I have heard, again and again, that I am "negative". This is the opposite of optimistic. The corollary of optimism is, alas, stupidity. I am repeatedly told to be positive by the sort of people who loaded the Challenger up one cold Winter morning and watched it explode overhead. I'm sure they said the techs that warned them the O-rings would fail at subzero temps were being "negative". My last couple jobs, I was The Guy who predicted failure points and planned to avert or reduce their damages. I was often told I was Negative, again and again, by people I know for a fact are Stupid. Their repeated inability to learn from their mistakes and the examples of others are defining features of stupidity. Ignorance can only be excused once. Stupidity is forever. I object to stupid people being in charge of anything more complicated than a broom. This is not to say you can't be happy about the future, provided you plan for potential failures. Optimism is about avoiding failure because you believe it is impossible because anything else wouldn't be Optimism. Optimism is crazy. That was the whole point of Candide, by Voltaire. Showing how Optimism is NOT SANE. You have to plan for the potential failures, not pretend they can't happen because they're inconvenient for your delusion.
America is facing the Fiscal Cliff. Most programs are getting cut, including military spending. There are upsides to that, many upsides since I'm a Libertarian and I'm morally opposed to "*bama Stash". The Fiscal Cliff got its own countdown timer on the financial news channels today. If the USA defaults (it probably won't) it would mean the final nail driven into the USD$ as the World Reserve Currency. The Dollar is the reserve currency because it is used by OPEC for all oil sales, an agreement between FDR and the king of Saudi Arabia back before WW2. That set the stage for the eventual defeat of the USSR and ended WW3 with only warning shots fired. So we're fighting WW4 now, not WW3.
The collapse of the Dollar, closer each time Quantitative Easing is used, will cause imports to become dramatically more expensive (car parts!) and the value of any savings to collapse to approximately half of their current value, possibly lower. My own math on US farm and military weapons exports (USA's two biggest dollar value exports), means the USD$ is actually worth around 20% what it was in 2006, before the big currency crash started and housing values were at their highest. Housing prices are starting to go up now, but there's this thing called "inflation". So you might see a huge price spike in your home... or not.
The limiting factor in home prices is actually the market value price, and that's controlled by the ability to pay. Since wages are falling across the board to Minimum Wage in all jobs, even highly skilled ones (the dream of Communists everywhere), the amount a couple can put towards a mortgage is growing smaller, not larger. For now, mortgage rates are low, so this is probably the bottom of the market HOWEVER, the fiscal cliff could drive that lower, and anything impacting the price of commuter fuel (gasoline and diesel) will also impact what price people can pay for a house because it impacts what jobs they can have. When their wages bottom out, housing values will be highest closest to jobs and lowest furthest away from them. Lowest could be almost nothing. Especially once the FedGovt stops paying *bama Stash to welfare mothers' rent because the Fiscal Cliff ends their program, under established law. Laws supported by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Naturally, this will not happen. As history shows, the government never defaults. They just compromise in a way that nobody likes. Of course, *bama has only given his usual baseless optimism speeches and has refused compromise, then went on vacation again. The days are counting down and the Democrats are playing chicken with their constituents, betting that the opposition, who would love to push those Democratic constituents into the sea like lemmings on a cliff in front of a bulldozer called "The Law", will back down.
Huh? I know the Democrats are crazy but HUH? Do they (Democrats) really think that attacking the wealthy party is going to get them (Republicans) to back down? The wealthy will lose some money in the fiscal cliff, but the poor will lose EVERYTHING; all their programs get cut, all their pet projects and free rent and cellphones, the entire *bama Stash is coming to an end with the fiscal cliff. Why aren't they cursing at their Democratic representatives to compromise and save their piece of the Stash? Dead poor people are people we don't have to pay taxes for. How is that hard to understand? Republicans aren't interested in punishing their own children so someone else's child will steal their future. Duh!
I look at the madness of the Democratic Party and all they aren't doing for the people who voted for them and despair. Only an insane person would find any Optimism in this situation. America needs jobs. The multinationals are exporting jobs for increased profits. The Multinationals ARE the problem and need to be shut down or taxed so heavily they'll stop seeing this country as a convenient tax shelter. That will open opportunities for local companies, ones that confine operations to within our borders and pay their appropriate taxes rather than cheat the system. This is a problem from both political parties. At least one needs to admit this and turn it into something they stand against. One party needs to be for the Middle Class. Right now, neither gives a damn.
We keep having problems with Robber Barons who put profits before all else, and bribe the politicians to ensure they can keep cheating the system. It is time to do something about that. Of course, that can't happen as long as those Robber Barons keep funding the election campaigns of the Democratic Party. Ironically, since taxing people is what the PRK does best, even those Robber Barons are finding it hard to retain their personal wealth in my state and the more poor people there are, getting *bama Stash, the more *bama Stash they vote for. Eventually the tipping point is reached and it all collapses with the poor voting themselves an infinite number of worthless dollars. That is the true end of Wealth, at least when measured in Dollars.
Penn and Teller are Libertarians, like me. Except of course, they have jobs. And money to lose. And pie.
The
obvious answer to the current political climate is to work less so you have less money to pay taxes with.
Work as little as you can get away with, and reduce your taxable spending. Give money to charity YOU
approve of so that comes out of your taxable income. Drive cheaper cars
so you pay less road tax (in the form of license/registration fees), and drive less
in general so you pay less money towards OPEC, the bastards, so they can
fund less terrorism. And think hard, every
time you spend money, whether there's an American-made product you could
buy instead of one that's "made in China". Start draining the funding of those *bama Stash programs so they go bankrupt, so the Poor can't abuse them anymore. Make the Dollar Crash. And put your money somewhere immune. I hear that fertile farmland is the next big thing. That's where the money comes from: food. Soon that will be all that's holding up our debt burden. Of course, the poor will probably vote for free food and higher taxes on farmers, again, so you may want to think really hard about failing just enough there, and reinvesting, so you again reduce taxable income. And if you can't do that, buy stocks/partnerships in farms that do. Do what the Robber Barons do, just do it smaller. Eventually the poor will die out or get jobs to eat because their vote becomes meaningless. That's the future we're headed towards. Democracy can't work for long like this, on Mandatory Optimism like some cult about to implode.
No thank you. Plan for the potential problems, be prepared for them, just in case. Accept that life isn't all Puppies and Rainbows. We need Realists these days. Not Optimists. If you don't believe me, look at Detroit Collapse in a Google image search. Optimists built that city, put in the pipes that broke and set aside no money in case housing prices stopped rising or fell. They were sure it could only get better. It collapsed. That's what Optimism gets you. Sometimes Optimists are lucky and they don't fail this time. This just encourages them to keep making the same mistakes. A Realist knows that stuff happens and you can't count on Good Luck to save you from yourself. You can't count on it. Optimists count on it. That's crazy.
On Monday I had a job interview. The second since I arrived up here. Jobs are rare here, and all of them pay Minimum Wage. Pause and consider that a moment. How are you supposed to rent a residence and eat and pay for gasoline for your job on minimum wage? You can't. Obviously, some jobs pay more, but apparently, there's an unstated rule that you must be female to deserve an interview. As I am not, my applications languish and weeks later I get a "we hired someone else, FOAD". This isn't a great feeling, particularly since my resume is fully loaded, like a Cadillac with all the extras. There are few jobs I haven't done, and few skills I don't have. Unfortunately, some of those skills would have landed me work, like driving a forklift, or operating the high end DC electrical test equipment used in electronics manufacturing. Sadly, I don't have those skills and even if I did, everybody around here expects me to have done nothing BUT electronics manufacturing for the last decade and they only pay a modest wage if I did know that. Having done all these other jobs seems to intimidate them. This is Sad Panda for me.
The job I interviewed for would be easy compared to most things I've done. Inventory of supplies, customer service by email and phone, minding the production employees while the owners are out having more of a life. Easy. I did that in my last couple jobs. Trained people too. Apparently I was just too qualified because they didn't keep their word about calling me and cowardly reposted their job the next day. How sad is that? No response to my query emails. I am left annoyed but at least I'm not working for minimum wage for someone who can't keep their word on the first day. So, call that a dodged bullet if you like. Isn't that something?
People buy these. They're the next big thing.
Part of me thinks I should see if the local motorcycle dealers will hire me to sell scooters. They do sell a few. It must be a rare thing, but rare is not none. The other job I'm interested in is one of the local independent bookstores. And maybe I'd think seriously about working at the local cooking supply store, though they didn't contact me about their cooking school like they said they would, which is bad business practice. You really shouldn't lie to employees or potential employees. It never ends well. There's also that farm supply store, though her ad is gone so maybe she's got someone while I was waiting for the wankers to keep their word. Figures.
Employers who lie really shouldn't be shocked if employees are skeptical. Duh! Only crazy people think others have no memory. Do I want to work for crazy people again? Oh hell no.
Storms are coming tomorrow and the rest of the week which are expected to drop a cumulative total of 3 inches of rain in Sacramento, 6 inches where I am, and 12 inches in the high Sierra. These storms are causing flood warnings. The reason this is rain rather than snow is the Atmospheric River I posted about a week ago is on the way. This is pretty typical for California. We've even had these kinds of Pineapple Express storms (coming from Hawaii) on New Years Eve, many times. I expect them then, but I don't always get them. In the 1990's it was almost predictable to have heavy warm rains and flooding New Years Eve. Sometimes the Rose Parade in Pasadena would get drowned out and delayed. We expect this.
