Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Ask Peter: Why Scottish Independence Will NEVER Happen!" video.

I'm an Aussie but one on my best mates is a Scot and my advice to him on this would be Look at how the Europeans negotiated with Britain after the Brexit vote then imagine how the English would treat the Scots??????????? For reference go and look what they REALLY DID to William Wallace not the family friendly Mel Gibson version and then put that into a financial frame of reference. One thing Peter does not count in here is that Scotland does have a fantastic energy resource if its smart enough to LISTEN. The North of Scotland and its islands are WINDY, very very WINDY. The wind in the north of Scotland doesn't blow it howls like a banshee in heat and it rarely rarely stops. Use the wind to create hydrogen and build a bloody pipe down to England and keep that going all the way to France. I did my degree in aerospace engineering. Back in the 1990s when we all thought we'd have to swap from Jet A-1 to hydrogen companies like Rolls Royce, Siemens and GE did all the work for making gas turbines run on hydrogen. All the technical issues were solved 20+ years ago. As soon as someone connects a wind turbine to an electrolyser that's connected to a pipe then the person who owns that wind turbine and electrolyser wont need to work again - EV_ARGH. Think of it like an oil well that doesn't run dry. Once its built its low maintenance and the cost of producing hydrogen becomes bugger all. All you have to do is check the gearbox for lube, the turbine blades for wear and replace the electrodes in the electrolyser when they wear down. The only reason it hasn't been done is there hasn't been a substantial hydrogen market. the reason why nobody has been buying hydrogen turbines is there hasn't been a requirement or a fuel source. THAT"S ALL CHANGING. You Scotts have an energy gold mine on your North Coast. All you need to be is smart about it.
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@chiefgilray Yeah I agree. One thing we do need is to tell the Americans to back off a bit and the biggest problem I see us having with American's isn't their culture or their people its their politics and economics (as a combination). Sorry if this is another long reply, but it will explain part of why everyone needs to tell America to back off. I actually went to college in America and did aerospace engineering (U. of Illinois). I was there during the 85 (mid-term) & 87 election (POTUS) election seasons and it drove me so nuts I never wanted anything to do with ANY politics again. BUT these days we don't have that luxury and we need to consider how American politics and economics function. Its one reason why I think a lot of people are watching people like Peter. They want to understand this stuff. Right now one of the biggest issues in the world is that there's a difference between How America is supposed to work and how it is working. No matter how much we might like or dislike America, its still 1/4 of the worlds economy and the US Dollar is still the worlds reserve currency and America still has so much military firepower it can smash anything it wants. The SOURCE of that problem is most American's no longer have a good understanding of: 1) How their own country actually functions versus how they think it functions; and 2) How the rest of the world actually functions. When I was there in the late 80s EVERYONE had studied (what they called) Civics in high school. It was where they learned how America functioned and I wished Australia had its version of that. It used to embarrass me how well informed they all were on things like the US Constitution and how their system worked. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and were right into that stuff. They dragged me into their discussions all the time. So even though I didn't like their politics I did got informed on how America was SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION and yes I love to catch up with a few people and ask a few pertinent questions. What none of us knew at that time was that a group of people out of the U. of Chicago (UoC), Harvard and Yale formed what we now know as the Federalist Society. People are starting to finally working out who these people are and what they have been working on for almost 40 years, which is tearing down and then re-building America into THEIR VERSION of what America should be. Its very much like what the Ayatollah's did in Iran but from an economic standpoint. People need to realise that these 3 Universities are PRIVATELY OWNED. So they make their own rules. Plus UoC was founded (in part) by John D. Rockefeller and although I can't say with 100% certainty, my conclusion is UoC was set up to find ways to re-build the entire world into a Rockefellian system. One its most prominent professors, Milton Freidman, basically said "Government is hopeless and we (the private sector) should run everything." Out of UoC also came James McKinsey (professor of accounting) who founded McKinsey Consultants and kicked off the consulting industry after which is now a cancer on our governments. From UoC's political science department we got wonderful things like "Offensive Realism" and the Neo-conservative movement that gave us the 2 longest wars (Iraq & Afghanistan) since WW2. But most of all out of UoC came Neoliberal Economics (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Freidman, Ronald Coase,....) that's dominated world economics since Reagan gave us Reaganomics and Thatcher gave us Thatcherism. Its resulted in the greatest wealth transfer in history and if you doubt that go and look up the report Bernie Sanders got the US Congressional Budget Office to update on "Family Wealth." Almost nothing has been said about this report in ANY media including social media. Just look at the 1st Graph on that report and it tells you that 50% of the American population has GONE NOWHERE in the last 30 years, while the Middle 40% has had some gains the TOP 10% have gained about $60 Trillion dollars in Wealth. That thin brown line across the bottom of that graph now represents 165 million people who are not only impoverished, but to get out of that poverty need to spend staggering amounts to get educated enough to get out. I have checked the Australian data which is presented a little differently but it tells the same basic story. Go an watch some of Gary Stevenson the young British Economist. In his 20s he became a multi-millionaire and became Citibank's top trader in the world and he did it betting AGAINST the Brits recovering from the GFC. He's now saying the same sorts of things about Britain. Sorry for the long reply, but its stuff I think people should know about and be discussing. The American people are NOT the problem their politicians, economists and the people who back them ARE the problem.
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@InformedKiwi It never ceases to amaze that Kiwis think arrogant stupidity is a virtue. Listen and you might learn something. History is littered with better technologies that were never adopted. Example 1: VHS tapes. Sorry but BetaMax was better in every way but 1. Better picture, better re-record, better in almost everything except they were more expensive to make and Hollywood wanted cheaper. Example 2: Molten Salt Reactors were better and more efficient and produced less waste than Water cooled reactors but were developed second and NOBODY held the patents that they could control. If Chernobyl or Fukushima had been MSRs then there would have been NO ACCIDENTS. Do you know the coal industry developed a new generation of boilers for power stations that would have reduced world CO2 emissions by several billion tons a year? Rio Tinto was one of the main players in that. They even had advertisements on TV at one stage telling everyone about their new technology. They even built a power station in Japan that used it. It was a technology that wasn't adopted, because Rio Tinto and others would have lost billions because the amount of coal they sell would have dropped significantly. The issues with producing and using Hydrogen from wind were solved years ago. The issues with using it in gas turbines were mostly solved in the 1990s BUT nobody wanted it at the time especially the jet fuel industry and the natural gas industry. The jet fuel guys didn't need to worry because they might have worked out the engine issues but not the fuel tank issues. Try coming down of your self imposed arrogance high chair WTFU. Being good at rugby means JACK SHlT about everything else. Just be grateful there's something you clowns are good at. And just because Scott Dixon, Scott McLaughlin and Shane Van Hamburger can drive doesn't mean the rest of you farking can.
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