Daylight savings time: a scheme designed to rip you off

This whole Daylight Savings Time (also known as summer time) bullshit has gone on long enough. It started with good intentions: to save candles. But in this day of the light bulb and LED, it merely wastes your hard-earned money. Here's how.

Ben Franklin (the statesman who had an overactive sex drive, remember?) first came up with the idea of DST way back in the 1700's. Back then, people burned whale oil or candles. Today, we generally burn coal for our power. But it's not lighting that's the concern.

During DST, there's more daylight (obviously). The government wants you to think it's saving money by making sure you don't have to use your lights. In reality, it's costing more. More daylight hours means more time you're awake. More time you're awake means the more you're using other electronic devices. See, light bulbs only take up a small fraction of your electric costs. It's mostly your TV, computer, A/C, etc. The more you're awake, the more you use all of these.

"So why bother with this DST nonsense at all?" you ask? Well, the electric companies have been lobbying congresses and parliaments around the world for many, many years now. Worldwide, the sale of electricity is a multi-trillion (US) dollar business. The electric companies have the money to pay off represenatives to do their bidding. And what they want above all else is you to consume more electricity.

What can you do? Well, there's not a lot you can do. You can lobby your local represenative, but I doubt you'll get very far. Money is the universal language, and speaks much much louder than any other language. I suggest you try to help start a local anti-DST chapter or such. Until then, do what I do: refuse to observe DST, and convince others to do the same.

Made in Chinatown

How often do you come across a product which says "Made in China" and think, "man, this is a cheap piece of crap", even when it isn't? Well, you've been made to think that way. This is the work of the U.S. government and various other governments around the world, who construct cheap, flimsy products which make China's actual products look bad. And then what do they do? They mark them as "Made in China".

Right now, you're probably thinking, "man, American's don't make crap products, they make good quality American products." Sorry, but you're wrong. Take, for example, a Ford. My dad actually worked at a Ford dealership, and when the cars came in for their 10,000km checkup, there were many little things wrong with them. Yes, bits were falling off left-right-and-centre. So much for high-quality American products. While these weren't necessarily American models, it was the standard GM practice: to put old components in their cars. So, I have proven that Americans can make bad products.

In the earlier days, Chinese exports were reasonably good and reliable. So vendors decided to outsource their products. This was back in the days when Japanese products were known as "jap crap". And why? They did the exact same thing. As you should know, Japanese products tend to be incredibly reliable. Back then, however, they were making flimsy products and selling them as "Made in Japan". You could ask your government about this, but they won't tell you about it.

Why? So they can raise their prices for their products.

If they can successfully degrade Chinese importing, then they can say "hey look, we made this in [INSERT COUNTRY HERE]", and charge you through the teeth, while the odds of getting an authentic Chinese product is about 40 to 1.

So what about those who label things as "Designed in U.S.A", but actually made in China? Or "Made in P.R.C."? This is an effort for Chinese manufacturers to work around the distasteful labels applied to their products. They send someone on a business trip to America primarily so they can design it there, then they move back to China.

This isn't the only country targeted with this market control. While most "dodgy" countries have the "child labour" label on them, an attempt to create low-grade goods marked as "Made in India" is currently underway.

The moon landing happened; shut up about it

I am aware of how much the US government lies to its people and the world. But one thing they did not lie about is the moon landing. Everyone always claims the moon landing had to be fake for a variety of reasons. Here's me blowing it all out of the water.

The flag was waving when they were planting it...there's no air on the moon so this is impossible.

Yes, it is true. There is no air on the moon. That is why the flag waved so much. See, when they were planting the flag, this created a lot of movement in the flag's fabric. There was no air to stop the flag from waving. Thus, it waved. Plus, do you really think NASA is that stupid...

There were no stars in the photographs...no atmosphere means you should have been able to see the stars

Uh, have you ever noticed that in pictures of the ISS, there are few stars? That is because the cameras were not sensitive enough to detect the stars. The sun is plenty bright, but the stars are relatively dim. Remember: the nearest star is 4 light years away. It doesn't seem like much, but it is truly an unfathomable distance (3.78421136 × 10^13 kilometers, in fact. Hardly a walk in the park). If you still aren't convinced, take a shitty point-and-shoot camera and try to photograph your favourite star (even your point and shoot is better than what they had on the moon). Remember not to do this with any special time lapse or whatever (a film frame isn't a 15-second exposure). You will notice that there are no stars to be found! Lo and behold.

But...but...there wasn't any dust on the landing foot pads!

Ah, there was not. And for good reason. Dust on the moon went flying away from the craft after the engine blew it all out of the way. See, the moon has less gravity. Dust behaves differently there. It flies farther away when you "blow" on it. The engines would have easily pushed most of the dust out of the way. Speaking of engines...

Why wasn't there scorch marks on the moon's surface from the engines!

Yes, those engines are pretty hot. Butheat doesn't cause scorch marks, it's the soot. And considering your average rocket engine doesn't create soot (the materials it burns turn into gases and not solids, aka soot), you wouldn't expect scorch marks.

Radiation would have fried the astronauts!

Not really. They weren't exposed to it long enough. Now, actually living on the moon would have been an issue. But they spent 6 days going there and back. Considering radiation levels on the moon are about 1 rem, and the lethal dose is 25 rems, the astronauts would be fine.

But why haven't they taken pictures of it with the Hubble or such?

Simple mathematics shows that the lunar lander would be way way way too small to spot via an ordinary telescope:

Take into account the size of the lunar lander. Let's just say say 10m square. The distance between the Hubble and the moon: about 350, 000 km. This works out as a visual angle of (10m)/(3.5 x 10^8m) * (180/PI) = 1.6 x 10^-6 degrees = 6 milliarcseconds. The best telescope on the Hubble has a 800x800 pixel of a 35 arcseconds field of view with a pixel scale of 46 milliarcseconds. (The actual resolution is lower than this. Meh.) Thus, the Hubble cannot see the lunar lander. It could, however, see it if it were 7 times bigger. Even then it'd be just a dot. Simple, eh?

But the shadows! They all weren't parallel!

Same thing on Earth too, thanks to terrain differences. They never are. Maybe if you got out more you'd see that... Also, the sun's rays aren't parallel either.

I could go on and on dispelling these myths. But I won't. Have some real solid proof.

For example, there are some folks who routinely shoot laser beams at the moon to see precisely how far away it is. I know several people who have gone to see this in action. I don't think these people would make it up.

There's also the fact that the Russians would have exposed it as a fraud if it were. Remember: the moon landing was motivated by the Cold War. Russia had a shitload of spies in America at the time. If anyone would have known if it were a hoax, it would be them. They would have exposed it instantly.

There's also Apollo 13. You know, the moon landing that never was? Do you honestly believe NASA would have made that up? I mean, it was a huge embarrasement to NASA (just imagine how much the Russians would have laughed at that).

Really, if you think the moon landing was fake, please take off your tin hat, take the $drug pipe out of your mouth, and get some sense. Thank you.

A little introduction.

I was thinking about doing a blog about conspiracy theories. Y'know, the sort of conspiracy theories like "food prices are increasing due to the oil companies attempting to get people to consume petrol instead". Or "Microsoft corrupting GNOME developers to use Apple-styled menubars". Maybe "Burger King intentionally putting low-grade ingredients into McDonalds burgers", perhaps?

Here's hoping I actually post some good stuff, and not just leave this to rot.