Sh*t You Hear On The News - RBA Rates and Tobacconist Fires Edition

I was listening to my ABC News and Guardian news podcasts this morning (26 Oct '23) and a few ironies struck me. Ironies. I mis-spoke. EFFING HUGE IRONIES I meant to say.

First up, the RBA. The ironic joke of the century, the impotent organ of greed, and about as useful as a chocolate teapot at High Tea. 

They're Going To Have To Admit It Soon.

Here's the RBA after - what is it now, twelve months? - of raising the interest rate are scratching their heads and their butts, yawning, and about to realise that they're irrelevant to the actions of the economy and the hot tea's 99% melted their teapot. 

They're going to have to say that as far as the Australian economy goes, they have zero effect whatsoever on it, The apparent "fact" that the economy has moved whenever the RBA made adjustments can be explained by the exact same mechanics that explain why gamblers can experience a "hot streak" or a "losing streak," why racing aficionados have a "system" that serves them for a decade and then suddenly it becomes apparent that tracking how many ass hairs each jockey has, had no actual effect on where the horses they rode placed in the field.

There's a really really great saying in science that says that "correlation does not equal causation" and I think the reserve bank is a living embodiment of pure dumb random chance over science. And pretty soon, they're going to have to own up to it. 

Tobacconist Shops Ablaze. So To Speak.

It's been a weird part of Melbourne life for a few months now - tobacconist shops being set on fire. Apparently also a few of the arsonists setting themselves on fire. It's true, the arsonists are apparently using whatever materials and means at hand to set those fires, and at least one was caught on video setting themself on fire by accident. Sorry - don't have a link to that but I heard about it on the radio. And these mightn't be the sharpest tools in the shed. 

But this - and also judging from the most recent story I came across about money laundering occurring in plain open sight and - finally - being properly investigated and prosecuted, that's also a bit of an indication that criminal organisations are ramping up activity. 

Also - there was some buzz on the news about some illegal vapes and vape juices - probably sold out of those same tobacco shops - and hey as a personal anecdote the wife and I were at a discount shop a few years ago looking through a range of normal tobacco pipes when the shop owner approached us and offered to sell us a crack pipe. We have no idea to this day why an Asian import $2 shop was selling tobacco pipes, but the little glass sphere just blew us away. WTF? 

The Biased Media

I saved the best until last. One of the articles I listened to came from the national radio service ABC, another from The Guardian. Both were podcasts, which I find a better way to consume the news. And they both had other things in common.

Each one was in the format of an interviewer throwing fairly pointed prompts at an interviewee. 

And in each case the interviewee was also a member of the journalistic staff at the same media organisation.

Talk about the best way to get the exact story you want. 

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Fly Again

It turns out that you can't. 

Fake "Certified" Engine Parts

have been going into one of the most popular commercial aircraft engines for years... Alert engineers in Portugal spotted a part that had suspiciously - no, impossibly - high wear soon after it had been installed in the engine, and that started an investigation that pointed the finger at AOG Technics Ltd in the UK. 

Turns out that buying reconditioned parts, "rebirthing" them with fake documentation claiming them to be new, and having a non-existent faked Quality Assurance Manager "sign off" on the quality of the parts can net almost obscene profits for an ex-Venezuelan ex-DJ ex-real-estate-agent UK immigrant. 

Effect Ripple

There are over 20,000 in commercial aircraft around the world. The scam's been going for years (they don't say how many, but claim he started somewhere between 2010 and - roughly, going by the article - 2016) and in that time it's not known exactly how many rebirthed "certified new" parts of all kinds Zamora started selling but in the year between 2019 and 2020 the company's profits experienced a huge rise, so make up your own mind. 

To my mind that's four years - that we can take a stab guess at - that possibly dodgy, quality-unknown parts were sent out into airline / aircraft maintenance organisations worldwide. There are usually spare engines (and airframe / landing gear / control susbsytem components) on the ground undergoing a rebuild, and depending on what Zamora's AOG company sold over that timeframe and what parts were actually uncertified and therefore fake, that's a lot of aircraft systems and quite a few aircraft flying potentially unsafe hardware.

And in fact, in the last few years there have been some aircraft incidents (that you can find by browsing Mentour Pilot and Mentour Now, among many many flight incident channels on Youtube) that - if a traceable link can be established back to AOG - would be attributable to Zamora personally as it appears from the Bloomberg article I used as a source that many - if not all - of his key employees may have been fake personas that don't actually exist. 

What Does That Mean?

Well, for a start, it means that any Boeing 737 aircraft that are equipped with the CFM56 engines that have been refurbished, maintained, or repaired in the last five years - and potentially, depending how far the fraud has been perpetrated - are definitely no longer as safe as they should be. Depending on how many other non-genuinely-new parts for any other subsystems AOG has sold since it was operated, there could be many other types of aircraft, many other subsystems affected. It turns one of the safest forms of transportation into something less safe. 

And What Does THAT Mean?

It means that the actions of one dishonest man can affect the lives of tens of thousands of passengers per day around the entire planet. 

Also To Be Noted

Aircraft maintenance organisations (be they independent repair hangars or self-operated maintenance hangars) are generally quite careful that the parts they use are certified as genuinely new or genuinely refurbished when they buy them. They have to accept that a supplier furnishes genuine certifications, although in many cases they "keep the bastards honest" by going to the suppliers of their suppliers to ensure they can get two levels of certification. 

They're now talking about "three levels of certification" and that's all positive. That means two levels below their current suppliers will get investigated by Purchasing managers and officers. It still won't spot the case where all three levels fake their documentation but it'll certainly help make things more difficult for dishonest suppliers.

The aircraft themselves that may have been affected will be easy to spot - once a part gets into the internal documentation system of a maintenance organisation they can track each part to the point where it entered their organisation's paperwork. So those aircraft will be rectified quite quickly, and I reckon that with luck not quite as many aircraft are affected as it at first seems. 

So in a few months all of the most critical systems will be rectified or proven by inspection, and the non-critical systems will also be rectified or inspected quickly. But it's worth keeping at the back of your mind if you travel. 

Epilogue:

As the Bloomberg article has pointed out, the aircraft industry has become the safe industry it is today because of quite deep trust relationships. At one stage not so long ago, if an aircraft engineer signed off as safe a system that subsequently failed and was found by the relevant air safety organisation to be the cause of an aircraft incident causing loss of lives, the death penalty was still an option. 