The Sacramento Bee (newspaper) predicts rains and flooding sufficient to threaten the levees holding back the rivers from giving low-lying neighborhoods the Katrina treatment. Flood warnings are mostly about keeping some emergency supplies in your car, be prepared for power outages, and know your escape routes. Staying with friends outside the flood zones is usually the best idea for these kinds of storm events. The smart people drove away from New Orleans days before Katrina hit. Smart people should have left the coast before Sandy hit. Not nearly enough did. I hope the people in Sacramento are thinking hard about the storms and the repair crews are being realistic about the levees. A radio would be invaluable, as information prevents or ends panic and restores civilized behavior.
Red Means Rain, lots of rain.
Right now we just have overcast skies with high clouds. Its chilly but not cold, and I expect the temps to rise before the rains fall. The air, after all, is coming from Hawaii. There will be strong winds and then the rain will pound up from the South. Snow levels will be very high, 7000-8000 feet so this is not a good time for skiing, sorry. Last evening I got to attend a belated Thanksgiving with family friends in this area and met some young folks who work the ski resorts around Tahoe, Alpine Meadows specifically. Its beautiful up there, if you can manage to live with the snow. It takes a lot of money and you have to live cheap because being a ski lift operator does not pay very well. You do it because you love it. To survive, they band together and co-rent a house. I envy their willingness to share. Its good for them and they're young enough it doesn't bother them much. I like my privacy, but that's something I've had to give up in order to survive in this crappy economy. They are a little bummed that these storm won't give them much snow. After the storms pass, the temps will likely drop and its possible we'll get some storms from the NW, coming down from Alaska. If so, there will be lots of snow. It IS that time of year.
I wish them well on their journey back up the mountain. Driving through black ice and crusty snow isn't any fun. SUVs are justified for that. I think I'll be eating soup while the rain falls. Its been a few weeks since I made clam chowder. I could make it again. I always enjoy listening to the spatter of rain on the windows and roof, and the wall I built with my Dad remains straight and strong.
There's really three kinds of scifi that get published. There's Clarkes Law, which is so far future the technology may as well be magic. There's Discovery scifi, wherein the new technology is either good or bad according to the message of the story. And there's Near Future scifi, which is the kind I write. This has to take place between now and 40 years in the future, no more than that.
Clarke's Law scifi is usually human allegory because the technology can do anything needed for the story. Realism is unnecessary. All those Culture novels are Clarkes Law stories. The tech in them is largely irrelevant. Star Trek is also Clarkes Law scifi but they pretend that the tech matters despite half the time the answer is to "reconfigure the deflector array". I swear they should just have a button installed for that. Episodes would be shorter so they could have more commercials. That and stop issuing red shirts on away missions. That never ends well.
Discovery scifi is the origin of all those monster movies based on Frankenstein and Body Snatchers. Things man wasn't meant to know, or the opposite: science threatens to free us from tyranny and is suppressed. Depends on who is directing it at the time. We are still technically in the age of Enlightenment, and its the primary difference between The West and the Islamic states which are largely still under Feudal organization and suppression of discovery. Which is really ironic since in their early days, the Islamists were major scientific minds. Discovery scifi is what every monster movie is about. Some things man as not meant to know is a very common theme. Who turned over the rock? Others are the allegory for freedom wrapped in the shroud of paranoia. The person who changes the course of the world. That's your space opera. Star Wars is about secrets being told and freedom gained by overwhelming the tyranny that suppresses some scientific truth. In Star Wars, that truth is that the Empire was corrupt and would eventually destroy itself, and that its tool for destruction was itself corrupt, having a fatal explosive weakness that made for really flashy movies with high box office profits.
Near Future scifi is the important one, however. While the other two are about human allegories or frailties, Near Future does something genuinely important. Due to its specific realism through a full immersion in a believable future, it puts the reader/viewer into the state of mind that they themselves can live in this place, perhaps even WILL live in this place. It shows what is possible. It shows that our future is still a human place for human beings. Not robots without pockets (Star Trek), or constant warfare and evil magic (Star Wars) or giant monsters destroying cities (Godzilla). Near Future is about life for people. The truly well done stories are rare, however. The tendency to drift into paranoia because that sells books for the Space Opera fans tends to ruin a setting. Military and Spy fiction is often Near Future, but again, the paranoia of the main character's actions defining the future for the rest of humanity is jarring and unrealistic. Such events occur regularly, and every Rock Star CEO wants to be that guy, but most of those people are shown over time to be Sociopaths, probably acquired through too much unwarranted praise and degenerate lifestyles. I avoid those people. The world is much too big to require dealing with them.
Near Future scifi is also the most challenging to write. You have to write human stories with modest ambitions because real people have modest ambitions. Family drama, romance, some minor adventure, these are acceptable topics that your audience empathizes with because these things happen to them. These are shared experiences. Bond movies are fun to watch but I wouldn't want to live there. World is always about to be blown up every couple years, assassins everywhere, car chases with machine gun fire across miles of city and everything seems to be made of gasoline and explodes? I'll pass on that level of destruction, thank you. I would much rather write about a future I'd be comfortable and safe living in. That's what Near Future is supposed to be. It's going to have its drama, but far lesser scale. Natural disasters like Sandy are disaster enough.
My choice, years ago, was to write Near Future scifi. I chose that because its much harder to write. It's the least disparaging towards the reader. It demands the most attention to detail from the author. It requires a plausible Voice for the character as a normal person. I wanted a real challenge, and do something at least as well or even better than others had done before me. This is how you land writing awards and sell books, after all. Do something new and do it better.
One of the greatest and most devastating poisons of a human mind is ambition. Most religions are actually about curtailing or moderating ambition to ensure civilized behavior towards our fellow man. Religions which DO NOT do this are called CULTS and either either modify back to something civilized and controlled or they explode into violence or implode into self destruction, often both. Remember the comet cult in San Diego? And the Branch Davidians? And the Mormons? They eventually moderated like the Catholics before them instead of dying in fire like David Khoresh. If only he'd followed the Uniform Building Code and kept his hands to himself he might have settled down into a religion too. And his compound might not have gone up like a pile of matchsticks. This is what happens when ambition leads you to madness.
I was born and raised in the Bay Area, one of the cauldrons of ambition and while some people were able to reign it in for the sake of decency, most people there do not. Raw ambition runs freely and that level of ego is called hubris, and hubris leads to mania and psychosis. I have seen people go crazy from ambition. I have witnessed suicides and murders develop from ambition, a common story on the evening news. I have watched ambitious men set aside their decency and become depraved over a small degree of power, and I found them pathetic and evil. That greedy corporations humor such beasts is shameful and self destructive. They allow it because they are run by ambitious men, who think the terror inspired by these evil men will enable them even great profits, even more power, even more slavish devotion. Ambition drives this. And this is why most of the companies in America are failing.
Ambition has caused them to push so far past civilized limits that their enduring legacy is to be shunned as the sub-humans they are. Decent people don't stand for it. Decent people have Ethics. I possess those. Ethics can be expensive, because you must curtail your greed, but they pay dividends because those who retain them as well will recognize them and prefer to do business with others possessing Ethics, to avoid being cheated. I've worked for several businesses driven by ambitious people who cast aside ethics and have since suffered legendary failure. The Dot.coms were legendary failures, as the cycle of boom and bust eventually led to an insane worship of Rockstar CEOs. Men who promised the world and usually failed to deliver for long. Investors who make decisions on sound bytes end up broke and the poverty just SPREADS. This too is ambition. Talking up stocks just to sell them off to suckers is still legal, barely, and there are TV networks which do this every business day. Those stocks often collapse in value, so some companies you do the opposite of what they claim and you'll consistently make money. Some billionaire investors ONLY buy stocks they understand. Fancy ponzi schemes have been around for centuries and will continue to be around in the future because the regulatory agencies are unwilling to police them. This is dereliction of duty, and should be treated as a criminal matter. Regulators who slack off should be jailed over it. They allow the ambitious crooks to keep robbing people and get away with it.
The most terrible ambition is the refusal to adapt to the new reality of Peak Oil. The oil is going away. We all have to change how we live in order to live on a much lower energy level. That means shorter journeys, cheaper food (grown closer rather than transported from far away), fewer material things, smaller homes with better insulation, and most important, a willingness to live slower. If the Bay Area has a motto it shares with other big cities, its: "FASTER!!" This is the battle cry of ambition. Its fueled by cheap oil and fast cars and instant information and a world that provides on demand. This is a lifestyle spoiled by easy answers. The Post Oil world has no easy answers and requires a great deal of patience. People with Ethics are already adapting to the Post Oil world, slowing down, leaving the cities behind, accepting lower wages and fewer material things. They are focusing on QUALITY rather than urgency. Stuff that lasts you only have to buy once. Stuff that is cheap you buy again and again. This is important to remember. People with too much ambition and no ethics are like cheap things. They'll fail you. You have to temper ambition or it will destroy you.
