Titanic Oceangate Submersible

It's well past the time when the five submariners aboard the submersible "Titan" should have run out of oxygen. We have questions but not really many answers.

UPDATE: Some questions answered - it seems the Titan imploded, it seems that the knock signals were spurious - but still leaves open if they were deliberately faked.

My first question is: Why were there so many stories? I don't mean journalitic coverage, I mean the things the experts surfaced. Today I broke my embargo on slavishly following the press and looked to see what's happening now that the official time limit's passed. 

I found two stories - you'll be able to find literally hundreds if not thousands - here and here. 

The Stuff That We Can Know.

Titan had 90hrs of oxygen on board.

Let's take this as a fact, that OceanGate thought the oxygen aboard would last five people a total of 90 hours. That figure has to perforce be a best guess. Panic - and you could halve the amount of time the oxygen would last you. Meditate and force yourself into slowed-down respiratory state and you could get to 100-120 hours. 

How Did They Scrub the CO2?

It doesn't matter if you have oxygen for 200 hours - you have to get rid of the CO2 (as Apollo 13 demonstrated in frightening detail) or you still suffocate. It seems that the lithium hydroxide filters might be a baseline to compare this to, the A13 had canisters of lithium hydroxide that could keep the expired CO2 of three astronauts scrubbed out of the air so I'm going to presume that Titan had at least that sort of a scrubber. 

The A13 had multiple spares so I'll presume that they had at least three, one to start on, one to replace halfway through the original mission, and a spare. Basically I think an A13 sized cartridge would scrub COS of 3 people for several days. The OceanGate missions were expected to only ever last eight hours and since the submersible had oxygen for three and three quarters days I'll presume they had the foresight to ensure redundancy.

The Implosion Sound?

In the investigation, it turns out that there was a sound similar to an implosion, right around the time that contact with the submersible was lost. Since that was at the 90 minute mark, the submersible would have been close to three quarters of the way down to the wreck of the Titanic. 

However, would it surprise us if we theorise that since one of the principals of OceanGate was on board and probably piloting, that the descent was maybe sped up  a bit? That may have put strain on the hull that it normally didn't experience and it imploded. Or perhaps they weren't really watching their descent and pancaked into the seafloor.

The Debris?

Whether the Titan imploded at 3/4 of final depth, at close to final depth, or on impact, can perhaps be established because the rescue ROV has apparently spotted a "debris field" that would be consistent with any of those senarios, and by analysing the pattern and spread of the remnants it would be fairly easy to work out at what altitude above the seafloor the incident had occurred.

The analysts also thought the debris found could well be materials similar to the composition of the Titan.

The Knocking?

Given that they found that debris and say that it looks to be similar to material that you'd expect to find if Titan had imploded, that makes it likely that the crew has perished and the Titan is destroyed. So where did the knock signals come from? The choices here are 1) implosion of the submersible at the 90 minute mark of the mission and loss of all aboard, or 2) the submersible is intact on the surface or the seafloor and someone is alive inside and signalling. 

The Stuff We Don't Know.

There are two scenarios and each has a few subvariants. 

The knocking signified that the submersible is on the surface or the seafloor and running out of time. I don't believe it could be floating at some intermediate depth just because that would mean it still has manoeuvring capability and should have surfaced once whatever incident they encountered was seen.

Given the loss of contact and a sound that could have been an implosion, my favoured guess is that the submersible did implode at or near target depth and is no more.

That means that the signal knocking was either the imagination of someone listening to the hydrophones, or some spurious noise that appeared to be intelligent signalling, or else an outright fraud committed by someone making such sounds to throw confusion into the search & rescue mission. 

Now A Crazy Thought.

• Paul-Henry Nargeolet was one of the people that first explored the Titanic and a French Navy diver.
• Stockton Rush was one of the principals and his wife was related to two people who died on that fateful Titanic voyage.
• Hamish Harding was a business jet trader and significant for his explorations and the records he's set.
• Shahzada Dawood is/was a friend of King Charles. 
  His son Suleman would be the traditional successor to that line.
• Given that the whole history of royalty is more labyrinthine and Byzantine than Machiavelli's deepest plots.
• And given that people close to the throne turn up dead from time to time.
• And also given that - had the most likely scenario occurred - then someone had to have been making the spurious signals in the vicinity, possibly to sow confusion.

So what are the chances that the Titan was deliberately scuttled for some ancient vendetta?

