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Thursday 24 April 2025: 21:50. Yet another not a house post this time, but in fact I originally wrote one very long post which was about three completely independent topics. So it made more sense to break them up into individual days. This one is about fibre broadband in Ireland, and the new fibre broadband just installed into my rented house.

A few months ago, our vDSL connection disappeared and when the man came out to fix it, he said the line had gone so he switched us over to another line. This new line synced at about 30 Mbps rather than the 92 Mbps we got before, and kept dropping out for twenty minutes or more at a time. This was similar to when we first had vDSL put in – I had to have the repair guy out many times until one of them finally came up with a stable vDSL solution. That had lasted since then until now.

Thankfully Ireland now has better options! You can now get fibre installed into the premises for free if you sign up to a twelve month contract. A man appeared about three weeks ago, he installed an additional cable from the pole into the current rented house, and voilà I now have a direct fibre internet connection to the world.

In my post about fibre to the premises in Ireland, it turns out I incorrectly stated that Ireland uses multi-mode fibre for the last mile. This is true in other countries, but I have since learned that Ireland went with single-mode fibre for its GPON (Gigabit capable Passive Optical Network) last mile solution throughout as we tend to have more sparsely populated urban settlements and it was easier to deploy one unified solution. Thus, in Ireland, every premises gets its own dedicated fibre pair from the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) within the premises back to the cabinet to your own dedicated port on the OLT (Optical Line Termination) card. That card is very similar to a managed switch, and it shares an upstream fibre connection between up to 128 ports i.e. premises, though it’s usually less than that (supposedly, always less than 64 in Ireland). You might then get a 2.5 Gbps uplink from the OLT to the backhaul carrier, which therefore has up to 64 premises sharing it.

The physical fibre backhaul in Ireland for historical reasons has three independent implementations: (i) the ducts of the historical telephone network, which tends to follow major roads and motorways (Open Eir) (ii) the ducts of the power supply network, which connects mobile phone towers (SIRO) (iii) where the government has spent public money on installing fibre where it is commercially not viable to otherwise do so (NBI). To make things a bit more confusing, the owners of the physical fibre are not always the operators nor maintainers of that fibre, and there has been an ongoing government push to consolidate everything under a single one stop shop – however, for now, it all remains a patchwork and there are separate OLTs for fibre from the historical telephone network (Open Eir) and for fibre from the power supply network (SIRO). So, to be specific, if I order fibre broadband from an ISP which uses Open Eir for the backhaul and when that contract ends I order fibre broadband from an ISP which uses SIRO for the backhaul, I get two ONTs with two fibre cables installed into my house. They hope to fix that by year 2030, as that’s obviously daft, but it will require new laws to be passed so there it is.

SIRO due to its physical trunking along major power cables tends to mainly appear only in urban centres, so for both my rented house and my future house being both rural the only backhaul fibre connectivity available is Eircom’s fibre network which for rural Ireland is usually the nearest ‘N-road’ which is the type which connects major towns, which eventually feed into the motorway system which ultimately ends up arriving into Dublin. In other words, if you follow the roads, you can say how the data flows which makes things a bit easier.

What happens next is a bit more complicated. The physical fibre moves the bits of data, and as far as I can tell there appear to be several Layer 3 packet switching network implementations some of which share the same duct, but may use physically separated cables or even separated fibres within the same cable. As of Q3 2024, 1.3 million premises were connected to the Eir fibre network; 609,000 to SIRO’s fibre network and 300,000 to NBI’s fibre network. There isn’t much public information about how all this hangs together, so I apologise in advance if this post also contains mistakes – I gleaned most of this off social media where network engineers say how they think things work (which isn’t always correct either I’ve noticed).

I mention all this detail because the fibre installed to the site uses the Eircom Layer 4 backhaul, whereas my rented house uses the BTIreland Layer 4 backhaul. I read online that ISPs can choose to run PPPoE or IPoE over the backhaul, and ISPs who use multiple wholesale networks tend to choose PPPoE because then they can mostly ignore which wholesale network is the backhaul, and treat the lot as if a single network. What this means, of course, is all traffic must go via Dublin if PPPoE is used, whereas it doesn’t if IPoE is used.

Let’s see this in practice:

From rented house to site:

traceroute to 217.183.227.33 (217.183.227.33), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
 1  lo1001.bas101.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.131.6)  8.949 ms  10.137 ms  9.245 ms
 2  be137-50.rt101.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.152.1)  7.961 ms  11.220 ms  8.181 ms
 3  be103-100.core201.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.239)  8.915 ms  be104-100.core202.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.241)  9.419 ms  be103-100.core201.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.239)  8.204 ms
 4  be204-100.rt102.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.244)  9.345 ms  be203-100.rt102.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.242)  12.443 ms  9.375 ms
 5  lag-40.br1.6cr.border.eircom.net (185.6.36.82)  8.567 ms  11.518 ms  8.825 ms
 6  eth-trunk21.hcore1.prp.core.eircom.net (86.43.12.214)  14.236 ms  11.549 ms  20.680 ms
 7  eth-trunk11.hcore1.lmk.core.eircom.net (159.134.123.10)  18.473 ms  17.230 ms  16.650 ms
 8  lag-1-agg3-mlw-hcore1-lmk.agg3.mlw.lmk-mlw.eircom.net (86.43.253.149)  15.396 ms  15.442 ms  18.941 ms
 9  217-183-227-33-dynamic.agg3.mlw.lmk-mlw.eircom.net (217.183.227.33)  17.578 ms  18.452 ms  20.854 ms

From site to rented house:

traceroute to 194.125.122.54 (194.125.122.54), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
 1  217-183-226-1-dynamic.agg3.mlw.lmk-mlw.eircom.net (217.183.226.1)  2.635 ms  3.926 ms  3.776 ms
 2  eth-trunk122.hcore1.mlw.core.eircom.net (86.43.253.150)  8.553 ms  3.782 ms  3.742 ms
 3  eth-trunk15.hcore1.prp.core.eircom.net (86.43.254.143)  19.218 ms  10.235 ms  10.804 ms
 4  *  *  *
 5  inex1.btireland.net (185.6.36.166)  9.500 ms  8.894 ms  8.884 ms
 6  be103-100.core201.bmt.btireland.net (193.95.129.161)  5.781 ms  9.060 ms  8.759 ms
 7  be304-100.core202.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.83)  8.706 ms  be304-100.core201.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.85)  9.394 ms  be404-100.core202.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.87)  8.888 ms
 8  be104-100.rt101.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.129.240)  10.145 ms  10.076 ms  10.875 ms
 9  po2.bas101.cwt.btireland.net (193.95.152.7)  10.364 ms  9.766 ms  9.866 ms
10  194.125.122.54 (194.125.122.54)  20.493 ms  17.644 ms  17.767 ms

(In case you think I am leaking my IP addresses, by the time you read this they will have been rotated – both are allocated by the ISP via dynamic DHCP and they change every few hours)

Geolocation works for these IPs! For site to rented house:

1. Mallow (Eircom)
2. Limerick (Eircom)
3. Citywest, Dublin (Eircom) – note I think this wrong, see below
4. Dublin Internet Neutral Exchange Association (INEX), which is where a lot of Ireland’s internet traffic gets peered.
5. Saggart, Dublin (BTIreland/Esatnet)
6. Swords, Dublin (BTIreland/Esatnet)
7. (Remaining IPs all geolocate to Dublin thanks to the PPPoE until …)
8. Cork (BTIreland/Esatnet)

I think the geolocation database a bit off though – in the traceroute, prp.core.eircom.net looks like Priory Park Telephone Exchange near Mount Merrion in Dublin, not Citywest; lmk.core.eircom.net looks like Roches Street Telephone Exchange in Limerick; mlw.core.eircom.net looks like some exchange in Mallow. cwt.btireland.net does look like Citywest instead.

This is the problem with my rented house’s ISP using PPPoE. If my rented house were also on Eir for its broadband – and because Eir only use their own backhaul exclusively – traffic between the two sites wouldn’t leave the Mallow switch and round trip ping times would be under three milliseconds. By forcing everything via Dublin, we get eighteen milliseconds instead. In case you are wondering if Eir’s Limerick node will route traffic destined for North America directly without it going via Dublin, unfortunately not – I assume it must go to Dublin to get routed onto whoever provides transatlantic cabling.

You’re probably wondering ‘get to what we care about – how fast is it?’:

The download speed is gated by the new G.hn powerline adapters I installed, which do at least go 3x faster than the Homeplug AV2 ones they replaced, and my testing of those did show they capped out on my rented house’s AC wiring at pretty much exactly that speed. So I’ll never see the full 500 Mbps the connection is supposedly capable of, but 345 Mbps is perfectly respectable especially when we got 92 Mbps under the former vDSL.

BUT there is more to a broadband connection than how it performs when the wind is blowing right. We began to notice slowdowns and disconnections, so I put a ping trace on both the rented home fibre broadband and onto the site’s fibre broadband connection. It pings the outermost node in BTIreland’s or Eir’s network every thirty seconds (i.e. their Dublin termination node), and these are a week of measurements up to last Monday:

So, firstly, yeah the BTIreland backhaul clearly has congestion problems in the evenings, there is a clear repeating spike in latencies in the second half of each day. There are also stability problems where the connection will randomly just hang and it takes a minute or two to renegotiate the PPPoE connection. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to this – Wednesday on the graph was particularly bad, yet Sunday-Monday has been solid.

I showed these graphs to the ISP’s customer support and they said that because I wasn’t using their router, there would be zero support. It’s what you get for €35 per month I suppose. Eir costs €74 per month so it’s double the cost (albeit for a 1 Gbps connection instead of 500 Mbps).

Eir’s backhaul, in comparison, seems to never experience congestion at all. The one (mild) ping spike on Saturday is because my children turned on the TV at the site, which then synchronised the media library with home which meant the connection ran flat out for a few minutes as lots of data got moved. Even then, ping times went from less than ten milliseconds to less than fourteen milliseconds. Not bad, Eir.

In case you’re wondering if BTIreland’s connection is being presented unfairly here, I can tell you we don’t stream anything over the internet. Yes it’s a more actively used connection than the site connection, but when we max it out is usually in the early hours of the morning where no ping spikes appear. This makes sense – what is throttling the maximum download speed is the powerlink connection, not the fibre connection, and I believe G.hn has a separate priority queue for ICMP.

