mind of glue

Been a while but I wanted to put into words one of my big dreams.

I want to be completely off-grid. Now that isn't particularly remarkable as many people do live off-grid. The issue is it's all about them. I want it to be a community project. Free power for as many people as possible.

Now this has probably been set off by modded minecraft. As you expand you need more and more power to supply all your machines and automation. One of the best things to do is create a feedback loop with a net gain of power. For example an auto wood farm, which automatically gets turned into charcoal, and then the charcoal is used in a generator to run the wood farm and the furnace making charcoal and having a net gain of power to go into a energy grid to power other things. Scale it up as needed to power everything.

Obviously it's bad to burn stuff and in real life the energy efficiencies would likely mean this isn't a net gain of power. Which results in the obvious solution being renewables. And is the usual method of modded minecraft a combination of solar and wind an occasionally water power fed into some battery buffer storage and then forgotten about until your needs outweigh the production.

So moving onto real life. I've been watching quite a lot of youtube videos from Ghost Town Living to mbmmllc and Martin Zero. And this stuff really excites me. A lot of it comes down to getting raw resources, refining them and then transporting them. Back then it was a lot of man power, coal and burning stuff. Nearly all of this can be replaced with electricity. And so the matter of if something is worth doing comes down to power. Now the industrial revolution is over, dirty coal power is on the decline. And yet there's cryptocurrency, which has a large amount of backlash over it's energy use. From wasted energy to taking it away from more productive/tangible uses. We've got expensive oil and gas prices causing heating costs to skyrocket and we're heading towards an electric vehicle revolution. Power is money.

But why is power so expensive? Sure when burning fossil fuels, there's a finite supply, accessing them is more and more difficult. But power is easy! Especially with cheap solar panels and a common theme of Martin Zero videos is water power. An ancient technology going back millennia, using water wheels to power something. There was incredibly complicated water flow systems to do all kinds of different jobs. In the modern world, it mostly comes down to Dams. Creating huge heads of water to generate electricity.

And yes, creating new Dams is expensive and can have large environmental impacts. But there's still plenty of ways to harness power. You learn in school that nearly all power comes from the Sun, and to a small extent, the Earth. We only harness a tiny tiny fraction of it that to our society there's infinite power to be had. With infinite power, there's no concern about small inefficiencies in collecting it.

However we rely on power companies. They have no incentive to create infinite power as that means power is worthless. And so they will always need to create a margin of demand and a profit margin.

But if I become self-sufficient, I have no need of the power company any more. My energy becomes free. Sure I have an initial investment in the infrastructure. But I can do what I want with it without having to worry about it costing me. I can run computers solving problems with the power. I could run my 3D printer without worrying about enegy cost. I could mine crypto without having a bad conscience. I could power my electric car and have free transportation. Sure my power input my be variable but that can be evened out with batteries which are also going through a revolution and so I can flatten my usage, or store up more than I need so I can do a larger project later. Finally there's any excess. I could sell it back to the grid.

But that doesn't feel right. I'm in a privileged situation where I can afford to eliminate my electricity costs. And so it's not the energy company paying for my electricity. It's those who are worse off. What I should be doing is giving my excess electricity away for free to those worse off.

My upfront cost of infrastructure is offset by the work done from using that power. I could be using the power to solve problems. Or if given away, they would use the power to solve their problems. That extra bit of cash saved might mean they can gain some time or pay off debt so they become more productive in their lives. So let's scale that up. If I complete my goal and generate enough electricity for myself and then 5% more. And then several others do the same. We can create a community pool of electricity. What if all businesses outside of business hours added to this pool from solar panels on their buildings roof. Quickly you would have large amounts of free energy. What could you do with that free energy? You could automate stuff. Make machines that mine with free electricity. Suddenly that raw material is cheaper because it cost you less to obtain it. That can then go into cheaper solar panels and so on, making energy more and more easily available. Until we get to a point of infinite energy.

