Tiny Houses In the Age of Poverty

Back in the 1950's, Socialists in our government insisted that Soviet Era multistory housing projects were the solution to housing the Poor Black People in places like Chicago. They were awful and created crime and convinced blacks that our govt was out to murder them. The noise of shared walls lead to anger and murders and most people who live there think they should be dynamited because they've damaged 3 generations of people into crime and despair and poverty. Flash forward 60 years.

People who bought homes 10 years ago during the Housing Bubble lost their jobs and have stopped making their payments. They've been squatting in the homes rent free in most cases and are starting to get evicted. The banks are doing this quietly in hopes of turning the home over without wrecking the home values in the neighborhood and causing a tsunami of foreclosures, which they'd end up eating since many mortgages are owned by those banks.

 

Most paying jobs went to China and India, so few can afford to rent or to buy a home. Houses still cost too much for the basic minimum wage paid today. There are lots sitting empty, but their list prices are way out of the market, and the market is defined as what people can afford to pay. Every time the govt intervenes to regulate wages in an industry, that industry collapses and goes overseas. We no longer get paid enough to survive in America. The American Dream is dead. The modern version of Fahrenheit 451 isn't burning books. Its mortgage default bankers seizing your house and kicking you out on the street. "We're from the government. We're here to help."

The Left looked for new solutions to homelessness, accidently provided by the New Poor in Tiny Houses, which are essentially wood houses built on trailers within a certain legal size, towed on wheels to a site and plugged into electric and water, sometimes as primitive as a garden house and orange construction cord outlet. Sometimes they're actual cottages without the wheels, but usually the wheels are part of the tax evasion scheme.

 

The Left realized these tiny houses might work for the Homeless, meeting the unfunded mandates from the Federal Govt to house the poor. So now, what about unit cost?

 

What is the right sized house for a person? Working to an economy of scale, less is better because it will take fewer materials and more homes can be built. Realistically? That depends. It is certainly possible to live in a studio apartment of basically one main room with the bed and kitchenette and separate bathroom behind a door for privacy, however the close spaces do drive people insane, and insanity is to be avoided. Most people intend to be outside and not there as much as possible, and during the age of universal employment this was a solution. Nowadays with most the population (65% and rising) unemployed, many are going to feel trapped in four walls, as if they were in jail. You can leave but if there's nowhere to go, and no money to spend, this also increases crimes of opportunity and potentially insanity.

 

You can reduce the feeling of being trapped with large enough windows to give the illusion of a larger living space to the resident however windows wreck a home's heating and cooling efficiency and one of the reasons apartment blocks were built in the first place was more efficient heating. Turns out not to be true, however. I also notice that sufficient light in a small apartment, especially natural sunlight, helps maintain good sleep and wake cycles where they belong and avoid Seasonal Affective Disorder (seasonal depression), such as commonly found in people living in the Pacific Northwest and are generally fixed by moving away from the heavy overcast and down to Arizona or California where the sun shines. Since housing requirements are an unfunded mandate from the Federal Govt, imposed and punished at whim, solutions have to be economically viable and local enough. And if a tiny house motivates the resident to trade up and sell the thing off to the next poor person, so much the better.

I have found that the smaller the space, the more important it is that it be cleaned. A dirty space tends to get dirtier faster because you notice it and human beings are self destructive. So removing the self destructive tendencies in a space matters as well. As best I can tell, you need frequently cleaning, good air movement to remove smells, excellent light, and what you see out the window should be trees etc rather than another trailer or fence. A fence is just another prison cell equivalent. Same with the window of another trailer staring back at you. So how they're placed, and what barriers you have between them is important too.

 

Can we build tiny houses on trailers cheap enough and fast enough, with enough insulation and large enough size, that they can be carted around to various sites and provide homes worth leasing or buying so people don't have to live in tents? It wouldn't even be necessary if the housing bubble finished popping. And I think it might, though the delusions of the Baby Boomers is delaying this, possibly till most of them are dead, or at least until they stop wrecking America through their selfish voting. The jerks.

 

Can a tiny house really work? I looked into it locally, at a larger model, the largest legally available on a trailer is 399 square feet, by law. Its somewhat narrow inside, the ceiling is low in the bathroom to allow a loft area, and it had some other issues. For one, there's little point building these without the thicker insulation, and putting the noisy air conditioner in the bedroom may keep you cool enough to sleep but the noise wouldn't let you. You can put a deck outside, but it can't be physical attached, at least not permanently, else it stops being a trailer and you get nailed with assessment fees, taxes, and fines. The unit I looked at had a pointless loft for storing stuff and possibly as bed space for the unwelcome visitor, the kind that's like fish: nice on the first day, stinks by the third. I think they offer units that don't bother with that. Since the A/C was external, on the ground with a hose, it must suck all kinds of power to keep the place bearable when it is actually hot out. And in the winters, while the gas fireplace is decorative and requires no cleaning, I can't see that being as good as a simple pellet stove, which is far cheaper to run. Additionally, most of these things have very small hot water heaters. I would say they're a critical failing to offer a bathtub in a home with a 4 gallon hot water heater. FAIL! On-Demand water heaters are probably the way to go, so long as you've got the propane. As soon as you start working off-grid, a tiny house should get serious about a hybrid-Photovoltaic setup, with the panel cooling liquid heating the hot water heater and the panels topping off the deep cycle batteries, then sending the rest into the hot water heater since you're going to want that for bathing, washing, cooking, and possibly a radiator in the bedroom on cold nights. Efficient use of heat and sunlight will be really key to make this work. Even going oversize and moving the house around with permits might be better for the person living there.

