Hi to everyone here.
The year is 2021 A.D. Europa is entirely occupied by the EU. Well not entirely! One small Country of indomitable Swiss peoples still hold out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the politicians who garrison the fortified camps of Germany, France, Italy and Austria…
Enough with the joking. I’m just a random citizen from Switzerland. And I look over the pond to observe the troubled nation of the Americans as a small side hobby. When Bill burst out in saying people don’t put their money where their mouth is, then I answered, I won’t spend money if you don’t do anything. Now that he told me about his new party I see that he is actually doing something. So I will pay a bit of my monthly salary to support a developing country to find it’s way back to peace and order.
Now I will tell you a bit about me.
I’m male, 26 and I’m single. My pronouns are he/him. This is the first time that I wrote down the pronouns and I only did so because this is a conservative website. I’m pretty active on YouTube, although not under this name. And I also spend some time on other websites. Mostly for reading and entertaining purposes. I like to discus with people who disagree with me and who are capable with reasoning for their position. My favorite topics are normally the debate between the Christian perspective and the Atheist one on an intellectual level. I take the side of the Christians. As someone with a background in electrical engineering, I know a bit how the world works. But I’m neither a historian, a scientist nor a philosopher. So my arguments are not too shallow but also not too deep. Recently I looked into the traditional understanding of Islam. I also enjoy watching game development videos on YouTube. And when it comes to reading I prefer when it goes into the direction of fantasy. In the Politics I’m more of a conservative, but I don’t think I agree with all the conservative talking points. For example I do think public schools can be done quite efficiently if the people are actually doing their job. But in the major points like freedom of speech, pro live or a spread out power structure I’m all on board with the conservatives.
I think one of the biggest problems you have in America which lead to your collapse is the huge city to countryside divide. With that you inevitably create a hugely divided population. Additionally to that you have a bad schooling system which keeps a large proportion of the students dumb and then you have the perfect mixture to explode.
Feel free to say hi and to ask pointed questions. And perhaps I will stay longer on this site than other places where people just talk about their daily live. But even if I don’t stay here on the blog, I will still pay the few bucks of foreign aid for a while. After all you do need it:)
Greetings Philipp
36 replies on “Hi to everyone here.”
Wellm SW is one of the few remaining countries where sense is preserved and a good political culture too. Applying respect to where it is due.
I hope it can hold longer then the US that started off better, but by now squandered its foundation completely. The problem is it’s not in a capsule, it keeps exporting the Californian mind dor for decades and now will switch gears. Without that big part of UE would not have advanced on a similar path.
We are just a bit slower in adapting new ideas into our society. During the Gorge Floyd stuff they also talked about banning certain foods. Two that come to mind are the “Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats” or “Mohrenkopf” in German and “Pizza Hawaii”. Mohr is an old German word for black people. And since it is everywhere, from food names to village names to flags to even people names (Moriz) it causes a bit of trouble. At the Gorge Floyd incident they took a food company from a few store chains because he refused to rename his Mohrenkopf to something more “decent”. I’m not even sure if Mohr is a racist term. In my opinion it is just old fashioned. I have never heard it in use besides in old names and books. And Pizza Hawaii is apparently bad because people from Hawaii don’t eat it or something. You know, the good old cultural appropriation. In the end it disappeared again pretty quickly. Or at least I didn’t hear of anything after a short while. We sadly pick up all those critical race theory as well. But I do hope other countries blow up (in a metaphorical sense) before it really reaches our country.
But as far as I know, our political culture is pretty decent. A wide range of opinions, people can talk to each other and the population is mostly represented. I can’t complain.
I do think the countryside of the US isn’t to far off from that. They do have other weird quirks though. Switzerland has the advantage that the largest city has less than half a million people and the most remote village is still reachable by public transport within half a day or so. That way we don’t go into too much into the extreme in the small village direction nor in the big city direction.
Welcome to the good chaos. Interestingly, if anyone were to read a lot of our founders writing, is that they distrusted large cities (their large cites are small compared to ours now.) They thought they were more open to corruption and group think. One reason they went to our electoral system; they did not want the cities telling the country what to do. (Like starve themselves or be slaves to serve the cities)
That sounds logical. But I’m biased because I also distrust large “anything made out of humans”. Large state, large companies, large unions, large churches, large bellies…
The Bible says “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” And yes, that includes me. Christians as a group too. No matter what you think of the Bible and/or Christians, that statement has a lot of wisdom in it. And by the way, my degree is a Chemical Engineering. Did 5 years as that and over 20 as a programmer.
