Democrats throwing Presidential Election

That is the question.  Are the Democrats knowingly throwing the coming presidential election. How bloody ridiculous, you say.  Why would any political party throw the presidential election on purpose.  Why indeed!

Let's look first at another item in our recent past.  Before the great depression of the 30's, the economy cycled between boom and bust about every 11 years.  The great depression was so severe that FDR (Franklin Delanor Roosevelt) was able to put in measures such as  Glass Steagall, that stopped the banks gambling with our money.  This stoped the boom and bust cycle for about 50 years until the banks came to the government and pleaded to have the regulations relaxed.  Their argument.  "Why would we do anything to wreck our businesses.  It is perfectly safe for you to remove the regulations" and the government fell for it. Later, after the 2008 crash, Obama succeeded in getting Dodd-Frank passed which returned some small measure of sanity into banking.

Actually, I don't think they fell for it.  I think they knew what would happen but were probably getting financial support for their elections from the banks and who knows what other 'perks'.

Now with this Covid19 crash, the banks are once more going to get a big bail out.  It would be far better to give it only to the people who would spend it just to keep their heads above water and thus feed it that way to the banks.  What will banks and other big businesses do with the money.  I bet they will buy back their shares at bargain basement prices so that they have less dividends to pay in the future and more money to give each other as bonuses.

So you have to ask yourself, why in the lead up to 2008 did the banks bundle up junk mortgages and sell them at a premium as if they were double A, knowing perfectly well that they were endangering the whole economic structure.  The answer is commissions.  With every transaction, the bank earns some money and part of that money goes to the employee who did the transaction.  Individual bankers could care less about the viability of their business as long as they can accumulate their commissions; as long as they can feather their nests. The viability of their companies is far down their list of priorities.

We come now to the question at hand.  Why would the Democrats knowingly throw the presidential election by choosing an incompetent man who is clearly 'loosing it' like Joe Biden*.  To answer that question it is instructive to paraphrase a comment by that great highly articulate politician, Sarah Palin.  I can still remember the one sensible comment she made in her career.  To paraphrase, she said, How come congressmen and senators who come into office with modest means, leave office rich.

 

*Three years later

That so called Senile old man has proven to be about the most effective president since FDR.  What a totally unexpected surprise.  And when he talks he reminds me of Will Rogers.  Subtle, understated and like a rapier.  Go figure.  Has he just chosen a plethora of great advisors or is he some sort of genius.  We should look in the old folks homes for our politicians if this is an example of what to expect. 

It certainly is not due to their salaries, which are quite adequate but not enough to make them rich.  Clearly there are various 'benefits' to be had if you are on the inside.

Do you see a parallel with the bankers.

So to answer the question, it is not so much that they want to throw the election.  The truth, though,  is that they would much rather throw the election and leave Trump in office so that the various systems that allow them to feather their nest remain, than to have Bernie in office.  They know for a dead certainty that Bernie will whittle away at the corrupt practices in government and that this will make it harder and harder for them to enrich themselves.

They would be quite happy if Joe was elected.  The Democrats are becoming more and more like Republicans.  In fact you could argue that they are outdoing the republicans in UN-democratic practices.  The Republicans always choose puppets for their presidential candidates who will do what they are told but who have zilch minds of their own.  The last thing they want is a leader that will look after the people rather than the insiders. The last thing they want is an honest president in the White House.  They need someone that will play the game. Look at those great presidents, Bush and Regan.  WTF.  If Joe is in office* the whole system will remain just as favorable for the insiders as it is today and sod the people.

*Three years later

OK, I admit it.  Biden has done more for the American people than any president I can remember.  

So what is the final answer to the question.

No the Democrats don't want to throw the presidential election but they would much rather loose than allow Bernie anywhere near the leavers of power.  Bernie would  drain the swamp as Trump promised to do with no intention of carrying through. 

Covid19 unexpected results

As this pandemic spreads through the world there will be some somewhat contrary, unexpected consequences.  Once a vaccine is developed and widely available, the whole situation changes but just now we see a situation in which some countries, notably, New Zealand, have put measures in place that may well stop the virus in it's tracks while others, notably Italy, have not.  In Italy, the virus has got away from them.

You may remember reports on a previous pandemic.  I refer to the black death in Europe.  Before it killed massive numbers of the population, the serfs were completely under the thumb of their feudal lords.  They had no where else to go.  Following the multiple waves of this disease through the population, the remaining serfs could sell their labor to the highest bidder and it was the beginning of the end for feudalism and the beginning of the rise of the 'common man'.

