The “Smart-Meter” may not be able to count right

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A great majority of so-called “Smart-Meters” that have been tested in Germany and elsewhere show that those intelligent meters miscount very often, and that not to the consumer's benefit.

Not so long ago you had to – at least once a year – read your electricity and gas meter, or someone from the utility companies would come around to read the meters. Intelligent meters, so-called “smart” meters, no do that all by themselves and in many cases transmit the data to the companies direct. Tests have shown, however, that they often get their figures wrong, badly wrong even, and that to the disadvantage of the consumer. To prove that the meter reading is wrong, however, is for the consumer not an easy one.

While a small number of smart-meters metered an amount of up to 30% below actual use the great majority, apparently, metered up to six times the real usage. In other words, the majority of those will leave the consumer out of pocket, and that very much so.

According to the researchers the reason that the smart-meters measure so badly and often higher than actual use could be because they use electronics that cause interference to the mains circuitry. And all those meters, by the way, were EU approved ones.

Consumer protection organizations are ringing the alarm bells because in the next couple of years those smart-meters are supposed to become mandatory everywhere. Unless they can be guaranteed to work accurately which, at present, the apparently cannot and do not, then the consumer will not be the one benefiting at all but will be disadvantaged. But, hey, so what, its great technology and technology is the way forward.

© 2017

Local urban farm redefining farm to table

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KJCT) -- Local farms have to deal with Colorado's ever changing weather.

Many farms, orchards and vineyards in the valley were caught off guard by the cold snap overnight earlier this week.

One urban farm, Rooted Gypsy Farms, that is trying to make it easier to shop local, lost hundreds of plants.

"I jumped the gun and planted a little too soon, the frost came and nipped them all a little bit and we lost over half of our crop," said Shauna Rhyne, with Rooted Gypsy Farms.

Business at Rooted Gypsy Farms is still just a seedling after all.

“October third was first delivery, so it’s still a new thing in the valley,” said Shauna Rhyne. “It kind of makes us feel like we are connected to the community, in a way that I feel good giving our product to a family.”

They use an aquaponics system for your lettuce, kale and other herbs.

“It’s all ran through the fish, they excrete ammonia, which turns into nitrate and nitrites, which the plants need to survive,” explained Rhyne.

They are all about community supported agriculture, meaning your produce comes from the soil to the kitchen.

Read more here.

Poundland Charlie Dimmock In the Garden Hand Trowel – Product Review

Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

While they may call it a hand spade on the website it is a trowel for planting – well – plants and digging in more or less soft soil. It is not a spade, not even a hand spade, and thus not a tool to dig heavy and untilled soil with, not even in a raised bed, for instance.

This trowel – no, folks, it is not a hand spade – is part of the new and exclusive Charlie Dimmock range – assortment of wooden handled hand tools at Poundland and yes, it costs just one British Pound. The assortment, according to the website, includes, aside from the trowel, a “rake”, which actually is a three-pronged weeder, a hand-hoe (which has fork tines on one side and a near heart-shaped blade on the other, so it is a bit like a mattock), a fork, and a scoop.

OK, but we shall, in this review, be talking about the trowel; a review of the hoe is to follow.

While it may not be hammer forged – at least it does not appear to me that it would be – and rather stamped steel and does not have a welded on bit that goes into the handle it is quite heavy but also quite well balanced.

The “blade” of the trowel sits snug and tight in the varnished wooden handle which has a hole for a thong and has a leather one fitted even. Not the greatest quality of leather in that thong though but, hey, where is the problem there. The blade of the trowel is coated with a hammer effect paint making it, together with wooden handle and all, look very good indeed. The edge of the blade has not been ground, though, as would be the case with more expensive makes but you cannot expect Rollins Bulldog or Burgon & Ball quality for a Pound now.

As trowels go the Charlie Dimmock one from Poundland will go the job a trowel is meant to do though, personally, I might not want to use it to dig out, say, dandelions from the lawn or even out of somewhat compacted soil elsewhere, or brambles from under shrubs or such in order not to put too much strain on it. Seeing that the edge is not beveled and ground it would also be rather hard work. Would I put a bevel and a ground edge onto the “blade”? The honest answer is no.

Considering the price of just one Pound, including VAT, I cannot fault the tool and if you have to count your pennies but still want a garden trowel that you can afford – and the cheapest you will find elsewhere if metal blade and wooden handle is desired will set you back around seven to ten times that much – then this is a good choice.