One of the great myths that Libs use to terrify each other and justify their methods and hypocrisy is that of Carrying Capacity. See, there really aren't that many soil scientists in the world. There should be, but there aren't. Its kinda hard to get paid for that, and most farmers learn it on the job rather than get a degree from the Academic side. Carrying Capacity is based on an idea that there's a maximum number of people that can be supplied with things needed to live: food, water, shelter, other resources that keep them calm and orderly. The easiest way to deal with shortages is to reduce people's expectations and get them used to lower standards of living so they don't require as much material goods to stay orderly. How severe that standard will be is a huge debate beyond the scope of this article. What I want to talk about is food supply.
See, most of these non-Scientist libs imagine the lowest number for currently used arable land is both fixed and falling based on some pretty ridiculous fantasies caused by sheer ignorance and a cult-mentality. Its been heavily discussed as a shifted form of Pre-Millenial/Post-Millenial Nihilism pretending to be enlightened post-Christianity. It is grim and childish. It is worth pointing out that the Libs favorite Scifi program, Star Trek, which pretends to be a Utopia of Enlightened Thought is actually a pretty severe dystopia built after a Dark Age of genocide and WW3. Hell, they don't even have Pockets. That's a huge clue it isn't a realistic show so the setting is pure handwave.
The recent scifi nonsense Terra Nova was a dystopia about a collapsing ecosphere so ridiculous they managed to evaporate the oceans (which is pretty impossible without killing everyone in the process). It wasn't in the least realistic. It was the petty nihilism of its Producer, Spielberg, under the tepid excuse of telling a story about people. I guess he's feeling his age. I'm glad the show failed.
In the real world? There's a lot more arable land that isn't in use because it is harder to make money working it since mechanization is easier with nice square level fields. Not the bits and pieces trimmed off the edges. That's land too. Post-mechanization those will matter again.
The other little gap in Libs knowledge is that cheap desalination is coming. The Australians started doing 2-stage vacuum desalination in the South edge of their continent. It is not perfect, since the concentrated brines produced are likely destructive to sea floor life so doing this large scale could damage the environment, however, the desalinated water can fix salt intrusion on the coasts and recharge aquifers drained by the last century of industrial agriculture and deep well pumping. When you can get lots of fresh water, cheaply, from the ocean, and pump it using solar power, you solve MANY population problems, namely food supply and population density.
I kinda wish that people living in modern dense cities would look seriously at small agricultural towns. Its the lack of jobs and the lack of small business training in schools, since Academics are the last people who could teach you to run a business since they're state-dependent themselves. I'd love to see the state teaching people soil science and how to run a farm for profit so people could seriously consider farming as a career rather than a jail sentence of hard labor. The cost of the combines that automate and mechanize farming are what favors bigger enterprises and the disuse of those little strips of arable land. Small concerns just can't compete. The combines can harvest everything at peak ripeness in a day or two.
Of course, someday oil will be so rare that human labor will get cheap again. We're headed that way now. Most jobs advertised actually pay Minimum Wage now. I know because I've been searching for work for months now. I literally couldn't afford to take many of the jobs in the Bay Area because rents were too high and wages too low. Up here in the foothills or down in the farmland, wages are still low, but housing is cheaper, maybe even affordable. Kinda wish I knew how to drive one of those combines or tractors. It wouldn't pay much, but it would pay rent and its a much easier job than Retail often is. Probably not nearly as frustrating either. Then again, combines kill people every year so I'm probably speaking from ignorance. Grass is greener, etc.
The last bit of restriction for carrying capacity is energy. We've already established we're past Hubbert's Peak, that the oil supply is declining compared to demand and the cheap oil is gone. We've just got expensive oil left and the price will keep rising. Nations are fighting over it. Its in everyone's interest to find ways to use less of it. This means bicycles, scooters, ultralight cars, living close to our jobs, and general lower power lifestyles. Economics is making all this the new normal anyway. The Haters in Washington (DC) are taking away all our ability to purchase junk or solve our own problems. They're doing their worst because they can, and we made sure they kept office so they can keep doing it. We are seeing the value of our savings deplete, our purchasing power decline, our living standards FALL. We are adapting because we must. We are giving up the big dreams, and many of the smaller ones too. The world is a big place again, not a small one. Things which are far away should not be our concern. I don't care who dies in Afghanistan anymore. I don't give a damn about the Gaza Strip or massacres in Zimbabwe. And unarmed fools on the high seas getting attacked by pirates? Your suicide isn't noteworthy at all. We have better things to do.
Having just watched Formula One in Sao Paolo, Brazil this morning I think there's a huge market for standalone modular energy and manufacturing technology. The Chinese will probably do it first, but America could be offering up compatible systems for solar power and CNC, enabling construction of factories and thus manufacturing in the Third World (Central and South America, Africa) to see others bootstrap themselves into a better today. No more waiting on promises from the First World, or exploitation by the Second. Let them build their own tech, at their own discretion, based on their own needs, for profit. Paying with cash for the equipment, not loans, not programs, not promises from either side. Owning the equipment means owning the profits. That's motivation, right there. That fixes the energy problem. What works for a rural ranch in the USA will work for a jungle village or savanna. It won't be neat and tidy, but neither are our roads. The real world is messy. And that's okay.
I see so much empty space, waiting for people to come and turn into prosperous country. I know it can be done. I grew up somewhere like that. I see people trapped in the dense cities being the biggest Nihilists of all because they don't leave long enough to see how big the world is, or know that space is opportunity. They remained trapped in their little Hamster Wheels of DOOM!, ignorant, defeated, and trying to take as many with them as they can. And that's really sad. Good thing that there's plenty of well traveled people outside that mindset ready and willing to do the real work, and we don't need the Hamsters. The world is Pretty Okay(tm) and that should always be in the backs of our minds.
I've done the math, some time ago, on electric cars and hybrid electrics. They're not very promising. Their parts are rare earth elements, only available for the very wealthy few, and thus not a serious solution to the future of transportation. While I do expect to see trams and light rail in all our cities and large towns, the steel used for the rails isn't cheap and we just can't put it everywhere, not all at once anyway. There is still a place for the car in the future, and its going to remain internal combustion because that's weight efficient and has no limitations on how many can be made, since it does not require rare earth elements. Just good old modern materials like steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber. The way forward for fuel economy is reducing the weight of cars so we use less gasoline to get the same result, namely moving you to work and back.
This is the PRIMARY REASON I got interested in motorcycles and scooters, because the motor scooter, while over 100 years old and the natural progression from the bicycle, has been getting around 120 mpg since shortly after their inception. Pause and consider that. Their manufacture is cheaper now, so the profits are greater. Your basic 50cc Vespa takes about 20 minutes to build on its assembly line in China or Italy and its body panels are plastic, rather than the heavier but more durable sheet metal they used to be. The panels just sort of curl around like Tupperware, which is why they have that nickname by their most jaded riders. This is my OTHER objection to the pricing on Vespas. You're buying a bent steel tube, some tupperware, an engine, and a couple wheels for that $4-6K you pay for the bike. That's a lot of money for 20 minutes assembly work. You'd think for all that you'd get something refined and state of the art, but you'd be wrong. The weight of the engine remains on the rear wheel, which ruins the handling and makes it more dangerous to ride compared to a motorcycle. The step through frame lets you wear a skirt (if you swing that way) and carry a bag of groceries on the flat floorboard between your feet, which makes it very useful. You have to have bags or cases on a motorcycle to do the same thing.
Some motorcycles come with those, like the venerable but very useful SuperCub. Its bigger wheels and better suspension also deal far better with bad roads. If the SuberCub were built with modern aluminum frame, disk brakes, a better transmission than the semi-Automatic such as a scaled down N-series double-clutch or one that simply enabled engine braking on hills or turned on an electromagnetic battery charger when you throttle back for very limited regenerative braking (if you can do that light enough) and replace the pressed steel wheels with cast alloy, well, the bike starts to be safer and more useful. Working with aluminum really isn't that hard. We've got good welders for that these days. Add an inch to the suspension travel and real progressive shocks, which are pretty cheap these days, and you'd have a reasonably safe two wheel scooter capable of dealing with real American roads. And for less than Vespa sells for.
I've been really pleased with Deus Cycles of Bali, Australia, and now the USA because they've taken very basic ugly bikes and fixed them up, stripped off the garbage, and leave behind a very simple bike that gets the job done. Its that kind of simple elegance that thrills me most. Much like the Mazda Miata is the ultimate in a British convertible, only it works all the time unlike the real thing. The original version wasn't that fast, but it was light and it had a great independent double wishbone suspension and the simplicity of the A-10 Warthog. Everything was manual. There were no computers to fail, other than its fuel injection. The lights always worked, the top was fabric, the car was simple and cheap. What's not to like about that? Its pure. That's what a sports car should be. Its why I like the Lotus Elise and the 1970's Porsche 911 and the newer but still basic Noble M400. I would love to have one of those for my next car. I probably won't because they're not practical and I lack the personal wealth to own an impractical car, but any of these would have been great to drive for the last 20 years. I'd probably be dead, having missed the apex of a turn by just that much, but at least I would have had many happy corners prior.
