A Natural Progression

I want you to imagine something happens to the oil supply and suddenly there's no gasoline. You still want to get to work so you don't get fired, even though your boss is just as screwed as you are.

What are your options?

1. Bicycle. 
2. Electric bicycle
3. Moped
4. Scooter/Underbone
5. Motorcycle
6. Hybrid electric car
7. Electric car
8. Ultralight car
9. Carpool (ugh!)
10. Mass Transit (yeah RIGHT!)

Mass Transit is mostly a showing the flag kind of thing. They don't have enough buses or trains in most towns to come more than every 45-90 minutes, and they don't have enough seats for everyone if cars ceased to be available.

Carpooling has some issues. Someone is always late and lazy and delaying the car can get everyone fired.

Electric cars and ultralight cars are either expensive or currently illegal and hybrids still use gasoline, albeit less gasoline.

A bicycle has around 20 miles of realistic range for you to get to work, have the energy to do the job, and have the energy to pedal it home. If you live more than 20 miles? Or you have hills? Forget it.

An electric bicycle will let you get those 20 miles a little less tired, and you can usually recharge it at work. They get a substantial tax writeoff for letting you. However, be prepared to pay $500-1000 per year to replace the batteries to run the bicycle. If you discharge half the battery you lose 20% of the battery charge permanently to chemical changes. If it gets HOT, this happens even quicker. This means you only really have about 50% of the stated Amps, which means you have to buy a much bigger capacity and weight battery than you thought you needed. You can avoid this, temporarily, if you use a LiFePO (Lithium Iron Phosphate) battery instead, as it allows many more recharges and avoids the crystallization problem. In cell phones the battery swells, something I'm sure you've personally seen. Phosphate and Carbon nanotubes bridges inside the battery should greatly improve battery life and allow you to use more of it but since this is new technology these are premium batteries and cost three times as much. I've read that the best regen brakes are about 20% efficient and cost about the same as a scooter so aren't really worth the money. So yes, an electric bicycle has value, but its used motorcycle money. A motorcycle which requires no charging or battery replacement.

If you have SOME fuel access, such as a ration card or convert your bike to run on ethanol and stockpile that, a scooter or motorcycle makes more sense than an electric bicycle. They exist now, they need fuel to run, but they are less expensive to maintain and cheap to buy, at least for now anyway. They don't require rare earth elements electric motors or stealable lithium batteries. While scooters are easy for carrying groceries home and have a certain style, their small wheels are bad on bumpy pavement and with no oil to waste, we're going to see our roads fall apart. I'm sorry but they will. I like pavement too. I ride a bicycle after all. Something bicyclists will like about motorcycles is they ride very similarly, only you aren't tired when you go uphill. The instincts to riding a bike transfer nicely into a motorcycle. Leaning into corners, steering, its so simple you are baffled people take classes in this. If the OPOC ever comes out for scooters, get one and you can run Biodiesel, which keeps forever and can be easily stockpiled. I'd totally do that, though I am starting to wonder if the Chinese factory is going to build them small after all. From what I see on their ads, they're aiming at truck engines and boats right now. The 50cc model they originally showed off doesn't seem to get any press. A pity since that has potential for bikes.

I still like the basic efficiency of the MadAss underbone motorcycle. Its NOT perfect, but the price and delivery model I like. $2500 crate to your door. Oh yeah, that's service. Attach handlebars and mirrors and signals, change oil, fill tank, run it down to DMV for registration, tax, and plate, voila! All for half the price of a Vespa that you aren't allowed to do the services on without breaking the warranty you have to pay for. On the MadAss you can swap engines with four bolts, and apparently it takes well to kick starters since the engine is small. And it gets 110 MPG. I do think I'd want the oil cooler and spare brake pads and the stiffer suspension since apparently its sprung really light on the front, as if they were expecting 120 pound riders or something ridiculous like that.

While the MadAss is probably a good bike, its not the cheapest option. A used Enduro is probably under $1000 and probably half that, already has long travel suspension. Its just ugly. Buy some road wheels and appropriate length progressive shocks and it becomes a credible road bike. Without the right fairings it won't be very comfy or stable on the freeway but out there, heavy bikes seem the most stable. Until such time as the governor lowers speed limits, which would be an unpopular move, we're kinda stuck as is.

CB1100 bike of the year 2013 

CB400F, circa 1960 something

Imagine if Honda would ship their old bikes and underbones and scooters to you direct instead of funneling them through overpriced dealerships? You still can visit the dealer for tuneups if you want, but fixed price sales? Hell yes. Delivery by crate is a good thing.

Honda Wave 125. Not Available in USA. 

I recently learned that my own Dad had a Honda 360 when I was a toddler. He gave me rides on it, tied to him with a belt. Scared the hell out of me. There's this twisty road above Marin General Hospital he used to go on... yikes. Scary as hell when your legs are under a foot long. The CB360 is the standard Japanese motorcycle I'd like to get, if I can track one down. It is easier to get Japanese bike parts than Italian scooter parts, though both are made in China. Vespa send the Italian parts to Italy, which is the other side of the world from California. Japan is about 10 days by containership, considerably faster than Italy, various ports, and all those railroads across the country. The Honda CB360 is light and has adequate power to go on the highway. Probably not enough for the freeway, unfortunately, but 55 mph they should be able to do it. Since the state of California are being utter tards to the motorcycle industry, which makes high efficiency vehicles that can reduce total CO and CO2 compared to SUVs... oh well. They'll change when they have to. I still want the bike. I think Dad would be well pleased and fondly nostalgic over it.

I'm sure that someday narrowtrack vehicles which are only 4 feet wide, like the VW 1L, will become more popular. With lower speed limits they'll be safe enough.

Eventually someone will probably invent a better battery for a cheaper electric car.

Eventually motors that let us stop using foreign oil will get into our vehicles, and things will get better.

Eventually.

For now, we should be asking ourselves what sort of gear to wear on our bikes, and if we'll look silly or sexy. Are you sexy enough to ride a bike? Or should you shuffle onto a bus and smell other people's BO? Isn't the stink enough to motivate you to some exercise? And if it isn't, maybe you should ride a bus soon to remind yourself. 

Red Wine Blends

You may know me well enough to have heard this complaint before: "I am always ahead of the curve. I'm so far ahead I'm freefalling off the curve without a parachute. I'm so bleeding edge I'm missing fingers." This is one of those times.

Last year, I posted several times my wine reviews, and the conclusion and red blends offered the best value: strongest flavor and fullest body wine for the dollar. At the time there was basically four wineries doing this that had gotten their products into my supermarket. Now there are around 15. I bought a couple new entries, one of which I've tried before: Rex-Goliath Free Range Red. Its a nice sharp cabernet sauvingnon heavy red with some obvious zinfandel to extend it. I like this one. The flavor is excellent. The trailing edge tastes like Merlot so it probably is... and I'm wrong. Its syrah and zinfandel, according to their website. I've never had a syrah that was any good so obviously they're doing things right. And its a $5/btl wine. Amazing. It tastes like a $10 wine. I can easily recommend this.

While I most prefer Menage A Trois for best quality, a $9/bottle wine in California is pricey. Expect to pay around $20/btl for that elsewhere, btw. $12 bottles here are $30 out of state. And it might be spoiled since wine trucks are rarely insulated against heat and never refrigerated because that costs too much for the trucker to afford the trip. Above 78'F, wine starts to go bad and above 85'F it tastes "burnt" which is the real name for it in the industry. At that point its only good for cooking stuff. If you really like wine then you should live here, where its both good and cheap.

The other bottle I got was Naked Grape Red Blend. I didn't buy the many others, which cost more, but depending on how these taste I could try them later. My go-to sipper of Impressions Red Blend was missing today. Guess they sold out.

Red wine is so CIVILIZED. It's the moral and cultural opposite of the fohtie maht likkuh. Good red wine is a standard of civilization and its presence or absence is an important indicator of quality. Even the murdering Spaniards were drinking good red wine while they were massacring indians and stealing their gold to pay debts in Spain during the age of Conquistadores. In my Spanish class, about 6 years ago, I learned that the bread that's traditional with wine started as a disposable cap to put over the carafe, hilariously an Arabic word, to keep the road dust out of the wine while you drank it at the stagecoach stop. In those days, mass transit was by stagecoach and the roads were covered in silt and clay so turned to clouds of dust in the summertime, same as the roads do here in California if not for pavement. That's ANOTHER upside of motorcycles. The dust goes behind you because they are rear wheel drive.