For less than a tenner you can, at Poundland, get all the hand tools you will need for your gardening endeavors, as long as you do not expect battle tank strength.

© 2017

Stop Tilling Your Vegetable Garden!

I get why you till. There’s something in all of us gardeners that leaps with joy when we see a freshly tilled bed. That rich, dark, blank canvas beckons us to come on over and work our vegetable magic. We imagine ourselves gently planting a seedling in the fluffy soil with no straining or digging necessary.

But, garden fantasies aside, tilling the garden every year is a terrible idea in practice. Not only are you destroying the soil structure, creating a hard pan, and bringing weed seeds up to the surface – you’re also creating more work for yourself.

Inevitably, within a few days of tilling there will be a torrential downpour that completely erodes and compacts your freshly tilled garden. It’ll look like a war zone of flattened, soil splattered plants with a depressing system of rivulets running everywhere.

Read more here.

Proletariat, precariat and unnecessariat

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

First we had the proletariat (well, we still have it, really; it is the working class), then recently and still with us, the precariat and now the unnecessariat.

The proletariat, the working class, arrived after the peasantry and was, in fact, forcibly created by the powers-that-be but rather should not be. The working class, almost everywhere, from the very beginning, has lived much more hand-to-mouth than the peasantry ever did, and that was also the idea. The peasantry was far too self-reliant and almost self-sufficient, despite the fact that many were but tenant farmers, at least towards the end, and had to pay tribute to the landlords.

But, self-reliance and self-sufficiency, especially combined with the common and a community that looked after one another, as was the case with the peasantry was not something that the factory owner could do with; he needed a slave class that was dependent entirely on him, the work he “provided” in his factories and the paltry wages he was paying. Often the employment in those factories went hand-in-hand with housing provided by the same factory owner and loss of work did not just mean loss of income but also homelessness. Thus was born the working class, the more-or-less class of industrial workers, the proletariat.

The precariat are the “downwardly mobile” former members of the working class, what is referred to as middle class in the USA, who are always one layoff or shift-reduction away from economic ruination.

Already before the arrival of those lay-offs, shift reduction and now, in many places the so-called “zero hours contracts” many members of the working class (I will not use the US term simply because it was designed to remove the proper class consciousness from the workers in the States) were often but one weekly paycheck away from poverty and homelessness anyway, but now things are more precarious even. Hence the term precariat. Their situation is extremely precarious.

Now below the precariat is the unnecessariat. That are the humans who are superfluous to corporations, who are a liability to the modern economic consensus, whom no corporation has any use for, except as a source of revenue from predatory loans, government subsidized "training" programs, and private prisons. This is how far capitalism has fallen under the neoliberal elite.

Corporations have realized humanity's long nightmare of a race of immortal, transhuman superbeings – robots – who view us as their inconvenient gut-flora, but it is those transhuman superbeings, namely robots into the equation and are, more and more, introducing them into the field of work. The unnecessariat are an expanding class, and if you are not in it yet, there is no reason to think you would not also land there tomorrow.

If there is no economic plan for the unnecessariat, there certainly is an abundance for plans to extract value from them. No-one has the option to just make their own way and be left alone at it.

Every four years some political ingenue decides that the solution to “poverty” is “retraining”: for the information economy, except that tech companies only hire high-grade university graduates, or for health care, except that an abundance of sick people does not translate into good jobs for nurses’ aides, or nowadays for “the trades” as if the world suffered a shortage of plumbers, though to some degree the world does suffer a shortage of good trades- and craftsmen and -women.

The retraining programs come and go, often mandated for recipients of unemployment benefit or whatever those things might be called. In the US there is also now a booming market in debtor’s prisons for unpaid bills, and , no doubt, those – privately run, more than likely – will also mushroom in other countries. It is a business opportunity after all.

There is a new – well all that new it is not – in the arsenal of the capitalism and that is hunger. More about that, however, in a separate article. Hunger, poverty and homelessness, or at least the threat of all three, are used as a weapon against the working class and unless the working class unites and fights those threats and capitalism as a whole many of the proletariat, who at present still have jobs, could find themselves amongst the precariat or even the unnecessariat.

Unite and fight; we have nothing to lose.

