Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Well as we close the evening before Christmas I wanted to wish anyone who reads my blog 

The year has been interesting, with some injury early on that took until even now to become better. I've been focused on some home renovations and construction projects (namely my shed / workshop).

So while there has been a few posts I've not really given time to the blog in these last few months.

Anyway, just for the interested, the picture above was taken on my Gen 1 Sony A7, with the Canon FD 300f4 lens I bought to use on the GH-1 .. its nice that the same lenses can be used (with different effect) in multiple cameras.

Anyway, with my storage and workshop shed made I can hopefully sort out my house better and work on some other projects (like the floor heating).

Happy New Year

down to Mt Alford

 While it may seem paradoxical to say down to a place that's North of here it happens to be a lower altitude.

The township of Mt Alford hosts a great little micro-brewery called Senic Rim Brewery (facebook link) 

So if you feel like it, join 15minutes of my ride down there (something I do a bit) from here in Killarney

on my trusty 500cc Yamaha T-Max for a beer with a mate...

... a lovely Belgian "Trappist" style.

Their German style sausage is fantastic too.

Help me in identifying my Seiko ...

People often come to the internet asking for help identifying a Seiko watch, sometimes they know that the important data is on the face of the watch around the 6 O'clock position, other times they don't.

The core information is in two places, on the dial and on the back plate. Some people at least provide pictures but are unable to (bother?) taking the time to take a picture of the face of their watch that can show details and then (apparently) can't be bothered to check that picture is clear before they post it online.

So here's a quick guide. Don't send a picture like this, which while sharp isn't helpful.

its not helpful because the information is around the 6 O'clock marker and can't be seen.

Worse don't send a blurry picture.

Since the "how to do this" isn't (apparently) obvious, I've made this video to show how to make a good basic image with your phone:

The as taken image is like this:

which I've even down-sized to save upload time / space. When you rotate it, then crop it and then maybe downsize it (cropping results in a smaller file anyway) you can get something nice and clear like this

Looking at that number the first part (4R36) is the movement reference number. that'll feed in to the next bit.

I strongly recommend you look at the back of the watch as identified by this great site retroseiko.

That site will give you the lowdown with the movement and the serial number to work out how to date your watch.

If you still can't work it out then take a few decent clear pictures like I have shown and ask on an internet group you might (at best) not get much help. However, if you help us to help you, we can, if you don't ... well, just don't expect answers you'll enjoy reading.

buckle down

For some time now I've been wearing my watch strap with the buckle down as you hold the watch, some people would call this at the 6 o'clock position.

A bit of searching found this well written and succinct article, which I will quote here (but here is the URL to go to the authors page):

So I write this, both as a stylist and a professional photographer. One of my sponsors asked me why I'm constantly switching my straps around in my photos, repositioning the buckled strap on the bottom of the watch, rather than at the top. 

For as long as I can remember, my super stylish grandfather did this and one time I asked him why, this is a paraphrasing of what he said to me. Let me know if you agree and if not, why not! 

The correct orientation for the buckle of a strapped watch is hanging from the '6-Oclock' or 'lower' lugs . 99% of makers incorrectly position the buckle at the '12-Oclock' lugs so when worn, the 'tag' end protrudes towards the "audience" . This is as rude as showing someone the sole of your shoe, and is incorrect form for strap watches in addition to actually contributing to tag- end snagging on all manner of impediments. 

Furthermore, when positioned with the buckle trailing the '6-Oclock' (as shown) the buckle is properly 'presented' to the admiring audience as the wearer twists his wrist to read the time, and if present, a signed buckle is displayed for all to see, as a measure of prideful branding. 

I wear ALL my strapped watches, other than deployment buckled ones this way. How or why on earth so many makers mount the buckles on the wrong end is beyond me.

I guess you can see what he means ... 

using my SRPE62K1 on its original NATO to demonstrate the point, (which I never wear because I now far prefer the pointless short strap cut off and leather straps made from NATO) shows he was correct on every point.

I wear it this way on all my watches NATO or not.

making a bet

 I like to see if my predictions are correct, so based on this article I'll predict that the outcomes of the projections are all appearing to reach an asymptote. So I'll just say "we'll not reach above it in my life time".

for clarity  ... this means we won't have a self sustaining fusion reaction that produces grid scale power in my lifetime.

The AOL effect

 

Many years ago the internet was a place where only government agencies or education facilities existed. These players were denoted by one of the following domain suffixes:

*.edu
*.gov
*.mil

Then along came the .com revolution and those of us on the net found a new group of people "the general public". At first this was people who were not typical members of the public because in 1989 the people who had a computer were fewer and usually had some legitimate business reason to own something of such specific use. 