I like to claim that I’m good at copying good opinions together into a decent view of the world. But I fall often prey to the Dunning-Kruger-Effect, like many people. I also have plenty of blind spots and whatever else people suffer from if they are humans.
And hi fellow engineer! Although I’m not too sure what chemical engineers do. Could you give me an overview? I don’t mind if you go into detail.
The main thing Chemical Engineers do is concern themselves with flow, reactor pressure and heat transfer. That is, how do get the materials into the vessel where the reaction occurs to produce the desired material. How do we get heat into the vessel if it needs heat to react (endothermic reaction) or get heat out off the vessel if heat producing reaction (exothermic). Does the reactor need high pressure or low pressure? An example of interesting flow is a coal slurry: finely ground up coal in a fluid to move through pipes instead of a conveyor belt or good old fashioned shovels. The fluid is normally deisel fuel, for the whole thing to burn in the furnace. The big problem with this is the coal can be abrasive and wear out pipes, so tougher pipes are needed, and any curves in the pipe should be gentle and not severe. We have a term for a reaction that requires high pressure and a high temperature: “beating it to death with a stick”.
Yes, really.
Sounds interesting and it also sounds like something I have no clue about. All three of them (Material science, Fluid dynamics and Thermodynamics).
What kind of materials did you work with? And you also mentioned programming. Did it have anything to do with chemical engineering? And in what language did you do the programming? FUP on PLCs, c on microcontrollers or python on PCs or any other combination?
Most of my programming for engineering was Basic or Cobol. After I went into pure programming it was COBOL, Assembler or a quick language call Quickjob. The programs were written in the seventies. I was involved in the Y2K “Crisis”.
I worked in the “horrific” petroleum (gasp!) Industry. Take the oil and make gasoline, (most went into making gasoline), diesel fuel, wax,( yes, wax) kerosene, (jet fuel), motor oil, plastics and much more. I mainly worked on producing gasoline. Simp!e distillation produced some, with lighter oil producing more and heavier oil producing less. Now my areas. We took chemicals with 8 carbons, but not enough hydrogen, put them into a vessel with hydrogen and a platinum catalyst and “beat it to death with a stick” to make gasoline. We took heavier liquid into a vessel, “beat it to death with a stick” and in effect, removed the carbon into a mass we called “coke” (close to pure carbon) which was used in the aluminum industry. This also produced gasoline. I specialized in the heat transfer area, improving efficiency in some areas by reducing need by 60%. (Mainly by cleaning the heat exchangers)
Sounds like an energy intensive system 🙂
Thank you for answering.
And what is your opinion on climate change while we’re at it?
My opinion in short is:
A short example is like this:
Even if human made climate change is as bad as they say and even if we don’t just prevent an ice age by doing what we do, this top down approach does not really work.
There are plenty of environmental issues. We shouldn’t just focus all our effort on some stupid stuff like building up a Wind farm and then needing Coal to power whatever it is lacking.
Thanks for your replies. My take on climate change is this: the climate is always changing. There was a medieval and Roman warm period at least one of which was equal or greater than one we have now Yes, we have a warm up. From the “little ice age” near the early 1800’s. One climatologist who says that if, for example to go one degree centigrade is caused by going from 200 ppm CO2 to 300 ppm, the next degree would need to go from 300 ppm to 500 ppm. The next degree would require going from 500 ppm to 900 ppm. Next degree would require going to 1700 ppm. Ooops. The model used so far needs constant adjustments to reflect reality, and keeps lowering the temp increase per ppm. We need pay attention to the environment, but wind and solar with current tech won’t do it and it actually incredibly environmentally polluting. And as to a diet… I’m doing good my self. And I know enough about Electrical Engineering to be dangerous. We had some training with circuit boards. We had set one up to cause a feedback loop, and another to stop it with one change. About all I really remember.
The diet was just a silly comparison of mine where I compare the difficulties of the climate change with the difficulties of dieting. It looks like you either didn’t get it or I didn’t get your response.