I don't see much point in straight line speed. That's BORING. Entering and exiting corners, apexing them each time, that's REAL DRIVING. It takes skill to do it right. It takes concentration to roll on the accelerator at just the right spot to sling you out of the corner faster than you went into it. When I look at the result of artistically stripping down an old bike into a purely functional machine, I see the same degree of elegance as I do in a pure sportscar. Bali pleases my sense of minimalism. Maybe someday I'll use that inspiration to do a similar bike.
Ford recently announced they are going to start building trucks with aluminum bodies. Now Ford is working to make carbon fiber body panels for common cars, cheaply, to reduce their weight and get them up to that mandated 80 mpg. I'd love to see that. I hope it happens well before their 2020 prediction. Considering that Ford currently has 1.0 L Ecomotor diesels running in their European Fiesta and Focus models, presumably they'll bring that here someday too. The engine block is cast aluminum, presumably heat treated, and the critical parts give it around 50 mpg. The Geo Metro, which is running a water cooled 1968 Triumph Triple engine built on contract by Suzuki of Japan got that kind of MPG with gasoline. Its true that Diesel is more energy dense fuel, but it also lacks the torque range of a gasoline engine, and Diesel motors are slightly harder to build since they are stressed more during the power stroke. Given the choice, in a rainstorm or a gravel road, I'd rather be in a 4 wheeled vehicle running on diesel than on a two-wheeled bike. Of course, if I had to grow the fuel myself, the bike would look pretty attractive.
People are willing to trade safety for fuel economy and for fun. A lighter car won't be as safe as one with lots of steel in it, but that lighter car will use a lot less fuel and maybe get us to that 80 mpg. Right in time for roads to stop being paved since the tar in asphalt could be turned into gasoline which has a better profit margin. Light cars are great, but everything in economics is about tradeoffs. The solution to fuel economy, biggest solution of all, is to work near our homes. Take that Minimum Wage job. I dare you. Live on that. You can eat Government Cheese (Velveeta) and pretend someone cares about you. It might not be fun, living that way, but if you work really close to home you can just walk there and walk home. 100 years ago this is how people did business in London. Are we brave enough to give up all the perqs of the transportation economy?
I happen to have recently seen a BBC documentary about the McLaren production car, which is appropriate here because it is ultralight, based on a carbon fiber tub for the central loadbearing crash box for the passenger(s). The cars are so light they are pushed around on roller skates rather than pulled on a big conveyor belt or rails. Have a look.
We've had a couple storms in the last month, but from Thanksgiving Day on we've been seeing the mid-60's here in the Gold Country. Its been beautiful blue skies, warm afternoons, pleasant sunlight, not too hot, and warm enough to open the windows and let the air move through. I stayed in for Black Friday because I'm morally opposed to Materialism. Its my little bit of protest.
Thanksgiving itself was fun. I went to see my brother and his family over in Lake County. It was an interesting two and a half hour drive from here. The last hour of which was twisty twisty roads through a region recently burned by wildfire. On the way there we threaded down out of the foothills surrounded by fall colors and down to the rice fields of Marysville. There were swans. Huge flocks of white swans east of town. Beautiful.
The day was very clear so the Sutter Buttes dominated the scene as we drove West through town and back into the rice fields again. We were driving so I was unable to get a picture of the Buttes, but they really are stunning, particularly since I happen to know they're extinct volcanoes. We eventually traversed Colusa and Williams was scarcely a blink before we were into the Coast Ranges and the road got really interesting. Its twisty there and was recently repaved following the wildfire.
The visit with family at their home was lovely. The kids are much bigger since I last saw them about six years ago. It was my first visit to their home. The elder two children are in high school classes and planning to finish early so they can move out and start college. I think that's a fine idea. My niece is the eldest child and at 16 she's practical and businesslike despite having her primary interests be graphic arts and creative writing. I hope the AA degree she's aiming for lands her jobs. My nephew just turned 15 on Black Friday so he's a great deal less certain about his educational goals. He's got time. The younger two are still kids. Max tested as a high genius IQ. I don't see it, but he might be understating or perhaps the test results are skewed. He's a nice kid, just like his brother and sister. He doesn't need any special education. The youngest is two and at that adorable age, but still prone to screaming and temper tantrums depending on how tired he is. He smiles by opening his mouth as wide as he can and showing all his teeth. Adorable. It was great seeing them all. Its amazing how I've missed so much of their lives while trapped in UnPton.
After the visit I got to drive us out of the twisty mountains as the light failed into dusk and then the purple hour faded into true night. It was FUN. Getting an SUV to take corners without getting loose on apexes was tricky. Doing it gently enough and carefully enough so there was no risk was a little harder. Mostly I would go into the turns at a safe speed and then apex with the accellerator on the way out, which is the way to do things on an unfamiliar road with a topheavy car. I was concentrating fully to make that work. I enjoyed the challenge.
As the night finally began I emerged from the coastal mountains and roared down into the flat roads again, which are boring straightaways between orchards, though I could see a hint of the silhouette formed by the buttes in the darkness. The drive to Yuba City was unremarkable and it turns out I barely beat the Tule fog that shrouded the entire valley shortly thereafter. Weaving through Yuba City over the Feather River bridge into Marysville once more, then out of town I managed to beat a Prius on the sprint from a stoplight, which enraged the driver enough to make them follow me the next 30 miles until they finally passed just before we returned home. All in all, a very rewarding drive though my headache from concentrating so hard lasted the rest of the night despite the application of Red Wine, two glasses, and a good laugh. It was a good day.
Driving like that is why I still enjoy it. I really don't think we're going to see electric cars that are fun to drive like that, not any you can afford anyway. Electrics are slow and heavy, with no apexing zip. Dune buggies, ultralight cars, that's what you'll want in the Post Oil future. We get closer to that every day as millions of barrels per day are extracted, refined, and burned. Gone forever. That's the nature of fossil fuels.
I was an amateur author. I'm even published, sort of, in a couple anthologies. My writing handbook gained the attention of published authors who hate Tropes, since my handbook essentially listed a number of them years before the Tropes site popped into being. I love the tropes site. Hours of endless reading about how entertainment has no new ideas. It should make you sad, but really, its about selling tickets. So is Star Trek, only most to sell you commercial time because the first Star Trek is older than I am, shockingly enough, and the Next Generation was one I watched religiously, even after it jumped the shark. Wesley Crusher's actor is my age. He tears into where Nextgen went wrong with his character. And blogs about beer too, and playing the modern conceited a55h0l3 in various TV shows including Eureka. He was hilarious in The Guild too.
The primary entertainment value of Star Trek is its a formula show. They try to mix it up so its a little less obvious, but its a formula show. At some point the non-red shirt characters will have to do something sciencey and reconfigure the main deflector dish (again) or program some button to save the day. And then forget about that trick forever and ever because then you can't watch the show out of sequence and that science trick PROBABLY violates the consistency of the Trek-verse bible.
At least it was scifi on TV and it got kids thinking about engineering during those crucial years, and that's its most important contribution. It showed kids they could be more than burger flippers. In my own employment history I've done my share of burger flipper jobs. I've also stepped up as an engineers assistant and made suggestions that got incorporated into real devices. Of course, in an honest company I would have been on the patent and I'd be getting a share of that $$. It was a thief I talked to, so he kept it all for himself and now I have another entry on my T.O.O. list. Ask a military person what that means.
Trek-verse has a lot of flaws. Its badly run, with its leadership evil, incompetent, or controlled by space worms. Their clothes don't even have pockets so people have to carry around stuff in their hands all the time. They never take advantage properly of scientific discoveries and as Cracked pointed out, they're exploring space to find novelty because their own culture is so oppressive nobody is doing creative things anymore. Its like the Hippies lost out to the Berkeley Totalitarians (two primary divisions of the Liberal Left) and the BT's have killed or brainwashed everyone who didn't want to think their way. The Trek-verse is a terrifying dystopian nightmare of a place. I wouldn't want to live there. Even back in the 19th century, when Scifi was still being invented as a genre, they knew that Utopia stories were dystopias warning of the failure mode that dominates them, and why Utopias are really evil Totalitarian dictatorships, a point that even Avatar the Last Airbender (cartoon, not movie) made about the Earth Kingdom, which was using mind control and murder on its own citizens to prevent panic over the Fire Kingdom being outside the walls of their capitol city. Trek is like that too, with a group of Black Ops that kills people all the time, plus another group that fights wars through time like an evil Dr. Who.
The reason that I watched it is that it was Sci-Fi on TV. The reason I came to love Stargate is that it parodied most of the Scifi that had been broadcast or turned into movies. And it hung lanterns on its objections to really bad/lazy writers in those shows, often mocking those bad ideas as actual plot points and showing how easily they could defeat poor logic. Since some of those episodes were written by members of the prior Star Trek episodes, they were registering their logical complaints against that committee. Stargate was Scifi revenge. It was often hilarious, but you had to know the show or movie they were referencing/parodying to get the joke. Col. O'Neil was often mentioning the Simpsons, which is his big cluehammer for the audience. Simpsons is all about mocking others stupidity. It is my generations response to bad govt and hypocrisy in the Baby Boomers.
