Tag: technology

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 1

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We’re in an odd moment technologically speaking.  The only thing anyone talks about is AI.  It’s the alpha and the omega.  It will bring on the singularity or it will usher in a golden age where we all live like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.”  On second thought maybe that would be the singularity since being lunch for troglodytes doesn’t sound like much of a golden age (unless you’re a troglodyte that is).

But I think it’s time to start looking beyond the glory of AI and begin to think of what comes next.  After all, in a manner of speaking AI is kind of like this century’s electronic calculator.  It made engineering work much more efficient but it didn’t eliminate the need for humans to look for answers to problems that needed to be solved.  It just made the process faster.  So once all the tech companies get through firing their engineers and computer scientists the industrial world is going to find that they’re still going to need to design “stuff” and solve new problems that are supposed to make the world a better place.

And contrary to present expectations AI isn’t going to plan and design the next bridge that spans a couple of miles across a bay or between mountains.  Sure, the engineers will use AI to find out the state of the art in civil engineering but eventually a human being will have to sign off on the drawings and take the legal responsibility that the bridge won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people.  And only an idiot would assume that the answer that AI gives him is worth risking prison time without making sure that he knows that the answers are correct.

So, let’s put AI into the category of modern tools and instead look at what problems are in our near future to solve.

Regardless of what everyone has said for the last thirty years, solar and wind energy are not the future energy sources we need.  But there will come a time when hydrocarbons will not be sufficient.  So, I would say that a replacement for oil and gas is the largest technical problem that humanity will face toward the end of this century.  But that means it’s already long overdue to start working out the details of what that will look like.  There may be several technologies that will exist.  I’ve questioned (and not just in a fictional setting) whether geothermal might become a significant source of global energy but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that nuclear fission will be the main energy source.

But just because fission has been a stable part of the energy grid in places like France for more than half a century doesn’t mean that the form currently employed is even close to what will power the world for the next century and more.  The science and technology of fission power is in its infancy.  The research in the United States that was going on in the 1950s and 1960s was strangled in its crib by the whole anti-nuclear movement of the time.  There will need to be a rebirth of nuclear power technology that will combine government, industry and academia.  And it will require energy policy to be handled by intelligent people in government.  And that is something we haven’t seen in half a century in this country.  Because it is a massive effort.  Eventually we will have to decide whether battery technology is a better storage medium for things like transportation than something like synthetic hydrocarbons or hydrogen.  And these questions should be answered based on efficiency and other important factors like safety.  But definitely not decided by idiots like Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Let’s see what’s next after power in Part 2.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay!

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The mighty wizards of tech-wonder have restored my laptop to full power.  I can once again perform miracles of tech-tacular blunder.  And yesterday provided a fitting completion to my purgatorial labors.  Now I can provide content (such as it is) to the site and its readers.

Now all I have to do is think of something interesting to pontificate about.

Hmmm.

Well, I better start thinking.

Tune Out

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Do you ever get tired of being pushed around by technology?  At the risk of being declared a Luddite boomer, I feel that the endless treadmill of technological innovation is all just a bit much.  And calling it innovation is sort of a euphemism.  This year Windows decided that instead of its lousy “Mail” program I needed to switch over to its differently lousy “Outlook” whenever I wanted to access my emails.  Well, I didn’t want to switch.  So, every morning when I started up my laptop, I would click on the Mail icon and it would start up Mail.  But a second later the Mail window would disappear and the Outlook configuration window would pop up telling me to go through the torture of surrendering my access to my own e-mails to Microsoft.  I would then use the Task Manager to close down the Outlook program and then I would click on the Mail icon again.  I would have to repeat this ritual three times before Outlook would give up and allow me to use Mail.  But the next day it would be the same madness again.

Luckily, I used to use an open-source program called Thunderbird for my email interface.  So, I tried loading it up on my laptop and eureka! it worked.

And every few days Microsoft tells me about photographs that I loaded on my laptop last year.  What the hell!  When did I give Microsoft permission to put my photos on their damn cloud?  We really have a problem with the technology companies.  Their overreach in every facet of our on-line lives is becoming absurd.  Many years ago, I had a laptop with Ubuntu as the operating system.  I was always complaining about how everything was clunky compared to Windows and how the open-source equivalents for Word and Excel and all the other proprietary programs were weird and unfamiliar and less sophisticated.