 

Most homes are too big for one person, these days, and 1000 square feet is honestly enough for two people, possibly two and an infant, if we were a society that had marriage and the basic family. I don't see much evidence of that today. The politicians have done their very best to destroy the family. It is up to us to deny them, and one of the ideas I had was taking a big house and turning it into boarding house, with door locks on each bedroom, higher rates for the master bedroom, and the kitchen run for profit by the staff, charging for meals. That prevents the typical roommates stealing food issue. It also creates jobs for a couple for every one of these McMansions, provided there's jobs available. Once the bubble finally bursts the rest of the way, these 5 bedroom houses will get a lot cheaper, and ones in college towns will be able to shuffle through students like dorms, only with live-in security. It could work. It doesn't have to be perfect. Additionally, the garage can be home to a restaurant or repair shop so the caretakers can have real income beyond maintenance and rents, meaning a McMansion can turn into a business. 

The alternative is to duplex a house, adding a sound-wall and dividing the heat and water, but that often means ripping out the drywall and gets expensive. Really, dropping the price of homes and finding a use for the space you don't need is the way to go. If we have to try and cram efficient heating and cooling into homes on wheels its probably going to be cost prohibitive. So tiny houses are a sort of solution, but bursting the bubble on houses with foundations is the better answer. Are you ready, America?

Japanese Hipsters and Fooly Cooly

Japan is a weird place. It is weird because the elements running the place are quietly battling those in charge of its counter culture, which makes its counter-media which are widely distributed. When you compare the Japan visited 150 years ago by Isabella Bird with the one from WW2 to the one that's there today, and get additional viewpoints you are left pondering what a very strange place it is. The counter-culture of Japan are the great grandchildren of the monsters that slaughtered their way across asia and the pacific, butching Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and especially Chinese. All these people bear scars on their grandparents, and they have long memories for revenge. And I can respect that. However, the ones they'd be avenging against are mostly dead by now or are withered away in old folks homes across Japan. Soon all the people who were alive during WW2 will be gone. So is it right to want revenge on the great grandkids of the survivors of a war fought by your great grandparents?

 

The Japanese are still using the image of the nuclear bomb going off in most of their anime. Not all, but most which have any kind of frantic shonen jump (boys) battles always get a mushroom cloud. The metaphor is thin at the best of times. And its pretty tired. These days there's more radiation in Japan from Fukushima leaking into the ground water and drifting in the pacific current. This is a bad time to eat fish caught there. Denying the accident following the quake and tsunami was so utterly pointless and destructive, especially when the world saw the videos of the thing blowing up. Duh! So there's still elements of mania in Japan.

 

Not all Japanese mania is bad, however. When Haruhi Suzumiya burst onto the scene a decade ago, its hipster driven God-Is-A-High-School-Girl message gained a flash mob that danced the opening number on the streets of Shinjuku, in Akihabara (Ah kee hah bah rah). As one of the anime I own, it is a classic like Martian Successor Nadesico and Cowboy Bebop.

There's important anime in there too, which reveal cultural clues to Japan's feelings, considering that their housing bubble burst in 1989 immediately following the translated statement: "You're nuts if you don't get in on this. You can't lose!" Its been 25 years and their economy is STILL in the toilet. This is best depicted in anime via the classic Niea_7: Poor Girl Blues which is about an 18 year old woman struggling to make ends meet, renting the room from the new owners of what used to be her family business, attending college prep classes so she can get a degree, but the bathhouse which serves a poor community is run by an MBA fresh out of college and it is failing. As the heroine is heading for college and more or less the same circumstances, this is the view of her future. The entire anime is an endless loop of layered despairs. Her best option is dating and marrying the smitten rice farmer's son she used to read stories to when she babysat him. He brings her 40 pound bags of rice which are literally keeping her alive. Now that's investing in your future, guys. Keeping your future spouse alive.

 

Another fine example of hipsterdom is FLCL aka Fooly Cooly. This is a gonzo anime from about 15 years ago and was reprised in the extremely violent threads and blood gore-fest of Kill La Kill. FLCL was far less gory, and remains on the top of the list for "coming of age" anime. It covers a great deal of territory with drastically broken people, often using each other for their own reasons, and how very absurd that is. This is probably a lot closer to the Real Japan, and how people feel about the place. The music is classic Japanese Punk. Since Japan's music tends to be 15-20 years behind the rest of the world, and usually lacks spontaneity you find the music of other nations, most often Japanese anime have songs by the voice actresses, which you can call competent but not inspired. FLCL is an exception to this rule. The soundtrack by the Pillows, a Japanese punk band is every bit as listenable as Zepplin or Green Day.