It’s basically like this. Each country has it’s own environmental problem. Looking for ones own health is already difficult enough (be it health for a person or environment for the country). But if you make a group project out of it where everybody has to tag along for it to work then it is most likely going to fail (in my example we add up the weight of all persons and in the climate debate people add all carbon footprint of all countries). As soon as you have a few people not going along you can basically give up before you even start. I like the example, but perhaps I need to work on the wording until I use it to explain something.
When it comes to wind/solar my electrical knowledge says that you can’t really build up an grid which can support it all. Even with our baseline power productions like coal or nuclear it is difficult and pretty unstable. But if we would switch to pure “green” energy we can forget it. Also I don’t like projects which are depended on the corporation of several countries. Currently we might do well. But I wouldn’t want to guarantee that a continent wide project won’t go through a country which tries to sabotage it in the long run. And an electric grid which is made out of pure “green” energy is depended on that.
By the way with unstable I don’t mean the daily changes of a few voltages. I mean that when some country deliberately or accidentally feeds a stupid voltage level of frequency into the grid everything could break down. But don’t take my opinion too seriously. I don’t really have a lot of contact to the electrical grid in my education or profession. My knowledge in that topic is limited to electricity and a bit of control theory.
I didn’t know that about the ppm of CO2 but it doesn’t surprise me. I like the waterlevel topic a bit. First of all it is really difficult to measure it. Each landmass is rising and sinking at a different pace and even the gravitational forces of the continents have a bit of an influence. Because of that if we accurately knew the world average, we had to change it for every coastline. And then since the last larger ice age the waterlevel is raising anyways. In the last 100 years the average level rose by around 7 inches. All the panic about the waterlevel rise is in reality spread out over at least several decades and probably a few centuries. Yes there are some countries where they are in danger because of sea level rise. And that is a pretty big problem for them. But that problem is more of a political problem than a geological problem. In the past those people would have just moved. And now that the borders are set, they can’t move anymore. And we can’t just say, the politics are fixed now, therefor the nature has to be stable from now on. And even without the global warming we have to remember that some of the coastlines rise or sink faster than the average water level does.
With that I don’t critique the actual science on that topic. But I do think some of the reaction out there is a bit exaugurated.
I forgot to put the sarcasm emoji on my diet comment. I got your point. Oddly enough, the U.S. Actually reduced its CO2 output after fracking in addition to turning into a net producer of petroleum products instead of a net importer. And yes, our electrical grid could not support all cars and trucks being electrical. Not without spending billions, if not trillions. Even nuclear has that issue. Now, it is theoretically possible, speaking as a Chemical Engineer, to take water and CO2 and make oxygen and just about any petrochemical product that is in oil, but the energy cost would be immense. That would be a way to use nuclear, and reduce CO2, and
create more petrochemicals, that can be used to make, say, medicines. Just hook the nuclear plant to the nearby conversion plant.
(Is this a scary idea, or am I?😲)
I live in a somewhat close distance to a nuclear plant. And I don’t have a problem with it. I wouldn’t even have a problem with building a new one or making a radioactive waste repository below my house (I don’t have a house yet). Mainly because I trust in our building standard. Swiss building standard is pretty high but not to a degree where it gets absurd. I do think the mining of the uranium is a bit of a problem because it is pretty dirty, but I can’t complain since I use a smartphone. And the materials in that are equally as dirty.
By the way if you like to see an architect nerd out about Swiss and German buildings then I can recommend the “European build show trip”-Playlist of Matt Risinger on YouTube. As someone with little clue on Architecture it was fun to watch. It’s a good representation on the difference of the building standard between America and central Europa. The entire playlist is around 2.5 hours and split into 12 videos. Each of those videos don’t need any of the other videos for context.
Watch Tony Heller’s videos https://www.youtube.com/c/TonyHeller/videos or on newtube after they will be taken down.
Funny that so far no one mentioned that I described America as a developing country. I guess that seems to be fact then. 😉
I think most of us have settled on “banana republic.” A close second is “tin-pot dictatorship” or something else with “tin-pot” in it.
Welcome to our herd of cats.
It is developing into idiocracy. Now at faster pace.
Good to see another cheerfull freedom loving barbarian holding out against the EU Empire.