Infinite energy could solve so many world problems. For example clean drinking water. It's an energy intensive process converting salt water to drinking water, but that doesn't matter if the energy is free and unlimited. Food production is an energy intensive process and so that could be eliminated. And so on causing a positive feedback loop enhancing humanity, raising people from the current levels of poverty and creating new innovations currently held back by energy requirements.

Essentially energy should be free for all and a basic human right. By the rich subsidising the energy infrastructure. I believe infinite energy to be a possibility. Of course it's not an investment without a return (damn capitalism) which will happen through the increased productivity and advancements given by energy not being a limiting factor.

This is the first of two scams I wanted to share my thoughts on.

Covid-19 has shown these scams for what they are and I hope when this is all over, there’s some real change. And if there isn’t, I still hope for real change!

I, like many my generation rent. I essentially fund the retirement of my landlords. They’re a nice couple but it’s just wrong. It creates a huge inequality of wealth. They bought this flat several years ago and they pay a mortgage on it. I pay £900 a month on rent. The cost of the property £235,000 in 2013. I’m willing to bet the mortage is under £900 a month. I would guess it being around £800, but could be more or less depending how much was initially paid. That’s £100 a month free money. You may say but they need to pay off their investment. But When they sell their property, perhaps if they die or move. They will likely sell the flat for £300,000 That’s £65,000 profit. They are making their living off of my living, it’s parasitic.

But they’re old, they probably only have one or two properties they rent. There’s plenty of bigger players, doing exactly the same thing, with many more properties and behaving a lot worse when it comes to maintenance and looking after the welfare of the occupiers.

Housing prices are being driven up by the rental market. Landlords are making property a scarcity which means they can also charge more for rents because the cost of the property was so high the mortgage is higher and therefore to make a profit, tenants must pay more.

The same applies to business and commercial lets. If you have a prime location in a city centre, you can charge crazy amounts. It’s free money on an asset that you have. For businesses it’s a monthly cost that goes into a pit. The business can increase its profits by reducing expenditure, and increasing turnover. But that lease and renting, is just an ever increasing expense. Where the landlords use these rents to pay for their living. They don’t work to earn a living like everyone else. They just take it from those who are earning a living.

At the moment businesses aren’t operating. They have no need for this space so why should they pay for it? But some landlords are so greedy especially when this is their only source of income. And demand full rent payments. This will either cause the business to leave, or go bust. Then the shop will lie empty. A worthless asset because the Landlord has bled the occupant dry. To counter this, Governments are telling banks to shoulder the loss of payments. So the Landlord’s mortgage goes down, and can “pass on” the savings to the occupier. The banks are just as parasitic in this system, earning money through the money of others. What’s been happening is banks are not passing on much. And the landlords being greedy can double dip, get reduced mortgage but try and keep full rent income. With businesses, they will collapse and with it comes the whole pile. This top down stimulus can’t work because the tower is built on greed. For regular people it is similar but worse. If you lose your income, that’s it. You have to ask nicely from your landlord to reduce or freeze rents. At least with businesses once this is over you can recoop your lost revenue by demanding higher rents. From regular people this isn’t the case. It’s not like wages will increase after this is over, if anything they’ll fall. And if you lose your job completely, who knows when you can get another. And this isn’t the case where you don’t need that place anyway. With a business the property is where you make your money. With a home, it’s where you live, you need it with or without an income. And if something doesn’t budge, the tenant is going to be evicted. The balance of power is always with the landlord.

What will bring about change? If there’s nobody to pay rents, holding onto these assets is worthless. If too many people end up homeless and homes and held onto but not lived in.

What will change be? House prices will crash. Landlords have to sell loss making properties at a loss to recoop costs.

What I hope will happen is laws are put in-place to stop the few with the wealth holding the cards of who gets to gets to live where.

Been having some thoughts about this, which I hope are positive things to look forward to. At the moment the news is all about treatment, isolation and economic impact. I believe will fast-track us to the future.

