NVDL: Apparently from Alan Knott-Craig (CEO of Vodacom) to his staff...
2008 has certainly started with a bang! The future was rosy on 31 December 2007, but suddenly everyone is buying candles and researching property in Perth!
A combination of recession in the USA, global equity market negativity, high interest rates, the National Credit Act and power outages have combined to create the perfect storm.
But don't panic!
This is not the first time there's been doom and gloom. Every few years the same thing happens. We experience massive economic growth, everyone is optimistic and buying Nescafe Gold, and holiday homes, and Merc's. The positivity gets ahead of itself and the economy overheats, and then panic sets in because the economy seems to be collapsing when in actual fact it's simply making an adjustment back to a reasonable level.
It happened in 1989, when SA defaulted on its international loans and the stock market and Rand crashed, it happened in 1994 when the ANC took power and everyone thought war would break out, it happened in 1998 when interest rates hit 25% and you couldn't give away your house, and it happened in 2001 when a fairly unstable guy by the name of Osama arranged for 2 Boeings to fly into the tallest buildings in New York!
On each of those occasions everyone thought it was the end of the world and that there was no light in sight. And on each occasion, believe it or not, the world did not actually end, it recovered and in fact things continued to get better.
I think 2008 will be a tough year, but I also see it as a great opportunity to seize the day whilst everyone else is whinging and get a front-seat on the inevitable boom that we'll experience in 2009, 2010 and beyond.
Make sure you make a mental note of everything that is happening now, because it will happen again and again, and if you don't recognize the symptoms you'll be suckered into the same negativity, and forget to look for the opportunities.
It's easy to be negative. Subconsciously, you WANT to be negative! Whenever you open the papers they tell you about the goriest hi-jacking and the most corrupt politicians. Why don't they dedicate more pages to the fact that Joburg is the world's biggest man-made forest, or to the corruption-free achievements of the vast majority of public officials? Because bad news sells. Good news is boring.
SA still has the best weather in world! We're lucky enough to possess a huge chunk of the world's resources, i.e.: gold, platinum, coal, iron. The growth in India and China will continue to accelerate (India and China sign 10mil new mobile customers every month), and so will their demand for our resources. The government has already embarked on massive infrastructure projects (some of them a tad late, i.e.: electricity), and this will pump money into the economy.
We are all lucky enough to be a part of the birth of a massive and all-encompassing industry. The Internet has and will continue to change the world. The enormity of its impact is up there with the wheel, electricity, TV, telephones, and possibly man's greatest ever invention, coffee. Not only does it open up an entirely untapped world of commerce, but it is also the ultimate disseminator of information and news. Apartheid would not have lasted 40 years if the Internet had existed! And you're part of it!
I'm looking forward to another year of ASA complaints, IR issues, Plug & Wireless parties, BTS roll-outs, billing runs, irate customers, happy customers, orange bubbles, faulty elevators, etc, etc. The nice stuff makes me feel good, and the challenges remind me why we can beat the competition. Most importantly I'm looking forward to having fun and making memories.
So ignore the doomsayers, install a timer on your geyser, and buy Ricoffee for a couple of months.
NVDL: Yes, it's all very positive and constructive, and at any other time I'd agree and go along with these sentiments. Except we're dealing with an overarching paradigm that is simply this: we have reached the limit to (what we thought was limitless)growth. It's absolute for as long as we are unable to solve cold fusion as a way to get lots of energy out of virtually nothing, and know how to manage/use/control it. Massive populations of human beings tied to resource limits is our current reality. We were able to reach 7 billion thanks to the magical benefits of cheap oil. With oil no longer cheaps, fewer and fewer human beings can enjoy those benefits. That's a long term, I daresay, permanent shift.
5 comments:
NVDL wrote:
"It's absolute for as long as we are unable to solve cold fusion as a way to get lots of energy out of virtually nothing, and know how to manage/use/control it."
Cold fusion energy doesn't come from "nothing." It comes from from the fusion of light elements to form heavy elements, just as plasma fusion energy does. At present, cold fusion cells cannot be easily controlled, and at least six of them have exploded at universities around the world, but I think significant progress has been made and this problem will soon be fixed. By 1992, cold fusion produced power density and temperatures as high as a fission reactor core, so there is no question that it can become a practical source of energy. (Note that cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times, in over 200 mainstream labs. See the Storms book, Table 1.)
For more information on cold fusion, see:
http://lenr-canr.org
"Massive populations of human beings tied to resource limits is our current reality. We were able to reach 7 billion thanks to the magical benefits of cheap oil."