I tried my best to figure out how the PPPoE implementation is routed to BTIreland in Citywest. I didn’t find out a conclusive answer, so I’m going to assume it is routed over Eir’s fibre and that the traffic congestion issues are within its Citywest data centre. The connection reliability issues may be the Powerline network, they may be the fibre between here and the pole, the cabinet or anything else. Or it could also be a Citywest capacity issue. I can’t really tell without a lot more work, and in the end it is ‘good enough’.

One thing I did learn is that almost all ISPs apart from Eir use PPPoE over fibre in Ireland. This makes sense for them, Ireland is a small network so a single IPv4 range could traverse all wholesale providers as a single network. But PPPoE isn’t without overhead, both in terms of ‘routing stupidity’ but also in CPU and network overhead. IPoE is definitely preferable, and Eir is currently the only ISP in Ireland guaranteeing that.

In fairness to Eir fibre broadband, you do get a nearly static public IPv6 /56 allocation – I say nearly static because I’ve never seen it change yet in a year, but because it’s handed out by DHCPv6 and Eir gave me no guarantees, it could change. The IPv4 address does change frequently though, leases are only one hour long and they appear to change every few days. OpenWRT makes setting up dynamic DNS easy, so the Wireguard VPN between the sites is never out for more than a few minutes.

My ISP using BT Ireland does not support IPv6 at all incidentally. From my experience to date, I think I’ll be sticking with Eir when we move into the new house. This is despite that, from my limited testing, international peering appears to better for BTIreland than for Eir e.g. I get 228 Mbps from New York to rented house whereas just 159 Mbps from the same New York provider to the site. Similarly, my colocated servers in the Czech Republic actually have no peering at all because it is Vodafone/BT networks all the way between home and the colocation.

Still, reliability and consistency trumps peak performance, and on that Eir is well ahead of BTIreland.

#broadband #internet

Wednesday 23 April 2025: 21:50. Also not a house post this time. After the last two posts also not being about the house build, you might be feeling concern? It’s actually more than forward progressing now, I’ve seen actual draft build plans from the builder. It’s just a case of dotting i’s and crossing t’s before I have something to show here.

No, this post is about televisions, because I felt compelled to purchase a new one to replace the ten year old 40 inch Samsung H-series which had been the staple in our rented house since just after Clara was born. Long time readers may remember that I already bought a new TV in the 2023 Good Friday sales, a Philips 65OLED937 which some consider the best TV of its generation. That, due to its overly large size for this rented house, has sat in its box since as the house build took far longer to start than expected.

What motivated this purchase is that a few weeks ago I ended up watching The Hunger Games with the family and I realised that we had to turn off most of the lights to make out much of a picture at all. The Samsung H-series was infamous for developing purple blotches in its screen just after the five year warranty expired, and their refusal to do anything about it I think cost them a lot of their high end customers forever who were furious that a four grand TV now had a mottled screen. My much smaller model cost €500 or so including delivery from Germany, so whilst the blotches were annoying they weren’t a showstopper. However, last few years the screen brightness began to fade. I twiddled some settings to produce a harsh unpleasant but still viewable screen, but even that ran out of rope a few weeks ago. I mean, if you have to turn off most of the lights to make out a picture at all, it genuinely now is time for a new TV.

Having been spoiled by the awesome picture and sound on the Philips, but also unwilling to spend much on this given that the Philips TV already has consumed any TV spending largesse I once had, I wondered how much TV could I get for the same original money as the Samsung? That 40 inch Samsung H-series originally cost me around €500 including delivery from Germany in 2015, which at the time was an absolute bargain given it retailed for no less than €850 in Ireland. €500 in 2015 is about €652 in today’s money. What can €652 buy you in Ireland today?

It turns out rather a lot. I ended up dropping €617 including delivery for:

• Panasonic TV43W90AEB (€429).
• Polk Signa S2 Soundbar and Subwoofer (€188).

The soundbar is because all reviews of the Panasonic W90 series specifically called out the lousy built in speakers. Having since heard them personally, they’re nothing like as bad as the reviewers made out. They’re not a patch on the Polk soundstage true, but if you leave the Polk turned off the built in speakers are perfectly acceptable for a TV. That said, yeah the Polk is worth the money without doubt.

The Panasonic W90 series are – by far – the cheapest TV which the Reddit Home Theatre enthusiasts feel is the absolute rock bottom that their eyes could be allowed to gaze upon. Normal price is about €800, but they are currently on deep discount to clear stock as their replacement model is inbound. The TV is Fire TV based which is deeply unfortunate as you will see later, but the CPU is very capable and it has all the tuners for satellite, cable etc. It is a true DisplayHDR 600 capable TV, and it has a 4k resolution. Here are the comparative specs:

	Samsung UE40H6470	Philips 65OLED937	Panasonic TV43W90AEB
Year released	2014	2022	2024
Screen size	40"	65"	43"
Panel technology	VA with edge backlight dimming	WOLED-EX	VA with full array backlight dimming (FALD, 40 zones?)
Panel bit depth	8 bit	10 bit	8 bit + 2 bit FRC
Panel resolution	1920 x 1080	3840 x 2160	3840 x 2160
Panel max refresh rate	120 Hz (but only under 3D, 60 Hz otherwise)	120 Hz	144 Hz
HDR	None	HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision	HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Dolby Vision IQ
DCI-P3	75%?	99%	96%
Rec.2020	likely not much!	75%	73%
Max brightness	330 nits	1300 nits	600 nits
Contrast	4800:1	Infinite	5400:1
Viewing angle without distortion	22 degrees	70 degrees	25? degrees
3D viewing	Yes via 3D glasses	No	No
Max power consumption	115 watts	220 watts	160 watts
CPU	4 core ?	4 core Mediatek MT9970B	4 core Mediatek MT9653
Speaker power	20 watts	100 watts	20 watts

As you can see, I did do my research when I chose that Samsung model back in 2015. For its time and for the money, it was very good and it had excellent reviews. I remember at the time that the temptation was to buy a 4k panel TV, but at that time they just didn’t have as good a picture as a 2k panel so I went with the 2k panel and at the time, I couldn’t complain. It was an above average TV – the picture was very good for SDR and the motion processing and upscaling etc were also good for its time. The 3D glasses support meant you could watch 3D movies like in the cinema, and apart from needing to sit rather too close to the small screen to get the proper effect, we did enjoy a few 3D movies before it became too much hassle to setup and fetch the content. The 3D effect was as good as the movies, if you were a few feet from the screen.

On specs alone, the Panasonic W90 holds a candle to the Philips 937 except in max brightness and contrast. I can speak from experience that the Philips 937 can produce seriously bright portions of the picture, like eye searingly so in a dark room, and on that the W90 just cannot compete. If you don’t have any eye searingly unusually bright portions of the picture, the W90 is competitive. Colours aren’t quite as rich, there is a touch of backlight blooming from the FALD array, and the lack of contrast is something you really notice when you’re not looking at an OLED panel. But yeah, the picture is very good, here is the Panasonic W90 showing the same scene as the Philips from back when I posted here about that TV:

The Polk soundbar as I mentioned above is a good improvement on the built in speakers. It makes a fair attempt at a sound stage, and the subwoofer adds a bit of whack to the audio. It is pretty good, and well above what TV audio normally is. It isn’t, however, as nice sounding as my ancient Audio Technica 2.1 speaker set which I used to have attached to TVs before the Samsung (which I last mentioned here), and the Polk certainly isn’t as nice as the integrated soundbar on the Philips 937. On music, the Polk makes a fairly good rendition of Massive Attack’s Teardrop, but it won’t get you emotional like the Audio Technica’s do with that song, or especially that monster JBL Partybox which rendered that song like nothing I’ve heard before.

All that said, the Polk does ‘just work’ in auto powering on and off with the TV, and they sip the electricity which the Audio Technica speakers most certainly do not (they basically burn full power always even with nothing playing, which is why I had to stop using them for the TV).

I will make one other mild criticism – I do think a 4k resolution is wasted on a 43 inch screen. Unless you sit within a metre of the TV, my tired old eyes don’t pick out much difference in picture detail from the 2k panel. Our sofa is a good three metres away, and I genuinely cannot tell between 1080p and 2160p content at that distance. Indeed, even sitting at the kitchen table maybe 1.5 metres away I can only see the difference in detail for slow moving pans of say wildlife in nature programmes. If it’s say an action movie e.g. The Matrix, the added detail isn’t noticeable. This is in contrast to that 65 inch Philips – there 4k content is very noticeable over 2k content, even three metres away.

All in all, given this TV is less than the original money for the Samsung TV after inflation, this is a whole lotta display and audio solution for the money. Absolutely there have been sacrifices to get to this budget, but it’s a demonstrably superior home theatre solution to the Samsung. Technology marches forwards!

Where technology has been marching backwards however …

Stupid awful Fire TV

Amazon’s Fire TV is a fork of Android, and you can still (just about) side load arbitrary Android applications onto it. Though, in fact you won’t need to, their app store now actually has apps you want in it such as the Jellyfin and Kodi apps.

And that part of Fire TV works well. Current Fire TV is derived from Android TV 11, so the app experience is exactly the same. The Kodi and Jellyfin apps automatically invoke HDR and surround sound content without any help nor configuration. It all ‘just works’ in the Android app space, and very well at that.

What doesn’t work well is that you can no longer disable the vast amount of advertising from Amazon directed at you unless you disconnect the TV entirely from the internet. Which hides all your installed apps, including the side loaded ones not installed by their app store. For no good technical reason, and only because I assume Amazon supports Fire OS for the TV manufacturer for free if Amazon then gets to shove advertising at the TV’s owner for the life of the device.

Up until end of 2024, you could replace the home launcher in Fire TV with your own one, and thus get a non-forced-down-your-throat TV experience. In 2025, that option is currently gone. You get exactly two choices:

1. Configure the TV to have no internet connection as a ‘dumb TV’. No apps, just the TV tuner EPGs and you can select HDMI inputs.
2. Configure the TV to have an internet connection and get force fed Amazon promotional shit all day every day. And there is a LOT of it, I count five pages of Amazon stuff complete with auto playing videos being rammed at you. And obviously, everything you say and do is also being recorded and sent back to their cloud to ‘improve the consumer experience’ and not at all to track your political ideological purity. Yay.