AoL however tried to capture the mums and dads of America and the experience became more and more the opinionated and uneducated and quickly if you saw a argument occuring you'd find that the protagonist had a domain suffix like .aol

Quickly it became known as Arseholes On Line and opinions were more like:

Then came internet on phones and it all got much worse as the base of internet use expanded. To me its not insignificant that the guy is using an Apple computer. Despite Apple not being the first to produce smartphones, they were the first to lowball it ot the General Public even adding cunning things to their default system seeings like "Sent from my iPhone" on emails. Making idiots think that only iPhones could do that , while making the rest of us facepalm.

Now its about "main stream TV" level.

are we the masters?

 Its often good to have a background in biology to be able to ask questions like: who is in charge

"However, we should never forget the hard-won cautionary lessons of history. Alchemy was not only a proto-science, but also a “hyper-science” that overpromised and underdelivered. Astrological predictions were taken so seriously that life had to adapt to theory, instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, modern society is not free from such magical thinking, putting too much confidence in omnipotent algorithms, without critically questioning their logical or ethical basis." (citation)

and are we then to become like wheat to the AI? Because wheat could be see as having enslaved humans as propagators and carers for it.

Worthy thought right there about the basis of symbiosis.

If we defer to the new religion to run our lives we need to ask basic questions like "is the machine a good parent".

Good Morning

The Big Question

I read this Guardian article this morning and it resonated with some of my views. Without reading too much into the word "meaning" in this it makes the important point of "we're all we've got"and perhaps we should stop thinking about SciFi, stop placing God as the center and start thinking about humanity as the center ... 

I would place religion as a key player in our environmental problems as well as our problems of getting along together. Religions (particularly the Abrahamic stemmed faiths) somehow are key in fostering the idea that somehow "God" and the "Final Conflict" are what we were created for.

So its not for the prudent management of our selves and our world, its somehow about pleasing God. Its almost as if all religions want to celebrate our death as the sacrifice for God.

To me this is complete madness.

The reality as I see it is that we have (in the last few dozen years) become truly world changing agents and are slowly waking up to that fact. 

We have to realise that if we fuck up here we fall forever, there is no "new land" to migrate to.

We need to get rid of the toxic mental disease at the heart of most of religion (all or most of them really) and make anthropocentric views the center of what's important.

Now to be clear I am not saying that  there is no God, what I am saying is that the human views of God are wrong. If we continue to rely on the ideas of a bunch of illiterate un-educated sheep shaggers and War Lords to inform us of what God is then we're locked into a thinking from 2000 years ago which is entirely out of step with human capacity right now.

investment watches

Its been a while since my last post here and so I thought I'd whack something together which I was thinking about a topic that came up in an internet discussion. The topic was "will this watch make a good investment".  Note: not this watch

but it sure is a nice watch.

Anyway, I see this being bantered around on various watch discussion sites where an amount of intellectual self delusion goes on (commonly I call this watch wanking).

A well known watch review site did an article (here) about the resale values of Rolex models and identified some pretty stand out models. I thought I'd discuss a the stand out model of the Daytona 116520 White.

As you can see from their chart (which I've edited to remove distraction) that seems to have grown in price from around US$13,000 when new to nearly US$30,000 now.

A KingWang type would just leap on that and go WOW ... I can make a packet on a watch.

Lets just do a little more analysis depth than that simplistic wanking, hmm? So to be able to get that sort of growth you had to know in advance which watches would go up and which would not. Notice that the Cellini Time actually went down in cost over the time between release and used price researched for their article (2020).

Now the Daytona was made in 1963, which means that you'd have had to keep it not only in good order, but either proof of service or a recent service done if you wanted to get that money. Such things are  not free. Financial people call this "cost of carry".

Now lets look at what would have happened if you'd put $13,000 down on something else, lets say good old fashioned gold. Now how much gold would you get in 1968? 

Back in 1968 gold was about US$39 per oz, that $13,000 works out to be about 342oz of gold (people didn't buy fractions of an Oz ) or nearly 11kg - that should suddenly scream out to you how much that actually is.

So now, if you'd put aside that gold, what would that be worth today? Well at US$2,424 per oz at the moment of writing means you would have US$829,008. Yes, thats eight hundred and twenty nine thousand and eight dollars.  That is because gold has risen like this since even the 70's

So you could now go out and buy 27 Daytonas and still have change.

Amusingly gold isn't even considered a good investment ... 

To make matters worse the inflation adjusted value of the Daytona that you spent half a  median house  price buying has not even kept place with inflation, because that would mean it would cost $102,472.13 in todays purchasing power ... making the current price about a third of what you'd paid for it.