It was that tight. 

The licensed engineer had provably passed all his certifications for the specific type of system they signed their name to. It was taken on trust that the training facility / school / organisation would not certify that engineer unless they were satisfied the engineer was indeed competent in all aspects of that subsystem. 

The engineer in their turn would be quite satisfied that their Quality Assurance department had provided only components that were of suitable quality and fit for purpose, they in turn would rely on their suppliers being honest and reliable, and so forth. Checks and balances ran both ways through that system, but because of the number of lives that depended on an aircraft (and the bloody-minded glee with which aircraft accidents are reported) everyone had a stake in keeping things above board. After all, if people lost faith in air travel, business would decline for everyone involved.

There have been a few "con-artist" incidents involving improperly conducted inspections or repairs, very few of fraudulent or faulty parts, and in almost all cases those incidents have been remedied without serious incident. And you can see why - with the amounts of sensational news coverage 

Stuff like Bloomberg News cost me to subscribe to. I could just join for free but I think it's important to encourage news resources to keep covering news. I feel it's important to include their links even though they're "semi-paywalled" by their insistence on getting you to subscribe for free or fee. 

I'd really appreciate it if you shared links to my articles too. A quick link into your social media of choice, on the instant messaging app you use, it helps grow my audience. And a donation or regular donation means the world to me to keep the costs from coming out of my pension.

Cop-Out Communicators Are Killing The Planet

Do you know why we're up the creek without a paddle, in a fast-sinking barbed-wire canoe? 

I call it "copout communication." There's a current Youtube ad "... plastic pollution has *flooded* our planet ..." that's a perfect example of this. Why? 

Because no, it hasn't. WE've flooded our planet with plastic. To put the ad like that is BS, pure and simple, and designed to "unalive" our sense of personal responsibility and "hand-jobbie" our sense of righteous indignation at how DARE plastic flood OUR planet. 

And yes I used some other copout mechanisms for demostration purposes - using euphemistic words for "kill" and "wank." So sue me. I did it to show how weak copout communication actually is. Re-read that last paragraph with the right words in place and you can see how much better of an impact it has. 

That one ad also puts the responsibility fair and square on - plastic itself. Not on the Fossil Fuel Cartel which gets such a huge profit out of fossil fuel and needs to be dismantled and the plants and refineries demolished. 

In a way me saying that we flooded the planet is a half-copout in itself. We're only responsible in that we allowed it to get to this stage and didn't put the onus for recycling right back on the producers of the goods we buy packaged in plastic, to recycle their shit plastic. 

Companies recycling their waste plastic is eminently doable these days with energy available in scads from the sun and wind. And if these companies were forced to install enough sustainable energy to run ALL of their operations from making to selling to taking back and recycling, then that would give better profits to the makers of sustainable energy generation equipment, which in turn would make it less expensive for others to buy and put into service. Win/win/win I love hat tricks!

By shutting down 95% of oilfields and refineries, that would certainly mean that a few rich FFC execs would have to try and eke out a living on their last several hundred million dollars - but that's a hardship I'm prepared to endure and so should you. These bastards have names and addresses and a legal presence in courts of law all over the world, people! Start going to get them!

Then There's...

Then there's this article I posted the other day, which also makes my point for me. A cute little seabird that commutes 10,000km each way on its migration. Even that bit of fuzzy-feelgood news is kind of pointless because the first part of the article's just there to convey that we actually know very little about some seabird migrations. It's an anti-article up to the halfway mark. The real headliner was the quiet little heading that reads "Seabird population in decline." To torture the whole story around so it looks like a good-news story is bullshit, it's a perfect example of another form of copout communication. 

Don't be a copout communicator. Share this article in your social messenger, your social networks. It helps me get my words out to more people, this message in front of more pairs of eyes. It's a quick and easy form of activism and it helps swell awareness of the issues we need to solve pretty damn quickly if we want to survive.

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Greed And Dissonance

I'll start with a conundrum:

What connects these dots? 

⦿ https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/08/22/grocery-items-expensive-inflation

⦿ https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/08/23/woolworths-swage-theft-profit

Hmmmm... I wonder...

The Dissonance

Listening to the news the other day, discussing how the price of groceries has been affecting Australians. There was some financial commentator speaking to the journalist about the prices of food. 

This is our Labor government. A government that supposedly stands for the working person, for living standards, against corporate exploitation. 

The cognitive dissonance in the radio interview was almost tangible. What was the reason people couldn't afford food? The economy seems to be doing well - supermarkets are showing strong profits, banks are showing good profits. Surely in such a strong economy, people should be able to afford food?

And why were the prices of food so high? The supermarkets, as noted, were making profits so why was food still so expensive? You know when people are looking right at an elephant and pretending that it's just an elephant-shaped hole in the space-time continuum? 

Unsurprisingly, shoplifting is on the rise. But what do they say? "...total stock loss was up 20 per cent compared to last year due to a rise in “organised retail theft” and crime driven by cost-of-living pressures..." Where the merry effing hell do they think those "cost-of-living pressures" come from? When a half kilo block of cheese costs $10? Not from the dairy farmers - Coles is still bending them over and giving them a good shafting, adding to the farmers' "cost-of-living pressures." Not from the factories like Bega. They too are getting a big dairy milking from Coles. 

Seems the "cost-of-living pressures" are all stemming from - Coles. And they have the chutzpah to blame "organised retail theft." Oh wait - that phrase can be read in two different ways... I get it now...

There was some discussion about what government body was in charge of fixing the prices of food to be affordable. Turns out there isn't one, the government believes that "the market will fix itself." Now where have I heard that particular bullshit before? 

But I realised that the government is also staring hard at an elephant-shaped void. 

I heard a similar thing about the housing cost crisis, too. How could prices have skyrocketed like that? Why were rents so high? Were there market forces at work here that couldn't be identified? 

And the price of energy was going up, too. Here, I commented on it in this article a few months back. I posted a while back that the same story was covered by two different newspapers thus: "Billion dollar shock for the electric grid" and "Energy providers enjoy a billion dollar windfall from renewables." Yep, the same event, in one case made to look terrifying and a justification for shocking price hikes. The other, a regrettable glitch in the media that gave away information that might erode profits. 

Honestly - people will literally turn themselves inside-out before they say that corporate heads and landlords are base greedy pigs and they don't give a flying f*** at the moon for anyone else. 