Kudos to Panasonic for still allowing the dumb TV configuration, and in fairness, the dumb TV UI is clean, uncluttered and intuitive. It’s just wasteful because now I have to use a separate Android TV box for absolutely no good reason.

I have a Xiaomi second gen TV box. It runs vanilla Android TV 11. It has a few Xiaomi apps and branding etc, but they are very easily ignored and they haven’t locked the Android launcher or anything. After all, I paid them money for an Android box, and that’s what they delivered. It costs slightly more than a Fire TV stick, and it is very considerably better because Xiaomi don’t ram stuff at you for the temerity to use the thing you paid them money for.

After a fair bit of faffing around, I figured out the settings for both the Xiaomi box and the TV to get them to correctly coordinate on HDR content and surround sound. To be honest, content in Jellyfin on the TV still seems to me to look and sound better than content in Jellyfin on the Xiaomi box. But maybe I’m being paranoid.

I really wish that Panasonic would insist to Amazon that side loaded apps CANNOT disappear when the device is deregistered from Amazon’s cloud. That’s all I (and I suspect anybody technical like me) wants. But I suppose we’re a small subsegment of the consumer base, and in the end by purchasing an additional box we do get what we want and the fancy high end Android platform built into the TV goes entirely to waste.

Kinda reminds me of how IBM used to install the high end mainframe hardware to every customer, but then artificially limit it in software until the customer paid the increased monthly rental fee. ‘Upgrades’ were therefore a few minutes to flip a switch, but it kinda leaves a bad taste in the buyer’s mouth.

Where next for TVs?

You might wonder what €500 in 2015 euros should buy you in 2035? It’s an interesting question, because unlike in 2015 where 4k HDR screens were known to be on the way, I am currently unaware of anything major in terms of technological improvements coming soon. Basically, OLED and mini-LED panels are expected to keep getting both cheaper and brighter for many years to come. That’s it – nobody is seriously discussing 8k resolution TVs any time soon.

I had to buy a new computer monitor four years ago – it is a 32 inch 4k monitor costing about €700 or so at the time. It can do 95% of DCI-P3 and is DisplayHDR 400 capable i.e. it tops out at about 400 nits brightness (you wouldn’t want any brighter in something that close to your face to be honest). In inflation adjusted euro, it is nearly twice the price of the 43 inch Panasonic TV just purchased, and for slight worse specs.

I therefore think it safe to say that medium to low end screens will soon routinely hit 100% of DCI-P3 colour gamut, whether for your phone, TV, laptop or computer monitor. And with that, the era of sRGB screens will have passed after thirty years. The next obvious milestone will be Rec.2020 colour gamut, for which at the time of writing the best available monitor of any kind can reach 82% of coverage. You currently need a high end laser projector if you want to reach 100% of Rec.2020. But it seems reasonable that a medium end TV in 2035 costing same money as my new one might have 85% of Rec.2020 and peak brightness of 1400 nits (as the current DisplayHDR highest standard is 1400, and 99.99% of all HDR content currently available does not exceed 1400 nits).

In terms of audio, I can see that for similar money to my new Polk 2.1 soundbar and woofer, somebody might do a 5.1.2 soundbar and subwoofer like the Philips TV has. This has two sideways firing speakers, two upwards firing speakers, and the three front speakers left, centre and right. That would currently be a very high end soundbar costing a lot of money, but the DSP chips which handle what signal to go to what speaker to render Dolby Atmos will get ever cheaper. Couple those with lower quality speakers into a budget package … I think it’s plausible for ten years from now.

#tv

Saturday 12 April 2025: 19:47. This post will be very different from almost any posted here in the past two decades. It is an essay about geopolitics, and it is the first long form essay I have written since before I had children over eleven years ago (so I am out of practice!). It was mainly written between 9th March 2025 and 24th March, with a fair bit of editing in response to feedback from others until the 31st. I was abroad last weekend, so two weeks have elapsed before I could publish this.

As with all speculation, all opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions at the current and present time. They will be different in a year, five years, or even tomorrow. My supporting claims may be factually wrong, either partially or completely, you will note I haven’t bothered to reference any of my claims nor speculations to emphasise how untrustworthy anything in this essay is. I write this essay purely to clarify my own thinking and to better position my family and those I care about.

Last post I claimed:

I am one of the few I believe to have correctly predicted the current secession of the United States from its colonial outposts in Europe in approximate timing, form and nature. Because I never wrote any of that down, only the people who know me well enough to have heard me blabbing on about all this since a few years after the financial collapse will be able to confirm it. I made the suspicion roughly after returning from working for BlackBerry in Canada [ed: in 2013], it got confirmed with how the first election of Donald Trump came about, and obviously we are right now in the beginning of said secession.

We are used to empires of antiquity only shrinking due to misfortune, defeat or incompetence. As a result, we tend to assume that once you have an Empire, nobody would willingly give it up. However, this hasn’t been true in recent centuries in Europe – those who gain Empire generally did so for good reasons at the time, and those reasons can change in ways where maintaining Empire no longer seems worth it. After all, Empire is (i) expensive (ii) unpopular with the citizenry who would much rather rulers concern themselves with local issues not faraway ones (iii) a lot of complicated effort balancing off competing foreign interests in a long term sustainable way, replete with much unpleasant surprise and blame whether things were your fault or not. One thus sees a pattern throughout European recent history of empires voluntarily disestablishing themselves, as I think the United States has just begun to do for its empire.

Five hundred years of European colonial empires

So, why does an Empire voluntarily give up its imperium? As the United States is the latest in a series of European globe striding colonial empires over the past five hundred years, I’ll only look at what I think are the relevant subset of European colonial empires preceding the American one, as I think how those ended are the most applicable to the current disestablishment:

1. The Spanish-Portuguese empire collapsed in the 1820s after Napoleon showed that Spain was no longer a worthy keeper of its colonies.
2. The First British empire (up to 1783, mostly in North America).
3. The First French empire, up to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe ended in 1815 and taking with it many of the institutions that had kept Europe relatively stable for centuries – in particular the Holy Roman Empire, which had kept the Germanic peoples restrained.
4. The Second British and French empires from 1820 onwards peaked around 1920, which together had been a sufficient global superpower to ensure a century of relative global peace. It ended by the 1960s after it had become fully internalised that the United States had taken over as global hegemon.

I use the term ‘colonial Empire’ because that’s what the literature uses, and readers will instantly know what it means. But really all these are sea-faring Empires based around far away colonies overseas – and most of the other European empires at the same time were principally land-based Empires, who tended towards regional spheres of influence as a result. Nations surrounded by sea have a natural advantage to specialise in maritime projections of power and trade, but it has an effect on cultures and values too – liberalism, individualism and egalitarianism as philosophies and mentalities tend to be more popular in maritime-focused cultures than land-focused cultures. This distinction will matter later in this essay.

Let’s take each of those colonial Empires in turn. The first modern European colonial empire ended because Spain and Portugal principally used their colonial income to purchase goods and services from Northern Europe, including mercenaries to fight their wars, rather than develop their own local industry and maintain their own local military of sufficient potency. Partially this was geography – the Iberian peninsula is almost like an island off the coast of Europe as its land bridge is high mountains. Certainly, at the time, by far the easiest way to get to it was by sea, which bred a certain complacency about invasion from anywhere but from the Moors to the south. Additionally, the land and weather were neither as agriculturally nor industrially forgiving nor bountiful as in Northern Europe, plus Northern Europe was where all the finance was. This is a good example of what happens when you offshore the wrong things to others – the others grow stronger off your wealth until you can’t stop them from invading you.

It’s not like all this wasn’t well known at the time by Spanish rulers. They embarked on multiple rounds of reform. Unfortunately, they weren’t executed competently, and arguably a full century of effort was put into turning things around by the Bourbons without much to show for it when Napoleon turned up. All that said, out of all the places Napoleon conquered, by far the most indigestible was the Iberian peninsula until his fateful Russian invasion. The lessons on how the Spanish managed their Empire and how they lost it was noticed by other Europeans.

The French and British empires fed off one another, with each desperate to prevent the other from gaining a significant advantage. In this, they continued an ancient rivalry as neighbours which had continually invaded one another for centuries and had then gone on to compete for North America which the British initially won, only for the newly formed United States to then secede. Though it waxed and waned, since independence the United States was mostly ambivalent towards Britain and France, and not much of an ally until the 20th century. They were happy to trade with the other maritime powers, and the wealth which accumulated within the US enabled the industrialisation which made the US Empire possible later. In any case, Europe had its reliable flows of cheap raw materials from North America without the hassle of governing, which was another useful lesson learned.

Obviously, Napoleon conquering all of Europe within a few short years scared the pants off the British, which caused them to double down on imperial expansion after 1815 to ensure that France would not threaten them again. France kept up a fair pace of colonial expansion into especially Africa to ensure it didn’t fall too far behind Britain. Between the two of them, the world gained a century of relative peace (‘Pax Britannica’) during which Central and Eastern Europe industrialised and militarised, setting the stage for WW1, then a pause, then its continuation WW2 which put Germany back in its pre-Napoleonic role as the restrained European hegemon, this time with the EU replacing the Holy Roman Empire as the German-restraining mechanism (both of which have eerily similar internal structures and processes, which is surely not a coincidence).

My claim is that Britain arguably overextended its Empire after the shock of Napoleon principally out of fear of what might happen if it didn’t. You need a critical mass of people to agree on that fear to achieve enough consensus to agree on such an allocation of resources to abroad rather than to home (which is never popular under any system of government). When post-revolutionary France suddenly leapt ahead in imperial accomplishment, and Britain had to muster everything to defeat Napoleon, it established uncontroversially with the British ruling elite that that genie must be firmly kept within the bottle going forth.

Whilst the British Empire technically peaked in 1920, it was approaching bankruptcy and it was widely recognised as having been unwell for some decades by that point. Most think that imperial decline set in during the long economic depression starting from 1873, during which continuing to pay for Empire began to be increasingly questioned. By the time the 20th century had begun, real doubt had set in whether the monies spent on ensuring the empire were worth it. After all, by then most regions of the world now had regional rulers who were more than happy to extract resources, put them on a boat and sell them to you for a price just like the United States. Why bother directly running colonies and getting all the blame, hassle and stress, when you could get most of the value of having colonies without the bother of running them?