Watches as an investment? Laugh ... I nearly shat.

Arlec PC800: how to delete a program

If you have one of these (or something similar with different branding) you may want occasionally to delete a specific program (emptying it), while not disturbing your other programs.

Well its not in the manual but I discovered it by accident. You press the Manual button with the progam you want to delete showing. Like this

hope that helps

the enduring appeal of the Dive Watch (is it based on signalling and identification?)

I had a discussion the other day (online) which (I'm sure) prompted Google to fish this Hodinkee article up into my feed. I felt that it was entirely bang on with what I was saying in that discussion about why we like our divers watches.

This watch was my second Seiko (discussed here) which I bought in around 1984. I picked it because I liked the Diver Style and did an amount of swimming, snorkelling and other wet (weather) activities. 

I liked the bezel timer aspect for daily things too (when the print still showed) and best of all it wasn't a big chunky watch that got in the way of things (discussed here) and shows that this "diver" style watch didn't need to be Bold and Chunky as it was thinner and lighter than many modern watches (such as my SNK805 or SRPE61K1).

Which is more interesting in light of the Hodinkee article. However while I strongly identified with everything identified in that piece there were a few points I'd change the wording of very slightly. So if I may make changes:

This was probably more true in the 1950s than it is today – case manufacturing precision, as well as improvements in seals and gaskets, mean that the days of it being advisable to take off your watch before washing your hands are long gone, and virtually any mechanical watch from a Seiko 5 on up is going to be able to tolerate splashes and even brief periods of immersion, and emerge none the worse for wear. I wore my first mechanical watch, a Seiko 5, into the ocean every summer for several years. I happened at the end of that period to have begun doing watchmaking as a hobby and out of curiosity I took the back off the watch, curious to see what it was becoming clear to me, was injudicious behaviour, might have done to the innards. There was a hint of corrosion around the inner part of the crown tube but that was it). However, though it may be less true today than it once was, the habit of thinking of perceiving dive watches as generally a significantly more practical and pragmatic choice for daily wear than non-dive watches, is probably permanently ingrained at this point.

So this paragraph shows clearly that the idea of the dive watch is rooted in the past when if you did want a watch which was robust and reliable in the field that probably a dive watch was all there was (to Captain Willard, who picked a Seiko not a Rolex) ... his humble Seiko 5 had no problems. Indeed my Seiko "Quartz Sports 100" was not a proper diver but a diver alike. As shown in my blog post there was no undue effect from swimming, snorkelling and SCUBA diving (as I discovered when changing my battery myself)

Remember this is not a certified diver, its just a diver styled watch. All I can say is that my experience matches his.

The article continues:

The second answer is that like any other sort of watch, dive watches say something about us. A dive watch projects, in its broad-shouldered rejection of the unnecessary, the same trustworthy, here-to-get-work done vibe as rolled up sleeves, a loosened tie, and a (navy blue) jacket thrown over the back of a conference room chair with a devil-may-care disregard of wrinkles. It says that you're a person who, though you might spend the majority of the day warming a desk chair with your posterior, could outside the workplace be a person of physical bravery, if not outright daring, who just might need a watch that will tolerate, say, jumping off the side of the Staten Island Ferry on a muggy August afternoon to save a loved one's errant poodle (it could happen).

... to basically say that its about how you pick your jewellery and your clothes to send a message (perhaps to yourself?) of who "you are" (or how you wish to sculpt your narrative).

This is starting to shape up as King Wang territory isn't it. If it wasn't clear by now that the author thinks its all about how you imagine yourself he states:

A thinner, more understated (less overstated?) watch may speak to your sense of sober discretion, or your refinement of taste but these are probably secondary considerations in the minds of most dive watch lovers, who all things being equal would rather be thought of as the James Bonds of this world, than the Thomas Crowns

And we all know that Bond wore a NATO ... right? The king is dead, long live the king?

A dive watch, in its most classic iterations, doesn't particularly feel designed at all, so much as made simply and purely to suit a particular purpose and that purity of intent has long outlasted the intent's actual relevance, in either diving or everyday life. In short, dive watches feel authentic – they project an air of necessity which other categories of timepieces simply fail to match, on many levels. In a world full of timepieces whose designs seem more or less arbitrary, or at best present in order to appeal to highly subjective vagaries of taste, the dive watch, we feel, looks the way it looks for a reason. This solid feeling of grounding in reality that the best dive watches have,  project this absence of arbitrariness and subjectivity in their basic features, is I think the most substantial reason for their enduring appeal.

With those minor changes (because its not really thinking, its the opposite, its not rational and is all emotional) I submit this is one of the best articles I've read.