I'm aware of how crazy that sounds. But it's remotely possible so I mention it. 

Please hit one of the links in the mini-banner and contribute to my costs incurred in running these blogs and sites. 

This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

... on the coalface. I said just a week ago that people who don't want to have children are okay to stay endlings. 

Now a bit more has come to my attention, and it says it right in the article that more than half of people who are active in climate change in any way (research, papers, activism, reporting, etc) believe that humanity is doomed by it. 

In my article I said "I couldn't imagine raising a small human . . . in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age . . ." and my choice of words was deliberate. Back in the 80s it wasn't yet a media phenomenon like it is today, but we had BBS systems and we were swapping the usual chat - weather reports: "yep, it stayed warmer, longer, before this winter. Beginning to believe that weird report hey?" - odd plant growth: "my tomatoes died off earlier this year, and my parsley shot away early too - must be something in the water?" 

In the 90s it was more obvious - my tomatoes cropped for longer, and they didn't even die off that year or the year after, and I had early crops off them. I had the Internet now and also ICQ. And I was chatting to people who were definitely reporting signs of weird weather. Not just one or two, either. It was a wake-up call. 

And by then it was getting a bit late to have young'uns, anyway. People stopped asking. I breathed a sigh of relief. But not about the climate, because by then it was starting to become A Topic Of Discussion everywhere. Not enough for people to actually do anything about it, but talking, at least. The rest is history. 

But look at it - the amount of distress that climate science - and the news it brings - has been creating. That last article BTW is from 2021. The Crikey reader comments roundup is from this year. The first two articles are also from this year. Here's another one.

I'm sure the climate is warming. I'm not sure the human species will survive the coming climate changes. I'm not sure most of plant and animal life on the planet will survive it. But I want to do everything I can to slow or avert it.

End Of Line? It's Terminal.

Are you the last of your lineage? After you, no more <insert family name here> running around the yard? No more <insert family tree name here> DNA in the world? 

Don't be too discouraged and don't feel too guilty. We share more DNA with other humans than we do with molluscs or mushrooms, but the variation in our genotype is only about 0.1%. While that means that our particular genome will end with us, the rest of our unique DNA is spread out among billions of other humans. 

So we're not really denying the gene pool of too much mixing. We think there have been only around 108bn home sapiens born on the planet since the species diverged from the hominid branch. There will soon be 9bn of us on the planet at a time, so maybe around 7-8% of all the h. sapiens that ever lived are here on the planet right now. Even if that figure was closer to 4% that's still a pretty large gene pool. It can do without contributions from some of us.

Don't Worry, Others Have Worried For You.

Starre Vartan had this same question in mind. (For podcast listeners - the link will be in the article when it's published.) 

And I had this question in mind when I decided I'd be an endling. (An "endling" is technically the last of a distinct species but the same concept applies to DNA of a family tree I think.) And actually - technically - I'd only be an endling of this branch of the <insert family tree name here> family tree. But I have female siblings and now quite a few nieces and nephews so their DNA contribution will outlive me.

There are also so many other things tied up in this. For one, why do we have this implacable drive to have our DNA be propagated into the future? Are we really the fittest h. sapiens that ever lived? Some people in history thought so - the eugenicists. "Terminate all inferior bloodlines, only the One True Race!" but that's just so much hokum. 

Because when you press any eugenicist to imagine the point where only their race exists on the planet with numbers approaching 9 billion, and ask them what this Superior Race will look like, it turns out they all look like that eugenicist. "Only Skwarkians with straight spines, brown eyes, three nipples, fine (but not too fine) musculature, a height of 180cm, and thick protective hair on their head!" they exclaim, and they're describing only themselves. 

When it comes down to a point where you've subdivided Skwarkians into 27 sub-races, only one will do. When you divide that last 1/27th into your family and the other 80,000 families, only YOUR family meets the standard. And then, do you know what you get? Have you got there yet? You get in-breeding, that's what you get. 

Imagine a time in the unimaginably far distant future when humans can instantaneously move wherever in the Universe they want and can form breeding unions with whomever they want, and the number of humans alive at any one time has so many zeroes after it that it's staggeringly close to the number of all planets. And the matter of "whomever they want" becomes inconsequential because there aren't any more variations possible of that 0.1% of the DNA... 

Slight Hiccup:

There may be a genetic predisposition component to not wanting to have kids. (The old joke "If your parents never had sex, chances are you won't either" comes to mind.) But truly - if there's a slight genetic variation that predisposes a person to not procreating, then that's a trait that will obviously breed itself out. 

