Horse 3330 - F1's Golden Elephant Problem

As we pass even further into yet another Formula One season where Max Verstappen and his Oranje Army rolls onwards to victory again and again and again and again, even Team Principals like Christian Horner are beginning to ask whether or not the sheer complete dominance of Verstappen and his Red Bull is bad for the sport. Presumably this is because the bosses at the various Formula One teams have begun to notice that expected TV revenues are starting to wane as advertisers either can't afford or can't be bothered to throw megadollarpounds at the sport. 

It does not help that the shop remains closed to newcomers, that prospective teams like Porsche/Audi and Andretti Motorsport with the might of General Motors behind it are actively denied entry. It does not help that Liberty Media have decided that watching Formula One is actively a Veblen Good and that they want to extract more from the wallets of would be spectators and viewers on television. It does not help that Formula One has abandoned its traditional homes of motorsport and can no longer get a French or German Grand Prix to be held any more, or that Formula One's treatment of nations like Korea, China, India, or even Britain and Belgium has been shocking.

Perhaps most worrying of all is that the cars themselves while being technical miracles, with arguably the best pilots in the world at the wheel, are just not particularly exciting to watch. They all stick to the road like they are on rails and even lap records look somewhat effortless. Partly the reason for that is that they probably do require less effort to drive than cars in the past and that they are all amazingly stable.

Stability in a motor car is usually a highly desirable trait. Stability through the three axes of motion (pitch, roll, yaw), means that you have a predictable motor car. That is exactly what you are looking for if the purpose is to transport people in safety and comfort but ironically if you want a maneuverable machine, then what you want is a thing which is more dynamic through those three axes of motion. The most excellent example that I can think of to demonstrate this, is the difference between a World War I fighter plane like the Fokker Dr.1 and the Airbus A380. The Fokker is highly maneuverable in all three axes whereas the Airbus is designed to give passengers a nice smooth ride.

A Formula One car, left purely to the whims of the engineers, is designed to go as fast as possible on a lap of a circuit, repeatedly. Given that this means sticking a Formula One car to the road as hard as possible so that the most power can be translated into raw speed, then this is the outcome which every team has chosen to pursue. Modern Formula One cars are also so aero dependent that in order to provide any kind of contest at all, they have had to hand back speed boosts to cars via the Drag Reduction System and 'push to pass' buttons which use the harvested hybrid power from the MGU-K. From a fan's perspective, who wants to watch a fun contest, the fastest and best cars at their job are boring to watch. If you are an engineer, boring is beautiful.

What the fans want to see, is ironically not the fastest and most technologically advanced cars in the world any more. The technical bound box has been so refined that exciting and fast are almost mutually exclusive concepts. This is why Max Verstappen and his Red Bull is bad for the sport. Together, they are arguably the second most complete driver to have ever existed, combined with the highest and best example of a Formula One car yet devised. That is boring.

If we turn back time to when I was ten years old, we again saw an amazing driver, combined with the highest and best example of a Formula One car yet devised. The difference back then though was that the cars were physically smaller and arguably harder to drive. If we place a McLaren MP4/4 from 1988 next to a McLaren MCL36 from 2022, we can see stark differences in philosophy. To wit:

On the left is the McLaren MP4/4 of 1988. It had the following critical geometry dimensions:

Wheelbase: 111.3"

Width: 72.0"

W/W Ratio: 1.5458

On the right is the McLaren MCL36 of 2022. It had the following critical geometry dimensions:

Wheelbase: 141.7"

Width: 78.7"

W/W Ratio: 1.8005

As regular readers may remember I have theory that the absolute best ratio for Wheelbase to width is the Golden Ratio (1+√5)/2, about 1.618033. I have no way to prove if this is right but it seems intuitively correct to me.

The McLaren MP4/4 of 1988 is I think undersquare by 4.47% whereas the McLaren MCL36 of 2022 is I think oversquare by 11.27%; relative to what I think is the perfect W/W Ratio. What this means in real terms is that the MP4/4 would have been easier to turn through the yaw axis and helped by throttle induced power sliding, whereas the MCL36 as a longer car, is harder to turn through the yaw axis and likely not helped at all by throttle induced power sliding, as power being transmitted through the rear wheels acts longitudinally down the axis of yaw. Add together the various vectored forces and this is why a modern Formula One car of Verstappen's looks so very sedate compared to the wild animals that Senna had to drive.

What this means for the cars of two year's ago as opposed to three decades ago is that they have gone from being slightly stubby to being very long. I have no doubt that drivers like Aryton Senna or Alain Prost would very easily adapt to a modern car, as would Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton very easily adapt to a older car, but the fact remains that a modern Formula One car is hideously stable in a straight line; to the point where due to things like anti-stall and flappy paddle gearboxes, I could jump into one and drive it. That simply should not be. A Formula One car should be the kind of thing that drivers should be able to finesse through corners but as it stands, they're all point and click affairs. Whilst it is not quite as stark as the difference between dancing in ballet flats and dancing in Doc Martens boots, modern Formula One drivers are not asked to dance like Nureyev, nor do they have the moves like Jagger.

The elephant in the room though, is that a modern Formula One car is an elephant in the room. They are wide, they are long, they are big.

Obviously narrower cars would be better because of packaging constraints at places like Monte-Carlo. You can not make steel lined racetracks in hilariously small city-states wider. My wee ickle Mazda 2 DJ is 66.7" wide, which if the Golden Ratio is applied, produces a wheelbase of 108". Ironically this is shorter than the cars of 1988. What's more important is that it is a whole foot narrower for each and every car. When you've suddenly gained two feet of space, then that's pretty impressive.

If I was Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, I'd also remove the big rear wings on the back entirely. I'd still want something to surround the wheels as the idea of jumped wheels is awful but I think that aerodynamic enhancement while good for lap times, is bad for motor racing. The older Formula Ford ruleset which had no wings at all, made for some really furious competition and a typical Formula Ford race was usually far more exciting than any Formula One race. The F4 regulations which have mostly replaced it, are just not inspiring. In that respect, Formula E looks way way cooler.

Horse 3329 - Kakosynaisthima - Element IV - Poverty

Mostly the various elements of Kakosynaisthima have to do with materiel which are invented by the self. I have heard it said that anger for instance, is not really an emotion but a reaction to a set of circumstances. I am not sure that I agree with this as as emotions are invented by the self, they are also very much the product of choice and will. I think that it is more likely that an emotion might very well be the product to circumstances' multiplier and the will's quotient. 

However Poverty is not necessarily a product of the materiel which are invented by the self. Someone who is currently living in a state of poverty could very well have been once in possession of a large estate and then degraded and dwindled it down, but equally another person may just have been unfortunate in the lottery of life. We can no more blame someone for being born a girl, or a slave, or for being born in a colonised or occupied nation, or being born into any other particular time and space in history, any more than we can praise the son of a merchant banker who in control of the affairs of millions of dollarpounds for having being born into such circumstance. Yet those who have won the lottery of life often act as though they are entirely self-made. 

One of the unfortunate consequences of living in a society which has been awash with very tory ideas based in nothing more than raw mercantilism but masquerading in the language of efficiency for about two and a half centuries, is that many people actually absorb and then believe the messages that they are told, despite the evidence of their own eyes and the circumstances which they find themselves. There is a pervasive belief for instance that people are poor because of something that they have done. Even scratch this notion beyond the surface even just a little bit, and you soon discover that people exchange the truth for a lie all too easily if it happens to fit their own selfish narrative for their own ends; which incidentally is one of the cornerstones that economic though happens to sit upon.

Are people really always poor because of something that they have done? Can you really blame a child for being born into one family or another? Is there any example ever in history of an unborn person having a choice of being born as a child pauper or a billionaire? What of the systems which people are born into? Does classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, really mean nothing? Why is it that the rich choose to send their children to private schools, and then wrong the neck of the state to subsidise that private exclusionary choice, if not to perpetuate advantage and maintain a kind of economic apartheid between classes?

As for the notion of work itself, is that really true? How come someone working their guts out cleaning toilets might earn $70,000 per year, while a three million dollar chunk of money on deposit at 3% earns $90,000 per year? Is there really a moral argument to be made that a person renting and paying money for the privilege of living in a house works less than the person who owns that same house and collects that rent as well as accrues the benefit of that same house appreciating in capital value? 

Perhaps one of the reasons why people who control money and power need to keep society awash with the idea of meritocracy is that if the great masses of people awoke from their dream and realised what was and is happening to them, then things would change pretty quickly. This is also why people who control money and power hate the idea of democracy. Democracy, that is rule by the demos, runs counter to the whole kosmos of retaining and controlling money and power. In their eyes if the right people no not have power, then the wrong people do.

Let us abandon the notion at this point that poverty is purely caused by the person in question, because while it is certainly true that people are sometimes profligate, or self-destructive, or unwise, or wastrels, or spendthrifts, the awful unspoken truth is that for the vast majority of human history except for a brief period which the French call les trente gloriuses, the rewards due to capital thanks to compound interest, the general principle of wealth condensation, and active measures to protect wealth and money like taxation measures, poverty is mostly the result of mass collateral damage by the rich and powerful.