I would say however that the SNK805 is perhaps another design which has its origins in the pragmatic and minimal practical design views

For this design comes from a time when "flight instrumentation" was actually worn on the navigators wrist. The outer dial is divided to display the minutes well and clearly as the most significant part of the time, meanwhile the hour takes the inner part of the face and we can read it sufficiently accuratly to know which hour we are in. This is the stuff of pre GPS navigational process.

In the 1980's I bought my above Seiko Sports 100 because it had a beautiful orange dial, wasn't thick, was well priced (I bought it used) and I like the diver style; in that order. I bought the SNK805 because I wanted a mechanical watch (which I could leave sitting around for some time and know it wouldn't need a battery change) or just wear every day and know the time - because I wanted to reduce how often I looked at my phone.

The SNK805 has been exemplary in that role for a tiny fraction of the cost of a (Desk) Diver.

the "scootering dream" vs reality

I love using my scooter, be it for a trip to the shops or just an afternoon ride to the sunset; however one thing is certain in my mind: I have to pay attention.

Scooters (and the idea) are sold to people as some sort of dreamy fantasy

beautiful bright future city-scapes and people dressed neatly and smiling, no crowds on sunny days ... its idylic, even pretty chicks can do it looking fashionable and hot.

The reality however is usually obscure obstacles that didn't stand out to your untrained eye

but when you get down to wheel level and look will be sufficient to off you with your itty bitty wheels ...

when you hit them without looking and going fast (see this post). 

Often they can be hidden under leaves or small debris:

so the rule is: if you can't see it suspect it.

Hitting small (you thought) insignificant obstacles which in combination with the itty bitty wheels of scooters your daydream ride may turn in to this

even at speeds that (if you've only been in cars) seem not fast ... the reality is however even a basic scooter goes faster than you can run and if you trip while running full speed you'll also risk injuries like the above.

Scooters should be ridden by a rider that respects these facts, because scooters can be dangerous, especially when going fast.

Remember, the only thing that really matters in safety is YOU. Scoot so that you can scoot again tomorrow and enjoy the future days

not so that you spend the rest of your life coping with injuries.

EV breaks the ICE (maybe)

We all know that EV's will save the world by reducing CO₂ emissions to zero.

right?

Well ... the other day I was in the supermarket and I saw this vehicle promotion set up

No prices mentioned ... but I'll get to that

I sauntered over and looked at the stickers on the windscreens; first the Niro

I couldn't help but notice that it was Zero ... yippie ... but what's that hard to read small print in low contrast there?

oh ... what do you mean "unless 100% renewable energy is used?"

Well if you charge that in this area at home at night then its basically going to be electricity coming from the Coal Powered grid, and so the "combined test" 16kwh / 100km ... or (as identified in a previous post) means releasing 13.6kg of CO2 / 100km ... oh dear.

So lets have a look at the Cerato

Which gives 6.8L of fuel per 100km, which will translate into (based on their claims) 15.8kg of CO2 / 100km which isn't much different to the reality of 13.6kg really.

But wait, what's this Combined and Extra Urban??

well this is because Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) use less fuel on highway use than around town use. Interestingly with EV's this is reversed. This is backed up by not only this site:

Unlike gas- or diesel-powered vehicles, which regularly beat their EPA ratings in our highway testing, every one of the 12 EVs that we've run range tests on to date has fallen short of both its EPA highway and combined figures.

but in the personal experience I have with friends who own EV's and also my scooters. Literally the faster you go the worse it gets (which is also true of ICE powered cars, but nobody tests them doing 80km/h along the track).

So this means that out here in the countryside that Niro will be more likely to be used at 100kmh NOT "combined" which will mean that the CO2 produced will simply go up above that claim, and maybe produce even a little MORE CO2 than the ICE version.

Oh Dear. 

No wonder they didn't list them separately ... cunning.

Prices?

So the Cerato is the 1.6L Turbo with Dual Clutch Transmission which is listed at AU$34,190 while the Niro is listed at AU$70,990

FARRK that's over AU$36,000 more.

So lets just do some quick stuff here. At current prices of about AU$1.50 per liter even just spending $30,000 will give you 20,000L of fuel which even at 8.9 (the urban figure) will give you about 222,222km (or something like 10 years of driving).

As always the devil is in the details when dealing with King Wang Marketing...

why is the "NATO" popular?

This is a genuine question.

For years I just wore a watch; mechanical, quartz, training watch ... I occasionally bought straps or bands if they wore out. I never really put much thought into it.

My recent return to searching for and buying a watch revealed a new thing to me: the NATO phenomenon. I would never have even found out about it if the Seiko I bought didn't come with one.