But that's okay too. It means that the eager breeders will breed, meaning that again, your action (in not adding to the gene pool) won't affect the viability of the species. We family endlings have the best of both worlds. The hiccup turns out to not be an issue either. 

On A Personal Note

I decided, as I said, to not have kids. A lot of things. I could never imagine me with a young'un, I mean, a pup was already a huge commitment... I couldn't imagine raising a small human and teaching them al about life - if I wanted that I'd have become a teacher I suppose - in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age. 

And if you've decided you'd prefer to make our population growth figures a bit less frenetic, don't worry. Everything will work out just fine. 

TTMMGH #00010 Budget BS

... are things like this spin doctoring: 

Pharmacies Can't Do Maths. (Or Can They?...)

Oh dear: "Medicine shortages are coming!" "Blame the government for shortages!" "Aaaaahhhhh!" "The Sky is falling!"

Only no. It's bullshit. 

Priceline's BS claim revolves around new rules allowing patients being able to get 60 days' worth of medicines in a prescription instead of 30 days' worth as the situation has stood in the past. So instead of having to see a doctor every month to renew prescriptions, people only have to go every 60 days. Instead of getting 30 tablets a month, people are able to get 60 tablets per two months. That's not a shortage - it's just the same dose but now in one twice-as-long prescription instead of two.

Your pharmacist - tired, or relaxed?

Same Amount Of Medication:

It's the same amount of medication, just dispensed double quantity and half as often... Oh... Hey... So maybe that's the issue... Instead of twelve dispensings, it'll only require six. I wonder. Is that the sticking point? The actual amount of medication dispensed is not going to change. Whether you take 365 tablets dispensed in 30-tablet prescriptions 12 times a year, or you take 365 tablets dispensed in 60-tablet prescriptions 6 times a year, it's still 365 tablets. This means Prickline is knowingly putting out bullshit. 

(Look - they're pharmacists. Maths is kind of important to their business. "Hmmm. Do I give this person's 500mg dose in five 100mg tablets five times a day, two tablets 250mg twice daily, or 500mg once a day? When the highest tolerable dose is no more 300mg every eight hours?" The point I'm making is that this would not have escaped them, so they're knowingly bullshitting. And that in turn clearly means that they have some other gripe with this. And it's not hard to see. . .) 

Because - oh look! Instead of our pharmacists booking twelve dispensings a year per customer medication, they'll now only be able to book six... And oh, again... Look... They get a per-dispense fee! And there are also per-maximum-quantity fees they are permitted to charge, and obviously if the maximum quantity they can dispense changes while the total per year remains the same, they get a fewer fees here, too. 

So mystery solved. Priceline are prevaricating because they'll lose income. The customer gets lower costs and fewer GP appointments needed, but the customer isn't as important as getting as many fees out of the Government as possible. (Nice move Jim, nice move...)

"Shortages" Of Medicines?

There have been shortages of medicines for years before this ever came along. There will still be the same amount of medicine afterwards. The government can't actually reach back in time, alter pharmaceutical companies' production, and then also magically reach into the future and alter their production-to-be. 

What could change, come to think of it, is pharmacies' policies about ordering in stocks knowing they will need twice as much of a drug, half as often as before. Again - and I reiterate and belabor this point - it's simple effing matehmatics. Pharmacists have to know maths for fancy stuff like titration and dosing, I'm sure they can handle simple halvings and doublings. As I've often said: Keep The Bastards Honest.  A slogan I've shamelessly stolen from Mr Chipp and Australian Democrats party and will continue to use whenever appropriate.

To recap - there'll be no actual shortage of medicines on account of the new prescription rules. The only way shortages could maybe occur might be if pharmacies decide to make things unpleasant for their customers by sort-of-deliberately forgetting that they're pharmacies and they know how to do maths, and instead don't plan for the right quantities of medications to be ordered in time, hoping that their customers will put pressure on the government for them when they can't get their medication. That seems to be a filthy dirty tactic so I'm actually loath to suggest it but it is also not beyond the realms of possibility.

And For Customers There's Also Another Less Obvious Upside:

To me the single most important upside of this change to prescribing/dispensing rules is that the pharmacists will be doing around 1/2 as much dispensing as they've had to in the past. 

Old: Pharmacist (dealing with several hundred prescriptions a day) gets barely enough time to check your prescription properly, hand it to you, and snap out "next please."