So what can we expect in countries like Italy where the virus has got away from them  First there will be a lot of death, skewed heavily toward the elderly and to people with existing medical conditions, and especially, but not confined to people with respiratory problems.  So what will this do to the health service.  Initially it will be overwhelmed.  There will never be enough beds or equipment to take care of the huge pulse of sick people and many will die.  Those that survive will most likely be immune to this virus and likely for a considerable time, perhaps for the rest of their life.  They will likely also have some degree of cross immunity for any mutations of this same virus.  Two results seem obvious.

First you are creating a large number of people rather rapidly who can go back to work, can take care of sick family members and can even work in isolation facilities with no danger to themselves or to others*.  There will be a lot of deaths, although not at any where near the rate of the black death and mainly among the elderly and otherwise medically compromised people.  This brings us to the second consequence

*It would be useful to issue a plastic card like a credit card or drivers license to people who have tested positive for antibodies and negative for the virus.  In other words, people who are now immune to the virus. They can be allowed to circulate and associate with the healthy and the sick with no danger to themselves or to others.

At the end of the spread of the disease, the government will have decreased health and pension costs.  Many sick people who needed more care than members of the general public are gone as are many pensioners.  It is a hard reality that the exchequer will be in better shape.  And this brings us to the third consequence.

Countries that reacted poorly to the virus and didn't stop it spreading will recover far more quickly than countries that stopped it in it's tracks.  Their businesses and especially tourist businesses and others in which the workers come in contact with large numbers of people can be up and running very quickly Of course all this changes when an effective vaccine is widely available.  With an effective vaccine the whole country can rapidly return to business as usual.  This brings us to the fourth consequence.

A country which has been slack in it's treatment of the disease will start to develop herd immunity which will slow down the further spread of the disease. A country that has stopped the spread of the virus will be vulnerable to new explosions of the virus until a vaccine is available and widely rolled out.

In addition, with all the death, not all of it confined to the sick and elderly, there will be upward mobility for the survivors.  The whole dynamics in businesses, governments and other organizations may change, sometimes for the better as some dead wood is got rid of and sometime for the worse as critical people die.

But, in all this, what is a government to do.  It can't present the above scenario to the people and say as a country we will be better off if we simply let the disease take it's course but a lot of you will die.  No government could, in good conscience do such a thing .  And besides, once a vaccine is readily available, the whole situation changes --- Until the next pandemic appears.

And, the more we can slow down the spread of the virus, the less people will be sick at any one time.  This is what they mean when they talk about flattening the curve.  This means that it will be possible to care for the sick more intensively and  save lives.

But, sadly, it is still very likely that countries that have allowed the virus to spread will be up and running sooner than countries that have looked after their citizens.

Renewable Energy - The breakthrough

There has finally been the breakthrough in renewable energy we have all been waiting for.  Many small incremental advances have been happening all along which has make this final, vital, critical breakthrough possible and many more will be made which will fine tune the system but we are over the hump.

Reduction of the cost of wind power over time

The price of solar and wind have become less expensive to install and operate, kW for kW than a coal fired power station.  In fact, it is now less expensive to build and operate a mega wind or solar farm than to operate an existing coal fired power station.  To put the cherry on the top, when you start to build a wind farm or solar  farm, each unit you install starts to generate electricity and produce revenue.  A new coal fired power station has to be complete before you see your first return.

Reduction in the price of solar panels over the years

And the chocolate sauce on the bottom is that if you have to do maintenance or repair, you do one turbine at a time while the rest continue to generate power (money).  A coal fired power station has to be taken out of production for maintenance.

But the weak point of renewable energy has always been that you are generating power when you don't need it and need it when you are not generating.  This  has now been solved.

Of course you always could have installed a huge battery bank of, say, Lead acid batteries.  You could have used those large units that the phone companies use to keep the power running no matter what the power generation companies are doing. These were the batteries that were much beloved by early adopters of renewable energy.  The phone companies would sell off the used ones that still had quite a bit of life in them.

The problem was that they degrade, need quite a bit of maintenance and are expensive.  They are also heavy although weight is not much of a problem in a static application.  The total life cycle cost of lead acid batteries made them a non starter for a commercial unit.  No other battery came out to be financially feasible either.

There was and is one sort of energy storage system that is economically feasible despite a cycle efficiency of about 75%.  That is Pumped Storage.  You pump water into a high reservoir when power is in excess of demand and run it back down through a generator when you need more than you are generating in other power plants.  However, most of the possible sites have been taken up and we need still more peak shaving plants (peaker plants) to take care of short and longer term peak demand.

