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To: TobagoJack who wrote (11900)	12/17/2001 12:14:57 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, today my wife and I went for a stroll to Newmarket [a shopping precinct] to enjoy 3D, exercize and to ogle CDMA phones [me - XX chromosome people have wiring missing in their brains which makes chatting to other people and admiring XXmas trees more interesting] and also XX chromosome people [me again, I seem to have special abilities for that too]. On the way, we walked over the motorway on a pedestrian bridge. We stopped and gazed at the torrent of steel hurtling along the wide asphalt. It somehow seemed an anachronism to me. Where the heck were those people in their steel boxes going? Huge trucks thundering along too. It seemed so purposeful yet so meaningless when I imagined the destinations they were going to and what they would achieve. That seemingly unstoppable flood of humanity and industrial revolution technology is no more permanent than horses and blacksmiths because the purpose is beyond the obvious activity. So, when you say that platinum is really good stuff, it looks like a motorway full of steel to me. Sure, computer disks and storage and cyberspace are the new superhighway and hundreds of millions of people are swarming out of 3D and onto that new motorway. So, if one can get into the steel business at the start of the production line, that's pretty good. But competition is pretty tough. The real money was made by the car companies and others with intellectual property and competitive skills to apply it. Platinum is the steel, aluminium or rubber of the 21st century. So I can imagine that demand will be substantial. But predicting that demand is fraught with difficulty. For example, you mention the storage disks. But information can be stored much more densely, accessibly and cheaply in solid state 3D pattern-matching systems [a bit like our neuron memory storage systems]. Platinum might be irrelevant. Even if platinum is used, the amount on my little, new, notebook computer disk is minuscule and more and more data is being stored with less and less platinum. I don't really want to store much on my notebook [which can get lost]. I'd rather store it in cyberspace, where I'm sure storage is cheaper and uses less platinum. <please do not forget petrochemical/energy applications yet to be invented in this world of diminishing supplies.> Crude oil and other fossil hydrocarbon supplies are indeed diminishing, but that is irrelevant. Supplies are still so vast that other than glitchy situations such as Saudi Arabia going off-line for a year or three which will cause price spikes, there is no shortage to worry about. Coal, gas and oil, not to mention Orinoco heavy oils are in such vast supply that there can't be much more than a nominal price rise. Certainly nothing to touch our modern economy where energy costs are less and less relevant. Even as supplies do slowly diminish, there are rapidly evolving technologies to improve the performance of that torrent of steel I watched today. For example, the VW Lupo diesel uses only 3 litres per 100 kilometres and is very, very clean. volkswagen.de People don't really need monster SUVs to go downtown and park for a movie. They might even use a Segway segway.com instead of a Lupo [or pop one in the boot for getting around the crowded centres]. Now, energy costs and platinum requirements go way down in that situation. Vegetable oils are so cheap that $5 will handle hundreds of kilometres of travel. The fossil fuel suppliers are NOT going to be able to increase their prices much. Check out Veggie Van veggievan.org In my oil days, I ran a trial using tallow ester mixed with diesel fuel. Worked fine! Tallow ester means sheep fat reacted with methanol [both in plentiful supply in Kiwiland]. Vegetable oils can work well too. Crude oil is never going to run out and isn't even going to increase in price too dramatically [though SUV owners might figure there are better options for travel in the village]. <as we step into that time machine, together with the Japanese, travelling to a new world, what do you want to be carrying in your one piece of luggage. > Cyberspace! Which will be handsfree, being implanted in the bone behind my ears, with retina scan input and larynx and tongue nerve transducers for output. With a little control box for other functions. Mqurice