Also – and I think this is more important than people realise – by 1890, approximately four generations had lived since Napoleon. By the time you get to great-grandchildren in charge of things, the memories and convictions of great-grandparents become more abstract facts than sincerely and deeply held truisms. I note that the United States believed in the need to maintain its empire for around 80 years after WW2; what it is doing now is because a sufficient number of its ruling elite no longer fears the consequences of withdrawing US hard power from Europe. That is almost exactly the same timescale on which Britain stopped committing fully to its Empire. I think this parallel in Imperial evolution timelines is not widely realised, in fact let’s compare the British and American imperial timelines directly:

	Britain	USA	Time since existential threat was dealt with
Existential threat vanquished	1815	1945
Imperial overexpansion caused extended Economic depression1 begins	1873	2008	(58 years)	(63 years)
Usefulness of Empire loses consensus within ruling elites	1900	2025?	(85 years)	(80? years)

Ah, but what about the 1973 stagflation period I hear you ask? Well, WW1 ended in 1918. 1973 - 1918 = 55 years. I’ve no idea if it isn’t just coincidence that these durations happen to align so well, and no doubt that the 1970s stagflation was brought on early by the oil price shocks from the Middle East (though the Economics literature is fairly sure stagflation would have happened anyway by the end of the 1970s).

All these resonances make you ponder, don’t they?

[1]: The meaning of ‘Extended Economic depression’ ought to be clarified – it is when an economic downturn lasts decades and during which a majority of the population feels that their lot in life is diminishing. The 1873 long depression lasted a quarter century and was particularly notable for most workers remaining both employed and increasing their purchasing power throughout due to falling prices; despite this there was rising anger with ruling elites for ‘cheating the system’ in favour of themselves – in reality, profit margins had fallen as mass production had soared, so this long depression was one of industrial overcapacity tying up capital in unproductive uses, so the ruling elite looked like they owned all the wealth, but they were actually quite trapped by how little capital there was around for growth. The current long depression starting in 2008 has run for seventeen years so far, and looks more similar to the 1873 long depression than any other I can think of – once again populists who impose tariffs are put in power by angry populations despite that on most measures, those populations are better off economically than they were before the depression began. The 1873 depression was ended by remilitarisation and sending off enough of that population to war that those who returned were grateful for their lots in life, and no longer so angry with ruling elites (which is paradoxical given those elites sent them off to die, but there you have it!). I suspect this depression is also ending with remilitarisation, and the only question will be whether war can be averted this time?

The post-WW2 European compact

It is worth recollecting why the US colonised Europe in the first place after WW2, and were generally welcomed in to do so at the time by most European countries – indeed, only France, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland out of all the European countries west of the Iron Curtain do not host US military bases.

Europeans, having repeatedly demonstrated their fondness for ethnically cleansing each other over millennia, were clearly unfit to have nuclear weapons. And I think that most of the Western and Central European ruling elite were wise enough to agree more or less to not obtaining them for the most part, and so you got the strange system of America lending nuclear weapons to various European countries who then claim they have no nuclear weapons, which persists to this day. Britain does have her own nuclear weapons, but depends exclusively on the US to maintain those weapons, which gives the US considerable soft power over British nuclear doctrine. Only France and Russia have a completely sovereign and independent weapon, targeting and delivery system. They alone can independently posture a potential nuclear strike by airplane bomber to warn off aggressors, as the British rely exclusively on US kit for non-submarine launched strikes i.e. British nukes would need to be mounted on US made missiles or aircraft, which gives the US a say over most of their use. And apart from Russia, France and Britain, no other European country has the capability to target hard power anywhere on the planet.

The United States holding a veto over European hard power was designed into the system from the beginning. The US, having been drawn into global war for a second time to protect its interests, was keen on preventing Europe from waging war going forth. So a compact was formed: European nations provided boots on the ground and raw numbers and paid for lots of expensive US kit which generated lots of good US factory jobs. The US kept a monopoly on strategic command, intelligence, and the ability to coordinate all the European militaries as a whole, with only France mounting a relevant objection to such submissiveness. Yes, some individual countries could to a limited degree coordinate and plan a mobilisation on their own – France independently, Britain with much quiet technical help and therefore acquiescence from the United States – but nobody other than the United States had the capacity to marshall European forces as a single entity.

Whilst expensive, the United States at the time gained much from this arrangement:

1. They got a front seat to preventing the expansion of Communism (and actually Eurasianism) via Soviet Russia.
2. They stopped European countries getting themselves into a state where they would blow up civilisation, including the United States.
3. Post WW2, only three other parts of the world had shown any ability to challenge US power across a global scale: the Soviets, Japan, and Europe. By keeping Europe and Japan under the US colonial thumb, they were neutered as threats to US hard power preeminence. And Japan and Europe ‘bookended’ the Soviet threat from both sides, physically containing it with buffer states between it and the US.
4. Whenever the US wanted to do something globally unpopular, it could hark back to the allied coalition of WW2 by getting most of those same countries to send their troops to fight alongside US troops. It therefore could claim a moral superiority by likening whatever unpopular thing it was doing with defeating Nazis in a coalition of the same allies which defeated Nazism. This was very useful – especially to the domestic audience – so long as you cared about looking morally superior and enough people remembered and cared about what happened during WW2.

The expansion of the United States Empire came with submission of Western Europe and Far Eastern Asia, and constraint of historical Eurasianism. This is what geopolitics calls ‘Atlanticism vs Eurasianism’, which is very long recognised in the literature – indeed, Orwell’s three warring superstates in 1984 were called Oceania (Americas + Anglo Saxon countries), Eurasia (Europe + Russia) and Eastasia (China + Far East). This gross oversimplification was at the time less true than it is today – but as with much in 1984, Orwell did a great job at extrapolating the future accurately from ongoing trends in his time.

I think things began to change the status quo due to these principle events:

1. The elimination of Soviet Russia as the only near peer global power (1991), which made Eurasianism as an ideological and economic competitor to Atlanticism seem a spent force to the United States ruling elite (to a certain extent, I think they conflate the defeat of Soviet Communism with the defeat of Eurasianism as an ideology and dream).
2. The rise of the EU and China as peer economic competitors. I’m going to claim year 2005 for that realisation sinking in (see below). Europe no longer seemed to be where one ought to be concentrating compared to the rising ‘Eastasia’.
3. The older generations who could still remember WW2 died off, and ever fewer people in charge held the old truisms about the need for American Empire.
4. The partial deindustrialisation which had earlier afflicted Europe as industry moved to cheaper locations was applied on relevant portions of the United States after a lag of a couple of decades. Europe mostly reacted with worker retraining programmes which were somewhat successful at least with the children of the dispossessed – whereas the United States mainly did not, leaving behind multiple compounding generations of dispossessed citizens whose chronic illnesses are amplified by obesity, opiates and insecurity.

I began to notice calls within the US to withdraw from Europe starting from around year 2005. At the time, I took it as the Americans being pissed off by European negativity about their invasion of Iraq, but with hindsight I think that the organisation of the invasion of Iraq had made people deeply evaluate the cost benefits of empire for the first time since the end of the Cold War. I think the financial crash of 2009 both distracted the ruling elite for a while, but also strengthened the belief that the money spent on maintaining Empire is an opportunity cost, and that money would be better spent elsewhere. Currently, much noise is made in the US about ‘pivoting’ to Asia, conveniently ignoring the fact that a remilitarised Europe is a far stronger challenge to US interests not least due to simple geographic proximity, and that Europe still controls far more of the critical supply lines for the US economy than anywhere else (indeed, something like twice that of China). So I actually think that enough of the US ruling elite have decided that empire is no longer worth it that its disestablishment has begun, and there will be no more a pivot to Asia than comprehensive withdrawal from its Empire worldwide, despite the loud claims otherwise.

To be clear, I think belief in things like Empire is a bit like herd immunity from vaccines. If 95% of your ruling elite think it important enough, you get continuing Empire. If ‘herd immunity’ drops below some threshold – let’s say 75%, you get no more Empire. The same happened in Britain, by around 1900 you had a significant few influential people within the establishment holding the opinion that colonial Empire no longer suited British interests. That was all that was needed for it to unwind – all you need is ‘just enough’ doubt.

As Britain then learned, losing your Empire means losing lots of other things too. As late as 1970, Britain still made something like one eighth of all manufactured goods produced globally, and its opinion carried global weight worldwide. Within ten years, all those factories had been closed and all their workers made unemployed. Strikes were called, and then labour was crushed, permanently transforming British society into what could be called a traumatised people prone to epidemics of mass false belief and lashing out against manufactured fake threats. Until very recently when the recently appointed UK Prime Minister Starmer very unexpectedly actually turned out to be something of a global leader, I think it reasonable to say Britain had become mostly viewed globally as a self destroying basket case, and its opinion worth only ridicule if it was noticed at all.

It’s no fun for a country to lose empire. Yes, your young adults no longer need to go fight in endless foreign wars; yes, the money saved can now be spent on national urgencies instead, whether infrastructure or hospitals or more social welfare; yes your politicians can now spend far more time attending to domestic issues than worrying about countries far away.

But the loss of international clout and global dominance also means substantial economic and cultural retrenchment, and as with Britain, generally it is your lower socioeconomic classes who get hit especially hard as economic primacy ebbs away. The US has plenty of ‘left behind’ places, but not as many as Europe in my opinion, and nothing like as entrenched either. I have visited ‘shit holes’ in the US, UK and France. The ones in the US have started to dig themselves out after a decade or two – the ones in the UK and France are as awful and unchanged as they were when I first visited, and I see no good reason that they will ever get better so long as their countries remain on the path they have been on.

I am therefore confident that misery will become especially entrenched in swathes of the US, far worse than at present. I am confident that shrinking US military capacity will mean Europe and/or China will be far more capable of dictating how things shall be to the US in the decades to come – something which will be a shock to a population and culture not used to submissiveness. If the effect of British, Spanish, French, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman post-imperial relative decline on their populations and culture are anything to go by, it’s going to be real not fun for the American people over the next few decades as their relative decline of importance in the world speeds up, and their population reels at how much appears to have gone so very wrong. I expect they will become very bitter, like in swathes of Europe today, bitter at anything and everything they define as ‘other’.

What I think is next medium term for Europe?

