A Mystery to Me

Posted on 29/04/2022 by Grumpa Joe

The huge shortage of new cars continues to baffle me. I have read many articles and listened to some videos explaining the shortage of computer chips that is the root cause. I just don’t buy the story. To me, this is a fake news story that is bigger than any used to bring down President Trump. In the mean time, people continue to drive old cars, or buy used ones at prices that the new ones brought two years ago. The fleet grows older as the shortage continues. My own car just turned 177,000 miles and celebrated it’s sixteenth birthday. I have friends who insist that my car is young and brag that their car has close to three hundred thousand miles. I will agree that the quality and reliability of modern cars has improved exponentially with the advent of electronic ignition, fuel injection, and CNC machines that can control metal part tolerances to four digits. Assembly has tightened gap tolerances with the assistance of computer controlled robots, and dipping car frames in electrostatic baths before applying primer and paint with robots that never get bored with monotonous spray patterns to give each car the same coverage. Yes, all of these wonderful technologies use computer chips in their controllers, and the cars use many computer chips to eliminate troublesome mechanical switches throughout. I understand all of that. I can even believe that the modern car has as many as forty chips deployed throughout. What I don’t believe is that modern car companies didn’t see the shortage coming. I also, don’t believe the chip manufacturers are out of capacity to make chips. Both car companies and chip producers have been in business for a long time. They couldn’t possibly have lost their ability to forecast demand. I can believe they might be a few percentage points off of a forecast, but not so far off that their businesses are in jeopardy.

Making a computer chip takes smarts, most of which comes from people in the USA, but the manufacturing cost is high and the result is that chip makers farm the manufacturing to cheap labor countries like China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. By transferring the making to those countries they get chips at a lower cost and make more money. The problem is that when a pandemic hits the labor pool those companies sink. I truly believe COVID had some effect on chip production, but not all.

I tend to be an aficionado of conspiracy theories, and have dreamt up a new one to chew on. What if the Green New Movement is in bed with all the car companies of the world? What if these car companies have pledged their allegiance to the Greenies to halt standard car production in favor of electric cars. How will they deal with the huge fleet of modern gas consuming vehicles in the WW fleet? As it turns out the chip shortage has been a great excuse for not making new cars while the older ones keep on ticking. That gives them time to convert manufacturing to all electric cars. I am shocked to learn that Cadillac, a division of General Motors is switching to all electric cars by 2025. The list doesn’t end with Cadillac. Add the following to the list of Greenies headed toward batteries:

Jaguar, Audi, Alfa Romeo, Rolls Royce, Mini, Volvo, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz, Fiat, Renault, Nissan, Volkswagen, GM, Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota. These companies are committed to selling zero emission vehicles by 2020-2030. Only Toyota who has been selling the Prius since the 1990’s has a delayed date of 2050. Hmmm. Maybe Toyota knows something the rest of them don’t. Toyota is also betting on hydrogen powered cars over electric.

All the facts support my theory of a conspiracy to save the world by forcing electric cars down our throats.

I have but one more question: what happens if after the entire world is solar, wind, battery, and hydrogen powered, and that includes, cars, trucks, trains, planes, and ocean going ships, and Antarctica melts anyway? Do we really want to waste our energy (pun intended) in trashing fossil fuels?

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Global Warming Ice Age

Posted on 01/06/2020 by Grumpa Joe

The first of June and it is cold again. Of course cold is relative. The temperature today is what I considered warm back in January, but for June it is now cool, no, cold. At 1:00 p.m. it has risen to 67 degrees F. All this attention to cold has been brought on by my reading. I’m attacking a group of books the titles of which I have seen for years but never attempted to read. The latest is South: The Story of Shackleton’s Expedition. The adventure took place during World War One 1914-17. The short version is Ernest Shackleton’s journey to be the first too find the south pole by land. How he and his crew ever survived this trip to frozen hell is nothing short of a miracle.

Throughout the read I kept thinking about how those who truly believe that global warming will cause Antarctica to melt are daft. I recommend theses people read this book and then tell me you still believe it will happen because we use fossil fuels. I believe the world will exhaust its supply of fossil fuel long before Antarctica melts. As long as earth is tilted as it is, and as long as the south pole is where it is, at the bottom of the sphere it will take armageddon to melt it even partially.

Oh yes, the earth can tilt like it did when our moon was formed and send the Sahara desert into a zone where it is cold and then maybe just maybe the south pole would melt. But, wouldn’t it stand to reason that as the existing pole shifts northward to expose it to the sun that another area of the planet will take its place and freeze into a new Antarctica? Wouldn’t it also stand to reason that as the planet shifted it would do so slowly thus causing the freeze to occur in a continuum so by the time Antartica was melted its counterpart would be frozen?

Reading this story was a double feature for me. I loved it as an adventure and second it got my stagnant brain to begin thinking logically about what would happen to all that ice. The reason for the ice is because most of Antarctica is in the dark just as the north pole is in the dark for much of it’s year. The second reason is that because the axis of the earth is tilted it puts Antarctica further from the sun so the place is really cold. Shackleton recorded minus fifty-five degrees below zero for a winter segment of his journey. He described what happens when the ice that had trapped and was holding his ship captive, cracks open and water fills the void. At minus 55 the water turned to ice four inches thick within minutes.

