Dust off those saddles…

I have broken my tablet computer. Terminally. I had left it on the floor by the bed, the phone rang, I got up to answer it and crunch. To top it all there was nobody on the phone. It was probably one of those timeout sales calls.

Fortunately I had opted for a cheap Chinese-made one so it won’t hurt too bad to replace it. And it did mean I got to take it apart. I’ve always wanted to see inside one of these things. So I now have two very small good quality speakers that will fit easily inside a model train with a sound generator, a couple of tiny cameras and a microphone (not sure how to wire up a camera but I can find out). Best of all is the ‘vibrate’ motor. Runs on 3V and is less than a cm long. I can fit that into something very small indeed, along with a couple of tiny button cells. My model building interest is rekindled!

I might make a tiny electric car. Might as well, we won’t have any petrol or diesel ones soon. Then again, I’ll be 80 in 2040 so probably won’t want to do much driving. My kids will still be driving age though. They’ll be stuck with those God-awful electric cars. Not even hybrids – the petrol and diesel won’t be allowed.

Suddenly, cars are the cause of all ills. Does that let smokers off the hook? We’ve been saying for a long time that the smoke from a cigarette is nothing compared to a passing truck, nor even a drive-by in a Mini. Nobody wanted to hear it.

It doesn’t let us off the hook because it was never about health and neither is this.

Ministers believe it poses the largest environment risk to public health in the UK, costing up to £2.7bn in lost productivity in one recent year.

Ministers believe whatever it is in their interests to believe, as always. But their thinking is in terms of lost productivity, not health. Sick drones don’t work as hard. That’s how it was sold to them. Same as with tobacco, booze, salt, fat, anything. They don’t give a shit about you. You exist to pay taxes to them. You exist to work so they don’t have to.

Remember when the antismokers checked carbon monoxide in breath tests on smokers in the street? On busy streets. They never tested nonsmokers and never tested themselves. If they had, all the results would have been the same because the CO and other stuff from exhaust fumes on a busy street will overwhelm anything a cigarette can do.

And yet, at that time, the buses and cars rolling by were totally harmless compared to half a gram of burning leaf.

When my grandmother was born there were no cars. They are really that recent, starting in the early 1900s as rich men’s toys. You had to have a man with a red flag walking in front to warn people you were coming so they wouldn’t be startled. That might come back with the electric car because those things are almost silent. They’ll need sound generators like model trains have, so they sound like a real one.

The Cult of the Green God is not satisfied because like all the other ‘mememe’ groups out there, they are never satisfied. They want cars banned right now. Except theirs of course. I mean, how do you get to the next conference on stopping oil use if oil products are banned? Walk there, like a common pleb? They are far too important for that.

Seriously, imagine a world where you can’t speed around in a flash Audi or BMW and have to try to pick up girls in a glorified disability cart. See it happening? The car industry can adapt of course, they just make electric cars instead of petrol ones and then charge more than the car’s value for new batteries.

But the oil industry? You really think they are going quietly into oblivion? Oh no, this isn’t going to be like the tobacco wars at all. The antismokers never wanted to ban tobacco. That would put them out of work so they work with the tobacco companies to reach a compromise where they both profit. Can’t happen when you completely delete all use of a product. The oil wars are going to be a lot more vicious.

Really though, it’s about our ability to go places without being controlled. They don’t like that. They didn’t like us having places to gather and talk so they wrecked the pubs and everything like them. There has been a war against personal transport for a long time and it was always going to be banned one day.

Your 2040 electric car will have all the latest gadgetry installed. No need to worry about speeding, it will be incapable of exceeding the limit, even in an emergency. No need to worry about it getting stolen because the authorities always know exactly where it is and have the power to turn it off remotely.

A lot of people are going to think that’s all good.

Until they are driving somewhere the authorities don’t want them to go…