Coyote Blog

I got an email today from some random Gmail account asking me to write about HyrdoInfra.  OK.  The email begins: "HydroInfra Technologies (HIT) is a Stockholm based clean tech company that has developed an innovative approach to neutralizing carbon fuel emissions from power plants and other polluting industries that burn fossil fuels."

Does it eliminate CO2?  NOx?  Particulates?  SOx?  I actually was at the bottom of my inbox for once so I went to the site.  I went to this applications page.  Apparently, it eliminates the "toxic cocktail" of pollutants that include all the ones I mentioned plus mercury and heavy metals.  Wow!  That is some stuff.

Their key product is a process for making something they call "HyrdroAtomic Nano Gas" or HNG.  It sounds like their PR guys got Michael Crichton and JJ Abrams drunk in a brainstorming session for pseudo-scientific names.

But hold on, this is the best part.  :

Splitting water (H20) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O.

This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.

We took a different approach by postulating that we could split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.

A specific low energy pulse is put into water. The water molecules line up in a certain structure and are split from the Hydrogen molecules.

The result is HNG.

HNG is packed with ‘Exotic Hydrogen’

Exotic Hydrogen is a recent scientific discovery.

HNG carries an abundance of Exotic Hydrogen and Oxygen.

On a Molecular level, HNG is a specific ratio mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

The unique qualities of HNG show that the placement of its’ charged electrons turns HNG into an abundant source of exotic Hydrogen.

HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen.

Some basic facts:

• HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions
• HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars.
• HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second.
• Oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame.
• HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the center thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
• HNG is stored in canisters, arrayed around the emission outlet channels. HNG is injected into the outlets to safely & effectively clean up the burning of fossil fuels.
• The pollution emissions are neutralized instantly & safely with no residual toxic cocktail or chemicals to manage after the HNG burning process is initiated.

Exotic Hyrdrogen!  I love it.  This is probably a component of the "red matter" in the Abrams Star Trek reboot.  Honestly, someone please tell me this a joke, a honeypot for mindless environmental activist drones.    What are the chemical reactions going on here?  If CO2 is captured, what form does it take?  How does a mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules in whatever state they are in do anything with heavy metals?  None of this is on the website.   On their "validation" page, they have big labels like "Horiba" that look like organizations thave somehow put their impremature on the study.  In fact, they are just names of analytical equipment makers.  It's like putting "IBM" in big print on your climate study because you ran your model on an IBM computer.

SCAM!  Honestly, when you see an article written to attract investment that sounds sort of impressive to laymen but makes absolutely no sense to anyone who knows the smallest about of Chemistry or Physics, it is an investment scam.

But they seem to get a lot of positive press.  In my search of Google, everything in the first ten pages or so are just uncritical republication of their press releases in environmental and business blogs.   You actually have to go into the comments sections of these articles to find anyone willing to observe this is all total BS.   If you want to totally understand why the global warming debate gets nowhere, watch commenter Michael at this link desperately try to hold onto his faith in HydroInfra while people who actually know things try to explain why this makes no sense.

Update:  If you want an actual nano-material that absorbs various pollutants, this may be one.

I am pretty freaking cynical about the political process, so it takes something pretty bad to catch my attention.  This attitude by Obamacare architect Jonathon Gruber, which is likely shared by most of the Administration, simply makes me sick:

An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a "lack of transparency" and the "stupidity of the American voter" helped Congress approve ObamaCare.

In a clip unearthed Sunday, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber appears on a panel and discusses how the reform earned enough votes to pass.

He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn't know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval.

"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. "And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."

Gruber made the comment while discussing how the law was "written in a tortured way" to avoid a bad score from the Congressional Budget Office. He suggested that voters would have rejected ObamaCare if the penalties for going without health insurance were interpreted as taxes, either by budget analysts or the public.

"If CBO scored the [individual] mandate as taxes, the bill dies," Gruber said.

"If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed," he added.

By the way, Jonathon Gruber was the one in 2012 who said over and over that the limitation of subsidies to state-run exchanges was not a drafting error, but was an intentional feature meant to give incentives to states to create exchanges.  Now that it is clear that incentive did not do its job, and a case is in front of the Supreme Court attempting to enforce the plain language of the law, Gruber is now saying that he mispoke (over and over again) in 2012 and it was a typo.  Given the fact that he has now admitted he would gladly lie (and has) to the public to defend Obamacare, how much should we believe his current claims?

As I wrote last week, one encountered a terrible problem when switching from iPhone to Android -- your phone number remained registered with the Apple iMessage servers as an iPhone and so that Apple tries to deliver texts from other iPhones to your new Android phone via their iMessage servers.  That does not work, and so the text just disappears into the ether, with the sender thinking it went through fine but the new Android user never seeing it.

After months and months of problems, and at least one class action lawsuit, Apple now offers a fix.  You can now de-register your phone number in the iMessage system by going to this link.  I don't know if it works and I don't know if there is any time delay.  I suddenly started receiving my texts from iPhones this weekend, about a week after I made the switch and called Apple to de-list me in their servers.

By the way, I tried to use the de-listing link.  The process involves a text back.  I never got a text back, lol.  So I am not positive the de-listing link is actually working, but since I was successful (apparently) with it last week doing it using the old method, I am not worried. I was successful using the method at the bottom of this page.

We are looking at a number of third-party internet-based software solutions for a range of things from HR onboarding to safety and training management.  With minimum wages and other government-imposed employment costs rising, we are looking for ways to automate anything we can.