Even if we admit all of the above as just causes for poverty, including the sometimes unwise and destructive nature of the people in question, then surely the mere existence of poverty demands a response, no? If there is to be found any telos in poverty at all, then there are two immediate perspectives that need to be considered: namely from the standpoint of the person in that state, and the standpoint of someone who is an observer.

Firstly, from the standpoint of the person experiencing poverty, it is awful. Depending on how impoverished someone is, the list of things forgone and not bought, is run through the matrix of necessity and affordability. Very big items such as house ownership, new car ownership, the quality of holidays, et cetera, all disappear. Depending on the level of poverty, increasingly smaller luxury items are struck off. Even things such as new clothing and nice food are struck off. Maybe things such as car ownership will be struck off. 

Further down the line, the list of which bills need to be paid immediately become a priority. It is reasonable to think that things like rent, electric, water, gas, telephony are going to be progressively cut back through domestic economies, but there still is a tipping point when even those things are struck off too. 

One of the ironies about being in a period of poverty is that it is actually more expensive than it would be otherwise. Quite apart from the fact that poorer people in an effort to gain some kind of immediate happiness in spite our their reduced state tends to create a sense of hyperbolic discounting, the very fact that one does not have access to a large amount of money means that buying things in larger amounts which is more efficient, is unavailable. In a broad sense, this also very much helps to explain why people who are renting somewhere to live get trapped in renting from other people. With arguably the biggest ticket item in someone's life being perpetually struck off, it only leaves a place for the economic vampires of the world. No wonder it is fun for people who derive their income by being tory vampires, to blame poorer people for making bad choices; especially in the light that the choice was never available to be made. 

Of course as more and more things are struck off, then this infringes upon one's ability to be connected with a group of friends and peers. It is more likely that a poorer person is more likely to either have fewer friends and/or become increasingly isolated. Perhaps the biggest blow to someone's happiness and well-being is not the loss of stuff, but the loss of friends.

While there is some degree of sympathy from others, a poorer person is more likely to cut themselves off from others. We can merely observe someone else's pain and suffering but to live through it, also imposes a degree of almost responsibility to not share it. There is sort of an implied or imagines perception that whatever malaise someone is suffering from, is at least part way contagious. Probably a great deal of the reason why people who control money and power want to make sure that their children do not associate with poorer children, and deliberately design systems such that private advantage is maintained by to sending their children to private schools, is that the real or imagined fear is that their children might accidentally catch poverty as though it were contagious. While that imagined state of catching poverty is almost certainly not real, the idea that if you can dream it you can be it, is still very very powerful.

In the immediate kosmos, someone who either through deliberate choice or because of active shunning is cut off from other people, has a very real need for validation and community also cut off. Poverty has a nasty way of firstly depriving one of the things that make life nice, then tolerable, then necessary, and as it first steals away one's standing, it then takes away one's pride, one's self worth, and perhaps drains away someone's soul. To go through that and experience that, is awful.

However, there are those people who through reasons of self-discipline, of spiritualism, of asceticism et cetera, who take on poverty as a thing to be cultivated. This is a way in part an attempt to tame and train the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, by deliberately depriving it of the "yummy, yummy, yummy". If there is a telos to this, it is to teach that one can be content despite the circumstance, though beyond that I am not entirely sure what kind of special revelation is necessarily transferrable to anyone else. Certainly various monks and nuns and other kinds of positions in various religious orders have all arrived at similar conclusions as to what poverty can teach and what its telos means. Perhaps it is really only when the "yummy, yummy, yummy" has been removed that people are forced to face and decide what actually is important.

Secondly, from the standpoint of someone who is an observer of the person experiencing poverty, it is possibly sad. 'Possibly' is the opposite word because watching someone else suffer, might not actually illicit any kind of response at all from the observer. There may be sadness and sympathy and/or empathy which forces to the observer to act, or there may be apathy which forces to the observer to do nothing and maybe invisibalise the the person experiencing poverty, or there may be antipathy which forces to the observer to act with contempt and revulsion.

There is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain; likewise the reaction prompted by observing someone else going through pleasure and pain is also asymmetrical.  The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, which wants to bring closer the "yummy, yummy, yummy" and push away that which is "not yummy", when encountering the person experiencing poverty, has either met with a circumstance demanding an exercise of humanity or met with a circumstance which internally demands a defensive position against the circumstance. 

It is really easy to sympathise with someone who is pleasant and going through something pleasurable because we hope that the "yummy, yummy, yummy" brushes off on us. It is harder to sympathise with someone who is not pleasant and going through something painful because we do not want that which is defective and broken infecting us. Observing someone else experiencing poverty, quite apart from the circumstances which caused that state, including those circumstances which are in no way under the control of the person in question, is in face cause for people inventing defensive strategies and coping mechanisms to keep poverty away; which itself are causes for further kakosynaisthima in that person.

A response of sympathy from someone who observes someone else going through poverty, first assumes that that observer takes at very least, the assumption that  the person suffering is in fact a person. A reaction of apathy mostly implies that the other person has lesser or zero value. A reaction of antipathy, which occasions contempt and revulsion, is evidence that the observer considers that the other person has value of less than zero. Those assumptions that another person has value of less than zero, are often caused by conditioning and continuation of classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, et cetera. The practice of antipathy actively solidifies that assumption and then puts action behind it.

As for the question of the observer who watches someone else going through poverty, you would hope that they at least make some kind of effort to alleviate or improve the situation. The actual solution to poverty is a systemic one; via larger persons corporate in community and commonwealth. Of course the biggest person corporate is that of the state; which is why the best person to actually change the systems which create poverty in the first place is the state. While there is a case to be made for charitable organisations, the truth remains that even the biggest of charitable organisations is still only really a private corporate person who is working against other private corporate persons who also act according to the same rules as individuals, but magnified. Corporations very much either act with apathy towards poverty, or active antipathy if there is profit to be made in creating a sense of contempt and revulsion in the general public. One only needs to see the terms used like "dole bludgers", or how the word "welfare" is demonised, by profit-driven corporate persons; when the word "welfare" in every given sense is to do with the well-being and care of people.

If there is anything to be gained by questioning whether or not there is any telos at all to poverty, then as the person going through it a sense of gratitude for what one does have, and perhaps even a sense of jealousy if it results in self-improvement might very well be in order. As someone who observes someone else going through poverty, then I would hope that their sense of empathy at least compels them to either change the system as best as they can to try and make it fairer, or to be generous with what they have.

Horse 3328 - Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys?

Sometimes when I write these pieces, I feel like the evening DJ for Banana Radio 4BA 1080am, playing classic hits and memories and the songs you love. This week on our radio rewind, we wind the clock back to 2016 , were we play non-stop Number Twos from DJ Trump. This week on DJ Trump's "Make America Great Again Again Again Again" tour, not only did he return to a classic steam of conscious schnibbity-nibbity-schnick-knuck-neigh nonsense, but he also returned to trying to break people's brains through unreality. 

The one thing that can be said that is true about Mr Trump is that he does speak his mind, no matter how undetached from reality, history, or facts, that it is. This week we got what you might call, a 'doozie':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq4xSuiueUc

Where our Union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg. Gettysburg what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable... I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious, and horrible - and so beautiful in so many different ways. It it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow!

I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to look, and to watch, and, uh... the statement of Robert Lee - who's no longer in favour - did you ever notice that? No longer in favour? “Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.”

They were fighting uphill. He said: “Wow, that was a big mistake”. He lost his great General and, uh, they were fighting. “Never fight uphill, me boys” but it was too late.

- Donald J Trump, 15th Apr 2024

As far as I have been able to determine, the Battle of Gettysburg which was fought in July of 1863, was the single bloodiest battle which the United States has ever fought in. If we assume that the soldiers of the Confederate States of America were in fact still Americans as Texas v. White (1869 - SCOTUS) ruled, then between the 43500 reported souls that were lost (23,049 Union, 20,451 Confed) and the 12,709 additional souls that went missing, then the number of bodies that were chewed through by gunshot and sword was between 14,000 and 18,000 per day.

But then again, as an Australian who lives on the other side of the world, what the heck do I know? I can assume that I know more about this than Mr Trump does. I am not even sure that Mr Trump knows that the Battle of Gettysburg was a Union victory and arguably a major turning point in the Civil War. I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump does not care that Pennsylvania was invaded by the Confederate army in late June 1863, that thousands of black people were forced to flee, and that those that were unable to flee were captured and then sent back south to be returned to slavery (or made slaves for the first time if they were free). I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump's audience does not care about any of this either. Furthermore I am reasonably sure that Mr Trump's audience does not care about anything that Mr Trump is actually saying, much less bothering to listen to him while he speaks. I have no idea who this guy is but fair play to him. He is acting the clown in what is already a circus.

