Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Self driving car

"avoid parking problems"

You may laugh, but if you can avoid Westminster (and other) councils' £30-40 quid per day parking charges by having your car trundle off to $CHEAP_PARKING_SPOT for £3-4/day, wouldn't you do that?

It's something that's been on the horizon for some time. Councils should have come up with strategies to adapt, but instead they've gone to a knee-jerk focus on maintaining income, despite parking money not being legally allowed to be used for anything other than roading/transportation.

Many councils have been illegally diverting parking and fines money into general expenditure - they can get away with this for a while as the only time it can be challenged is when the annual plan is announced, with an objection period of only a few weeks each year.

Re: Missing the point.

"That will really screw up transport in London."

Only if you think of "transport in london" as being busses and trains - which are horribly disjointed. If you look at the way dutch timetables work and the way you can step off a train onto the bus home without waiting 15 minutes, you realise just how broken the idea of UK "customer service" is.

With cheap electric vehicles (johnnycab) operating in a cooperative manner on the road, busses are redundant. They're only _barely_ economic at peak traffic times and wild subsidy guzzlers the rest of the time. Better to use smaller vehicles which can entrain themselves on the road and which have the ablity to take groups of passengers from stop A to stop M without pausng at stops B-L in between.

" once we get to the point where many more things are robotic....driverless taxi's, robotic lawyers, "

It's boiling a frog. We already have robotic accountants and accounts clerks - noone noticed.

Whte collar jobs are at MORE risk of being automated out of existence than blue collar ones. The return on investment is higher.

There's a net benefit for robotic drivers in terms of the massive reduction in crash rates we'll see. Insurance company premiums will ensure that once driverless cars are "good enough", wanting to get behind the wheel anywhere other than on a private track is going to cost you a fortune. They're also likely to insist on seeing drivers certified to a much higher standard than is currently accepted and regularly retested, even if the government doesn't. Failure to do that will attract even higher premiums.

Shortly after that, private car ownership is likely to nosedive - which means less parking congestion and an awful lot of councils looking around for new income streams.

Re: I've never understood...

"1 litre of petrol is about 10kWh, so it would take about 3h 10m to get the equivalent of 1 litre of petrol through a 13A plug. A typical petrol pump pushes through 50 litres per minute."

It would be on par with the current motor fuel exemption system which allows you to produce up to 1000(*) litres of biodiesel or other fuel per annum for personal use

In any case, electricity prices are going to increase drastically in the near-mid term to pay for all those nuclear power plants needed to keep the lights on. People might only be 3 meals away from rioting, but they're probably less than 3 missed eastenders' episodes away from it too (actually a lack of clean water will do it fastest and no power == no water being treated)

(*) It's been a while since I made my own biofuels and I can't remember if it's 1000 or 2000.

Re: I've never understood...

One metric is that if you are paid so little that you require _any_ government assistance, then you'd qualify as poor. (I'm not counting things like subsidies, etc)

Working poor in the UK are a large fraction of the population and you can also argue that any employer whose staff need government topups is benefitting from an undeclared state subsidy,

There are a lot of people who consider themselves "middle class", who are in fact "working class", by economic metrics. Owning one's own house doesn't magically transform someone into the middling classes and its this group who are being hardest hit by tax hikes as they can't avoid them on one side and unlike the _real_ middle classes, ithere are few-to-no tax loopholes available to reduce the tax burden.

One thing the government _could_ (but won't) do is to streamline the entire tax system and remove most of the loopholes. A government's income is "tax take, minus the costs of collection" and New Zealand proved 30 years ago that if you do that, you can get rid of 1/3 of your revenue/customs staff, set lower tax rates and STILL end up with a higher _net_ take than previously. The interesting part is that even though the rich ended up paying a lot more tax, they were generally ok with it as the perception of punitive marginal rates went away and it was still less than notional tax liability before loopholes were taken into account.

Re: RE: MrXavia

"Eventually the council may just decide to build a bridge over it instead of filling it in..."

Report it as a material hazard to cyclists and see how fast they react. Councils don't like paying out £20-60k at a time.

Re: What about the downsides?

"The "carbon emissions" are moved, not saved and may even increase due to grid losses, charging losses and battery losses"

Tank to wheel efficiency of most cars and busses is in the region of about 5% - less than 1% in stop start traffic.

Tank(furnace) to wheel efficiency of electric vehicles is around 35% and stop/start traffic makes little difference if they use regenerative braking.

The interesting part that goes with that is that the electricity cost of refining the fuel to run a car is about the same as charging an electric car.

Carbon emissions are a problem. Look up "Leptav Sea Methane Emissions" and then "Storegga slide" and then "Anoxic Oceanic Event". We're going to have to stop burning carbon sooner rather than later and not just for electricity (which only accounts for about 35% of carbon emissions).

This brings in some interesting problems:

1: To replace the other 65% of emissions (with electricity), you're going to need to increase electrical generation capacity by a factor of _AT LEAST_ 6, probably 8. Electric vehicle fleets alone will double the requirement at minimum, and replacing gas/oil heating systems will be as much again - which you CAN'T timeshift by much even with storage heating. Industrial processes will need considerably more electricity than a 1:1 reduction in carbon you might naively think, because a lot of it is making high quality heat.

