Category Archives: technology

Electric cars

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In the recent years we’ve been bombarded by propaganda trying to shove electric cars down our throat, regardless of the fact that nobody really wants them, so I’ll write some things about that.

First of all, I have to say that I actually like electric cars as a concept. The electric motor is much more reliable and easy to maintain than the internal combustion engine. It also has excellent performance curve. My problem is with other things: first, the Li-ion battery is simply unfit for purpose. It decays after a few years, which is a problem since it’s the most expensive part of the car. It uses up Lithium, which is a very rare element that has to be mined and transported across huge distances, it’s a much more limited finite resource than petroleum, the batteries pose an inherent fire hazard which increases with age, use and mechanical damage, in order to power a car a battery needs to have huge capacity, and in order to charge such a huge battery you need either lots of time, or you need to shove an incredible amount of amps into the battery in a very short period of time, in your garage during the night, and this makes me uneasy, because if something goes wrong you have an incredibly deadly mixture of high current, dangerous chemistry and fire. Some of the battery issues can be resolved in the future, but we are not there yet. Right now the towing companies outright refuse to deal with wrecked electric cars because they are such a hazard.

Also, the electric cars are incredibly uneconomical. They cost more and do less. Apparently, most people agree with me since adoption of electric cars was not widespread, outside the circle of rich hipsters at least. You see, there’s a much more ecological and economical option: get a diesel with a modern particle filter and you get something that goes fast, sips fuel, is so low emission it actually beats most sources of electricity and certainly beats the environmental impact of Li-ion batteries, and is comparatively a bargain. Which is why the eco-nutcases are now working to badmouth and eventually ban diesel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually in favour of outlawing the old diesel shitboxes that leave black clouds of suffocation behind them, but we are talking about cars that don’t have particle filters. Euro 5 and Euro 6 diesels are not only not a problem, they are actually the best solution available. Everybody should drive those and the ecological impact of cars would drop to the point of background noise. Also, natural gas makes great sense as fuel, since it’s abundant and cheap, and you can easily convert gasoline engines to run on it and reduce their environmental impact, not on the combustion side, but on the oil refinery side of the equation.

But when we get to the energy supply side of things, it’s not like electricity is actually an abundant resource. In fact, I don’t see additional nuclear power plants being built to offset the expected increase in power consumption caused by the electric cars. Everybody talks about those stupid windmills that are the most useless and dirty power source of all time, and solar panels which are basically toxic waste, don’t work in most places for the majority of time, and work only at the time of day when people don’t charge their electric cars; the peak expected consumption would be over night. And oh yeah, neither the windmills nor the solar panels are recyclable. It’s just terrible landfill fodder, which makes “ecological” electricity sources terrible for the environment.

Which is why I expect the following to take place.

Now it’s “diesel is nasty, has to be banned, electric cars are pure and clean and wonderful”. Let’s say everybody switches to electric cars. Then it will be “electric cars consume more power in a day than a normal household consumes in a year, how dare you drive those pigs!”, “electric cars use components sourced from poor countries/using child labour/consuming finite resources, you should all feel guilty and kill yourselves for driving them”, and so on, ad nauseam. The next step would obviously be to restrict private vehicle ownership and push us to public transportation, which would of course be as crowded as those Japanese bullet trains where people are packed as sardines in a can. Which brings us to the next step, where the eco-freaks will simply kill us all because that solves all problems.

New Apple stuff

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Apple recently released the new 16″ laptop, and it’s a significant improvement over the fail-fest that’s been going on since 2016. Still a reduced selection of ports, still cooling any plasticky gaming laptop would easily surpass, but there’s the ESC key again, and the keyboard is no longer that terrible breakable thing.

However, I lost a whole day of vacation fixing the mess Catalina update made on my mid-2015 15″ retinabook, having disabled 32-bit code, which made Virtualbox not run, macports initially didn’t run so I had to wait for an update, GPG didn’t run, Synergy didn’t run, and half of other stuff either didn’t work, or had to be updated. Stuff that had no updates was a problem, but I replaced most of everything with open source stuff compiled from the macports library, but it left me wondering what would happen if Apple did another “upgrade” and simply blocked macports or at least its access to the xcode compiler. That would render the computer completely unusable to me. Also, something seems to be broken with the Virtualbox guest VGA driver, and so much of the functionality I relied upon was broken by that single update (including my mail archive no longer syncing due to Apple making “improvements” to the mail application, forcing me to get a paid upgrade for the archiving software) that I got incredibly pissed.

Also, after having used it for years I decided that the 15″ laptop is too big for what I normally use it for, which is to put it in my lap and write articles. The keyboard is too far away, the whole thing is too big and unwieldy, and the only plus is the screen and the speed. With everything else, I was able to get much more comfortable with my old 13″ Air, so I don’t think I’ll be getting another big laptop again, especially since I’ve been using an ultralight Asus (Zenbook Flip UX370UA) for half a year or so and I happen to be using it much more frequently than I do the big Macbook, and only due to a much more practical size, at least for what I use it for. Also, Microsoft integrated Linux into the Win10, so now I have full access to the CLI tools that I normally use even without OS X or virtualization, which makes Windows machines very usable to me, as usable as Macs. Sure, I can write text messages or pick up a phone call from the Macbook, which makes it very convenient at times, and the Macbook screen and touchpad are still significantly superior to anything non-Apple, but the gap is decreasing due to Apple screwing up increasingly more, and others doing increasingly more things right.