What I find truly strange about this is why Trump would want to invoke his imagined words of General Robert E Lee, immediately after having said that the "Union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg". Its not very often that you want to glorify the words of the loser; who in this case literally fought a war and this battle against the country that you want to be President of (again). 

History generally reports the Battle of Gettysburg was a battle that General Robert E Lee lost, rather than one which Major General George Meade, Commander of the Army of the Potomac, won. Lee who had his headquarters in a house to the north west of Gettysburg, would have had a view over relatively flattish fields; which means that he should have been able to see all of Union positions fairly easy. Even just a cursory glance over the general area with Google maps gives you the impression that this was Lee’s battle to lose.

If nothing else, Lee should have taken basic instruction from the military treatise on how to conduct war, from ancient Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu:

CHAPTER 10. TERRAIN

2 - Ground which can be freely traversed by both sides is called ACCESSIBLE.

3 - With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. 

4 - Then you will be able to fight with advantage.

- The Art of War, Sun Tzu, c.500 BC

There's so many things wrong with Mr Trump's imagined fantasy of the Battle of Gettysburg that it is almost like trying to play Pass The Parcel by unwrapping all of the layers to discover that there's nothing actually at the centre.

“Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.”

1 - I can not find any citation for this quote before 3 days ago, much less in any account from 1863.

2 - You can't actually "fight uphill" on flat terrain.

3 - At any rate, Trump's quite idiotic depiction of Lee is one of a great General, who was betrayed by his troops. This is actually a far cry from the actual military engineer who took responsibility for the campaign and battle.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Robert_E_Lee/FREREL/3/8*.html

Pickett was too nearly frantic with grief to remark Lee's language.

"General Lee, I have no division now, Armistead is down, Garnett is down, and Kemper is mortally wounded."

"Come, General Pickett," said Lee, "this has been my fight and upon my shoulders rests the blame. The men and officers of your command have written the name of Virginia as high today as it has ever been written before."

Some of the survivors crowded around the riders then, and Lee repeated, "Your men have done all that men could do; the fault is entirely my own."

- Chapter VIII, R. E. Lee: A Biography, Douglas Southall Freeman (1934)

4 - Fighting uphill could and did work; including in the context of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant who would eventually lead the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War, was in command in the field at the Battle of Chattanooga in November of 1863; when he ordered Union troops to charge uphill at Missionary Ridge, supported by rifle fire shooting upwards as cover.

As for why Mr Trump is trying to play this kind of game by aligning himself with a kind of forgotten dream that literally nobody can remember, it makes reasonable political sense. These were the kinds of tactics and rhetoric that gave him the Presidency in 2016 and I guess that he thinks that he can claim underdog status somehow. It doesn't need to make any logical sense, because clearly the people who vote for him, if this kind of rhetoric is anything to go by, honestly do not care.

And therein lies a crux as to why this is so very strange: "the statement of Robert Lee - who's no longer in favour - did you ever notice that? No longer in favour?"

There is a good reason why he's "longer in favour"; namely that General Robert E Lee was a loser, that the Confederate States of America lost, nor that the Confederate States of America were an entity for less time than Bluey has been a TV series. Yes, I am making that comparison: Bluey is more successful and has lasted longer than the Confederate States of America. Does Mr Trump want to paint himself as some kind of "hero" like Robert E Lee? Maybe.

Horse 3327 - Caltrain's Sweet Sweet KISS

https://www.caltrain.com/news/caltrain-pilot-first-nation-bi-level-dual-electric-and-battery-powered-train-expand-zero

Today, the California Transportation Commission approved the allocation of funds from an $80 million award from the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) for one battery-equipped electric multiple unit train (BEMU) and the associated R&D so that Caltrain will be operable with zero-emission trains on both electrified service area of the corridor as well as the portion of the corridor from Tamien Station in San Jose to Gilroy that does not yet have overhead electrified lines. 

- California Transportation Commission, 17th Aug 2023 

For reasons that make no sense to me, the California Transportation Commission (Caltrain) only last year in 2023, decided that it was going to roll out battery equipped electric trains. This was heralded in various news outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronical to great aplomb as this "First-in-the-Nation" double decker electric train was zero emission at the train itself and would be the beginning of the transition to a fully electrified service.

Why I find this so mind-bendingly crazy is that in London, companies like the City & South London Railway, and Underground Electric Railways Ltd., had begun to install electric railways in London in 1890:

"By eighteen-ninety, we'd enough,

Of smoky trains that went puff-puff,

And so we have perfection found,

The bright electric Underground."

Admittedly England was relatively slow on the uptake of electrifying its regional lines but other nations such as France, Germany, Japan, and even places like China have gone full steam ahead into the future at two hundred miles an hour. In Sydney and NSW, we have had electric Suburban and Regional services now, beginning in about 1923. It seems to me that the United States, which is a hyper-capitalist paradise, should have embraced electric trains everywhere as a way of reducing input costs for moving freight around and that smaller passenger services like Amtrak and Caltrain, should have already got on board with electric trains. 

Instead, American railways while being hyper-capitalist, are so cost averse to building new infrastructure, that the lines that most railways run on, are for the most part legacy pieces from at least 90 to 150 years ago. Caltrain in shining the light with its bona-fide electrified Bi-Level Dual Battery and Electric trains, is having to make its own tracks in creating and upgrading new infrastructure, charging facilities, and related maintenance yards. About the only thing that it does not need to do, is invent the BEMUs themselves because it can and has bought off the shelf equipment.

Again, I do not understand why Caltrain has gone for Stadler's KISS trains, when it could have gone for smaller pieces from Siemens, or CRRC. Those Stadler KISS BEMUs are chunky chunky hefty bois, being as much as 15'7" tall; which is insanity when you consider that the A-Set, B-Set, D-Set et cetera trains in Sydney, which are also bi-level EMUs, are only 14'9" all. That 8 inches might not sound like a lot but when you have to bore every tunnel for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and dirt is excavated to the third power of measurement, and load capacity which is needed to carry bigger trains is imposed to the fourth power of measurement per wheel (because this is a squared power times a squared power), then this is a lot more investment needed.

I know very well that the Comeng/Downer EDI/CRRC trains in Sydney, would have worked exceptionally well in California because they already work exceptionally well in Sydney and NSW, where they are already made to climb into mountains and run for hundreds of kilometers. We also already know that they work excellently in regional and commuter applications because that's the job that they already fulfil.

Nevertheless, the Stadler KISS BEMUs which Caltrain have taken delivery of, look pretty neat. There is a different kind of packaging decision which has been taken with regards the placement of stairs and vestibule areas; which seems to be a result of California having very low platforms and needing to have roll-on/roll-off abilities to be able to cater for people with mobility needs. This means that the doors look like they are in the wrong spot by my way of thinking but quite frankly I can take a flying leap off of a short platform. I do not know how tall pantograph heights are relative to the train but I am sure that all of this will have been worked out too.

My grand hope for the United States is that these KISS trains are a roaring success. America as once the leader in futurism has since about the time of Reagan, decided that it wants to be anti-modern. The nation that was once able to put men on the moon, has been scrobbling around in the rust of its future's past, now the actual past. Great names such as the Burlington, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, have all been faced up to computer driven commodity hell as trucks and air travel have eaten their lunch. Airlines also tended to drive trains off the tracks and buses into second class jokes. These KISS trains look really really neat though. I don't know how nice they're going to look in 2060 but that's the kind of age that the first of the Tangaras in Sydney are now, and they still look really really neat.

For reasons that make less than no sense to me, the Californian Government aided and abetted by the US Federal Government, thinks that cars are actually a better idea and devote all manner of space to the worship of the car in the United States. Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Diego is the most trafficked road in the world but even then at best, it can only manage 2400 cars per lane per hour. This means to say that for most of the Interstate highways across Los Angeles, even though they know about trains, they refuse to use them. This is madness.

I live in Sydney which is an ocean away both physically and culturally. The space taken up by a four lane railway line, is generally narrower than the space required to build a four lane Interstate. During peak hour from where I live out in the bogan Western Suburbs, we have a four minute service from Blacktown to the City. This is because Blacktown as an interchange station has connecting services from both the Western Line, the Richmond Line, and the Blue Mountains Line. A four minute service, with seating space only is about 800 people per train; which equates to 12,000 people per hour. To get that kind of capacity in cars on the Interstate, every single car would need to have six people per car and the truth is that the majority of then only have one person per car.

As a city comparable in size to Sydney, and now having seen the tech of bi-level electric trains (which we have had in Sydney since the 1960s) in California, maybe they might be ready to take a step into the 1970s? I think it insane that if Sydney's train network were in the United States, it would be second only behind the New York Subway in size; despite and inspite of the United States having many megaopolises bigger than Sydney. I find it more insane that the internal shuttle train network in Walt Disney World in Florida is on the top ten of the biggest mass transport networks in America. The fact that public transport is so anaemic in the United States that that is a thing, is monumentally stupid.