Anyway, after folks started eating the bread, that stopped being stale and they started adding Ham and Cheese slices to the bread and the bread started being eaten as you drink the wine so wine, cheese, bread, ham, and olives are all associated with sitting down for an afternoon rest, since travel was work and you needed a break from it. Like here, Spain has hot afternoons, and taking a break through the heat of the day is a good idea to protect from heat exhaustion. From that we got tappas and the Basques expanded it into their own style of hors d'oevres, with cheeses and fish and more jamon, though it wasn't called that particular word. So really, the result of all this was good things and you now have things to eat that go with wine. Aren't you glad? And we have the Basques to thank for arty people wearing berets to show their support for ETA, the Basque separatist terrorist group in Spain. Most of the Basques just moved to California and Nevada instead, and can enjoy their culture without Spaniards giving them a hard time. I think its great we can ship them wine, and they ship up their Sheepherder bread and cheeses and we're all happy.

Flipping Houses

During and after the housing boom, there was a common practice, developed in the 1970's I think. If you're a multi-talented general contractor with the skills and knowledge and some money saved, you buy a house on spec(ulation), officially move into it for the legally required 2 years with perhaps a trailer parked in back or alongside, and gut it, renovate the whole thing yourself, and at the end of the legally mandated tax period, sell for a profit then flip that money in a slightly bigger and better house, or one with less of a mortgage and more of your own money, so you keep more of it. Repeat. After three or four of these flips you're owning the whole house at the end and the money you keep is your own. If you reinvest in a house you're living in, its lower taxes or tax free. At least it was at the time. In the old days when houses were cheap, around $20K, this would have been chump change. When cheap houses are $300K? This is a retirement fund. It becomes a viable lifestyle choice, a career. There's a lot of physical effort and financial risk. At this point, rural homes are a huge risk thanks to gasoline/oil supplies being unstable thanks to middle east violence.

Contractors are still doing this, which is why you don't hear them whining much about the end of the housing boom. Yes, throwing up cheaply built McMansions was easy money, but the smart guys started flipping houses with value that would last despite the crash. Some lost money, some are wringing value out of them as rentals, and others went bankrupt on them and started over. Contractors are very determined people, and time is money to them.

Personally, I see the biggest potential for fixed real estate is tiny towns where there are still tiny bungalows to be had and fixed up, perhaps rented out or sold. Yes, you're taking a huge risk on the neighborhood, but with the Bear Market tearing apart retirement funds, small cheap places are the future. The formerly rich will either come around and accept poverty or they'll be found dead from suicide. Alcohol poisoning was the #1 killer of people in my home town, oddly enough. Apparently it is easy to overdose and die from it. I thought you just got a hangover.

I like small bungalows, I just don't know of any jobs in towns that still have them for a reasonable price. The bungalow is a pre-Car house, meaning they didn't come with a garage. Leaving your car on the street in most poor towns is an invitation to have it broken into, or be vandalized. Bungalows often got a carraige house in the back, which usually got converted into a one-car garage with its entrance from a gate on the alleyway, which is sadly an avenue for crime. The alternative, in some places, was a side driveway that passed beside the house to the back. If that gate is opened or climbed by a burglar, this gives them easy access to a breakable window or forceable door and you get robbed. From what I've seen, obvious security is a warning sign you have something to protect, which in modern times means drugs and cash. Subtle security is far more important. In a town like this one with dozens of banners declaring "Hydroponic supplies!" everywhere, you can imagine what people do with it. That's the downside of the mountains. One of them.

Bungalows are a security risk, and they're small, but they aren't organized around cars which means if we never manage to find a better battery than Lithium, we won't need garages in the future because we're all too poor to own electric cars. Its going to be for rich people only, no matter what that electric car guy says. Maybe golf carts, since those use really cheap battery materials, but lithium? That's rare as gold. Or silver, anyway. Not common enough for everybody, so worth stealing. So we won't need garages and most of those houses with the big 2-car garage dominating the front? That's going to get converted. If we're lucky, into a shop. If we're not, perhaps a couple bedrooms or a battery shed for solar power to keep the house liveable when the power grid keeps having brownouts and blackouts every day. That's the future we're heading towards, after all.

Since Bungalows are a classic design and very small, they're easier to heat and cool and should adapt to solar relatively well. They often have excellent natural lighting and allow the breeze to flow through because they're from the time of boilers and radiators, ice boxes, and no A/C. They would be ideal low-power demand homes. You just have to accept that they're small. They aren't built for huge personal space. For a single person like me, needing a bedroom and an office and internet, it would be ideal. I love the brightness and they fit in small spaces, with smaller windows than today so you can plant a garden to cover your view and not lose all your heat through the glass. Most are single pane wood frame windows. Most of those need to be rebuilt and the sash weight re-hung. That's what counterbalances an old window so you can open it. Many of the Bungalows had glass brick walls. Turns out glass brick is vacuum inside so are really excellent insulators, R30 is typical. So you build glass brick walls and you get light and still keep your insulation value. A very handy thing. When I studied architecture it was one of the old ideas that I liked. Same with deliberate reflective or bright walls to light up a glass brick wall and illuminate the space inside. In certain homes they'd build interior light shaft spaces to take advantage of this, sometimes called Light Wells. A clever designer would get three walls worth of reflection off this and put up some artwork or garden in the well too. Just remember to drain it properly if its exposed to the outside. If its got a skylight dome, be sure to wash it off as part of monthly maintenance.

Really, I think I could be happy with under 1000 square feet, provided I had a separate carriage house for a workshop and space to park my motorcycle and car for those rainy days. Put solar panels on the south facing roof surfaces, and hybrid solar water heaters with heat exchangers to preheat the water, you retain good heating in the winter off grid and provide power to a battery bank that runs your appliances, lights, computer, TV, video game console, refrigerator, etc. Retain your civilization. Even if everyone else is gradually following you, because its cheaper and more reliable than the government fail-o-tron. I suspect that once blackouts become common, we're all going to be installing house batteries with a shutoff like a house sized version of the one you plug your computer into. After losing a few freezers worth of good steaks and frozen pizzas, it is going to make sense to spend the money to route your mains into a box. House batteries can be lead-acid, after all, since weight is irrelevant. Or Zinc air since those are even cheaper. The tech exists to make a modest looking house energy efficient. Many homes where I live, which are ranch houses for the most part (big garage taking half the front), have solar panels on the roof. I can't tell by looking at them if they're PV or water heaters. Every little bit helps, provided it is done right. The simplest answer is PV leading to a DC immersion heating coil in the water heater, which the PV powers and saves you money on your hot water heating bill. The next step after that is a bigger water heater, then a hot water sump. Then radiators running from that sump to heat your home in the winter. Of course, most of your power comes in the summer when you can't use the hot water and don't need the heat so battery system is probably for the best, except batteries get loss. There's no perfect in this system.

The most important part of Bungalows is they are modest small efficient homes, not ostentatious. They appeal to me a great deal. And since they're not organized around a garage or driveway, they mean something post oil. Even the above model with a driveway sneaking past it on the left, probably to a carriage house in back, even with its big security hole its still a lovely modest home. It is classic and vintage and retains its value when all the ranch homes remain ugly and decline. Its a shame that Oakland has so many of these homes in poor repair and its violence may end up dooming them. The building style remains, however and new homes can be constructed this way in the future, and older homes renovated into variations of this style. Turn a two car garage into one, and put some windows up on the walled up half. Tear up half the driveway, plant a garden, turn it into something a bit more classy.

Can this tacky McMansion become something... classy?

Trailer Renovation

Houses aren't the only thing you can buy, fix up, and sell for a profit. Websites dedicated to photographing completed vehicles are interesting. Hotrods and motorcycles are both popular for that, as nostalgia is big business.

A Teardrop Trailer, complete with rack for a scooter or motorcycle. 

A friend of mine wanted to build Teardrop trailers, which is a good idea only the plans he had got modified for higher strength. This put some delays into the project and the space for it in our metal shop wasn't guaranteed. The raw materials, like square steel tubing aren't square when you buy them, just the length you paid for. You have to fix that yourself with a heating torch or pay someone to do it for you, which is a career by itself. Even being physically close to the material supply stores isn't enough. Are the wheels in the right place? If you put too much tongue weight on the hitch it will lift the front wheels of the tow vehicles. If you put the wheels too far forward, the hitch will lift the rear wheels of the tow vehicle of pop off the hitch, possibly at speed and go flying into oncoming traffic, which makes you liable of 2nd degree murder and criminal negligence. So you as the manufacturer had better get this right. And document it for court. There's always some critical step and it becomes a steep learning curve. I can see why trailers and RV's are so very expensive.

