The Episodikal Podcast

Accidental voting mechanism

June 12, 2022 Episodikal Media Episode 4

In this episode, wondering where green energy is, we talk about the energy crisis, the not-so-new electric cars, and finally discover the hidden functionality your power switch manufacturer didn’t tell you this multipurpose device has. You will be surprised just how much power your power switch has.

Free energy in the 19th century
The history of Porsche begins electrically
Italian city fundraises to pay retirees' rising energy bills
Young people can’t afford power bills as they work from home during lockdown
Your electricity could be turned off for 10 minutes this weekend - here’s why
Multi-Purpose Complex Voskhod

We sincerely thank our friends from USA, Canada, and Australia for expressing their support and ideas for the new topics to cover 🙏

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Alexey :

It's so great to see that our listeners are sharing their opinions and ideas in the comments. And we truly appreciate these interactions. Guys, please keep the comments coming. You're listening to The Episodikal Podcast, where we talk about topics that are not discussed in the mainstream media, but that concern everyone living on this planet. And today we'll talk about the energy crisis. In the previous episode, we touched on the topic of the metaverse and discussed some of the issues as we see them. As exciting as this may seem to some, there are as always things that we need to consider and think through before rushing all in. And I love technology. From the first time when I saw a computer at the age of six, I knew that this was it. And I've been working in the field for my whole life. So I'm definitely not against progress. That is if we really are progressing. I mean, can we say that minor technological advances in the recent years improved our lives? We're not even talking about drastic changes. I agree that having faster computers and electric cars is great, but not having the electricity to power them is not what we expected. To me it looks like we are regressing and making one step forward, and who knows how many steps backward? These brings us to most important question, where's the green energy? Taliy, you just returned from Washington DC, where you've been with our friends talking to people. Can you please tell us a bit more?

Taliy:

Yeah, thank you so much, Alex. So pleasure to be here with you again. And yeah, we just came back from DC trip with the Creative Society, we were representing our community at the forum, locally hosted International Forum, touching topics like lobbying, and lobbying, modern lobbying, is basically something that we should apply in our life. Because we as a society, the best way to lobby something is to make a request, just articulate what do you want. Also, I had the chance to speak to the people, I love traveling around US and just talking to people from different cities, countries, and to get to know what their concerns are like, what's the most pressing issues there are on their minds, and everyone had the same thing they were talking about. It's the rising cost of living, it's inability to afford very basic things here in the US like gas prices going out of control. By the end of this year, we have all this food shortages and things. But what my friends from Michigan told me was shocking. They said they went to local Panera Bread, and half of the menu was not even there, you cannot order things. And then whatever is left on it was super expensive. And the quality was much lower than previously. And the question why? They say it's because of the supply chains, it's because of the gas prices, it's because of this crisis. And if it goes like that, by the end of the year, just go into a local, I don't know hamburger place is gonna be a luxurious thing that not anyone can afford. And especially considering if you want to drive your truck over there to go for a drive-thru, it's going to be a luxurious experience. It's not like stuff that we used to. So even things that were normal or getting out of reach for many of us. And if you think you're going to be fine working from home, over there, well think about that price of electricity is going up, you're not gonna be able to afford sitting at your laptop. That's actually not a joke. That's what's happening in Australia right now in 2021. With increasing electricity prices, so I don't know where that green energy is. Yeah, answering your question. I have no idea where the energy is.