Let’s start with the obvious. Amazon is hiring to meet demand, the death of the high-street is accelerated and more and more shopping is done online. High street businesses which have been scraping along, will go under. These are all things that would happen sooner or later but as a result of the virus. It will bring about the same change suddenly and sooner.

Pollution will slow down dramatically. Less flights, less people travelling to work, rush hour traffic. Depending how long the pandemic goes on for, the more visible the effects of lower pollution will be! This should give a good push for how the world can survive without these luxuries and then when the pandemic ends, things don’t have to revert back to being super polluting! Those who can work from home will be encouraged to. And flexible work hours will also be encouraged. Previously, these have been possible but there hasn’t been the incentive for employers to have employees work from home, even though the measures have been in place. Education may drastically change! If schools are off for extended periods of time, or exams get cancelled. Education will no longer be measured by attendance and grades.

Now to get onto the more extreme possibilities that might happen in a post Coronovirus world.

Wages and bills. With large proportions of the population, no longer able to earn an income, the government is having to foot the bill for essentials. Food, Water, Electricity, Housing and now internet. If people can’t work, or leave the house in some cases, they still need food. Rents and mortgages can’t be paid, and people need access to the outside world. If rents and mortgages can’t be paid, then owning property becomes worthless, and not something to be profited from which in turn affects banks and landlords. Money as an entity changes.

Another side to this is those who provide these essentials suddenly have immense value to the state. The health sector, the education sector and the food sector. State ownership becomes more important as individuals cannot afford anything. It would be hoped that those health workers finally receive better pay that fits with what they’re doing.

Finally it would be hoped that as a result of this. In the future we are more prepared. Health services wouldn’t be at breaking point during normal day-to-day life. People have savings and can afford to go without work for as long as is needed to. Those self-employed and are in the gig-economy and just general employees have better protections. We stop being wasteful and spending today and not preparing for tomorrow.

Doom is here, or maybe will be at some point later.

This is specifically about the UK from the news I’ve read about and how it’s economy functions. Some of this may apply to other countries if they’re similar.

So what am I talking about? The current balance between young people and old people is bad and getting worse. Something has to give. To put it simply, people are living older, and young/middle aged people are having less babies. Now this is something that happens all over the world, but I feel in particular the UK is in a bad place to deal with it.

Let’s start with government. Oh isn’t democracy wonderful. In it’s simplest form the people in the majority dictate what decisions are made. In this case the older generation are the majority. There’s the old saying that the “older generation come out in force” and that young voters need to vote more. There’s two problems with this. Even if much more of the young demographic came out and voted they’d still be in the minority. What incentive do young people have to vote when they already know their vote won’t make a difference. There have been some votes where more than the average turnout for young people has happened, and it’s usually not made a difference. Sure sometimes the votes are very close. Take Brexit as a big example. It was said that the older generation swayed the vote in favour of leave. But why would they be in favour of leave? Well the big leave campaign focused on getting money back for the NHS. Now, I’m tempted to say the lies and propaganda of the campaign influenced vulnerable people kinda of like door to door salesmen preying on the elderly. But that would be unfair and would not account for many people. As I’m a believer most are capable of making an informed decision. What was more likely is that the NHS is of huge importance to the elderly as they use it most and therefore leaving to get more money for the NHS is a good thing.

Here’s the biggest problem with the UK government. First Past the Post system. If you don’t get the majority, you don’t get a say. Many other countries use different systems, some give proportional representation. The UK doesn’t. In almost every part of the country, the old outnumber the young. And politicians try to get elected and the best way to do this is come up with policies which are good for the “majority”. This means the older generation hold huge power over every decision made in the UK. Of course, not every decision made will be detrimental to the younger generation. But some are and I’m going to go into those.