And The Pillows applied to a the best coming of age anime? One full of Japanese hipsters hurting each other to hurt themselves? That's layers of depth and makes so much more sense of their situation.

 

Of course the anime with the greatest and most honest nihilism is "Welcome To The NHK", and its pretty grim. Rather than play the despair of the broken Japanese economy, this shows just how few options people have, and the spiral that leads to the inevitable, in the nation with the highest suicide rate on earth and whose money is controlled by sadistic grandmothers who inherited control from husbands they literally worked to DEATH. Now they grin like cannibals and deny funding of new businesses, even if those would energize the economy and save the future because those evil grandmothers would rather their nation DIE WITH THEM than have a future out of their own greedy control. How f'd up is that? There is such a thing as declaring someone incompetent, Japan. Get on with it. You might even save yourselves.

 

When I was at Foothill college studying medicine, which is totally EASY btw, I had quite a few divorced 28 year old Japanese woman classmates. They were distant, cold, very focused on their careers and education, and had been rejected by their own people and left Japan as "Christmas Cake", which is any unmarried woman over age 24. Any one of them were pretty and marriageable and probably will once they get income of their own in their new careers. Japan hates people succeeding. Keep them down, I guess. It's a big Asian ghetto. Small wonder the goofiness of Samurai Champloo, its soundtrack composed of black American hip hop tunes twisted into a very unique sound by Japanese teenagers. It was seriously weird. Thank Nabeshin.

Nabeshin is the director of most of these anime mentioned, and sometimes appears as a character in them, usually very gonzo. He is the essential rejection of Japanese conservatism which clearly isn't working and is effectively murdering (often literally) Japanese youth. Nabeshin calls out for a new way. It really is odd that Japanese progressivism is really just putting the crazy old ladies in the rest home and investing in small business with the now-freed up money instead of buying govt bonds when the govt is only selling them to pay the interest on the bonds they've already sold. Japan is completely screwed, financially. Don't own Yen. Seriously don't. They have the largest debt on earth. Its $1 Quadrillion converted to dollars. That's one thousand trillion. Or a million billion. Or a thousand million million. Can you imagine that kind of number? How do the youth intend to pay that off, when 99% of that debt is owed to grandmothers who already hate their children so much they setup the banking system to deny business loans so there's never going to be competition to their power? Seriously Japan, put your grandma in a home. She's insane. Its called Senile.

Why do I care? Because what's happened there is happening here in the USA. The Federal Reserve is printing money, selling bonds to itself, which the taxpayer is required to pay back, to support a currency we're required by law to use and they can actually shoot us if we refused to accept it. The law doesn't say what we can charge in the exchange rate, but considering there's an actual Dictator violating the constitution telling us what we can do? That could change in an instant. So are we 10 years behind Japan? Are the despairs of Japan our future? It kinda looks that way. That's why I pay attention. Also, the art is good in their anime. Their TV is better than ours.

Breaded Pan-Fried Chicken

2 boneless chicken breasts, thighs, or tenders
1 egg, beaten in a bowl
1 T poultry seasoning
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup panko bread crumbs

Mix bread crumbs and seasonings into a salad bowl.
Dip chicken first into egg, coating all sides, then dip into breadcrumbs, coating all surfaces. Set onto cookie sheet and let rest at least 20 minutes. This is important. Otherwise the breadcrumbs will fall off when you cook them.

In a frying pan, add 2 T. olive oil over medium low heat and fry the chicken, face down for 5 minutes, then flip and reduce heat to low for 15 minutes until done and bread crumbs browned. This should be enough. The thinner the chicken is, the quicker it cooks. A thick piece needs lower heat and longer time.

Serve with rice and either zucchini or yellow squash or steamed broccoli and a chefs green salad. White wine is appropriate with this dish, as well, a chenin blanc or cabernet blanc. A chardonnay or pinot grigio is probably too strongly flavored for this dish, which is pretty light and delicate.

Amalfi and Positano

In Forza Motorsport 3 and 4, the driving game includes courses on the Amalfi coast in Italy, in Positano which is a World Heritage Site visited by thousands of tourists every month year round. Positano is one of those really amazing places with no parking.

Walk everywhere because its a medieval city. Its very steep. There are paved stone staircases lined with hand-laid rock walls. Same with the few roads through it. Most are also paved in cobblestones. Driving on cobblestones is slippery and jiggly. The seas are usually calm because its the Mediterranean. You can build a jetty and harbors are simplicity itself. There's no serious currents. Its just pretty. A great place for boating, but no actual beach as you can see. Beaches require sand, which comes from sandstone eroding inland or being carried there by currents or rivers. If there's no rivers, there's no sand.