New: Pharmacist (dealing with half as many prescriptions a day because the pharmacy still has the same number of customers and dispenses the same amount of medication but now only has to deal with patients half as often) can check your prescription in an unhurried fashion, has time to chat with you and do the things that pharmacists all used to do before increasing demands on their time robbed them of the customer contact part of their jobs. 

So it seems that not only will there be no "shortage of medications" but there'll be a cost benefit to customers and a chance to return to the more personalised style of medicine that pharmacies once were able to provide.

Hashtag #BoycottPriceline - because the customer's best interests seem not to be theirs.

Favour to ask:

Please wander back up to the neat banner at the top of the blog, and click on either side of it, to support my blogs and/or subscribe to my newsletter so that you'll see all my posts emailed to you once a week. And please share this post with friends on social media and instant messaging. 

I Have A Secret Superpower

. . . apparently . . .

Most of my life I've been able to "fit" things. Let me explain. As a child I had a lot of time to figure stuff out. We moved around a lot, I had and still have a life-long love affair with reading scientific, technical, practical, and mechanical magazines and manuals. And our moving around gave me opportunities to indulge my passion. There were generally always tech / sci magazines around, generally agricultural because one of Dad's careers was Agricultural Engineer, but every school I went to had at least one set of encyclopedias, one set of How It Works or similar. One farmhouse we lived at had a decade's worth of "Western Farmer" magazines that always included two to ten articles of home-made agricultural machinery, modifications a farmer may have made to their equipment, and novel uses for existimg implements.

You get the idea. Now add to that, that since I was old enough to read (around age 4) and write (age 5) I was also a lucky 60s toddler whose grandparents bought him the Mickey Mouse comics, and my hero of the series was Daniel Duesentrieb aka Gyro Gearloose in English. Yep, the inventor chicken with the Thinking Cap. I was determined to either become him when I grew up, or a veterinarian. We always had cats and dogs, horses and donkeys, and later emus, kangaroos, goats, sheep, and even a camel. So for over a decade it was a coin-toss that separated those choices. 

What Do I Mean, "Fit" Things? 

Well, for a start and as you've probably gathered by now, I ended up with engineering rather than biology. One of the first times my superpower kicked in - and I noticed it - was around age ten when we were driving along an inland Western Australian road and suddenly there was a rattling clattering racket the likes of which none of us had ever heard. (Also, this was our first year of owning a battered old secondhand Landrover and definitely our first time driving 1,500km with everything we owned loaded in the tray. We had no idea what noises a Landie could make and still survive back then.)

So I'm listening to the noise as we slowed down and Dad got ready to change a tyre out there. "Hang on! I think we have something wrapped around the shaft!" 

Dad looked and sure enough, a piece of barbed wire had gotten on the driveshaft, FSM knows how, but there it was. I got to slide under the car and use the fencing pliers to cut it loose. And a month later when we were sitting in the homestead we'd moved to that Dad asked me how I'd spotted that lone piece of wire at speed on such a boring long drive and I realised - I hadn't seen it. At least, I hadn't seen anything on the road immediately before and in fact we'd all been dozing off because after a while every kilometre looks like every other kilometre along roads like that. 

But in my head I must have fitted the knocking noise to the engine - nope, engine turns faster than that - and to the wheels - nope, they turned slower than the noise was going - and then I must have realised that the driveshaft was the only thing that was revolving at about that rate at that speed. I have to stress that at the time it was just a sudden flash and there was the answer, but when we were talking about that trip a few weeks later I still thought it was just obvious and wondered why no-one else had picked it. But in my head, I fitted the rhythm to the rhythms of the other things and matched it. 

Quite often I can match a spark of light to which part of a machine is producing it, a wrong sound to a particular part's motion. And I honestly never really thought this was a Secret Superpower until I was THIS years old. 

Similarly, seeing one of these on the counter at an antique/curio shop in South Guildford in Perth, WA, with a sign on it saying one could win a $50 voucher for the shop if one could guess what it was. 

It was a challenge. Heater? (I also have to add - it was not the one pictured, but quite similar. And it had been painted and so wasn't a rust piece like the one pictured.) I thought about it. Age? No idea. Old. And suddenly it hit me, I spoke to the proprietor who confirmed that I had it right, and I told them to keep the voucher for the next person. I was happy just to have picked it. If you want to have a go, think about it, answer at the bottom of the article.