Europe has clearly decided to remove the United States monopoly on the power to mobilise European armies as a single entity, and they have committed at least one trillion (yes, one thousand billion) euro to excising US hegemony from Europe. That is a very serious amount of money by any standard. It demonstrates genuine true commitment to the end goal. It means that this time, they really are serious about achieving this, unlike in the past.

From my best calculations, going forth from now Europe will spend in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms more than the US spends annually on its military². Given how Germany went from negligible military power in 1933 to being able to conquer Europe by 1939, a decade from now Europe should be once again the most powerful, most modern, and most recently battle-hardened by modern warfare hard power on the planet. I expect at least 500 new nuclear weapons and delivery systems based on the French design to be secretly manufactured starting about now. Europe will eventually need to have about 2,000 nukes, I expect China to top out at around 2,000 nukes, and I expect the United States and possibly Russia to shrink their down to maybe 2,500 nukes each for the simple reasons that (a) maintaining them is very expensive and (b) two thousand modern nuclear weapons is more than enough to end current human civilisation: each bomb will vaporise a city. The United States has about 300 medium-sized cities; Europe has around 800 similar sized cities. Destroy all the cities and put radioactive nuclear fallout over anything which can grow food … well, no more current civilisation. Two thousand nukes is enough to simultaneously destroy both the US and China. You don’t need more.

However, due to lack of any singular command, Europe will be a highly impotent hard power incapable of fully directing itself at more than the most urgent of self interest. So, a bit like with how the Holy Roman Empire and how now the EU restrains Germany, how Europe governs itself will undoubtedly enfeeble its newly reacquired hard military power. Uncontroversial things like direct threats to European borders will galvanise support (and as a result, I think Russia’s recent expansionism is now doomed in the medium term), but for distant hard power projection I don’t see Europe being able to easily muster sufficient consensus unless it is completely uncontroversial. UN-backed peacekeeping missions etc will be the extent of concerted EU global hard power projection.

This will leave the relatively less potent military powers of China and the US competitive because they will have a single leadership able to focus on a single set of coherent objectives in a way Europe never will, barring a massive change in how Europe coordinates itself e.g. another Napoleon. I don’t doubt both the US and China will establish their regional spheres of influence, and rivalry will appear wherever those spheres intersect. In any case, the days of a single global hegemon will in the medium term be over.

[2]: A US dollar bought 45% more stuff if spent in the EU in 2023 according to PPP calculations because costs are 45% lower than in the US, so a US dollar ‘goes further’.

Will a three global hegemon state be stable long term?

Game theory says that only two actors can achieve stable outcomes. Three actors cannot. Physics agrees – two similar sized bodies in a gravitational system is stable. Three similar sized bodies is not.

However, the three future bodies will be anything but similar sized. I don’t see Europe as capable of jockeying for power at the edges of its sphere of influence like China and the US will be able. It simply will move too slowly, with too much uncertainty to compete with speed. Where it will undoubtedly compete instead is where its slow, ponderous processes work best which in my opinion is surely going to be expansion of its boundaries. Europe’s population is one of the oldest in the world, and will decline in population quicker than China’s and especially America’s. As mass immigration from outside the EU is deeply unpopular, the obvious solution is to admit more neighbouring countries into the EU. I can see Ukraine, Turkey, and even Russia joining the EU in the next few decades.

Yes – Russia. Due to so many decades of Atlanticism prevailing, people in Anglo-Saxon countries forget that half of Europe – and arguably more than half – naturally tends to illiberal Eurasianism in thought and culture. Having been suppressed for decades, that is currently most noticeable in the resurgence of the far right, however European illiberalism has never disappeared nor do I expect it ever will.

While American Atlanticism may currently consider Eurasianism a spent force, many towards the east of Europe think Eurasianism is on the cusp of re-ascendency. A Europe freed of US colonial influence would be acceptable to Russia, and Russia has cheap energy and raw materials and thousands of nuclear weapons all of which would be very useful to European soft and hard power. Europe has the economic clout and financing Russia lacks. Russia would correctly conclude that by joining, it could exert considerable influence over EU policy and direction from within, more so than by staying out, plus it would neuter the considerable military threat now growing right on its doorstep. Indeed, Putin’s equivalent to Mein Kampf for Hitler is arguably Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics in terms of a single book which lays out his preferred vision of the future and how to get there. Published in 1997, it is about pushing the US and Britain out of Europe by weakening them from within by sowing discord and misinformation within their liberally managed but not well educated polities, and forcing repeated crises which rock the establishment, and then ‘reverse merging’ the EU to regain all the lost Russian satellites back under its wing i.e. Russia gets everything its ruling elite have wanted since the Mongolian Empire ended – the Russian Empire restored, now including all of Europe, with a single continuous hegemonic platform from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Russia becomes able to project herself as a global power never possible previously with the insufficient economic heft Soviet Communism could generate.

Obviously that’s the dream, and reality will fall far short of any dream. But there’s a lot of mutual benefit to doing a deal if the US leaves the European stage – Russia has plenty of the stuff Europe wants both ideologically and in materials, and US withdrawal will leave a vacuum which shall be filled. Russia similarly gains, and post-Putin those running things on both sides will surely see a blue moon historical opportunity for a union. I think it highly likely that post-Putin and post-US, Russia will declare itself to have renounced all its bad ways, apply to join the EU, and I think the EU will accept after putting on a sufficient show of ‘being tough on Russia’. This could begin as soon as fifteen years from now, so maybe by year 2040. The historical dream of Eurasia will be finally achieved.

The founding of a stable Eurasia will disturb status quos – admitting Russia would give the EU an extensive land border with China, which may or may not be welcomed at the time. China’s government is generally pragmatic – a land border with an expanded EU may well be considered an opportunity as much as a threat, if China continues to think of the EU as it does now – rather ineffective, and therefore not much of a threat. That said, such a Eurasia would truly be a colossus globally speaking – the biggest economy, by far the biggest military, the biggest continuous land mass, and around one billion (admittedly rather elderly) citizens. China has always feared threats from its north, so such a titan appearing alongside may go down poorly. Hard to say this far out – it may insist on some sort of buffer state in between, as is likely for Canada to become between Eurasia and the United States.

I’m not at all sure how much I personally would like the EU with Russia and her supporting countries exercising her influence within, tilting the centre of political discourse and culture far to the right of now, and with distinctly illiberal elements. I think the new centre would be somewhat around Hungary’s present right wing, and I think such an EU would be quite distasteful to me personally. But I know from history that systems of equally sized powers lead to catastrophic war – you need somebody to be the biggest, baddest hegemon to ensure peace. An illiberal Europe as the global hegemon is better than nuclear ashes, and it will still be relatively liberal compared to many parts of the world. It is therefore better than almost all the alternatives I can think of, so I’d have to get over it.

There is also India, which is surely to become a great power sooner rather than later. I don’t currently see imperial ambitions, but I do see them expanding their sphere of influence to the detriment of China’s and Russia’s. And that will truly make the system a three body problem, which is definitely unstable. Long term stability needs to avoid equally sized powers.

What I think is immediately next for the US?

I can’t say anything useful about a potential US-Europe-China-India world as it’s too unpredictable, so bringing it back to what I care about i.e. family, friends etc, what happens in the next few years in Europe and the US?

It seems hard to believe that the US won’t experience a substantial economic contraction next. Never mind the tariffs, it’s the uncertainty which ruins economic confidence. Nobody can now trust that anything from the United States, including from its companies, will provide uninterrupted service after the current US President put a halt to even commercial supplies of services by US firms to foreigners (one example of several is when the US very recently prevented its companies supplying commercial grade satellite photos to Ukraine – something I personally have purchased in the past, and from now onwards I could not be sure I could purchase in the future). Why make your business reliant on goods and services from US firms when they could be suddenly halted, or their price suddenly rise by 20% or more? So I expect a hefty withdrawal by global buyers from anything US supplied, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop that now as confidence and trust have been lost.

Not only is anything from the US now unreliable, Economics teaches that fiscal deficits are financed by trade imbalances i.e. you can run a deficit in your fiscal budget if and only if you have a negative flow in your foreign trade so they cancel each other out. If you remove your trade deficit with foreigners using tariffs and/or by scaring them off to other suppliers, you have to also eliminate your fiscal deficit, otherwise you get a run on your currency and capital flees your economy (i.e. a stock and bond market crash combined with your currency crashing). That means the US government will have to close their fiscal deficit either by spending cuts or tax rises. Neither is good for economic growth. It doesn’t help that two of the major sources of US deficit financing – Europe and China – will be spending lots of money domestically going forth instead of putting it into US Treasuries which fills in the US government fiscal gap. There is a confluence of factors all at once very negative for the US economic outlook. In fact, I struggle to think of a parallel in Economic history where so many negative economic factors occurred simultaneously. From a pure Economist perspective, what will happen next is very exciting, but for real people on the ground in the United States I can’t see it being anything other than awful.

On that basis, it would seem reasonable that due to severe recession, the mid-term US elections in 2026 could put both houses under the control of Democrats, who would surely then impeach the current US President who by then would be very deeply unpopular with voters. I am sure some purging of his movement and ideology would then occur, some passing of new laws to reduce the powers of the ‘elected King’ going forth, and somebody more reliable put into the White House instead. Some fine words might be said about recommitting to US hegemony, but to be honest once enough of the ruling elite don’t want to do Empire any more – and by proactively enabling Trump v2 which they very easily could have stopped, they clearly don’t want to do Empire from now on – only more rapid withdrawal from the world is coming next for the United States. Only a crisis which existentially threatens the US can change that now.

What I think is immediately next for Europe?

Europe is about to receive a sustained fiscal firehose of money. Due to such substantial and sustained fiscal stimulus, it seems very hard to believe that the recession of the past few years won’t end as a result. Parts of Europe strongly tied to the US economy like Ireland will see recession, but Central Europe I think will roar to life as factories start churning out weapons by the million, and most of Central and Eastern Europe starts mandatory military training of its citizens. All that new spending combined with taking so many workers out of the workforce will surely be inflationary, so I think the cost of living is going to rise, and therefore so will interest rates to try and hold down inflation.