Teardrop trailers are a step up from a tent, being rigid, and better security and comfort, though you can't stand up in one. Most trailers have sleeping space, a car stereo, a window for ventilation and light, and minimal storage space. A teardrop can be pulled by most cars because they weigh around 1000 pounds. Keep in mind that most sedans can ONLY tow 1000 pounds, though ironically compact cars can often tow 1500, and a Subaru, long reviled as a lousy tow vehicle, can tow 2500. Some SUVs are closer to 3500 pounds of tow capacity so would pull a Teardrop trailer with ease, though something taller and longer would offer more comfort and features. Better trailers with higher ceilings and built with an aluminum frame and thicker insulation are usually the better choice for camping short term. Once you start living full time in a trailer, you need more space and proper washing facilities. You either pay to carry that with you or pay to rent them and stay in places they can be had. Whether this is bath house and laundromat or a KOA campground, that's up to you. None of that is truly cheap.

I've seen folks try and make money restoring cars, but hot rods lose money. Too many dreams invested in those and the parts are often not available anymore and you either pay for it through the nose, hunt junkyards, or upgrade to something fancy and expensive. The buyers are obsessed with the quality of every detail so they are crucial to what makes a car a Hot Rod. This is why hot rods are treated as rolling art objects. There's no profit there.

Contrast this with motorcycles which are bought from farmer sheds and private party sales, sometimes as disassembled parts in boxes or crates for mere hundreds ($400-800 or so). The chrome is polished and parts replaced, the bike reassembled or rebuilt for fairly low material investment and the end result gets photographed and the finished product sells for thousands, which is actual profit. A motorcycle is a shorter term investment and while the end value is lower than an RV, they are also quicker to turn over too. Buyers are far more likely to have the cash to buy them. The danger seems to be collecting them in your garage, a far-too-common trait of avid motorcyclists from what I've see on ADVRider.com.

It looks like RVs would be a good potential for restoration, but the biggest problem there is the market of people you could sell it to. Fuel is expensive, people are poor today, and buyers are few and far between. Any RV sold cheap is going to have big problems, probably expensive ones. You'd probably need to gut the thing and start over with a shell. If that's the case, isn't it cheaper to go custom from the beginning? My friend's efforts with the Teardrop trailer proved you can build a trailer chassis with a mail order axle and MIG welder. The steel isn't impossible to get, just irritating because it doesn't come straight. His trailer was perhaps too heavy for what it was intended to be, and while steel is much easier to work with, aluminum might be a better choice for a trailer because it weighs about half as much for the same strength. It really just needs to be strong enough to hold the coverings on and provide a framework for the cabinets, bed, and kitchen mounting. Good Teardrops have a panel on the back to expose the kitchen area (outside!), and the sink. Downside is if its raining, you're standing out in it trying to cook. Many clever modders build a tent to cover the back end, keeping off the rain and bugs. A second mod would be an outdoor shower inside a curtain. Pity the water goes everywhere, including the soap. Might be frowned upon in many campgrounds. Its real minimalism, but at least its light weight and cheap. If only Top Gear pulled one of those.

Steel is not the only answer to trailer manufacturing. There are many trailers built of Aluminum, beyond the obvious and high quality (and expensive) Airstream. For value holding, Airstream is probably it. The fiberglass ones are certainly functional, but being plastic means they are less than classic. Fiberglass cracks and is damaged by UV light. It isn't nice. Much like the modern Vespas aren't metal and will fall apart like the Tupperware they're apparently made from given sufficient time in the sun, old metal ones are best. I wonder if someone will eventually make nice looking aluminum sheeting to cover a modern Vespa with?

I wish I knew enough structural engineering to build a trailer without massive legal threat. If the structure fails on the road and someone dies, you get sued. Maybe even face criminal negligence charges. Defending yourself is very expensive. At least, that's how I understand it.

Its probably safer from a legal standpoint to LLC yourself, and gut a flatbed since that will be DOT certified. The coed above built this little house onto a trailer that was DOT certified.

Your other option is gut a nice looking shell and rebuild the inside properly. If you don't mind your company going bankrupt every couple years and paying yourself huge wages and dividends towards the next LLC. LLC, Limited Liability Corporation is entirely about legal protection. And all loans are cosigned by a person that the bank goes after. That means you. Anybody wanting to start a business had best do some hard studying of Business and Tort Law. Its really discouraging, but you have to protect yourself. It's so dirty, most Boomers prefer stock investing because your money is safer and the returns are better. Stocks are a lower risk than a business which can be sued at any time.

It is ironic that motorcycle owners rarely sue builders, perhaps because they accept and admit that motorcycles are dangerous and most accidents on a bike are operator error. I have heard of cases where they did. There was a famous one where a biker on a custom chopper hit a small bump on the freeway north of San Jose and the front forks tore off, dropping the bike onto the road to skid in a shower of sparks. The rider survived and sued them out of business. Turns out the design was really stupid since it is really difficult or impossible to make that weld and it looks like they don't check each weld properly.

From what I've seen, a trailer or RV with modern appliances and furnishing is worth far more and while prices are high now because there are still relatively rich Baby Boomers, this won't always be true and the longer you wait, the lower this price will be till break-even is reached and the boomers are dying in rest homes. Probably 15-20 years of that left. Sounds like a lot of time, I know, but think about it. Is our Dollar going to be worth much in 5 or 10 years? Its already inflated. The administration is going out of its way to destroy the USA's reputation, which directly lowers the value of the dollar since it is a Fiat currency. How many trailers or RV's can you restore to lovely condition and then find a buyer with the money, rather than just wasting your time, who can and will pay more than you put into it so you make money on the deal? So basically, if you're going to flip an RV, fix the stuff and flip it fast. Don't take too long because as America gets poorer, buyers will have less money to pay and banks will have less interest in funding a mobile home that can "be stolen".

Poacher's Rifle

Down in South Africa, there's a favored rifle for hunting meat for the cookpot by poor poachers. While it is still relatively common to find African blacksmiths building crude muskets and using and reusing the same bullet over and over again, there's a more stable and reliable platform that's been in use since the late 60's, after release of the NATO 5.56 round for the M-16 rifle.

Take the spent brass casing, clean it and resize the neck slightly larger to 6 mm, add primer and powder and seat a 100 grain bullet. A small bolt action carbine-weight rifle in 6x45 mm is enough to punch through most game if aimed carefully, and won't ruin the meat because it is deliberately too slow to fragment. Its essentially a bigger .22 LR, but can be reloaded. Its also quiet because the powder charge isn't very big, and won't generate much muzzle flash so can be used at night. This is illegal for hunting in the USA, at least game animals. Its mostly used by poachers, but has value in a survival scenario for the same reasons.

It can be loaded hotter with a lighter bullet, like the 85 grain, and becomes a decent coyote and deer rifle, oddly enough. It can also be seated in an AR-15 or a heavy bolt rifle rather than a light carry carbine and gets used in benchrest competition. Benchrest is a rifle that weighs 15 pounds and is placed on heavy sandbags on a concrete bench and is fired into a target at 100 yards with the object being the fewest holes in the paper. Yes, that's right. FEWEST HOLES. The idea is overlap or shoot through the prior hole. I am that good with the proper tools, but I rarely put that much effort into bullet concentricity and weight variance testing, which is necessary. My powder charges would get me dime sized cloverleaf holes though. I did that with a .223, and later my 8mm. My .338 and 7mm are capable of it too, though the 338 is like being kicked by a mule. If it were in a Browning or a rechambered gas action rifle, I'd carry a rifle like that in Bear Country. It is capable of killing a charging grizzly if you can unsling it fast enough. Wilderness people tend to treat grizzlies very carefully, which is the right answer to them. I've had enough close encounters to agree. Black bears are more aggressive however, and I'd prefer to shoot those on sight. They should be afraid of us. When they aren't, they kill people.

For some crazy reason, the survival rifle for downed pilots is the AR-7 .22 LR takedown rifle which fits into its plastic floatation stock. Useful, so long as you only want to kill rabbits or turkeys. I'm really unclear why this wasn't upgraded to a 9x19 mm carbine instead, since pilots already carry a 9 mm pistol with them. This is not the only choice, however. Considering the growing success of the 6.8 SPC, I remain surprised the US military isn't changing out the upper receivers on their rifles for that caliber. It is better in every way for all the varying missions our troops are using rifles.