Well, maybe I’m changing my mind.  I’m seriously considering having the computer I use on the internet, open-source.  No Microsoft, no Cloud, no nothing.  I think Elon Musk and whoever Trump puts in at the FCC should do a deep dive on the privacy problems that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest of the tech companies cause.  We’re monitored and analyzed and prodded by these companies and each time they “upgrade” their products they ratchet their control of your online existence a little more.

The latest annoyance is having to provide a secondary check on your identity through a cell phone.  Apparently, an e-mail address is no longer enough.  They need you attached to a sim card or they’re not happy.  Even Amazon wants to institute this but I’ve stoutly refused to knuckle under and, well, Jeff Bezos knows I spend a lot of money at Amazon so he’s patient.  Or maybe he’s noted my age somehow and knows that old codgers still believe that the customer is always right.  Too bad he can’t pass that idea along to Bill Gates.

Well, that’s enough complaining.  I’ll have to check into the practicality of a completely Microsoft-free internet computer.  I can’t think of an issue.  I’ll keep the programs that I use that are proprietary on a separate desk top that isn’t plugged into the internet.  In your face Bill Gates!  Commie.

Sunnyside Saturday

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It’s Saturday and that’s the happiest day of the work week (in my opinion).  And so today can’t be doom and gloom day.  No end of the world stuff or triumphant deep state conspiracy theories for me today.

I was just watching a YouTube video about why commercial nuclear fusion is fifty years away and always will be (ha ha).  And of course there were no surprises there.  The sheer magnitude of the temperatures, pressures, magnetic flux and energy consumption needed to make this process work is beyond daunting.  It’s technical lunacy.  When you look at where nuclear fusion does exist (a star), what you realize is that this is an environment where gravity can compete against the electromagnetic force head-to-head.  That is not going to happen in our labs and factories.  So, we have to pay for magnetic containment and we pay by the gigawatt-hour.  It’s not a good trade-off.

When I try to imagine what practical controlled nuclear fusion would look like I conjure up a tiny gun shooting tritium nuclei, one at a time, into a target of heavy water and boiling the heavy water to make steam.  It’s my version of the “Back to the Future,” Mr. Fusion engine that runs Doc Brown’s time machine at the end of the movie.  The breakthrough is that I’m able (by magic) to keep the energy expenditure for the tritium gun down to the level of what I can extract from a USB cable on my MP3 player.  Of course, where I get the radioactive tritium from and how I keep myself from being irradiated while riding in my fusion powered car are at this point undetermined.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Given a thousand years I think we’ll make real progress on commercial nuclear fusion or find out it’s not feasible.  And I think research on it is a very good idea, if for no other reason than that it will spawn innumerable amazing technological byproducts that may be even more beneficial than the primary problem.  But I think we should all put aside any dreams of living in a world powered by nuclear fusion (unless some wise guy figures out that cold fusion is an actual thing).

But all of this is just the intro to my main thought.  And that is what would life on Earth be like if energy really were essentially free.  Now I don’t mean free, free.  The infrastructure for breeder reactors and handling their waste products will be an incredibly complicated and expensive industry that will employ a good chunk of the technically minded part of the population.  And maintaining a power grid and the other allied industries that will grow up around very cheap electricity (e.g., syn-fuel) has always been a big piece of modern life.

But imagine if you can what kinds of problems would be solvable if essentially limitless power were available.  For instance, what if desalination of sea water could be accomplished at a scale to be able to farm the Sahara Desert?  Think of the engineering projects that become feasible if power is no longer a problem.

And all chemical synthesis is available if the power to provide the potential to run the reaction in your direction is provided.  We could even start making cars out of metal again.  I’ve always dreamed of having a car that was immune to road salt corrosion.  Hastelloy C, Tantalum, or boring old titanium?

But the best part of all is imagining that my electric bill for my home heating and cooling and lighting is zippity doo dah all the way up to some pretty impressive electrical usage.  Hell, even I would give up my oil heat and use resistance heating just for the sake of getting rid of that damn furnace that’s always breaking down.  And I want them to throw in free fuel for my car up to let’s say a couple of thousand miles worth a week.  Ah, what a wonderful world it could be without technophobes.

Alright, all optimism for the week officially used up.

Curtis Yarvin Doles Out Some Holiday Pessimism

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My favorite neo-corpora-monarchist provides one of his maximalist essays on why technology isn’t going to save mankind and in fact may do the opposite.