Why does everyone love this piece of weird stuff? Its like a Solution looking for a Problem (which does not exist). Is it because "it sounds military"

The stated problem is "what if my spring bar breaks" ... well a simple strap would solve that, no need for the two thickness and keeper strap (which I usually cut off as discussed here).

The keeper isn't needed to hold the watch on the strap, unless you take it off, hold it by the buckle and whirl it around your head.

Then there is the idea about it being a Bond thing ... well, Bond never wore a NATO, until after the Bond NATO was established in the watch community

Is the only answer that its about this problem?

Applying Occams Razor I think this is probably it.

I've done my own research

More or less I'm just going to republish this as it stood; in the unlikely place of Facebook (link) However in case that goes away or you don't have Facebook here it is. 

NOTE: emphasis and formatting mine:

---

“Do your research!!!”

Here’s the thing. Research is a learned skill; it is hard, it is nuanced and complex, and it is true that the majority of people would not even know where to begin or even HOW to do [their own] research.

Research is NOT:

• Googling,
• doom scrolling your FB newsfeed, or 
• binge serial watching what the YouTube algo feeds you or 
• reading Reddit / 4Chan 😖 

to search for the results you are hoping to find to be “true.” These are called confirmation biases, and are quickly and easily ruled out when doing actual research.

A post credited to Linda Gamble Spadaro, a licensed mental health counselor in Florida, sums this up quite well:

Please stop saying you researched it.

You didn’t research anything and it is highly probable you don’t know how to do so.

Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results? No?

Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source (that would be the author, publisher and funder), then critique the writing for logical fallacies, cognitive distortions and plain inaccuracies?

Did you ask yourself why this source might publish these particular results? Did you follow the trail of references and apply the same source of scrutiny to them?

No? Then you didn’t…research anything. You read or watched a video, most likely with little or no objectivity. You came across something in your algorithm manipulated feed, something that jived with your implicit biases and served your confirmation bias, and subconsciously applied your emotional filters and called it proof.”

This doesn’t even go into institutional review boards (IRB’s), also known as independent ethics committees, ethical review boards, or touch on peer-review, or meta-analyses.

To sum it up, a healthy dose of scepticism is/can be a good thing…as long as we are also applying it to those things we wish/think to be true, and not just those things we choose to be sceptical towards, or in denial of.

Most importantly, though, is to apply our best critical thinking skills to ensure we are doing our best to suss out the facts from the fiction, the myths, and outright BS in pseudoscience and politics.

Misinformation is being used as a tool of war and to undermine our public health, and it is up to each of us to fight against it.

PS: this video emerged on YouTube in late August of 2023 by Sabine

I strongly recommend watching it in full.

Next from this lecture in what amounts to a teams 50 years work on a topic we get this sound advice:

https://youtu.be/7mOvJbmpG6A?t=569

From the transcript starting at 9:31

Now before I present any clinical evidence let me just make three principles about research.

First of all my boss in the my early years in Cardiff, Archie Cochran, of this University, he very effectively publicized the principle that; in evaluating evidence it's essential at all available evidence is considered and never just a selection.

It's awfully easy to have a hypothesis and spend a Friday afternoon going through the literature and finding one or two Publications that show the same kind of thing as we're looking for in that particular hypothesis. That is so misleading it should never be done. So he went to enormous efforts as you will see in what follows that we would collect all the available evidence.

Then the follower of other modern medicines William Moser he said I think it sums up "medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability". In the end science never proves anything, always [it is] another explanation and conclusions about a particular hypothesis [and] can only be established at best to be Beyond Reasonable Doubt.

Don't look to me for any certainty in what I say but I think we've established a number of important steps which go beyond Reasonable Doubt.

Sage words.

Lastly a new skill (for anyone not still in high school, where at least in Australia this is now part of the curriculum) is the concept of Critcal thinking. Its outlined well at Monash Uni's site here.

Becoming an expert takes a lot more than just time, it takes feedback that you were wrong or confirmation that you are correct.

Best Wishes

What is the vegan agenda?

I often wonder what it is that is the real Vegan Agenda. 

A quick look around shows that involves grandstanding, putting "their message" out there in a highly visible way (like this model chick in an Asian city)

(seeming to biggyback of another quasi religious organisation called PeTA) and aligning with "saving the earth".

Now I know that vegetarians have been around for most of recorded history, but Veganism is something new. Vegans go beyond vegetarian and will often make a fuss about even the merest amount of "pollutants" in foods, yet that same vegan can be observed eating non-vegan foods (if one is careful because its often in in seclusion).

Why is it so?

The answer in my view is that Vegans seek beyond all other things to be noticed, to be special, to be apart and to signal their virtue. Interestingly this is the exact realm of the narcissist.