I know a friend who killed marauding feral pigs with a friend whose property was overrun and being contaminated by them. They used 6.8 SPC rifles for most of it. Note that feral pigs are considered pest animals in all 50 states and territories and may be killed with any weapon any way or time you like. Poison is allowed too. They are NOT game animals and do not receive game animal protections like deer or elk. Killing pigs gets you a thank you from State Game wardens. Not fines. I've read many reports of deer and antelope hunting with 6.8 SPC, and its a legal round for it. A good compromise, and rifle rounds are all about the compromises.

I could easily see the argument for survival rifles being a 6.8 SPC, provided you find your ejected brass and reload it. I'm not a fan of survivalists shooting crappy military surplus ammunition. It speaks to incompetence and ignorance and is rather the opposite of preparedness. Ranchers and farmers load their own because they can't afford to miss and hand loading is the only way to know you will hit what you aim at. Handloads are quality control. Factory ammo is for lawyers. So really, your choices are:

1. .223 aka 5.56x45 mm NATO
2. 6x45mm
3. 6.8 SPC (Special Purpose Cartridge)

Load that into a bolt action, make your shot count, and keep the weight down to 5-6 pounds. The rifle you have with you is worth infinitely more than the one still in the truck because it is too heavy. 

Don't get me wrong. This is an engineering challenge to me. I am not a poacher. I get my meat from the grocery store. I respect the wild game and prefer to photograph it. Poaching and habitat destruction are really sad events that I'd like to see prevented. Wildfires, like the ones around me these days, are destroying habitat and killing wild game more than poachers do. 

I'd like to see the outcome of these wildfires being further funding to CalFire to clear more understory brush. The Rim Fire is a crown fire because Yosemite got behind on their understory brush clearing. You gotta clear every 3-5 years or you get a ladder fuel and crown fires with smoke visible from space, and chokes me awake at 4:00 AM this morning, again. It takes work to save the old trees. 

Real environmentalists are horrified at the Rim Fire and the resulting habitat destruction of all those game animals, the terrible erosion and landslides which will come this winter, and flood and filled-in reservoirs that will cause worse floods downriver in the Delta, all from these bad fires. This is the result. I'll have to watch the other stuff play out. 

I love California, I just wish it was more proactive about caring for itself. Have a little dignity and a lot less self destruction. 

Syrian Nerve Gas

A couple points from the news last night.

1. Throwing bombs at Syria is more likely to kill civilians than military targets. Does the USA want to double the death toll of the nerve gas attacks? That's what throwing missiles around will do. Its insane.
2. A congressmen suggested we call for a peace conference in a neutral country so the various factions of the civil war can talk instead of kill each other. This has been the only positive suggestion. 
3. Talk of firing missiles into Syria has scared the Stock Market even worse. Democrat Baby Boomers that voted for the current president have their retirement funds in US stocks. When the market goes down, they get poorer. The Boomers who opposed Vietnam but whose president expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now wants us in Syria. Irony. 

I look forward to the next presidential election because the current guy has insured we'll always see Jimmy Carter as the more effective President, practically successful in comparison. Until this guy, he was the low point, the worst president in history. Let's hear it for record setting! 

The Rim fire is even bigger, 280 square miles and growing. The smoke is visible this morning, filling the Sacramento Valley with brown murk, whose top is a few hundred feet below me, thank goodness. This meant that the air is largely clear and I was able to go for a good hard walk up the hill to a local park and get in the exercise I need. I will do that again later today. I really need it. 

I can't do a thing about bombing Syria and mass murder of civilians. I can't fix the fear in the Bear Market. The Democrat Baby Boomers voted for this, so this is what they got. 

A little humor about Obamacare tax boondoggle. 

Of course, that turns into this: 

Doing anything to Syria is Lose-Lose. Leave it alone. It's tragic and awful and Syria is protected by Iran and Russia. There's no good outcome by throwing more violence at it. Ask for peace talks. 

Bad News Monday

Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever has been found in four people in Florida. Long feared by the CDC and NIH that it would cross the Florida Strait from Cuba, Dengue has a 60% mortality rate and the many mutations of the illness have cumulative effect; the more times you get it, the more fatal it becomes. It has symptoms similar to Ebola. It is transmitted by mosquitoes and by touch. Assuming these are not the last cases, there will be more and death will follow. There is no treatment, no drugs or medication. The victim either fights it off or they die. It only seems to be in Tropical and Subtropical areas so you can physically flee from it to cooler weather, which makes it better than Malaria or West Nile, found all the way to the Arctic Circle.

Chemical Weapons used in Syria still apparently insufficient reason for USA to do more than send a "sternly worded letter". The Russians, who provided the weapons and are selling new ones hand-over-fist to Assad say that the USA will violate treaties if we do anything about Syria. Why are we listening to them?

Mass murder of protesters by the military coup oppressing Egypt is still getting illegal funding from Democrat-run USA administration. It is AGAINST THE LAW to give money to a coup. Democrats passed that law in the 1960's. Billions of our tax dollars are going to a regime that slaughters everyone standing up for Democracy. And Democratic voters continue to support murder. If a Republican administration was illegally funding this coup, there would be demands for impeachment. The Media pretends that its not important. After all, its just Egyptians. Its not like they have rights. Can you SMELL the racism?

USA still in Afghanistan, still feeding the bombers and their children, still supporting and enabling future terrorism. If we left, they would have no one but themselves to focus their violence on and the problem would solve itself. America is NOT the World Police. Didn't the current president run on a platform of ending those wars?

The Fort Hood Islamic terrorist was found guilty, but media refuses to call him a terrorist, and the US govt refuses to pay terror victim benefits to survivors and the families of the dead because that would admit that terrorism is still happening on US soil and that Islamics are potential terrorists and need to be treated as such for everyone's safety. Since Islam is not a race, bias against them falls under the same kind of thing as bias against Neo Nazis or Gang Members: self-identified potential threats to others. The Islamists might cut off our oil supply in retaliation. But what about the Monterey Shale in California? Do we still NEED to be nice to Islam? I don't think we do. Level the playing field.

The Rim Fire in Yosemite is now 224 square miles and only 7% contained. The little rain we got yesterday didn't seem to help down there. The fire threatens the hydroelectric dam at Hetch Hetchy reservoir, source of the power and water of the city of San Francisco via powerlines and aqueducts across the San Joaquin Valley and over the Coast Range mountains and under the Bay via a pipe through Newark beside the bridge there. San Francisco is a LONG WAY from sustainable. A good reason to discourage people from living there.

The American Fire near Foresthill continues to burn, though it is more contained. I smelled a faint trace of its smoke this morning but it gradually took over and the air is blue outside now. The birds don't like it much either.

Rain

Good thing I washed my car a few days ago, because it rained this morning. Off and on, showers, for about 3 hours. Big drops but no thunder. It knocked the smoke out of the air and it feels like autumn rather than August. Nice.

Formula 1 race in Spa, Belgium was fantastic. No rain during the race despite rain in Qualifying on Saturday. Vettel got in front in the second turn and kind of stayed there for the rest of the race. At the end, he was 15 seconds ahead of the number 2, which is a huge lead in a race where cars reach 195 mph. Got up at 5 for that, required coffee but it was good and Dad and I both enjoy it. Its so civilized, the competition and the engineering and tactics involved. Socialists probably can't stand it. There are people in the race who win and people who don't. And the race determines WHO wins and who doesn't. Socialists would rather nobody win than somebody lose. Idiots. I hope that F1 continues on into the future. Its one of the few sports I follow and bother watching consistently.

Thanks to the rain, the smoke is knocked out of the air and I can breathe properly. My windows are open to allow through the breeze and I feel very happy. Hope everyone enjoys their Sunday.

Wild Fire Update

The Foresthill wildfire south of me, and the Yosemite Rim Fire further away, have combined their smoke to generate stifling white clouds of smoke today. Even the wind blowing is actually making it thicker. My eyes and throat both hurt from being out in for half an hour to buy groceries. Dad and I watched Formula 1 qualifying this morning. He's laid down for a nap. Indycar is going qualifying at Sears Point Raceway near Schelleville, at the Southern tip of the Sonoma Mountains, mountains which I grew up staring at at the North end. The Sonoma mountains, contrary to the claims of hippies, were volcanoes, big ones. A whole line of them. There is still cooling magma below responsible for 97'C water full of borate, so useless for irrigation but good for heating. As I understand it, one computer company was using it for heat prior to closing their plant again, down in Penngrove. I miss my home, though I don't like how they Nerfed(tm) it up. All this safety crap just slows down the inevitable. People who live there already want to die. Lets not pretend. Driving fast from road rage is a good way to die on those roads, and they're 10 times smoother than they were when I grew up driving on them. Weaklings. I miss the sirens and the smirks for the latest victim of hubris. Greek Gods would favor the bravery of driving those roads. It was like battle.