Caltrain's new Stadler KISS BEMUs could be modified to just be purely EMUs, or even just adopt anything by Downer EDI, or CRRC, or Siemens, and run in tunnels under the Interstate if the thought of ripping them up is traumatic. Granted that the initial investment would be big but you'd only have to do that once. As it is, the Eisenhower Interstate System of Defense Highways was already the largest piece of socialist infrastructure in the history of the world and as much as American's love to yell "I don't want socialism", that's how their dinner gets to them. 

It should therefore be more or less a fait accompli to just demolish four lanes of traffic from every Interstate in Los Angeles (5, 10, 15, 405, 110 et cetera) and install railway lines everywhere. Quite apart from the fact that it is magnitudes more efficient to move people together via trains, the argument can be made purely due to the fact that tail-pipe emmissions from the Interstate system in Los Angeles causes a smog so bad so often that you can cut cubes out of it with a bread knife. Caltrain already has the solution to improving air quality in California and quite apart from what you feel about climate change (it's real - it's a hoax: I don't care, have a sook), ask any Angelo whether they actually like sitting in traffic on The 5 and they'll probably look at you with the same kind of incredulity that I look at the idiocy of people sitting on The 5 going nowhere fast.

Horse 3326 - Public Housing Is A Cognitohazard To NIMBYs

In David Langford’s 1988 short story called “BLIT” (Berryman Logical Image Technique), there are a series of images called ‘Basilisks’ which are named after the legendary serpent king who could kill with a single blow. The Basilisks in BLIT are images which exploit programming flaws in the structure of the human mind; which cause people’s brains to crash. A human without a working brain, has a life expectancy of about 30 minutes maximum.

I mention Langford’s Basilisk because the idea of cognitohazards seems to be the main reason why NIMBYs are so risk averse to wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy put forward by State and Federal Governments. Housing policy, if you are a NIMBY, appears to be something of an idea hazard; which implemented can harm others if fulfilled, or can cause danger to the person who knows the idea.

In Australia, the provision of public housing is the responsibility of State Governments. Federal Governments have had some degree of say when it came to social and affordable housing but really that only extended as far as the provision of defence housing, of war widows’ housing, and of housing for people on unemployment and sickness benefits. The vast bulk of responsibility for social and affordable housing in Australia, has always been the under the purview of the States.

Here's the fun thing: The States can just build public housing. That’s it. The States in every State (and Territory) in the nation, can just do whatever they want to with regards public housing.

I find arguments that the States can’t build public housing because it is going to somehow upend the so-called ‘heritage’ on an area, complete and utter chiroptera guano. Not only am I unconvinced by arguments of so-called ‘heritage’ on an area but when it comes to actually challenging so-called ‘heritage’, it instantly collapses when a sufficiently large amount of money is waved around.

To wit: I work in the Insanic Republic of Mosman. Near where I work used to be six Federation era houses; all of which were built between 1895 and 1914. A firm called  Helm Properties, found it exceptionally easy to wave around enough money so that all of the former residents left, and now 20 apartments with 35 car park spaces will be built. At a total cost of $26m, the 20 apartments were sold at an average price of $7m a piece from what I can determine. All this means to say is if even in Mosman, where the average resident may as well be a person in God’s Waiting Room (for the First Class Special Flight of course), so-called ‘heritage’ listing when push comes to cheque-book, is a lie.

Also to wit: When it came to projects like the M8 or the Second Harbour Tunnel, or the Sydney Metro Project in New South Wales, the NSW State Government had no problem throwing buckets of money at the. So-called ‘heritage’ listing was no problem there either.

While I don’t think that merely opening up development zoning open slather is a good thing, because we all know that will be developers who build shonky buildings cutting corners, and risking lives; with as much density as the regulations will allow to take advantage of people like students and poorer people; which will fall over exactly eleven minutes after the tax advantages are over, the planning system for building places for people to live in, is just awful. The truth is that we will need some kind of private development to provide the housing stock that our cities desperately need, due to four decades of rampant neglect. 

The opening premise of Adam Smith’s 1759 work “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is that people are rationally selfish. I personally have doubts about the rationality of people but in relation to social and public housing, that selfishness gets turned all the way up to 11. Even if building public housing for the common good is excellent, people are in fact entitled to protect the value of their single biggest asset, which is their home, and they can and will do so; loudly. They can and will let their elected representatives know what they want; including blocking even modest attempts to introduce any kind of gentle density in the form of townhouses and sideways terraces. It seems that the only way that you really get proper housing stock build is either by reclaiming brownfield sites or cutting into greenfield sites.

At the same time part of the housing debate is very much racially motivated by xenophobic people who see that the world has changed in ways that they do not like, has introduced faces that they do not like; and so, there is a secondary argument that housing problems can be solved by cutting immigration.

I might very well be a loonie but it seems to me that the best place for new homes to be built is actually over the top of existing railway lines; which currently are just open air space waiting to be used. It matters not a jot if an electric train passes underneath someone’s house in terms of air quality because the fumes from electric trains are produced far away at the power station. London went electric as early as it could from the 1890s, with both the City and South London Railway and Underground Electric Railways Company of London exploiting the fact that they could build housing near or on top of railway lines.

The reason is obvious. If you put housing near existing transport infrastructure, then this allows people to get to where they work, shop, go to school, et cetera; while also killing urban sprawl, and car dependency. Say what you like about a climate crisis, even you have to concede that addressing a housing but actively improving people’s quality of life is a no brainer. 

But mention any of this on any social media platform and people will try and string you up like you are SARS Cov-19, the plague, a murderer and a common criminal. Maybe it is true that just building more homes on its own is not going to tackle the housing crisis and that the housing crisis needs to be addressed by making homes that are built more affordable. However, NIMBYs are so against wanting anything that remotely looks like any kind of housing policy that the idea of building any more houses at all is a cognitohazard that they fear will break their minds.

Horse 3325 - The Greatest Comeback In All Of Sport

As far as I am concerned, too much sport is never enough. Things like politics and business are better off viewed through the lens of sport, and military conflicts would be better for all concerned if armies abandoned killing each other and the spectators, and instead fought a contest on the sporting field. Contrary to the quite frankly ridiculous assertion that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, this would have been better for all concerned if they had kept the fight on the sporting fields of Eton and someone instead had put a bullet in Napoleon and Wellington. "They wrapped themselves in the glory" says the statue. Yeah right, I am not convinced. "They wrapped themselves in the glory... that other people fought for" more like. 53,000 dads never came home.  They'd have all been better off if they'd gone to the footy... including Napoleon and Wellington.

Too much sport is clearly the more glorious option. The glint of silverware, after people wait and wonder until their team scores and then scream at the sky above, is brighter and bigger and better than so-called grown-up things like love and war. Victory whose daughters are Honour and Glory, is obviously better War whose sons are Fear, Terror, Chaos, and Confusion. 

As the title suggests, this is what I think that the greatest comeback in all of sport was. Comebacks are better than lay down triumphs for the simple reason that sport is a contest and when there is no contest... there is no contest. As much as everyone loves and is soon tired of seeing a maestro at work, the idea that a clear an obvious champion should beat down on everyone gets pretty old pretty quickly. Max Verstappen could very well be the greatest Formula One driver of all time, but my favourite Formula One Grand Prix of all time was when Jean Alesi won in Canada in 1995. This was a victory which proved to be his only Grand Prix win, which might have made it all the more special, but the manner in which the mercurial Frenchman who looked like he was going nowhere in the race managed to hold on while everyone else fell away was a joy to watch.

Arguably the best stories in sporting contests are when someone comes back after being way behind. I personally think that the 2005 European Champions League Final between Liverpool and AC Milan was amazing but at the time it was heartbreaking to watch. Liverpool were 3-nil down at half time, came back to 3-3 at full time, held on for extra time and then managed to win on penalties which was unheard of for an English team to do.

When Australia II beat Liberty to win the 1983 America's Cup, after being 3-nil down a series of match races they then won the next four of seven to win 4-3. What makes that all the more remarkable is that the New York Yacht Club had held what was originally known as the 100 Guineas Cup since 1851 which meant that they had held it for 132 years and nobody had pushed them to a tie-break race.

Very likely the biggest statistical comeback is something like that, where the team that comes back has scored no points and then wins enough to win the match. However I think that that greatest comeback in all of sport actually happened in an Australian Rules football match because the statistical outlay of being so far behind, is far more unlikely. 3-nil down to 3-4 up happens uncommonly but still often enough to provide reasonable data on. The Australian Rules football match which I think had the greatest comeback in all of sport, had a margin which has only been overcome twice at professional level since 1859. 

In 1999, on a cold day in Melbourne in June, my team Hawthorn played St Kilda at Waverley Park, in a match which would ultimately prove nothing as neither team made the playoffs. Waverley Park, aka VFL Park, was a very big football ground which was built by Kerry Packer so that he could have a place to put on and show his new World Series Cricket without having to annoy the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the Victorian and Australian Cricket Associations (or pay them). The ground was so massive that cricket was played with ropes well inside the ground, and even Australian Rules football which uses a cricket field as its field of play, moved the boundary lines well inside the fences. 