Alexey :

This is very interesting that you mentioned this about Australia. It's true that there was an article, we'll link to it in the show notes, that young people could not afford working from home because they had long lockdown still in 2021, people were forced to work from homes, but they could not afford to pay their electricity bill. Well, this brings many questions, obviously. Why is the pace of low, first, and why is the electricity in Australia where they have a lot of sun, why they're not harnessing the power of solar? If they say it's so great, why is there not enough? And why is it so expensive? We have also got news from our friends from Germany who have right now intermittent power cuts because the power grid cannot sustain the demand because they don't have enough supply of electricity. I think Germany was the country that lobbied the most for green energy and they shut down all their power plants. And now they're trying to revive the old power plants that work on coal because they don't have enough electricity. We know that trillions of dollars are being spent and were spent on switching to this renewable energy and here we are. We don't have enough power or the cost is so high that people can't afford it. So where did the money go? This is the question that everyone should ask their local government. If this money comes from our taxes, well, we should be able to trace where it is spent. And if we don't have this electricity, we don't have enough to power our homes. This is not progress. I mean, I don't find this situation that we're switching to electric cars. Every car manufacturer now has electric car, or several of them, I don't know how it is in the US, but in Europe, the fast charging stations, they charge you almost as much as you pay for gas. And this is where we come to the same conclusion that no matter what energy source, even if it would be special water, in the consumerist format of society, you would be charged the same price. This is crazy for me.

Taliy:

This is really crazy. Because when you think about it, all the resources we have right now, it's enough resources for everyone needs, but it's not enough resources for the human greed. And this is when we come to another interesting topic, when I was asking the very same people I met in DC, like should human greed be limited at some level? And almost everyone was saying yes. And then the second question, I was asking, like, on what level, and most people said it should be some serious big amount of money. And I was like, what's the big amount of money? And people were like, well, few million dollars. Most of the people when I was asking them in form of game, let's assume we want to limit human greed, few million dollars for an individual according to most of the people I serveyed. It's not representative, by any means. They do say that few million dollars would be enough if the rest of the resources we would use for the benefit of the society somehow. Because what we have right now the system is just not working. Oh, one cool thing. We met this one person in Washington, DC, he was wearing this t-shirt, which was saying"no tax". And I was like, what's that about? And apparently that taxation is just out of control. People don't want to pay taxes. So he said without even knowing where they're going. Like, as you said, we have to have a right to track down our money. This kind of things are just not quite there, and we're not informed enough. I feel like we need more transparency in this kind of things. Definitely.

Alexey :

Transparency is definitely something that we are lacking in our society. Right now we are at this stage where we have internet and a lot of social networks, and people are just sharing what they see. It is much more difficult to contain this information. 50 years ago, you would have natural catastrophe. And unless it breaks the circle of a regional newspaper or TV channel, you would not be able to know about these things elsewhere. It's not the case today. Even going back several years, I remember a friend in Italy. And this stuck in my mind because it was maybe seven or eight years ago already. He told me, you know, there are households in Italy that cannot afford to have the electricity on for the whole 24 hours. They're just switching it on for a couple of hours to do I don't know the laundry or something that requires electricity. And then they switch it off. And this was like seven or eight years ago. And I was thinking like, wow, this is crazy. Now what what we have is even worse, we've been talking about NFTs, the metaverse, and the cryptocurrencies. Where do you think all these things live or reside? Well, right. These are software applications that require huge data centers in every part of the world. What do they need? Well, they need a lot of space and electricity. And data centers and cryptocurrency mining farms are among the most power-hungry consumers of electricity. And their numbers are growing. I mean, if we're talking about expanding everything to unimaginable levels, we would have to increase the electricity production. How are we even thinking about increasing these things? While people don't have enough electricity to power their homes? Can we even call our society civilized if in 21st century we do not have not only affordable electricity, but we don't have free electricity, which is also possible, and you can just find on the internet and we've been talking about the fuelless generators as well.