 

If you look at that sea, imagine it is rough with 10 foot high waves snapping ashore, throwing spray in the air 40 feet high and then blow down into the distance 200 feet in the stiff breeze that rarely stops. That's kinda what the Pacific Coast looks like when the fog burns off, which doesn't happen every day. Somedays it stays foggy and chilly enough to cause hypothermia. Windbreaker jackets exist to deal with that weather. The winds on the Pacific Coast affect the building design, since it is rarely sunny enough to want to hide from it. You make the most of the sun you get, and you shelter your plants and their soil because the wind is so strong it rips their leaves off, twists their branches, and tears away their soil. Its a challenge for an architect since the wind driven rain wets the blown salt spray and causes serious rust of anything steel there, and even corrodes aluminum. The wind blows water up and under clay tile roofs like you see in the pictures, so those are useless there. The sand that blows around chips paint and window glass. There's also landslides, earthquakes, twisty roads and rockslides, and sometimes flashfloods roll down and tear out the hairpin turn of Highway 1. The upshot being there's a lot of maintenance and repairs required if you choose to live near the Pacific Ocean. Contrast with the above calm of the sea in the Amalfi harbor. So pretty. Love to live there, right? But the fish is better in the Pacific. Fish like cold water. It holds more nutrients. The boats in Bodega Bay, which is way more spread out than Positano and Amalfi, are strictly working fishing boats, with a few running whale watching or salmon fishing for the tourists. The bay itself goes shallow enough they raise oysters there. The channel gets dredged every 5-10 years, depending on money available for it. If the salmon come back, there will be money. That's how things are. If the homes were closer together, they'd emulate more of what charms Positano offers. Ultra-dense housing in classic vintage stone makes for a very walkable community. As it is now, Bodega Bay more strongly resembles the set of the 1980's horror flick "The Fog!" by Stephen King. So how can a foggy, windy, smelly place that's often cold become more cute, more walkable, more charming, enough to keep pulling tourists even after most of our oil is so expensive and exported that the drive itself is half the expense? I think about things like that.

 

The upshot of that expensive drive, and a big part of the draw of the coast itself, beyond views and really delicious locally caught fish, is the drive is long, twisty, scenic, and fantastic in a touring car or sports car, depending on if you're taking your wife or your girlfriend. Because even if you love your girlfriend, your wife will hate her. So strict separation is required. Ahem. That was a joke.

 

There is a nice loop available too, actually SEVERAL loops available. Marin County and San Francisco folks used to come up through Mill Valley and climb over Mount Tamalpais, which is the road featured in the chase scene of Basic Instinct, which does NOT do those curves justice, then follow Hwy 1 up through Point Reyes Station, along Tamales Bay, past Dillon Beach, and into Sonoma County and up to Bodega Bay through the various twists and turns and beaches, then further up to Jenner and then land on River Road towards Guerneville, following the Russian River through the big Redwood and back to the Wine Country. You end up nearby either Santa Rosa or Healdsburg, depending on a left or right turn, or you can cross over the Highway, go another 10 miles and be in Napa County at the head of Napa Valley in Calistoga, at the north end of the Valley. Napa is at the South end. Between are the best wineries on Earth. That makes a nice place to spend the night and the next day can be wine tasting brunches and a slow meander back home with a properly tame and satisfied woman beside you, no longer fretful and obnoxious. That's what a proper vacation up the coast should do for you. So, if Bodega Bay looked a bit more like Positano, creeping up the hillside, crammed together with walkways, cheerful people waving as they meandered by, would that be worth a visit? I think so. Now repeat with Fort Bragg, Mendocino, Eureka, and those other little seaside towns up Highway 1. And be sure to offer a nice charging lot for all the Tesla's, and B&Bs for the couples to recharge themselves within. So long as California remains as a center for tourism and agriculture, it must continue to focus on those two things so it can make money and justify the costs of its maintenance and visitors.

Kitchen Generation

I grew up in Santa Rosa, California. It is the wine country. I was half a mile from Matanzas Creek Winery, at the foot of an extinct volcano that loomed overhead. It was a weird place to grow up. The days would get hot, then the fog would surge in from the Pacific, roiling over the hills, ushered by the icy breeze. Temperatures would drop from 85'F down to 55'F in about an hour, sometimes less. If you went to the movies in an afternoon, you came out into fog that clung to your eyelashes and dropped visibility to a mere 200 feet. It was mystical and awesome and I miss it. I don't miss all the jerks who lived there, however, which is why I don't. If there's a plague and they die off? I'd move back.

 

Growing up in foodie heaven, surrounded by wine, excellent bakeries, and the world's highest density of restaurants, one for every 40 people, being familiar with the very best food would easily lead to preparing it. I got good in the kitchen, between natural interest and exposure. When I finally married, I thought I'd found someone who shared my passion, but not so much. Since I am single again, and in a dateless zone of meth junkies, potheads, and creepy cougars, I feel like reminiscing on what I can no longer find.