St Kilda in 1999 were a disappointingly average side who should have done much better. They certainly had the thug power in both Big Bad Mad Bad Barry Hall and Spida Everett to if not win footy games, then to win fistfights. After climbing as high 3rd they dribbled down the ladder and would not be playing in the finals that season. Facing up against them in that match was a Hawthorn which that season was mildly awful. In any given week that season, the question was not if Hawthorn would win or lose but by how much they would lose? There was no hope at all of finals footy for Hawthorn and the season vacillated between terrible and dire.

This match started badly for Hawthorn and proceeded to get worse. Hawthorn scored an initial behind but the score very quickly blew out to Hawthorn 0.1.1 to St.Kilda 6.3.39. When Hawthorn did finally score an opening goal, they very quickly remembered that they were an awful team and upon a passage of play which saw a forward completely spew the ball into the terraces while inside St Kilda's goal square, play moved back up the field and never seemed to return for a long time.

Remember how I said that Waverley Park was massively massive? For most of the first quarter, we spent a lot of our time running all over the empty wooden terraces fishing out balls that had been used score goals and returning them to the goal umpire. For most of the second quarter, we spent a lot of our time standing by the fence trying to see very small brown and yellow clad players fail in their ineptitude to even get the ball away from equally small black, white and red players up the other end of the field; which may as well have been in another suburb and practically was. 

Late in the first quarter, this was looking like a humiliation: "7 plays 57, well I suppose the game's already over..." said the commentary and if a 50 point deficit looks bad, it got worse. Part way through the second quarter, the slaughter was so terrible that St.Kilda were on 11.4.70 while Hawthorn had still not even made it within the 50 metre ring at our end of the field; much less moved the numbers on the aging 'digital' scoreboard made up of thousands of sometimes broken light bulbs, from 1.1.7.

For everyone in the world who is in that general kind of region which we call "Not Australia", which means that you are devoid of the most insane game ever devised by mankind that somehow became both professional and raised up quasi-semi-hemi-demigods (Praise Dipper!), a three goal lead in an Australian Rules football match is generally a decent enough buffer that a team can afford to relax a bit and still waltz away with the win and four points. However, in this match, St.Kilda had their boot standing so heavily on the head of Hawthorn that the widest margin that this match blew out to was 10 goals, 3 behinds. 10.3.63 is itself a score which might have been expected on a cold and increasingly nasty night in Victoria. As temperatures plunged into single digits, so did the hopes of Hawthorn fans.

In the second half weak sunshine shone on the ground and with it, the weak rays of hope floodlit the match. Somehow, in a defiance of logic and common sense, Hawthorn would turn around a 63 point deficit and by the end of the match had scored 12 unanswered goals. When the siren blared out its final whinge of contempt for the weather, for the evening and for even the existence of Waverley Park itself, at the end of the 4th Quarter the score was: St Kilda 14.12.96 - Hawthorn 17.7.109.

How?

To this day I have no idea how you turn around a ten goal deficit. Where do you dig down inside yourself to find the mental strength? To this day I do not understand what could have motivated the Hawthorn team to rise up in a match which in the grand scheme of the season meant absolutely nothing of value at all, since neither St.Kilda nor Hawthorn had any hope of playing finals footy that year. In the quarter century which has followed, there has been exactly one Australian Rules Football Match in which a bigger deficit has been turned around but the context of that match was that both sides were playing with the incentive of winning a better place on the ladder and hopefully picking up a bye in the finals series. How do you as a coach convince 22 tired men to step up to the occasion, when there is no occasion to step up to? There would be no big dance in September.

This is why in my not very well paid opinion, this is the greatest comeback in all of sport. To come back to win a trophy is one thing but to come back to win a normal regular league match where there was no incentive, no carrot, no piece of pie, no hope of finals footy, nothing, is quite another. I don't even remember who won the flag in 1999. What I do remember is this match; which still shines brighter than silverware.

Horse 3324 - Kakosynaisthima - Element IV - Poverty

 Mostly the various elements of Kakosynaisthima have to do with materiel which are invented by the self. I have heard it said that anger for instance, is not really an emotion but a reaction to a set of circumstances. I am not sure that I agree with this as as emotions are invented by the self, they are also very much the product of choice and will. I think that it is more likely that an emotion might very well be the product to circumstances' multiplier and the will's quotient. 

However Poverty is not necessarily a product of the materiel which are invented by the self. Someone who is currently living in a state of poverty could very well have been once in possession of a large estate and then degraded and dwindled it down, but equally another person may just have been unfortunate in the lottery of life. We can no more blame someone for being born a girl, or a slave, or for being born in a colonised or occupied nation, or being born into any other particular time and space in history, any more than we can praise the son of a merchant banker who in control of the affairs of millions of dollarpounds for having being born into such circumstance. Yet those who have won the lottery of life often act as though they are entirely self-made. 

One of the unfortunate consequences of living in a society which has been awash with very tory ideas based in nothing more than raw mercantilism but masquerading in the language of efficiency for about two and a half centuries, is that many people actually absorb and then believe the messages that they are told, despite the evidence of their own eyes and the circumstances which they find themselves. There is a pervasive belief for instance that people are poor because of something that they have done. Even scratch this notion beyond the surface even just a little bit, and you soon discover that people exchange the truth for a lie all too easily if it happens to fit their own selfish narrative for their own ends; which incidentally is one of the cornerstones that economic though happens to sit upon.

Are people really always poor because of something that they have done? Can you really blame a child for being born into one family or another? Is there any example ever in history of an unborn person having a choice of being born as a child pauper or a billionaire? What of the systems which people are born into? Does classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, really mean nothing? Why is it that the rich choose to send their children to private schools, and then wrong the neck of the state to subsidise that private exclusionary choice, if not to perpetuate advantage and maintain a kind of economic apartheid between classes?

As for the notion of work itself, is that really true? How come someone working their guts out cleaning toilets might earn $70,000 per year, while a three million dollar chunk of money on deposit at 3% earns $90,000 per year? Is there really a moral argument to be made that a person renting and paying money for the privilege of living in a house works less than the person who owns that same house and collects that rent as well as accrues the benefit of that same house appreciating in capital value? 

Perhaps one of the reasons why people who control money and power need to keep society awash with the idea of meritocracy is that if the great masses of people awoke from their dream and realised what was and is happening to them, then things would change pretty quickly. This is also why people who control money and power hate the idea of democracy. Democracy, that is rule by the demos, runs counter to the whole kosmos of retaining and controlling money and power. In their eyes if the right people no not have power, then the wrong people do.

Let us abandon the notion at this point that poverty is purely caused by the person in question, because while it is certainly true that people are sometimes profligate, or self-destructive, or unwise, or wastrels, or spendthrifts, the awful unspoken truth is that for the vast majority of human history except for a brief period which the French call les trente gloriuses, the rewards due to capital thanks to compound interest, the general principle of wealth condensation, and active measures to protect wealth and money like taxation measures, poverty is mostly the result of mass collateral damage by the rich and powerful.

Even if we admit all of the above as just causes for poverty, including the sometimes unwise and destructive nature of the people in question, then surely the mere existence of poverty demands a response, no? If there is to be found any telos in poverty at all, then there are two immediate perspectives that need to be considered: namely from the standpoint of the person in that state, and the standpoint of someone who is an observer.

Firstly, from the standpoint of the person experiencing poverty, it is awful. Depending on how impoverished someone is, the list of things forgone and not bought, is run through the matrix of necessity and affordability. Very big items such as house ownership, new car ownership, the quality of holidays, et cetera, all disappear. Depending on the level of poverty, increasingly smaller luxury items are struck off. Even things such as new clothing and nice food are struck off. Maybe things such as car ownership will be struck off. 

Further down the line, the list of which bills need to be paid immediately become a priority. It is reasonable to think that things like rent, electric, water, gas, telephony are going to be progressively cut back through domestic economies, but there still is a tipping point when even those things are struck off too. 

One of the ironies about being in a period of poverty is that it is actually more expensive than it would be otherwise. Quite apart from the fact that poorer people in an effort to gain some kind of immediate happiness in spite our their reduced state tends to create a sense of hyperbolic discounting, the very fact that one does not have access to a large amount of money means that buying things in larger amounts which is more efficient, is unavailable. In a broad sense, this also very much helps to explain why people who are renting somewhere to live get trapped in renting from other people. With arguably the biggest ticket item in someone's life being perpetually struck off, it only leaves a place for the economic vampires of the world. No wonder it is fun for people who derive their income by being tory vampires, to blame poorer people for making bad choices; especially in the light that the choice was never available to be made. 

Of course as more and more things are struck off, then this infringes upon one's ability to be connected with a group of friends and peers. It is more likely that a poorer person is more likely to either have fewer friends and/or become increasingly isolated. Perhaps the biggest blow to someone's happiness and well-being is not the loss of stuff, but the loss of friends.