Taliy:

Thing I've seen on the internet that the new lottery jackpot is equals to two tanks of gas. I think that's gonna be somewhere out there by the end of this year. You would think that if our civilization progressing, we should get more affordable energy, and at some point, maybe even free energy. You know, when I'm watching 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla was transmitting energy wirelessly, lighting that light bulbs just like in the middle of the field with no wires at all. And then I'm seeing what we're having right now. I feel like we downgraded in some way. Like we didn't have cell phones and the Internet back then 100 years ago, but like what else besides that do we have right now? By the way, for all the Tesla car fans, which I also love those cars, but the technology was invented 100 years ago, the very same engine that's right there in your Tesla was invented by Nikola Tesla 100, over 100 years ago, and we only applied it right now. He was originally thinking to use wireless energy stations to power the cars wirelessly. For those of you who love history, it's also a fascinating fact how he had this huge battle of the ways to transmit energy. The way they used to do it before was super inefficient. But it was super profitable for some people who invested in those wires, and they did not want to risk replace them with more efficient energy. So basically whole Manhattan 100 years ago was covered in wires you couldn not see sky. If it wasn't for Nikola Tesla, it would be super dark in there until these days, because apparently, when some people invested into certain technology, and there is a newer technology that is much better, but it requires more investments from them, they're gonna stand in the way they're not going to let that thing stand in there between them and their profit. It's the consumer is at its so called best, yeah!

Alexey :

Going back to the electric cars, you know that the first cars in preparation were electric cars, even Porsche had the first car prototype, I think it surfaced somewhere it was from 1889, or something like that. It was an electric car. And Ford also was building an electric car before John D. Rockefeller came to him and said: no, no, look, you have to build an internal combustion engine. At that time. In the US, there were around 250 car manufacturers, I mean, guys who were trying, experimenting with building cars. Building an electric car is much simpler. Because you don't have an engine that is really complicated, you don't have that much moving parts, you could use also electricity that could be transmitted wirelessly with the inventions that Tesla was testing. And this is funny that we now all live in this world where we are reliant on gas to power our cars, and natural gas to power our power stations that we'll require also to produce electricity. And all this seems to have started with this switch that Ford produced the first car as a an internal combustion engine. As Rockefeller promised him, he would be the king of the automotive industry. And it happened. There were only 25 manufacturers left. And we know how many of them are left today, much less, I was thinking electric car is very simple in its construction. I mean, you don't need to have 1000s 10s of 1000s of controlled explosions just in front of you or behind you, depending where your engine is, and you have to control these, contain these explosions, basically just taking out about 10% of released energy for the wheels, all the rest just goes into the atmosphere. We are seeing today, electric cars presented as the best new invention of the century and everyone is hopping on this bandwagon.

Taliy:

We have to mature, we have to just see that there are technologies to do certain things, but they're not being used because it's financially against somebody's interest. Like you said the very first cars produced in this civilization were electric. And also the technology was about to be developed. And you know, the problem they say was producing batteries. But what we've seen in the beginning of the century, they were not thinking about producing batteries, they were thinking about using wireless transmission of energy. And we've seen the pictures. Have you seen those pictures from the end of 19 centuries where there are trams? There are trams that are moving in the streets of the cities with no wires! Like how crazy is that? And you can see stations over there. Apparently transmitting stations. And this whole thing has been erased. If it wasn't for the aliensoul28, the account on TikTok, I wouldn't know about it. I was just shocked to see those pictures. And apparently so many more technologies were just put somewhere on the shelf, or maybe oil companies like you said Rockfeller, he was personally interested in shutting down the electric car technology and so much, much more were just bought out by big oil companies and put on the shelf. They're not interested in developing any other technologies of getting electricity. But it's super fascinating when it comes to those pictures. Maybe we can pull them up and just include in this podcast short reels.

Alexey :

We can put links to these in the show notes. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And we can maybe touch upon this in another episode about how the information is being erased.

Taliy:

That would be super interesting, like lost technologies of the past. Yeah, because when I'm watching those geoglyphs made by the Nazca or like, you know, huge technologies or this multi angle pyramids or walls they've been doing with you then super sharp laser sharp stones. They call it poly agonal..

Alexey :

Cladding.

Taliy:

It's just mind blowing. And those things like 24,000 years old, and according to our history with did not even exist back then. Not only electricity, but we were somewhere hanging on the trees back then. Yeah. So this is super fascinating. And I would love to touch upon this topic and actually bring up some super fascinating stuff. And you can tell by the number of views how much people interested in this kind of stuff. And I would really love to disclose this wire war between Nikola Tesla and gosh Edison. Edison was the one who invested into the...

