“Evening O’er An 802.11g”, this is my newest photocomposition. Here is a Florida sunset next to my new high-gain antenna, set for the 30km radius mentioned last day. The working parts, running on 24 volts, are inside a weatherproof housing. It is not working right but that is a matter of a day or so of calibration. Eventually, there will probably be a second identical antenna facing 180 degrees the other way, covering out past the Everglades.
For those always wondered about those weird extra settings in your router, we now know what they are for. We will use this power only for good, but then again, don’t piss us off. We can really reach out and touch someone. You do know what packet-sniffing software is, do you not? Breaking a mild rule about predictions, next weekend club has a scheduled training session. We are picking up the tab for our honorary West Palm member to travel to town to teach us hands-on to make PDB boards. He is also providing the club with several expensive sensors we would not otherwise be able to afford.
I spent the hot part of the day searching for the chemicals. I have a $10 bottle of etchant, a new word in my vocabulary. All this may seem primitive to anyone who took shop in high school, but it is anything but easy considering there is nothing even remotely like this in my entire background. Learning practical skills other than picking rocks on the farm was a dangerous practice when I was a kid at home. Very dangerous. And what new word did you learn today? Is Pocahontas really a word?
When I was in Radio Shack, one of the staff asked about web sites where he could begin to learn electronics. This is what, September? That’s missing the boat by a ways, but I directed him to English sources where there is less baloney and better grammar. Like myself, it appears most English at least bother to proofread what they write at least once. He’s welcome to join the club but we are a little past the blinking light stage. Once we can make even primitive printed circuit boards, we approach robot production time and after that it will be nearly impossible to catch up.
E24, the honorary member, has produced clone Arduino boards, so I’d like this opportunity to go over again what it is we gain by etching PCBs. We finally will be able to burn our own EEPROM chips and remove them from the Arduino to the clone at a considerable savings. This will also free us from having to dismantle and reuse parts after each project. Further, it will eliminate the maze of dangling wires that accompanied our later projects and allow us to permanently embed the chips in working robots. Nothing sophisticated at first, but then again, compared to February, anything we build that moves will be sophisticated beyond our original beliefs.
The following is commentary on food prices and a possible explanation. This is not required reading, you can skip it. But food is the fastest inflating item most people buy. It helps to know some of the reasons. The term for countries that produce pineapples, sugar, coffee, tobacco, this type of product are called “dessert” economies. They produce what we have for dessert.
A package of crackers is $5.49, same with 2/3 of a pound of coffee. Shopping today was definitely not a pleasure as real inflation is hitting the working class at around 15% per year for three years running now (my estimate). Real inflation is what you pay, not the government statistic. I knew it would be food, since this country has reverted to the system most of the world uses. Huge land-owning estates concentrated in a few hands. The average citizen doesn’t see it because farm machines are still cheaper than human labor, but just leave that border open a few more decades.
But does everybody know the system the rest of the world uses? Allow me to explain as best I can. American farms have always been different from the rest, the small farmer owned his land and usually enough of if it to make a profit. When the west was opened, millions of Europeans headed west for the opportunity to own land, something not possible under the feudal and enclosure systems back in Europe. For most of humanity, you’ve got a wealthy land owner and everybody else is a laborer.
This formula is further distorted in America because, except for the defunct plantation era, farms were limited in size by the cost of bringing in the crops. When combines and reapers came along, they were so efficient it led to larger farms and fewer farmers. The cities absorbed the excess population into manufacturing plants at first, and more recently, pizza delivery boys and security guards.
In the other continents, human labor remained the cheapest for centuries, cheaper than a donkey. Most food is grown by tenant farmers under short leases, giving them no incentive to improve the land since in the end it all reverts back to the estate owner. Each farmer has to exploit the land to the limit before his lease is up. Of course, the landlord is motivated to squeeze as much from the farmer as possible. I’ve seen people who read about land reform scratch their heads about laws that say the farmer gets to “keep” 40% of what he produces. This makes sense if the landlord would otherwise take 95%.
Nor is it enough to send foreign aid to these small farmers, since most of them have no way to sell any surpluses on the open market. It would rot in their fields. Railways are so expensive only the wealthy landowners could afford to build them. If the workers produce and sell a surplus, they eventually become healthy, literate, and sooner or later learn they have rights. Worse, they could then afford guns and ammo. It is better for landlords to keep them at a subsistence level and dying young.
The two places I’ve seen this state of affairs are India and Venezuela. (There are worse, but I haven’t seen them.) I can forgive Venezuela because politics is the cause and solution, and Chavez has initiated land reform. But India made it religion-based meaning they’ll continue to die by the billions without ever learning a damn thing.
For successful land reform, I look to the example of Egypt, where Nassar’s government bought the cotton plantations for the price the foreign owner’s declared them to be worth on their income tax returns. He rightfully nationalized the Suez Canal as well, after losing 120,000 soldiers defending it at El Alamein. Gaining excellent practice for their future wars, the Egyptian Army retreated so fast Rommel couldn’t catch ‘em until he ran smack into the entire British 8th Army which, by pure coincidence, happened to be on their Annual Target Practice and Jamboree near the Qattara Depression and came out of their tents during tea to see what all the bloody noise was about.
The underlying difficulty is it is expensive to develop roads, canals, barges, ports and railways to get the food to people who want to buy it. In America, our system was constructed over 100 years using big chunks of our national wealth. It is still inefficient yet probably no other nation in history could afford to duplicate it. Hell, we could not replace or keep it repaired ourselves. In South America under Spanish rule, trade between villages and neighboring countries was forbidden (Casa Contrataction), so all colonial wealth eventually went to Spain.
Yet Spain had nothing the farm laborers wanted in return. Even today you can find abandoned opera houses 500 miles up the Amazon. Each village tends to produce what it can consume or trade locally. If you try to improve them or and the land, only the wealthy landowner gets richer. This is what farm subsidies are doing to the United States. The small farmer is being squeezed from both sides. Possibly the US needs land reform of its own.
The only US land I’ve ever owned was 1/8 of a desert acre in California, won the only time I ever played poker. It was $200 of useless subdivision and repossessed for back taxes in 1984.