The photo above shows the change of Antarctic sea ice between 1850 to 2013. I learned in my fourth grade science class that water expands when it freezes, and it subsequently reduces when it melts. What that tell me is that we should have been seeing a loss of coastal regions to ice melt water since 1850. Have we? I have never read nor heard any such phenomenon reported. Try this experiment for your self. Fill a glass tumbler with ice cubes to the brim, next add water until it is at the brim. Let the ice-water filled glass sit for a couple of days and watch to see if there is any water on the surface the glass sits on. There won’t be any. That is because as the ice melts it’s volume contracts you will have a full glass of water without ice when it is done.

Watch the animation above and see how the sea ice changes from year to year. Tell me have you read of any reports that the oceans are rising and falling at our shorelines in sync with this changes? I haven’t.

I believe only God can increase global warming that will cause the ice at the poles to melt. I don’t believe that mere men can effect such an extreme shift in temperature that will cause the ice to melt and the oceans to flood the earth.

My recommendation to all the people who believe in man made global warming that will cause the ice at the south pole to melt and flood the world is this: put your energy into believing in God. Nature will take care of planet earth and we will not be responsible for it’s demise, but God will.

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, family, Science | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Will Humans Become Extinct?

Posted on 30/03/2017 by Grumpa Joe

A news headline today featured Michael Moore saying Trump will cause humans to go extinct. Forgive me folks, but Michael Moore is a very large bag of wind. What will cause humans to become extinct is their fading memories. It seems that the young crowd in developed countries have forgotten what sex is really for. The result has been a bunch of young people screwing their jollies off without bearing children. The problem is so bad that countries have taken to importing immigrants, USA included, to save themselves. I’ve written about this before, and I will continue to write about it over and over. Sex is for procreation not for fun, although  there is a good bit of pleasure associated with it.

Michael Moore’s point is that Trump will cause worldwide havoc by his activity to abandon US participation in global warming committees. The plain and simple fact is that there is no credible evidence whatsoever to support man-made global warming and there is no measured trend indicating a rise in global temperature. Yes, there has been some melting of ice in the Arctic, but the ice has returned in cyclic fashion. Leftists spurred on by Barack Obama have been so thoroughly brain washed to believe that we will cause the earth to drown in the water resulting in the melting Antarctica that they even have the Pope convinced.

If Antarctica ice were to melt it would take well over a hundred years for it to become evident. I believe mankind is smart enough to save itself when it sees the water seeping into their lives.

Anyway, I will not be around in a hundred years to watch this phenomenon happen so it doesn’t bother me at all. All of my family is smart enough to live inland where the water will not affect them. Since the majority of crazies live on either the West or the East coast I recommend they wear life vests and scuba gear to bed.

miro-zeman-department-of-electrical-sustainable-energy-6-638.jpg

In the same one hundred years, we will have depleted our fossil fuel supply, well maybe, and our shift to some unknown yet to be discovered power source similar to Lithium Di-crystals used to power the Starship Enterprise will have been discovered to save the day.

The need for power will spur men to find new sources of energy that will allow us to survive. At this time, there is still plenty of fossil fuel to supply our needs for the next two to five hundred years. I also expect some genius kid to invent a low-cost process to scrub excess CO2 from the air and thus prevent any overheating of the planet. All we have to do is to shift kids from studying banking and political science to real math and real science so we might stand a chance.

Remember Michael Moore is a number one source for FAKE news, and man’s need for energy will drive him to invent new ways to get it.

 

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Strings Attached

Posted on 02/03/2010 by Grumpa Joe

    Hope and Change are the hallmark campaign slogans that excited the country. So were all the promises. Most of which can never be kept. Consider the promise, not to have any lobbyists in the administration. Even I loved that one. The government is loaded with big money interests trying to buy favors. That system is exactly what the voters believed would change. It has not. Instead of lobbyists who work for capitalistic interests, we have thirty something czars on the payroll. Obama hired all of them to change the country by infiltrating and revising the procedures of the bureaucracy. How is this any different from a bunch of former government employees who know how to use the Washington ropes?

    The inside lobbyists (czars) are affecting non-capitalistic type policy. So, instead of affecting what business favors a company can get, they are affecting the liberties we enjoy. They promote ideas like manmade global warming, and propose policies to tax the polluters and give the money to third world countries. What is that all about? What about the idea, that the country becomes less dependent on foreign oil? The insider lobbyists defeat any move toward drilling that affects the environment. Instead, they push for nuclear power without any regard for how to deal with waste. Never mind that the waste remains lethal for twenty thousand years. I guess we will have to wait for the Chinese to find a way to neutralize the waste.  Also being affected are gun control, freedom of speech, your paycheck, the car you drive, health care, and more. There is a minimum of thirty-two insider lobbyists working overtime to get favors from the system. This excludes all the campaign donors like Soros who like to push the president’s buttons.

     Yesterday, I read a news item about George Soros. He thinks Obama screwed up. Soros actually condones the takeover of the banking system, and he is angry with BO for missing the opportunity. He invested a lot of money to get the boy elected, and he expects a return.

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