While there is some degree of sympathy from others, a poorer person is more likely to cut themselves off from others. We can merely observe someone else's pain and suffering but to live through it, also imposes a degree of almost responsibility to not share it. There is sort of an implied or imagines perception that whatever malaise someone is suffering from, is at least part way contagious. Probably a great deal of the reason why people who control money and power want to make sure that their children do not associate with poorer children, and deliberately design systems such that private advantage is maintained by to sending their children to private schools, is that the real or imagined fear is that their children might accidentally catch poverty as though it were contagious. While that imagined state of catching poverty is almost certainly not real, the idea that if you can dream it you can be it, is still very very powerful.

In the immediate kosmos, someone who either through deliberate choice or because of active shunning is cut off from other people, has a very real need for validation and community also cut off. Poverty has a nasty way of firstly depriving one of the things that make life nice, then tolerable, then necessary, and as it first steals away one's standing, it then takes away one's pride, one's self worth, and perhaps drains away someone's soul. To go through that and experience that, is awful.

However, there are those people who through reasons of self-discipline, of spiritualism, of asceticism et cetera, who take on poverty as a thing to be cultivated. This is a way in part an attempt to tame and train the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, by deliberately depriving it of the "yummy, yummy, yummy". If there is a telos to this, it is to teach that one can be content despite the circumstance, though beyond that I am not entirely sure what kind of special revelation is necessarily transferrable to anyone else. Certainly various monks and nuns and other kinds of positions in various religious orders have all arrived at similar conclusions as to what poverty can teach and what its telos means. Perhaps it is really only when the "yummy, yummy, yummy" has been removed that people are forced to face and decide what actually is important.

Secondly, from the standpoint of someone who is an observer of the person experiencing poverty, it is possibly sad. 'Possibly' is the opposite word because watching someone else suffer, might not actually illicit any kind of response at all from the observer. There may be sadness and sympathy and/or empathy which forces to the observer to act, or there may be apathy which forces to the observer to do nothing and maybe invisibalise the the person experiencing poverty, or there may be antipathy which forces to the observer to act with contempt and revulsion.

There is an asymmetry between pleasure and pain; likewise the reaction prompted by observing someone else going through pleasure and pain is also asymmetrical.  The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, which wants to bring closer the "yummy, yummy, yummy" and push away that which is "not yummy", when encountering the person experiencing poverty, has either met with a circumstance demanding an exercise of humanity or met with a circumstance which internally demands a defensive position against the circumstance. 

It is really easy to sympathise with someone who is pleasant and going through something pleasurable because we hope that the "yummy, yummy, yummy" brushes off on us. It is harder to sympathise with someone who is not pleasant and going through something painful because we do not want that which is defective and broken infecting us. Observing someone else experiencing poverty, quite apart from the circumstances which caused that state, including those circumstances which are in no way under the control of the person in question, is in face cause for people inventing defensive strategies and coping mechanisms to keep poverty away; which itself are causes for further kakosynaisthima in that person.

A response of sympathy from someone who observes someone else going through poverty, first assumes that that observer takes at very least, the assumption that  the person suffering is in fact a person. A reaction of apathy mostly implies that the other person has lesser or zero value. A reaction of antipathy, which occasions contempt and revulsion, is evidence that the observer considers that the other person has value of less than zero. Those assumptions that another person has value of less than zero, are often caused by conditioning and continuation of classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, et cetera. The practice of antipathy actively solidifies that assumption and then puts action behind it.

As for the question of the observer who watches someone else going through poverty, you would hope that they at least make some kind of effort to alleviate or improve the situation. The actual solution to poverty is a systemic one; via larger persons corporate in community and commonwealth. Of course the biggest person corporate is that of the state; which is why the best person to actually change the systems which create poverty in the first place is the state. While there is a case to be made for charitable organisations, the truth remains that even the biggest of charitable organisations is still only really a private corporate person who is working against other private corporate persons who also act according to the same rules as individuals, but magnified. Corporations very much either act with apathy towards poverty, or active antipathy if there is profit to be made in creating a sense of contempt and revulsion in the general public. One only needs to see the terms used like "dole bludgers", or how the word "welfare" is demonised, by profit-driven corporate persons; when the word "welfare" in every given sense is to do with the well-being and care of people.

If there is anything to be gained by questioning whether or not there is any telos at all to poverty, then as the person going through it a sense of gratitude for what one does have, and perhaps even a sense of jealousy if it results in self-improvement might very well be in order. As someone who observes someone else going through poverty, then I would hope that their sense of empathy at least compels them to either change the system as best as they can to try and make it fairer, or to be generous with what they have.

Horse 3323 - CELSIUS V FAHRENHEIT [2024] - Judgement

 CELSIUS V FAHRENHEIT [2024] - Judgement

The Fake Internet Court of Australia

H3323/1

We have learned of a dispute which has arisen and which rattled though the internuts until it finally made its way to this court until it found this fake internet court's attention:

https://twitter.com/ItsAndyRyan/status/1770502479878193226

Who's to say which system is better?

- Andy Ryan, via X, 21st Mar 2024

Well Mister Ryan, if you want matters of hypothetical ethics solved then you go to Geoffrey Robertson QC; if you want matters of astrophysics and rocket surgery solved then you go to Neil de Grasse Tyson; if you want to know what knick-knacks to put into a room or what kind of rug needs to go underneath that hideous coffee table that you can't bear to part with then you go to Tonia Todman; but if you want definitive answers to questions of no consequence then you come to The Fake Internet Court of Australia. Who is to say which system is better? I am.

This court is not only equipped to answer this dispute but it asserts jurisdiction in all spaces and all times. If that seems like an act of ultimate hubris to you, then your feeling is correct. It is. We have hubris by the bucket load here. The Fake Internet Court of Australia will judge upon about which is better: Celsius or Fahrenheit?

Probably the reason as to why this argument is uniquely posed, is that the United States of America will go to any and all lengths to use any system of measurement other than the Metric System. Miles, pounds, gallons, furlongs, barleycorns, school buses, smoots, elephants; literally any nutjob, whackjob, madjob or oddjob system, with no ground in logic or sense will do. This is despite the fact and in spite of the fact that the Metric System which is very French, was adopted by the same country which helped the United States gain their independence. This is also despite the fact and in spite of the fact that the United States was the first country to adopt decimal currency and knows very well how to operate in a system where 100 cents make 1 dollar. What the hell is a kilometer? It is an actual freedom unit; 100 per cent of the time.

These are the facts as this court sees them:

The Celsius system of temperature measurement is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius. It sounds strange that an astronomer would want to do temperature calculations but when you bear in mind that back in the 1740s, scientists were far more polymathical and ecumenical to different areas of scientific reading, this is not unexpected. In Celsius' 1742 paper "Observationer Om Twänne Beständiga Grader På En Thermometer" (Observations about two stable degrees on a thermometer), Celsius performed a series of experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He then assigned an index of 100 to the melting point of ice and an index of 0 to the boiling point of water. This proved to be really useful but the rest of the scientific community assigned the an index 0 the melting point of ice and the index of 100 to the boiling point of water because it makes more sense that the numbers should go up the hotter that a thing is.

Likewise the Fahrenheit system of temperature measurement is named after the Polish-German Gabriel Fahrenheit, who, was an instrument maker; specifically trying to make temperature measuring instruments. His thermometer made us of the fact that elemental mercury while being a liquid metal at normal room temperatures, is still subject to the same kinds of expansion and contraction as other metals when heat is applied. His scale was derived from the fact that his personally developed frigiforic mineral salt ice mixture when frozen, had a very stable melting point where he could calibrate his zero mark. The 90 mark was taken from the temperature when his thermometer was placed underneath someone's arm of in the mouth; though he worked out pretty quickly that 96 as a highly composite number was very useful. His scale which was then adopted in various places, was tinkered with and tinkered with and tinkered with.

It has to be said here that the name "Anders Celsius" probably sounds completely normal for a Swede and the name "Gabriel Fahrenheit" does indeed sound ver very German. However it can not be denied that in the English tongue, the name "Gabriel Fahrenheit" is a positively cracking name for a baby. Moreover if you hear the name "Gabriel Fahrenheit" coming out of the mouth from someone oop North, when ten year old Gabriel is out playing football in the street at 6pm such as "Gabriel Fahrenheit! Your tea is ready!", then that's well great and pure belter.

The real nub, crux, and central plank of this case is that it matters not an iota what system anyone uses, as long as everyone agrees to it. However, the idea of preparing a specific frigiforic mixture to obtain your zero point as opposed to using ordinary water under normal laboratory conditions, is very very silly. Counter to that, practically everyone in the world who wants to know what the temperature of something is, does not calibrate their own instruments. I for instance do not have to care how many electrics are in a Volt, how a Horsepower is calculated, or if the speed limit on the road is 50 whether or not that's in miles or kilometers as long as the dials in my car match up.

