Road Tax

Everybody knows that motorcycles are dangerous. In a car the frame protects you from a crash. On a bike you are outside that frame. You can fall off, which is generally safer if the bike goes down, but don't get between the bike and what it's hitting. That's fine to say, but accidents can be so fast you don't get time to prepare. Sometimes you die. Sometimes you get crippled for life, or maybe face huge medical bills and permanent pain. Accidents on bikes are life changing. I will point out that bicyclists are under most of the same risks and blithely wear almost no protective gear. We see it as exercise and largely ignore the threat of cars running us over. We should think about the risks more.

In Southeast Asia, they call all the blood shed by scooterists and bicyclists killed in accidents on the roads "Road Tax". It's typically grim Asian humor. I suspect only Americans in the USA are optimists. I would call Optimism a conceit of the rich. Americans are rich. We have refrigerators and credit cards and paved roads and reliable electricity. The rest of the world? Not so much. Peak Oil showed me that someday we'll have the same poor standard of living as the rest of the world. I grew up with what modern people would call Third World conditions, since my electric power was NOT reliable, my water supply was contaminated with both e.coli and mercury (with health and sanity problems resulting), and my road so narrow and bumpy having a good suspension and brakes was a literal life-saving requirement... well, I'm used to it. I have different standards. I am prepared for the future. For the dangers and realities of the Post Oil world. I've already lived in it. Its going to be tough to accept the new risks the rest of the world never got to escape.

In a car you can wear comfortable summer clothes, enjoy air conditioning, and your stereo. Its very comfortable. There are many distractions in a car. Its a dreamy place. And you don't always see the oncoming bike. That car roof also protects you from weather and wind. The car is mostly adjustable around you but you pay for that comfort in reduced fuel economy. Most people are travelling ALONE most of the time. So all that weight is where our fuel economy is wasted. Safety and comfort are for rich nations. Those comforts of the big metal cage? That's the past we can't afford anymore. We pissed that away living outside our means for 60 years.

The future is bikes, both pedal and motorcycle. On a bike you have to wear armor and mean it, or you'll die or be shredded or abraded to death in a fall. You need special clothing to deal with heat, with cold, with wind. It costs money. If you gain or lose weight you may have to buy it again so it fits. Bad fitting safety gear can cause more injuries in a crash. A common 250cc bike will average around 70 mpg. A 125cc bike gets you to 110 mpg. That fuel economy is the future, like it or not.

A car has four wheels. If one tire loses grip on a loose surface, the car has 3 more wheels to hold grip, to make the turn, to stay upright. A bike only has two wheels so if one of those loses grip, you'll probably fall. Around here, gravel driveways leave sprays of fine pea gravel on the road where cars pull out. These sprays offer no grip, meaning if you hit the brakes your bike loses grip and falls. You have to coast across them: no brakes, no power, perfectly upright. Do it wrong, you fall. They're even a problem for bicyclists. Going into a corner too fast and not having sufficient grip to brake before the road ends is known as "running out of road". It is the # 1 cause of accidents and death in motorcycling, and much of the time, going too fast in those corners was influenced by road rage or alcohol. So if you ride a motorcycle, don't drink, and don't ride angry. It can kill you. Drunken riding kills and cripples all those Harley riders. Riding to a bar on your Hog is a sign of suicide. They give other motorcyclists a bad name and raise everyone's insurance rates. There is good reason that modern bikes offer ABS as a expensive option. ABS can protect you from losing grip and if you can afford it as a new rider, get it. It could save your life. You still have to do your part.

If you can't do that, get a jeep or a convertible, or check your state laws for riding an ATV on the roads. That's legal in PRK, provided you register after installing fenders, turn signals, mirrors, and other lights. That gets you Prius mileage for about 1/4th the cost.

Another major safety/grip problem is tar snakes. No grip for your tires on the shiny tar. If you hit that in a corner, you may fall when your tire loses grip so they must be dodged or slid across upright with no side stress. Memorizing where those snakes are on your commute road, so you're going slower across that or missing their placement is a key survival strategy. That or stick to 4 wheels. They're even worse when it rains. This is the #2 cause of accident or death for motorcyclists. ABS is even more important with this one, but you still have the dodge the tar snakes.

In a car, you're a big obvious metal crab on the road, and people see you. On a bike you're a slender vertical line and not always perceived by the human eye until after a driver turns across your path, or pulls out into you. Many motorcyclists are blocked by cars pulling out of driveways and end up splattered over the car suddenly, which can be a fatal crash above 10 mph. This is one of those things motorcyclists warn new riders about. Cars are the problem. Empty roads are safe unless you've got a death wish and run out of road on a corner. Cars hitting you or turning in front of you when they just acted like they saw you is the #3 cause of death/accidents for motorcyclists. Defensive driving courses are offered in nearly all states. The basic rule is assume the car doesn't see you, even if they stare, nod, or wave at you. Human beings are crap at perception, and get distracted easily.

Fourth danger is mechanical failure. A low tire, a weak or warped brake, these can kill you. You are supposed to check for these and other issues prior to starting your engine every time you're going to ride it. This is a few minutes work, but necessary, even for a very short trip. Starting the motor and then putting on your gear (helmet, THEN gloves) gives it time to warm up enough to run.

I still need my motorcycle license, then I need my bike chosen and fixed up with the progressive suspension for the shitty roads and the good disc brakes that can survive long steep grades without warping or fading, and maybe that means I should just buy the used Ninja 250 since that's the most cost effective bike capable of tackling the mountains here. I feel like it's too much bike for a 5 minute commute to work. Its a good weekend ride, but if I wanted a weekend ride I'd get a 500cc semi-naked Honda or even buy and restore a 450 Suzuki from the 1980s. There are many choices. Hell, if I could find an older 600cc Ninja inline 4, those are strong and durable engines and a lovely sound. I still prefer vintage, I just don't like Harley.

Honda 1100 cc

The TU250x, which is allegedly "not sold in California" but is apparently physically for sale in every Suzuki dealer's show room, is a more comfortable choice for around town riding like a scooter, but it still a capable road bike but not a freeway bike as it can't go over 45 mph on that gearing setup. The gears can be changed, but it really doesn't have the power for freeway, much less the aerodynamics. Its a naked bike. Its very classic and pretty. Around town, under 45 mph, its fun. And it will do 45 mph all day. You just have to accept the limitations of a 250cc engine, even with fuel injection.

I still see a place for ultralight vehicles here. The original Fiat 500 had a 500 cc 2-stroke motorcycle engine. It was famously slow, but very thrifty with the fuel. The car weighed little and in wrecks kinda doubled as the closed casket at the funeral. Most European safety standards are essentially metal rain covers rather than passenger protection from a wreck. Only America seems to have worked out crumple zones as a safety feature rather than something to insure your death. Ze Germans build unsafe cars too, though the models they sell here comply with our standards. This is why those cool looking cars on Top Gear aren't sold here. They are a joke in crashes. A sad joke where the driver and passengers are all dead as the punchline. That's road tax too.

When you consider that safe cars are also a luxury we can no longer afford, and that safety costs us 10 mpg or more, and our nation is largely bankrupt and only supported financially because the Chinese are buying our worthless savings bonds and T-Bills, something which will eventually stop when the figure out we are going to default and the nation split up into states with no portion of the Federal Debt, well, things will change. We'll look at that and balance the scales and take the risks. The more bikes on the road, the fewer cars to cause the actual deaths. It won't be perfect. Lots more people will die. This is better than everyone starving to death because few people are within bicycling range of their jobs. If you don't work, you don't eat.