We would sometimes get grass fires out there, but being so close to the Pacific, the air was mostly very clean, and the rain was delicious to taste. Not like here. I'm far enough East the air is contaminated with Diesel fumes, sulphur from the refineries, phosphates from agriculture (fertilizer and pesticides), and soot from burnt stubble after harvest. There's also lots of local wood burning stoves because propane is $200-300 month in the winter and not everybody has natural gas pipes for heating. There's a good reason homes on propane are $30K cheaper. They'll cost way more than that over the course of the mortgage, and that's at current prices, not future ones. Throw in the fact that rural homes have to pay a lot more for fire insurance and must cut down all trees and brush within 150 feet of a home or the fire department won't bother to save your place, because... well you're asking for it. Do the work or don't live there. The Rim Fire in Yosemite is a crown fire which is why its so big and so smoky. It got off the ground into the tree tops and the whole tree burns in that. This winter will have terrible erosion from this, and flooding downstream. Wildfires have many costs. Preventing them has many costs too.

Today would be nice if not for the choking smoke. Today I stay indoors and watch Indycars near my hometown, at a track I used to visit to watch IMSA races, sometimes with Paul Newman behind the wheel. He was one of many. Make the best of it.

RV Parks and Mobility

Along the same line of thought as my pondering of a life out of a trailer or RV, I also wonder about the value and advantages of better quality RV parks instead of the more infamous and bottom dwelling "trailer parks", the kind that get hit by tornadoes and are populated by skanks and hillbillies in wifebeater shirts and flipflops. I'm not really the flipflop and wifebeater type, you see.

When I was a lad, we would sometimes take camping vacations, with a car and a big tent and usually bicycles on the roof. We'd go someplace with good fishing, and we'd cook meals out of doors and swat at mosquitoes while we ate on a picnic bench, often under pine trees somewhere in the Eastern Sierra. Sometimes these were state park run campgrounds, which in the 1980's were really nice btw and often had flush toilets rather than just pits. They also had water taps so they weren't completely dry campgrounds. Sometimes these were fancier KOA campgrounds, which had a tent side and an RV side, since RVers often run generators all night which is damned annoying when you want peace and quiet while you sleep. Remember that because it might be important later.

The KOA campgrounds have something valuable about them. First, they have hot showers, with facilities that are clean and well maintained. They have proper flush toilets so you don't have to use the one in the RV, and they don't stink. They have a club-room with a TV, usually a ping pong table, a coin-op laundry and coin op video games. The one we went to between Blairsden and Portola had all that and a small shop with a few essentials. You pay extra for that, but I really think it was worth it, so long as it is cheaper than a 3 star motel. KOA was 4 star camping, basically. Ze Germans are fond of KOA because it is very orderly.

The big advantages of those facilities is that you don't have to use your own bathroom on your RV when you want to get properly clean. You can stretch out. You can socialize with other people. You can do your laundry, because no RV comes with a laundromat. Its those crucial things which makes living in such a small space bearable, namely treating the RV as a shelter for sleep rather than a jail cell on wheels.

I have written before of the existence of the very tiny ultralight trailers which can be pulled by a station wagon or SUV. The smallest are basically a picnic table and a sink on wheels so you can get out of the weather and eat in peace when you're going somewhere rough with bad weather for the weekend. I don't think those are properly liveable space. You have to be able to get clean. Dirt is fun and all, but its also full of things that can give you fun infections, and contains parasites and other fun stuff. Best to wash off. We aren't dark ages peasants anymore. Having clean clothes, a clean living space, being able to stretch out, these are important. Trying to picture carrying laundry via a motorcycle... yeah. Not so great. You could probably get away with it on a scooter, though, using that footwell space that will hold 3 bags of groceries.

I think that right now, RVs are too expensive to justify this, and rent at the high end RV parks with all these facilities is probably nearly as expensive as a leased apartment. I don't know that this will always be true, however. When the baby boomers start dying off, their superfluous stuff, like RVs will be selling cheap by descendants who don't want to deal with their fuel economy problems or store those huge things when they're in super-high density apartment complexes with open gates and burglars meandering through (Florida?). RVs are for people with time, space, and money to deal with them. A bit too specialized for the people so codependent that they can't leave their families or home towns. We have to be more flexible than that. Even though Peak Oil is happening MUCH SLOWER than we anticipated back in 2005, it IS happening. Ergo the value of bubble cars.

My current interest in personal mobility is due to experiencing the downsides of being a captive labor market. When managers of businesses think they can exploit the local labor, mostly because that labor won't leave a bad place, they end up with both lower pay and sometimes forced to do either illegal or immoral things.

I am glad that you don't actually NEED to own an RV to escape. Renting a Uhaul and minimizing your stuff, packing up and leaving town for somewhere, if not better, at least different, is often the right answer. Ideally, everything I own should be light enough I can pick up each part of it by myself. I currently own furniture which takes two to pickup. I hope to replace that at some point so it isn't necessary to have help when I move. A small victory, but a victory just the same. You just can't count on people.

The Western States are dangerously isolated without the fuel to run away from bastards and brutes. Peak Oil can really hurt us here. If the oil in the Monterey Shale gets into our economy, the West will stay habitable. If it all goes to China, things are going to get a lot worse, and the suicide rate in the West will climb until most of the towns are empty, and the cities implode like Stockton or Oakland have. I have noticed the Smug claims of arrivals in the really remote mountain hideaways claiming that THEY will be spared from destruction because the community likes them, but go back far enough and you'll find an excuse to cut them off and there's good reason the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi were full of human bones. Many of them gnawed upon by human teeth. If you don't grow food, you are dead meat in the worst case scenario. Every mountain town is under threat of this.

I consider this the strongest argument for decade/century scale public works projects to distract the public and its predatory capitalists/socialists so there's always some pressure relief valve, some place to go. The Columbia River canals, and the Grand Canal from the Frasier River through the Rockies into the Great Plains to refill the Ogalalla Aquifer and restart agriculture there, these are worthy projects which will cost billions of man hours in labor and result in major stability in food supply and thus protection from most of the bad 60-year droughts North America has history of experiencing. The Ogalalla has about 40-60 years of water in it. Refill that and you've got enough protection should conditions change. When idiots go on about sea level rise and unstable weather, I point to the actual research into these enduring droughts which have collapsed complex civilizations and require enormous effort to protect against. If I were in politics, this is what I would be pushing:

1. Dredge ports and reservoirs. 
2. Build the Columbia and Frasier River canals. This means making nice with Canada, but America is becoming Socialist like them so this is easier than it sounds. 
3. Fill in the below-sea-level "islands" of the San Joaquin Delta to prevent flooding and water contamination. 
4. Deliberately flood the Kern River Basin farms runined by caliche for wildlife refuges, ending the temporary desert that's formed near Bakersfield and Wasco. 
5. Fund practical desalination for water supply to LA and San Diego, and export that tech to Mexico so Baja can do more agriculture. Make that a major US export for farming and civil use. 
6. Fund State campgrounds and staff them so mobile people have somewhere safe and clean to stay. We did it in the 1970's. We can do that again. Offer tax breaks to private campgrounds which go above and beyond (KOA). 
7. Build more commuter rail and tourist rail options, not just high speed rail. We need BOTH options to survive. Pass the laws allowing safety exceptions for the ancient steam trains. It is currently illegal to start them due to safety requirements, despite them working for decades. 
8. Punish abusive corporations cheating the tax code and harming the population. Make them PAY. 
9. Correct all the things wrong in the state constitution. Currently, every male 14+ is in the state militia, a law from 1850. Every married woman's children are her husbands, even if they aren't and you have DNA tests to prove it. Those must be fixed. 
10. Scale back the requirements for riding scooters so tourists can rent and ride rather than need a full motorcycle license. Allow reciprocity. 
11. Correct for missing alternate routes through passes so slow vehicles can get through off a freeway. Connect frontage roads, and offer signs so routes are marked for bicycle and scooter tourists using them. 
12. Remove fees from state parks which operate fine without them. There are parks which charge a fee to pay the wages of the person collecting the fee, but nothing more. This is stupid. 
13. Admit and accept that California is about Gold Rush history, about Golden Age Hollywood, and play up those looks for the tourists, complete with uniforms appropriate to the era. Living history works to draw tourists. 
14. Rebuild streetcar routes in all towns and cities, and have them run frequently so they are useful. As oil runs out, electric streetcars will become primary transportation. We had them until Standard Oil destroyed them in 1925. Cheap solar provides the power. 
15. Allow lower safety vehicles from EU to be sold here, accepting the high death toll. Gain advantages of high fuel economy vehicles and lighter weight. 