As supply chains diversify away from the US to more reliable suppliers, I expect China to especially benefit, perhaps even enough for its economy to exit the economic depression they’ve been faking that they’re not having. Their leadership is more than well aware of this once in a generation opportunity to end the unipolar world and the ‘collective West’, so they’ve been sending lots of high level representatives to Europe all of whom have been saying lots of nice things to Europeans about how poorly they’re being treated, and making it very clear that Chinese factories stand ready, and Chinese supply chains are reliable and trustworthy not like American factories. I see Turkey has been doing the exact same, pitching itself as a near shore supplier of anything Europe might need locally produced, and also talking up how poorly the Europeans are being treated. The Turks, like the French, are amongst the very few in Europe to have 100% US independent weapon systems to sell, and as a member of NATO all their kit will work with existing NATO kit without issue. All very canny of them, and I expect the military industrial complexes of France-China-Turkey will do well out of all this.

All that said, there is substantial external risk for Europe. If there is a run on US treasuries, the catastrophic consequences on the global economy cannot be overstated. I find it hard to believe that the US Congress wouldn’t do what it takes to prevent that, same as during the financial crash, but unlike last time they can’t just print a whole load of cash and throw it at the problem which was politically relatively easy to do. This time they’d have to drastically cut spending (most probably military spending, cutting anything else would negatively impact the economy more severely), also raise taxes up to European levels, and the Fed would have to severely raise interest rates to sustain the value of the US dollar. As the saying goes, when the US economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and that will remain true even after years of active economic decoupling by everybody else from the US. US decline is bad for all short term.

I’m getting the distinct impression that either there will be a temporary pause to the war in Ukraine while both Europe and Russia rearm as fast as they can, or there will be no pause at all and it’ll just grind on until Putin exits the stage. Either scenario suits European leadership, as they don’t really care about Russian and Ukrainian lives lost. So long as they keep the fighting in Ukraine so Russia doesn’t threaten other European countries is all that matters to them in the short term. It seems very unlikely Russia can sustain the current pace for five more years; and five years from now, European military might will far exceed Russia’s. Both together will force an end to fighting, Putin and those close to him will meet an untimely end, and I expect EU entry talks for a newly rehabilitated Russia to begin not long thereafter.

The ideal outcome in my opinion

I’m getting into very speculative territory now i.e aspirational rather than speculative. Everything above speculates Niall’s best guesses about the short to medium term, and that ultimately leads into ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if?’ territory. So here goes my aspirational ending of this essay.

The relative decline of a single superpower is invariably good in the short term for other powers, who can rise to occupy the vacant space just as how Spain-Portugal was replaced by France-Britain, who then were replaced by the United States as dominant global hegemon. As the United States retreats from its Empire, it is a fair bet that at least China, Europe and India will occupy a larger space than they currently do.

However, three bodies of similar size are not stable – and four bodies of similar size are profoundly unstable. This is very not good when those powers all have nuclear weapons. So the ideal would actually be for at least one power to be generally recognised as supreme over all the others, in the same way as the Holy Roman Emperor was recognised as above all other Kings. As with the Holy Roman Empire, for this arrangement to work well for everybody, that Emperor needs to be restrained sufficiently that everybody can agree to them being supreme precisely because they are ineffective. I can’t currently think of any better solution than that the direct descendent of the Holy Roman Empire, the European Union, becomes the globally recognised supreme power, precisely because it will be quite incapable most of the time.

If the EU expands to include Russia and Turkey and their surrounds, she ought to be very well placed to become the new global hegemon. Everybody will dislike her equally, yet all would conclude that with her in charge no one power gets too big to cause the others problems. EU dispute mechanisms are meandering and slow, but they are effective in the long term – there is a mutually acceptable outcome which is eventually reached, no matter the initial intransigence of the interlocutors. The rule of some commonly agreed law is what matters long term for preventing Armageddon.

The Holy Roman Empire, towards its end, had two main powers of Prussia and Austria, with lots of smaller principalities supporting it. When Napoleon emerged to threaten that Empire, Prussia looked away towards Poland instead of supporting Austria. It was the perceived indifference of mighty Prussia that caused smaller principalities to defect to Napoleon to avoid invasion, which resulted in Austria standing alone against Napoleon until defeat. The Prussians then became easy takings for Napoleon. Had they all stood together initially, Napoleon would have been defeated at the beginning, and all would have benefited. To put things bluntly, we may all dislike the current system, but by collectively agreeing to support said system, we all ensure our collective survival and prospering.

Even if the EU were to become the replacement global hegemon, at some future point it will fall apart and either something better will replace it, or a new Dark Ages will begin and it’ll be up to the next civilisation which emerges centuries later to do better than we did. But for right now, I can’t think of a better replacement for US colonial empire as the global hegemon than the European Union.

Conclusion

I can’t say that I started the process of writing this essay with my ideal outcome just described. I have somehow arrived at the conclusion that more EU doesn’t just solve European problems, but it also solves world problems. More EU – and I find myself wincing as I type this – is probably the least worst solution to a post American world order in my opinion at the current time.

This essay has ignored most of the future growth areas of the world – India, Africa and South America – concentrating only on the currently dominant cultural spheres of influence of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia as Orwell grossly oversimplified it. This does a disservice to those regions and especially their own histories which European colonial empire has suppressed in recent centuries, but surely will not in future centuries. The reason I didn’t get into them above is that none of them have shown interest past nor present in globe-striding colonial Empire, and this being an essay about that, they necessarily were omitted. There is another big reason – this essay is basically a reheated synthesis of the last one hundred and fifty years of mainstream conservative Western geopolitical thought, which only concerned itself with the three spheres of influence above. Representative works might be:

• Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (1919) by Halford Mackinder.
• America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942) by Nicholas Spykman.
• Diplomacy (1994) by Henry Kissinger.

I should point out for balance’s sake that France, Russia and China all have their own independent schools of geopolitical thinking and literature. My own personal understanding is that they all agree on the same basic points as the Anglo-Saxon literature, they just reach different conclusions and recommendations. There is universal consensus, as far as I am aware, on the natural gravitational force to create Eurasia which only the Russian literature favours. Everybody else writes about how to counter, frustrate, mitigate and impede Eurasianism. Chinese geopolitical thinking, in particular, considers itself as closest to the classical British Empire as a maritime-focused trading power, and has been borrowing from British Imperial geopolitical strategy to keep its unruly neighbours at each other and therefore in thrall to China.

Due to a lack of academic literature, it is hard to imagine how things might play out globally if one of India, Africa or South America decided to begin playing ‘the great game’ – it depends on the accumulation of capital and wealth and therefore the means to disrupt the status quo. I think I’ll likely be quite old before how things could play out might become clear. With a bit of luck, myself, family and friends will all be happy, healthy and content. Ultimately, that’s what matters the most to me.

Addendum

I started writing this essay on the 9th March, the day after the post where I mentioned that I would write this essay. In the weeks since then, two things worth noting have happened.

The first is I was slightly annoyed to see an article in The Economist which pretty much is the analysis part of this essay with the future speculation parts removed. It felt a bit like somebody had cribbed off my essay … of course, in reality, they probably started writing exactly when I did and obviously they can’t publish the wild speculation parts in a magazine as respectable as The Economist. And almost certainly they’ve read all the same material that I have. In any case, the analysis part was almost identical to the above, so I guess despite being ‘out of the loop’ of dinner parties held by the ruling elites, I appear to have fairly well nailed what they’re all discussing internally. I guess that shows I’m on the button.

The second is that for a few days before the US vetoed the idea of a multinational peace keeping force in Ukraine entirely, it would appear that China was willing to commit a surprising amount of resources to enforcing peace in Ukraine as part of a European-led peacekeeping mission. Apparently thousands of very well armed troops were offered without being asked for it, and the quantity and depth offered was above what anyone had anticipated. Obviously social media went mad over it, but having thought it through, while it would be a bold move by China, it makes a great deal of sense for them on every axis I can think of. I don’t doubt that China’s many scenario planning strategists had cooked up this game play years ago, and having dusted it off and run it through the various committees of the party as a quick final check, President Xi gave final approval.

China desires most of all a multi-polar world made up of regional spheres of influence with its border to the North secure and supply lines safe. To this end, it has put Russia under its thumb economically to secure the Northern border; expanded its sphere of influence to the North, South and West and to a much lesser extent, its East; engaged in a directed social media campaign of propaganda across the world to favour its talking points, to the detriment of the collective West; and tried its best to set the stage for an anticipated and hoped for relative decline of US power. China’s best outcome from all this would be:

1. The USA’s soft power destroyed, with the collective West as a force ended and all its allies actively removing US influence from within themselves.

2. BUT with the bulk of US forces overseas tied up in Europe and therefore not relocated to Asia.

3. AND with the historical threat from the North firmly kept within its box (I believe the last successful toppling of Chinese rulers from outside China was the Mongol conquest – indeed most of the modern Great Wall was built after to prevent that ever happening again).

Helping out Europe with Ukraine at this time after the last few years of helping out Russia with Ukraine therefore makes sense. Europe is peeling itself away from US hegemony and will soon become a major world hard power – getting in early with helping them out is good politics and good business. The fact China was willing to put boots on the ground while the US was not would have had a superb return on investment in terms of both optics and further weakening US reputation and reliability – with a good chance that the Americans would be goaded into not removing itself from Europe, leaving Asia for China. Supporting Russia to peel Europe away from the US made sense until now, but now one needs to also tie up Russia in Europe and keep it away from thinking of what to do with all those troops who will be otherwise now kicking around – never mind the longer term concern of what if Europe and Russia unite? And finally, it surely has not been lost on the Chinese leadership that an even worse threat from the North would be if the US and Russia got together into an alliance against China.

As much as paying for a few thousand Chinese peacekeeping troops to be stationed in Ukraine going forth would have caused political problems at home, it would have been an inexpensive way of getting a whole load of bang for the buck. I don’t doubt that down the line, once Europe could ignore US requests, all the stuff the US insists Europe can’t sell to China as it threatens US interests could be dispensed with. Especially in gratitude for the Chinese being a friend when it was needed.

In any case, it became moot. What remains of the strategic analysis complex in the US recognised how catastrophic it would be for an ‘everybody bar the US has boots on the ground’ outcome, so they removed from discussion entirely the peacekeeping force proposal as an option. Even the quite unserious current US administration could see what terrible optics it would have, so they suddenly stopped demanding boots must go on the ground, and now demand that no boots must go on the ground. Hence whatever ‘peace deal’ for Ukraine which now emerges will no longer have a multinational peacekeeping force as a component.