Socialism only works till you run out of other people's money. That is what is happening today. The Fed is printing trillions of dollars a year, and the Chinese are buying the bonds. That will eventually pass a tipping point and the dollar will go worthless. Most experts think this will happen when the Prime Interest Rate goes up, something threatened every 3 months. That's the point where we stop being able to buy foreign oil to feed our car economy, and you may find yourself stuck. Stuck. Unable to move, along with everyone else. That's the Day of Shock. The Day our Economy Stood Still.

Most experts expect panic at that point. Food hoarding, gasoline hoarding, riots. I don't know we'll be so disorderly or not, but many things will happen. Eventually they'll give us fuel rationing, and work out how to ship food to the supermarkets, probably with more food rationing cards like during WW2, and we'll buy what is authorized and the lights will sometimes go out and that will suck. But we'll deal. And we'll get thinner.

If you have the motorcycle license and the bike, you can ride to work further than other people carpooling together. You can get there fresh, on your own schedule and leave on your own schedule. The leathers are less of hassle than a carpool twit who's always late and gets everyone in the carpool fired from their jobs. We all know people like that, who consider their petty concerns worthy delays, how they exercise power over others. I knew a guy like that who cost people their jobs. He was really satisfied by it too. He was evil. This is ANOTHER good argument for motorcycles. You don't get fired because of someone else making you late. Retain control of your own destiny. Even if its uncomfortable.

Some of the economy will retain its specialists, and thus retain some of the better skills and products. We'll recover faster the more people have motorcycles suitable for commuting to work. That's why I write this blog. To show people the future that's unavoidable, and offer a rational solution they can prepare for now, including costs of investment, time requirements, and strategies. I think this is healthier than guns and ammo. If you think you need a gun for civil unrest, move somewhere that unrest is unlikely. Defense attorney fees will always be more than rent increases of living in a better area. Running away is free. Fighting might cost your life. Being in jail pays no wage. Do I need to go on? So get a bike and a safe place to sleep. Pick a job that's safe and close. You massively reduce the borrowed trouble of the old world we can't afford anymore. We are post-Disney(tm) survivors. We have to adapt to reality now. It's A Big World After All.

Picking Your Bike

As the weather warms up I am seeing more people on bicycles, more bicycles with moped engine conversions climbing the hills (no license or registration required even in PRK), and more dual sport/enduro motorcycles being used as basic commuter transportation around town. Enduro motorcycles in particular are cheap used, cheap to operate, get 70 mpg with a 250cc engine, and can handle bad roads and potholes (common here) easily because that’s what they were designed for. 

There's some codes to know. Bikes that end in F means offroad only, not road legal (as is. they can get a mirror, turn signals, and license plate and become road legal in most states). L or R means road legals. X often means fuel injected, which is a nice feature but often adds around $1500 to the price. The upside is you can start the engine and go, not wait 5 minutes for it to warm up, or have to adjust the choke at stoplights during your ride. 

Supermoto is slick tires for street riding and firmer, often lowered, suspension. Most motorcycle riders recommend Progressive suspension, which gets firmer the harder it is pushed, as this can save you from a bad bump. I'm pretty sure my BMW 320i had a progressive air-shock suspension. It is important to know this because you may need to buy and install the suspension yourself, since it must be attuned to your weight. Some are adjustable, which is what most suggest. They aren't cheap, however, and come in many sizes. Just knowing what parts are needed is crucial or you'll buy the wrong ones and waste time sending it back and forth. To get the MadAss a progressive suspension, and long enough trailing arm that I won't wheelie up the hill by accident (and get hurt), its another $1500 on top of the $2500 it costs initially. This gets me to $4000 for a 125cc. 

I can buy a new standard motorcycle with twice the engine and fully adjustable suspension and fuel injection from Suzuki for only $400 more. A bike that runs immediately, is highway capable and can climb hills and gets 80 mpg instead of 100 mpg, but would actually carry a passenger and is well regarded. Really, I'd rather have that. The MadAss is better than a scooter, of course. If it can be ridden with a forkoil change and stronger front springs, great! That saves a lot of money. And its light enough to park on the porch. 

The Enduro bike appears to be the transportation of the future. With slick tires it is good on the streets. Switched back to knobby tires its an all-terrain vehicle. I see a surprising number of high school kids on these instead of cars, wearing proper helmets and obeying traffic laws. Sensible riding, not yahoos trying to kill themselves. There’s also a lot of old motorcycles restored to full operation on the road, ones from the 1970’s and 1980’s being used as daily riders. We are finally seeing the shift from four wheels to two wheels gain momentum. 

While we still love Hot Rods and fancy cars as much as the next person, they’re showpieces, not daily commuters. Around here, Minimum Wage is a good job if you can get it. What you do for your money is more important since you’re often paid the same either way. Making your expenses minimal means accepting daily risks. Cheap small displacement motorcycles as your daily driver are one of those risks. I think many do this because they don’t have the credit to buy a car, the cash to buy one used, much less the wages to afford gasoline for a thirsty V8 or even I-4. Times are hard. 

$2500, shipping included, 100 MPG.

I think I will save the MadAss as a backup choice if the local Enduro bikes are going to cost more, or prove so unreliable due to my own ignorance, that I need a new motorcycle to reliably commute. Its the learning curve of dealing with mechanical issues I don't yet understand as well as getting to work on time that worries me most and points me at new bikes for the first ride. Not showing off. Its about caution here. Will a used $500 enduro I paid too much for with no rings and leaking oil that only starts sometime, a good choice for me? I think no. 

While I CAN bicycle, and probably should, its going to get HOT soon. Its already hitting 81'F every day. I sleep with the window wide open and its only chilly, not cold. All of this leads to either developing the ability to bicycle in serious heat up the hill after working and sweating all day, or riding the motorcycle home, wearing a high air-flow armor jacket, gloves, and helmet. I can do that. Its probably less sweaty than biking. I'm already getting 9 hours of aerobic bending, walking, stretching and twisting every day. 

On a completely unrelated note the Synergies Mod for Torchlight 2 IS a lot more fun than the basic game. I hope they figure out the game balance for the new character types. I created a Necromancer character named Faith and gave her a Paladin as a pet, named Xander. I always liked that pairing in Buffy. They should have stood by each other, but the show played up the tragedy for drama value and what's done is done. I kinda wish there was a video game that allowed you to explore via motorcycles and manage your finances as you meander through deserts and mountains and ford rivers and deal with the weather and bugs and mud, all from the comfort of your living room in High Def. Probably a silly idea, right? No guns involved. No blood or gore. Just exploration. 

Grass Valley Antique Car Show Saturday 4/27/13

One of the upsides (there are many) of living in this mountain town is they have a hot rod and antique car show here a couple times a year. One of them they close down the streets in Downtown Grass Valley and fill it with fancy cars from the 1940's and 50's and some of the 60's if they're really nice. Most of them are fully restored, all are pretty. And its free. So, after the show and some time correcting the pictures, which were all a little dark, some setting that's off, here you go. I tried to put the slideshow here but blogger software is being a butt.

Grass Valley Hot Rod and Classic Car Show 2013

I look a lot of pictures of the details. Most of those details took LOTS of work, and its those details, left unfinished in the original cars that were slapped together by indifferent assemblers paid to go fast, not quality, that makes a Hot Rod special. Details. Imagine if all cars in America had this level of quality. If there was this much pride in everything we did? There'd be less Stuff, but the Stuff would be nicer.

