Pointers on How We Try and Sort Out the Mess We’re In

Why do civilisations and societies fail. Neglect. The assumption that a system can look after itself, not requiring constant tending, updating, maintenance and a backup if things go wrong will be the downfall of it. It can’t work, but many in this country think it can, minimal provision in everything. You can’t run one area at full capacity and efficiency while doing nothing in another, all needs to be balanced and preferably run at an optimum. Some things can run fast, others slow, but if you run a fast system above the levels of the slow system you either get backlogs, or require storage, adding to the burden, not reducing it as you need to maintain both now as well. The idea that you can skimp on supply or maintenance, running systems at below necessary requirements because they’re not needed for a while, means they won’t be there, or will likely fail much easier when used. Future failure is built into the system.

Neglect takes time. It takes time for neglect to filter through, governments and councils have been following their ideologies and neglecting their duties. If you don’t maintain a car and only maintain and use routes that you approve of, all around doesn’t suddenly just stop. Little things start to happen, then larger things and finally things break down. This is what is happening, so outside the narrow interests, things decay and finally only the main area functions, but the supplies dwindle as the areas that supply it fail. Then the main routes and central area also fail as it cuts back everything to minimal levels, not expanding, but always cutting back and neglecting or removing.
Outside London and the major cities commerce is dying. Then being bought up and the locals outbid in fire sales by London and the major cities as things like second or holiday dwellings and seasonal tourist businesses. But the local capital is gone and rented out at higher rates than the locals can afford, so they move out closer to cities or abroad. And so, the communities die, often closed up until the next ‘city holiday season,’ but the long-established local infrastructure also goes with it, smalls roads, churches, community centres, etc, the holiday area only minimally maintained and mainly populated by minimum security while closed. Big projects go on all around in isolated pockets, but only use the area as an access throughway, like a necessary muddy track or farm lane. Gradually it gets ruts too and becomes unusable, so direct roads are built, but being of benefit to nothing local, just for links to the cities.

The first thing we need to do is get the transport system back up and running. The rail network outside the major towns, especially London, is a shamble, the bus services outside the major towns, especially London, are a shambles, the roads outside the major towns, especially London, are crumbling, the motorways outside links to the major towns are jamming up all the time, and even those are becoming parking lots, alternative routes failing constantly with ill thought out, planned, and implemented repositioning. Londoners and those in big cities say ‘we see none of that here, what’s the problem?’ Centralisation is the problem.
We see lip service done to environmental matters, but now everything needs to go by road, so heavy vehicles, getting heavier all the time, are damaging them. Saving money for big firms that can afford them, but killing the road infrastructure. Distribution centres for big companies are in mostly rural areas whose roads are dying because of it, so links for those big companies are the only things planned or built, areas outside this neglected. Smaller vehicles, preferable electric from that point, would cost more, but be cleaner for cities.
The most environmentally friendly system is rail by far. Implemented well it would be the cheapest too. Linked to dock systems by rail, not the cheapest deep ports that are rare, but the newer and more efficient ships. Massive container ships, the cheapest per item option are not necessary as a problem there is amplified by the size. One major failure can block all the rest. The owners not losing that much, just the area paying for it, or supplied by it.
Public transport is not a luxury, but necessary, most people not using it because it is so unreliable, a mad dash to town and out again each mainly within one hour. With modern technology a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 350 days a year operation is required for a secular society. But, people don’t need to work 40 hours a week, probably only half that to be efficient, some people not being employed, but not seen as skivers and parasites, but potential resources and taken care of well and maintained. Work being a privilege. It gives people purpose, so they have time to contribute to community requirements. Parking needs to be taken out of the hands of the profiteers. For a bare bit of tarmac more than £1 per hour outlawed for private, free for council or public provided, maybe more than £1.50 per hour for multi-storeys, overrunning charged at maybe 50% higher, not 5,000%, big fines illegal. Free parking for employees only really happens at present for the very big firms with their own car parks.
The ideal system would be free electric bus transport in the cities in the whole country, maybe new efficient diesels and smaller minibuses for long trips and country. Free, with no accounting system, just monitoring, they wouldn’t need all the extra provision, payment systems, accounting, banking, cash collection, floats and change. Seasonal transport variations and shop opening needs to be outlawed. Either you provide it, or you don’t and somebody else does, neglecting local communities considered a crime. Decent cycle ways need to be constructed completely away from traffic, well lit, monitored, policed, with limits on speed, bikes exceeding it confiscated, standardised modular batteries used, not the personalised and unique ones that mean massive expense and short-term obsolescence. Maybe not even owning batteries, so battery swaps and stations, even vending machines, would be common. The same is required for cars, but a heavy-duty system.