Alexey :

It's the direct and alternating current. I think it concerns this thing. Yeah, the wires were heating and everything. Yeah. There was this article all over the news that Italian city fundraises to pay retirees' rising energy bills. There are a lot of retirees in Florence, for example. Their annual pension is about 9000 euros, and they cannot afford to pay the rising energy bills. So the city...

Taliy:

Like how much is the bill?

Alexey :

I don't know how much is the bill. But let's say that it is several hundreds euros per month, I guess. The city fundraises, so taking money from other people, concerned people, to pay for these retirees energy bills, while the city's supplying this energy, they were increasing, they are increasing the prices, and they are paying so little to these people who are retired. Well, maybe they could increase their pension or they could decrease their bill. No, they put up a crowdfunding campaign for people again, to pay for the electricity bill. Wow, this really doesn't make any sense to me, but...

Taliy:

It's a twisted reality that we live in. And I'm sure their excuse is gonna be like, well, you know, the city doesn't own the electric station, it's in private hands, they can set their own price for it. But wasn't that city plan built by the people themselves. And now, they cannot even use the energy produced. But that very plan. This is insane. And is this really how we solve these problems by doing fundraising from ordinary people? Where we already pay a lot of taxes, but they're just not used to solve these issues. We're not going to be able to fundraise for every single problem we have by not targeting the root cause of this thing. So we have to think different way we have to think of the society. What do we actually want the system to look like? You know, we have to brainstorm it, get people from different fields of work and new AI technologies calculating it through to find the way to make it possible. I don't see that going on. Lex, what do you think about that? Do we even have this kind of discussion?

Alexey :

We are having this discussion here, and during the forum, I would like to say that calculating these models would be a great application for the AI that we already have today. Instead of applying all and using all the electricity to calculate filters for social networks, so that people look funny, or more beautiful, maybe we could use this electricity to calculate out a better model of the distribution of resources and how to organize our lives? Maybe then we would have people just glowing of happiness just because they have a better life. And I think this would be really nice. There are solutions that can solve this, we can dedicate a whole episode to the multipurpose complex Voskhod at a later time that can calculate everything and can tell exactly where we need and how much we need of food, clothing or any other resource that people require. But for this, we need to understand that people should possess all the resources, at least the necessary ones like the electricity or any other source of energy that we might have in the future. We should supply to everyone, at least the basic needs. This should be the main priority that people at least do not struggle through their lives, then we will see how this changes our world. But we can already calculate the results of investing in what's needed for this kind of infrastructure using the AI that we already have. We don't even need anything greater than that. If we just decide as a society that this is important to us. Then we can switch and redirect this scientific potential in order to serve humanity, not just to calculate facial expressions or what whatever we have on social networks.

Taliy:

Yeah, this is super funny. I was watching this documentary on YouTube about the Silicon Valley guys who invent startups raising millions of dollars, and they were so passionate, and so cocky like each one of them was like I'm here to change the world! I'm here to make a difference! I'm gonna change the world and they were like, well, what do you do? Well, I'm inventing masks for Instagram and Snapchat and the like, well, that's our level of change in the world - inventing a new mask for social media really? That's what we consider? Really, let's think straight. Each one of us wants to live good life, when people want to do good, people are good and happy and when they are provided with their needs, when the basic needs are covered. And things you touched upon, the the resources thing, like every constitution in the world says that resources of the country belong to the people. But it doesn't mention like how do you actually use it, because they belong to the people according to the Constitution while they're buried in land, and when somebody extracted them from the land, they don't belong to people anymore. They belong to whoever extracted them. How does this thing, where's like...

Alexey :

Finders keepers.

