Weather Shift

Its been hot, but it got cloudy and turned the sky a sort of orange shade all day yesterday, thick enough to make the shadows vanish. The wind came up and got stronger over night. Its dawn now, cool breezes gust this way and that, rustling the trees, there are clouds, and the there's potential for thunderstorms and rain today. Maybe. More likely, we'll just have the higher humidity, more clouds passing by, the usual thunderheads building higher up over Donner Pass and Reno, and then nothing local. Still, its nice to wake up to air like this. I'm very fond of it. Air that shifts direction every few moments is my favorite. Its not boring. I like walking in this weather, and bicycling too, though walking is best because you can just stop and feel the air shifts stirring the hairs on your arms, head, and legs.

I watched a show from Japan with That Guy(tm) about a student teacher who tried to force her ideals on students, to be the best they could be. And the show went on to say how the students didn't want to be the best, because it wasn't want they wanted, and how they rejected her and her enthusiasm, pushed her away for being really annoying, and how that rejection broke her heart and made her susceptible to despair. I wonder if I've been doing that. It is certainly possible.

I merely ask, why tell me your problems if you don't want a solution? I have the wrong gender for pure sympathy. Looking betrayed because there really is a way to end the problem you're facing is really the wrong response. Perhaps I respond this way because the essence of Libertarianism is "respect people's choices, even the ones that kill them". Most people who make bad choices want OTHERS to pay for them, and they keep making those choices till it DOES kill them. Possibly while killing the people who cared about them too. Libertarians segregate ourselves from paying for others decisions. We just watch them die, nod our heads, and go about our business when it's over. It's a sort of Schaedenfraude without being quite so vocal about it. We know that we can't and shouldn't save everybody, because saving them rejects their choices, their right to choose, and we're all dying in the end anyway. There's a degree of Greek valor in Libertarianism, in believing that we should make our lives and deaths count for something in the eyes of the gods, watching us from Mount Olympus. They're as good as any. And better than some Middle Eastern hack famous for promoting human slavery, genocide, and three thousand year old blood feuds. Read the book of Daniel sometime. Libertarianism is all about respecting human lives and human deaths, respecting rights properly, even the right to be wrong till it kills you. The big upside to that is big acts of mass stupidity that kill lots of people, like sitting under an oncoming hurricane or erupting volcano? We kind of cheer their ends. I'm a fan of Darwinism, after all. Stupid is as stupid does. I went to school for years to get proper respect for natural disasters, and to do the necessary preparations to avoid the worst of it, and know my risks. I have little respect for ignorant people, but being ignorant is a choice and if ignorance kills someone, well... okay.

Beth Gibbons when she was young is actually a very plain woman. I guess the hard decade of the 90's gave her those sharp edges, the sultry smirk, and grounded her firmly in the misery of real life so she could properly sing about it in Portishead. The above video is not some charming piece about fatherhood. Its about domestic violence. It was Massive Attack's breakout hit in the 80's, the one that made them famous and paid for Mezzanine.

I was a listener of Live 105 in San Francisco when they first formed from the split with KMEL, across the hall and managed by the same company. They were different formats. KMEL was rap and hip hop for black people in Oakland and Hayward. KITS (Live 105) was New Wave and later Alternative for the white kids and asians in the rest of the Bay Area. Massive Attack was one of those semi-crossover bands which could play on either, depending on song. Tricky got lots of airplay on KMEL. Beth Gibbons on KITS. When she formed Portishead after Massive Attack drifted apart, she focused on Jazz style lyrics, downtempo, and gave us that blue album in 1993. We had Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers on one hand, Portishead on the other. Depending on which mountain I was driving behind determined if I could hear Live 105 or not. I was glad when CDs got cheaper, and CD players that didn't skip got into cars so I could listen to good music while I drove around the County. I enjoyed exploring the roads, seeing the views that tourists come for, meandering through country lanes past vineyards and over hills and along dry creeks which would briefly carry huge floods of water when the rains surged. Home was beautiful, just a really bad place to be if you had to work for a living. Or maybe the people there made it bad. Many were not very nice.

I don't regret my limiting interactions with other people after high school. That was a good call. Knowing what I know now, hell is other people. Still sadly true. As positive as I am towards motorcycles and scooters here? I wouldn't down there. The roads are too bumpy, and I've seen way too many deaths, most of them on modified cafe racers. Even with four wheel all independent suspension, the roads are bumpy enough you can feel the wheels lose contact around corners, and minding your speed into corners takes all your concentration. Its a literal life and death event, driving there. Lowering speed limits just increased the traffic, not reduced the death rate.