Next, comes communications. 5G and super-fast broadband is touted in London and the big cities. Plus, 3G everywhere is being switched off, but many parts of the country outside big cities and especially London haven’t even got a decent 4G. 3G is all they have, or had, and is being switched off. Lack of decent communication is damaging the whole of society. Super-fast broadband is being pushed, usually digging up the roads to do so, but the throughput is almost the same as before, especially for rural areas that rely on old and outdated routing, priority bands given to big cities, especially London. Data access is a nightmare in the UK, uneven, unfair, badly charged and able to quick cut off, so a public data access is a requirement. It doesn’t need to be fast, just the minimum 4G standard throughout. The wire based telephone system has been abandoned mainly, so in areas with poor 4G access there is no backup if broadband goes down in the area, so resilience is shot. Without the broadband business and modern life that runs on it is cancelled.

Housing. We have ‘shanty towns’ of caravans in nearly every major city where damp, mould and poor sanitation is the name of the game, caused by such high rents and next to no support, occasionally moved on and removed by wealthy people’s objections to the eyesore who do nothing to help, just doing things to make thing more difficult and worse.

At the moment we have vast systems to stop people getting more than they are entitled to, but none to ensure they are getting what they are entitled to. The government has a policy that telling benefits claimants what they can get is a disciplinary offence. This has to stop. The benefits system is a right, not a privilege, not a skivers paradise, but a backup system for underutilised resources, so to swindle the public out of their rights is a social crime, not a noble task. The idea that the minimum, or less than minimum to survive in modern society is adequate, needs to end. Government in a human and civilised society needs to prove that people shouldn’t receive benefits, not prove they do. The governments for the past 50 years have been fanning resentment of those lucky enough to find the employment they want, turning the fortunate against the unfortunate. The ones that realise this quite often have been victims of that abusive system and everyone is at risk at some time. Situations can change for everyone; injury, illness, deaths, age, relationship breakups, accidents, it benefits us all to know there is some kind of system to cushion it, not automatically classed as ‘the enemy.’

There needs to be a minimum standard for all, accommodation, food, drink, entertainment, health services, transport, probably through minimum income which will allow for some form of choice, but a society that doesn’t provide this can claim to be neither ‘decent’ or ‘civilised,’ just a mass of competing animals out for only themselves. Nothing noble, just there and also discardable by anyone in control, or if situations change. People shouldn’t live in fear of where their next meal is coming from, or where they will sleep for the night. This is the mark of the cruel and uncaring despots who build in their own downfall, and societies too if you let them.
There will be those who choose abuse the system and just do nothing, but they should be pitied, as they have and serve no purpose. They might benefit, but they know deep down they have no value to anyone, even to themselves. They will probably get ill and die young anyway, people who neglect things and others often neglecting themselves in the end, in a constantly downward spiral Everyone can play a part, an efficient and professional system just trying to work out how, not just discarding because they the people in charge aren’t clever enough, or as much as they think they are. This means valuing everyone and trying to give them a purpose, not just those you personally respect through wealth, fame and fortune. Their lives exist because of those lower down. Take the lower down away, they fail and fall with the rest and become as the lower down.

This feeling of a lack of representation and control is generated by actions; things falling apart everywhere, and people who are supposed to manage it blaming all kinds of other groups for their own failings. ‘If you can’t blame somebody else, blame somebody using a new perspective of history.’ Technocrats believe technology and AI will solve everything, managers believe re-organisation and better management will cure all, isolationists believing stopping people coming here and ejecting people will sort it all out, financiers believe generating more money will solve all problems. All only having grand ideas about a small blinkered area of interest, but essentially interdependent on all the others.
It’s like a machine that normally works fairly OK at certain settings, but somebody who plays around with the settings as they think they can improve things by major changes, but end up madly fluctuating from one extreme to the other, nothing good being produced, only problems to be fixed.
We need free enterprise, but we also need certain things to be under government control, such as water, gas, electricity, waste and sewage, public transport, health, education, maybe even the communications and data infrastructure as none of those are currently working well, and all failing one by one under private management.
We had a mixed economy in the UK, which worked OK, then a change to a mainly public one that didn’t work, now we’re in a mainly private one that doesn’t work with no concept of supporting structure and relationships, taking away a strut here, a bolt there to save money, the idea that each part must make a profit ensuring the downfall of the whole, discarding the baby with the bath water.

With power, we need to get away from this naïve view that all energy is electricity, it’s not. For us it’s only a small proportion. So, people who crow away about the levels of wind and solar are just like donkeys braying in the wind. Dependence on wind and solar is unreliable to a level high of total incompetency at present as a core source of energy. It’s the Trump view of life, ignoring the obvious and things facts if you don’t like them and persuading others to think the same. It’s ideology and fantasy, not science. Nuclear is consistent, but full of risks, and everything is being tried to manage at minimum cost, balancing total countrywide disaster against revenues. Chernobyl was just a routine test that went wrong, Fukushima, where the whole of Japan got very, very lucky. Winds and currents in the wrong direction, Japan might have been over. In the UK we have a lot of coastal nuclear, Fukushima was a bit unique and a problem waiting to happen, but we could lose say Somerset, Kent or Hampshire if things go badly wrong. If we lost Kent and maybe contaminated London who would say a nice electricity supply was worth the risk?