Many of these things will come from state money, from taxes. Many are things which cost little anyway. Some of them are going to employ a fair number of people. If tourists and retirees find more convenience living in more places, the state will get more residents and visitors, bringing more money here and putting the population closer to the food supply. Thanks to all the sunshine, this also means more abundant solar power to run those desalination pumps on the coast, which resolves the water supply issue until the Columbia River canal irrigates Eastern Oregon and Nevada for those real estate booms. The West ends up being the pressure relief valve for the imperfect or ambitious in the East to have somewhere to GO rather than revolt, rather than turn to terrorism to make their demands heard in a place that INSISTS that birth is most important, not ability. The East is all about the Blood. The West is all about Merit. It should stay that way, for national stability. As long as people are having kids, we have a responsibility to offer places for them to go where they aren't trapped and desperate, a place that their talents and ambitions can fuel positive ventures rather than endless wars as we saw in Europe for two thousand years. We can't afford to make those mistakes. We are better served solving the problems with big public works and long term plans with long term payoff. It just makes sense. 

Art Collector

My best friend collects art. Ever since he was a kid, he collected pocket knives. The little ones for trimming the tip of a quill pen or whittling as stick, or trimming a vegetable from the garden for dinner tonight, or gutting a fish you'd caught in a sunny brook in the meadow. These carefully crafted hand tools are objects of art, of a more peaceful and less violent time than today.

My ex-wife loved many kinds of art, collecting Japanese kimono, old cameras including duplex lens and baffle types, now sitting lonely in her storage space because she didn't take them with her when she fled our marriage years ago. She even collected scents, which I came to appreciate in my prior job, though their snobbery was a little childish. My ex was a woman fascinated with history and liked owning pieces of it, documenting them when time allowed, seeing historic places and photographing them. I hope she's still doing that. It made her happy.

I like mechanical things. I'd love to own an old all-metal Vespa that I could restore like a hotrod. While many mock the Hipsters, I appreciate the effort required to return ancient mopeds to working condition and using such stylish and under-powered vehicles for general transportation. My electronics are discreet and functional, extra durable so they'll last. There's style to be had in respecting good engineering. There's so much brutal and bad engineering today, stuff designed to break right after the warranty expires so you'll buy it again. That is the kind of thing which should not be rewarded.

When I view the art photos of restored and converted motorcycles, saved from rusting apart in some barn and turned into elegant rolling art with functional engine and suspension I have high respect when it is done well. I see these kinds of motorcycles the same way fans of old cars love hotrods. This is one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of BikeExif and Deus Cycles. Minimalist street trackers look extremely practical to me. They have the right suspension and tires to go pretty much anywhere, yet have the classy looks to gain a certain respect. They aren't junk or overweight Milwaukee (or is it Tennessee now?) iron. I've been really impressed with the finish on nicely done street trackers. If you're going to spend money on a bike, it may as well be one that's pretty rather than losing half its value when the first wheel leaves the lot where you bought it.

These days quality is all that truly lasts, and your reputation is more important than your address. As a technician and lover of art, what I collect had better be portable. And my life had better be portable too, because staying in a place that's going wrong is a good way to end up very unhappy and go down with the ship. I don't respect people who go down with the ship, especially when there are perfectly good lifeboats and oars to go somewhere else. I see motorcycles and RVs as the lifeboat and oars. A means to escape a bad place, full of bad people and a bad economy. Forgiveness is for masochists.

Leaving a stupid place behind, or treating it with sufficient caution, could be a life and death level choice. These days, with elderly Baby Boomers retiring and even ending up in rest homes there are a lot of old RVs for sale, some of them pretty tired. Its a pity I'm not proficient as a mechanic to restore one of those. A person who knows their big engines and wood working could make a career out of buying and restoring old RVs for sale. The money from selling them should pay for a decent income and lead to a retirement. The best part about an RV business is its mobile. You aren't stuck paying some ridiculous lease or taxes when a town starts going under and punishes the local businesses with unfair taxes in order to give preference to WalMart, which pays none in most cases. Town councils can be dumb, corrupt, or both. Voting with your feet is one of the best ideas I've heard for dealing with modern corrupt government. There's probably good reason many of the Native Americans the European invaders found were living mobile lives. On this continent its just a good idea. In modern times, we do this with backpacks, cars, motorcycles, RVs, trailers, whatever it takes to escape a bad situation. I just recommend keeping your job history and finances clean.

In my sad experience, telling a bad employer "No, I won't break the law for you" is a good way to get fired, and prospective employers tend to weight being fired rather heavily. On the upside, an employer that wants you to break the law for them so you go to jail rather than themselves... that's a job you don't want. So not getting a job after you explain you refused to break the law? That's a good thing. Some sucker may get that job, and that income, but how much will it be worth in jail? This is why protecting yourself from crime is so much harder today. Many potential employers seem to be looking for victims. Don't play along.

One of the more clever and obvious solutions to bad employers is contract work, with a lawyer on retainer to enforce that contract, and include significant financial penalties if the other party violates them. Enough to cover your losses. And never drive into a job without gas money to drive out of it again. You don't get all the facts when you take a contract. Usually, a contractor is called in with some critical and expensive information not disclosed which may make the contract impossible to fulfill and still make a profit. Self employment is the future, but its also very difficult to accomplish if you are naive and trusting. Get a good contract and pay your lawyer to review it before you sign. If you don't you're going to get screwed. That's just how things work in the real world.

The smarter answer is contracts with stages built into them, with payments and signoff of work accomplished at key points. This protects both sides and won't leave you hanging, unpaid, when the project is finished. I have worked with people who would LEAVE the office when they were supposed to collect payment for a week's work, then complain the client didn't pay and essentially stole the work. Why do business with such people, knowing this in advance? What the hell were you thinking? There's a lot of insanity and desperation in the world. It is hard to avoid it, it's so pervasive. Get your ducks lined up, knock them down and always be ready to leave for the next contract if the one you're on gets sketchy and the other side looks like they won't pay or are cheating you. Always do the inspection before you sign, or leave a clause which allows you to walk away if the inspection shows they lied. There's a LOT of that in the real world.

At every one of the temp jobs I've worked, the temp agency mis-represented the working conditions and job duties, then claimed it was the contractor that lied to them. My choice was to work the job anyway, for less money than I deserved based on the requirements, or walk and never work with that temp agency again. I think this is half the reason why temp agencies don't really exist anymore. That and they charge 3 times what they pay the employee, and the contractor expects what they're paying in labor effort, but the temp is getting barely more than minimum wage, and shows their contempt by working exactly that hard. When elderly people complain about this today, I sometimes remind them that minimum wage is a great motivator to under-perform in retaliation. And shopping at price-cutting retailers is why you put up with bad service, so be polite to the employees because they won't be polite if you're rude. Its just common sense, after all.

These days, mobility seems to be the answer. Tying yourself to a community that has no viable business model is just asking to be exploited, to be harmed. Don't be a masochist. Pull up stakes and move on.

Thunderstorms

They've been threatening thunderstorms and dry lightning, the kind that starts forest fires, for days now. Yesterday was grey and overcast, humid, and smoky. The sun never quite came out, but there was no rain here. The big thunderstorm that started in Nevada flowed over the mountains and passed just north of Nevada City, missing us. Normally storms come from the Pacific and flow East, disappating in the high Sierra and usually vanishing over Reno, or turning into Virga (rain that doesn't hit the ground) across Nevada. The storms this summer have rained a fair bit in Nevada and crescendoed their violence into the Eastern Sierra, which is usually dry and beautifully bare away from the rivers full of trout and mosquitoes, all summer long. Its been peculiar. California is in drought, but Nevada is getting more than is usual share of rain. Arizona too. The Monsoon weather coming up out of the Sea of Cortez has been really interesting and is likely a pattern that will stabilize. Take that, "Global Warming". Maybe some of those pleistocene lakes will get some water in them after all. I still think they'll need human help, in the form of the Columbia River Canal through Oregon and down into the Carson Sink and Lake Lahontan, but that's a big project it would be worth suffering immortality to see happen.

This morning, around 6 AM, it rained, big thunderstorm drops, for about 10 minutes. Really lovely, strong smell and all. "Is your sunroof closed?" my Dad asked. "Yes, two days ago." It was the day he'd washed his car. The family car washing-rain curse affects the whole family, not just me. Back when the first warning was issued and the blue sky was covered in Grey, I closed my car sunroof and waited for hail, lightning, and big rain. I would welcome more rain, even though it isn't showing up on radar. It would help put out the big fires burning, and knock the smoke out of the air. Both Dad and I have sore throats from the smoke. Its very irritating and listening to him clear his throat and cough for an hour every morning is worrisome. He's been doing this for years, but even so, its worrisome.