The classic short term peak demand story that everyone quotes is in the UK in the intermission in a live broadcast of a foot ball game.  Everyone heads for the kitchen to put on the jug (turn on the electric kettle). Demand spikes and the power distribution company must be ready to cope with this demand.  Otherwise you would have brown outs all over the UK.  If your electricity model is a commercial one, you must then pay whatever the peaker plant demands for this excess electricity.  Even if you are a totally government run operation, you will have had to build peaker plants that most of the time are not earning their keep.  You have tied up a lot of tax money in a facility that runs intermittently.

So what is this breakthrough and why is it a breakthrough.  I am talking about the Australian Lithium ion mega-battery. It has a capacity of 100 mWh (mega Watt hours) and is owned by a wind farm in South Australia.  But why is it a breakthrough.

It Is On Line To Return Revenue Equal To It's Full Capital Cost In A Tad Over Three Years!!!!!

Economics trump all other considerations.  Economics is more powerful than all of our articles and placard waving demonstrations.  It even trumps venal politicians who are in the pocket of 'Big-Coal' and will try anything to scupper anything that interferes with their ill gotten gains.  If it is economic (makes bags of money for the owner) it will be adopted.

You might ask, how does a battery that doesn't produce any electricity; that only stores electricity, earn money.  Well there are a number of ways.  Here is one just related to the way the electrical grid operates and one related to the fact that it is owned by a wind farm.

First we have peak shaving.  When the demand comes in, the power distribution company has to supply more electricity.  Either it has to build a peaker power station or has to buy electricity from an existing peaker power station.  If you are a supplier of power to other companies, If you own a mega battery, you have the perfect solution for supplying peak power to other companies.  If you are a distribution company that owns a mega battery, you no longer have to pay these high prices to other companies.  You have power stored in in-house.

All this would hold true even for a company that  just owned a mega battery but no renewable energy generation capacity at all.  They would buy power when it was cheap and sell it when it is expensive.

For a renewable energy company with a solar or wind farm, it is even better.  You have built this expensive unit but have to feather your wind turbines or simply not send the power to the grid when the wind turbines or solar panels are generating.  With a mega-battery, you can store the excess power, making best use of the generating capacity of the farm and sell it when there is a demand.

All this points to an interesting economic fact.  The early adopters of mega-batteries will get huge returns.  Who has ever heard of an investment that returns almost a third of it's capital cost in a year.  When everyone has mega batteries, this advantage will disappear.  The batteries will still be great money earners but not at this stupendously, ridiculously high level.

I love the cherry on the top and there is one in this story too.  When you start up a peaker plant, it takes time to come up to capacity.  In the mean time the voltage and phase fidelity in the grid suffers.  With a mega battery, the response is in terms of milliseconds so both the phase and the voltage remain true.  This is a huge advantage for electronic devices which do not respond well to fluctuation in voltage or in the sine wave of the electricity.

So what is the story behind this mega battery.  Elon Musk of Tesla made a twitter comment regarding Australian power generation and was taken up by an Australian millionaire to put his money where his mouth was.  He took up the challenge.

He said that he could supply a mega battery to this Australian wind farm in 100 days.  If he could not, he would give them the battery for free.  Of course, he met the deadline and the rest is history in the making.  The thing is massively profitable.  Incidentally, do you think that Scott Morrison or any others of the silly Australian politicians will recant their foolish words about a mega prawn, mega banana and mega battery and admit they were wrong.  I don't think so.  They are complete dinosaurs and should be voted out by the Australian people.

Covid-19 and Racism

This blog was triggered by some ning nong here in New Zealand shouting at a woman of Asian decent to go back home.  It happens that she is a MD and has never been to China and is a New Zealand citizen.  That sort of attitude is highly unacceptable in New Zealand but there are always some stupid people.

But let's face it, we all are racists, or religousists or Politicalists or some other "ist".  It is the way we evolved.  One group, insiders of their own group, fighting another group and in earlier times, killing all the men and taking the woman for their own tribe (and sometimes eating the men).  Perhaps we should call them all Clanish.  Whatever clan you belong to, you believe that the other clans are of lesser status and of lesser value.  We have minor religious variations leading to clanishness (Ireland), Political differences (The US of A), color (nearly everywhere) and on and on it goes.

The Chinese themselves are no exception.  They are arguably the most clannish of people.  When they immigrate to another country, they tend to form enclaves that we call China Towns such as in San Fransisco and Vancouver and certainly do not want their young people marrying outside their clan.  As such, they might show a little understanding when the surrounding population is a bit clannish too.