Cascadia

Back in the 1970's, when LA was stealing our water and insane Liberalism was at its peak with that wacko Moonbeam Brown trying to force through a Periferal Canal and kill all the salmon just so LA could have green lawns because they had more population and more dead to vote in the elections, back then, there was serious talk of voting to split California into the North and South at the Grapevine and Mohave desert. It would have legally cutoff LA's water, ending the "negotiated by pointed guns" water rights contracts. It would have been a real nightmare for the Federales in DC, so they nixed it. The thing is, the sentiment remains. When people are most angry, they draw the line further north, cutting off Sacramento and the Bay Area into the South and making NorCal that much smaller, with my home town the largest remaining city in the new state. As its only got 130,000 people that's not much. But Alta California (as some wanted to call the Northern portion) was only part of the picture.

Cascade is named for the Cascade mountains, which run from the Mohawk Fault (Feather river in California) all the way to the Rockies in British Columbia. This name is also used to designate the Cascadia Subduction Complex, which is where the Juan De Fuca plate slides under the North American Plate from the Triple Junction near Petrolia all the way to the Vancouver Island in British Columbia. This complex provides the source of the lava for the volcanoes and the super-quakes that have caused some big tsunamis, including the 10 pointer in January of 1700 that destroyed coastal towns in Japan.

Cascadia as a rational fair trade group is a more international deal than NAFTA, but specific to the north Pacific. Done right, Cascadia would be the wet part of California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington (state), British Columbia (itching to escape French-Canada since BC speaks english), the Yukon, and Alaska. It would also offer some trade with Baja Mexico and Southern California/LA via ship, and Nevada and probably Montana and Wyoming via train. It would tarriff trade with the rest of the USA, but offer tit-for-tat deals based on fair trade and free trade agreements, particularly with the rest of the Pacific Rim, which is easier for us to deal with than the rest of the USA. We're 10 days by containership from Japan and 12 from China, for example. Something like that. Rail across the USA takes just as long, longer for freight. Cascadia is openly hostile towards DC taxation, since we don't get the benefit from it. For every dollar we send East, we get only 60 cents back. That's a well known fact. And its very irritating, since the East openly mocks us for paying. They are parasites. We are better off without them.

Would Cascadia work as a country? Well, yes. It has within its state borders significant agriculture, hydroelectric capacity, irrigation, refineries, some oil supply, steel mills, shipyards, military bases, gun makers, armor makers, machine shops, welding, ports, ferries, roads, railyards, railroads, computer companies, biotechs, dairies, slaughterhouses, even junkfood bakeries, brewers, canneries and all that stuff you need for modern civilization is made here. We even make cars. We don't NEED the east, or the MidWest to be honest. We don't mind the MidWest, but we don't need them. Garrison Keillor can GFH along with PBS pledge month. Shipping costs and delays cross country are enough to justify making it here, and we have been for over a century. What do we need you Easterners for?

If Cascadia formed, that would be it for the extorted tax dollars of 50 million people and that extra 40% they steal from us to subsidize their Eastern Interests and their annual hurricane rebuilding sprees on the Eastern shore and Florida. Federal dollars weren't rebuilding California when we had our big quakes. They just laughed on national TV, then pretended to be repentant. 99% of Easterners make the rest look bad.

If we declined further participation if the multilevel marketing scheme that is the root of American "capitalism" (Fascism: state supported capitalism), we'd stop paying for that. The NYC childishness would be off our TV. If you want to live in New York: go there. With our blessing. Just don't come back. We don't want you. New York is a playground for a certain kind of sociopath, breeding worse sociopaths. We have enough trouble with our Hollywood psychos and the lunatics prancing around with their vaporware claims in the Bay Area, called Venture Capitalists or CEOs. We don't need yours telling us, in the West, how to live. We are a different country. And that's the crux of the division, beyond the obvious continent between us.

Cascadia is built on very different values. Less destructive and divisive, more constructive and practical without being mean. That's possible here because the only resources we fight over are land and water, and there's a lot of land. If we form our own country, that missing 40% could go to those century-scale public works projects so we'd have more water, opening up more land for our use. Like the Columbia River Canal into Oregon and Nevada. Refill Lake Lahontan. Reno is already turning into a Ghost Town. More than half empty. It's a glorified truck stop. Eventually it won't even be that. Peak Oil kinda ruins the place. The big Lake Lahontan project would flood a fair bit of Nevada, but it would also cause a real estate boom and would make for great fishing. I'm in favor of that. Run a railroad around the rim, some bridges, its still passable, but it would be wonderful for houseboats and bass fishing and lake trout. 8500 square miles, and 900 feet deep at its deepest point in Pyrimid Lake, 500 feet deep at Black Rock Lake, where they hold Burning Man every summer. I'm pretty sure they'd either move it or build a raft for the festival.

Cascadia, keeping its OWN taxes, could build electric passenger and freight rail, powered by solar. Our roads would be better because we wouldn't be skimming it past the low bidder so evil fat cats got big mansions in Virginia. Haven't you wondered why the roads are crap here? There you go. Our hospitals could have their legal requirements changed so we weren't serving the illegals who walk out without paying, which ended up killing taxpayers after the emergency rooms bankrupted and closed, leaving heart attack victims too far from hospitals to arrive before dying. Many people in SoCal are really ANGRY about that, btw. Many fled SoCal for that specific reason. The hospital law had unintended consequences of increasing racism. Thank you Federales! You suck.

I would like to see DC deal with its troubles without my taxes to bail them out every year. They do nothing for us, here in the West. They're more like the British. If its unfair, add another law so its more unfair. We're more like Pioneers: solve the problem, move on. They want to be how they are, fine. Stop pointing a gun at me and demanding 40% of my wages. I would laugh my a55 off if the Governor made it law that only state authorized agencies can demand taxes, and then refused to authorize the IRS agents in that capacity. It would then be a reportable crime if the IRS demanded money from you. Neatly cutting them off.

Naturally, this would mean we'd lose those few matching funds, which mostly impacts "federal programs" which are for roads, military, and useless eaters. As I'm in favor of full employment, cutting off the useless eaters is a major win. Have to offer a carrot, but the stick is "no work, no eat".

If the State shifts funds to the roads, they stay paved, a bit longer. Pavement is a luxury we can't afford much longer anyway. The East is going to stop funding our road repairs soon anyway.

America is a Cult. It has cult behaviors: fanaticism, misplaced loyalty, strong hateful division, violent political disputes, and unresolved tensions. This is not healthy, and could lead to violence. I don't want that. Revolutions always kill the good people first, and the result is generations of hatred and violence. The only healthy solution to a cult is to leave. Think of it as a divorce from a codependent drug addicted Spouse, an abusive spouse we'll call Debra Caine (DC). She got really fat after the marriage and we're much too handsome to stay with her when all she does is eat bon-bons and sit on the couch watching soap operas and complaining about how the house is dirty and why can't we afford a nice Mexican maid? It's exhausting supporting the useless fleshbag.

Cascadia is standing up for ourselves. Its saying goodbye to the bad ex-wife. Its ending this biased arrangement before it kills us. We don't have to sink with the ship. Cults either implode or explode, and the wars around the world suggest its exploded. The current president thinks starting more wars is a good way to avoid any domestic examination of his failures. Of how little he's accomplished. The Russians warned the FBI about the Chechen bombers in Boston. Twice. The Obama Administration shut down the inquiry. Said it wasn't important. Does that Administration deserve further respect? I say no. Time to split. Politely but effectively split.