With cold fusion we could support a much larger population, but I do not think it would be a good idea. However, we can greatly reduce the effects of mankind on nature by combining cold fusion with various other technologies, such as existing Japanese food factories. I estimated that we could grow enough food for the entire U.S. population in an area the size of greater New York City. This would eliminate food shortages and the deleterious effects of agriculture on land. For more information, see my e-book:
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
Recommended by Arthur C. Clarke and many distinguished scientists.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
Thanks for pointing out how cold fusion works. The basic point is that the amount of energy in a newspaper or glass may be enough to power a city, and so, compared to deposits of coal and oil it can seem like a very small quantity. I did say 'virtually' nothing, meaning - a very small quantity of matter - employing cold fusion - can produce a lot of energy. Just stating it in simple terms.
Yes, with cold fusion we COULD do a lot. If aliens came to earth we COULD chat to them. If I married Britney Spears I COULD this or that....It's all a lot of nonsense until it is actually in place. And right now while all of the above is POSSIBLE, it's still fanciful.
You wrote:
"The basic point is that the amount of energy in a newspaper or glass may be enough to power a city, and so, compared to deposits of coal and oil it can seem like a very small quantity."
Quite right. Fission and fusion both produce millions of times more energy per gram of fuel than chemical reactions do.
"Yes, with cold fusion we COULD do a lot. If aliens came to earth we COULD chat to them. If I married Britney Spears I COULD this or that....It's all a lot of nonsense until it is actually in place. And right now while all of the above is POSSIBLE, it's still fanciful."
It isn't a bit fanciful. Companies such as Mitsubishi would not spend $20 million on "fanciful" experiments, and the top National Laboratories in Italy, India and China and the U.S. Navy do not publish hundreds of pages of official documents containing "fanciful" data from mass spectrometers and calorimeters.
Cold fusion was discovered in 1927, and rediscovered by Fleischmann and Pons in the 1980s. It has made considerable progress since then. Thousands of papers on the subject have been published, many of them in the world's most prestigious peer-reviewed journals. I recommend you read several of these papers before commenting on this research. You should not dismiss peer-reviewed, widely replicated experimental data with flippant comments about Space Aliens or Britney Spears. That is a closed-minded and unscientific. You should not ridicule nearly 20 years of patient labor by thousands of professional scientists worldwide.
Roughly $100 million has been spent on this research, and the excess heat and transmutations can now be reproduced at will. If the heat can be better controlled, there is no reason to think the reaction cannot be scaled up and made into a practical source of energy. Significant progress in controlling the reaction has been reported in the last year or so.
If the reaction can commercialize it will rapidly end the energy crisis and remove any threat of global warming from CO2. This is highly desirable outcome, so I do not think people like you should go around ridiculing and dismissing the research. That kind of attitude has caused many problems for the researchers over the years.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
It's fanciful in the sense that we we think we can expect or anticipate to transition to a technology that needs a lot of work when we need a solution around about...er...NOW. It's as fanciful as the idea of colonising the galaxy. Possible yes, plausible yes, probable - well, not in our immediate future. Just my opinion ;-) I'm not saying let's not be enthusiastic about the development. I'm not saying don't invest in it. I'm saying my concern is the lateness of the hour.
You wrote:
"It's fanciful in the sense that we we think we can expect or anticipate to transition to a technology that needs a lot of work when we need a solution around about...er...NOW."
Experts in cold fusion believe that if sufficient research funding were made available, and if the problem of control can be solved, we could have prototype heat engines and space heaters in a few years. This would cost several hundred million dollars.
At that stage we would need massive funding, hundreds of billions of dollars, but within 5 or 10 years we would have cold fusion automobiles, generators and space heating. That would take care of nearly all energy production. It would leave only things like aircraft, railroad engines and some other heavy equipment that typically takes decades to design.
Cold fusion power density and heat are not extreme. The reaction produces no measurable levels of radioactive waste or chemical pollution. It would not be difficult to adapt it to existing technology. It should take no longer than it took Toyota to design and begin selling the Prius, which was 5 or 10 years (5 years in Japan, 10 for the rest of the world.)
The transition would begin with relatively small machines such as automobiles and co-generators under 100 kW. These two machines alone would replace more than half of our primary energy generation.
To summarize, cold fusion works on a small scale, and it produces no pollution, therefore it could solve the energy crisis faster than conventional, large-scale centralized technology such as fission reactors, gas turbines, megawatt scale wind turbines, and hydrogen powered automobiles.
I discussed this topic in my book "Cold Fusion and the Future" which was recommended by Arthur C. Clarke and many distinguished professors. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
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