This breeze is making me nostalgic. It was like this there fairly often, especially in the Fall. I loved the frost covered mornings, the banks of fog. The temporary heat of the day. The smell of fermenting grapes and the blankness of CO2 gushing out of wide open winery doors every October. I miss the sharp smell of wood smoke, and the hiss of grills sizzling, the smell of baking bread after the first rains start the yellow grasses rotting. I wonder if the people who live there see it as anything but a mere nuisance? Somehow, I doubt they really get it. My Dad thinks I should look for a job back there, move back to Santa Rosa. Be able to enjoy the place again. He might be right. At least I'd have my preferred weather, and the twisting murderous roads.

Yes, I'd run into people I knew, not all of them people I liked or wanted to see again. Not all of them were decent human beings. Many were pure monsters. But we were imprisoned in High School together, and high school is mandatory, involuntary, and you can't quit till you graduate or flunk out. That hurts people. And we were all wounded when we escaped with our diplomas. The years following, college and then trying to find a career, it was HARD, learning just how vicious people are. All that desperation, all those shortcuts and suicides and people doing the wrong thing for a tiny tiny advantage short term. But I see that everywhere now, not just in my home.

I thought having more balanced politics would improve things, create more jobs, but it wasn't true, certainly not 15 years ago when I moved up here. Having resources creates more jobs. Having reason to employ people creates more jobs. Having easy transportation creates jobs. And automation destroys them, the jobs and the people. The end of mass production for the weapons and aerospace industry is why Oakland collapsed in the 1980's. We blame THEM for the collapse of their community, but that's really unfair under the circumstances.

It's ironic that the internet has done a great job of unemploying all the people who did rote jobs, who did customer service and sales. Price shopping is the touch of a button now, and there's no need to be an expert on a gizmo to talk about it when the customer will just read about it on Amazon or Costco or Best Buy and it gets mail order shipped to them in a few days, easy as can be. All those businesses based on direct personal connections to walk in customers? Mostly gone. You talk more with your checkout clerk at the supermarket than you do with the machine selling you your home theater so you don't have to go to the movies and get sticky feet and smell the masses of humanity, listen to their crunching smacking mouths as they eat. Maybe people like that, but I don't care. We're a failing civilization.

I have said it before: the future of America is agriculture and tourism. And their support activities. The Present is medical care for the dying Baby Boomers and their favorite retirement luxuries while they still have the money to pay for them. But those are jobs in a shrinking market because The Money Always Runs Out. Once the Boomers are dead, the number of medical jobs will decline as the population drops, and pay will decline as the Boomers get poorer paying for end of life services. Don't count on an inheritance. When they're gone, everything changes. It's mostly a matter of how much they guilt the rest of us into paying for their end, and how much that destroys the remainder of our future. In the Big Picture, I must simply wait for their end. Eventually their greedy and bad living will end their stranglehold on political power, and new generations can step up and do something progressive and useful. Start fixing things instead of stealing all the money, all the time.

If ultra-capacitor batteries (think a battery and capacitor combined for benefits of both) ever get scaled up and implemented, I can easily see a future where PG&E (electric utility) will offer gas-station type plugs via automated coin-op to quick-charge your electric car or motorcycle or van or truck outside a transformer station, and that gas stations will have big transformers out back to do this too. Have your choice of fuel type, pay, fill/charge, complete and go. If we're lucky.

I still see a strong chance we'll have a "bump" that changes us, a period of a few weeks where the oil supply stops, prices panic, hoarding grabs it all from the stations and nobody is moving. So our economy just STOPS till we fix the fuel crisis, by admitting we are too dependent on transportation. I suspect we'll just be too surprised it actually stopped to do much more than stare. Rioting is too much like work, and Americans don't have a strong work ethic anymore. It's not like people would bicycle to the site of a riot. And they can't drive, otherwise there's no reason to riot. If they can't stagger out drunk and angry and break something before they get tired, it just doesn't happen. This is a very good reason to live away from angry minorities, and why White Flight is still going on. Distance is excellent defense.

I need more knowledge of electrical assemblies. There are interesting jobs using them. It would benefit me to know the terms, the devices and what they do, so I can work with them. To be able to use a volt meter, and know the right way to solder things. And test components prior to using them in an assembly. There are too many cool things one can do with electronics. Stuff people eventually pay for. I should learn it just to install solar panels, at the very least, and setup a backup battery system for my refrigerator, if the power gets twitchy. Losing a whole fridge worth of food in a power blackout is often several hundred bucks today. We used to have a big deep freezer in our garage. A garage that passed 125'F in the summertime. Trying to maintain a deep freeze with that ambient temperature? It kills a compressor, then it stops being frozen. Imagine being on vacation during that, and coming home to a biohazard of rotted food.

Enology also interests me, and viticulture, using IT to run sensors in a field, wirelessly, to control watering of the grape vines to perfection. It would be a fun job, I suspect. Managing chemistry of fermentation would also be interesting. I wonder if there's some intro level books? I'm not excited about going back to college for a degree in a field that's mostly just USING the knowledge, not paying more just because you have a piece of paper.

Meh. I have chores to do while the temperature is still nice enough to be pleasant. Have a good morning.