And Actually

This is a state of affairs that can't continue, and I think the government is aware of that. Regarding the energy prices skyrocketing, they pulled the rather limp move of fixing gas prices for a few months, as if that was going to stop any of the price gouging that's still ongoing to this moment. At this moment, renewables and batteries are coming online at a tremedous pace. Each battery, each wind turbine, each solar plant, is reducing the fuel costs of generating energy. And yet the price keeps going up. It's not to cover capital costs, because while solar panel and turbine manufacturers are also capitalists, they still haven't quite developed the brass bollocks that the energy companies have. 

So it's all just totally greed, so that when - inevitably - the energy companies have to concede that they can't justify those rates any more, they can drop them back a little, amid much fanfare, and most people won't remember that this "new low price" is higher than it was while fossil fuels still had to be paid for on top of maintenance.

Landlords wasted no time raising rates, banks kept their rates high on the basis of the Reserve. The Reserve kept doing the same thing over and over because their boss liked his cosy lunches with his bank chief mates and the government wasn't having a quiet nice word in his ear to back the eff down because he was killing the less wealthy of the Australian population. 

And the government knows that we now know that they're quite okay with everyday Australian people dying for the sake of corporate wellbeing. If this was a war, there'd be outrage and activism. Because it's being so soft-pedalled in the media and they are - as observed - spinning the news so much that bits are flying off, we need to change the public's focus so they can see those bits sticking to the news screen.

Capitalism is dying. The concept of 'post-capitalism' is no longer an abstract concept. What kind of a post-capitalist world we get, we need to start agitating for now. We need to make better decisions than the handfull of CEOs and shadow chiefs have done, because look where that's led us to - a world where governments can decide on an 'acceptable' number of their constituents who'll be killed by the decisions made. 

Capitalism has been ruled by numbers. Numbers of people the product will kill either in the acquiring of the raw materials, or in the process of making he product in the factory, or in the number of people who are killed by the waste products directly or later, indirectly, by the damage to the planet, or finally, the number os people the product will directly kill by misadventure, poisoning, unsafe application. 

Numbers are great at understanding the planet and the Universe but they're pretty shyte when you start using them to define how many people you knowingly plan to kill so you can make another number in a thing called a 'bank account' increase. 

What we want for post-capitalism isn't that. 

Stewardship, Morals

That's the thing we want. I don't want to make another single dollar out of paper or polymer, nor strike another coin out of metal, in order for people to compare the hypothetical size of their external genitalia in terms of dollars and cents. 

I'd much rather settle for a change to how we learn to know our own value in terms of how we can live a lifestyle we feel comfortable with while simultaneously making sure that lifestyle doesn't cause more irreparable harm to the one and only planet we're able to live on, as it turns out. 

Do I bang on about killing capitalism too much? I rather think not. I wish you'd help me get the message our farther and wider. I definitely know I bang on about that too much, but - come to think of it - no. No I bloody well don't. Your support means the difference to me of being able to keep blog stuff paid. To pay for the odd advertisement to get wider exposure and wider dissemination. 

To you, it can mean as little as the cost of a cup of coffee a month. I know cost of living bites, but I'm on a pension and paying all the bills for domain names and server fees (because Internet providers also need to pay their employees) and I put every scrap of donations towards that. I've never even bought myself a cup of coffee out of it. Ironic hey?

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Indonesia/Australia Lithium Battery Project

Spodumene. "Spod, you mean? Hahaha hehehe *snort* spod's a funny name for a mineral."

Yeah, I thought it was funny. I even thought it was schist. (Geologist jokes alert.) I also thought all those little mines scattered around Australia that were mining Rare Earth Element mineral sands and ores like spodumene were "toy mines." I'd seen a few "proper" mines - you know, the kind that leave scars on the Earth that you can see from the ISS, and they seemed to me to embody mining, not like those smaller ones. But that was forty years ago and most of those niche metals were still pretty niche. 

Nowadays, I'm kicking myself that I didn't invest some money into them back then in the early 1980s... I predicted heaps of things in my life, but spodumene (lithium) wasn't one of them. (Nor most of the other.)

Australia is ranked sixth in terms of REE mineral resources, with 3,660,000 tonnes which is about 3% of REE resources. China 44m tonnes and Russia 12m tonnes  between them have 48%. Brazil, Vietnam, and India command 24% or 30.9m tonnes. Pulling up in the rear are the USA at 1% or 1.44m tonnes, Malaysia with less than 1% and 30,000 tonnes, other smaller producers between them 4.4m tonnes or about 4%.  -- Geoscience Australia (Last updated:7 June 2023)

This illustrates how quickly things change given the rate of change of technology. Forty years ago these REEs were a novelty, a niche resource. Now they're worth forging alliances over. Indonesia wants access to spodumene to refine into lithium to manufacture EV batteries. It's sad that we just dig Australia up and send it overseas anyway, seems we have a history of sending our best stuff overseas for others to profit from. Are we really so colonially whipped that we feel that that's all we deserve? 

But it's even much more sadderererer when you think that we had a company willing to make batteries here, we have another one recycling (mainly lead-acid but who knows, one day perhaps lithium-ion style as well?) batteries. We had several plans to produce EVs locally. We had the plant sitting around. We had (and still have) people who'd jump at a chance to work in such places manufacturing the future. 

Do you get a glimpse, however tiny, of how frustrated I am that we throw away so much value? Our Universities and research organisations totally pwned the solar cell race for years. The support from the government was so rewarding and sustaining that the people that pioneered that early research went to China and formed one of the biggest solar PV companies there instead. In fact, I asked ChatGPT to compile me a list of Aussie innovations and inventions that we couldn't seem to follow up on. 