 

Know what would be awesome? A wife who cooks better than I do. That's asking a lot, since I'm nearly to restaurant quality. Still, a wife who could genuinely and seriously cook, likes it, and shows off because she's just that awesome a chef? That would impress me.

 

An Italian or French woman, skilled and happy in her kitchen the way I am? That would be something. I would marry a woman like that. In my first marriage, I cooked most of the meals. I got good at it. I got better since cooking for my aging parents. I've learned how to time meals, and cooking appropriate portions and including the necessary nutrition.

A pity that real cooking is astonishingly rare in my generation. Few women my age or younger actually cook anymore. In the last 20 years I've met ONE serious female cook from my generation. And none in the younger generations (Y and Millenials). Lots of women barely know how to heat food, or even know that microwaves have more settings than "TIME". Most women consider cooking a massive chore and refuse to be good at it as a sign of contempt for men, which they often are barely familiar with. Strange, these same women believe men should be able to tear down and rebuild an engine in a weekend, or build an entire house in a month in chiseled and sculpted bodies they saw in a magazine this one time. Sigh. Men and women both have real issues with expectations. Most women get pretty frosty at my ability to cook. There's unspoken outrage.

Our culture is so broken. Women are taught by their teachers are role models to hate men, resent men. They have the same opportunities but insist that simply isn't enough and they deserve to have EVERYTHING, a fulfilling career AND children they somehow have time to raise, and a nanny and a driver, and a limo, and a Versacchi pantsuit that looks slimming and the fatty desert and a stairmaster and .... yeah. Insane stuff. Yet, they won't go into a kitchen and learn to cook unless they have children of their own, and only to assert their babies are getting the best care, those times when they remember they are supposed to be good mothers rather than neurotic. Sigh. I would hope this isn't true for my entire generation, but that's what I've seen. And evidence trumps beliefs and wishful thinking.

I've never met a woman who liked engines enough to take them apart and fix them. Or cared about performance of her car enough to do the research herself. Most women I've met would use the wrong tool and utterly wrecked the thing they were trying to fix. So pathetic, and vicious, and deliberately hateful. Mechanical Sympathy is a thing ascribed to men for good reason. There seems to be real differences in Gender that seriously matter and aren't talked about.

If I had an Italian wife, who liked to cook, I suspect we'd spend a lot of time together, stuffing pasta, roasting peppers and meats, creating dishes and handing them out to the little old ladies as "cooked too much to finish". I would need a kitchen with two working stations in it, same sized, so we'd have room to work and not accidentally drop things or cut ourselves being jostled. Finding out that the actress who played the sex droid Seven of Nine would come home from the job of looking statuesque in her fetish costume, strip the silly things off, put on her apron and whites, and get to work cooking meals at her restaurant in LA? I really respected that. It's endearing, too. For a foodie like me, who started learning to cook at age 4? Sounds like the perfect woman. So perfect she married a French chef herself and they are happily married. Good for them both.

 

If a lady mechanical engineer working on optimized and balanced engines for ultralight cars strips off her coveralls, scrubs off all the grease and swaps for whites, and takes up a long knife in order to build a complex meal? That's even better. There would be conversation and laughter and sketches and solutions. Good times could be had. A pity such people are rare enough to be nearly mythical.  

This being California, there's a lot of tasty fishes worth cooking with. Sea Bass, Rock Cod, Red Snapper, Salmon, Halibut, even Anchovies can be turned into delicious dishes. You have to be an unfussy eater. Our Pacific waters produce excellent fish for the table. They need a couple years break to get their numbers back, and once oil is too valuable to waste on powering trawlers crossing oceans for fish, we'll be in good shape minding our OWN fish on our OWN coast, thanks much. I could see myself living in a stepped community like Bodega Bay, despite the faultline running there, since it would allow me daily access to fresh fish. And the tourists would know that, if I ran a B&B, for example. I expect to live another 50 years, possibly more. Plenty of time to take the windtorn and ragged Bodega Bay and convert that hillside into something resembling one of those tidy provincial towns people drive 1000 miles to see in person. And yes, it will fall down in the earthquakes, but it will be rebuilt, too. The locals are hardy folk. They don't whine about how hard it is. They just pick sweep up the mess, and build again. A woman who can do that is worth something. No histrionics, no drama. Just sweep up the mess and get on with it. That's what I want in a wife.

 

I wonder what a woman like that wants in a husband?

Amalfi and Jefferson Redevelopment Plans

Something I really respect about Italy is the entire peninsula is full of volcanoes and gets earthquakes, yet they build out of stone anyway. I appreciate that sort of dedicated "F-U, nature" of Italians. Also, the understand the important things of life, namely good food, wine, and women all exist to be enjoyed, not hoarded. Where I grew up we had both Italian and Portugeuse immigrants, living working, intermarrying. One of my better friends had parents from both camps, and her dad baked really excellent French bread. The bakery has since gone under, but it was the kind you wrote sonnets about and served with fresh butter or sharp cheeses. Good stuff.

 

You really shouldn't build with stone in Earthquake country, yet there are lots of buildings that survive the quakes for one reason or another. As I understand it, the bullet scarred walls from the Allied invasion, retaking Italy from the fascists in WW2, are still there, sometimes left as is. There's a distinctive pride in that. I wonder if we should build that seriously here? Out of stone rather than steel and concrete. Put some labor and pride into our homes and workplaces, and expect to use them for centuries rather than tear them down like tents in 10-15 years like we've been doing with most commercial real estate. There were a lovely group of craftsman bungalows along the nasty green lake in South Reno, all carefully maintained. Someone bought them, tore them down, and will replace them with new duplex condos because its easier to build new than retrofit. They can get more profits. This is a shame. The new condos weren't much for character. And the lake still stinks.

 

Something I find a bit confusing, is America has these enormous cities, even my own home town has gotten huge, but there's few jobs beyond the obvious retail and repair and basic medical. For actual industry? Not so much. My home town was pretty odd because it had a restaurant for every 40 people, the highest number in the world. Can you imagine? Working in the food industry was something people make full careers from there. Of course, being allergic to raw shrimp, the single most popular restaurant meat, means I can't do that myself. I get nasty hives. Can't handle crab either.

 

Bodega Bay, which means Bay Bay, which is NOT the same place as Bodega, which is in a valley, on Highway 12 but not actually in view of the ocean just close to it, and was the site of the Hitchcock movie The Birds.

And yes, that schoolhouse is still there.

 

The big upside of old, pre-car, architecture is it remains classical and useful after cars are gone, and when you parked in newer carriage houses converted into a garage in another building. The house itself is a house. The various Victorians and bungalows in the old towns across California are the ones that hold their value. Not the newer and poorly made ranch houses, which eventually turn out to have black mold and termites. The old houses might have plaster lath and ancient electrical, but most have been updated decades ago, at prior owner's expense. You may want to replace the avocado green tile and the burnt umber or ochre shag carpet and maybe fill in the conversation pit that was so stylish in the 1970s but is just a tripping hazard that reeks of patchouli oil today.

 

A modern or old bungalow, the typical Craftsman Bungalow built by hand, over time, by a young man who ordered the plans via a Sears-Roebuck catalog and did all the construction on weekends with hand tools for the immense sum of several thousand dollars in materials, and land that must have cost a hundred, easy. The angled square pillars are usually plywood and hollow with a normal 4x4 post inside to hold up the porch roof. The various details are all hand made, bit by bit, adding value to the home after its finished and liveable. All are basically night or weekend projects. I think even the window frames were handmade, with the glass ordered in sheets. In a Craftsman, the builder does everything. Ironically, the Art Deco material, glass blocks, are very good insulation, being R-30, since they are a vacuum inside. Walls of glass blocks provide excellent light, yet allow privacy. Same with stained glass and obscured glass (rippley kind) which lets in light yet retains privacy. On a very small lot, this is a good thing. Using your spaces to provide good light to a home is so important. I've lived in too many dark places to like them very much. I want natural light.

 

I think it is worth noting that there are many very beautiful Bungalows in both Oakland and LA, but not all of them are maintained due to being rentals with Section 8 criminal gang members living inside. This is a shame. Once water prices rise without subsidies to cushion them, many of these homes will end up abandoned as their residents flee for more affordable cities. Perhaps they'll move to Detroit, where you can buy a distressed home downtown for $500. You might get shot or stabbed there, but you can own it. And if enough people move from Oakland and LA to Detroit, maybe this crucial difference will enable them to make a serious change, and restore the city to greatness. It really is a fantastic location, geographically. They just need to make a living doing something other than just building cars nobody can afford anymore.

 

Here in California, I look at the tiny Sacramento Valley towns, the farm towns, with their abandoned railroad passenger train stations empty, businesses shuttered on actual Main Streets, beautiful bungalows needing attention, and ground water only feet down as the river flows by, and I think: this place has potential. It needs jobs. It needs industry. I hope that Jefferson brings them in, like Reno has. Allow Lacquer and you'll get furniture makers again. Deny carbon taxes and you'll get welding shops and machineshops moving in from the Bay Area, where the lunatic Greens in Berkeley have nearly killed them off, the spiteful pricks. There's more manufacturing in Woodland and Colusa and Yuba City than there is the Bay Area. And there could be a lot more. These towns would welcome a Toyota Factory, building trucks and small cars. They could sell them locally too. If there were a Subaru Forester Plant in Roseville or Loomis they'd sell all they made in the Sacramento metropolitan district and Sierra Foothills, easy. Hear that Subaru? Jeep is rare up here. Lots of Subarus everywhere. I would totally buy a WRX STI if I had the money. They're great on these roads, and we get enough snow lingering for it to make sense.