© 2017

Church solar project inspires solar for neighborhood

One of the things that has always interested me about solar—and other clean tech—is the potential for them to become contagious. While few of us have the power, or the inclination, to build a coal plant just because the neighbors down the road have one, the distributed nature of solar means that one installation can lead to many more as neighbors get inspired by what other neighbors are doing.

There's still one impediment to this though. And that's money. Despite rapid declines in the cost of solar power, upfront costs can be prohibitive for many—even if there are long-term savings to be had.

Enter Resonant Energy. Based in Boston, this social enterprise is working on building coalitions of community partners to plan, finance and install solar projects. One of its flagship efforts—a successful Interfaith Community Solar Campaign—has already brought solar to Second Church in Dorchester, Bethel A.M.E., and the Church of Saint Augustine and Saint Martin. Because upfront costs are covered by the project, churches start saving from day one.

Read more here.

6 most common sources of plastic pollution

The 5 Gyres Institute has published a report called “The Plastics BAN List.” Its purpose is to assess which plastics are most damaging to human health and the environment. Plastic waste was collected and analyzed to see in which form it’s most commonly found, which toxic chemicals are used to create the plastics, and what recovery systems (i.e. recycling, composting, reuse) exist, if any.

The list includes “Better Alternatives Now” (that’s where the BAN acronym comes in) – ways in which consumers, industry, and government can take voluntary action without waiting for technological fixes.

Voluntary action is key because, as the BAN list explains in its Findings and Recommendations, nearly all of these products have no economic value in today’s recycling systems. This may come as a shock to those people who think recycling is a viable green solution:

Read more here.

British Home Secretary wants to ban encryption

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd wants to ban encryption – well basically – for she demands that the security services and police be given access to the encryption WhatsApp and other secure messaging services. Calls have been made already a while ago to outlaw the use and possession of the Web- and desktop based Telegram messaging service which also end-to-end encrypts messages. Only WhatsApp is much more popular for sure as it is on so many smartphones and used by so many people daily, and not just by those with ill intent.

It has to be said that the British Home Secretary is not the only interior minister who wants to do this. In other countries similar moves are afoot such as in Germany as regards to Facebook and other social media. It was also the EU who was wanting to make the possession and use of “Telegram” illegal, in the same way that the governments want to outlaw email encryption – such as PGP – altogether. Apparently, if you are not up to anything illegal you can't have anything to hide, is their argument. In light of certain countries now giving green light to all our email data and even content being sold to advertising agencies and such like I am sure we all have something to hide or at least would like some of our more personal email exchanges and such to be kept private, as well as other details.

If the powers-that-be – which really should not be – insist that they have the right to be snooping on everything it is high time that the people turned the tables on them.

Thus, maybe, we will have to devise our own codes again, like in the days of old, such as the book cypher or phrase cypher.

Phrase cypher are “innocent” phrases and sentences that have a meaning only to the sender and the recipient and can be hidden in almost any text – as long as it makes sense – such as “Aunt Betty has a new hen”, “the post may be a little late today”, etc.

I am very well aware that this approach would be considered by the powers-that-be probably as illegal but they would have to know first what really is going on.

Also the demand to be given access to encrypted messages of apps and such like is but the first step on the ladder of being able to read all emails and ordinary letter, have no doubt about it. Already the British government and a number of other EU ones and that of the USA demand to get that right, namely to read all of our emails without the need for a warrant.

In the US the postal service has for years already been routinely copying the recipient and sender from letters and packages, and that not just from mail coming from outside the US.

In light of the above we have to question as to whether – in fact – a more or less routine general breach of the postal secrecy law is in operation and if not many letters are already being opened (or read in some other way that we do not know about).

Do you know why envelopes have, or at least used to have, a very strange pattered interior lining? That lining is intended to make it more or less impossible to read the contents, or at least part of the contents, of a letter without actually opening it. Just a little snippet of trivia here.

For the moment, at least in the majority of countries, letters sent via a postal network, that is to say “snail mail”, is still safe as, theoretically, and I do stress the word theoretically, an individual warrant is required for the authorities to intercept and read our letters. The “for the moment” will also have to be stressed very severely here.

Therefore it may really be the time that we considered devising our own codes and cyphers that can be hidden in ordinary letters, emails and even messages on whatever kind of service, without the “enemy” realizing that a cypher is being used. But all intended recipients then have to be on the same page and sing from the same hymn sheet.