Having no Music experience, when I saw this next thing in the opp shop, I was puzzled. But I did my thing and brained it - hard - for a few minutes and finally, I figured it out. 

Got home and googled violin brace and: bingo!

Finding an odd-shaped piece of nylon on the street, realising it had to be the clip for a menu sign since it was outside a bakery, taking it in to the owner and them being able to save one of their signs falling down into their fast food prep area - priceless. I got free pies and pasties for a few weeks after that. 

Things just - fit - in my head after a bit of thinking. And I have to admit that quite often I don't manage to work out an item's purpose, but generally if I can examine a thing and turn it around, the answer comes to me. 

A: The mystery object was a WWII Automobile Headlight Blackout Cover. They were ancient history before I was even born. 

I'll let you into a secret - the banner image at the top of this blog page has links to donate, and to subscribe to my once a week email newsletter. Please consider doing one or both? It'll help me a lot with these blogs. 

TTMMGH #00009

Things That Make Me Go Hmmm #9

Apparently Australia  Post are no longer going to do letters. Australia Post is bleeding out. Now they're about to get 'reviewed' to see whether we'll still receive letters. I haven't written a letter in a decade or two I'll admit, but I receive plenty of them from various organisations that still think dead trees (wrapped in more dead trees yo!) and with another small dead tree (YO!!) glued to them are cool. As long as said organisations are making money off me I think they'll want letter delivery.

National Mail Carrier No Longer To Carry Mail.

Shades of dystopia.

And this is the article I started off reading: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2023/03/02/australia-post-letter-review/ - Australia Post is going to get 'reviewed' to see if they should still convey letters. What? Are we going to have to put letters in a cardboard box now and pretend they're parcels? Is this the stupidest thing I've heard for years? Probably yes, and yes. 

One other thing that occurs to me is that letters from Aunty Mabel with a crisp tenner in them will become a thing of the past. Which of course goes well with the eventual aim of taking physical cash money out of circulation and using digital transactions all the way. Is this stupid too? Yes. Never an economy has grown and thrived but that it didn't have a bustling cash undercurrent to it. While the world's governments are busy trying to wring every taxable dollar out of their constituents and sparing their corporate overlords from the slightest hint of tax, they forget that cash greases the wheels...

But the days of letter writing seem out the window. 👍💥🙏😁 <- These guys are so much easier. And impersonal.

Mind you, these days unless it's written on gold leaf or some fancy paper in the blood of a sacrificed weasel, you could just as easily (I suppose) scan your letter to a PDF and then email it, so it shouldn't upset me. But dammit there are still going to be at least two people on Earth who don't have an email account or a mobile phone and what are THEY going to do, huh? Also we have LETTERBOXES outside our homes, notice they are not "PARCELBOXES"? (Not everyone has the luxury I've had of making a parcel delivery hatch in their new Not So Bastard Gate...)

Also, sometimes you need to send a signature by mail. I suppose you could always sign, scan to PDF, and then send - but the ways to defraud by such a process are too numerous to count. Talk about making it easy for forgers fraudsters and other criminal elements. I suppose one way would be to take the signed document to the Post Office, pay them to examine, authenticate, scan, and then email it to the destination Post Office where it can be printed and placed in an "Authenticated" envelope and delivered, but that really takes us back to the days of telegrams. 

Remember telegrams?STOP.They.were.awful.STOP.And.cost.a.fortune.to.send.STOP.

With this we seem to have regressed back to the days of telegrams once again.

The thing that really gets me about all this is how Australia Post made a veritable fortune during the pandemic and instead of staffing and skilling up, they cryed liek bebbehs and said they'd just stop delivering stuff until their poor overworked (and never augmented by new staff) staff caught up. Timely and sometimes time-sensitive deliveries seemed to be irrelevant to them. And now I guess irrelevance has caught up...

The.banner.above.this.article.includes.links.to.subscribe.or.donate.STOP.Please.do...

Meow meow meow

喵喵喵 = Meow meow meow

That is all.

Influencing Government 101

We'll see, eh? I just sent the following which I'll put as a quote below this paragraph:

I'm aware that fossil fuel companies bear a huge responsibility - almost all of it, actually - for the current parlous state of the planet. Their greed knows no bounds, and the people they exercise that greed upon is us - people like myself, my neighbours (who all also think as I do, btw) and yourself. 20% energy price hikes while the actual cost of generating that energy has fallen by 20% thanks to wind and solar and baseload batteries? WTAH.