“Johannesburg and Kinshasa have the same technology level as Palo Alto and Berkeley. 

…

The implicit premise of techno-optimism is that technology drives civilization. To fix any and all of the problems of society, just get out of the way of technology.

Across history, do we find this premise to be true? 

…

It seems clear that the Third World is, in the medium term at least, humanity’s future. The barriers that separate the First and Third Worlds are geographical accidents or legacies of the 20th or even 19th century. Everywhere they are visibly crumbling.

In even the medium term, the problem of curing the Third World becomes equivalent to the problem of preserving the First World from whatever is ailing the Third World. Indeed it is not hard to find recognizable patches of Third World inside the First. If this does not strike you as the most important historical problem of our period, more travel may be indicated—or at least, just read a Paul Theroux book.”

And then it goes down hill from there:

“Historically, civilizations of last men tend to fall when they are overrun by barbarians. Technology can artificially forestall this fate—but as Hannah Arendt put it, every new generation is its own barbarian invasion. Barbarians may not even be needed. In the end, Walter Benjamin prophesied, the last man will simply put himself to death:

Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Indeed, if present trends continue, “voluntary human extinction” seems likely to become a live political issue within our children’s lifetimes. You laugh.”

Merry Christmas from Curtis Yarvin?  Interesting but pessimistic and long read.

Fugit Inreparabile Tempus

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The sands of the hour glass run out on Summer 2023.  The various grandchildren are back from their vacations and soon their world will be submerged into the confines of the classroom.  But for the next two weeks their parents will be scrambling to keep the kids busy while all of the various work schedules re-mesh after summer.

And at a time like this, grandparents can be really useful.  Camera Girl will be a veritable general.  She will wield a spatula like a baton, whipping up scrambled eggs, pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and spaghetti and meatballs as the moment requires.  I will be more like the NCO trying to maintain order among the troops and where necessary preventing mayhem.  I will be more or less on duty for the duration.

I will try to provide content as best I can but without a doubt there will be some gaps on the site as is probably already apparent.  Well, in these dog days we all have to make do.  But there will be plenty of fascinating developments in the fall.  Most likely the world will be exploding in all directions and in all senses of the word by the end of September.

I think the days of the Silicon Valley miracle are coming to an end.  I think the next bust is upon us and among the casualties, most of the companies that have been providing news and entertainment content are going to disappear.

The interesting thing to see is who will be the survivors.  And right in the center of this trend is Elon Musk and his bet on X.  Can he make that bet pay off?  Not being any kind of technology maven, as far as I know, his chances are precisely 50/50.  But even the Googles and the Facebooks don’t have much better than those odds to survive long term.

The basis for our information economy hasn’t reached any stable equilibrium and all of these companies are to a certain extent monopolies that the surveillance state allows to exist.  What will happen in the future is completely indeterminate.  But for some reason Elon Musk seemed to think he could run one of these companies without the blessing of the feds.  Now whether he’s changed his mind about that or not is a question.  Free speech is a bold claim in 2023.  Can it actually exist in America?  That’s what everyone wants to know.

But almost as difficult to know is whether even fake news can make a profit anymore.  Do serfs really need the news?  And would they actually pay to read it?  It seems unlikely in the extreme.  But it’s an important question.  We’re all forced to pay for our cable bill and out of that we pay CNN and MSNBC to shovel horse manure through the copper and fiber-optic wires that run down our streets.  And they shoot it up to cell towers and bounce it off satellites.  But eventually when only Guatemalan and Congolese Americans are left will they be willing or even able to pay for a cable bill?  And why would they care what Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper has to tell them about Joe Biden or Dylan Mulvaney?

It just seems to me that all of this we see, YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the rest is ephemeral nonsense to be swept away along with virtual reality headsets and transgender influencers.  It’s all just absurd nonsense like flag pole sitters and gold fish eating college kids.  Pretty soon the reality of our national debt is going to hit home and then we’ll find out what we’re willing to spend money on.  The answer is probably bread and not much else.

But here at the end of the silly season I’ll enjoy the warmish weather and ignore the periodic sprinklings of volcanic ash that filter down from the mouth of Vesuvius.  I mean what are the odds?