Final Judgement:

There are in fact three systems of temperature measurement which are in common usage. In making judgement it is best to compare their usefulness; the broadest way to do this is to compare their usefulness as applied to humans. This is what the three systems feel like to a human:

On a scale of 0 to 100 in Fahrenheit, 0 is cold and 100 is hot.

On a scale of 0 to 100 in Celcius, 0 is cold and 100 is dead.

On a scale of 0 to 100 in Kelvin, 0 is dead and 100 is dead.

Immediately this becomes a question of utility, of what feels right, and of what is sensible. We can perform a sensibility test quite easily, just by asking the simple question of fact. Is the system suitable for science, and it is suitable for humans?

Fahrenheit while it is suitable for humans is also very clearly, silly. 30 degrees Fahrenheit is cold and 100 is hot. The fact that 0 is take from a specific sample of salty water, means that it is of no use at all to humans in the real world. About the only shred of utility that Fahrenheit possesses is that 100 is hot and seems like it should be intuitively hot.

Celsius is both useful for scientific studies and suitable for humans. 0 degrees Celsius is cold and quite obviously so, and while 100 is dead, 40 is hot. If it is freezing outside, then minus temperatures is excellent at communicating that. 10 is cold. 20 is nice. 30 is warm. 40 is hot. 50 is deeply unpleasant. 60 is dead. 70 is dead. 80 is dead. 100 is boiling. 180 is an oven. 700 is a fire. 5000 is the sun. This is all reasonably intiuative. 

Kelvin while it is useful for scientific studies is clearly unsuitable for humans. When dealing with the cold, dark, expansive, horror of space, then Kelvin is perfectly sensible. But for looking at things which humans live inside of, although it is true that the temperature outside at the moment is 291 Kelvin, that is really really silly. 

As someone who is sufficiently old enough to have been born into a world which still remembered the Imperial System, I know that I am about 6 feet tall, weigh about 140 pounds and have no idea what that is in metric. I also know how fast 80km/h is, and how fast 90mph is. A pound is a useful amount of cheese a kilo is what flour comes in. A pint is a nice amount of brown ale and 1L of milk fits in the fridge. Indeed as someone who was born into a world which still remembered the Imperial System, I straddle both worlds. Then because I am married to a very very fine lady who having been born in America has also kind of learnt to walk in two worlds, I am fine with doing Metric/Imperial mental gymnastics for ease of being understood. Nevertheless, Celsius is better because Fahrenheit is silly.

Relative to the question of how many beans are in a pile (the answer is at least 23), we should be able to put that number into the schema for what is nice.  Generally speaking if there are 22 of a thing, it is nice. 23 is a clump. 24 is knowable. 25 is just about too many things. Humans do not really have intuitive powers to understand 25 things at once. Using this entirely furious spurious reasoning, then 22 then the ideal perfect number for a temperature to be nice, is 22. 

22 in Celcius, is nice.

22 in Fahrenheit, is cold.

DO NOT GO OUTSIDE IF IT IS 22 KELVINS OUT THERE!

This court hereby orders that henceforth, everyone in the world uses Celsius; including you 'Murica. Stop dragging your heels. It would not take long for a generation of children to be completely fluent in metric and it will take maybe four generations for the memory to be just that, a memory. The awful truth is that Fahrenheit in a world of Celsius is very very silly. As for you Andy Ryan, while you have been forensis amicus, this court finds that the country which you live in, which is full of nutjobbers, whackjobbers, madjobbers and oddjobbers, is guilty of massive amounts of knavery designed to perpetuate stupidity.

America, you are guilty of both conspiracy and deception. You have brought hateration and holleration into this fake internet court and as you have no sensible business by continuing to use Fahrenheit when Celsius is very clearly and obviously more sensible, we order you to desist and stop this egregious pretense. If we ever see you back before this court, the penalties will be severe. Get out; lest you make a mockery of my courtroom. We are already perfectly capable of making a mockery of this fake internet courtroom as it is. You are malevolent and have now ensnared others in your villainy. Can you not see what trouble thou hast wrought? 

- ROLLO75 J

(this case will be reported in FILR as H3323/1 - Ed)

Horse 3322 - Biden v Trump: Landslide to Biden 535-3

 

I have been running a survey for the last week to run a head-to-head match up for United States President between Willow Biden and Donald Trump. Across various platforms, I have had 187 replies and the results have been 186-1 in favour of Willow Biden. As we have already determined via the Fake Internet Court of Australia, rulings that I make on Horse are officially unofficial and binding upon all people at all times and in all places in the kosmos; so this means that if we extrapolate the results of this survey to a General Election in November, then Willow Biden head-to-head match up for United States President should beat Donald Trump 535-3 in the Electoral College. We know that this is a popular result as I have already conducted the survey.

There are of course two things which would prevent Willow Biden from being United States President.

The first being that she is only 4 years old and falls foul of the Article II, Section 1 Constitutional requirement that someone needs to be at least thirty-five years old in order to be President. Personally I think that this is a consequence of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton burning the midnight oil and deliberately designing the US Constitution such that George Washingmachine would be a king-like figure and that one of them would be President at some point in the future after George stood down or died.. Sure there was a minor shooty-shooty-bang-bang incident which left one of them very very dead but the other did in fact become President.

The second thing which would prevent Willow Biden from being United States President, would be that she has not lived in the United States for the past fourteen years. Exactly why this very specific requirement was inserted into the Constitution is beyond me because after having read through the notes of the Constitutional Conventions, this seems purely like it was added on the basis of one person's motion. There are practically no debates on this clause beyond the mechanical aye and nay and the rubber stamp of acceptance. 

If these legal disabilities were set aside, under some kind of Constitutional Amendment like the type that made Arnold Schwarzenegger President in "Demolition Man", then there is nothing necessarily to stop Willow from being elected as President, except for what the legal definition of a Person is. The concept that corporations/companies are Persons is not a new invention. SCOTUS has also ruled in the "Citizens United" case that corporations as legal persons have the same rights with regards lobbying, advertising, and making donations to political candidates and parties; so in a non-corporeal person is in fact and at law a person, then proving that a cat is a person is a matter of legal interpretation. 

I think that the results of my wee little survey demonstrate that people are not happy with the current gerontocratic choices which they have before them and will overwhelmingly choose a cat for President over the current two choices. What ever charge that you can lay against Biden for being old equally applies to Trump and likewise what ever charge that you can lay against Trump for being doddery equally applies to Biden. This isn't to say that old people aren't capable of making important decisions, it is just that the demands of running an administration where the stakes in a lot of cases involve spending massive amounts of coin and sometimes souls, is great. We have performed the experiment again and again where we send a relatively spritely person into office and the end of their one or two terms, end up looking much much older. Who by worrying can turn the hair on their head black or white? It turns out, the President of the United States.

Assuming that a cat is a person, then the fact that we would have literally no way of knowing what they said, seems like a problem. Although having said that, the idea that there would be effectively a dead hand at the tiller has a distinct chance of being an improvement over the kinds of things that we have seen coming out of various administrations for the past 80 years. A cat is unlikely to send the country to war for instance. Although since we are entering the realm of pure subjective fantasy here, if a cat could actually faithfully execute the office of the Presidency, then I am reasonably sure that the United States would tilt towards a ham based economy very quickly.

If we take a thousand yard view over the strangeness of the past decade or so, then in the most sensible timeline that we never had, Hilary Clinton would have been President in 2016 and we would now be coming to a very boring Presidential Election with Paul Ryan as the incumbent. The only reason that Biden was put up as any kind of serious candidate is that he is the compromise choice against Trump. 

In the most lovely timeline that we never had, then Bernie Sanders would have been endorsed by the rank and file of the Democrats and then been elected in the General Election in 2016 as a genuine reform President of the likes not seen since the Roosevelts Franklin D and Teddy. He would have made a genuine effort to shift the economic balance towards the left a bit, instead of this forever set of rightist eejits who basically perpetuate Reagan's plans ad nauseum but with rapidly departing sets of equally stupid identity politics. Bernie Sanders would have been and should have been in charge during the COVID-19 pandemic but instead America was forced to live with seven kinds of stupidity.

So here again is why we see that in my highly unscientific survey, that Willow Biden easily beats Trump in a head to head contest. The current two choices, are akin to deciding whether or not you would like to put your head into a bucket of cow manure or sheep manure. Always remember that the problem with democracy is that whomever you vote for, a politician will get in. When given the choice between a politician and a cat, the cat will win every time.

Aside:

The test of whether or not a potential candidate for a political office has a cat, is a good one. The reason for this is that having a cat means that the person knows what it is like to care for someone who can be objectively precocious and capricious. Dog people have an animal which wants to be their friend. Cat people have an animal which wants to be aloof. 