Me: Could you please compile a list of Australian inventions and innovations that had to be produced overseas? (such as our advances in solar panel technology, wi-fi, etc?) ChatGPT: Certainly! Australia has contributed to several significant inventions and innovations that have had a global impact. While some of these advancements were produced and commercialized overseas, their Australian origins remain noteworthy. Here's a list of Australian inventions and innovations that had to be produced overseas:

Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi technology, also known as IEEE 802.11, was developed by a team of researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia during the late 1990s. While the core technology was developed in Australia, it was later commercialized and produced by various companies worldwide. Cochlear Implants: The cochlear implant, a revolutionary hearing device that helps people with severe hearing loss or deafness, was invented in the 1970s by Dr. Graeme Clark at the University of Melbourne. Cochlear Limited, an Australian company, was established to develop and produce these implants, which have since been utilized globally. Polymer Banknotes: Australia was one of the early adopters of polymer banknote technology, which replaced traditional paper-based currency with more durable and secure plastic notes. The concept was developed by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in collaboration with the CSIRO during the 1980s. Many other countries have since adopted polymer banknotes. Black Box Flight Recorder: The flight data recorder, commonly known as the black box, was invented by Australian engineer David Warren in the 1950s. Although initially met with skepticism, it became an essential aviation safety device used worldwide. Ultrasound Scanner: The world's first ultrasound scanner was developed in the late 1950s by Australian researchers David Robinson and George Kossoff. The technology has become a critical diagnostic tool in the medical field, used globally. Winged Keel: The winged keel, an innovative design used in the America's Cup yacht race in 1983, was created by Australian yachtsman Ben Lexcen. The technology improved yacht stability and performance and was produced overseas for racing. Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Technology: Australia has made significant advancements in solar panel technology, with research conducted by organizations like the University of New South Wales leading to improved efficiency and cost reduction. While solar panels are now manufactured worldwide, Australia's research contributions have been influential. Dual-Flushing Toilet: The dual-flush toilet system, designed to conserve water by offering different flushing options, was patented by Australian inventor Bruce Thompson in the 1980s. It has been widely adopted internationally to promote water conservation. Spray-on Skin: Developed by Dr. Fiona Wood and her team, spray-on skin technology is used to treat severe burns by promoting skin regeneration. While initially developed in Australia, it has been used in other countries to aid burn victims. Medical Pen Needle: Invented by Australian Arthur Smith in the 1980s, the medical pen needle revolutionized insulin delivery for diabetics. It allowed for more convenient and less painful self-administration of insulin, a vital hormone for managing diabetes. Inflatable Aircraft Escape Slide: The inflatable aircraft escape slide was invented by Australian engineer Jack Grant in the 1950s. This innovation significantly improved aircraft safety by providing passengers with a rapid evacuation option in case of emergency landings or accidents. Gardasil (HPV Vaccine): Developed by Australian immunologist Ian Frazer and his team, Gardasil is a vaccine that protects against certain strains of human papillomavirus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer. It has been used worldwide to prevent HPV-related diseases. Res-Q-Link (Personal Locator Beacon): The Res-Q-Link is a personal locator beacon designed for maritime and aviation safety. It was invented by Australian aviator Dick Smith, who established the Australian Geographic magazine, and it has been widely used for emergency distress signaling globally. Electronic Pacemaker: In the 1920s, Australian anesthetist Dr. Mark Lidwill and physicist Edgar Booth developed one of the world's first electronic pacemakers, which aided in regulating heart rhythms. The pacemaker technology has since saved countless lives worldwide. Speedo Swimwear: The iconic Speedo swimwear brand originated in Australia in the early 20th century. Its innovative designs and use of advanced materials have made it a globally recognized name in swimwear and aquatic sports. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR): Developed by Australian biochemist Kary Mullis in the 1980s, PCR is a groundbreaking technique used to amplify DNA sequences. PCR has become an essential tool in molecular biology and various scientific fields globally. Quantum Bit (Qubit) Research: Australia has been a pioneer in quantum computing research, with significant contributions from researchers at the University of New South Wales and other institutions. Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize information processing. In-vitro Fertilization (IVF): While the concept of IVF was developed independently by researchers worldwide, Australians such as Carl Wood and Alan Trounson played a crucial role in refining and advancing the technology. IVF has since helped millions of couples worldwide overcome infertility. Bionic Eye: The development of the bionic eye, a retinal implant designed to restore vision to people with certain types of blindness, involved Australian researchers from the Bionics Institute and the University of Melbourne. Electronic Sphygmomanometer (Digital Blood Pressure Monitor): The electronic sphygmomanometer, an automated blood pressure monitoring device, was invented by Australian engineer David O. Murphy in the late 1970s. It became a standard medical tool worldwide.

See? That list may or may not be 100% accurate (given ChatZGPT's spotty track record) but as far as I can see those are all legitimate, and they point out how little benefit remains in Australia from all our innovation. 

See? I may be a thought innovator. Please let me know by signing for a newsletter, contacting me, or supporting my writing. 

And we need - now more than ever - to have some of these industries on our own shores. Here goes.

The World's Becoming Really Bad.

I don't mean just a little bit bad, like climate scientists have not been saying for decades but coporations have. I mean we-might-die-oh-fuck bad. Theoretically the planet can only heat up so much, but then other theories say "just hold my beer" and it could get very VERY bad. 

And one of the upsides/downsides (depending which side of the globe you're on, see what I did there?) is that some places are already close to uninhabitable while others are already uninhabitable to their local ecosystems. 

But of a more direct concern to us is that people are already dying as their ecosystems heat up. LOTS of people. It's not going to get better next year or the year after, but it might be possible to slow the rate down, make the worst effects a bit milder. 

The only thing is that we need to do that NOW. Not by the end of the year, NOW. If we could stop all vehicles in their tracks right now, we might be able to do it. If we could stop shipping and air transport, that might help too. And if we could do that without a variety of corporations getting on their high horses about how they'll be "negatively affected" by this, we need to start shooting. 

Because what those poor corporations will experience will pale beside what their customers and staff will experience. We will die. Not pleasantly slipping off in our sleep but quite horribly drowning in our own sweat and internal condensation. There are already that are killing like that. Places with high temperatures and high humidities where people's insides are cooler than the surrounding air and so the water condenses inside their lungs. You won't see much of that in the news I'll wager, but there are already places where those conditions have existed this year, and really only pure luck has dictated that it hasn't been a major city. Yet. 

And as I'm lately observing, governments are not going to be happy when they no longer have anyone to govern, so many of them are even now making plans to stand up to corporations, negotiate them down to the facts or else making them illegal or whatever it is that governments do when they want to make something stop.

Meanwhile, consider the Catch-22 of it all. The northern hemisphere is slightly warmer than the southern. That may be because the majority of the landmass of the Earth is in the northern hemi and the majority of the oceans is in the southern. 

Take a look:

That says it all. The oceans exchange heat from the northern to the southern half, but slowly. The north has very little water mass to soak up excess heat, whereas the south has a lot. The north has huge landmasses, and landmasses drive initial warming. The south has quite a small total landmass to heat up. 