I wish the economy in the foothills was strong, that it was more than lawn mowing services, medical, and a skeleton crew of govt and retail to keep the bare minimum of care available for the retirees. Business is not good here, and its worse everywhere else. You have to go down the mountain into the Flatland to find anything resembling actual business, and there's so many people, so much competition, its hard to find a niche with any safety. As a risk-avoidant person, the whole thing is frustrating.

At least the weather is good. While we get wildfires in summer and fall and heavy smoke, we also get cooler weather than the Valley. It was 104'F in Sacramento yesterday, but barely 95'F here. Big difference for 2600 feet. They're closer to the Bay and the Delta Breeze, but we feel it more. Just heard a big rumble of thunder. For Easterners and Midwesterners, thunder is so common as to be unnoticeable. Here? Once or twice a year. Conditions are usually wrong to get thunderstorms with actual lightning. A bit too dry, and the valley isn't wide enough to build the big clouds before its hitting the Sierras and either dropping the rain high up or crossing over and turning to Virga across Nevada's many mountain ranges. We still get weird storms, and sometimes tornadoes in weird places like Marysville, but its rare. The blizzard early this year was a good example of very weird weather, but that's California. People pay extra for that, and ignore the lousy economy for basic business. I think the weather is just about Agriculture and Tourism, and that's all it allows. A pity. I don't speak Spanish, and that's much of the population in farm country. It would be nice if the folks with the amazing talents in metal working were building businesses and making their ideas into real products, but they don't seem to do that. A pity.

I just heard the first firebomber of the day head past, going to the Swede's fire near Lake Oroville. 2000 acres and growing. If the last bit of lightning, plus the bits I can't hear because they're further away, sparks more fires, the crews are going to be extra busy after this storm. The most hilarious part is the storm, and the lightning, don't show up on the radar. But they're happening. How's that work?

A Glimpse of Fracking the Monterey Formation, California

The Monterey Formation in central California, running from the Bay Area down to Santa Barbara, inland to the start of the Sierras (map below), contains as much oil as Saudi Arabia did, without all the problems of working with Arabs.

It's a domestic site, and requires fracking to get it out since most of the oil is in shale. To frack, you drill a well, inject a million gallons of water for each well, and some chemicals and sand. The effect is limited to around 150 meters from the bore hole, so a honeycomb grid of wells every 300 meters is necessary, though directional drilling probably works best and will run dozens of holes out of one borehole. Maybe. That's a LOT of drilling and a lot of water. We're talking millions of wells for that large area. It's years of work. Significant lakes worth of water. And all of it here in California, safely away from the Muslim terrorists. We can tell them "thank you, no" to further oil sales and work with what we've got in our own borders.

The payoff from fracking is a fantastic reason to get cheap desalination, and a really potent political action committee going after the water needed. Downside? The US Federal Govt won't be letting California gain independence with this still being untapped. The gold they might ignore, but not this. Oil is too valuable. Upside is cheap solar will happen because there's finally an industrial reason to have it. All those water pumps. Same with cheap desalination. It will be necessary to get the water for the fracking, and all the pipelines and pumps, well, when this is over in about a century, there will be a lot of scrap materials for other use available.

With so many oil wells, there's going to be jobs for geologists and drillers and petroleum engineers, but they'll be moving site every year or so for each group of wellheads. I expect trailers are the easiest, that or RVs. Some sections are flat and hot. Some are mountainous near the coast. All will involve many drilling rigs being setup, used, put away, and a massive number of pipes to catch the natural gas and the oil, for use, and probably re-use the water at the next well. The formation is up to 1900 feet thick, which means there could be a LOT of oil to recover there. The current estimate is just under 16 billion barrels of oil. That's not a small number.

So say they figure out the water and get the pipes and spill basins setup and capture the natural gas to funnel off to our underground storage near South Sacramento (no really, that's a real thing). Say that this whole thing works and makes enough money and produces sufficient oil to keep our cars on the road, at a higher price. What is the impact on Peak Oil preparations? We'll have fuel for jobs, those still working domestically anyway. We'll have jobs building the wellhead sites, running them for years for the last drops of oil, and making them pretty while that finishes, and more jobs decommissioning them after it's done.

Who is an enemy of this?

1. The Arabs. They'd attack it just to keep eating. They trade oil for food because they don't grow their own. 
2. The environmentalists, Earth First! and ELF in particular would attack it to create a catastrophic spill and blame the oil industry, despite actually destroying the environment in the process. 
3. The fishermen (anglers) would be against it, since the rivers would drop and hold less fish. 
4. Agriculture would be against it. That's their water supply. 
5. LA would be against it, because it would be using the water they were planning to wash their driveways with. 

BTW, it was a picture like this on the evening news in San Francisco, during the early 1980's drought that forced us (in the North) to put bricks in our toilets which got the Divide California movement some traction. Those of us from the North remember it and remain angry. That is our water washing off their driveway to make it pretty.

Water is a very big deal in California, and the place most of the oil resides is quite short of fresh water. What goes into the ground must be fresh water, too, not salt. Eventually that aqueduct will leak out into someone's well or get into the rivers and the cost of poisoning a river, and all the land downstream, with salt? Trillions in fines and lawsuits is just the start. So, it has to be fresh water. And the wiki isn't clear as to what chemicals are put into water to make it frack better than just water itself.

California is about Agriculture and Tourism, with retirees just being a kind of tourist that stays longer, perhaps think of them as a crop that pays you to care for them. Nice weather in the rest of the state, but crappy down by Bakersfield, complete with heavy pollution. It rains about 1-3 inches a year there. Its a desert, slightly drier than most of the Mohave Desert, actually. If it wasn't for the reservoirs capturing rainfall in the Sierras and carefully feeding it into the irrigation systems by gravity, there'd be nobody living there.

So the biggest challenge of the Monterey Formation Fracking project, and all that oil, is getting the water to extract it. I suspect this will happen the way I've described: cheap desalination and cheap solar to pump it. However, there's another way, just a LOT slower.

• You can empty LA and use all their water for the wells. LA won't like that. 
• Or you can crank up the water pumps near Tracy and run the aqueduct system at maximum, killing all the fish in the delta and draining the SF bay into the system. 
• Or you can use salt water when fresh water isn't available and bribe the govt to overlook the poisoning of aquifers in California with Salt Water. 
• Or you can build the Grand Canal from the Columbia River down through Oregon, Nevada, and finally the Owens River before diverting it through Tehachapi Pass into the San Joaquin Valley and provide the fresh water for the wells. That's the larger water supply, but it will lose a lot on the way. Or it will after the rights revert, year by year, to allow real estate deals along the canals in the Oregon and Nevada High Desert. Not ideal, but it could happen. 

These are not ideal solutions, but they are solutions. Grand civil engineering projects, like extracting a Saudia Arabia of oil from California without causing the greatest man-made publicized ecological catastrophe in history... well, them's is the cards. What do you think? 

America's Cup

So I mostly just follow Formula 1 racing, but I also have a soft spot for America's Cup sailboat racing. They aren't exactly standard transportation, but they're really interesting designs, extreme ways to mess with rules and produce boats that go very fast. The current crop are catamarans with 100 foot high hard wing-sails rather than fabric, and they have hydrofoils to allow the boat to lift out of the water and fly across it, using the hydrofoils and the sails with manual tuning through human powered winches, to zoom 5-10 feet above the water, mostly. Truly amazing. I really respect the engineers who came up with this, and the people who actually built and tested these sailboats, and the crews who eventually learned how to run them for races. I don't like that the course in SF Bay is too damned small. It should be much bigger, going around bridges and into the Sacramento River current near Angel Island, not just back and forth a few laps from the prison to the end of Fort Mason. It would be more interesting with a bigger course.

See how cool that is? This is technically the Louis Vuitton Cup, which is a semi-final race before the America's Cup itself. Its still cool. Some of this technology can be applied to cargo ships, just like Formula 1 race technology eventually because Fuel Injection and Variable Valve Timing (VTEC). Race technology DOES end up in more boring vehicles, if its reliable and a good advantage for commercial purposes. I applaud that application. Good show!

LOL: SacBee Predicts 5 foot sea level rise (up to 2000 years from now)

Articles like this deserve to be mocked. Its so simplistic, utter fear mongering to ignore the 660+ dead in the riots in Egypt, riots paid for by our current President in spite of the law that makes it illegal to do so. The coward who wrote this wouldn't even cite the study by name. What a jackass.