Horse 3321 - Kakosynaisthima - Element III - Loneliness

I have stated at various times that the centre of the observable universe is 19mm behind the corneas of one's eyeballs. For every person who has ever lived, they can only see the world through their own perspective and by virtue of being that central point, they are also the main character in the narrative of their own lives. It therefore makes rational sense that the self which is at the centre of its own observable universe, which wants to make its existence pleasant, should want to command more of the things it likes and reduce the frequency of the things it does not like. I think that one of the the consequences of being at the centre of the observable universe, is that everyone without exception is both rationally and irrationally selfish. The central character for the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos is none other than "I". That rational and irrational selfishness, logically means that people want to do what they like and do not want to do what they do not like. The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos wants things that are "yummy" and does not want things that are "not yummy". Yes, this is obvious but this is the cornerstone from which I extend the following set of argument.

The beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos in an effort to bring the "yummy, yummy, yummy" closer and push the "not yummy" further away, has come up with quite effective stratagems for doing that. When you put various beasts which shout "I" at the heart of the kosmos together, then what ends up happening is that they form like communities. We find other people who are like us and who like us. Paradoxically this is both excellent and horrid at the same time. Human beings as individually small beings can achieve things on their own but achieve massive things together in community and commonwealth. This is the underlying reason why families, clubs, churches, societies, partnerships, companies, corporations and even the nation state exist. Human beings as social beings also have a need for validation and reflection, and so forming community and commonwealth is essential to the proper formation and functioning of a human.

However, although in forming community and commonwealth in an effort to bring the "yummy, yummy, yummy" closer and pushing the "not yummy" further away, human beings are also hideously excellent at shunning and excluding other human beings who for whatever defect, might undermine that community and commonwealth. This is the logical consequence of trying to push the "not yummy" further away. It makes good sense to push away people who are cruel and nasty, but in forming community and commonwealth, cliques are also effective at pushing away people who are perceived as defective in other ways; such as being shy, poor, small, smelly, disabled, mentally different, weird, et cetera. Other people who do not meet the crietria for  community and commonwealth are othered; sometimes in not very nice ways. The grounds for exclusion and pushing away people also extends to aspects such as sex, race, religion, et cetera. Those people 'over there' must be excluded, lest they damage us in some way and we accidentally catch their poverty, weirdness, race, disablity, religion, et cetera. Living inside the fortress is lovely for those inside but for those outside, the wilderness can be awful. The ugly truth is that it can be fun and much sport, mirth, and jolity can be had from making someone else's existence miserable. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Loneliness as a thing is so very effective because it makes excellent use of the fact that humans are lost and trapped within the fortress of their own mind. Whilst I think that the idea of solipsism in principle is a rubbish idea, when it comes to one's perception of the world, it makes no functional difference in perspective. At a cosmic level, nobody else can experience the world as you do and neither can you experience the world as they do. There are things that people experience together but these are experienced together proximally at the third thing, or intimately at each other. On that level, there is no experience with someone else from the same perspective, ever. Excluding and shunning someone is so very powerful because they uniquely feel that exclusion; with good reason. Quite literally nobody else can feel what they do.

The hint within the word 'Loneliness' itself, is that this is a singularly singular experience. Keeping that in mind, Loneliness is experienced by someone who stands as the central character of their own universe and by nobody else and this explains why it is so awful to endure. Loneliness can not be shared; which means its burden also can not be shared. Moreover, you can not tell yourself to go away to try and get rid of it either. 

There is of course a distinction between being lonely and being alone. It is possible to be alone and yet feel a sense of connectedness and community with people who are not present. It is also possible to be lonely within a sea of people. There is a difference between being alone in a place where you feel that you are supposed to be, as opposed to being in a place where you are supposed to be and are yet still devoid of connectedness and community. There is also a difference between being lonely in a great multitude of abstract indifference, to being lonely within a room of people who in maintaining their own fortress of community and commonwealth, have excluded you and perhaps are being cruel and nasty about it.

The art of weaponsing loneliness is learnt at a surprisingly young age. Children actually get to learn both the joy and power of making someone else feel miserable as well as the hurt from others making then feel miserable at an early age. The phrase "I don't want to be your friend" or "I don't like you" is a direct attack on a person. Children learn very quickly that they can hurt people and be hurt by people in ways that does not involve physical violence, though in some circumstances when bullying crosses that line, weaponised enforced loneliness and physical violence can and do go together. The strange thing is that because the kosmos which we have constructed for ourselves turned schooling into a societal servant for the purposes of serving industrial capitalism, that we place children into hot-boxes of learning factories for more than a decade. Within in these factories, the mechanics of enforcing loneliness is weaponised.

When people get a wee bit older, probably the most intense feelings of loneliness are experienced by teenagers; who biology is flooding their bodies with chemicals in an effort to finally build the child into the adult. I have no method of actually determining if emotions are actually more intense but the proximity and repeated exposure to others for whom deriving sport, mirth, and jollity which is had from making someone else's existence miserable, can not be avoided. It is probably in one's teenage years when one feels the most of everything, love, hate, joy, sadness, community and loneliness. 

As with Pain, people who experience Loneliness might develop virtues such as self-esteem, self-worth, resilience, and independence as manufactured responses to Loneliness; but again, not necessarily because Loneliness produces those things. As with Pain, manufactured responses to Loneliness can also include hurt and sadness, despair, hopelessness, depression and even a tiredness of life itself.

Paradoxically I think that Loneliness as a thing is both "not yummy" and yet actually has a purpose. Loneliness is perhaps the process by which we learn that on some deep level no-one else is really there fighting for you in the last garrison; but more importantly, nor can they do so. It is impossible for anyone else to truly have your back until the absolute end. Other people have their own worries and have to make sure that they too are keeping their own head above water. It's enough for them to worry about what today holds, much less about tomorrow for that day holds worries of its own; they have to look out for what is coming over their own horizon. Is any of this actually a bad thing though?

Perhaps people experiencing loneliness might imagine that other people are engaged in expending energy in actively hating them, when this is mostly untrue. Although everyone is intrinsically selfish, an imagined sense that someone is spending their spare time in active hate is simply pointless, when in truth the other person is not thinking about them at all.

Again we turn to those manufactured responses of self-esteem, self-worth, independence, and resilience, as products of the process of Loneliness. Resilience is a necessary quality for an individual to possess in a kosmos which is indifferent and which is populated by other ultimately selfish individuals. Loneliness itself forces us not only to confront the fact that we are ultimately alone in the universe, but that we are on a cosmic level. Nobody does know "what it's like to the bad man, to be the sad man, behind blue eyes"; which means that The Who were correct. The outstanding question is what one is supposed to do with that confrontation.

You can turn the knives inwards. You can accept the accusations of defectiveness with the intent to harm one's self. The scary thing is that people who choose to push away people on the basis of some defect, are very often more likely right than wrong. Anyone who has spent some time introspectively looking at their own person and character, very quickly becomes aware of the defects which others quite rightly suggest exist. You could very well in fact be shy, or poor, mentally different, weird, et cetera. Since you can't escape those grounds of accusation, is it actually worth acting upon those grounds of the accusations of defectiveness? There is no shortage of so-called "self-help" books; which has to be one of the most morally repugnant ideas out there. Self-help assumes that the person who suffers due to the accusations of defectiveness and subsequent exclusion, is more responsible to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than laying the blame for actually acting  cruelly and horribly in the first place.

Or, you can accept the accusations of defectiveness as a statement of inventory. Remember, those accusations are very often more likely right than wrong. A better response is to show one's self the kindness which others withheld. Every manufactured responses to Loneliness is created in the silent and dark workshop of the quiet self. One does not build self-esteem, self-worth, or resilience, without first accepting the premise that one's self is an object which is worthy. The words "I love you", "I need you", "I want you", are the most powerful words in the universe and when backed up with action can and do change lives. When those words are used to to works of kindness to others, they build other people up. When those words are used as hammers to work-harden the self, then the accusations of defectiveness can be met with acceptance that the defect exists.

There is a neat illustration called the "hedgehog's dilemma" which basically states that we are all afraid of getting close to other people, lest they turn their spines outwards and hurt us. However, as deeply social creatures who both need to love and be loved and who need to validate others and to be validated, those spines make it hard to actually fulfil our own needs. Accepting the premise that one's self is an object which is worthy and accepting the premise that others are also objects which are worthy, might very well be the key to solving the dilemma. It really does not help that the hedgehog's dilemma itself is cause for people inventing defensive strategies and coping mechanisms; which themselves are causes for accusations of defectiveness.

The unspoken truth which hides behind the corneas of someone else's eyeballs, is that they too are also small, pathetic, and often do not have terribly much power in the kosmos. People dare not speak about this awful truth that often because the idea in the face of a mostly indifferent kosmos is horrifying. People are afraid to be vulnerable because if they hold themselves out and other people do not like them, then that's all that they have. The telos of loneliness if there is one, is that realisation that if this is all that one has, then the fact that one is alone and adrift in the kosmos, is not necessarily sufficient grounds to turn the knives inwards. IF this is all that I have and all that I am, I might actually be pretty neat.