Taliy:

Yeah, exactly. Guys, do we think it through? Like, where's that barrier when it becomes private? But I get it - it costs price to dig out stuff and everything. But still, you have in the Constitution those words and nobody's paying attention to them, I just find it super funny. It's actually a serious kind of topics, and we should discuss them more maybe invite professionals in the industry, and think about some brave solutions, because we need brave new ideas in this world. We need aspiring goals as a society like our parents, grandparents, were excited about going to space, to the moon, like exploring new planets. Today, we only have one guy who's excited about going to Mars. But the rest, we're not that optimistic about our future. And I think for good reason. I think we need more not just optimism, but calculated optimism, we need to calculate the options because what we've seen in the past that people behave much better in real life, that what's presented in Hollywood movies, when a natural disaster occurs, when something bad happens - tornado destroys a village. You would think people behave like animals, like in Hollywood movies, everyone would fight for survival. But in real life, we often see that people act humane.

Alexey :

You know, we can we can maybe talk it in a future episode. And guys, let us know if this is something you'd be interested in, about how we are being conditioned by the movies, and that these movies appear at certain times, they're timed to certain events that are happening, and the symbols and all the heraldics, let's say, that are being used in these films. Well, they remind people about some other events in the past and they portray this image of government that needs to be shut down. And the war for independence, you know, this fight for independence of a person or the whole society. We've been living with these ideas for many centuries, if not 1000s of years. And it didn't really work well for us, as we can see. We can touch upon how movies, I think right now, it's mostly movies and TV shows, how they change the perspective ever so slightly, people don't even see or notice how this happens. But this changes the perception and the ideas.

Taliy:

Yeah, but this behavior models of people when they behave like this or behave like that, sometimes people really come together for good reason and can do something good, coordinated. Like there's one news, I remember this#BigPowerOff hashtag in Spain, where people coordinated from all over the state and just switched off the electricity for one hour. Could you tell me more about that?

Alexey :

Oh, yeah, it was in... People in Spain, they decided to do something in order to fight this rise in in costs. And what they did, they said, Okay, well, let's show our solidarity like that we are all together. And they've switched off the electricity, for one minute on March 15. And government, they heard the message and there were, I think 6 billion euros of aids that were dispensed. I still don't know why the government does these help packages when they can lower the costs. What this deed is that British, we're also thinking about doing the same - turning off the electricity for 10 minutes because the electricity price rose 54% in April 2022 in the UK. 54%! If it goes in the same progression, I don't think that anyone would be able to do it. And this #BigPowerOff, this is the hashtag in Spain, it lasted only you know for one One minute on March 15. And this already was sufficient for the government to release these economic aid measures.

Taliy:

Yeah, so just to explain that, why it's significant because the way the power grid is working - it's the energy is being produced, and it has to go somewhere, it has to be consumed on the other end. Otherwise, it's overloading the whole system, energy is being produced, not consumed. And this is a huge, huge problem. This can cause serious damage to the power grid and the power plant itself.

Alexey :

What we should learn from this situation is that, well, first, people have the power, not yet the electricity, but they have the power to have the electricity as well. Another thing is that they need to unite. And this is the main thing. When they united, and all of them, even if it's not 100% of people, but enough for the government to see the result of their action, they did it at the same time. This shows that only united we can change the world that we all live in, only united! Because when it's one person switching off, or even 10, or even 10%. Well, these are in the fluctuations that are being accounted for when they build these power structures. I like this analogy, power structures. There's a lot of similarities between the government power and the electrical power. We have to look at this example. And the

takeaway would be:

united we can! This is what needs to be done at the planetary level. I mean, I'm not talking about switching off the electricity at the planetary level.

Taliy:

And if we do the very same thing that people in Spain did, just for one minute, that's the way, that's the way with no violence with no you know, no big words. Just take action. Just take simple step like that, and...

Alexey :

It's the accidental voting mechanism. This wasn't intended to be used like that, but in case we don't have internet or there is blockage of the internet. Yeah, we just can switch off the electricity...

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