So what's the problem?

We down in the antipodes may be desperate to ditch fossil fuels but we won't be able to do so without batteries and EVs and wind turbines. We won't even be able to run air conditioners as much as we'll need to. And we're already woefully under-performing in manufacturing. How we'd bootstrap up a renewables industry let alone start manufacturing air conditioners or even electric scooters is beyond me right now. 

The problem is

Most of the manufacturing is in the northern half. There are few manufacturing powerhouses this side of the Big Divider. If we want to have electricity and manufactured goods after the Big Burn, we should be securing that capability RIGHT NOW. And I just realised that I've actually said it, there's a much bigger problem. 

The Big Burn Is Coming

The northern hemisphere is probably going to feel the worst of the climate crisis' effects. There's also pretty good evidence that the northern hemisphere created most of the climate crisis but let's be honest that's a matter of opportunity not motivation. If civilisations down under had won the race to the Industrial Revolution the world would be in just as bad a shape. 

But as the north's disastrous and catastrophe-fraught summer has shown, the genie's well out of the lamp and granting wishes. 

Back to the article

There are few large manufacturing industrial ventures this side. A lot of resource gathering (aka mining and polluting and exploiting) has happened here though. But even if the resource reserve of the planet was to keep digging crap out of the ground after the BB, there'd be nothing much by way of processing it. Maybe Indonesia, Malaysia. Some of South America and South Africa might have a few processing smelters etc, a few factories. But the majority of that kind of industry lies well above the equator. 

And at the kind of effects we've seen this year, much of it will be able to keep on going. Roads between centres may melt but train tracks can be built. But we're totally 100% NOT guaranteed that this year has been the turning point. 

So - making batteries in Indonesia will give us energy storage, storage that (grimly, I have to add here "for as long as it is able to") will allow us to eke out the renewable energy we have. As I said, the northern hemi will also create demand for those batteries. And win most of the production, too. But there's a - small - chance that some of the battery production will be able to be done onshore in Australia (remember Australia? I started off with Indonesia and Australia collaborating on battery technology and while it's taken a bit to get back to the point where this is going to start to make sense) because to NOT do that would be foolish. 

I'm looking directly at Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen as I write this. Get some production happening right here in this country where we seem to manage crises much better than the average, where we have unemployed people who are quite capable of operating such plant. There is going to be demand for it quite soon. I'm willing to bet on that. 

Of course, there's another thing: Indonesia is in the equatorial zone so they may be protected from the extremes of the northern hemisphere for now. But that belt also gets the most consistent heating effect. And it's important to note that a mere ten years ago the Indonesian president at that time, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said that he wanted his military to be capable of "wiping out" Australia. It's no longer in the online record but I remember that at the time this generated a bit of buzz. So I suspect those reports have been removed by now. I did find this - the watered-down version. It does point to what Indonesia will want to do once the equatorial zone becomes less habitable... Maybe having factories here will provide them a way to bring some people to safety. A LOT of people are going to be seeking safety down under.

But as we know, we have had manufacturing capacity, we do have military and defence agreements, and we've got a perfectly terrible record on refuge seekers. We've also - and largely thanks to a negative, authoritarian, and regressive right wing dinosaur government - lost manufacturing industries and capabilities, innovations we developed, and a lot of our national pride and reputation as the "Lucky Country." There's no doubt in my mind that our two-party system and especially the Liberal/National Party Coalition within it has put us in a situation where we'll need to make a concerted effort to recover. But recover that spirit we will have to as the climate disaster progresses, and that of course under that very disastrous planetary situation. 

I really hope our national identity as the Aussie Battler survives the next decade... 

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Return To Offices. But Why?

There are often gloved-hand moves being made by corporations, "adjustments" to their operating practices, that turn out to have other, sometimes unintended, most times carefully planned, outcomes. 

Here's one such set of moves. TL;DR: Move back into the office or (unspecified) action will be taken. It presents a number of questions for me and I'm going to try and unravel them here.

COVID

COVID is a long way from being an "insignificant thing like flu" as we all seem to want to pretend. It's still churning along at rates worse than when we were in the lockdowns that prompted the WFH practices that companies now seem determined to destroy. 

COVID itself

It's still just as infectious, just as damaging, as it was. And in fact with some of the new variants we're already skating balls to the wall close to losing the war against a virus. Putting people back in close proximity seems a move designed to kill off and incapacitate staff. You have to wonder how that mindset could have taken hold, no matter how much or little based on fake Kool-Aid it is.

Long COVID

The other reason COVID's not finished with us. LC is to have health ill effects from the ravages of COVID after the actual virus first stages have passed. A person may not be shedding virions any more but they also have little capacity to deal with daily commutes and dealing with in-person interactions. Again, it's got me speculating why a company would want to do this. 

Work performance

It seems apparent that the world didn't disintegrate during the lockdowns, nor did workers forget their duty to their employers, because the work got done, often better than they had in offices. A few slackers perhaps, but they could be weeded out and in fact I seem to recall one of these cases being online along with the solution which was to terminate that person's employment and replace them. 

So. Why?

Given the company's insistence on RTO (Return To Office) you have to agree that the company sees some advantages, some improvement to their bottom line. Corporations don't operate on a social, familial basis. They work towards financial goals, and those goals always include some increase in profit margins. 

Forget the team-building "we work better as a face to face team" kumbaya bullshit. That's nothing they're concerned with. Employees have proven able to complete their tasks from home just as efficiently, so that's not the stated reason they can give, either. 

Worker efficiencies

Having proven able to do their jobs under what the management might consider challenging conditions, they may be of the opinion that returning these "new improved" workers back under the corporate whip.  

Worker actual work hours

Shorter work weeks / hours have not been proven to negatively affect actual work output. This has been shown in study after study now, and not just by paid-for research either. So if workers got their work done in fewer hours at home, then that means that the company may think that the employee will perform more tasks when placed in the office environment again, considering how they may have appeared to have a few spare "slack" hours during their WFH work time. 

Real Estate Issues

Also, it might irk many corporations that they're paying rent on properties that aren't being utilised. And the part where Amazon is considering moving back to main hubs and ditching smaller offices seems to indicate that. But is it really? 