Philipp,
Welcome to BW, I too am an Electrical Engineer but many (many) years senior to you. Your observation with respect to our schooling system is 100% accurate. As a small business owner for 35+ years my biggest challenge was finding high school kids – grade 12 here in the US – that wanted to learn a profession. “I’m going to college” because that’s what mommy and daddy say AND PAY FOR!!! for a degree in social behavior blah blah blah. Then they’re out on the streets as antifa because they can’t find a job that pays worth a damn. In the four years – if they were really attentive – they went to ‘college, they could have made about $200k, not had any debt and be bringing in over 100k a year at present, AND have a position where they didn’t have to get there dainty little hands dirty.
Sorry for the little rant, but being retired I don’t get to go off on that tirade as much anymore. Again welcome to BW, we’re glad to have you here.
I wouldn’t say our school is perfect. When I talked with my teacher at the university of applied science he said that the level of knowledge from the students is dropping.
And we also have students who just study what they are interested in. Since public school, university and the university of applied science is almost free for the attendee, there is rarely and debt involved. Also after the 10th grade or so around half the people go the apprenticeship route. That is where we work half the time and we go to school half the time. The good thing is that we still can go to university on that route. I did do it that way. It’s still not perfect but it is way better than whatever I hear that you have. Or at least I think so judging from the apparent outcome.
Hello, Phillip! Population density and cultural divisions, education and control of production are all very serious issues, now…and ever before.
Welcome aboard!
Hi
I didn’t mention control of production. But I agree that this is also important. Switzerland is and was never self sufficient (yes, 500 years ago or so it was, but not in recent time). That is one of the reasons why we traded with both sides in ww2. We barely have any natural resources. Only rocksalt, wood, stone and water. And we have more people than the land could feed, even if we were to put everything we have into it.
As far as I know, America could be self sufficient. Your politicians just don’t want to.
Our politicians (on both sides of the spectrum) are hard to trust. The system of buying external power and favor has ruined our nation.
It seems daily the prospect of individual or national liberty slips away.
You appear to be an Asterix fan… as am I. But I also spent a good deal of time in Europe, it is not all that commonly known here in the USA.
At my parents home there are the first 30 booklets of Asterix. I’ve read them a few times. But I wouldn’t call myself a fan. I just thought it is a funny idea and I went with it. What kinds of comics are known in America, besides Marvel and DC?
I enjoyed all the Asterix novels up until the point that Goscinny died. At which point I found a remarkably different set of stories taking place which I did not enjoy.
And I really wasn’t much of a comic book reader after leaving Europe, so I am not really up-to-date on that.
I don’t know of any person who doesn’t agree with you. By the way do you know Globi? If so you visited Switzerland. In Switzerland everybody knows him. Outside nobody knows him.
I enjoyed all the Asterix novels up until the point that Goscinny died. At which point I found a remarkably different set of stories taking place which I did not enjoy.
And I really wasn’t much of a comic book reader after leaving Europe, so I am not really up-to-date on that. I do however have the Collector Edition (written only in French and no other language that I know of) of the book of potions.
Sorry for the re-write, but the system basically said I could no longer edit my previous comment. So I ended up having to write another.
I’m not aware of any book of potions and google didn’t help. What is it about?
I’ll see if I can pull it out of mothballs and send you something.
Here we go… found it sooner than I though. Lucky you, I organized my collections a few months back.
At the time I got it, it literally wasn’t for sale anywhere. The only way you could get it was by purchasing some kind of collection, in which the book came with it as a bonus.
Well, I wanted to the thing so I searched around for it and found it on a French auction website. They only accepted bank transfers as payment too, and the transfer itself cost me more than what I paid for the book because while they like transfers in Europe, they aren’t as common here in the USA. I literally used the old Google Translate to communicate back and forth in French as I arranged the purchase.
So… back to the book… as far as I know, never translated outside of French, it is called:
“Secrets de Druides” Looks like it has a print year of 2010.
Thank you for your effort. Since I’m not that good of a French speaker it isn’t surprising that I didn’t hear of it so far. But I better don’t read it since the secret of the magic potion shouldn’t be known to non druids 😉
If I recall correctly, in lists all the Magic Potions used throughout the entire Asterix Series and only basically tells you what the Asterix Series already said, for the most part.
The strength potion basically would say what was mentioned in the very first book, Asterix the Gaul. Then would say the rest is a secret.
You can’t edit a comment once it has been replied to.
Ahhhhhh!! Well, okay. That makes interesting sense. Good to know. Thanks!