Currently for the UK:

Gas accounts for about 43% of energy.
Oil accounts for 32%
Coal accounts for about 3%
Burning stuff; wood, waste, etc, accounts for 10%
This is 88% of the energy used in the UK, the rest, 12% is electricity. The others usually are so small in comparison that they’re not worth mentioning.
12% of our energy is electricity, where over the year about 40% is from gas, 12% is nuclear, 12% is wind, 2% is solar, 8% hydroelectric, 10% is burning stuff, and 6% we get from interconnectors from other countries. But, you can’t just go on rare maximum outputs for assessments of anything. All you do is just delude yourself and others.

This means that really the overall the percentages for energy are around:

Gas, 46%
Oil, 32%
Coal, 3%
Burning stuff, 12%
Nuclear, 1%
Wind, Solar and Hydroelectric, 3%
Other countries, 1%
Other bits of those combined and largely unrecordable, 2%. There’s no bonfire or personal generator census.

This is common in many countries. Then you have a lot of the renewables such as wind and solar are manufactured using oil, and countries that have heavy coal industries, so even then the overall percentages may be increased for gas, oil and coal, the pollution still being produced for us, just not being in our own back yard or recorded in our figures. Like eating chips off the plate of the person sitting next to you, and claiming you’re successfully dieting.

Gas and oil for us is the main supply of energy, electricity for our gadgets and communications. We did have large storage of gas and oil, but both were mainly abandoned and resilience compromised by people who had no clue about the areas they managed and controlled. They saw money and profits as the only driver of importance, not actually having access to the them, and having a sustainable and reliable supply. They worked in theory and were totally clueless about the real world, as bad as the green movement. So, we now have no energy security in the UK, and things likely to get worse.

Oil is running out, coal is running out, and we are using up gas like there’s no tomorrow, wells and mines getting deeper every year, so we have it today, but in the next 100 or so years it’s over; gone for maybe 20,000 years. The resource wars have already started. In 100-200 years, what we have now will be regarded as total peace because of this.
Subterranean hydrogen is touted because of massive discoveries, but nobody currently capable of getting to the stuff. Probably cost more than you could get out anyway.

Wind and Solar are the future, we can provide all our needs from the sun. But, both are incredibly fickle and unreliable. We see scientific advances claimed for 2 or 10 times previous levels of outputs for solar, but none hold water, and usually are totally impractical in real life situations, costing massive amounts to implement, way more than they sort out. They are generally scientific curiosities and quirks, marketed as the new panacea, the reality is never likely to ever work, not at least within a few hundred years. Fusion is one of those areas, not one working and practical reactor created after 90 years constant research. Compare fission where the first fission reactor using technology and knowledge of that age took 10 years after the first experiments, fusion around the same time. The claims for minutes running admired, when years running is necessary, each trivial step applauded, when miles are needed. The claim for unlimited cheap and clean energy mainly made by those who are clueless about the expertise, the engineering and the dangerous materials required. Stuff you wouldn’t want within 50 miles of your family.
So, we have wind, and solar, but always quoted on theoretical outputs in perfect laboratory conditions, never reality, like claims for a new car doing 200 miles to the gallon, but only managing 60 mpg for everyone, but the fake claims allowed and approved by the obsessed, indoctrinated and religiously environmental. We need real figures, not marketing fantasy ones they’re allowed to get away with, like cheap conmen, swindlers and obscure and unhinged, but admired religious sect leaders.

The problem with electricity from renewable means is one thing; storage. I’m not talking about expensive and inefficient lithium container systems that can only balance market forces for a while, I’m talking cheap large-scale storage. Some things are highly unlikely to ever be economically viable. The much-extolled pumped hydro systems costing maybe 20 years family electricity use to implement, the running of it costing similar to oil, so you probably need the same amount of gas or oil as before running alongside it or somewhere else to function.

Currently there is no practical electrical storage system anywhere in the world. There’s a few battery plants with limited functionality, but usually they are tiny in output and duration compared to the overall requirement.

One possibility maybe local gasometers filled with hydrogen and using hydrogen instead of natural gas. The hydrogen coming from electrolysis plants using the surplus provision of wind and solar, which by necessity must be many more times than required. If the requirement for the UK is say 35GW on average, we must have 100GW actual or quite possibly 200GW worth rated. When normal, generate direct power for the UK, when surplus generate hydrogen for the gasometers, when low use hydrogen from the gasometers and hydrogen power stations. Hydrogen fuel cells for transport are possible, but again, not without storage in cars, so a storage medium must be found, possibly by converting to ammonia first. Probably much easier to change to and from than trying to get super absorbing materials to work, so ammonia powered cars with maybe hybrid fuel cell powering electric and hydrogen combustion engines.

Another possibility may be large field size capacitance systems filled alternately with layers of scrap and sintered metal and plastic. Basically, a large capacitor, charged up by a nearby power station and feeding back into the grid when necessary. Maybe cover it with a layer of solar cells and wind turbines around the edge.