anticipating EV market growth. In the Amsterdam region in Holland planning for EV charging spots was just blocked for years. Fighting renewables has been a right wing hobby, in the North of Holland a school was even reprimanded and asked to break down a wind turbine experiment of more than 2 meter high, because the whole windy barely inhabited province had banned all wind turbine construction.

If you take a hydrogen filling station for a hydrogen car, its just a loser. You can use one filling spot only once every half hour (the pump needs to buffer H2 in a high pressure tank which takes time), and the next pump needs to be 7 meters away. So you need a lot of space to fill hydrogen cars and you will never serve enough to replace gasoline and diesel. Its high risk, one H2 gas station exploded in Norway recently.

But because H2 is a delay strategy for the gas industry pundits have to talk about it knowing that it makes no sense. It’s like a religious fanatic talking about a miracle that never happened. The feeling of being a morally degraded person to propose an expensive solution where resources need to be put into fighting climate change must also incur a cost. Its like that marketing guy at the Pall Mall sigaret factory we once say, who had yellow fingers and bad breath from smoking the product he sold.

H2 is proposed as storage medium for African (Desertec) energy with the argument it loses little energy in transit. A new pipe would be constructed to carry it to the industrial regions of Europe of course in a very slow and expensive process. Of course the loss would be about 60% of the solar energy turned into H2, or more if the H2 is burned. Compare that to batteries that can be build with a 95% efficiency. So if you run a battery rail service from Spain to Germany you are probably left with more energy!

Then there is ammonia NH3, a much easier substance to work with, much safer, for which there are ships and infrastructure in place. So if you want to move hydrogen you could do it in the form of NH3. Generation of NH3 is easy, and you can get it from farmers who are forced to consider it waste. This shows how the H2 economy is a lie to sell gas, because a real H2 economy would be eager to use NH3 : It has all the benefits of clean burning and your average diesel car can use it without much changes.

So hopefully H2 advocates will not shoot themselves or jump off a bridge for wasting their lives deceiving millions and burdening future generations. We hope they don’t revolt against their sick paymasters who want to waste more than 60% of wind energy coming in from the North Sea for no clear reason. When Napoleon marched towards Cairo many of his soldiers became so desperate from the dry emptyness of the desert and the boredom of their existence that they threw themselves into the Nile to be eaten by the aligators. H2 advocates must feel the same. Droning on about a dumb idea is soul destroying. Hang in there!

A while back I decided to read up on my IT security awareness and made a list of books to read. I read a couple, for instance “There’s a war on but nobody knows!” (translated title) by a journalist who analyzed the international hacker scene, and “Targeted” by Brittany Kaiser. The last book was easy to read, it chornicles the adventures of real life Brittany Kaiser who decided to work for the mother company SCL Group of the now well known and prosecuted Cambridge Analytica.

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The story of how she got hired and ultimately fired by Alex Nix, a colorfull albeit ruthless and slightly autistic man, who has by now been prosecuted for the abuse of Facebook data after having claimed to have destroyed it.

The basic business proposition of the SCL group was that it could produce marketing content that would help achieve the aims of whoever hired them. This could be billboards or webcontent on facebook, targeted adds or email campaigns. The SCL group exists since 1990, and it seems to have been involved in a number of political maneurvres, revolutions you could say. In one part of the book Alexander claims that they could both start a revolution and uprising, and when the end of it was achieved could calm people down as well.

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Brittany describes that the help of the company was used in the Brexit referendum and in much more detail the Trump election. In both cases the claim was that a database of targets for influencing would be created. Facebook was used for a long time because it made data available on the relations of people through its develoment API (this is a kind of raw data portal that software developers can talk to), so that millions of voters could be precisely profiled and, what is more amazing : Adds could be speficially targeted to specific groups.

Both Brexit and Trump can likely be attributed to targeted lying to people who’s privacy had been compromized by Facebook

After Facebook stopped allowing download of relation data and personal datapoints, it did continue to ‘augment’ profiles, so if Cambridge Analytica tried to target a family man redneck in Texas in a constituency with water scarcity for instance, Facebook would still send the same message to a number of other members that fit the profile. These messages where part fact, part exaggeration, but often blatant lies and fabrications. The source of the add was usually not shown, so a facebook user would not know it was the Trump or Cruz campaign that produced the message.

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Ted Cruz and later Trump’s CA driven rise was largely funded by the Mercers, who are basically anarchists

Now the book Targeted doesn’t go in too much detail, but it gives a pretty good picture of what is going on in terms of marketing. The online and sometimes even online experience of people is slowely being tailored just to their personality, by people that don’t identify themselves. People who run AI algorithms to find out what someone responds to, that know people better than they do themselves because modern life leaves litte room for introspection. The developers in the book even seemed to believe that a specific nr of ‘impressions’ would have a predictable effect.

Armies of hackers are employed in offices around the world. Sometimes with protection they can make millions in online crimes

Now before CA there was Snowden, and the NSA, who has been at recording communication since the 1940’s, starting with telegraph messages. You have What’sapp and other apps, who are encrypted but messages of which can be intercepted as they are typed on smartphones and PCs. The market of hacking tools, worms and viruses is so developed it has call centers. The book describes big office buildings full of hackers in China and ransomware criminals being used by Putin in Russia.

Today there are many SCL groups, and they work for politicians, governments, businesses and private citizen. We are against nuclear energy and it is 100% certain the nuclear lobby has hired an SCL clone to target me with messages that will soften my resistance. Why is it certain? Because it is cost effective. Because it works. Because the data is already in the hands of these companies. Even though Alexander Nix and CA has been convicted and fined for using Facebook data, Berxit and Trump are facts.

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Reading Targeted is not so much usefull to learn that this is going on, it is a good way to get used to the idea, to kind of get massaged into this new world. “All your data are belong to us” to praphrase the bad english from a Japanese console game. Should you be paranoid about online and offline messages? Yes!! If you have no ambition and want to accept your fate, you will be programmed, because the people who are really paranoid are the ones trying to shape your opinion. To really believe it you need to take some time to give this influence arms and legs.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in limiting political speech on his platform, even if its only a fraction of his revenue stream. It must be that now that Trump is in charge companies can’t operate freely and have to enable the republican agenda, or to be more precise the Mercer-Bannon-Trump agenda, which is greedy and nihilist. Even then, most adds in the Trump campaign where not easy to trace back to Trump. This means that even if Zuckerberg says he doesn’t want politicians to lie in adds on his platform, he can still show adds of ‘Astroturf’ non-profit grassroots fake companies that convey messages advantageous to one politician or another.

The most serious consequence of automated personalized messages is that it might be true to make a system like that 100% reliable. It may be that developers now know how many messages of what kind to what people they have to make happen to achieve a certain outcome. When Boris Johnson hammered the phrase “Get it done” to win the votes to finalize Brexit, an outsider could see that he was like a mugger, who was mugging the UK, and the UK getting tired of it after 3 years agreed: Get it over with! It took the loss to get rid of the hassle. Brexit was manhandled through in a way, but the voters didn’t know anymore being confused and fed up.

There are two options now for the world : Regions will increasingly fall in the grip of a continuous barrage of messages that push people around, into anger and fear and despair, resulting in a shakeout by opportunists. Or some regions put a stop to this new industry of robo-psy-ops while there are still thinking responsible people in it. The odds are stacked against the latter.