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Monday 23rd 53-58F, 12-14C, heavy overcast and breezy. It seems that Google wants a £17 billion windfall from taxing those who use its Drive backup service. How much tax will Google pay on its massive windfall? My calculations are based on a nominal one billion user base. i.e.Those who need more than the paltry 15GB Google offers in exchange for collecting all our inside leg measurements and then selling them to the highest bidder. £17 per annum is the price of increasing storage to the next level above "Free." Meaning that your private information is exchanged with advertisers to subsidize their expenses.The news is that Google and Apple are planning to build several massive data centers in Denmark. They will use vast quantities of electricity at prices which Danish private consumers can only dream of after a drunken night out.
Jut getting these vast, tax-free monopolies to shed their excess heat for local house warming is not even guaranteed. It actually has to be negotiated. Otherwise the "unwanted" heat would probably be dumped straight into the sea. Just as the Atlantic Current is weakening and record temperatures make weekly headline news. If power corrupts then Googles of power corrupts absolutely.
Talking of electricity: Remember the Danish government which utterly destroyed private electric car sales overnight by introducing massive import taxes? You know the basic idea: A country highly reliant on wind power but which has no means [at all] of electricity storage. So they are forced to give any excess power away to the European grid. Well now the same lot want half a million electric cars on the Danish roads by 2350 at the absolute earliest. Half a million cars will make a huge storage battery. But much too late!
Are they intending to reduce import charges on the huge fleet of F35 US fighters which they intend to buy? They obviously see themselves as an emerging superpower and all round political big hitter in global defense politics. Population 5.7m. These fighter aircraft are so noisy that they will have to be stationed
on floating, artificial islands out at sea with the offshore wind farms.
Denmark is far too small for such noisy aircraft to be allowed to take
off and land in its own countryside! Think Concorde and add a couple of
noughts! Including the price! Just the real price the Danes are paying in voting for ever more right wing parties in a desperate bid to end decades of open immigration. Give any of them a whiff of a mandate and you get the whole right wing baggage. Warts and all. Too busy for a ride today.Tuesday 24th 50F, 10C, gales building, heavy overcast with showers forecast. I have just watched a blackbird do a 180° in mid air, fly backwards for another yard and then land effortlessly [and still backwards] onto a tree branch. I only managed half a mile before it started raining and it felt like sandblasting being driven by the wind. The pale bird of prey is still mourning the loss of its trees. It has been hanging around on the tree stumps right from the beginning of the clearance.
Click on any image for an enlargement.
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