Asking remote employees to face increased commute times over their original RTO commutes seems like a fairly bad idea and might result in employee attrition due to the ever-present "screw you!" response some workers will inevitably have at this. It will also result in further attrition as employees develop health conditions, and also as stated before, employees with LC suffer health declines or even fatalities. 

Culture

The stated culture reasons ("It's easier to learn . . . our culture . . . in the office . . .  true for people of all tenures at Amazon . . .") don't ever forget that your company is NOT your family. That idea of "culture" is "value extraction at any cost to the employee" not "fine fuzzy warm relationships between employees." I mean - there may be some slight benefits to the social cultural aspects of all clustering in soulless spaces but I really can't see that as a primary reason. And yet Jassey led with it...

Analysis Mr Spock

I'll start off: There's an elephant in the room. See if you can spot it. Meanwhile, the analysis:

We can say that "culture" is only desirable to the company insofar as it helps with onboarding. Jassey says onboarding is a culture goal. I say that it's the only reasonable goal to surmise. Maybe some employees get all warm and fuzzy at having colleagues around them to bother and distract, or maybe a very select few miss the distraction and bother. But these aren't productive. Also - going by their stated attitudes to RTO - most employees are signalling quite emphatically that they don't want or need "in-person social culture."

It almost looks like management are wanting to piss a few employees off enough that they'll quit. 

Then there's the dubious benefits of commuting to work and back daily. For a start, we know that the daily commute spikes pollutant levels wherever there are commuters. We know how for a few glorious weeks, clean air and a reduction in greenhouse gases accompanied lockdowns. So forcing commuting makes little sense in this context.

There's the daily frustration of sitting in traffic / sitting on public transport for several hours every day. It removes those hours from your leisure and social life. (The most savvy will also see how when the Eight Hour Day was apportioned, it seems that only the Work Eight Hours has been preserved as unalterable and inviolate. Companies are quite happy for the employees to take the daily commute times out of their own leisure times, and don't give back half the daily travel time by way of shortening the work day...)

And then on top of that is the health effect - commutes generally happen from places with little pollution to an area with heavy pollution due to all the commutes converging there. In your own car you can shut out the pollution - but generate more for fellow commuters to have to shut out... As it's often a frustrating process, there are also health effects caused by increased stress levels. 

I'm betting unhealthier employees aren't more productive than employees sitting at home where they're in effect cutting their commute to the three minutes it takes to close the laptop and step out of the home office. 

Then there's that whole COVID angle. Are management really that hoodwinked because the figures aren't quite so loudly announced now? I don't think so, but I'd actually rather be wrong than to believe that COVID could be being used as a tool of attrition to reduce staff numbers. I just can't discount the possibility...

So - RTO will involve staff attrition, pretty certainly. And staff going back to their work practices from before WFH of using the water cooler and break room, informal cubicle meetings, and other counterproductive practices. It could involve some resignations due to stress, health, or anger at being forced. 

Listen. When I was last in employment, if I'd brought a chair shiatsu massage insert to work for my current state of health, I'd have found myself fired pretty smartly. If I was in the state of physical health I'm currently in and had been asked to not bring the massager because of "morale" (which was the dark side of "culture back then) I think I'd have had no option but to resign. 

As it is right now, I'm sitting writing this while my lower back's getting rendered a bit more pain-free. Can you spot the difference in my writing because of it? And I can tell you that if anything, I'm able to work faster because I can stretch sitting to 30 minutes at a time rather than 10-15. 

As I developed COPD / emphysema back then too, commuting became extremely damaging to me back then and was one reason I asked to be on disability pension. And because I've since developed some of the long-term LC issues as well, any office space that involves stairs, high CO2 levels, or contact with people who have flus or colds is also out for me unless I want to die years earlier than I should.

I don't owe any company that much of my life additional to work time.

elephant!

The one thing that isn't in that article is AI. Need I paint the bigger picture NOW ?

But of course I will. Watch Amazon as they lay off those injurious to cultural morale, accept the reignations of the "eff you!" and "not on my watch" mob - and then don't replace any but the few that do jobs that can't be done by AI.  

(Okay, okay. I *may* just have closed my eyes to take a power nap after the shiatsu back cushion finished. But in my defense, I'm also retired with disability and doing this for the enjoyment and the very small donations pool this brings in.) 

Oh look! Another elephant!

But I am betting that this is a great motivator behind many RTO campaigns by many companies. The people who are sitting in their office complexes are the ones that drink the Kool-aid, keep their heads down, and are at their most productive in a mob situation. The rest will have been outsourced to one or other AI software. 

These companies will gain because they can close satellite offices and stop paying rent, they may even be able to relinquish one floor of their core office buildings, pay fewer employess, and slip a shafting in under the radar. Where you going to go to now, Central Office Slave? Don't forget that in a few more weeks we'll have a smarter AI that we could then use to replace you. (And don't let's bullshit about it. As soon as we have an AI that can replace you, we'll find a reason to let you go. But at least this way you'll stay on our terms until then.)

And that's my entire analysis. Prepare for it now. Since we can't really force a company to keep us on the payroll while an AI is doing our job (although by rights they should) we can do the next best thing. Lobby your government to tax the companies the full nine yards, and use the windfall to pay you a small (but adequate to survive on) Universal Basic Income. With a UBI under your belt you may not be able to afford the latest EV but you'll be able to pick and choose between jobs you actually like and want to do rather than be getting shunted from pillar to post by that company. 

---

Activate! Do things! Right now! Write to your local members of government, write to the relevant ministers of tax and human support and legal rights and remind them that unless they plan to round us all up with our own military and shoot us, we're the people that will get them re-elected next year. Write letters to the Editor and the local papers. Share the futter uck out of this article and articles like it. 

Keep The Bastards Honest! And - git offa ma lawn!

Imma Just Do Round-ups now.

I'm noticing something that's creating difficulties for tech bloggers, tech journos, and avid tech readers. It's partly Ray Kurzweil's fault, partly Gordon Moore's fault, and it's also a fact of life and Nature. 

I commented in other recent posts that some things I was writing articles about were progressing so quickly that it was getting hard to keep up. How hard? One of those articles is scheduled for July 26th, weeks after this article will already have been posted . . . I wish that last sentence was hyperbolic BS but it isn't. As I was writing it I had to stop and rewrite chunks of what I'd already written, to include new information. That, on top of yet other articles I'd posted and in some cases needed to update mere days after posting.