The Windows laptops still have significant problems. First, almost everything has a 16:9 screen ratio, which is terrible for small laptop screens; it starts making sense from 17″ upwards. Second, touchpads on Windows laptops range from significantly worse than Apple, to absolute garbage. Third, Windows has a nasty habit of not completing the suspend command if some process refuses to respond, which leads to closing the laptop that is still actually on, merrily overheating and draining your battery in the bag. This makes Windows behave terribly on laptops. Also, Win10 constantly updates, which makes it incredibly annoying after a while. Honestly, I don’t want to even see anything updating other than the antivirus. It can update itself twice a year and that’s it. The only improvement introduced by those updates was the WSL, everything else was cosmetics and had no business rebooting my system. Microsoft should seriously reduce the frequency of updates because this is getting on everybody’s nerves. However, other than that, Win10 is fine. It’s fast, it’s elegant, it’s comfortable to use, and for the most part it’s as reliable as Mac OS, and much more reliable than any Linux desktop. Essentially, Apple is one serious fuckup away from me switching completely to Windows/Linux combo. On the other hand, Windows was always one serious fuckup away from me switching to Mac/Linux combo, so things are quite equally matched now.

Shameless plug

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My son Mihael finally made a proper web page for his latest software project, the one he won the 3rd place in the national competition with. What’s actually more impressive is that the competition is for all four high school years, which means he competed against the 3rd and 4th year students, as the only 1st year student in the competition, and most of the projects were done by whole teams while he did this one himself.

He put it up on both Apple and Android stores, but making a paid version on the Android store was too complicated for some reason that I already forgot because it was months ago, so that one is free. The iOS version costs some money and is well worth it if you ask me, because I use it whenever I have to buy something that contains tiny e-codes on the label and I want to find out what kind of shit I’m about to eat. So yeah, buy it so that you don’t end up eating poison, and Mihael learns that writing software beats making YouTube videos about playing video games as a career path. 🙂

 

Mining asteroids for gold

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I recently saw articles speculating about asteroids with high metal content and feasibility of mining gold, platinum and similar expensive stuff there. The calculations is basically that there must be a zillion tons of gold there and if we bring it to Earth the price of gold would plummet because the supply would suddenly increase.

I agree with Schiff’s analysis. However, I would also explore the details, as I once used the “gold is a discovery of a golden asteroid away from being worthless”. At first, this argument is sound, since the value of gold is based on restricted supply, and all the gold ever mined on Earth would fit in a cube with a side of 20 meters.

However, another argument is that gold is extremely abundant on Earth. Earth is unique among the planets because of its extraordinarily high metallicity. That’s why we have a magnetic field at the time where other rocky planets have cooled down and no longer have a core floating in a molten mantle. We have so much heavy elements, that nuclear fission and radioactive decay create over half of the temperature that keeps Earth’s interior molten. A significant portion of that are the elements we would deem precious, such as gold and the platinoids. Also, Earth’s crust contains quite a lot of gold. It’s quite easy to create heavy machinery assisted by human labour here on Earth, and create mining shafts and what not. Despite all that, mining gold is barely profitable.

Now let’s imagine we really do find out that there are significant amounts of gold on some asteroid. You know what would happen to the price of gold on the market? Nothing. Why? Because we still haven’t managed to bring home a sample of material from an asteroid. In comparison to mining asteroids, having a steady population on Mars is child’s play.

Operating a mine, which basically means crushing millions of tons of iron ore into dust, separating what you want to keep from what you want to discard, all in micro-gravity, high radiation and no atmosphere, no food for the workers, it’s such an enormous task, it could realistically be imagined by a Kardashev type II civilization, and we are not yet type I. You can realistically imagine us crushing asteroids for mining when it’s easy for us to terraform Venus and have six billion people living there, and have cities on Titan and Europa. However, at that point adding all the gold in the solar system still wouldn’t be enough to cover a GDP of the size necessary to run a civilization that mines the asteroid field for minerals and creates a Dyson sphere with the remaining material, just because they need the solar energy to operate the thing. Mining asteroids for minerals isn’t something that would be done by Earth. It would be done as a joint endeavour of Mars, Europa and Ganymede, by the Russians and the Chinese who would make up the population of the colonies; Earth would be too busy talking about genders to take part.

A Delta IV rocket launch costs $17,400 per kg delivered to lower Earth orbit (LEO). Falcon Heavy is supposed to reduce the cost to $1700 per kg. Essentially, you have to pay at least an ounce of gold to get a kilo of anything into orbit. This includes an entire asteroid-mining spacecraft, with human crew because a mine can’t be safely operated over more than half an hour delay due to light speed. If an AI could operate a mine in the asteroid field independently, then it would have a Kardashev type II civilization and you would be either apes in a zoo, or fossils. If remote operation is impractical because of the speed of light, AI operation is possible but then you have bigger problems, it leaves you with the simplest and the most practical option of maintaining a manned space station in the asteroid belt, supplying it from Earth, shielding it from radiation and impact in an area full of high-speed debris, dealing with rock and metal dust produced by crushing ore, in microgravity conditions, mining gold, shaping it into a sun sail in order to slowly reduce its orbital velocity and send it to Earth, catch it there by the second crew somewhere in Earth or Moon orbit, melt it into gold bullion and send it to Earth to be recovered.

In short, gold is going to become cheap once the AI running the solar system finds no use for it, but until then, or other cause or extinction, it’s the best place to store your life savings.