Tuesday 29 December 2020

Seeing the obvious

 When a child wants to cross the road away from a zebra crossing, or share a bottle of vodka with a friend, they often dismiss the attempts of adults to tell them they'll get into trouble, find out themselves, and then learn the hard way. Adults however often never grow out of this stage, accepting any plan or policy made by those in authority and frantically defending them against challenges from elsewhere. I can think of three such examples where the ideas were presented, and to me and supposedly anyone with a three figure IQ could see they were guaranteed to disaster, and currently only one is now redundant, for the sole reason it was based on the free market so failed naturally. But my point was the idea was so foul it should never have attracted a single penny to be most certainly wasted on it. This was before anyone had mobile phones, and before the technology was publicly available. But rather than wait for it to shortly arrive, a Hong Kong firm, Hutchison Telecom, rolled out a semi-mobile phone, ie one which could only make calls, but not receive them, and then only within the small range of randomly provided aerials.

To me if you wanted a randomly provided local phone service, at a fraction of the price, we had had phone boxes for almost a century, so carrying your own handset which could only be used for outgoing calls, where there was local coverage, at many times the cost of the existing and identical in function (except if you were already there people could also call you back to save you money) was a total redundancy. Nevertheless, Hutchison, driven by nothing more than sheer childish ignorance, spent millions setting up aerials and equipment, and as anyone with the said triple digit IQ would have reasonably worked out, bombed and lost more or less everything they had.

Sadly this was a small scale and not an isolated example, in fact quite the opposite. Rather than be put off and train people to be more careful in future, outside the free market and led purely by subsidies, they then rolled out wind and solar farms, which were motivated mainly by the huge fees paid to their owners, rather than any actual performance. But the customers, not for wind as none of us were given a choice, but solar, had to have a missing link themselves. To me, windmills (besides the incredible expense) turn randomly, not when you do or don't need them, and need a constant backup for when they don't work. Again, like the Hutchison Rabbit, totally redundant. But because of said financial incentives they persist as a pyramid scheme, where the product is irrelevant, only the exchange of money. But those millions of advocates, when presented with evidence the child exclaiming the emperor is naked, refuse to accept this and somehow bypass their thinking mind to defend them at all costs, even though many also need to cut down forests to build them, and they all murder innocent birds.

Solar panels are arguably even easier to analyse. All solar panels have a maximum capacity to convert the sunlight to power. Most are currently around a half that capacity, which is only ever achieved in full sunlight and reduces gradually to zero at sunset. Therefore you can calculate exactly the maximum amount of power you will get per day every year, and how many panels need to cover the area to do so. Then the maximum is reduced by every hour of cloud. So they know exactly the most power an array, whether a farm or a house will provide. These are fairly low compared to the current cost, so in common with wind farms, massive subsidies are offered to keep the cost low, and then to pay owners for power generated when they are out at work or away. Without these incentives they have little genuine function, as the possible 20 years they may last may never pay back the thousands of pounds spent on buying them, as you can do this sum before you decide to buy them. But those, in comparison with the basic fact, are minor issues, as of course the more you need power the less the sun provides, in direct proportion. As all energy warming up our planet ultimately comes from the sun, then relying on the sun when the sun isn't there much or at all is clearly the least reliable method of providing power, yet they keep doing it.

But the best has been saved for last. Imagine a typical local car journey. A few miles, stopping at the end and maybe once or twice on the way. Even if you only plan a route from A to B, supposing a friend waves you down, or you see a shop open with a parking space so you can pick up something you need. Nothing special, just a normal day. Now imagine doing this journey in a car with no steering wheel or pedals. When you leave you put in the destination and it just takes you there. Well yes, if a) There is no other traffic on the way and b) If you don't change your plans on the way. The other traffic is supposed to be controlled by sensors, which in theory is possible, so say an animal runs into the road it sees it as soon as you would and has been programmed to take appropriate action. Or a car cuts you up. I expect with an infinite number of sensors it could just about react to hazards as a human being. It remains to be tested. But if you change your plans, how will it know where there are parking restrictions or not, when and where it is safe to cross the road for a parking space, how to tell the car you want to stop in time as it's not in the program, and if your plan is like mine, to drive 200 miles in a day and take photos wherever you get a chance and is safe to do so you can repeat this process a few hundred times over. I'll be driving along a dual carriageway at 70 and see a layby ahead and decided to stop to take photos, or maybe not at the next one as I'd been there before. How much notice should I tell the car to stop, and can I really rely on it to pull out into the traffic when I move off which is three lanes of 70mph vehicles a human eye can't usually miss day or night, including motorcycles?

But self-driving cars are said to be months or at most a few years away. Unlike the first three examples, if it all goes tits up this time people can say I told you so. I give the trials on public roads an hour maximum.