My thanks to those who gave feedback on this essay and corrections of spelling and grammar: Megan Bean, Clara Douglas, Francis Douglas, Liz O’Sullivan, David Sankel, Chris Schumerth, Robert Seacord, Matt Thompson and Ruth Wright.

I hope you all found my little essay thought provoking. Here’s hoping the best possible outcomes arise from the current change in great power configuration!

#geopolitics

Saturday 29 March 2025: 18:50. This post is about neither geopolitics nor the house build. The geopolitics essay is written, it is about 7,000 words or so cut down from over 15,000 words. It’s currently in its final stages of review by various people I roped into proof reading it for me. I expect it should get published here maybe two weeks from now after I’ve merged everybody’s comments and feedback, and fixed up some of my less well explained paragraphs.

This is actually a much shorter post about Powerline Networking i.e. the power hungry adapters you can get to transport Ethernet over your power sockets. This is nearly the worst type of wired networking you can do, but it’s still proper wired networking and therefore of a different class to wireless networking (which is fundamentally less reliable). You would never fit Powerline Networking anywhere you have a choice e.g. if you own your own house, just fit Ethernet or Fibre. But if you rent and you’re not allowed to drill holes in your walls and roof, Powerline can be a reasonable solution – and it is better than Wifi in terms of reliability and consistency.

Powerline Networking

We fitted Homeplug AV1 500? into this rented house shortly after we moved in in 2013 precisely because I needed to get the internet from where the vDSL modem is (next to the front door) to where everything else is without problems caused by the very crowded 2.4Ghz Wifi dropping out due to us living within high density former council housing. That did work well, but the AV1’s would drop out any time the microwave turned on plus they were well slower than the vDSL connection (70 Mbps at the time). I therefore got my first set of AV2’s in 2014, they were AV2 600’s and they were still a bit slower than the vDSL connection, but impervious to microwaves so that was a win. Annoyed by losing internet speed, I then splurged on my first set of AV2 1200’s in 2015 and they were finally faster than my vDSL, as they could do about 100 Mbps in terms of TCP transfer bandwidth. And that’s where I stopped, as there is no point fitting something faster than your external network. And, in fairness, those AV2 1200’s have been utterly trouble free for ten years now. They ‘just work’.

About one month ago, our internet went totally dead. Out came the Eircom guy, he fitted a new line, which turned out to be flaky with the best connection speed at about 20 - 30 Mbps and it constantly dropping out. We had the exact same problem when we first moved in, and I had the Eircom guy out like a yoyo to fix it until they finally found some combination of wiring which was fairly stable – you’d still get occasional outages for a few minutes, but it was liveable and you generally got about 90 Mbps. To be honest, 90 Mbps is plenty enough internet for most use cases – you don’t need more, it’s now a ‘nice to have’ if it’s more. Indeed, if anything, the biggest issue now with vDSL is latency, you get an extra 10 milliseconds with vDSL or so for those few hundred metres to the cabinet which is a significant chunk of the total latency to anywhere in Europe.

I wasn’t in the mood to go through that circus again with getting Eircom constantly out to fiddle with the vDSL, so I looked into getting fibre installed into the home. I had fibre installed into the site last year where to avoid the install fee, you needed to sign up to a 24 month contract. Seeing as I very seriously hope that we are out of here a year from now, that would be a non-starter however thankfully only a year later, now the minimum contract length to get free installation has dropped to twelve months. So I signed up!

Fibre to the Home (FTTH)

Fibre to the home is interesting stuff. Your traditional analogue phone line is a twisted pair of copper (and often copper coated aluminium in Ireland) cables between the cabinet and your house. It arrives into your house as maybe a 3 mm diameter cable. What fibre to the home does is physically replace that cable with an identical one, but with a fibre optic cable within instead. The big advantage of this is one to one physical compatibility – often reusing the existing hole in the wall as you simply pull out the old cable and push in the new cable. You can reuse the same terminating enclosure in the wall, same fixings from your roof to the pole etc.

In fact, fibre to the home is probably the only place where multi-mode rather than single-mode fibre is going to survive into the long term. Multi-mode fibre shines multiple frequencies of light down a single fibre, whereas single-mode shines exactly one frequency. My future house uses dual channel single-mode fibre throughout – it is nowadays same price as multi-mode as the fibre has become so cheap, and if you can run a fibre for each direction, then single-mode fibre is superior in every way. My very cheap 2.5 Gbps fibre transducers will do 10 km of fibre or so, so they’re way overkill, and with more powerful transducers you can do 10 Gbps over 100 km without issue. The multi-mode fibre used in FTTH swaps the ability to carry multiple signals within a single fibre for far shorter distances – 10 Gbps might only work over 550 metres or so – but now you can pack multiple links into each fibre. Run half a dozen fibres per cable from the cabinet to the pole, and you can give each home off that pole up to 10 Gbps each. As all vDSL connections are within hundreds of metres from the cabinet, multi-mode fibre really shines as a direct substitute in this case.

Anyway, this Monday they’ll be swapping my analogue cable to the pole outside for a fibre cable to the same pole and then I’ll have a 500 Mbps internet connection (which is the lowest still available in Ireland for fibre). Obviously a Powerline Network able to do only 100 Mbps would mean giving up most of the internet speed once again, so that’s what motivated me to look into the latest and greatest in Powerline technology to see what has replaced my AV2 1200’s.

G.hn

It turns out that there has been no replacement for AV2 in the past ten years! In fact, the AV2 consortium wound itself up in 2018, considering its work ‘done’. Their last AV2 release was AV2 2000 to supersede 1200, but as https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/powerline/view/ shows, it’s actually slower than the 1200 for short to medium distances and only really improves long distances.

There is however a new kid on the block: G.hn, which stands for ‘Gigabit Home Networking’. It has a very different lineage. It was originally for putting ethernet over analogue telephone wires i.e. rather like vDSL, and it’s much closer to vDSL in terms of implementation though still quite different.

That smallnetbuilder list of benchmarks above does show a G.hn entry, and it’s slower than AV2 1200. But not by much – 120 Mbps vs 160 Mbps. What has changed since is that there is a newer edition of G.hn called ‘Wave 2’ which uses MIMO, whereas original G.hn only used SISO. So it should now be rather faster than before. Unfortunately, there is a real lack of anything empirical on the internet about G.hn Wave 2. There are no reviews at all comparing different technologies on the same network. Some folk on Reddit and Amazon reviews were positive, some were negative. There was nothing conclusive – which is why I have written all this up, because nobody seems to have done any actual side by side testing despite that G.hn Wave 2 products landed in 2021 or so.

Benchmarking G.hn vs Homeplug AV2

I took a punt on a G.hn Wave 2 kit, once again from TP-Link, and I swapped the existing TP-Links identically for the new ones with an identical network and identical testing. It should be mentioned that I have two AV2 networks in the home, and I only replaced one of them for the testing, so the power cables are ‘noisy’ with traffic from the other AV2 network. I should also mention that I explicitly disabled vDSL compatibility for both AV2 and G.hn, which defaults to on for both, and I disabled power saving for both.

	PHY TX	PHY RX	iperf TX	iperf RX	Efficiency	ping TX	ping RX
Homeplug AV2 1200	387 Mbps	426 Mbps	75.7 Mbps	93.6 Mbps	~20%	6 ms	5 ms
G.hn 2400	731 Mbps	920 Mbps	230 Mbps	296 Mbps	~30%	14 ms	3 ms

That is about three times faster for TCP bandwidth than before, which is quite impressive. The ping times get better in one direction, but much worse in the other. Weird, though it could be the other AV2 network interfering.

It looks like I’ll get about half of my shiny new 500 Mbps fibre connection, which is still three times better than the vDSL when it was at its best. Probably more importantly, ten milliseconds should be lopped off latencies, meaning that the internet will ‘feel’ much faster.

And I guess we’re not moving out now until April 2026!

#powerline

Saturday 8 March 2025: 18:34. Still stuck in joist design for my house build, where we have been since November. There has been a break through thankfully, they will be reducing all the joist heights from 304 mm to 254 mm, and with a bit of rejigging the ceiling buildups we have avoided a redesign because none of the finished ceiling heights need to change (thankfully!). They’re working on finishing up the joist design, and then we can finally move onto foundation design. Who knows, might actually erect something by end of 2025!

I have completed migrating from the sixth to the seventh generation dedicated server architecture, and the sixth generation hardware will idle from now on probably until its rental expires in the summer. So far, so good – to date it’s running very well, and the difference in terms of email client speed is very noticeable. It was a fair few months to get it done, and probably at least fifty hours of my time between all the researching and configuration etc. But that should be my public server infrastructure solved until I’m fifty-five years old or thereabouts.

Also some months ago I happened to be reading Hacker News where somebody mentioned that ancient Roman coins are so plentiful that you can buy bags of them for not much money at all. That kinda led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, it turns out a surprising amount of ancient coinage has survived – probably for the dumb simple reason that it was valuable by definition, so people went out of their way to retain and preserve it. You can, off eBay, get a genuine Greek solid silver tetradrachm made during the reign of Alexander the Great for under €100 if you bid carefully at auction – complete with portrait of the man himself! As much as buying a whole load of ancient silver and gold coinage has a certain appeal, it is a horrendous consumer of both money and time for which I currently have much higher priority uses. But I did see you can pick up unwashed Late Roman Imperial ‘shrapnel’ for cheap enough I reckoned it worth buying a few as a teaching opportunity for my children.

So I purchased ten unwashed bronzes for fifty euro, an absolute rip off considering you can get a thousand unwashed bronzes for under a thousand euro, but I suppose there are claims that mine would come from a checked batch with more ‘good ones’ in it i.e. legible ones. Well, after the kids had scrubbed them with toothbrushes and let them soak in deionised water in between a few times over several days, here are the three best of the ten coins:

The first I reckon is a Constantine (unsure which); the second I think he’s Valentinian the third (425-455 AD); the third he’s not quite clear enough to make out, but almost certainly a Late Roman Emperor. A further three coins had a bust which could be just about made out, but not well enough to say which emperor, and of the remaining four, three only had some letters which could be made out with nothing else, and the last we could maybe make something out coin-like if you squinted hard enough – but neither writing nor bust.