How California Should Prepare For The Future

Thanks to Black Swans and my Boy Scout training, I find the current govt behaving like a Disney(tm) Ostrich, with its head in the sand.

There is no serious preparation for Peak Oil or fuel interruption, and right now there must be or we'll get screwed when that Black Swan finally happens. Some of this needs to be enabled by govt. Or govt needs to get out of the way. As the current governor is obsessed with the Train To Nowhere and keeping his constituents in LA happy with water subsidies, I have to think of all the things I would do BETTER if I were in charge. Every man knows he can out-think a fool, even if the man he's sure is a fool really isn't. Its entirely possible that Brown is utterly stymied by entrenched communists in the Assembly and Senate, preventing preps he's pushing for but never get airplay on the media because Peak Oil prep isn't sexy enough. Its possible. I just don't know. I have never met Gov. Brown myself. Maybe he knows all about Peak Oil. It just isn't happening.

If I ran the state of California, if I were the governor, I'd be focused on two things. California is about Agriculture and Tourism. That's what we do ever since we exported our technology jobs. We have great weather and great scenery and most of the state is EMPTY. Despite 33 million people here, its mostly empty. A great safe place to visit. So bring in the tourist dollars. We're not getting full employment for 33 million people by outsourcing our jobs to China and India. Sorry, but we're not. That must be reversed.

Our agriculture is dependent on irrigation, supplied by our annual winter monsoon rains. The trouble with those is sedimentation is filling up the dams and reducing their capacity. Some of that is erosion following wildfires, which means preventing wildfires, or at least managing them better so there's a lot less erosion is crucial to that multi-billion dollar industry. Funny how forestry is so important to the state. Its the Sierras that stop the clouds and force the rains to fall. Adiabatic heating, is the scientific cause. That's half the issue.

The other issue is the sediment filling the reservoirs needs to be dug out and removed. The way to accomplish that is temporarily drain the dams, or do the clearing when water levels are low, with bulldozers and trucks. Dredging and silt don't go together. It just liquefies and ends up downstream making the mess worse where there's other problems. Like between the levees, making the river level rise higher and higher so floods cut through them and flood the protected delta farmland. This happens, too.

Flood control is a huge issue here because, like the Tigris and Euphrates basins, we get our floods at exactly the wrong time. The floods come right after planting instead of before, like you see in Egypt.

We solved this crucial problem with the above dams, catching the snow melt and paring it out for summer irrigation. This is what they tried to do in ancient Sumeria (aka Babylon aka Iraq) and often failed. Siltation is the enemy of flood control. The 3 Rivers Gorge Dam is filling up with silt so those two million people and 3,000 year old temples they evicted and destroyed? Wasted effort. In a decade or less it will be full of mud and just an expensive waterfall. That's what happens. Lake Mead is doing the same thing. Damming the Colorado River just traps the silt a while. LA has given up its water rights to the Colorado, getting it from us instead. Every tax-payer in California is paying for cheap water to LA so LA can have green lawns and we have low-flow toilets and showheads. Thank you LA! I hate you!

Technology is a sideline which should be encouraged, but outsourcing production should be tariffed to hell so outsourcing companies are penalized instead of rewarded. It needs to be built here. So people here have jobs. Staying home unemployed just leads to babies you can't feed, drug problems, burglary, and other crime. It is NOT leading to new businesses. A big part of that is the regulations which scare away the largely ignorant new business makers from actually doing business here. They leave the state so they can figure things out as they go rather than be fined and shut down out of ignorance and vicious Fascist inspectors who are actually looking for a bribe a new business can't afford. And I wouldn't say bribe if I wasn't personally aware of many cases of EXACTLY that. And that person still has their job as a State fire inspector! WTF! Even local newspaper coverage didn't get them fired. Or arrested since a crime was committed.

Detroit is a fantastic example of our national unemployment problem. All those beaten down car engineers that lost their jobs when the big 3 went under (just long enough to fire them). How many started businesses with ideas their supervisors turned down as too expensive or not fashionable enough? None that I know of. Though some likely exist, none of them did it in Detroit. Smart people abandoned the place like the war zone it became and went elsewhere. Move somewhere cheaper and safer that still has streetlights, sewer and water. Detroit is like Beirut without the TV coverage and truck bombings. But the violence is there. You don't start businesses in war zones if you just want to make better cars. I think many of the engineers just plain retired, or found entirely different careers. And this is a terrible loss for America. If GM and Ford hadn't refused to upgrade their suspensions, they would have competed with the European cars which handle better because they don't have a fixed axle with leaf springs. Hondas outsold American sedans because they're all independent suspensions which won't flip over and kill you because there's a pothole on the corner. That MATTERS. Honda also doesn't fall back on "Oh they all do that" when you complain to the dealer about a problem. GM and Ford and that other one that just makes trucks, they failed customer service consistently for decades.

Then the Big 3 opted to build SUVs when they knew damned well there were no serious oil discoveries since 1964, and even Prudhoe Bay just helped a little, didn't fix the problem and would run dry soon. If they'd been smart, they could have talked up sexy cute cars and build something like a Spyder with fender flares and a good engine roar that got 40 mpg back in 1985. And no, I'm not talking about that POS Pontiac. They should have taken part in and promoted rally car racing so the Europeans would see our cars and been impressed instead of dismissive. They could have done this. We should be doing this now, leading the way. Instead Detroit got taken over by the Governor, the mayor etc face dereliction charges and probably other fun stuff involving felony jail time and Detroit's sole value is for making post-apocalyptic zombie movies. Which really, we're all tired of.

As Governor, I wouldn't want any city in California to be a war zone. Not Oakland, not Stockton, not South Central LA or Fresno or South Sacramento. Any law enforcement chief refusing to answer 911 calls gets arrested for dereliction of duty. Felony dereliction. Have fun in prison. I'd put into LAW that 911 calls must be responded to, and force it through the state constitution so it can't be overturned or ignored. If you are a civilized country, you protect your citizens from crime. No excuses.

I believe in self defense. Especially for young women and mothers who are way too often victims of violent crime. I would allow concealed carry and repeal the no-guns in public spaces rules because its not fair for a housewife with a stalking ex husband to be murdered at the post office or picking up her kids from school. There's been ONE post office shooting in 200 years. Banning CCW there is asinine. Particularly since cops carry there so it is already violated.

I would also see about offering low cost loans to FAMILIES so they can get foreclosed houses instead of "investors" who then rehab and jack up the rent, leaving families broke and unable to get the white picket fence, something very close to my own heart. I think Habitat for Humanity is doing good charity work. More organizations like them should exist.

I would also offer incentives to move business out of the really expensive cities with water pumping keeping them green and shift population back (from the coastal cities) to where water is gravity fed and cheap (central valley). The best way is to shut off the water subsidies and make residents pay the real price. Leave the $1000/month water bills to rich people. Many central valley cities are ghost towns but would be cheap to run those big Bay Area and LA businesses. The water is already there. Pumping water 5 feet up a well is a hell of a lot less energy than 1200 or 3000 feet over a mountain pass. The energy cost of irrigation of cities in California is horrifying. We could be energy independent if LA was left a desert. Instead we spend billions on pumping WATER. That has to end. A large portion of the irrigated land in the southern San Joaquin valley is ruined by caliche, a form of calcite sealing caused by over-irrigation. The damage has been done, and can't be fixed for long. The land is a lost cause. It would make good rice paddies... or we could rebuild the massive lake that used to be there which served as wild migratory bird habitat. Allow the Kern River to flood there and provide just enough water flow to keep it from going stagnant so the birds come back. They WOULD. We'd get our flamingos again. And all those geese and ducks. Environmental win instead of parched desert. The only real downside is potential mosquitoes, however with all the water you could plant appropriate mosquito eating fish, like brown trout, and that offers sport fishing. Its also food for the birds. Yet more potential tourism opportunities.