I don't write by committee. This is a big part of why I don't care much about feedback and I don't troll for suggestions on what I should write next, thus why I don't participate on the boards so popular with scifi geeks, like Spacebattles.com. They do turn out some funny ideas after pages of geekery argumentation on some aspect of a ruleset. I think most of them are actually computer programmers or future programmers, since programming languages are really about rulesets in virtual worlds, and they have the right obsession with detail for that kind of thing. Spotting failure modes in every single scifi episode of shows like Star Trek, and mocking that failure makes sense with their debugger approach to everything around them.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer mocked the monster movies and "lets split up in the spooky building so we can all be picked off one by one" logic that ends up killing the entire cast. Buffy was good that way. If you'd seen the movies, you'd get the joke. The lantern hanger characters like Xander and Cordelia were all about pointing at the huge blatant plot holes, and it was refreshing to have a villain (Spike) that was smart enough to run away and try a new tactic rather than monologuing and being defeated in an utterly corny way.
Why are these things so popular? Because fans of scifi and fantasy are sick to death of these crappy tropes being used again and again. Its a big part of why I watch anime. Asia uses different tropes. The heros slaughter the innocent and feel really bad about it, or see their lover die on the cusp of victory so they're never truly happy again. Try that in Hollywood. They change the ending till its happy because the lousy Marketing goons don't recognize the hatred for "seen that before" young audiences have, and unfortunately, the only people who buy tickets to movies anymore are welfare kids, and their needs and histories are completely different from the Geeks who's parents both worked and whose Dad was either an engineer or a programmer. We've given up on Hollywood because it no longer entertains us, and we don't find Reverse Discrimination funny. Nor do we think Blaxsploitation to be funny either. That's just another bit of racism at work, racism from Hollywood which is as far distant from Us as they can be. Hollywood is trapped in a hall of mirrors and all they can see is reflections of themselves. This is why the interesting movies are being made by non-Hollywood studios, with none of those Eterna-Fail marketing firms who only make movies for black people and those who hate them.
These days its the video games, most of which are heavily influenced by the Japanese programmers and thus Asian tropes, that are leading the way. These days we're seeing a lot of geeky kids getting into video game design, though getting a job after is tricky. I find the really well done games impress me a lot, particularly the ones with really well designed environments (landscapes). Its the nooks and crannies, the details that make it pop, the unnecessary stuff that steps it out of the rail-gunner (plot so linear its like its on rails) and offers a lot more options and exploration. There are starting to be games for puzzles and I'd love to see ones that are about exploration, about going outside so the idea isn't so alien and those inner city kids can be directly reminded there is a world beyond the freeways and ghettos.
You really can't take the Trek-verse and make it realistic. There are too many place it is broken, or a quick solution to a corner the writers forced the characters into actually breaks their science if used again, and breaking the universe just leads to horrible Implosions!
And to think that's the voice of the Smurfette. I'm thinking the actress smoked a couple packs a day for years.
I'm kinda glad that Scott Bakula did such a good job of destroying the entire Star Trek franchaise. Or rather the writers for the Enterprise show did. Its not really fair to blame Bakula himself. He was just the star of the show, the captain of the last Trek TV show. Now Star Trek went Alt-Universe through time travel and we've got some grittier characters but the biggest problem with any story that includes time travel is that time travel becomes the primary plot point. ALWAYS. Its that scab you can't stop picking at, for writers. You know its going to leave a scar. And time travel way back in Star Trek 5 introduced the Temporal War and instead of using satellites to record history for later. In ST Voyager they just used it to shoot laser beams at each other or destroy civilizations in utterly contemptible genocide, without a single comment on how evil that is during the show. And this is from Hollywood, where survivors of the holocaust live. Is the irony lost? Really? ST can be really horrendously hypocritical.
Also, I'm counting the hours till the Gaza ceasefire fails again. Typically cease fires last a few days, then the shooting starts again. In the Middle East there are two states of war: 1) Firing! and 2) Reload. That's it. This is my biggest objection to any religion from there. If religion is why they're killing each other, and God is supposed to be about Peace, clearly they're worshiping the wrong God. Ergo, anything coming out of the Middle East that isn't burned is bad for you, particularly anything having to do with how you should live your life. They clearly have no idea, since they're shooting each other with rockets and tanks.
The Trek-verse is in several ceasefires with its neighbors, all of which are constantly being cheated on by both sides, then the survivors blackmailed into silence so war won't break out. This denies the honest cause of their real conflicts: war over resources caused by overpopulation. You would think in a universe so huge, and with interstellar FTL so cheap they'd be doing a lot more terraforming than fighting each other, but Trek is all about the flashy space battles, not realism. Realism is boring. Raising families is boring, to scifi writers who apparently don't have kids of their own. Building things, which most fans of the show end up doing in their real lives, seems to bore the writers of the show, since none of them are engineers. They're writers who get paid to make flashy and cheap CGI explosions and soap-opera moments.
The real engineers of the world were busy creating the Internet and making The Future happen. A future they'd watched on Star Trek. Your basic smartphone is more powerful than the original Tri-Corder. And the smartphone can be yours for easy monthly payments. We don't have flying cars, but Airbus or Boeing will take you to other cities quickly enough. And we have electric cars if you're willing to deal with paying large sums of money to get stranded on the side of the road. Our real-world personal computers are massively more powerful than the punch card models from the original Star Trek, and our engineers are way smarter than those envisioned by the writers of the show.
I doubt we'll ever see a realistic scifi show. Cheating the endings is so much more fun, and engineers don't generally write scifi. They have better things to do, solving real world problems. Star Trek did a great job creating more engineers, and I kinda hope something else comes along and replaces it, something that captures the imagination of kids but is a little less about war and a little more about building good things in the world that lets people raise their kids in peace instead of throwing artillery shells into buildings on the Gaza Strip.We just don't have the resources to continue these ridiculous wars on slight differences in local religions. The Irish have wisely given it up, ending the general support for the Troubles. They still get a few extremists, but the general population is fed up with the whole thing. They'd rather have a second beer at the pub and toddle off home. The coming decades in Ireland will be great times for creative works. George Bernard Shaw comes to mind.
Only the extremist members of the USA's parties still care about abortion, which is really about whether its baby killing or not. Having just visited my 2 year old nephew, who is at that adorable age of limited communication and mobility, I am baffled by people who kill their own babies but its not for me to say. If the Conservatives were more realistic they should be Pro-Abortion since the ones getting them are folks they'd rather not be paying for anyway. Wanna cut down the costs of Welfare? Duh! Abortions are cheaper than AFDC benefits or college diplomas. If the political parties were more consistent, the Democratic party should be anti-abortion because it gives them more dependent voters and the Republicans should be pro-abortion because it kills off those same dependent voters. Why is the world so perverse? I'm thinking this is yet again the fault of those Middle Easterners. And their insidiously evil Trek-verse that actually includes massive genocide and a dark age as part of their setting.
Travel strikes and strikes in general are a natural offshoot to the incumbent winning the election. You might think that the Democrats and Unions would be natural allies, but they really aren't. Despite transgressions against common sense, like button pushing jobs, for the most part union members have unions because they work in industries with a history of trying to kill or abuse them. Steel workers for example can die in horrible screaming agony when molten steel falls on them and burns them to a crisp. Not fun. People have been saying nasty things about the Bakers Union in regards to Hostess company, complaining that its an easy job for braindead people but pause and consider: can you lose a finger or arm when those bread machines grab you? Hell yes. Is seeing your wages cut to minimum acceptable when the executives were getting bonuses and raises? No, it really wasn't okay. Striking makes sense. Even if you drive the business under and have to find a new job, that's still fair play. That this makes the current president look bad, killing off the Twinkie and Wonderbread after being elected? Well, that's politics isn't it. I think I had a twinkie once when I was a kid, maybe around 9-10 years old. Just once. Never since then. I don't feel like I'm missing much here.
The current strike in LAX is amusing to me. The airline employees union is another job where there's a lot of danger, some less obvious than being run over by vehicles on the tarmac or going deaf permanently from all the noise. Those are bad enough. Anyone who flies for a living? That's a chest x-ray every transcontinental flight. Did you know that? The lack of atmosphere to shield you from xrays and gamma rays due to flying at high altitude gives you the radiation exposure of a chest x-ray. Do enough of those and you get enough radiation damage your chances of radiation poisoning and cancer become "certain" rather than "probable". It's a death sentence. This impacts your steward/ess and pilots both. People may be really annoyed about the strike in LA, but consider how trod upon they are. This is a nation where unfair treatment of workers is commonplace under the constant threat to outsource.
In my opinion, having recently worked at a sweatshop, ANY operation threatening to Outsource can get the h311 out. And have their product taxed to hell and back too. My last employer was in desperate need of a union to stomp their petty tyrannies flat, and see some managers fired. Some of my coworkers who transferred out called them little mafias and accused them of gangsterism. I am sympathetic to unions that see friends lose hands or arms in production plants run by bean counters who falsify paperwork and fire people "as a warning to the rest" because it gets them a little bonus. Companies need to think really hard about the legal liability they assume when allowing selfish managers to be employed there.
