This story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar’s electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as…
Read More it’s called “power” for a reasonI have some problems with “10:10”, the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic. No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to…
Read More No Future in the Cath Kidston FavelaShorter Tim, Energy Edition: Commodity prices always come down in the end; except when I really want the price of steel to stay at 2007 levels because it harms the economics of wind power. Further, supply of manufactured goods always responds to price signals except when I have a bizarre ideological opposition to some particular…
Read More Bonus Tim Worstall Stupidity Watch25 years ago today I was a three year old boy, living in a village in the Yorkshire Dales, from where you could see the golfball aerials at the NSA’s Menwith Hill base. Later, people I knew well would protest it for ages, and a man who was supposedly an engineer for LockMart there lived…
Read More Petrov DayI’m about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it’s a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I’ve made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy…
Read More The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)Jamie Zawinski links to a campaign to have a Californian sewage works renamed after George W. Bush. I disagree, strongly. Who on earth would associate something as civic, egalitarian, and useful as sewage treatment with the Commander Guy? Not just that, but it’s a publicly-owned sewage plant, part of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.…
Read More Civilisation is common defence and waste disposalBack in 2004, this blog went to the European Social Forum – we weren’t that impressed, but we did call it “the Caesar’s Palace of Ranting”. I’m not sure what the equivalent for the UKUUG’s OpenTech 2008 would be; there was plenty of ranting, but a sight less committee wank, more practicality, even if no-one…
Read More OpenTech 2008: It’s like the ESF, with code…On Wednesday morning, I was nearly knocked down by an electric 7.5 tonne lorry on the Strand. On Thursday evening, I saw another one passing on a low loader near my home. There is a surprising British industry in here – both of these were Modec vehicles, but there is also Smith Electric Vehicles in…
Read More Electric TrucksThis should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that? I can’t help but think, however, that…
Read More The Only Way To Defeat This Is To SurrenderRemind me not to go back to Dubai if at all possible. It’s what happens when you leave the keys where the postmodernists can get at them, a formless mass of rapid urbanisation running along the coast from the border with Sharjah to beyond the docks at Jebel Ali. “Sprawl” doesn’t describe it, because sprawl…
Read More Brainfuck City