A California governor should get involved in the solar debacle. Solar is something which would work here, provided we're building the panels really cheap and thus can afford to install them on every roof. We get over 320 days a year of sun, give or take 20 days for drought or a wet year. PV Panels plus batteries means you can cut California power demand by half. Maybe more. Most power goes to water heating. If you pour the PV power into a water heater, all day long as the sun shines you're heating your water tank and NOT drawing from the grid. This is a good thing and is very simple. An independent loop means its not interfering with PG&E so the issue of dealing with them is moot. I remember well the blackouts in California associated with the Enron scam. No riots, but there could have been. It was HOT those nights. If we'd had Cheap Solar then, we could have jailed Enron instead of bargained with them and ending up tripling our power bills. Since the power grid is falling apart, we really NEED solar for those inevitable blackouts coming. I'm NOT touching the grid unless California leaves the Union and joins Cascadia, and the whole state needs to vote on that referendum.

Around half the people in jail in California are there because they were caught with a joint. I don't like pot. But it's hardly the same as kidnapping or rape. I'd decriminalize marijuana possession but still treat public intoxication and DUI like alcohol and other drugs.

I'd also offer a path to ex-convicts to becoming a proper citizen again, with rights they can regain with every step of recovery. Drug treatment while in prison, with testing, shortens the sentence and makes them eligible for parole. This means they don't have to stay criminals and form mafias out of necessity. Offer recovery path and many will take it. CalFIRE is proof it works. If they go recidivist, they get shot. If they follow the program they get their rights back. This would eventually cut down on crime, and crime costs. Those hundred thousand prisoners are expensive.

I worked on fire prevention projects here over 10 years ago. I worked with state and local forestry and firemen to map roads for wild-fire fighting. One of the things I learned was that America learned from the indians how to clear the understory brush so wildfires from lightning wouldn't burn down the whole forest. Without understory brush, the fire can't get into the treetops, can't get very hot. The trees survive if there's only light grass and leaves on the ground. We funded the continued clearing from the Gold Rush until 1925 when Liberal policies ended the practice, focusing on putting the fires out rather than letting them burn the way nature did. Because of that, understory brush around trees is the most EVER and wildfires often become crown fires which burn down entire forests, fast, and then leads to massive erosion when the rains come months later, killing the salmon, causing flooding downstream, and overtopping the levees in the Central Valley where all the farms are. So a modest fire becomes a billion dollar problem for decades after. In face of this, I would fund CalFire for forest clearing and create a state habitat law/amendment which requires development dollars get oversight so they aren't wasted or hidden (real scandal!).

I want parks to go free rather than close because they can't pay for a gate keeper who wasn't needed in the first place. Charging visitors to pay the wages for the guy who charges the visitors? With state tax funds paying for the park in the first place? That's asinine, obscene, stupid, and a rip off. Make more parks free. Put staffing wages into the campgrounds and game management, fish in particular, so the nature tourists have more to enjoy.

Plant more trout! Too many California lakes and rivers are empty of fish. They used to be full of them in the 1970's. This is ridiculous. I gave up fishing because Fish and Game wasn't arresting the poachers carrying out buckets of fish, and they put them in on Opening Day rather than a month early so the fish had a chance to adapt and stop tasting like evil fish food goo and more like fish. I fished as a lad. It was great. Back then, you could actually catch something. Now? Forget it. That needs to be fixed. We had entire towns surviving on fishing dollars in places along the Feather River. Most of those died when the state stopped its fish planting programs. It was paid for with taxes, and lots of people had jobs because of it.

I am in favor of paving some trails so bicycles, especially parents with kids, can enjoy parks more easily. The Truckee River Trail is great for families. So are the paved trails near the American River. We need more of those. Safe pleasant parks so future generations will see nature as a good thing. Campgrounds with managers keep out the ugly and can call the armed park rangers to arrest the mean drunks or criminals that try to take them over or scare away the decent people. We're coming around to a point where there's enough desperation that 1980's level creepy villains are congregating in real life. We can't scare the tourists or they won't come back.

Hunt the pot fields in parks, like we used to, so people who want to grow it use their own land, legally. Not shooting innocent hikers or hunters. Take the money out of it and most of the violence will go too. I would also authorize FLIR helicopters (aka CAMP) use so we can find the meth labs and pot growers. Decriminalization should end illegal pot houses in the first place, but meth labs are scary and their operators murderers. Shooting meth lab people does us all a favor.

I would offer reciprocity for out of state scooters so 49cc can go unlicensed here. Make it easy. Make it cheap. Let them sell for $500 instead of $2200 by yanking control away from CARB, the Obstruction Agency they are now known for being.

I would expand the 49cc reciprocity to allow scooters up to 125cc with no license or registration requirement, just maintain the helmet law and a basic plate for a flat one-time fee. That would encourage people to use them by keeping the costs and hassles low. Scooters get 100 mpg or better. 125cc is pretty minimal in California, due to hills. Yes, scooter engines pollute, but people get to work on them. Full Employment is a good goal. Offering a cheap means to stay mobile and get to work protects our economy from rising gasoline costs and offers a way forward when the inevitable rationing comes.


I would offer experimental vehicle licenses for any car mods and make it easy, a simple online form to register and a special bright orange plate so drivers would notice the vehicle might be "exciting". Limitation being whether it can carry a passenger (requires inspection for passenger plate/license) and possibly requiring a helmet for the driver. If they feel nerdy they might not do it unless it really is an experimental vehicle. California used to be about innovation, not retirement plans. We need that youthful energy again. And we need to get rid of that bullshit motorcycle muffler law. 70 mpg, no exploited rare earths or wars required. Duh!

If I were the governor California would actually be a place the youth felt there was a future here, and govt got out of the way of innovation they wanted to try. A place business could grow, not be stifled. Did you know that welding shops have to pay a carbon tax because they use carbon dioxide gas while building machines to solve California's problems? That's a big FU to welders, and most fled the state over it. If you want a future you, you have to make it possible to operate, not make business run away screaming for a more rational place. Make California less oppressive and hateful than it has become. This is what we need for a future with more than tourism and agriculture.

Flukes and Whales, Black Swans

When I was just getting onto the internet in 1993, I read a newsgroup, a BBS, on the alt domain called alt.cyberpunk. There was a frequent poster there with a signature file that read: "Beware of flukes. Sometimes they are attached to whales." It was more of a warning than a joke. That stayed with me.

In business way too many flukes turn up. This nagging problem leads to that equipment breaking, or this issue invalidates quality to every single product processed on the equipment. This failed test with a "process" to cheat it immediately after means 90% of the site's claimed stock is actually invalid and must be discarded, meaning the $100M they claim they have in inventory is really only worth about $1M, a 99% collapse in value that's being kept secret by the company executives and managers from the company's buyer who isn't aware of the problems consistently reported by operators/technicians to their shift leads and supervisors for years now. Stuff like that turns into a Whale. Those little flukes of failure. They are more commonly known today as Black Swan events, which are unexpected but possible outcomes that arise from bad luck. Hurricane Katrina flooding New Orleans was a black swan.