I went to a meeting for unemployed people yesterday. It was supposed to be about small scale manufacturing. It wasn't. It was a captive advertisement for an Obama-Stash program and a local college program that is designed to get you to leave this place by getting you that first interview at a factory, somewhere else. That's not small scale manufacturing. Its something, but not what I wanted to learn about, not the sort I wanted to meet. I think if I'd run that meeting, I'd be talking seriously about the requirements to run a business, and have a dozen business owners who are looking for employees that DO small scale manufacturing locally. No excuses, just people who are running shops up here. With all the electronics firms in the area you'd expect some to be there. No such luck. Same with the Welding folks, who were half of those at this meeting and there was no speaker on the subject. None responded well to the warning about Metal Fume Fever. I guess they're immortal androids, not like human beings with lungs or livers. I spent a week in agony from Metal Fume Fever. Really not fun. I don't recommend it for people I care about. Welding can be done safely, but it rarely is, and few welders have the breather masks to protect themselves from metals exposure. My experience welding was nasty and going to deal with organics was an improvement, even though those cause cancer too, just more slowly. Another doomed industry in serious need of Unionizing, if only to drive the damn thing out of the country.
And really, the biggest problem here is abusive managers. If managers were fair and pay was too, there'd be no appeal to Unionize and no turnover problems or loss of crucial skills that keep an operation running smoothly, which is key to manager workload and profitability. I think between greedy and lazy managers and greedy and indifferent stockholders, you end up pushing the actual workers too far. And then your business implodes. Unions are really the last warning you get. You either work with their terms or you die, as a company. Once you get the employees angry enough to Unionize, your profitability is DONE. Your smooth operations are DONE. Your business is DONE. You get to compromise way more than you want to, all because you wouldn't compromise early enough to prevent your own DOOM. So despite being a Libertarian, I really understand WHY people unionize and see it as a fitting punishment for abuse and incompetence in the business world. If I become a manager I will be VERY aware of that potential outcome and how to keep my people both happy and productive and treat them with the needed respect to continue business profitably. That's not easy, but I have YEARS worth of bad examples to use to my advantage.
There is a saying: "It's the Stingy Man that spends the most." I just spend a full IT work day becoming increasingly angry trying to get an Android tablet to do what it says it will do, namely to read books. Twitchy, crashy, dysfunctional. And the OS Android 4.0 is not very good. It lacks the crucial exception handling necessary to be stable. Worse, the model I was working on did not have Google Play installed, which meant I could NOT update or upgrade the buggy apps it was installed with, and the instructions to install apps were just plain wrong. Walking off my rage for a good half an hour (that's how angry I was) pondering the situation, and how if I were being paid for this particular job it would already be 3x the value of the device in labor, I knew the right answer was to return it and get something that works, right off the bat, easily, every time, no excuses. With all the exception handling code written and tested so you get an error message rather than a black screen and a non-responsive paperweight.
And Exception Handling is the real ugly bugaboo of the IT industry. Its what people like me learned to hate the absence of. And what SHOULD be a fireable offense for any salesrep or CEO bandying his hardware/software like its finished. If the coding isn't done or tested, its not reliable, and thus will cost untold man hours of IT rage and returned products. Customers will not stand for paying good money for crap product. Salesreps think selling garbage to suckers is funny because they get paid and the IT guy has to deal with all the screwups. The one who sold an untested device to my elderly parents? That's going back as I type this. And my elderly parents are now rather pissed off and suspicious of the whole Android Operating System. They've had an object lesson in DRM and do not think its okay. Something I worked out ages ago, with EFF pointing out all its flaws on Wired. Really, tablets are a mobile sales opportunity attached to your credit card, and if what you're buying doesn't arrive perfectly? Yeah, people get angry. Fingers start pointing. Its a bad scene.
I still want a convergence device someday, but Android isn't there yet. My elderly mother will be using audiobooks on my MP3 player, which is non-DRM btw, and runs on disposable batteries so it still works years after purchase. That's what you need. The real world is about quality and durability. It's not about pulling a fast one.
I am totally digging this Winter weather. We've got a storm coming in off the coast, up from Eureka. It's dumping lots of rain on the way here, and its reasonably warm out too. We're expecting a couple inches from this storm.
I got up pretty early today in the dimness of dawn to a grey sky and strong winter blustering about. But it was not cold. I gathered brilliant yellow fig leaves from the lawn, bagged them up, and scuttled back indoors before the few drops became many. Right now there's an infrequent misting, visibly distracting over distance but barely wetting anything but decking and pavement, both of which were water saturated by the prior winter storms. Still no snow here yet, and this one is just more rain as well. In the scale of things, rain is perfectly normal. Paint Your Wagon takes place in Nevada City, which is about 4 miles from where I'm sitting.
Yes, that is Clint Eastwood. And he sings. Its a musical. They have songs about Gold, Rain, and Talking to Trees. The local theater in Nevada City does it every couple years for the tourists and local fans. The movie itself was filmed up in Oregon since Nevada City kept developing so its not tents and mud anymore. There are MANY other abandoned ghost towns lurking in the West, if you care to tour them. Bring a GPS, which helps with locating them. Some remnants are just foundations and a few bits of broken glass. Some aren't even that. Some are more intact, with abandoned frame houses and other buildings left behind, like Bodie, which became a state park.
Up here, everybody measures everybody else's hardships and excuses and foolhardiness by asking what elevation they live at. Not where in particular, but the elevation. For You Lowlanders, this may sound Mysterious! but its a good measure of how much snow you deal with, and snow is such a pain in the buttocks that its the primary shared hardship of the region. Snow melts into black ice overnight, or evaporates in strong wind. It piles up into drifts and it tears branches off of trees, downing power lines and leaving you in the dark. It turns into dirty ice and requires installing tire chains where its melting and soaks into your clothes and requires careful effort to avoid, to drive through places where it isn't melting but getting deeper the higher you climb. And chains break, tearing apart your car, maybe causing an accident. It's EXPENSIVE to live above the snow line. The higher up you live, the more of this crap you get to deal with, the more headaches and expense.
I live just below (2600 feet) the nominal snow line (3000 feet). We get a week of snow on the ground and a few days of it being a road hazard. That's a big part of why people live here, still, after the mines shut down. They'll reopen eventually because there's still billions of dollars in gold down beneath my feet, somewhere. We do get blackouts here, but they usually involve a drunk driver smacking into a power pole, not snowy covered branches. In the countryside its all too common so owning a generator and battery powered lanterns is a good idea. Sometimes blackouts can go on for weeks. Did you know they don't build power station transformers in the USA anymore? That should be a strategic asset, mandatory, with stockpiles and everything, like military supplies of nerve gas or Velveeta govt cheese. Locals here keep stocked pantries in case they get snowed in, and many people have wells. Most of the people living at this elevation or higher have a Subaru. I wouldn't mind having one myself. It only gains you a little more stability and a little earlier or later driving in crappy conditions compared to a standard front wheel drive car, but that little bit can make the difference and people own them here for good reason. In these times, with this fun weather to enjoy, doing things for GOOD reasons is key.
Hurricane Sandy did a good job showing America that natural disasters are both common and powerful and with a little bad luck, very destructive. Sandy hit the coastline during a high tide so its storm surge was as tall as it could be. This flooded a lot of places, a lot of suburbs and urban areas were lashed by horizontal rain and its drain grates plugged with fallen leaves or other debris. A real mess. They'll be cleaning that up till next spring.
In California we get heavy snow storms in the Sierras, enough to give us 25 feet of snow on the ground in the high Sierra. I've seen 40 feet of snow at Donner Pass and at Mammoth Mountain. That's the cumulative result of many storms but so long as it stays below freezing it doesn't melt till Springtime. Sometimes these snows are interrupted by unexpected warm wet storms coming up from Hawaii in early Spring, so called Pineapple Express events aka Atmospheric Rivers. These storm events nail the Sierras with rain and melt all the snow, all at once, so the rivers flowing down from the Sierras quickly rise to flood stage. If water isn't let out of reservoirs well in advance of the storm (possibly leaving the state with crippling drought if they're wrong) to catch what's coming then emergency overflow lets the floods downstream during the worst possible time, when rivers are all at their peak flood stage.
Pineapple Express
These floods put the aging and not well maintained Levee system under physical strain. Some are already leaking. Others are being eroded by the river and have noticeably slumped. There are many places along Highway 160, which runs along the Sacramento river through the Delta, where the road dips and leans when it is supposed to be flat and level. These are places where additional stress will make the levees fail. Failure of the levees would obviously flood the delta. The undeveloped fields surrounding the Causeway running to Davis is a huge area meant to take overflow from the rivers that meet in Sacramento and push that water out onto a huge flood plain instead of valuable farmlands or homes. And the homes are behind levees too. Interstate 80 goes on and over and down between several levees north of the City before gradually climbing out of flood areas into Citrus Heights and Roseville.
Localized flooding is annoying, mostly caused by leaves in the drains. Levee breaks flood neighborhoods, block roads, and can drown people. The previous Governor Arnold had a serious funding plan in place to repair the levee system till a vote could be taken to do something more serious and durable, but Emergency budget mess, an annual problem, prevented that. The new Governor Moonbeam would rather talk about funding a high speed gerrymander rail system. Levees affecting several million people including the capitol itself, I guess they aren't flashy enough for Moonbeam to care about fixing. A Sandy-level flood event next spring, if it happened this year, would put paid to the levees in Stockton and the Delta and probably Sacramento too. We'd probably see Hwy 160 close, washed away by the raging river, and the Army Corps of Engineers take the blame again. The cost of the damages will be in the billions, mostly because of the homes affected and the people who have to move.