Lets take a look at what a narcissist is first.

further that because Vegans have an agenda and look to a systematic belief system it also ticks many boxes of "Cult"

The question of "religious" style motivations is already examined by some papers on the psychology of Veganism. For instance this one which explores how people inclined towards a religion are indeed also inclined towards Vegan ideals.

Results show that religiosity exerts some effect on consumer environmental predisposition, and that, in turn, such predisposition determines vegan purchasing intentions. A split model is then proposed considering Christian and Buddhist consumers. Results of multigroup analysis show that religious influxes on consumer environmental predispositions might vary according to different religious faiths.

Someone who is religious is often more inclined towards "magical thinking" (and do recall that religion has been the #1 enemy of Science since Science really started).

Vegans will have you believe that their "teachings" are the only way towards the (holy) goal of a Sustainable World for humanity.  Yet that claim really does not bear examination; indeed closer examination will reveal that title belongs squarely with good old vegetarians (and especially if they make a few concessions to dairy and eggs). 

This study for instance 

found that the vegan diet would feed fewer people than two of the vegetarian and two of the four omnivorous diets studied.

So any moral high ground would only be apparent if you don't actually test the claims. 

Interestingly this is exactly in line with Malignant Narcissists who love control and hate facts.

but wait ... there's more

The Vegan agenda goes beyond just "sustainable" and well into control for controls sake. While turning a blind eye to the amount of animals killed in the harvesting of their soya bean crops (or even the entire eco-systems laid waste in clearing habitats to plant them); Vegans will decry medications for their excipients , refuse beers or wines because of miniscule components used in manufacture and even tell you what shoes to wear.

Whats even more amusing is that numerous health studies have shown that being Vegan (and probably vegetarian) is not universally good for health and involves many complex tricks to make sure you're not setting yourself up for a deficiency disease (link to a University Publication). An amusing anecdote is that a person I know was getting sick, so she consulted her Doctor. Blood tests were done and the Doctor suggested that the problem was her Iron content was low. He suggested a small serving of red meat weekly. ... NOPE ... not for the faithful. So he suggested a glass of Stout or Guinness (evidence for that), but again NOPE ... its not Vegan 

Sounds a bit like "its not Catholic" or "its not Halal" or some other non scientific impractical and often cruel religious view doesn't it.

Lastly Vegans (much like religions) seem to feel its OK to bring violence to bear because of "what's at steak" (oh, steak ... mmmm).

From that article:

• Animal activists who brought central Melbourne to a standstill recently have vowed to step up their campaign of civil disobedience and raids on abattoirs and farms.
• Activists say they will risk big fines and possible jail terms for privacy and trespass offences
• Chris Delforce, said animal rights activism was a natural extension of the growth of veganism, as people became more aware of the treatment of animals raised for food, fibre, entertainment and research.
• The extremists and the radicals that we've seen invading farms and businesses, it's unlikely they'll ever have reasonable conversations.

Extremists and radicals ... fits the picture.

It gets even more ridiculous...

...when you consider that quite a lot of Vegans don't want to make substantial changes to the food that they eat. so rather than just "don't eat it" they want to eschew eggs and have their mayonnaise ... talk about Marie Antoinette 

and manufacturers (who just want to sell stuff) place VEGAN in big letters (perhaps for the morons) on what is obviously a vegan product anyway.

What's even more ironic is that (aside from wanting to have their views but not make any changes) these products are often more expensive to make, release more CO₂ and other areas (study):

The vegan mayonnaise had a significantly (p < 0.05) lower impact across 4 categories, but a significantly higher impact across 8 categories out of 16, including climate change and resource-use-energy-carriers.

Laugh ... I nearly shat.

Long ago I wrote a whimsical piece about the Zombies of Moronity ... I see that Vegans are forming up as a group and taking that crown by force (along with say, QAnon).

The King is dead, long live the King. King Wang, King Wang, Wanking...

My position on Electric Cars

I did my masters research in Environmental Science, my focus was on sustainable development and I believe strongly in the viewpoints of Ecological Modernisation.

So that being said I have nothing against Electric Cars (EC) per se.

Modernisation should be undertaken in a stepwise manner which is consistent with Sustainable Development. I do not see evidence that the EC industry is sustainable, but it is quite happy to ride a wave of public sentiment which is essentially based on the idea that it is a panacea for climate change. It is not. Instead we see Government "picking a winner" (that'd be EC's) and pushing that agenda. This is a bad idea.

What I am against is what I see as the following list problems.

Why do it?

Well first there is the idea you're saving the planet with reduced CO₂ emissions, lets work an example.