Often, it's random chance. If you're a Boy Scout like me, you plan for the worst, because you SEE the black swan so you know it exists. Boy Scouts don't die in the blizzard that blows up in June while hiking because they are prepared. Those do happen. Rarely, but they do. The Sims games are really good about teaching players to adapt and deal with the unexpected. Ironically, this is healing since most Sims players are Aspbergers/Autistic or OCD cases who feel the need to micromanage and control stuff, often because the pace of real life is too fast for them to keep up. Life feels out of control. The simulation of Godlike control calms them. I've got a cousin and uncle who were big on this, and my wife played quite a few of the newer Sims games, but always cheated with the money (big clue there!) because she really couldn't handle all the details. Watching one person, others would catch fire and die (actual plot point in The Sims, btw). Real businesses are like that. The fires are often metaphorical but you have to put them out or prevent them happening.

I play RPG games, which are also good business training. You start with a very small stake and put in the work and invest as you go in skills that help you gain profit, and you leave no money on the ground or you'll soon get stuck and unable to go forward, end up dying when you tackle a problem you can't handle. You take risks, you solve problems, you invest in yourself and your tools to get the job done and you become adaptive. And predictive. These are valid skills in the real world. Since they no longer teach business in public school, at ALL, games are the place kids will learn it. Ironic, right? Instead of turning kids violent, its teaching them to analyze and think. I think this is hilarious. Particularly since Critical Thinking was removed from the Graduation Requirements for California State University system. You can be a college graduate and completely ignorant. Critical Thinking enables you to deal with real life, rather than pretend it is what you say it is, what I call "insane" and psychologists define as "psychotic". I've met lots of psychotics over the years. Most are harmless, but never give them power over you. They will make your life hell.

The fluke-whale issue is one of the reasons people hand-wave peak oil as unimportant, despite momentary bitching at the gas pump every single fill-up. They DON'T understand that price increases may eventually lead to a Black Swan event, like a sudden loss of access to fuel, period. There are many potential causes for that, even real accidents.

People say all sorts of asinine things, but I remember 1979 quite well. I was only 8, but that's old enough to remember the gas lines, and rationing. I also remember 1974, when there was fuel rationing the first time since WW2. This country has had rationing several times. Kids these days pretend that history doesn't exist before they were born because they are psychotic. This nation is no longer effective at keeping the terrorists out. Some of them will be smart enough to hit us where it actually hurts. Ras Tanura loading platform is just sitting there, daring Iran or Saudi or some AQ team to blow it up. Our own refineries are poorly guarded as well. Break enough of those and we'll have a panic.

Eventually terrorists or an accident or some other random Black Swan will interrupt our critical supplies and the fluke of high prices turns into the whale of transportation panic and collapse. In a best case scenario there's armed guards at the gas stations and mandatory rationing instituted immediately instead of the worst case, which is riots, food hoarding, and arson, followed by full shut down of the economy worse than 1929. We had fuel in 1929. We don't have much now, and most of that would go to emergency services (riot police, fire, ambulance) and eventually food and medicine delivery trucks to keep the survivors of the initial panic under control and potentially alive, if govt considered population valuable.

At my job I face the street most the time and hear every vehicle engine as it goes by. I look up when I hear a scooter or motorcycle so I'm seeing how much 2-wheeled traffic goes back and forth through town. Its kinda surprising. It is increasing as the weather warms up. And I'm seeing more and more 250cc enduro bikes on the road. Near the high school, near the college, going across town. More and more of them. They're ugly, but they go anywhere and they handle the bumps. I also see tons of scooters. Not all of them are Vespas or Hondas either. I'm seeing some of the better Yamahas too. New ones. They cost a lot, but they have available parts and its not warranty-destroying to change the belt and oil. I think this community is moving in the right direction there. I'd like to see the State do better.

Poly Acrylic Nitrile Nano Fibers

This is pretty interesting.

This is a thinner version of fiber than carbon fiber, with a different composition and more amorphous than crystalline which due to how it's extracted is tougher and stronger than carbon fiber. Being less brittle it lasts longer, meaning you can also use less of it to do the same job, meaning lighter and stronger body panels or weight bearing parts in cars and airplanes and body armor (big whoop. Stop starting wars and you won't need body armor). This would also make for lighter frames in motorcycles and scooters and bicycles. Strong enough to last and tough enough not to shatter when you hit a bump hard.

The problem I see with this is amorphous chemicals contain energy and will eventually lose that, gaining crystal structure. See that in really old glass, particularly volcanic glass, which will then cost it strength and toughness. This means in time, things made of of this will suddenly break, and with carbon fiber type substances: at the worst possible time, under max load, when the operator really NEEDS it to work. That's a reason to stick to steel bikes, btw. The steel is self healing, at the crystal level. They spontaneously reform their crystals after being stressed most of the time. This is why steel springs last a very long time, if not unduly stressed.

This material was invented in 2005, and its being used in DNA/medical research, materials like structural car panels and armor, and in lithium batteries as an insulator. Considering we're short on lithium that only really benefits rich people, cellphones and laptops. I'm still holding out for Thermite batteries. I think that's the way forward. Everybody could have one. But that's a materials problem for another day. This material will make ultralight cars. If it can be made cheap enough and in mass quantities, we could have the dream of the 900 pound 50 HP ultralight car, one that keeps the rain off and allows you to commute on a gallon of fuel per week. We can name it the AlGore, in dishonor of that buffoon important contributor to confusion over awareness of global warming. Sigh. If only he'd explained that warming started 19,500 years ago and was continuing today instead of insisting it was recent and caused by man. The science says otherwise. If he'd stopped playing to Haters and did science? He might have won over the community instead of doing what libs do best: DIVIDE everyone. This is why Green policies always lose the vote. They're always splitting and fighting among themselves instead of looking at the big picture: preserve and protect nature for the future. The Boy Scout in me cringes every time AlGore opens his mouth. A car named for him should be a gross polluter that's underpowered and gutless and falls apart at the worst time, is unreliable, and full of hot air. Like him.

Technology

The tinfoil hat types love the idea of Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons. They love the idea that an EMP could fry every computer in the world, all at once, and force us to give up knowledge, returning to a 1950's dark age existence. Mostly, they like this because they have that letter switching brain disease, the one whose name I can never remember. They can't use a computer so they hate everyone who can. I dislike those people.

I don't dislike the idea of basic skills. I'm all in favor of those. I'm baffled by adults who can't cook their own dinner, or can't drive a manual transmission, yet have the time to constantly Tweet and update their Facebook page. WTF is wrong with you? Use your time a little more wisely.

If say, the Chinese launched an EMP over the USA and fried our computers? It would piss us off, but we'd be back up in hours in many places, weeks in the worst hit. Why? CDROMs are immune to EMP. So are DVDs. They're OPTICAL data, not magnetic. So EMP doesn't affect them. Also, with the Cloud, data is mirrored all over the world so my emails and blog posts are in Sweden and elsewhere simultaneously. Fry the local server, when the ISP comes back up and I type in my username and password, kept in hard copy, it logs in and there it is. Just a minor hiccup. So an EMP is only hours of frustration for common people, possibly requiring replacement of a PC which would mean days rather than hours, and the military would just launch the nukes and burn the appropriate city to ashes in minutes anyway. So EMP is a bad move. Ergo, its unlikely to happen alone, or at all.