I’ve briefly touched on the NHS (National Health Service). This is likely to be an international problem. The NHS is under massive strain. It’s a wonderful system: pay tax, fund free health care for all. Everyone should have a right to free healthcare. There’s a couple of things which are applying this strain. There’s not been enough support in the forms of staff and funding. And if there’s an older generation, they are using the health service more and some even being kept alive because of it. This squeeze is causing over crowding and meaning cuts to GP’s and other less used parts of the NHS like mental health. Now the solution is to provide more funding and more doctors and nurses. There’s no other real alternative and this is going to keep increasing as the population becomes more unbalanced. In the short term, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot by decreasing the amount of doctors and nurses by removing incentives and bursaries to study medicine, over-working the current medical professionals and increasing fees to study and train more people. Long term, this should get sorted out, but the tax bill to pay for the NHS is going to be more and more. Now onto a problem which is much more of a discriminating against young people issue. Tuition fees. A few years ago the Conservative coalition government with the Liberal Democrats approved increase tuition fees. Going for £3000 a year to a maximum of £9000 a year. This is a ludicrous price hike and obviously all the universities opted to charge the maximum for all courses. What’s happened to all this money? well, nothing. University heads have lined their pockets. Students and families can’t afford those prices, so everyone gets student loans. This happened before the price hike. So now with the price hike, the loans are just bigger. So the government pays more money to give students loans to then get less back. Because, unless you end up with an amazing job, you are never going to pay back your debt, after a long time, your debt is just written off. This just creates a hole. Money magically appears to pay for stupidly inflated fees and then most of it doesn’t come back. Sure money is constantly coming back in a stream. The loans are essentially a tax which people pay a little bit every month. But at some point the that hole is going to be so big, something is going to break.

The kicker, is that for many jobs a degree is required because everyone else has a degree, even if decades ago nobody needed a degree for that same job. If you’re in a job like this, I’m sure you’ll be much more educated than your seniors, earning less and paying some eternal tax for your trouble.

Looks like we’re onto jobs. Before you get you’re first job, you’re likely to have to work for free. As even if you’re educated and qualified, you still need experience. this is likely to cause more debts. And if you’re lucky you get a good job, but you work for little. Saving nothing and everything you get is spent on making ends meet, particularly accommodation. You’ll need to continue this for several years before you’ll have worked your way up to begin to save for anything. For many this stage comes sometime in their 30′s, and people wonder why people are having less children and having them when their older? They simply can’t afford to start families. All the while, you’ll probably be being told to save money into a pension. Who knows if you’ll ever see it though, as the age of retirement is going up as the population lives older. For years the starting salary has remained the same, with minimum wage steadily increasing with inflation. The issue is that the cost of living is far exceeding inflation particularly driven by accommodation. With this being the case, future generations are likely to have to work even longer before they reach that stabilisation needed to start having families. There is going to come to a point where this stabilisation happens at, or after women reach menopause and no longer able start these families. People will be put in the horrible situation of choosing they can’t have children, or they have children before they can afford to.

Lets get onto Accommodation. House Prices are going up and up and up.  The UK has not enough new houses being built and the areas to build houses are getting smaller. This means many people currently rent until their mid 30′s and as prices go up this will mean there will be many people in the future who will rent their whole lives. This is very strongly correlated to the previous point on jobs. Who wants to bring up a family in uncertain living circumstances. People wait until they can afford a home. The other side is that all houses in the UK are currently owned by the older generation and baby boom era.  They fight against disruptive developments in their area, making new housing estates expensive to place. They don’t usually sell their houses as at that age, they don’t really need the money. If they do move house, they downsize to bungalows and all the housing which would be affordable or appropriate to first time buyers. But the elders are downsizing. They’ve got a fortune from selling their huge house and can outbid a first timer for that small flat our bungalow. The other big problem, is since house prices rise so fast. They are the perfect investment. If you have the money and you want to see a big return. Invest in property. This means lots of Landlords and houses sitting empty. Taking away affordable properties to buy. When you have a home, you are investing into your house. The money is going into something you own, and later can sell back. Also with likely increase in value. Rent is a hole. The money doesn’t ever return to you. The longer you’re renting for, the poorer you’ll be. This is creating a very dangerous gap between a poor young generation and a rich older generation.