2: Assuming perfect solar panels on every rooftop and windmills everywhere, renewables can _just match_ current electrical generation capacity (forget drax, it and its kin are greenwash which are destroying old growth forest at a prodigious rate)

3: Hydro is tapped out, tidal won't make enough different to matter. Electricity can only be economically transported about 1000-1200 miles before line losses and construction costs kill the feasibility of the project - less than 200 miles underwater (and underwater links top out around 2GW).

3a: That means "paving the desert" and using electrricity from there is a non-starter - for starters the deserts belong to african countries (colonialism writ large) and secondly the transmission lines _alone_ would be the largest engineering project in the history of humanity, with 75+% losses into Europe (No, superconducting cables are not practical. They need to be cooled and trenched, which is ok for 20 miles but not thousands)

4: If the developed world stopped using carbon tomorrow, the developing world has the capacity to make up the emissions and then some, whilst bootstrapping themselves to developed status.

The only logical path is nuclear and lots of it - to the tune of about 60 Hinkley points in the UK alone and deployment fo the same across the developing world.

By the time those reach midlife to end-of-life we (or rather the chinese, as they're the ones doing the lion's share of R&D) should have Molten Salt Reactors sorted and commercially viable. These are at least 100 times safer than current nuclear (which is already 300,000 times safer than coal) and break down conventional "nuclear waste"(*) - both the 99% viable stuff that comes out of a conventional reactor and the 90+% "depleted" uranium that's currently discarded after enrichment or turned into H-bomb casings/bullets, - leaving 1% waste output which is safe to handle in 100-300 years (5-10 for some byproducts, which are saleable commodities such as helium and other noble gasses. Anything "hot" or toxic goes back into the reactor melt pool for further breakdown)

(*) A conventional 800-1000MW reactor over a 60 year lifespan produces enough high level waste to fill a large swimming pool and is safe to handle for reprocessing in about 300 years (less if you wear gloves)

Ideally molten salt reactors will be ready long before conventional plants reach end of life, but we can't afford to sit around another 30 years waiting for them to be commercially viable and then 20 more to build the things. Carbon-emitting power plants need replacing now and we don't _have_ 50 years to sit around with our thumbs up our arses.

Yes, I'm aware that nuclear technology has drawbacks, but even with a worst case chernoybl event every decade(**) that'd be 50-60,000 deaths vs 500million or so if climate change gets bad and 2-3 billion if the atmosphere drops to 15-16% oxygen or less in the case of an Anoxic Event.

(**) The world's coal plants emit enough radium alone to equal the radiation output of several chernobyls each year. Making a fuss about nukes when that's going on is on par with panicking about plane crashes but not bothering to wear a seat belt when you're in the car.

Re: Just let's not go down the Blair + Brown route shall we?

"There is way too many of them defeating the "congestion" part of the congestion charge."

As opposed to bangers with cloned plates?

Re: What about the downsides?

"Road tax" (VED) - nets about 5-7 billion per year

Fuel duties and taxes net about 70 billion per year

Only about 5-7 billion is spent on roads each year and the vast majority of damage is caused by vehicles in excess of 7 tons (damage goes up with the 5th power of axle weight and the square of speed)

A fleet of self-driving 6-8 seat minibuses would be _far_ better for the roads than any kind of double decker bus and the interesting thing is that they'd probably give better speeds for passengers.

Re: What about the downsides?

The interesting part is that 1 bus carrying 40 people does about 5000 times as much roadbed damage as 40 cars carrying 1 person and that damage doesn't decrease much if the bus is empty.

Driverless cars are more likely to smooth traffic flow too, because they don't do stupid things like jumping red lights or fouling intersections.

The really interesting part is that overall traffic levels (and numbers of parked cars) are set to radically decrease (driverless cars means cheaper taxi services, which means more people not bothering to buy a car, or leaving it at home when going into the city) - which is a real cause for concern to areas like Westminster which have become totally dependent on parking income.

Sadiq is seeing the things as a threat and not an opportunity. They come with the Knowledge built-in and updated as to the best route every second of every day.

Re: Definition of obscene

"Whatever turns the judge on."

In a lot of recent cases that seems to include "copious quantities of money"

The interesting part about UK limited liability company law is that it cushions the shareholders, but NOT the directors.

If OFCOM want to make an example of them (and they should), there's a clear path open (The insolvency service don't like repeat phoenixers either)

Re: Outsourcing

"The outsourcing of program production doesn't save money, it's political and hides salaries"

It also means what's produced is subject to private copyrights (instead of beeb ones) and can be charged extra for, later.

Re: Welcome to 21st Century USA - How about an unbiased source?