The tinfoil hat brigade forgets that technology has been organized into useful libraries on how to build it or improve it. The Way Things Work was the hardcopy book version. How Things Work .com is the same deal, only online. CNC, someday better programmed but functional now, would let us build any replacement part for any factory or machine we needed, including vehicles and military weapons, to just keep going and going. If China goes stupid and attacks us or its neighbors, Shanghai will be hit, instantly, and that's that for mass production. The rest of the world will take what it learned from Chinese manufacturing, remember that we don't have slaves here, and train kids in CNC so we can continue on without China at a slightly higher price. Too bad.

The Tinfoil Hat Brigade buy cars without fuel injection because EFI is computers and they can fry in an EMP attack. Maybe that's fine, but EFI passes smog emissions and carburetors mostly don't. This comes up a lot with motorcycles and scooters, which are mostly still carbureted. I'm curious about learning how to adjust one properly. Fuel mixture and RPM adjustments and how to adjust the choke. I don't know those things. They might be interesting. My first car was a VW bug, which was a carbureted 4 cylinder. Fiddled with that a lot, trying to make it perform. The BMW that came after it was EFI, but it had compression problems from a dirty head, needed to be torn apart and cleaned. Really should have done that. It was my best driving sports car, the only one that really cornered right. Good transmission too. I still miss that car. Sold it to an angry divorcee who drove it like a bat out of hell. She probably destroyed the engine. Some people don't like machines very much, they express rage through them. My brother used to Floor his accellerator and kept burning up the rings in his cars, requiring an engine rebuild. This is weird because he was good to his reel to reel tape recorder but couldn't do the same care and maintenance to his car. We are not the same kind of people, he and I. I'm in less of a rush, and I look 8 years younger but I'm actually 2 years older. Not having 4 kids is part of that.

Last weekend, I explained to my Dad, who is 72, how a thumb drive works. A solid state key-chain hard drive that plugs into a USB port and will hold entire Gigabytes of data, like his favorite digital pictures, his financial backups, documents, whatever. My brother had asked for pictures of mom. So now he'll get them, far easier than a CDROM, by thumb drive. Cost? $8 at Staples. I showed him how to plug it into the USB port, and how to select all pictures, and how to copy and paste them onto the drive, just like that. He was shocked at how easy it was. Wants help repeating it, but asked about updating files or adding new ones. Being live-in tech support was one of the things I've done since last October when my money ran out and I had to move home. The sewing machines are coming out this week. Along with the thread. Soon this will be my room, properly. Maybe even get a TV so I can play my Xbox or watch a movie. Nah. This monitor is great. I just need a TV-IN card so I can use it on this. Or ignore the Xbox and just buy a few PC games.

It is a windy day today, not listed in the news at all. There were coyotes yelping last night, just a few. All mom's flowers are blooming. Even the Azaleas are out. And the Rhododendrons. The situation is baffling, but we deal. Makes me want to bicycle more, or hop a quiet motorcycle and just muddle around on the back roads. This is a good place to live. Mom was happy here. Dad has friends. I guess we'll be okay. Nothing is ever ideal.

On Writing Science Fiction

I write fiction sometimes. Not often anymore. I'm way too wrapped up in my oil blog and trying to dodge the heavy blows of our failing society to tell stories in metaphor. Most of my writing was 10-20 years ago. When I was young enough to show the cruelties indirectly. I'm not a big fan of human nature. I've seen too much ugliness from people to think much of kindness. I've seen too many suicides and murders and Federally protected racism. A scifi writer should always show the long term consequences of what people think are minor issues today. Like Socialism in the Larry Niven novels "The State" series.

Back during the Cold War, the fringe scifi writers thought the commies would win because many of them were socialists and were continually told that feeling is the same as doing, meaning the idealists did very little to make it work, the Russians spent all their time drunk, and which is why the commies lost the war eventually. That and they couldn't get hard currency to buy stealth weapons to fight the West on even footing. We outspent them and they lost. Russia remains a third world country run by villains. So much for scifi predictions. But you have to write them, just the same. It's what scifi readers want. If you don't give them what they want, they won't buy it. And that's the point of writing scifi: get paid.

I mostly wrote my ideas from dreams, many of them nightmares, and used my experiences of human cruelty and viciousness to give believable edge to them. I also study most of my waking hours and stay current on international news, since those lead to eventual wars. Business men use our troops to kill officials who won't take the offered bribes to exploit their citizens into slavery or poisoned water or famine. Our troops are called heroes, and are told various things, but its really about who got in the way of the evil man in the business suit. Business men rarely have morals or ethics. They see the low hanging fruit, the profit, and murder and genocide are both just fine, just tools to get the profit. Its terrible. Its part of the reason I'm happy working in a Fair Trade company. No slavery or exploitation allowed. I have too many moral scruples to operate in a traditional corporation today. Yes it still works by profit motive. If they don't grow and harvest product, they don't get paid.

Many of my dreams have really odd settings which require a lot of explaining, and you want to do that cleverly, "show" not "tell". The extreme end of genetic engineering is humans who use few resources and successfully out-breed their competition, other humans, often killing them like rats if they prefer quantity over quality. This is how most of the world views child soldiers, btw. They're quantity. They can, with great effort, become human beings again, but mostly we just shoot them on sight. They have great reflexes so we mustn't give them the chance to shoot ours first. Or worse, offer them visas through the State Department so they can blow up our marathons or fly planes into our buildings. That's what child soldiers do. Terrorism is their forte.

A good scifi writer can predict these insane and largely unthinkable events and write about that. Readers want shock and awe. In my original version of my novel The Fall, North Koreans put a nuke in a shipping container and when it was opened in Alameda, it nuked San Francisco, ignited the Richmond Refineries into firestorm, and then the fallout poisoned the Delta. Those are some of the richest farmlands on Earth, and it starved a billion people to death in China and Japan thanks to our rice fields getting poisoned. Thus freeing North Korea to invade the South, the entire point of the war. We were just a distraction.

I also had Arab terrorists with a nuke in their fishing trawler cross into Galveston Bay and set off the nuke, burning the refineries there, causing panic and collapse of the rest of the USA due to lack of gasoline. Just In Time inventory is major weakness. A Rand (cold war think tank) study covered that potential sneak attack and its consequences. I met one of the study's authors in college. Really smart guy, was marrying one of the nice girls in my class. I just repeated it for my novel. Of course, everyone said the Arabs would NEVER attack America. Then we got their bombing of the World Trade Center, but the building didn't fall down. Lots of smoke inhalation. Mohammed Salameh needs to be tortured every single day because he gave the 9/11 hijackers the idea. Its not okay for him to have peaceful incarceration. Allah must hear his pleas for mercy. After 9/11 submarines and Coast Guard now scan ships and boats for gamma rays, which you can't shield very well, indicating if a nuke is on board, 60 miles out to sea. This is a REAL THING they actually do. It would stop the thing I predicted in my novel.

I had dreams of an empty India, with tigers and leopards running around and human bones everywhere. In that scenario, a plague had been targeted at Indian people, at their specific genome pattern and accidentally killed them all. It all began with a Pakistani genetic engineer whose girlfriend was murdered by her family for shaming herself because she was Hindu and he was Muslim. This is an event that actually happened, btw. I just made him competent at revenge. So he engineers a super-targeted Smallpox, something Indian people aren't immunized against and goes after them specifically, ignoring everyone not Indian. In months, all were dead and after the fallout from retaliatory nukes faded and the cleanup begun, people from around the rest of the world ventured in a few years later, exploring the ruins. Turns out the plague killed the Tibetans too and the Nepalese because they're also sharing enough genes it got them as well. Bones everywhere, marked by GPS for later collection and burial/cremation/recycling into fertilizer. We can't waste all that phosphorus.  Explorers carry GPS smartphones and guns because the Leopards and tigers both have a taste for people and will eat you given a chance.