In a recent test on the Mini SE (electric) it used about 32kWh to cover 190km. This is about 17kWh/100km which is pretty typical. However if you charged that in Queensland apparently that results in about 26kg of CO2 (according to this site  https://www.powershop.com.au/carbon-calculator/).  

Now if you drove the regular Mini (based on its claims) it will use 11 liters of fuel which is about 2.4kg of CO₂ per liter or 26.4kg of CO₂

"I just shit my pants" (laughing), because you just spent $10,000 dollars more to virtue signal on something that does not achieve the objectives you imagined it would. Does that make you a fool or a zealot?

Motivation of Governments should always be viewed with scepticism (see this older post), as should the motivations of industry. When I see things such as the following I find it hard to not be sceptical about the actual motivations.

Such things in the points as diesel cars, curiously touted by governments and backed by fuel price advantages previously, are now bad news; this in a matter of a few years. I understood that the incentives to get into a diesel car are now dwindling ... will that happen to ECs? Well yes, we already are seeing that in places that began adopting them.

While arguments are made for the reduction in "tail pipe" emissions from cars in cities the drive to replace hydrobarbon based conversion of energy into motion in the car to only storage of electricity in the car is not backed up by similar clear spending on generation sources and transmission sources of  electricity.

Its well understood that most generation is not without pollution (even CO₂) and the best studies have shown that its at best about 30% reduction of CO₂ depending where you live and how your electricity is generated. Yet we do not see a proliferation of ECs in the lower power demands, we instead see them in the higher power demand areas. Tesla leading the charge and BMW and others coming on board.

The prices are certainly not something the average person is going to afford, with them being priced in the order of over AU$100,000.

Top Down Driven:

Meaning that in the "top price tier" there isn't so much of a difference between the xDrive and the older X5 BMW, but for "people's cars" the bill is very high. This is not news to me, as my recent comparison of "like for like" EV vs regular (now called) ICE cars shows you pay more than double (nearly 3 times) down at the lower end for the same thing. 

There is no mention anywhere of how many kW hours per 100km these BMW's consume. Which is even something that the average person (the one expected to make decisions) barely understands. Even when it comes to liters per 100km in their car ICE car. 

For reference my eScooter consumes less than 2kWh per 100km and the most generous figures you can expect from an Electric Car is more than 10 times that, but that comes with the issues of recharging (soon).

Fairly clearly these Electric Cars are not aimed at the masses (even the Hyundai EV, for who on the low end can afford 3 times the price for a basic car), nor it seems aimed at doing anything more about reducing CO₂ than virtue signalling. Remember, electricity often depends on stuff which generates CO₂.

However it goes deeper in my view, because the central (yet to be solved) issue is the cars battery pack. Currently this is Lithium, which while itself abundant currently relies on elements which are certainly not, NOR is there a certain supply of it (places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and China being the world top two suppliers).  Lets side step the supply and ethical issues involved right there, but expect wars over this. Just like wars are over petroleum right now.

Its commonly touted that battery prices are falling (but ignored that the battery packs in cars are requiring more and more battery), with even reputable institutions putting out "public fluff" in blog posts selling the idea that  lithium batteries are getting cheaper.

I personally love the projection into the future ... suggesting it will continue falling, but their point of "look out, auto industry" is perhaps the storm that will drive prices UP not down.  Its quite certain that there is not enough battery being made (probably in any short time being able to be made) to supply the volume of batteries the ECs (which apparently we all need) will require. 

Fun Fact:

Did you know that while your laptop has maybe 3 lithium cells in it, my scooter 78 that a Tesla has over 7000? So if we consider the battery an essentially non recyclable component, and indeed a representing a scarce resource its important to make good use of it. We can make 100 eScooters per Tesla just on batteries alone ... so which would make more impact for reducing emissions? Tesla on the road or 100 more people in (say) London using an eScooter for last mile?

Yep. We are going to need a LOT of batteries. I read recently that a major Italian conglomerate is stepping into the ring:

which may sound encouraging but will this actually reduce prices or will a massive demand increase drive the price higher? 2Giga-Watt hour ... it seems a big number, but how many EC's is that? Assuming that an "average" EC needs a 50kWh battery that's about 40 Thousand cars. Currently the EU buys about 1 Million  cars a year ... so thats enough to give 4% of new car sales. Piffle innit.

Perhaps they are only in there because of government distortion of the market?

What do I mean? Well apparently Europe has now decided that even Hybrids are not sufficient to satisfy their regulatory requirements

which pretty much leaves EC's which means more battery sales and probably because of demand higher prices for the makers (who are already in a tight margins game).

What is Power

So, if we have an Electric Car we have to charge it right?