So if you want to read "Technology's Pace Is Racing" you'll need to wait until 26 Jul 2023 to open the link. And that is a really weird feeling for me, linking to an article that hasn't been posted yet. Also, by the time it comes out, I'll already have written several other articles that have probably leapfrogged it. 

The Race Is On

I mentioned YouTubers having difficulties with progress, tech equipment and hardware reviewers who take the time to produce a decent long-form video report, finding that newer technology almost made their video outdated by the time they posted it. Unless you want a quickly-assembled frantic short-form video that's pretty much ephemeral, there's some production time involved. 

Prediction #1:

In order to cope, some of the more popular tech review / explainer / news YouTubers will begin to rely on AI to write their scripts, edit the videos, and publish them. Some may even generate deepfakes of themselves to present the videos, taking themselves out of the loop almost entirely. Some will use this as a way to get more travelling to location, interviewing, and on-the-ground fact-gathering time, and less need to stitch it into a coherent report and present it. 

If they're in a field where they can do their entire field part of the production process by remote video presence, expect that often a deepfake will be doing the whole interview for them while they do other things like recording 

I don't think it's a stretch when I say that tools like telepresence robots will be pressed into service. Channel presenter sits behind their desk and pretty much has a Zoom session into a robot at the other end, they get to 'virtually see' their target story location and converse with the people there while their camera operator manages any vision-gathering equipment the telepresence bot has available - and maybe even that can be handled by a piece of AI software. 

Bottom line: Big YouTubers will have the resources to invest in such software and hardware and will get bigger - unless the tide turns against such automation. (It won't - if anyone still has any romantic notions of the person with the iPhone and a ring light and tripod unbelievably making it to the Big League Of Influencers, give it up now - there's a professional; production team behind almost every one, and they're all desperate to ditch a few costs (="probably means staff") so every automation process has been adopted to speed the workflow and reduce the number of hours it occupies... )

Sub-Prediction #1.01:
Who will benefit? Well, for a start, the "Next Big Thing" people. They'll start off already using all available automation and automata - the "iPhones" of their era - and so will be seen as resourceful and edgy, whereas the old guard will all be seen as betraying their old school values. I've already been guilty of looking askance at long format content creators falling for the lure (and income) of the short-form video brainfart formats, and those that overuse automation and obviously plagiarised-and-written-by-GPT scripts, and actually stopped following a few of them.

But a new audience will see new rising stars and accept all the things I see as shortcomings as "edgy" and "nouveau."

My best guess of a "talking head"
operating another "talking head."

Back at the studio, the footage and audio can be stitched together mostly by AI under the direction of the video and audio producers and the presenter, and then presented by their deepfake studio presence. A story with a deadline can be gathered in the same day in this way.

(Talk about a weird weird WEIRD coincidence - my podcast reader has been throwing up some weird results lately, this time from 27 Jan 2023 an ABC News Daily podcast.

It's titled "This episode was written by an AI bot." I can't even make shit like this up, as I cued it up, put the earphones in, and gave it a listen. (I've only had ABC 'casts on my reader for about two months total and have received a few long-past items but this would be six months old")

And it wasn't all written by an AI bot, just the introduction was. And it seems it wasn't read by a deepfake voice - or was it? - and the rest was a normal ABC podcast format. But thanks to the Sentient Inernet AI Overbeings for providing this little extra snippet...)

-- ABC News Daily

Why?

A few months ago, the online publication world was enraged by GPTs. Some bloggers and news outlets put their content behind a paywall to prevent any AI getting it's neural networks into their all-precious "content." I haven't followed this up, but what would it cost someone to take out a subscription to their content - and hand control of it to their AI? That was such a knee-jerk pathetic and ill-thought-out response to the possible GPT threat that left me shaking my head. 

Today, most of the big players haven't specifically said they use GPT networks to write their content, but I've seen quite a few copy writers have lost their jobs, and most strongly suspect that a piece of software has replaced them. 

(SIDENOTE: I know, my social graph is only a small part of the world, but the composition of it is much the same as any other person's. I don't believe I have a propensity to favour professional writers over anyone else, so I can safely assume that what I can infer from my group will be similar to what others can infer from theirs. And that means that many people will have noticed that the field of professional writing has just taken a direct hit.)

Direct a journalist to interview and report that back, feed it through a speech to text to a GPT and bingo! - an article pops out the other end only needing slight adjustments if any at all to be published. 

Hand a script to the teleprompter operator at your news studio, the newsreader will not know if it was written b y a human, a GPT, or the janitor.

This creates a situation

... where some news organisations loudly and publicly distanced themselves from the use of AI - but they also have had layoffs. There are now some TV stations that use virtual deepfake newsreaders and use it as a selling point, and an unknown number that also use them but are keeping schtumm on this fact. 

As mentioned a bit back, Youtube depends on content - terabytes, petabytes - of content, and on people glued to their screens. Both the screens and the attention spans are steadily shrinking. I don't mean everyone becomes a compulsive grasshopper consuming content one tiny fragment at a time without ever noticing the grass stem that the fragment came from. 

But I mean the vast majority of content is consumed for entertainment alone and not for any deeper significance or educational value. Youtube lives by those views, not by the views of the long-format videos these days. And it's also not Youtube's "fault" - they need the money, after all. I mean - look at the history of entertainment. 

+ Hominids imitating a big fat lazy prey animal to its family. Time to hunt.
+ Images scratched in the wall of a cave that they all used on their migration. Big fat lazy prey animals are to be found here.
+ Short dances and plays, demonstrating "how we do things around here." We hunt big lazy prey animals like this, and we share it with the other families who live here. Culture is being taught and learned even as it entertains.
+ That Shakespeare, he's got such great plays! And so is this acting troupe! And the artworks in the foyer! 
+ Mr Rogers. Mork & Mindy. Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Dr Julius Sumner Miller, Neil deGrasse Tyson on TV
+ Physics Girl (please send her all your support as she still deals with Long COVID) and Joe Scott on Youtube and Nebula.

THAT'S entertainment.

Pretty much the arc of history - we live by stories, teach by stories, entertain one another by stories. And we get better and better at telling our stories farther and wider. Always at almost every stage there's technology involved, props, drawing stones, footlights, televisions, and the Internet. And at almost every stage, entertainment trumps education, and the money's where the audience's wishes are. 

