Jasper packed a large bunch of Artemisia Afra for his Christmas holiday in Johannesburg. He and his daughter Shashi repacked into the resulting Christmas gifts:
Artemesia Afra
Jasper stripped leaves from stems and packed them into (recycled nut butter) bottles, while Shashi hand wrote labels and pasted them onto the bottles. So, for the cost of harvesting the Wilde Als (Atemisia Afra), plus the cost of a page of sticky labels and some ink, seven gifts were hand made, and a pleasant, “crafty” afternoon was spent.
Offices were always going to become optional. Video conferencing was always going to drag us into a global market. The Internet was always going to make the world smaller each year. Nobody could predict the rapid acceleration of these trends in 2020.
Believe it or not, we have the pandemic to thank for these advancements, with technology finally thrusting us into a new world of remote work, video conference sales calls, global digital events and teams working from wherever their homes may be.
Like it or not, this was always where the future was going, it just arrived with a crash, not a whimper.
Last week learners Aviwe and Michelle accepted a challenge to achieve 20 words per minute in two weeks. Here they are, ready to go with Tux Typing on our Ubuntu Linux PC.
According to this article, Australia’s lockdown led to a surge in roof-top solar panel installations, possibly making 2020 a record breaking year for Australian green power growth. It is believed that more people working at home, together wih reduced transport costs, meaning more money for home improvements, and pandemic low interest rates, were also factors. Australia now has 2.4 million rooftop solar systems, generating 9.7 gigawatts, or 9.7 trillion watts.
Putting this another way, Australian rooftops do about one quarter of what Eskom achieves.
Solar panel prices have dropped nine-fold in a decade. What is the pay-back period now? About ten years ago, it was at least 20 years before recoupment. Nine fold is roughly 11% per annum reduction in cost, so it must surely have reduced the recoupment period to ten years or less.
We are at the beginning of 4IR. What is it? Let’s do key words for each so far. Industrial Revolution number:
1. Mechanisation: textile looms, plough, steam
2. Heavy industry: Mines, Oil, Electricity
3. Telecoms: Electronics, Computers, Nuclear, Space
4. Internet: ATMs, Cellphones, Smartphones
Perhaps even more simply, we can trace the developments by travel:
Really, rocket? Yes. Elon Musk thinks we can go anywhere on earth in half an hour. Where the Concorde billboards shouted Breakfast in London, Lunch in New York (some added "Luggage in Hong Kong"), Musk believes it can be (for example) Breakfast in London, Tea in Sydney. Since SpaceX is already well into working on getting to Mars, why not just believe him? His “Starship” (looking like a huge, stainless steel beer can, maybe as big as those cylindrical apartment blocks) launched on Tuesday 4th of August, lifted itself 150m, then gently, successfully returned to the the ground.
Only a decade ago, rockets became junk soon after launch. These days, SpaceX returns them into use, though we don’t know whether Starship will be re-used.
What has really changed from revolution to revolution, and what changes will 4IR bring?
More details are emerging about Elon Musk’s Starlink. You may want to install one of these (from SpaceX) on your nearby koppie:
It appears they will supply a dish to Beta users who sign up for the test period. Cost of dish/antenna is not yet clear. Charge for internet usage is around $149 per year. That’s about R2.5k pa or R210 pm. A dish on a high koppie (with a much smaller dinner plate sized) node pointing at a receiver on a high point, for example on the roof of a dwelling, will enable 1GB/Sec download (eg an an entire 90 min Hollywood feature movie inside three minutes).
SO WHAT … is NEW? Some answers:
Simplicity
Savings
Unforeseens
Simplicity
Elon Musk wants everyone to have internet. For a start, there is no such thing as a Tesla car without internet. They get, and need, updates almost constantly. So Musk says these Starlink antennae will not need specialists to install them. Anyone will be able to.
Secondly, Tesla sells roofing tiles that collect solar electriciy, and batteries that store it. This will become more common. In South Africa, that means (since Eskom has largely killed itself of as a trustworthy supplier) more and more farmers are going to wean their farms off Eskom, at least in terms of supply to their dwellings. The first thing a criminal wants is to disable your power so you can’t get help, so generating your own at your house rules out the bad guys cutting off supply from down the road somewhwere.
Simple electricity and internet installations are the way to go, and DIY power generation will become the norm on farms where 3-phase is not needed for heavy machinery plants.
Ayabonga with sheep and implements, destined for his mother in Eastern Cape.
Hanglip hosted several graduates since November 2018. Two are still with us. He and the other, Bongeka Duba, set off to the Transkei, taking some sheep sold to Ayabonga’s mother, together with a pair of implements Hanglip will never again use. Bongeka will go on home from there.
In Sebastian Faulks’s book Birdsong set in WWI, he said that war was “A huge crime against nature”. Can anyone beat that for a description? Here’s a challenge. Take one third of KwaZulu Natal, find thickets of woods, and get rid of them by shooting at them until there’s nothing left alive. No? Too much? What’s wrong? It took them only four days to get rid of Delville Wood in 1916.
"every fiscal conservative is hiding their copy of Ayn Rand and is lining up for benefits from the nanny state"
Ricardo Salvador:
“Emancipation never really came to agriculture, in the sense that we still don’t pay the full value of the labor that’s required to make the entire system work.
There’s a phenomenon that all of us are observing at the moment that…. We could make this a political conversation, and I will try to steer away from that. But the fact is that policy is involved, and the phenomenon that I’m referring to is the phenomenon that’s known typically as the fog of war. When you have a major crisis that is absorbing the public’s attention, this is a prime time to try to push through policy goals that normally would just be completely intolerable, unpalatable, to the public.