© 2017

Today's throwaway and buy new society

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The intro – so to speak – below was posted on a Facebook forum by a lady who was rather disgusted, as we can see from what she writes, by the attitude of the woman, or women, concerned:

“Overheard while walking the dog:

'Oh, look at that, the button's just come off my coat, I'll have to get a new one now'

I turned to watch while the dog had stopped for a sniff. She had the button in her hand! Her friend was sympathizing with her about how badly things are made etc. IT'S A FLAMING BUTTON! They were making enough of a fuss that had I not been dog walking and had my usual handbag on me, I'd have offered to sew it back on there and then!!”

The problem is that that is the attitude of the great majority of people today almost everywhere we look in the so-called developed world.

So, a button, which has not even been lost but is in her hand, has come off her coat and the only thing that both women (not counting the lady who was walking the dog and who posted the original) can think of is that the coat, thus, will need replacing. They could not even think as far as needle and thread and sewing the button back on.

How did the thing go as to “for the lack of a nail a shoe was lost”? Something about the kingdom having been lost in the end. Preventative maintenance, also with clothing, is a good idea to make them last longer, and that also goes for cheap clothes. There is no need to throw a garment away because of a loose or lost button. All that is required is needle and thread (and obviously the knowledge of how to sew on a button) and also a button if the latter is lost.

Is it any wonder that tonnes of clothes are thrown on a daily basis, often clothes that would not need to be thrown if one would walk the repair path, and the great majority of those clothes thrown out end up in landfill. What we also seem to see is that people do not care much in general either. If they leave a coat or whatever behind in a park they rarely ever come back looking for it, be that children's clothes or adult ones.

That same also goes for many other things that they lose. People just no longer – a great majority of them, at least – appear to be valuing their possessions. While many of the older generation – at least those that grew up with not much disposable cash – and I include myself in this – act differently those that are somewhat younger when it comes to valuing possessions. But not just as far as losing something and then going and looking for it rather than, as the younger generations do, simply buying new; they also look to make their things last, even though today that is not that easy as repair often it not possible or several times more expensive than buying new.

But a button on a coat and then considering that a new coat must be purchased is just something that to me, at least, is difficult to fathom. Not only is it a case of waste of a garment, it is a serious waste of resources. And the resources are not just, in the case of a coat, the cloth and labor and such, but it is a very long list, depending whether it is made from man-made fibers or natural fibers. It includes oil and the resources it took to get the stuff out of the ground, if it is a polyester material, for instance, or seed, water, etc. if cotton, and that just for starters.

I don't know, but somewhere along the line many seem to have entirely lost the plot.

© 2017

The party city grows up: how Berlin's clubbers built their own urban village

What if a city allowed a huge regeneration project to be led, not by the wealthiest property developer, but by the club owners who put on the best parties in town? With the opening of Holzmarkt, Berlin is about to find out

For the first decade of the 21st century, the industrial wasteland between Berlin’s Ostbahnhof station and the river Spree was earmarked for a huge urban regeneration project – one that would show that the German capital could keep up with London and New York. Where flowing water had once marked the divide between communist and capitalist spheres of influence were to be a phalanx of high-rise blocks made of shiny glass, some of them 80 metres tall, containing luxury apartments, hotels and offices.

But tomorrow, that same 12,000m² patch of land will open with an altogether different look: an urban village made of recycled windows, secondhand bricks and scrap wood, containing among other things a studio for circus acrobats, a children’s theatre, a cake shop and a nursery where parents can drop off their children while they go clubbing next door. There’s even a landing stage for beavers.

The Holzmarkt development is the result of an unprecedented experiment in a major world capital: what if a city allowed a new quarter to be built not by the highest bidding property developers or the urban planners with the highest accolades, but the nightclub owners who put on the best parties in town?

Juval Dieziger, 42, and Christoph Klenzendorf, 43, used to run Bar25, an institution which started as a silver ‘68 Nagetusch trailer serving up whisky and techno and grew into a nightclub in the style of a Western saloon underneath the old Jannowitzbrücke station.

Along with nearby Berghain, Bar25 was one of the legendary venues that fostered post-millennial Berlin’s status as a party capital. With the site due to be regenerated by holding company SpreeUrban, Bar25 closed its doors with a five-day party in 2010.

Read more here.