We have run into a useability issue on most of this software.  As a note, my employees tend to be 55 years old and older, and so many do not have a firm handle on computer skills.  So stuff needs to be simple and just work.  Unfortunately, no one seems to be willing or able to design a system that works with default browser settings.  In particular, everyone wants to design their software to require popups.  I have no idea why.  But time after time I put a system out for a subset of my employees to test and I immediately get 19 people calling me back saying that it does not work, they can't get in, etc.  The typical problem is that most of this software seems to require that the browsers popup blocker be turned off.  Why in the world would you design software for a feature that 99% of browsers today have turned off by default?  And worse, that require users to change a setting that only exists deep in setup menus most users don't even know exist.  I am pretty capable and it took me some poking around to find the popup options in Chrome.

This makes me totally crazy.  I had a long talk today with my onboarding company trying to explain why getting rid of an hour of HR time with their software at the cost of an extra hour of IT support time for each new employee trying to access the system does not save me any freaking money.  We received access to a training and safety system for free from our insurance company but it took so much of my personal time to get each employee able to successfully log into it that we abandoned it this year, despite it having a lot of good resources in it.  I will tell you guys that despite the world of these business solutions being apparently crowded, there is still room out there for someone who can program a front-end that reliably works with a variety of browsers and systems.

In the continuing battle to give males in college roughly the same due process rights as possessed by a black man in 1930's Alabama, my alma mater was one of the last holdouts fighting the trend.  No longer:

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education wrapped up its investigation of Princeton University's sexual harassment and assault policies. The findings were unsurprising, though still striking: the government essentially accused the university of violating federal anti-discrimination law by extending too much due process to accused students.

Princeton had been one of the last hold-outs on the standard of proof in college rape trials. The university required adjudicators to obtain "clear and convincing" proof that a student was guilty of sexual assault before convicting him. That's too tough, said DOE. As part of its settlement, Princeton is required to lower its evidence standard to "a preponderance of the evidence," which means adjudicators must convict if they are 50.1 percent persuaded by the accuser.

Princeton's old policy was also criticized by DOE for allowing accused students to appeal decisions, but not accusers. Both this practice and the evidence standard were revised under Princeton's new, DOE-compliant policy.

Note that Princeton's former policies on burden of proof and restrictions on double jeopardy roughly mirror the due process rights Americans have in every other context except when they are males accused of sexual assault on a college campus.

I wish Princeton had held out and forced the Administration to test this in court.  I certainly would have donated to support the legal fund.

I am not even going to excerpt it.  You need to read Ken Whites satirical take on Miles Sisk demanding that bloggers who made animated GIF's critical of student government be thrown into concentration camps, or something.

How are people like this going to actually survive in the real world?  They are going to leave college and just sort of explode, like deep sea creatures brought up to the surface.  Someone please tell me that Miles Sisk is actually a clever performance artist.

Update:   OK, one little excerpt:

Sisk has not provided any evidence that the mean bloggers have made threats of harm as opposed to trite gifs and memes about banal student politics. "If a privileged kid who is a student leader at a good university feels he has to demand that the state protect him from criticism, what possible hope do most Americans have of governing themselves?" asked Yale historian Margaret Scott. "Freedom is hard. Self-governance is hard. Living together without resorting to tyranny is hard. Our founders pledged to each other 'our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor' to achieve those goals. This kid won't pledge to put up with someone mocking student government with a Parks & Recreation screencap."

Scientists agreed that Sisk's lack of fortitude — which was described as "pusillanimous," "snivellingly serfish," "contemptibly spineless," and "typical for a sophomore" — marked the rise of an American citizen unable to carry the burdens of representative government, individual rights, or unregulated daily interactions with other humans. "It's not just his craven thirst for totalitarian rule," agreed Duke professor Wil Trent. "It's also the abject ignorance. Running a society together requires a baseline of civic literacy. When even a student leader at a good university is ignorant of the most basic rights of other citizens — game over, man. Game over."

Both parties chose to run against people who were not even on the ballot yesterday.  Republicans ran against the President and largely won.  Democrats ran against the Koch brothers (who are not even elected officials or even the largest private donors in the election) and to a lesser extent against mythical candidates who were going to ban all contraception, and lost.

Honestly, I can only remember three elections in the last 40 years with changes in power that really mattered in terms of actual legislative and policy changes:  The first term Reagan and Obama elections and the midterm election of the Gingrich Republicans in '94.

This Republican class lacks the unity around a written legislative agenda that the Gingrich Republicans had.  So I don't really expect much.  The best we can hope for is perhaps a bit more effective push-back against creeping executive power, which certainly would be welcome.

My son is taking some kind of politics course in Rome (Italy) and the discussion in class yesterday was on Joe Arpaio and immigration.

I won't advise you on whether or not to vote.  Libertarians are split pretty evenly between "Don't vote, you are just giving authoritarianism your blessing", "Vote Libertarian because it is a useful protest and message", and "Vote for the major party candidate who has a hope of getting elected who is least bad."  I will leave parsing all that to you.

However, if you do vote, I have one bit of advice I always give on propositions:  Your default vote for any proposition (as it should be for legislators) should be "no".  If its purpose is unclear, if you are not sure of the full implications, if you don't know how it is funded, if you haven't thought about unintended consequences, if you haven't heard the pitch from both the 'yes' and 'no' camps -- then vote no.  Also beware that many Propositions that seem outwardly liberty-enhancing are actually Trojan Horses meant to be the opposite.   Vote yes only if you have thought through all this and you are comfortable the new law would have a net positive benefit.

Also, via Maggies Farm, I think this is a good image for election day: