Category: Little Known Facts

The Deal With Silver

Little Known Facts 18 Comments

Wall Street Mav;

Silver is not like Gold. Gold once it is mined and refined sits in vaults or jewelry. All gold ever mined still exists.

Silver is consumed by industry. It is turned into a conductive silver paste that is applied to products. It is very difficult to recycle because such a tiny amount of silver is used in each. So it is not worthwhile to recycle. Only about 20% of silver is recycled from e-waste.

The $4.4 trillion “market cap” for silver is assuming that all 56 billion oz of silver that has been mined throughout history … is still around and available. It is NOT. Probably 80% of the silver has been consumed by industry. It is buried in landfills.

They Wouldn’t Do That

Little Known Facts 11 Comments

Would they?

David Clinton- Bill C-4: Join a Political Party in Canada and Mess Up Your Life?

All of which means that, for the low, low price of a single party membership card, you’ve bought yourself vulnerability to the threat of identity theft, harassment, and exposure of your sensitive (and likely controversial) political views. Employers, landlords, insurers, neighbors, old enemies, new enemies, future enemies? They’d be crazy not to drink deep from this Pierian spring.

Ghosts On The Grid

Alternative Subsidy It's Probably Nothing Little Known Facts 9 Comments

With the Feast of All Hallows rapidly approaching I thought it would be apt to explain how the grid is haunted by a concept that doesn’t really exist. A pre-occupation with a made-up concept risks the security of our power grids. In this blog I will explain how “vars” aren’t real, and treating them as if they are is creating existential risks on our power grids.

Not being able to properly explain reactive power is common in the energy industry – ask a dozen people to explain it and you’ll get twelve different answers. Most will reach for the beer-glass analogy where real power as the liquid and reactive power is the froth, or mutter something about “energy sloshing back and forth” on the grid. More sophisticated responses will mention capacitors “injecting vars” and inductors absorbing them. These phrases are repeated so often that they’ve become folklore. Unfortunately none of them describes what actually happens in power grids.

“Vars” in particular is an accounting fictions that obscure the underlying physics. And because we’ve replaced understanding of the physics with shorthand, we now incorrectly believe that anything producing current including batteries, solar inverters, or a clever algorithm, can perform the same stabilising role as the electromagnetic machines that built our power system.This misunderstanding could one day cost us the grid.

Go read it.

Recurring Urges

Little Known Facts 4 Comments

On prison and its occupants:

In short, before ending up in prison, the vast majority of the perpetrators, the supposedly downtrodden and marginalised, have at least five prior arrests, with almost half having 10 or more, and one in seven, 20 or more. At which point, the phrase that comes to mind is the nature of the beast.

Other phrases may conceivably occur to readers.

Those with a taste for grim humour are steered towards this quite strong indication of how a crime rate can improve when just three burglars – with over 200 convictions between them – flee the police in a stolen car before colliding with something solid and ceasing to be.

An illustration, one of many, of how a very large fraction of crime could be prevented by dealing decisively with a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders.

Oh, there’s more.

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