 

I really think there's a future in cute grid-pattern valley towns, from 100 years ago. They've got local water, which is so important, cheap. What they need is jobs. Once the price of water goes up in the Bay Area, following either the split or the collapse of the pumping subsidy, most of the big industries will bail out of the East and South Bay area. Poof! That price will also cause a housing bubble collapse, which is long overdue anyway. Most homes in the Bay Area are nearly worthless ranch houses with termites singing Kumbayah and holding hands, which is all that's keeping them upright. Don't buy a home built on an orchard. The termites eat the roots of the trees cut down and bulldozed over to build the tract homes. When they run out of roots to eat, the tunnels upwards and eat your home. This is WELL KNOWN from tract houses in Orange County. And termite eaten wood must be replaced with treated wood, which they won't eat, but if they get up into the walls and attic it is too late. You're better off with arson at that point. Considering most Bay Area tract homes are $2500/mo to rent, and $3800/mo. for a mortgage, and both parents must work to cover that outlandish cost because your average home for a middle class working couple is $600K, you can buy in Sacramento Valley for around $200K or considerably less in the really small northern towns. Better house, same size, with grid streets instead of cul-de-sacs. Riskier for the children who play in traffic, but better for public transit and bicycles. And children playing in traffic are incipient Darwin Awards, after all. Duh!

 

Small towns are cheaper to run than big cities. They don't require as many services, or employees running those services, because they are small and residents have reasonable expectations, rather than overt racism driving their demands for "more!" like you see in Oakland and South Sacramento and North Highlands, which are high crime areas filled with a certain minority that claims it can't be racist "just because." Uh-huh. Nice to know who to avoid living near. A shame since 35 years ago, Oakland had some of the best metal workers in the world. They're all retired and gone now. A pity.

 

The other big thing which makes small towns liveable is water supply, which can be managed via reservoirs and pumping stations and tanks and wells and canals and diversions. The West side of the north Sacramento Valley is in rain shadow. Rain shadow, aka Banana Belt, is the chemical reaction to water and heat, wherein the change from vapor to liquid releases heat, which when the pressure changes as it descends, is different dry than wet. This is called Adiabatic Heating, and you find it is the cause for the warm winters in Palm Springs, and the relatively lack of snow in Reno and Ashland, since the air descending from Pacific weather systems becomes too warm for much precipitation. Very important. This lack of rainfall behind, east of, the Coast Range mountains of Northern California, soon to be Jefferson state, means that its dry grassland with only creeks draining out of those hills for water supply. These creeks are where you find the towns, which are the only places with drinking water for people to live there. A plan was proposed a few decades ago to build a big reservoir on the wet side of the hills, then using an aqueduct and tunnels through the mountains, carry the water through, irrigate, and gain a huge farmland area, which would be a boon to both real estate and farm income, which is America's most important export. We feed the world. And if we stop, the world loses 2 billion people rather quickly. Remember that, world. You need us to stay alive. Famine causes war and disease outbreak. I would not be the LEAST surprised to learn that ISIL accidentally causes a massive plague outbreak of that middle eastern severe respiratory (MERS) virus I've read about.

I'd like for America to ignore the Middle East entirely, and let them kill each other. We can focus on farming and manufacturing and living in beautiful homes and maybe see about constructing things out of stone. The coat of Amalfi, which is a world heritage site, could be duplicated on the northern California coastline, even with the earthquakes. From Tiburon and around the Marin Headlands, the north end of the Golden Gate bridge, up the coast through Point Reyes Station and Bodega Bay, up to Jenner and Fort Ross, Mendocino, Fort Brag and Eureka and Crescent City. Coastal tourists stop in every town on the Oregon coast, but they go inland rather than cross into California because its ugly and sad here. And that needs to be fixed. If it was touristy, tourists would come. Hopefully, Jefferson State redevelopment experts will push investment there, once the crucial infrastructure is dealt with, and the money is rolling in. If all we did was mimic Reno, we'd still be better than Lower California. And that's so key.

 

Be Better in Jefferson!

Classes Cancelled

I was all signed up for Librarian courses at the local college, so I could get a job and get paid. Then I got a call on Thursday and learned that the teacher had bailed out on the program. The school is trying to find another teacher, and will call me if they manage it, but I'm a pessimist for a reason. Disappointing.

Once more, I can't help but wonder if I should put more effort into editing my old novels and making them ready for print on demand publishing. That might get me some money. I know that others have said my novels are good. And that's very nice of them to say that. I don't know that they really are, but I could probably fix them, and make them sell. I could use the income. With the incredible lack of jobs in this area, and my education as a Librarian strictly on-the-job and unpaid without the paper, thanks to some snobbery by those working there are terrified I'll replace them because I shelve and they ... don't. And in the end, being a librarian is about having a library, which means shelving returned books, and manning the desk to loan them out again. Since I'm not allowed to Man the desk, despite being one of the few men there, I shelve, for 5-6 hours at a time. I make sure it gets done. Its not easy, but its not very hard either. Its mostly just time consuming. Honestly, once they teach me the software for loaning and returning books? I'm ready. And if I were carrying around a smartphone logged into the library system and did Nonfiction searches for subjects patrons ask for while I'm shelving? Then I'm already doing more than they are. Not that they aren't great librarians, or adequate ones. Whatever. I just like books, and the patrons don't bother me at all, except when some don't bathe. Otherwise? They're fine. Its a very unstressful job.