And That's Why I Predict #1

In order to survive adopters of new technology, existing performers have to also adopt that which gives the advantage. And now there are so many new things in the mix, there'll be a lot of change. There'll be hold-outs that will resist. But by and large the way our entertainment and infotainment will be produced will allow more and more to be created. And when there's more information available, the tech innovators will learn more and be able to create newer better tech. And that's reason #1 why my hobby is becoming harder to keep up with.

Prediction #2

Bloggers are a pretty egocentric lot - we diarise online, after all, no matter what the subject is, we are in effect using a form of vanity press to get our ideas and words out there. You'll probably find the world of blogging to be the last to be affected by the GPT uptake. 

I tried to get ChatGPT to write me a few articles' worth of content. And it did a creditable job of it - here, take a look - but of course I don't have the money to buy a full subscription to any of the major AI outlets so I got 350 - 450 words only per topic, and I didn't fact check any of it because that would defeat the purpose of a cold test. The respective AI sites produced reasonable output but I prefer my own style. 

I'm a fairly simple case - I don't have the money to use a GPT to write my articles anyway, but even if I did, I'd prefer to write things myself. I'll presume that other granddad bloggers will be a bit the same and avoid using mechano-ghost-writers too. Which will form a pool of old-school handmade content online. If people still want it.

You can help this granddad blogger by donating - it really helps me to pay for things related to the blogging and Making projects. I especially made that little graphic above to make it easy for people to tip me for my content and help me with those costs. 

So anyhow - my prediction is that you'll get more and more AI-written content (unacknowledged) on news sites, and find a core of old school bloggers who'll probably avoid the lure of the AI Goldmine.

Hang on - "Round-ups?"

Yep. 

Stuff happens so fast that I have no hope of creating one post for each new piece of good news that shows up on my radar - so I'm considering putting together round-up posts. 

And I'm not even kidding - I'm having trouble keeping up with writing two to four posts a week across all my blogs and there are currently over a dozen links (each needing a paragraph or two to introduce them) already... Same thing's happening with other tech, with politics, and with all my other topics. 

If - IF - this gig was a job, I'd be on it 12-14 hours a day but it's just a hobby and doesn't pay me anything so I can't afford to just employ someone to do the laundry, cooking, and gardening to keep my spouse and myself alive so that I could dedicate myself to fulltime writing, and it's already eating into what little time I have. So sometimes, when things go hyperbolic, it'll have to be a round-up like this.

A different Singularity

Ray Kurzweil predicted a Singularity where our human evolution would be overtaken by tech. Gary Moore observed that the number of transistors in a device doubled roughly every eighteen months. 

"The Ted Predictor" (here he modestly coughed to divert attention from his obviously attention-grabbing ploy) is my own invention, which roughly translates into: 

"The amount of technological power one can obtain for a given sum - adjusted for inflation - doubles every eighteen months, and the converse also - the same amount of technological power drops in price by half over that time." 

-- Ted  

In fact, I think the Ted Predictor is somewhat holding back because while some things (laptops and PCs, for example seem to be being artificially held back) aren't following the Predictor, almost everything else is exceeding it. I put off buying a particular 3D printer because it was more than twice what I was prepared to pay for what amounted (at that time - don't hate on me!) to an expensive toy. A year later I bought it - admittedly as a result of two specials on top of each other - for under half what it had cost when I first checked it out.

The Great Chip Shortage put dents in all the predictions, and Raspberry Pi are still relying on their "first to market" cred to keep prices high. But meanwhile China's been racing itself to the bottom on other chip / small board computer market and I can get a radar human presence detector for around six bucks today that had cost upward of twenty - thirty just over a year ago. The microphone I wanted but would have had to pay upwards of a hundred for almost two years ago, I can now buy for thirty-three. 

But I don't want it now anyway, because reasonable pair of wireless Lavalier mics that were over $50 just a year ago were on special sale for $12 a few weeks ago so I got them. They arrived here in Australia within twelve days. And didn't cost anything for shipping.

And of course, the sheer quantity of new tech is increasing. The sheer quantity and level of detail about world events and politics increases. (You can cram five news grabs into the time that a news magazine video article...) Our demand for energy increases, and energy tech ramps up. And yep - I'm saying that entertainment (infotainment, okay) drives much of the technologies we are using today.

Free Prediction: 

You can see that entertainment went from utilitarian, once-off, and vital; to something you might see once or twice in your life; to seeing the newsreels at the cinema every few weeks along with the latest B&W movie; to something we consume almost continuously every day. 

The only thing we still aren't doing is living inside the entertainment. That was what Second Life wanted us to do, what Meta is trying to do now. Until the technology catches up, 

And how meta is this? I said in posts over one and a half decades ago that we would develop augmentation technology that would be far better than any VR / AR visor technology, and have reiterated that in a blog post (which may or may not have been posted by the time this post comes out) again. Ray Kurzweil's Singularity may be coming very soon. 

And once that tech comes along, we'll be able to actually live the medium. Don't think this is a decade away - I suspect it's quite a lot closer than that. And sorry - it won't be Musk's Neuralink technology, that's a bit like hammering a couple of nails into your skull and connecting a 9V battery to them. NOT my idea of fun. 

Actually, even my idea (as good as it might turn out to be - or not) doesn't appeal to me. But I'm a fossil FFSM's sake. New younger people will see it as normal.

Augmented and Virtual Reality platforms will take the place of Youtube. Tom Scott has a guess at Youtube's future (the whole video's worth watching, do yourself a favour and restart it after this) and it's much the same as mine - low effort will win out - and that's a bit depressing. 

But look - if I could make an engram from an experience I have and you could just download it and bam, there it is now in your mind - would you still want to go and look at the video version, watch it at painstakingly slow speeds, mull it over, leave a comment asking what I meant when I said "engram" there at 14 minutes into the video? 

Note:

I even make most of the artwork in my blogs. I freely admit I use AI to generate base images for me because my hand-eye coordination sucks balls, but I build the works up painstakingly with only a mouse and a free software package called paint.net not because it's easy but because I like to put myself into my articles, and make them a more pleasant experience for you while reading them. 

It's not that I can't use a drawing pad and stylus, but that I can't afford one. And all it would take to turn a two hour paint project into a one hour joy is that my donations don't even fully cover running costs yet. You could help me immensely by going to my Ko-Fi page and donating the price of a cup of coffee monthly. Or if you prefer a more direct giving approach you could just Paypal Me directly. Believe me it would make a huge difference.