The power needed needed by EC's is best understood in Watt hours ... like if you run a bulb for an hour, or a car for an hour you need Watt hours. Most people (or so it seems) do not understand their power bill, so lets have a little look at mine:

So last month I used 168 kWh, if I'd had an EC and was charging it at home, and lets say it was one of the better EC's that uses 17kWh/100km and I did 20km per day (getting to and from work)  that's 100km or 17kWh per week (just to and from work) that's about 70kWh per month. That's a lot less than the average distance driven per week, which is much closer to 260km per week or about 176kWh per month, meaning double my draw from the grid.

Notice I didn't talk about the money ... just the draw from the grid.

So the grid will need to account for at least something like that in order to cope with the load.

Sure, we'll do it in stages, but you know ... somebody has to pay money for all the increased power generation, all the increased grid capacity and probably this will come in the form of increased power costs (so you'll pay more for your power). Also you'll probably have to pay something in the short term because power (measured in Watts) is underlied by two factors (sorry, again the general public is going to have difficulty with this because many failed science); Amps and Volts. Indeed its simple its exactly a multiplication. 

If you are going to pull 1000Watts (that's 1kW) from the grid then (assuming you have 240Volt power as Australia, Europe and the UK do; but America doesn't) you'll have to pull about 4 amps. For every 1Kw you want you'll need to add another 4 amps.

If your battery (like the BMW is 77kWh; go back up and check) and you want to charge it in 10 hours you'll need to pull 7.7kW from the grid for those 10 hours. This equates to about 30amps ... 

So?

Well the average house is wired to cope with pulling about 80 amps from the grid, so I hope you aren't using your AC or Electric Heater, Boiler or other electrical appliances because if you are you'll trip a fuse that's INTO your house and you'll be "off grid"

Clearly unless of course we get some magic solution we will be setting ourselves up for problems.

So back to Sustainable Development to me

1. none of this seems sustainable ecologically
2. it does not work economically for the masses
3. it is a lot of effort for a smaller return, perhaps even a negative return when all the adaptations are counted in.

Alternatives?

To me the Sustainable Development is to do the following

1. work at actually reducing your driving, get a bicycle or maybe an eBike, a  small motor-scooter (perhaps electric?) or an eScooter for those smaller trips (like getting to work). Myself I've cut my petrol consumption in half using the above.
2. use public transport as much as possible, perhaps get a folding bike or an eScooter for the "last mile" (*as eScooters are not legal yet in some places (yes, I'm looking at you UK) then perhaps agitate for that?)
3. try to think deeper and really grapple with the problems and the knock on effects

Friends of mine will know this is not my first post on Electric Vehicles, indeed I've had a few (see here, which will include this). Interestingly this whole thing really hasn't changed in the last ten years, as my first post on Electric Scooters was just over 10 years ago (think Vespa, not the stand up type you can take on the subway). In that post I clarified that it makes no economic sense and returns little benefit to the consumer. Nothing has changed, and all that has happend is we've clarified that without cheaper electricity that is not polluting there is little benefit to the environment then or now for EC's.

Indeed if batteries are wasted (like the 10 year old Nissan Leaf rotting up my street) then the advantages of an EC are quickly negative. I fear that in the hands of "the general public" (because right now its only enthusiasts) we'll see lots more "lost resources" with people stuffing up their EC's by misoperation and general neglect.

Its a path we need to consider carefully before rushing into. Ecological Modernisation isn't just about what technology Society uses, its about how Society thinks and operates ... this isn't just about consuming, about buying more (but Tesla and BMW would love you to think it does), it means you need to engage, you need to understand and you need to act!

because in reality we are fighting for our childrens lives (so make sure you understand the basics).

Superglue as a wound dressing

For those of us on warfarin (and maybe some others) abrasions and mild cuts bleed like stuck pigs (as the saying goes). As I age my skin seems more inclined to be broken by impacts than at a younger ages and forearms often bear the brunt of this. The other day I caught my arm on something and opened up a wound which of course bled all over my shirt (fuck).

So after I treated the wound basically (clean, apply pressure to reduce bleeding) I mix in a drop of superglue with the fluids coming out of the wound (plasma as well as a bit of blood) and allow to dry. This is what it looked like:

The opening (a skin tear) is a bit under a cm.

The next advantage from Superglue comes the next day when it is much more stable than a scab is and even after a shower you don't need to worry about "wiping off the scab and bleeding again"

Works well and will fall off as the underlying skin exfoliates naturally.

Remember:

1. apply pressure (with a bit of absorbent paper covering the wound) first
2. when its not oozing as much (should be no more than a few minuets) apply super glod
3. DO NOT apply pressure with your finger then ... unless you want a comedy to ensue

HTH