I've been a life-long, rusted-on, dyed-in-the-wool Labor voter and supporter, following in the footsteps of my socialist/communist parents, and I'll continue to do so. The Labor party won't lose my vote (considering the alternatives...) so letting the fossil fuel cartel get their way won't affect my vote.

Labor does so much good that it doesn't make sense to me to vote any other way - but it never hurts to do more good, does it? More people will start to see the good being done, equals more supporters. And I'd really love to see Labor mop the floor for the next two elections at least. As a Victorian for the last 12 years, I cheered myself hoarse when Dan The Man retained the premiership. I'd like to see me able to do that for you, and Mr Albanese, and the whole Party.

I got one of those invitations to fill in an online petition - and did it. Cue an Internet cat or something. 

But as I'm always saying - Keep the bastards honest! - and if you get a chance to email / petition (the Minister (& Staff) for Energy as my email was, or any other) DO IT. I happen to actually be a rusted-on Labor supporter because it's the closest thing to my idea of Socialism. And I hope my response gets included in Minister Bowen's decision. It's more likely to achieve that if tens of thousands of people were also emailing with a similar message. 

And that's quite literally what it takes to influence the Government. People protesting on the streets don't directly influence the Government unless they're storming Parliament House or rioting, and even then this isn't usually a positive influence. But public protests should reveal an issue - they usually get a few minutes' airtime on TV and radio after all - and then that's not an end to the matter, it's the beginning. That is where YOU and I and anyone else you can motivate, start sending paper mail, letters to the editor, and emails to Ministers and MPs and Premiers and even the PM if you deem important enough.

As long as you're polite and explain your opinion and intent in a plain and respectful manner, it will usually get glanced at by a staffer, and if there are enough similar sentiments expressed then that message and a count of how many emails will get passed on along the chain. If yours is the email that expresses the concern best, or in a particularly expressive manner, it'll probably be the one that gets passed along.

So write well, and get your opinion across. But do it. I wonder if this message will be taken on board... Give me a buzz on Mastodon.

Japan As Bellwether

The last thing any country wants is a steadily rising average age and a steadily falling birthrate.

Seems like no-one's watching the herd right now. Except Japan. Think of Japan as a bellwether: The Ageing Shrinking Nation Of Japan. The world's human population is growing in some places but I'll be willing to bet long odds that the Western world's population is on a downturn and probably about to hit a very steep drop. 

Just in some of my blogs alone, What Are You Eating? and Water Is Now Unsafe Everywhere and "Modern" Diseases and COVID19 Second-biggest Killer In Australia are just a few spots where I pointed this out. But you can go back a lot further on any of those blogs and find more places where I raised similar concerns.

Thanks to the long-term effects of a bad case of "Global Lead Plastic And PFAS Poisoning" along with our insistence on eating foods made with stuff that never existed before we created it, human fertility has dropped considerably, the range and severity of illnesses we now routinely contract has increased, and the climate we're enduring is placing further stress on every form of life on the planet, including us. 

Things like our brief - but oh so catastrophic and toxic - love affairs we had with leaded petrol, the PFAS compounds in fossil-fuel-created plastics - and the plastics themselves - will poison the planet for centuries, even if we find a way to neutralise them, those poisons are now spread ALL over the globe, getting into the food chain from every direction. No-one's quite realised yet that to have a hope of reversing our procreation issues, we're going to have to get almost all of it and isolate it again. And the particles are TINY. And in their billions if not perhaps even trillions. . .

Pointing to plankton and saying that they seem to be only minimally affected is no indication that this means that the "Pb-PFAS 1-2 Punch" is insignificant. Far from it. Lead has ruined at least two Western generations directly and will continue to accumulate in animals and plants that we rely on for food, in our water. And those plankton have never had to deal with the rest of the toxin load we've given ourselves:

From my parents' generation to whatever Gen we're up to now, we're among the first humans ever to have willingly ingested carcinogens - bleaches - fats that hadn't existed before this era and share more in common with engine oil than any biological lipid.

And also around two thousand food additives, only about half of which are (and some only very slightly, at that) related to a biological food. What biological food we took, much of it was grown with glyphosate and other pest and weed control, antibiotics and growth hormones, chemical "supplements" that also never existed in the world before we began feeding it to one another.

In addition, we also willingly took tobacco and nicotinoid products, alcohols that never saw a shred of natural produce in their origins, and inhaled the fumes of cars and factories and sweating out of the plastics we use and handle in their tens thousands in our daily lives. Go on, tell me we're not screw-snookered.