I want to write this novel because it would make a fantastic warning against the dangers of unregulated genetic code experimentation, something which SHOULD be regulated and treated as the weapon it could be. These same jackasses fuss about aimable weapons like firearms, ignoring the plague potential of genetic weapons anybody can buy, unrestricted, and for not that much money. My former employer would probably have offered a volume discount to an engineer buying smallpox virus parts. They wouldn't care how it could be used. They sell to a rather well known example of bio-plague experimentation without regulation by the FDA, threatening many local crops and all sorts of people, after all. Regulation is needed in that industry. Synthetic DNA is much more dangerous than guns. And can save just as many lives as they take. We need moral people doing the work though. Evil should have no access to this stuff. It's too dangerous.

A pity that the anti-gunner senators are too busy taking bribes from the Pharma-coms to actually think about the potential harm or long term horrors this technology has. Which is why scifi authors have to do it and scare people into forcing senators to deal with this real weapon of mass destruction or be replaced.

Scifi, after all, is a kind of journalism. It changes the world by showing you what CAN be. Smart phones are the direct reflection of Star Trek Tricorders. Hilarious, but true. I've like to see serious no-shit you are under arrest regulators investigating these biotechs and who they're selling to. Billions of lives are at risk. Bioterrorists really don't need to know that much to assemble a weapon that spreads to everyone. Dump it into the air at an airport and however long after that a million people are infecting another 100 people each. Do the math. That's really frightening. Warning people with a nasty and graphic outcome, that's what I can do.

The Volvo Of Scooters

Buddy International is an importer of scooters from Taiwan, scooters copied from the greats. The Buddy Stella is a clone of the classic model we saw in Roman Holiday. Its not cheap. But its durable, 4 speed manual transmission (bicycle twist shifter!), and it gets 140 mpg (if you're gentle) with its 149cc engine and 10 inch wheels.

It's the wheel size that ruins it for me, however. Most reviewers agree that the engines from Buddy are really strong for their size/displacement and run very well. Of course, thanks to the warranty you aren't allowed to work on them. Not even to change the oil. No valve adjustment, no air filter changes. Its all warranty work and good luck finding one of those. Most of these Chinese companies pay the actual mechanic less than minimum wage, so the mechanics find other things to do than work on your bike unless you're willing to kick down the difference between what the warranty pays and what he's supposed to get hourly, and at that point most owners say to hell with it and do their own work, violating the warranty. Since you're paying for warranty to around $2300 of the price of this above bike, that's not a small sum to ignore. This is a $3600+dealer fees bike. With 10 inch wheels.

Pot holes are 3 inches deep in California, average. Most scooters have a two inch vertical suspension. That means the wheel axle is rebounding less than 2 inches from the pavement surface, meaning the front tire gives at least half an inch, putting the wheel axle 1.5 inches from the pavement surface and max load, except of course the suspension is under compression by the RIDER, another inch along with the tire so that 3 inch deep pothole? The vectors are not favorable to keeping the bike upright. The pothole might kill you. For looks the Vespa clones are great. They just don't work on real mountain roads like these. They are an excess of risk. And its a shame because they're cute.

This is another Buddy scooter. Again, 10 inch wheels, two inch suspension, very rough riding around here. Cute! but unsafe. Its a real shame. I'd love to have one of these, but I love not being in the hospital a lot more, and I'd like to be able to devote a trace of my attention to the scenery rather than dodging every pot hole, pavement seam, ripple, root, or tar snake.

There's this Aprilia, which is lovely, but costs a lot, again, being Italian. Its mostly markup. The advantage is it has the traditional CVT. The problem is it has CVT and I live in the MOUNTAINS. There's no engine braking with a CVT. They just go faster and faster down the hill. So good brakes are a MUST. But it's got much larger 16 inch wheels, which are proper motorcycle size. It can survive a pothole, probably, and bumpy pavement. Its suspension is a whole 3 inches of throw, which is a lot for a scooter but really minimal for any motorcycle worth its salt. A standard motorcycle has 5 inches of wheel travel so they go over bumps pretty smoothly.

I'd have one of these in an ideal world where I sell a book and it gets optioned and actually MADE into a movie while still relevant, by a reputable company with a budget? Yeah. Proper vintage bike, lots of handmade details, big knobby tires, a serious front disc brake, and a lovely amount of chrome. Its both shiny and minimal. No nasty pipewrap. I don't actually like Rat Bikes, you see. I've got this whole Gentrification thing in me. I like conservative styles. Even my Aloha shirts are actually an old style.

Since I'm not in need of that level of statement, I'll probably just get the MadAss. It is the cheapest and safest option and light and small enough the neighbors at the hair salon won't mind and the electric start won't wake my neighbors up when I start it up for work. Dad thinks I can get this into the garage, if I buy one. I'm doubtful, but I'm willing to try. The red car could be parked a foot forward, or even two, if we remove some of the stuff there. That would be enough room.

Its supposed to be 78'F tomorrow and the next day. I might bicycle to work, depending on how I feel.

Scooter vs Motorcycle revisited

There's a modest financial improvement in my life which will allow me to get a motorcycle or scooter after all.  Once things settle down with the funeral and associated legalities, including my divorce, and I've gotten a new windshield, a set of new tires on the car, verified the shocks are okay, and check the brakes to insure they still have proper thickness on the pads, after all that sensible stuff with my daily driver car.

Only then can I sign up for motorcycle safety class, pick out a helmet, jacket and gloves which ALL FIT, and proceed with learning how to ride. That Guy(tm) tells me that the new Ninja 300 trounced the Honda CBR 250 in sport bikes. Having two more cylinders at higher compression and another 50 cc's of displacement might have something to do with it.

This is, however a weekend race ride, not a "commuting to work and back on a warm spring/summer day" ride. I'm looking for the latter, for those times when I don't want to pedal but still ambitious enough for two wheels. I still plan to bike to work at least once a week. It's really good for me and gives me days of lower blood sugars, which is healthy. I have to turn down my insulin pump for about 3 days after bicycling.

I love the LOOK of the Vespas, but I can't help expecting the price to crash because they're the same Tupperware(tm) plastics as the cheap scooters, so you're paying that extra $3500 for what exactly? Service plans? What if you like doing maintenance and grease in your pores makes you happy? This is why I enjoy my bicycle. Vespa's markup makes Hondas look reasonably priced, and they're about $1000 more than they're worth, too. Considering the prices and the quality of the roads, I'm really inclined to think hard about the Suzuki TU250X, assuming I'm the right size for it AND its actually available for sale unlike what the website claims at the same time they're saying they've got them in their show room. WTF is that?

I still need to visit the used motorcycle place and consider used scooters, assuming the engine is cold and I can start it so I know it works. When I get frustrated with these and the worries of spare parts, I look back at the MadAss 125 and think that's the best deal. Big wheels, full suspension, disc brakes, and still very light and able to carry a bag of groceries and climb the local hills. It's a Monkey Bike, but it does the job of a commuter and they'll ship to my door with a crate for $2500. That's a lot less "oh, we have a $700 delivery and dealer prep fee on top of that $4500 for the Vespa itself" which makes my jaw clench in anger. I really think White People should snap more often so we return to be properly feared. Maybe that's over the top, but we've been really easy going for a bit too long.

I'll look at this more intently once work and the funeral stuff is more settled.