Certainly an expensive way of learning about history, but hopefully one that they’ll remember. The key lessons taught were: (i) Long lived emperors turn up more frequently than short lived ones (ii) Emperors who debased their money by printing a lot of coin also turn up more frequently and (iii) we get a lot of Late Roman Imperial coin turning up because at the end of the empire, the owners of buried stashes either died in the instability or the stash simply became not worth digging up as Imperial coin isn’t worth much without an Empire to spend it in. Having hopefully communicated these three points to my children, I guess I can draw a line under this teaching opportunity.

Solar panel history for my site

In Autumn 2023 – can you believe it was nearly eighteen months ago now! – a virtual diary entry showed my newly mounted solar panels on the site. These eighteen panels are half of the future house roof panels and half was deliberately chosen as you cannot fit more than twenty panels per string, which implies eighteen on one string and twenty panels on the other string.

The Sungrow hybrid inverter has performed absolutely flawlessly during this time. The early days had many uncontrolled outages during the winter period as I hadn’t yet figured out quite the right settings (my first time installing and commissioning a solar panel system!), but by March 2024 I nearly had all the configuration kinks ironed out. Since then – apart from a ‘loop of death’ outage in November 2024 which was due a very rare combination of events – it really has been solid as a rock.

To be clear, if less radiation falls from the sky than is consumed by the security cameras and internet connection there, yes the batteries do run down and eventually the system turns off. I call this a ‘controlled outage’ because the system detects it will soon run out of power and it turns everything but the inverter off. It then recharges the batteries up to a minimum threshold before restoring power, and at no point does the system get confused. This is different to an uncontrolled outage where the inverter does not recharge the batteries for some reason, and enters into a fault condition requiring me to manually intervene on site.

That ‘loop of death’ I mentioned is an example. Previously, I had the system configured to never let the battery drop below 5% charge, and that worked fine. Unfortunately, last November what happened was a sudden drop in temperature after when the battery had reached 4% charge or so. Lower temperatures mean less battery capacity, so that 4% suddenly became effectively zero. This caused the computer inside the batteries to physically disconnect the batteries to prevent them getting damaged. When the sunshine reappeared, the physical switch connecting the batteries was tripped, and there was no ability to charge them. I didn’t notice this for a few days as it was an especially dull week of weather, only when it kept not coming back did I drive out to investigate where I was obviously appalled as if I couldn’t get any charge back into the batteries, I couldn’t prevent the physical safety relays from firing. That would turn several thousand euros of battery into bricks. That was quite a stressful morning. Still, I got them rescued, and I tweaked the configuration to henceforth never let the batteries get below 20% charge instead. That worked brilliantly – the entire winter 24-25 period of little solar irradiation passed without a single further uncontrolled outage.

Anyway, Sungrow offer an optional cloud service integration which provides remote management and remote monitoring via a phone app and/or website. If enabled, it records every five minutes the following measurements into its history database:

1. Volts and amps on PV strings one and two.
2. Volts and amps on each phase of the three phase AC output.
3. Total DC power in kW.
4. Total AC power in kW (from this you can calculate inverter efficiency).
5. Battery charging or discharging power in kW.

You can get a whole bunch more measurements from the cloud interface, but as far as I can tell, the above are the only ones stored in a long term time series database. Said database is downloadable into your choice of CSV or Excel, however their export tool only permits thirty minute granularity if you’re downloading a month or more. That’s good enough for my use case, which is attempting to estimate how much power those panels could gather if all the power they could generate were used.

Daily hours of light

For obvious reasons, if the sun isn’t shining then solar panels cannot generate power. As we live quite far north, there is considerable variance in daylight hours across the year: approximately 7.75 hours at the winter solstice up to 16.75 hours at the summer solstice. That is 32% of the day for winter, and 70% of the day for summer. This is a best case – while solar panels work surprisingly well in bright cloudy days, they do not work well in dull cloudy days. A short day means less opportunity for thick cloud to pass within the hours of daylight.

Solar panels, interestingly, develop their maximum voltage if radiation lands on them exactly perpendicularly. If it lands oblique to ninety degrees, you get less voltage, and indeed much of the recent technological progress in solar panels has come from increasing the voltage developed over a wider angle. Voltage will appear with almost any amount of light – indeed, as my time series history clearly shows, a full moon on a clear night will generate more than fifty volts across those eighteen panels. You won’t get more than a few watts out of it, maybe enough to charge a phone, but it’s not nothing. I can also see that peak voltage – around 730 volts – clearly happens in winter, whereas summers might not beat around 690 volts. This is because these panels are mounted at 45 degrees, and when the sun is high the angle is quite oblique to their perpendicular. In any case, we can tell when light reaches the panels by when voltage appears on the PV string, and for our graph below we count the number of half hour slots with more that 500 volts appearing on the PV string.

The next bit is harder. The batteries start charging as soon as enough power appears on the panels that it is worth sending some to the batteries. Having stood next to the inverter, I can tell you it appears to determine how much load it can put on the panels by incrementally scaling up how many amps it draws from the panels, and if the voltage droops it backs off. I can tell this from relays clicking, and a volt and current meter attached (note that standard consumer multimeters cannot handle > 500 volts! You need a trade multimeter for this). Obviously, the time series we have doesn’t capture any of this, and only reports how many kW was flowing into the battery at any given time. And once the battery is full, it stops charging it.

This tends to mean that only the very beginning of each morning charges the battery, and therefore our only measurements for estimating how much power these panels can gather are for the very start of the day only. This matters, because solar irradiation has a curve like this:

… where zero is the horizon, and that curve is for June 20th at my latitude. This means solar irradiation reaches two thirds full strength four hours into the day, so measuring capture for only the first few hours of the day will grossly underestimate total capacity to capture for a whole day. I therefore need to ‘undo’ that curve which looks to be approximately x² or x⁴.

Anyway, I chose x^0.25 and here is the year of 2024 (I actually tell a small lie – Jan/Feb are actually 2025, because of all the uncontrolled outages in Jan/Feb 2024. It’s why I was waiting until March 2025 to write up this post):

As previously described, the blue line is the total number of 30 minute periods with more than 500 volts on the PV string – this strongly tracks the number of daylight hours, unsurprisingly, with the variance due to cloud cover. As mentioned above, ignore the dip in November with the ‘loop of death’, and do bear in mind that for Nov-Dec-Jan-Feb there can be occasional gaps in the data due to controlled outages due to lack of power raining down from the sky. Obviously if there is no power, there is no internet, and the numbers then don’t appear on Sungrow’s cloud service. This artifically depresses those months, but it also artificially boosts them because the batteries will often suck in 8 - 10 kWh in a day during those months which makes that day look unusually good.

Something perhaps surprising about the blue line is it ranges between 20% and 60%, rather than between 32% and 70% as described above. The answer is simple: geography. We have tree cover to the west which chops off the end of the day in the summer, and mountains to the south which chops off both sunrise and sunset in winter. The panels are mounted on the ground so they are particularly affected by geography – once onto the house’s roof, that effect should be markedly diminished.

The red line is the estimated number of kWh available per day based on the rate of charging in the morning descaled by x^0.25, and then linearly adjusted to match this estimate of solar PV production from my house’s PHPP computer model of its predicted performance:

This is for thirty-seven panels, so divide everything by two to get what PHPP thinks ought to be the solar PV yield for this location. I matched my estimated graph such that Jun-Jul matches what this graph predicts (~27 kWh/day), as does Dec-Jan (~10 kWh/day).

So, the obvious elephant in the room is that the curves of both graphs don’t match! To be honest, the PHPP graph looks like the sunrise graph whereby due to how the planet rotates whilst also going around the sun, sunrise gets earlier quicker in the beginning of the year. This might be a bug in PHPP? I have a second set of kWh per day estimations for the house from the Easy PV website:

Now that looks more like my graph! There is an off-centre bias towards Apr-May, and a similar raised tail Aug-Sep to the PHPP estimate, but it’s less pronounced. Easy PV also thinks a bit less power will be captured in summer, but especially in winter (the red is contribution back to the grid; the green is charging of battery; the blue is consumption).

My graph does show a raised tail Aug-Sep, but no off-centre bias towards Apr-May. But do you know it could be as simple as that the weather in 2024 in Apr-May was unusually cloudy? It’s entirely possible, each year’s graph will have its own shape, and only by averaging say ten years of them might you get the shapes that Easy PV and PHPP show.

Perhaps a future virtual diary entry here might average all the annual results and find out?

The next virtual diary entry

Which brings me onto the likely topic of my next virtual diary entry here.

I haven’t written here about geopolitics in a very long time, certainly decades. It’s not that I haven’t been keeping up to date and well informed, rather to be honest I don’t think my thoughts on it are worth typing up in my very limited spare time. If I am to invest multiple hours clarifying my thinking onto this virtual paper, generally it is because of:

1. I need a searchable record of my past thinking for future projects. This has been 65% of everything I’ve written here in certainly the past fifteen years.

2. It helps me to clarify what I am actually thinking by writing out prose to describe that thinking, even if I never expect to need to refer to that thinking again in the future. This might be as much as 30% of everything I’ve written here in the past fifteen years.

And because my thinking on geopolitics usually really doesn’t matter, it isn’t worth investing a non-trivial amount of my free time to write it up.

I am one of the few I believe to have correctly predicted the current secession of the United States from its colonial outposts in Europe in approximate timing, form and nature. Because I never wrote any of that down, only the people who know me well enough to have heard me blabbing on about all this since a few years after the financial collapse will be able to confirm it. I made the suspicion roughly after returning from working for BlackBerry in Canada, it got confirmed with how the first election of Donald Trump came about, and obviously we are right now in the beginning of said secession.

Most of such ‘pub bar talk’ material is harmless and irrelevant – a hobby thankfully usually not punished for doing it publicly in the collective West, unlike in most of the rest of the World. But when trillions of euro will be spent and billions of lives are about to radically change from the trajectory they were previously on, now it actually matters enough to be worth writing up here.

My family, but also my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues and indeed my people will now not live the rest of their lives along the patterns previously assumed. Seeing as they rather matter to me, I ought to clarify my thinking on this topic in order to have my best guess at what will happen in the future before I die. Only then can I guide those I care about in the right directions as best I can.

So I need to write something up. It will likely take me several weeks to phrase it correctly. But I do think it needs doing.

If you’re interested in such things, watch out for that here. If you’re not, remember to skip the next post! Until then, be happy!

#house