"global warming benefits them so long as it happens slowly so that Siberian infrastructure can be upgraded in time"

And if the Leptav sea emissions turn into a Storegga event, the Siberian infrastructure (and population) can be restarted from scratch. The pesky factor of that amount of seawater incursion triggering all the swamps is but a mere bagatelle

Re: Welcome to 21st Century USA

" so that by now, the US is barely making the top-10 in the world by this criterion. "

Speaking of not making the top tens, the USA is out of most of them in terms of freedom indicies AND is #35 on human rights.

There are none so blind as those who will not see

Re: Within the conservative community...

> (I prefer New Scientist myself but that is probably a regional thing).

I read both and if anything SciAm is quite conservative.

" the chances of being fined are tiny."

If the government was SERIOUS about killing this kind of scam, they'd allow a right of private action like the USA did in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (47 USC 227) - look it up.

Making the callers and the companies they advertsie for jointly and severally liable has had a marked chilling effect on unwanted marketing phone calls in the USA over the last 26 years - mainly because the death of 1 million papercuts is a lot harder to avoid than playing whack-a-mole with regulators.

Re: More to the point - how much has it saved?

It's like the massive IT projects rolled out in the UK, Asutalia and New Zealand in the 1990s linking banks, welfare and tax information together in order to find all those bludgers fiddling the system - we were told it would pay for itself in the first year, yadda yadda.

In every case, what was found was that there were very few welfare cheats (but a lot of people who were entitled to claim but didn't) and 90+% of the fraud detected was actually being committed by welfare department staff (which should have been detectable anyway). Even with that, the amount of welfare fraud detected came to less than 10% of the rollout costs.

VED is about £5 billion per year to the government.

Fuel taxes are more than 10 times that much revenue (£65 billion in 2009)

When Cameron promised to ringfence vehicle taxation for roading, he knew full well that it was a minor issue in comparison to the income from motor spirit taxation and duty. (a litre of petrol's _actual_ cost is about 20p, the rest is tax of some sort or another.)

Re: No car tax?

"All of London low emission zone cameras can do it too. Same for the congestion charge. "

7 years ago the Met was estimating that thanks to congestion charge cameras, around 8-10% of cars on London roads were running on cloned plates.

The dork that drove into me went one better, not only was the plate fake, but the tax disc that went with it was visually quite credible - and the car even had a faked up VIN that passed casual view (as in right for the model). It shouldn't be a surprise that he ran off and left his pride&joy sitting in the middle of a busy Croydon road, rather than be there when the Plod arrived.

Re: Early symptom of the demise of $BIGCO?

> There are people who don't know what is meant by 'Could you open a web browser please?'

I have had to explain how to close a window more than 5 times in 15 minutes - whilst on the SAME call.

Re: Self interest?

" In the case of an emergency, the airline's insurance company foots the bill. "

It would be in the interests of the insurers to make sure it's working. The payouts would be much higher if the runway wasn't there.

Re: The results will be meaningless

"Algae will produce molecular oxygen."

1: Only whilst there's light - the rest of the time they're absorbing it.

1a: If the waters become acidic then they produce less oxygen - and oceanic acidity has already increased 30% in the last 250 years (Ph scales are logarithmic)

2: When the algae dies it settles to the bottom and absorbs oxygen whilst decaying.

3: If algae levels get too high (bloom) then they deoxygenate the water at night and die en masse.

It's the 3rd item which is responsible for most of our oil reserves as the blooms settle and then get covered in further debris under anoxic conditions.

Re: The results will be meaningless

Longer term it is - Look up Anoxic Oceanic Events. They tend to go hand in hand geologically with CO2 spikes.

The worry from some quarters is whether we're pushing to the knee point of one or have already passed it.

Things like the Leptav Methane Emissions are worrying enough - current remote sensing instruments can't detect methane over water. This means that the "phantom emissions" originally attributed to agriculture may well be coming from there (the methane survey authors weren't aware of Leptav emissions until AFTER they published). Onsite observers claimed the plumes are over 1km wide at the surface - and this is the first time that clathrate plumes have made it to the surface.

The bigger worry is that if the Leptav clathrates bubbling out get to the point of destabilising the Siberian continental margin then we could see a Storegga style methane burp and associated landslides+tsunamis putting somewhere between 1-5GT of methane into the atmosphere in a few weeks or days. This would be bad news - if you look at geologic record, Storegga's methane burp kicked global temperatures by a couple of degrees and appear to have been the trigger for rapid ice melt/sea level rise.

Re: Claim: all IPv6 addresses are *PUBLIC*

"Most home routers offering IPv6 still seem to just expose the plain IPv6 address directly anyway. Not fantastic."

As long as they apply the _same_ firewalling rules on IPv6 as on IPv4 (ie, all incoming blocked by default, etc) then there's no major issue.

There are of home routers which mirror the IPv4 rules to IPv6 by default.

Re: IT happens

"DAB got turned off where I live"

And there was much rejoicing.

Re: I must admit I'd love to have access to one locally.

" Does the cheap labor of an emerging economy become meaningless when factories and laborers aren't needed?"

More or less. Once you have the technology for on-demand production it makes the most sense to produce close to the point of consumption.

On the other hand you're saving a lot of people from quite shitty jobs and perhaps giving them opportunities that will allow them to leapfrog industrial economies.