Welcome
To Hell
A Hell
We Made
Welcome

Now we also have viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID19 it causes. Have you noticed no-one mentions COVID any more? While it still kills more people per day than almost every other disease? Also the return of some diseases we thought we'd all but eliminated, because along with shovelling BAD chemicals into themselves with every mouthful, people are refusing the GOOD ones that prevent us dying from preventable causes? 

Weltschmerz 

There's another cause for the decline. Whether you want to believe it or not, we all know, somewhere in our subconscious mind, that the world is wrong. This isn't a food we can thrive on. (But it's cheap... We can afford it...) But WHY can't we afford it? This is the Age Of Plenty - we're digging and extracting resources out of the planet at a hitherto unequalled and unimagined rate - surely that's creating enough wealth? 

Quiet Quitting 

QQ is just another aspect of this weltschmerz. We know we're doing things that should be improving the lives of ourselves and others - but we can plainly see that this isn't so. We're working, we're creating wealth and goods and products, but no-one seems to be benefiting from it.

Fertility Rates

I'm quite willing to bet that alongside the chemical, hormonal, and physical causes of the declining fertility rates, a lot of people have just not felt right about bringing a child into this world. I know because I'm one of those people. My wife's another. Several of our friends and acquaintances also feel that the world doesn't need another person to live in squalor and relative poverty. Or they're too focused on attaining enough wealth to be comfortably off, and children just hinder that plan. 

Not Just Japan

China's having similar birthrate and ageing population issues. Their workforce currently provides a significant portion of the world's total goods. Factories are going understaffed. And the reasons are much the same as in the last paragraph. (Also hey - we have all these scandals caused by greed, are we worth reproducing?)

It's a whole combination of things, as we just saw in that short whip-around of issues just above here. Third World countries are seeing the advance of globalisation bring more and more of these toxic issues home to them in the form of access to news, access to processed foods, and seeing their work also not lead to increased wealth.

And places like India and Pakistan either haven't gotten the memo yet either, or aren't letting on what's happening within their borders. 

Russia's doing well at reducing their entire population by making Russia a less desirable place to live and by squandering their wealth on a pointless dick-army-size exercise.  

And there you have the problem in a nutshell - we've snookered ourselves. Always we've exploited every advance for personal gain and wealth, for exercising power over others, and in the process we don't check ourselves every once in a while to see what we're actually doing. 

I told you - I did a personal QQ decades ago, no sympathy here. Unless you were wanting to help me and others make a difference in this deplorable state of affairs. 

ChatGPT

My mate ChatGPT has this to say about this blog post:

"This writing style is closest to a person who is expressing a sense of hopelessness and despair about the state of the world, particularly in regards to issues such as overconsumption, declining fertility rates, and the negative effects of globalisation. They also seem to have a strong sense of social and environmental responsibility. They express a sense of frustration and disappointment with the current state of the world, and suggest that people have become too focused on personal gain and wealth at the expense of the greater good. They also seem to express a sense of personal disengagement from the world, and a desire for change."

I just fed the whole text in and asked CGPT to tell me about the person that wrote it. Am I that obvious? 😸

---

Please Read Down Here Too.

I blog because I like to share. Things you can read about on my suite of blogs (which I'm the sole person creating, researching, writing, and publicising) range over topics like cyber-ethics (AI, sustainable energy, EVs) and 3D printing and recycling plastics and other waste streams, general tech and personal ramblings, environmental and ethical issues, rants about sustainable and eco-friendly tech and bad actors on those scenes, COVID news and opinion, even a recipe blog that has less chit-chat and more recipe..

There are a few others but they're not really my main topics. On top of that I design and make the odd machines and things to help with recycling, my vegetable garden and soon to be reinstated mini aquaponics system, and more. It's a lot to do. I can only manage it because I'm retired on a disability pension. I've included a link below to Chat with me on Mastodon (which is a Twitter alternative without the bitter after-taste) if you think you'd like to write the odd article on one or more of the blogs and help out, or if you have an idea you'd like me to investigate and follow up.

Lastly, if you'd like to help me defray the costs of domain names, server hosting, parts and materials for the show projects, you could donate the price of a cup of coffee - or even make that a monthly donation - by going to my Ko-Fi page, and you could also Paypal Direct.

Chat with me on Mastodon >>