I'm glad I watched a Saturday afternoon scifi-comedy called Iron Sky, which has space Nazis on the dark side of the moon. It was like a Uwe Boll film, only one that didn't run out of money so it got all its special effects and the direction was slightly better. Many of the actors were old hands from actual Uwe Boll films, btw.

Really, this is hilarious. And its so much better than the usual inland sea crap. When I write about an inland sea, I don't call it a sea. I call it a lake. A flooded estuary of brackish water, which is a mix of fresh water and salt, though the amount of salt water will change depending on tide and season, since high floods from the rivers pouring out are likely to drive away most of the salt. I also point out that the levies are there because the fools who grew vegetables on pure-carbon of the drained estuary literally turned the soil into vegetables and air because it wasn't soil to start with. This is why its below sea level. NOT due to magic global warming chemicals. Sigh. Such idiots.

I find those people really frustrating. They bought in to the nonsense and now they preach it and believe it. Its their religion. Kinda like the Nazis in the movie. They believe in peace through superior firepower and annihilation of inferior peoples etc blah blah. And they lose. Bring the next ice age. I will enjoy watching sea levels fall, bays empty, and coastlines rise out of the sea. It will be hilarious.

Got snowshoes?

A Naked Ninja Is Not Sexy

The current trend in motorcycles is plastic shrouding, ostensibly for better stability in the wind at high speed. These are called fairings. On a Ninja 250 or 600, it enables the bike to go 100 mph and not kill the rider, on a straight anyway. A naked bike has a lot of wind buffeting above 55 mph and windshields and fairings stop being girly and start being necessary. When the first 4 cylinder Honda motorcycles got fairings and big windshields, they were immensely popular with highway tourist riders because they were stable and reasonably comfortable, provided the rider was poised, balanced, and didn't mind paying as much for the bike as you would for a decent small convertible. Between the Honda Goldwing and a Mazda Miata, I'd rather have the Miata. That's not to say its the only choice. Between a Geo Metro and a Suzuki Bandit 650, I'd rather have the Bandit. As road bikes go, its nearly perfect. They were, of course, discontinued, but used ones are around and are good for riding up here.

The primary problem with a fairing is that a motorcycle's natural position is on its side, and eventually it will end up there. A plastic fairing isn't strong so it will break with the weight of a bike on it. The fairings are slightly expensive to make, but not nearly as pricey as the resellers make them out to be, the majority of the bike price. Ergo, there are people riding around on Naked Ninjas, which is about as unsexy a bike as you can imagine. Underneath that fairing is ugly functional tubing, wiring harness, zip ties, and no thought to looks at all. They built it cheap and the fairing covers all the ugly. Its still a bike under there, but LORD, the 250 is a mess. A naked bike from the 1960's is better looking because it had to be or it wouldn't sell in the first place. They didn't really have plastic yet. This is also why they're desirable for restoration because they have CLASS and look good when they're done.

As much as I like the Bandit for being nicely sized and a good balance, that trailing arm suspension is just a simple aluminum rectangular box-tube with holes in it for the rear axle. That is NOT a nice looking trailing arm suspension component. It is cheap, it probably works okay. But its nice to see that there are aftermarket guys building proper trailing arms for the Ninja and the Bandit out there. Fixing all the ugly on a Ninja is so big a deal I have never seen one that looked good. That said, people try because you can convert them into Enduros and there are lengthy trips done by folks up through Quebec on dirt roads using a Ninja 250 with knobby tires and panniers (hard saddlebags). Since it has 5 inches of suspension, its just enough to make it work on crappy roads. I see Bandits up here in the Sierras, curving through the side roads and enjoying the lean. With drought being the normal state of things, this is an excellent place to ride a road bike most of the year. That's the upside of drought. Dry roads. For now.

Why so many choices? Well, it's like this. We can't afford to buy new stuff. We're all too broke. Artisans and craftsmen are the future of America, at least for non-farm and non-hospitality jobs, and they'll be less broke if they find a way to use their crafts to get funding through tourism and agriculture. It's tough. It's easy to rant and fingerpoint at who destroyed America, but the sad truth is we did every time we picked the cheaper option when we bought something, because that cheaper option shifted jobs away from Americans and out of the country. We caused Globalism to destroy us by being cheap. And now we suffer the consequences. We can't fix that, but we can fix what we've already got and live through the mistake.

Artisans and craftsmen are already finding old machines, cheap, rusting and missing parts, and restoring them to operation. This is easier with the motorcycles made of metal rather than plastic because repairing metal is pretty easy, but few of us have plastic molds or the skill to "weld" plastic. Bikes than are built to fall over, Enduros, and ride on really bad roads are the easiest to keep working. Standard (upright seating position) bikes with no plastic are the next best and will probably be around in another century. They will be maintained through parts replaced using a library of downloadable CNC part designs and laser sintering on demand at a fabrication shop. It will get cheaper, eventually, and heat treating will make it just as good, or better, than the original. Yes, we'll eventually get around to building new bikes from scratch, and new ultralight cars that are cheap, using download CNC and open-source designs, and to hell with safety testing, but that hasn't happened yet.

Other than the hotrod community, which I follow because its a local thing here with free shows, most car makers are less than enthusiastic about taking risks on new models. Safety standards and high dollar lawsuits against car makers for daring to sell a vehicle which isn't perfectly safe in all conditions... well, you'd be a fool to risk that under standard car-dealership rules. There's too much money involved, and those who got into that business and PAID so much to get there do not like a new cheapskate builder to show up and undercut their business by building light vehicles with good fuel economy.

There was a story published that turned out to be wrong in many details, from the San Francisco Examiner newspaper this week about the 1L from VW. They said it was going to sell for $600. Not a typo just plain wrong. They did print a retraction later. A cheap Chinese scooter that works for about 90 days is $599. No way in Hell is China going to be building cars for that. They didn't even do the basic fact checking to realize it's the 1L, which is going to sell for $45K, but gets 240 mpg on diesel, but only has a top speed of around 45 mph, is 3 feet tall, and is built to crash standards at that speed, not actual freeway traffic. It's a concept car, one that runs on back roads and tracks, to prove it can work. It just isn't practical. The basic car is a carbon fiber bathtub, and the engine is a tiny diesel suitable for a motorcycle or scooter. It gets great gas mileage and is more comfortable in bad weather than a bike, but at 3 feet tall it is likely to get run over in traffic by a texting coed in her Dad's SUV (because it's safe and she's a ditz). And run over is literal. This is a death-trap car. An EXPENSIVE death-trap car. With that low ground clearance I doubt it can even get into or out of a parking lot here in California. We have these fairly steep cuts through our sidewalks and that looks like it would scrape. Who will be buying that? I think this is why they aren't actually in production or for sale in the real world. This is not going to sell very well.

I do see a future in TIG welding cromoly steel tubing into a race frame, attaching mounting points and fitting very minimal parts salvaged from the junkyard into a working experimental vehicle. Like a dune buggy. Covering that with basic weather protection and eventually fiberglass or carbon fiber, if it gets cheap enough, will result in many unique homebuilt vehicles. Most of the weird ones from car shows are basically sculptures with no internal mechanics and often with 1/2 inch of ground clearance. They're meant to make you stare. I'm talking about working experimental vehicles, ones that break down and you learn something from what failed. Realistically, any vehicle with less than 5 inches of ground clearance doesn't have a future. That forces many of the weirder experiments to settle down a bit and a middle ground of efficiency will result. That's what we really need.

Of course, experimental vehicles are not comfortable or crash tested and likely unsafe in interesting ways, but its still cheaper than the 1L and accomplishes the same job: a ride to work with good fuel economy. A clever and skilled artisan will build something that belongs on Top Gear, either in the joke category (Eagle iThrust or Hovervan) or the budget supercar one.

They will take longer than building a bike, of course, or modifying a golf cart to run faster, which is what most people are going to end up with: a golf cart with some plastic sheets to keep off the rain. None of these vehicles are ideal, but they'll get the job done, if the operators are willing to put up with the extra time and discomfort to get there. Four wheels is allegedly safer than two, right? There are conversions of ATVs with fenders and turn signals which makes them street legal, even here in California. Not ideal, but better than pedaling up a steep hill.

I still think an Enduro is the easiest answer. They're ugly, but they'll run forever on any road, no matter how badly maintained that road becomes. So long as we have roads and reasons to use them, there will be a means to do so. I just wish the Socialists weren't so damn cheap about road repair or so insistent about safety. It's our choice to die in fiery auto crashes. Not all of us are content to be useless eaters.