I really wonder if we might all be better served by gradually moving our urban populations, suburban in particular, into rural agricultural towns that are nearly abandoned in the Central Valley and build our businesses there instead of concentrating them in the Bay Area, which pumps its drinking water from downstream of all those sewer systems and agricultural fields. Water treatment plants DO NOT get all that crap out of the water before it goes into the pipes. They very strictly follow Federal regulations, which very specifically DO NOT include common destructive toxins which would be costly or difficult to remove from effluent. Think about that the next time you wash your dishes or drink some water in San Jose or Oakland. Toilet to Tap. Flooding events introduce even more fun things into that water supply. Sometimes it flushes a lot of crap out to sea, which is a good thing. Sometimes it just pushes new chemicals into the system, new toxins spilled, new runoff. We aren't hearing about that from Sandy because most of the flooding is from seawater storm surge or rain from the hurricane. In California, flooded rivers have been recycling wastewater used dozens of times. Around and around.
If the levees break, as they will if they're stressed enough, farmland will absorb much of the flooding. Where homes and neighborhoods flood there will be all sorts of outcry. If its one ethnic group in that neighborhood that gets flooded we'll hear the same claims as we did in New Orleans. Claims of Conspiracy, of racism in the Army Corps of Engineers. Deliberate attack on black or Mexican people. Sigh. The trouble with tough economic times like this, now that we've shipped all our jobs to China, is that finger pointing is the traditional response. The Us-Them divide is human nature. It doesn't matter if its true or not. The finger pointing will happen. Mob mentality, and rioting, well, they cause repercussions. It can spiral out of control.
In light of that kind of violent result, fixing the levees so there's one less excuse for race riots looks relatively cheap. Providing community organizers with information, well in advance, about how flood waters are handled, and where overflow will go, is key. Providing them with the means to identify failing sections of levee so it can be repaired also helps, as does legitimizing their positions and making the organizers elected gives them reason to follow the law and motivated to see those laws in turn followed by their communities to gain the benefits. This cuts down on the rioting.
Scientific research into erosion shows that levees tend to be self defeating anyway, but spillway areas help a lot. There's no substitute for a flood plain. After decades of annual flooding in old Sacramento, the city largely gave up and paved over the first floor and turned the second into the street level. There are still places where you can see the original street level 15 feet down, in Old Town Sacramento. Oakland did this too, for the same reason, thanks to high tides the correspond to springtime floods of the Sacramento River. You see the waters rise in Marin as well, same reason.
When the next Ice Age restarts, possibly in our lifetimes or our grandkids, I don't know if we'll see bigger floods, smaller ones, or roughly the same. Less snow will melt than falls, however. The summer snowpacks will rise, perhaps gradually, perhaps not so gradually on the North-Eastern face of mountains, in the high country. Perched aquifers will fill and probably freeze into permafrost while other parts will continue to flow out and down, feeding streams and the trees living along them. We might see a surge of natural reforestation. We will probably see some changes in wind patterns. Maybe the North Wind will change its direction, going inland. Maybe it will get stronger, pushing cold water further South. Maybe it will weaken, allowing more Pineapple express events to fall on the Sierra during more of the year, lowering summer temps just enough that the snow packs don't melt, allowing the accumulations to grow into glaciers again. There are still several glaciers in California, in the Sierras, high up.
While the imagery of Venice flooding captures the imagination of iPhone users everywhere, no amount of Carbon Trading is going to stop the return of the Ice Age. I'm sorry. Its not. The whole planet is locked in that cycle. This happens to be one of the warm cycles. Light skinned people like me are specially evolved to living close to or on the ice. We get our Vitamin D showing less skin, and we resist frostbite through a few tricks in our blood and noses. When they get around to curing my Diabetes, I have every intention of taking up snowshoeing and cold weather photography. The Eastern Sierra are my kind of Lonely. Maybe I'll take up Telemarking (real cross country skiing) if I can find friends tough enough to keep up with me. Or maybe I'll do the more modern but noisy snowmobiling, possibly electric. I like my Western horizons big. You have to go out into it for that to properly sink in.
Easterners can adapt to increasingly vicious snow storms coming off the Arctic and more hurricanes thanks to living so close to the Gulf Stream current, but here in California I wonder if we'll be seeing hurricanes of our own or more Pineapple Express events? Or will we watch the storms of the Triple Junction (Eureka) drifting South bringing back that 125 inches of rain a year we had a few thousand years ago? The increased water supply will wash out roads and levees, and flood Sacramento something fierce before filling the Sacramento river delta with migratory bird habitat, once the island levees fail. Davis will be a great place to live to observe that being 40 feet above sea level if I remember correctly, yet close to the flood plains and Delta. That's the main reason for the remaining groves of Redwood trees, btw. They're flood tolerant. They love water. High Ground matters. If you're dumb enough to buy a house below a river, should I pity you and be forced to pay to rebuild it or should I point and laugh?
The levees around Sacramento and Stockton were engineered for specific levels of storm event, for certain heights of flooding, and for certain frequencies of maintenance which haven't been done. When the levees fail under the right/wrong levels of stress, we can point fingers but we're still left with the question of what to do next. Do you rebuild a place that's already flooded? Do you move to higher ground because we, as a nation, are broke? Do we fix the levees and keep our fingers crossed that a similar flood event won't break a levee somewhere else? At what point do we admit that living below our rivers might be a bad idea? And that's the real question. When do we take responsibility for our bad decisions?
For over a decade now, my friends (and customers) have been itching for a proper convergence media device, one computer gizmo that does the phone, camera, family photos, email, shopping, browsing, movie player, and handheld video games. All in one. With network access wherever, whenever, always.
The network issues are more or less of a problem depending where you live and how flat it is and how much you're willing to pay. Network access isn't free. WiMax and 4G cover a lot of territory, and 802.11n gets the home covered. Seamlessly switching between networks is going to be the next big thing in these devices.
Onboard memory and plug-in data cards make up the difference for movies and other media. If the OS is reliable and not a battery hog, your user complains less.
Synchronization with your home and office PC take care of other media and data files. OS support of encryption enable a lot of the rest.
A full function browser is crucial. People don't want to be educated about limitations in mobile devices. They want it to do everything their desktop will, and whine if it doesn't. The Whining got me out of IT.
Printer and projector support. Visiting executives always whine about that, and return devices that make them email an attached document or presentation like its offended them.
Camera that supports HD streaming video so live full motion video calling is common. This is coming. Its mostly a matter of appropriate compression and no dropped frames, or at least less noticeable ones. This is a WiMax and 4G issue, bandwidth and a smarter video compression scheme.
Battery life is getting there. Most people want to be able to use their PDA or phone ALL DAY on one charge, then charge it overnight while they're sleeping. Frankly, this is a reasonable demand. Tech companies now design chips for reducing the power consumption of the components and converting less of the power into heat.
Eventually, when all these features are combined we'll end up with incredibly well informed bicyclists carrying a device with the screen size that matches their needs best. Its a good bet there will be many manufacturers producing these, with some differences in features and price but eventually you'll get what you pay for.
If we're very lucky, we'll be scooterists too. I wouldn't mind owning a modern EFI version of the Honda Supercub underbone motorcycle, particularly if its the 108cc version that will actually pull my local hills. Or the Wave 125S, available everywhere but here in the USA despite it being a very good choice. It will need a waterproof and strong rack to carry my Nexus, or maybe a bluetooth screen for displaying the GPS, assuming I get a blow to the head causing me to forget how to operate a map.
I'm enjoying the Secession movement as it is meant to be taken: a protest. Its funny that the Libs, having won their election, object to the opposition protesting the outcome much as they'd have protested had the Democrats lost. This is more or less how they behaved when W won a second term. Remember Alec Baldwin whining he was going to leave America on national TV? Nobody seems to hold him to that. The liberals always get amnesia when it comes to their own hypocrisies.
Secession is just another protest. Its not going to amount to actual legal separation of any state from the Union. It doesn't matter if its legal or not. Its impractical. While my own state gets a small fraction of its tax dollars back, a considerable portion of the population eats on Federal benefits like Welfare. I can tell you they're truly despised by the working population too. However much you may dislike the Hostess employees for going on strike over seeing their wages lowered to Minimum, at least they worked for a living. If it bothers you that much, buy twinkies and put them in the cellar for the apocalypse or till the rats eat them and die.
Even if the nation divided, legally, and started up proper border patrols and the Federal Govt left behind to service the communist liberal Eastern states alone, and try to fund all their projects without enough people actually working to pay for them, I would welcome the separation. I am living in the 8th largest economy in the world, the state that gave us the internet and the way to use it, personal computers. California, should it become rational, would be okay.
