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Excellent diary!

Where is the pyramid building industry today?
Where is the horse transport industry today?
Where are the tea or wheat schooners, the traction engines, the telex, the fax machines, the fixed line phones?

We will adapt to life without commercial flight. 32 million workers will need retraining. 80% of them can quickly move into service jobs in the expansion of other travel modes such as sea or rail. The 20% specialized staff - pilots, designers, mechanics etc will find it harder - pilots most of all.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 at 08:13:00 AM EST

Where is the pyramid building industry today?

Being reinvented as cob and straw bale. doesn't need concrete or cement which are gonna be flat bust soon as well


Where is the horse transport industry today?

On the comeback within 20 years. I guarantee it.

Where are the tea or wheat schooners,

I've been wondering if these will comeback in some form for low cost freight in some parts of the world. I think there will be other ways of greenly powering ships, but sail is always free.

the traction engines
...is just a steam powered tractor. the enxt generation will be lectric, but I wonder if there will be a return to static engines.

the telex, the fax machines, the fixed line phones?

don't you have fixed lines in finland anymore ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 at 08:48:20 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Precisely ;-)

I have a fixed line because my accountant hasn't progressed beyond the fax. I hardly use it otherwise, but it came with the broadband deal.

Even Finnish grannies are switching to 'mummo-phones' - they look like the old fixed phones with big keys and a pick up handset, but they have gsm inside and no wires.

When WiMax arrives we can recover an enormous amount of valuable copper.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 at 08:58:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Then rid me of a misapprehension: Wimax is a two-way system, ie the user has a receiver/emitter? (I thought you would still need to upload by coaxial, like satellite connections).
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 at 09:57:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]
It is a wireless system. A base station will radiate over about 30 kms. All you'll need is the equivalent of a wireless receiver like the Bluetooth in your laptop. So it enables local non-interactive television, radio, magazines, information services etc

But interactivity directly with base does require a more powerful emitter at your end. Or this will probably be accomplished by wifi cascading - meaning that WiFi stations are connected in a flexible network back to the base station. This is an existing technology.

This can work reasonably efficiently where downloading from the base is the main data traffic, and uploading to the base is much smaller.

The current promotion of WiMax focuses on 'last mile' access. Which means there will be a node covering a few hundred houses - just as currently optical runs up to your neighbourhood and then wires or cable bring the signal into the house = the last mile.

But I don't think WiMax base stations are going to be that expensive. And, as I've said before, they enable local peer-to-peer systems that can be independent of the Internet. Thus one of their unique and unprecedented effects IMO will be the relocalization (or denationalization) of communities.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 at 01:04:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]
iPhone offers the old-fashioned rotary dial:

Though it probably does not offer the edge touch for your fingers.

by das monde on Wed Jun 4th, 2008 at 02:55:30 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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