Lunar lander ideas over the decades

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On Monday, June 22, 2020 at 8:00:22 PM UTC+2, Alain Fournier wrote:
On Jun/22/2020 at 02:58, wrote :

Now if the local telecomm provider (read: government enforced monopoly)
would just do their jobs and fix our landline....

???

I'm curious here. Where are you hailing from? Which country imposes such
horrible hardship on its citizens?

South Africa, a semi-government owned company called TELKOM has the
monopoly on all cable based telecomms. There was another company whose name
escapes me right now but they went belly up when ESKOM's problems started a
decade ago. In 1996 the new(ish) government promised to dismantle this
legacy of apartheid ASAP and usher in a new era of prosperity. I guess they
figured out that seeing as the Cabinet gets to (indirectly) appoint the
leadership of state-owned companies that keeping TELKOM was a good way to
keep friends and supports gainfully employed.

We have a similar situation with ESKOM, the electricity provider monopoly,
who has major problems keeping the lights on. Their cabinet appointed
leadership can't figure out why 40-year old power stations keep breaking
down, or why coal suppliers refuse to supply coal when they haven't been
paid in three months, and whose leadership gets hysterical when they can't
figure out WHY the company has a 25% decline in income during a period when
the parts of the country that actually pay for their electricity were being
turned off for 25% of the time. Oh and the new power station (was supposed
to be the biggest, most efficient, least polluting coal burning power
station in the Southern Hemisphere) is 10 X over budget, 10 years later,
and all work done so far has been found to be defective, or sub-standard.
Estimates are that it will be 20 X over budget and won't be fully operation
before 2040.

We also had a government owned iron and steel monopoly, ISKOR, which except
for some minor low volume specialist metallurgy has gone the way of the
dinosaurs. The state-owned national airline SAA hasn't paid its staff in 3
months, and before that they weren't on full pay anyway. It has just
received another billion dollar rescue package. We have a government owned
monopoly on rail transport, and they can't even get the trains to run on
time, or prevent the passenger trains from being torched in arson attacks.
Our ports are run another monopoly which makes getting your good through
customs an exercise in frustration.

And yes, 2G is scheduled to go away here soon too. The rights to those wave
lengths of that transmission space have already been sold. The wireless
operators don't really mind, because that means they get to sell everyone
who wants to stay connected a 4G or LTE device.



Alain Fournier


Sorry for the long winded reply. An update on my landline connection. The
connection is restored but I still can't use it because the modem's
software can't reset the password used by the last device. I got this far
by waiting patiently on the phone for just over 75 minutes yesterday.

Be grateful for what you have over in the real world.

Regards
Frank

I was on a Zoom chat with a bunch of fellow DBAs and one was from South
Africa and she was talking about an upcoming power outage because of the
factors you mention.

--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/

On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 3:08:38 AM UTC+2, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

I was on a Zoom chat with a bunch of fellow DBAs and one was from South
Africa and she was talking about an upcoming power outage because of the
factors you mention.

ESKOM has warned us all that 'Load-Shedding' (their euphamism for rolling blackouts / brownouts) is eminent this winter (we're in the Southern hemisphere), if all of us don't converse electricity. This is while, for the first time in history, the largest urban center of non-payment for electricity is actually under going ten hours a day blackouts due to maintenance and breakdowns. It is also occurring with-in weeks of two major metros announcing that if there is Load-shedding this winter they have made provision by installing hundreds of megawatts worth of diesel generators, that can running for days on end, and have secured enough diesel to run said generators at full capacity until summer.

Translation: those Metros are no longer prepared to have their citizens and the businesses that pay taxes to the Metro blackmailed. If ESKOM does something stupid the Metros are ready to go it alone under the single provision that the law makes for breaking the monopoly on power generation and distribution. Unfortunately I do not live within either of those Metros zones of control.

On the other side of things almost everyone who can afford it (I can't) has bought inverters, batteries, solar panels and / or generators. The generators suck because of the noise (I had a neighbor who had 3, including a 25kwe diesel. He wrapped them up in noise-absorbing boxes and filtered the exhaust fumes but it still felt and smelt like I was at ground zero of a post-apocalyptic dragster race). But those South Africans who can afford (who are hardly a majority) are making it clear that they don't intend to be under ESKOM's thumb this winter.

Another rush set of purchases has been gas (LPG in cylinders, almost nowhere in SA has piped gas) appliances. Gas cookers, stoves, space heaters, bath and shower water heater, fridges, and even LPG fueled generators are flying off the shelves so fast no one can keep their stock levels up. Unfortunately that party has a definite expiry date built in. SA single source of LPG is estimated to become non-profitable by 2023, which unless a pipeline from Mozambique finally gets finished will leave us without an affordable supply of LPG. We'll be back to buying it in tanker ships from the Middle East and the Americas. And the Green lobby, and some other people, are not too keen on the idea of having ships holding mega-liters of easily evaporating fuel parked off their pristine coastline. Given the safety record of some parts of the South African coast I'm not too happy about it either.



--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net
IT Disaster Response -
https://www.amazon.com/Disaster-Resp...dp/1484221834/



Anyway,

Take care.
Regards
Frank