Odd people say weird stuff everyday. Last week, a 40-something woman came into the booking hall to get out of the wind and roll up a cigarette. Against my unspoken wishes, she decided to instigate a conversation. She opened by stating that my life must be shit. Perhaps it is. I guess things depend on perspective. My response was to suggest that things could be worse. For example, I had just watched a woman on the CCTV spend five minutes picking up soggy, discarded cigarette butts from the gutter outside before coming into the booking hall to try and turn those butts into a new cigarette. The penny dropped, the conversation was done and she left.
A couple of weeks earlier, a friend of Mrs P regaled us all with alien stories, boldly asserting that ‘everyone knows aliens are here’. When I interjected to point out that this isn’t quite true, she spoke over me. ‘Oh here we go, here comes Mr Rational.’ And she was being quite serious. Rationality counts for nothing. Evidence? Facts? Phooey! I’d been here with her before. She’d claimed that a full moon has greater gravitational effect than other types of moon. I’d tried to explain stuff about the moon’s perigee and sub lunar points and blah blah blah. But you know, it’s ok.
People, odd and otherwise, say weird stuff and that’s ok. I partake myself, from time to time. Don’t we all? It gives us stuff to chat about. Stories to tell. And it livens up the world. Until it doesn’t. I’m going to make a largely unprovable prediction with genuine confidence that it will come to pass. In 2018, nearly 14,000 people in the US were shot dead by another person. I predict that over the next twelve months, a greater number of unvaccinated people will die from Covid because they’d been persuaded by the antivax community not to get the jab. I think my prediction is extraordinarily conservative.
This persuasion is almost totally driven by the internet. There’s a conversation to be had on the subject. And I’m happy to enter the debate as Mr Rational.
The Mexile 
I tell people that war with China or Russia is a very long reach because of the fact that we three are owners of city levelers. Sure we’ll pee on each others shoes but going all out with our pocket guns…not one chance in ten million. Even that idiot Trump knew the real situation. Most of what we spend on military kit is to deal with the rest of the hooligans. This is not popular thought but I suspect it is accurate.
Money supply: When a very great deal of money is lost through a stock market crash, housing crash or as in the recent mass shutdown of work due to the lockdowns, polities that enjoy ‘reserve’ monetary status can print/create money out of thin air until they reach the amount that was lost and not turn on the inflation fire hose. This is not considered rational but again I suspect it to be true.
I think we should revisit Hydrogen as a ‘heavy lift platform, “Oh the humanity”, I think our building materials are a little better than they were a hundred years ago.
We should put more effort into casting metals in space. That zero gravity has possibilities.
And last for today. We need to spend a lot more money on looking into how gravity is transferred through time and space. Figure how to turn it off in a localized manner. Yeah, I’m a crackpot.
I really liked the cigarette story-nice response.
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I’ve read more than one economist wail that printing money solves nothing. Well of course not. Its use has, in my lifetime, been very much a preventative action. Always best to be proactive rather than reactive.
It was a shame Alien Girl didn’t let me finish. I don’t exclude the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. I’m simply aware that the chances of two civilisations meeting are a bit remote. Sure, perhaps there’s some worm hole tech out there. But probably not.
The most likely meeting of civilisations will be thru a probe sent by one to the other. It’ll take millions of years to get where it needs to go and if it finds signs of life, it’ll probably be extinct life. It’ll send the data back home, over millions of more years, to a civilisation that itself is now probably extinct.
But that this could even be possible is a miracle in itself and is thanks to improvements to atomic clocks which now mean a device can keep time to within a second over a period of 16 million years. Essential, when navigation through space is entirely dependent on accurate time keeping.
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The gold silver debate toward the end of the nineteenth century had to do with money supply, gold won that debate. If we tried to use gold today, gold would cost better than a million an ounce if the supply were set at today’s amount. China has a better grip on its concept of money supply-print as much as the economy can swallow without double digit inflation. They whisper that they would like to go global with their currency but that would mean giving up control of their money supply-not in our lifetime Gary.
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