Even if Secession divides the nation, trucks are still going to cross borders. It will take longer, with the inspections and the taxes from state to state, but that just drives more local competition to make it here. That's hardly a downside unless you like eating salad in the wintertime. Switch to coleslaw! Its hilarious how the Libs just can't accept that they are disliked by normal people. They have to vilify and demonize people with different opinions, which is exactly what they accuse their opposition of doing. We're used to that sort of behavior from the Libs, but that they aren't looking at themselves in the mirror and being ashamed? How pathetic is that?
Now expand the concept of a fragmented Union of Socialist Americans into neighbors. What has mainland Mexico ever done for Baja Mexico? What has Eastern Canada ever done for British Columbia? What has Toronto ever done for Quebec? Will Newfoundland split off from Quebec? Will they join a North Atlantic States Trade Bloc with Iceland and Ireland and Norway and Bermuda? Maybe Maine and Vermont will split off from the Yankees and join that Bloc too? They like to go their own way. The cost of repairing the hurricane damage and the ongoing delays and blackouts, those have to be making people think about permanently leaving the disaster zone the same way people abandoned Louisiana. Pack what you can save and go. Why stay and suffer? This is what is driving a lot of the contempt behind the protest.
I consider myself a Californian FIRST, an American second, despite my ancestors founding this country, literally, and fighting to create its national sovereignty. National Sovereignty is a concept regarded contemptuously by the leadership of the current ruling party, in public, on internationally broadcast interviews. THAT more than anything drives the Secession protests. Easterners keep taking my money to fund programs for Easterners. I never see a dime of it. Why on Earth would I support them?
National borders change. The Baby Boomers should remember this, since many changed in the 1960's. Nations invade and take from other nations. Cities can be destroyed. Places can be settled or developed. Populations swell or contract as resources surge or wane. The map is not static. It is fluid. Things change. Not always by war. Sometimes by technology or investment. Look at how China has drawn so much of its population out of the countryside and into the cities where you can survive on only 10 hours per day of labor compared to the 18 hours a day on the farm. There's time for a hobby, or even sleeping. And hey, China is going to end the One Child Per Family rule in 2015 so mothers won't be forced to abort any fetus unfortunate enough to be a girl. Considering that all that seems to be keeping Africa populated are those anti-AIDS pills, they may be looking at settling that continent in a couple decades.
If Africa were largely Chinese, and fully developed over the next couple centuries, complete with irrigation and roads and houses and mines and factories, Africa would be a real powerhouse of industry. They have lots of iron. Lots of rare earths in Africa as well. It really is a good place for mining and industry, and with all the sunlight, a good place for agriculture and solar energy. It probably won't be done by the native Africans, who can't see a percentage in bothering. They are accused of being lazy because no developer offers real financial motivation. One Laptop Per Child, if it is ever implemented, will probably give us some really amazing mechanical engineers, provided the teens learning engineering don't get AIDS like everyone else. If that happens, the Chinese Pioneers will have to get along with their African neighbors rather than simply storm in and grind the bones for fertilizer.
Here are some things that I think we'll see happen in our lifetimes.
Panama Canal access limited/banned for USA flag or bound ships. Possibly controlled by Chinese Navy. Maybe assigned by the UN as a Peacekeeper force.
End of drug smuggling from Mexico to USA due to poor USA economy and weak dollar. Foreigners are already demanding hundreds instead of twenties. That's inflation.
Oil primarily shipped under contract rather than open market, mostly to China. Probably under guard of Chinese Navy and Air Force.
Cars mostly running electric, alcohol, and natural gas. Brazil is the world provider of alcohol fuel from sugar cane. Fuel will be so expensive that nobody will be able to afford to drive to the job they want, so either bike or scooter to the job they can reach without exhaustion.
Africa touted as the new frontier for development. Massive EU and Asian efforts will flood that place. Roads, hospitals, water treatment plants, actual fences and patrols to keep down the Leopards (don't laugh, there are 150,000 of them and they still eat plenty of people), and some kind of responsible govts so an education isn't just another way to pay higher bribes.
Brazil doing some very public development efforts so all those sugar cane plantations have some reason to keep working instead of seeing all the money go to the Brazillionaires and their henchmen with guns.
Baja California turned into rich people mansions using installed desalination to provide all irrigation. Repeat on any desert islands (most of Cuba, Easter Island). Various coastlines with water shortages are ideal for this treatment. Peru, Western Sahara and southern Morocco, Namibia, any stretch of North Africa not wet enough for agriculture (Libya, western coastal Egypt, Arabian peninsula coastlines), Somalia, Natal in South Africa. These are places that Irrigation will transform. This same tech would irrigate LA and San Diego too, without touching the Colorado River water or needing the Owens River any longer. The Lake could come back. So could the farming in Long Valley.
Big irrigation canal projects. This means a canal off of the Columbia River through Eastern Oregon to Nevada. All those dry high desert valleys are prime territory for real estate development. Capture and redirect rainfall supplying the Eel river through a tunnel into the Western Sacramento Valley, from Red Bluff South along I-5. And diversions from the Frasier River via canals and pumps to the upper Great Plains, then into the Ogalalla Aquifer and refill what has been drained out of it in the last 150 years. That would restore farming for several million people and double or triple our grain output. If we had a rational govt instead of one that partied like its 1999, they'd be working on that now.
All of these are either changed national lines or ignore the lines completely. When you're talking about possession being 9/10ths of the law, and that being backed up by Predator drones and AAA/SAM batteries run by expert veterans, you can see how a city-state mentality will build up and become the New Normal. I can easily see a certain leeway granted to families operating lands that would be useless nothing without them providing the desalination facilities and the manpower to keep it all running. Organization and a certain ruthlessness, no doubt.
There is a tendency for public figures to blame the Union workers for being greedy and going on strike, particularly in Conservative circles. Hostess, makers of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, is threatening to bankrupt and liquidate
if the striking union employees don't give up and go back to work.
Hostess is cutting their wages to minimum and their benefits aren't
benefits anymore. Kinda like what I saw at my last job, and what I'm
seeing in many businesses that remain absurdly profitable for shareholders but very
undesirable for workers. We are becoming a Minimum Wage country. And its
going to kill the Twinkie. Say bye bye, Twinkies!
Bye bye!
My last job needed a Union. It was unhealthy work and we were paid $4/hour LESS than the competitors. People kept quitting to work for those better companies, leaving the survivors to train yet more people who would (and DID) quit. If it got a Union, the company would almost certainly shut down the site claiming: "the Union was demanding too much to be profitable." That's the knee-jerk response, and it needs close questioning and PROOF. In a publicly traded company, financial disclosure is reasonable. Trouble is, lying about that doesn't seem to land people in jail like it used to, so you won't get the truth, even behind closed doors.
Hostess is claiming the Union demands would make them unprofitable. However, the article I read did NOT interview the Union rep, which would be fair and balanced reporting. They also did not provide any financial data, just the vague claim from Hostess. There is more than one side to this and bias isn't helping anybody. Persons claiming it's a job for idiots have clearly never worked with production machinery, and don't realize that stuff is finicky and equipment I've worked with was rarely maintained at the claimed level on the paperwork. Theirs is probably the same. Keeping production equipment running is non-trivial and requires expert level knowledge, which the assembly line workers have. This means they're not stupid, and pretending they are is just the sort of insult to make them call Hostess's bluff.
Raleys supermarket chain finally resolved its Union differences last night, but neither side is happy and unhappy employees go work for someone else. I hope that isn't too common, because I like shopping there. They offer a quality product and if you comparison shop you get it for a reasonable price.
This is a REAL green business.
As for my former place of employment, if the doors close I would turn the site into a bicycle manufacturing company. Far better use of location and resources, and a much cleaner business. That town is a bicycle heaven anyway. It's flat, with vineyards, surrounded by very scenic hills with roads through them. A great place to ride no matter what your skills and fitness. Exactly the sort of place you would want that kind of factory. And the site is next door to the active railroad, where some time in the future you could be loading freight up for shipping cross country. Also, a local tourist railroad hobbyist organization wants to reactivate the old tracks from the original Transcontinental Railroad in order to run their steam train from Niles to Pleasanton right past the Senior Center where the grumpy old people said no. When that batch dies, the new old people might be less grumpy and allow it. That would be another good thing, since its further tourism and would offer a way back UP Niles Canyon after coasting down, if you happened to be too tired to return otherwise. Much more fun for the family or a date than calling a taxi. Antique trains are fun. Grandkids might visit more often if they had a train to ride, past the Senior Center. Ahem.
Where's MY jar of mayonnaise?
At this point, I think the Union workers should call Hostess's bluff and dare them to close the company forever. Hostess makes junk food for children and potheads with the munchies. It may be a piece of Americana, but it sure isn't priceless. If some philanthropist wants to buy the rights and make them again paying proper wages and charging a nostalgia price, go right ahead. Ted Turner owns most of the bison still living in America. Maybe he can be convinced to own the Twinkie too?
UPDATE: Strikers are still picketing after the 2 PM deadline, so Hostess says they're asking a Judge tomorrow to allow them to liquidate the company.
The good news is you can make your own Twinkies at home with a piping kit and a tube cutter starting from a nice yellow sponge cake. Isn't that great? Use butter cream inside and it will taste even better. As for Wonderbread? Ugh! Buy real bread, please.