Guest Contributor – TomD – 10JAN2023 – A Civil Engineering Perspective

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TomD

I’m a Civil Engineer specializing in structural for most of my career. For almost all in-ground concrete installations, the nature and strength of the subgrade is more important than the strength of the concrete. Subgrade means whatever the concrete is sitting on. In other words, no matter how strong the concrete or asphalt, it isn’t any stronger than what it is bearing on.

I’ve never been associated with residential work but in commercial, government,, etc. work, testing the subgrade is very important. It should be to you too. If you’re spending a lot of money on asphalt or concrete in a non-controlled environment, for your own sake. please call a local geotech outftit, explain your circumstance, and get a proposal.

If you’re spending couple to several 10’s of thousands, please spend a couple of hundred ensuring it doesn’t fail in a year or two.

Outcompeting The Left

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Millennials aren’t patriots.  And they aren’t individualists.  They’re mostly sort of like grade-school children.  In fact, grade-school children that went to a really artsy-fartsy grade school.  There’s no way we are going to turn them into revolutionaries, ready to storm the barricades in search of liberty.  They don’t want liberty.  They want a latte.

But millennials will someday soon be the majority of voters in this country.  So even if they don’t believe in what we believe in we can get them to follow us if we can outcompete the woke option.  “What the hell is photog talking about?” you’re probably saying to yourself.  Let me explain.

Currently Silicon Valley is almost entirely composed of woke companies that have been telling millennials for twenty years that they are not only smart but also good.  Google famously had a motto “Don’t be Evil.”  Facebook, Twitter and all the other social sites spend half of their time just banning anyone who won’t acknowledge the need to worship the cult of pronouns.  Undoubtedly that sort of mean girl social selection activity has a definite demographic cohort that will relish that environment.  We call them Karens.  And right now, they seem to be the dominant life-form on planet Earth.  But as powerful as they are, I think there is a very large chunk of the millennial population that would like something more interesting to look at and talk about than Karen’s latest battle against accidental misgendering.

So how hard could it be to come up with a site that’s more interesting than that.  Look at what Substack has recently done.  They provide a platform for (among other things) journalists who are too normal to survive in the woke media environment.  Guys as liberal as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were hurled into the outer darkness by the likes of Rolling Stone and The Intercept because they thought that journalism should be factual.  Not unbiased mind you, but just not completely fake.  Now they’re making more money than they did previously by committing actual journalism and providing a service to readers who are tired of being lied to.

Other social sites have slowly begun to appear to compete head-to-head with the likes of YouTube and Facebook.  Rumble, Gab and BitChute are tiny players but they provide a service that isn’t available from YouTube.  The market for their product is growing and will continue to do so.  And it is attracting people with deeper pockets like Peter Thiele.

These are the beginnings of competition.  They barely register on Big Tech’s radar.  But that will change.  Better product will draw customers.  And honestly the entertainment value of Facebook and Twitter is pretty low.  I can easily imagine someone monetizing the audience that exists for reality-based news and entertainment.  It will happen and when it does it will attract more than just a right-wing audience.  It will attract everyone except for the left-wing ideologues.  A good example of that is the recent news that Greg Gutfeld was now the “King of Late-Night Comedy.”  Greg Gutfeld isn’t a conservative.  But he’s a libertarian who doesn’t alienate the conservatives who enjoy his humor.  He is vague enough about his own personal beliefs that Trump fans and normies think of him as their guy.  And that’s good enough.  I’d like it better if there were an even more right-wing guy who came on after Gutfeld on Fox News.  Someone a little more edgy but it’s a beginning.  If Fox News were smart, they’d give the Babylon Bee guys their own show too.  Of course, they currently have a YouTube channel of their own but I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube eventually shut them down.  They’re that funny I assume they’ll be considered a threat.

And that’s my point.  The Left has become “all fake all the time.”  In the long run that becomes quite boring.  It can be outcompeted in a marketplace of ideas.  So, all we need to do is create that marketplace and let reality do the rest.

The Country Leading the World Into a Nuclear Power Future – Finland?

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Apparently the Finns have taken a decisive step toward making nuclear power the basis for their electric energy generating capability right through the next century.  The Finns have done the work to not only move into the next generation of nuclear power plant design but they are currently building the first modern large scale long term (permanent) repository for spent fuel rods.

If only Americans were as realistic and logical, especially all those global warming kooks who want to get away from fossil fuels but are too stupid to realize we already have the technology that will replace fossil fuels in the future.