The new Chancellor of the Exchequer for the UK is quite a surprise at first glance. Yet despite his name, Kwasi Kwarteng’s route to the second most powerful political post in the UK is utterly classic with Eton, Cambridge, Harvard and JP Morgan on his CV. In his first act as chancellor, Kwasi has dumped big and angry cats amongst some now very worked-up pigeons. He seems to be of the admirable yet oddly very unpopular view that individuals are quite able to spend their own money. He has cut taxes! And not even by very much. Nevertheless, so ingrained is the notion that only governments have the requisite skills, knowledge and empathy to keep we mere mortals safe and content, that the fact that governments are actually very bad at doing governing stuff, is largely ignored. Chancellor Kwarteng’s plan to replace reluctant taxpayers with willing lenders has been tried many times before, but as usual the talking heads are sure he has misjudged the whole thing and both the British currency and interest rates have reacted badly.
What will definitely end badly is “the incorporation and establishment of the South African National Water Resources Infrastructure Agency Limited as a state-owned company and major public entity owned and controlled by the State to administer, fund, finance, operate, maintain and provide advisory services in respect of national water resources infrastructure”. This sounds like Eskom for water and should have us all fleeing to install rain water tanks.
A small war in the centuries-old tussle between theoretical and experimental science is reaching an interesting stage as enthusiastic supporters of the electrical vehicle side-hustle of the greater climate change extravaganza are learning about efficiency factors. Very simply it is turning out that almost everything the theoreticians promised that electric vehicles would do is not happening and the experimental side (mostly of course the customers) is coming up with results way worse than predicted. It’s not that the science was necessarily wrong, it’s that the theorists failed to factor in real-life human behaviour. That is, the way we use our powered devices is usually very different from the way the designers expected we would and this severely reduces the efficiency factors that should be used in the theoretical calculations. We are just pretty hard on our stuff! EV owners are becoming increasingly disillusioned with for example, the realisation that fully charging an EV using one’s home electricity supply is very slow and it gets worse if the neighbours are charging as well. Suburban domestic utility networks were designed and installed a long time ago and can’t cope.
The war between Ukraine and Russia seems inexorably to be dragging in other nations. The US just keeps voting ever increasing sums of money to the Ukraine. This week a mystifying pair of underwater explosions at the bottom of the Baltic Sea may have been the linked to the severing two very large and critical natural gas delivery pipelines called Nord Stream 1 & 2 that originate in Russia. terminate in Denmark and are operated by Germany. All the usually garrulous internet search engines have gone strangely quiet when asked for more information on the incident. The word sabotage which was common in early reports has all but disappeared. Disturbing.
Another illustration of how science works was shown us this week when NASA deliberately crashed a purpose built bare-bones space craft into a hapless asteroid named Dimorphos. This small chunk of blameless rock, together with its companion asteroid Didymos was cruising through space about 11 million km away from Earth. Theory predicts that the collision and resulting transfer of kinetic energy will appreciably alter their orbits around each other and the sun. And provide data for designing further such deliberate collisions. With the space craft having left Earth almost a year ago and the expected orbit perturbations taking a few days to observe and confirm, this is a leisurely experiment to see if there is any basis for thinking that mankind could respond to an actual threat to Earth itself from a malignant piece of space rock headed our way. https://dart.jhuapl.edu/Mission/index.php
Meanwhile many fans think that referees are posing a very definite threat to the rugby. The official in charge of the bokke/ Argentinian game nearly caused micro climate changes by continually waving yellow cards about.
James Greener
Friday 30th September 2020