This blog, though is mainly concerned with whether or not we have something to fear from China with regard to diseases such as the latest Covid-19.  What are the facts.

Many of the viruses that most threaten us are recent zoonosis; recent transfers from animals to humans.  The ones that have been in the human population for a long time are less deadly since the population has developed some partial immunity to them and the virusis have modified (evolved) their genetics* so that they spread more easily.  This involves not killing their host rapidly or they burn themselves out.  The body takes a week or so to develop immunity to a given virus so if it is slow acting, the body will often eliminate the virus if you can keep the person alive for that length of time.  This is not to say that old familiar viruses do not kill people.  They do.  It is just that the new ones, recently transferred from animals tend to be more deadly.

* That is actually a bad way of expressing it.  In fact, varieties of the virus which kill their host rapidly, die out while ones that only make them sick spread far further and wider.  Ones that show no symptoms for some time while being able to jump from human to human spread even better.  Covid 19 is apparently such a virus.

So is China a threat.  Well yes it is for a number of reasons.

First there are very large populations of Chinese living in close proximity  in China so a virus, once caught by one person can spread rather rapidly.  A pretty good population of infected people can be established before it comes to the attention of the officials.  This is especially so if the virus shows no symptoms for an initial period in which it can be spread.

A second problem was illustrated by this latest Covid-19 virus.  The doctor that reported it was chastised by the local government for spreading false news.  There is a fairly large and established level of corruption and fear of loosing status in China.

Then there is the problem of the huge number of pigs and chickens in China in close proximity.  Some viruses spread between animals before jumping to humans and having animals in huge numbers in close proximity to each other and to humans can encourage such outbreaks.

Add to this the great variety of animals that the Chinese use for food.  There are markets for wild food including snakes, bats, cats, dogs and essentially anything made of meat.  These varied animals are often kept live, together in outdoor wild meat markets.  In addition many exotic animal parts are used in Chinese medicine.  All this brings humans into close proximity with a whole host of viruses.  It is amazing that we don't have more outbreaks.

It is notable that when a new virus appears in a human population, it takes around 6 months to develop a vaccine for it.  In the mean time we have to fall back on old methods of quarantine and to give credit where credit is due, the Chinese government has been magnificent in this regard.  Due to her stringent methods very few cases of this disease have been seen outside of China. One suspects that this situation is unlikely to continue.

So yes, it is likely that more of these viruses will come from China than from other countries but as long as the Chinese apply quarantine measures as they have been doing, we are in pretty good shape.  Let's hope other countries can take a lesson from the actions of the Chinese. Not all new viruses have come from China.  The trick is to slow it down until we have developed a vacine.

However, there is no justification for being racist against Chinese people because of the situation in China.

Clearing Australian air pollution

There is not much you can do to clear the outside air in Australia from all the pollution caused by bush fires short of taking climate change seriously but it is a different story inside your house.  The problem is all the tiny particles of soot, dust and other aerosols created by the fires.  There are P10's, P5's and even P2.5's.  These tiny particles are sucked deep into the lungs where they cause all sorts of problems.

The technology to clear the air in your house is the same that is used to clear particulates from smoke stacks.  Look at the smoke stacks in any modern country and at the most, they put out water vapor clouds that rapidly dissipate in the air and, of course Carbon dioxide.  It is called electrostatic precipitation.  Home units are sometimes called negative ion generators.  So how do they work.

The 220 volt AC is fed into a transformer that steps up the voltage.  (does anyone know what voltage they use.  Haven't been able to find the info).  The high voltage is then run through a rectifier such as a wheatstone bridge to give pulsating high voltage DC power.  If there is need to smooth out the power, a capacitor can be connected between the positive and negative outputs of the Wheatstone bridge.  The negative side is then run through a seriously strong resistor so that you can't get a shock (at least not a bad one) if you touch the spike.  the spike is where the electrons come off into the air and for reasons I won't go into, a spike is the best configuration to send electrons into the air.

The electrons stick to particles in the air, charging them and as the charged particles come close to surfaces, they are attracted and stick.

The positive side can  be grounded to your power supply ground but better still, put the grounding wire provided, with the metal end into a large shallow body of water with a pinch of salt in the water.

One of our sons had breathing problems when he was younger so we put one of these on a small shelf above his bed.  It wasn't long before the wall behind the bed turned black from all the charged particles that the electrostatic charge glued there.  With a grounded body of conductive water, you will see the water get grungy as charge particles are attracted to the water.  If this doesn't happen, you either have very clean air (unlikely) or you have an inferior  brand of negative ion generator.  Our son's breathing and his sleep was much improved.