Lastly Pensions. This is likely to be the real cause of the crash. Pensions are weird in the fact that what you save is actually paying for the people who have just retired and the next generation when they pay into their pension are actually paying for your pension. A larger older generation means more pensions to pay for. A smaller younger generation means less people to pay pensions. A bigger wage gap also means less money to pay for existing pensions. With each following generation, The person has a similar sized pension pot due to working longer and longer, but the number of people receiving a pension keeps increasing. With the age people are having families at getting older, there’s less and less of the younger generation and the countries pension deficit will get bigger and bigger, until pop! The country’s credit rating plummets and who knows how bad things will get.

The thing is, getting a job in general seems to good to be true.

I can feel that contentment/happiness fading and I’m worried I’m going to crash. I’m unemployed. Job hunting, interviews and assessment days are tiring and draining when you don’t get them. I should be happy as I’m being productive and getting fairly far in lots of job application processes. But until I get something I’m just going to get worn down.

I’ve left my friends at university, I’ve no longer got the friends I once had at home. I lack the freedom I had at university. Money is a big struggle (live in a well-off area). Tennis season is basically over now.

I’ve not been in a relationship in over a year and it feels like a very long time since I’ve had any sort of affection, and I’ve no idea how long I’m going to be in my current situation. I could be off to the other side of the country in a couple of weeks or I could be where I am for a year.

So with 4th year of University coming to an end I’ve been applying to lots of Engineering jobs and graduate schemes. And I’ve been coming across “ As part of the Equal Opportunities & Diversity Policy, the company is seeking to increase the representation of disabled people, racial/religious minorities and women because these groups are currently under represented in particular sections and at particular levels.” With one application even getting an automated reply from an application of. We regret to inform you we will not be taking your application further. Reason: Non-Diversity.

Now I’m a young white, middle-class, straight guy, so I don’t exactly have things “hard” and Tumblr would probably say I can’t complain. However this is kind of stupid. I understand that Engineering is a male dominated sector. But the whole thing of “Equal Opportunities” should be equal opportunities in regards to people with the right skills regardless of race or gender, not equal as in we need an even number of every variation of diversity.

Through university, there’s been very few girls. Either one or two out of 30 or so guys. To encourage this a lot of student bursaries are set up specifically for women to take up Engineering degrees. Being a student is expensive and we’re often told we should contact companies and look to get bursaries. There simply isn’t any unless you’re a girl or you’re studying abroad.

I chose engineering partly as the jobs are meant to be well-paid. That should have universal appeal, yet I still find only one or two girls on my course. Clearly something is failing. So those few girls have lots of opportunities with funding.

Next onto the stage I’m at with jobs. Well I’ve already said that companies are now actively looking for girls so that makes it fairly easy. My flatmate is a girl doing civil engineering. She’s already had a few job offers from companies. Who have actively gone out to look for her. She didn’t apply. She doesn’t really want to join them for a number of reasons. It’s very clear she’s been selected because she’s a girl making her seem like a token and not going to be taken seriously. Some of these companies are mostly older white men, so as a young attractive female she’s of course going to feel uncomfortable.

As time at university comes to an end. We get interviews and surveys about our time here. My flatmate told me she was selected for an interview and photo. Along with 5 others. One was the only other girl on her course, another was a black guy, one was a Chinese woman and a Chinese guy. This is who was chosen to show what engineering is like. It’s just a token diverse group.

Companies are wanting to change their image of being an all white male company. But if they do things properly and pick the best people. The ratio at universities is still the same ratio. Therefore they are being biased and not being equal and picking tokens. So to sort out “Equality” you have to go completely against “Equality”.