I hope the school calls me and offers the classes online after all. I want those units. I want to get this piece of paper so I can stop being annoyed about working for free. I could use income for the work I'm doing. And its a fair amount of work. Its like the work you do. You get paid. Why shouldn't I?

Flaws of Scifi

Science Fiction is not a perfectly defined genre. It is often lumped into Fantasy, so you find space stations and pressure suits next to swords and dragons on the bookshelf of your local bookstore and library. They don't put westerns and horror together or mystery and romance, so this annoys me.

Serious literary critics find it easy to despise scifi, as an allowed form of overt intellectual bigotry. Their contempt for the nature of scifi is probably based on frequently poor quality writing by scifi authors who are selling to teenage boys, but most mystery fiction and horror is crap too. You don't hear them complaining about their poor merits to literature. 

 

Scifi is about ideas, sometimes stupid retreads of space opera, but sometimes very revolutionary ones that matter in the long run, ones that should be taken more seriously. Scifi can afford to be interesting because they will always be despised by the New York Times. And when you're at the bottom, the only way to go is up. Or continue on the bottom, anyway.

 

There is a downside to scifi, however, when you see scifi stories adapted to a 90 minute movie. Most are terrible. Many producers in Hollywood insist on turning scifi into bible stories. Hollywood is mostly Jewish and bible stories suit their religious purposes, with the excuse of ticket sales and test audiences. Scifi movies are pretty much ruined from the outset. Too many characters rising from the dead. Or building an ark. Or throwing down the temple. Sigh. I am truly sick of how scifi movies are ruined. Some are also quite dumb. The rolling spaceship wheel in Prometheus crushing a villain-character? Really?

 

Or a giant mechanical steam powered spider? Really? I think too much of Hollywood is made of cocaine fueled insanity. If the war on drugs were really implemented, Hollywood would fall silent. They need their cocaine or they just can't work. If you call that kind of crap work.

 

Even the Japanese ruin scifi, though they ruin it in different ways, namely insisting on tropist Moe girls or excess violence rather than scientific discovery or actual character development. And then everything explodes because they JUST CAN'T stop moping because we nuked them twice. They had it coming. Ask the Philippinos and Vietnamese and Singaporeans and Indonesians and especially the Chinese how they feel about Japan. If we hadn't, they'd be nuking Japan every xmas in retaliation. They're THAT ANGRY. Most directors can't find anything worthy of ticket buying or advertisement without pantie shots and overly bouncy breasts, powered armor suit battles where a sword trumps all other weapons except maybe an energy sword and the furious hidden inner power. Ugh. Boring. The aliens in Japanese scifi are usually just slightly altered Americans, or half-American half-Japanese thugs with a hairstyle that stopped being popular in the 1950's, a direct reference to the Occupation and reconstruction, something Japan remains amazingly hypocritical for. We dragged them kicking and screaming out of the 14th century and into the 20th, and they complain, still, that we nuked them. Wimps. They had it coming.

 

It is a shame that movie directors are often massively ignorant people. Real science is interesting to a scientist and public television is full of documentaries about science. I grew up watching Connections and Cosmos and Nova. But I guess its not good TV for people with short attention spans, and they assume it won't sell tickets despite the success of Gravity. I personally liked the move Contact up to the point where they finally decoded the message from space. After that, it was crap. Hollywood ruining something. Raping the source material, generally speaking. Decoding the message was really interesting. It was the high point of the movie. After that it was politics and religion. Again.

If you want to find more serious scifi, you have to stick with the source, the books. This is a great reason to read. You still run into problems, however. Scifi that sells is scifi that meets its audiences expectations. For every masterpiece like Neuromancer and Use of Weapons and The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, there are overly explained piles of crap like Star Trek and the various space fantasies of Star Wars. Stories that are so logical or illogical they make you cringe. Real people, real characters, can't exist in such frameworks. Even the thinly veiled Koran of Dune, with its 15th century Italianate politics and infighting and Moslem Jihaadists, is better scifi than any Star Trek. I think that too much of scifi is written for kids with Asbergers, and thus the excuse it provides for not understanding other people.

 

In Japan they call the tendency towards overt escapism Chu-ni-byo, aka Middle School Syndrome. Japan also has the full blown regression called Hikki-ko-mori, where the sufferer hides in their apartment until the money runs out and they end up homeless and die of exposure, thanks to full rejection of all people and human society. Very few recover. Japan quietly drives a fair bit of its population to suicide, the highest rate on earth actually. That there's several series written for Aspbergers Kids has a certain sense to its essential market exploitation, but if you don't have it, reading it is really dry. The entire Star Trek Next Generation series explains things too much, and they immediately forget the discoveries of the prior episode. Deep Space 9 was highly unusual for Star Trek because its the only Star Trek where discoveries aren't lost, get built on for the next episode so its more like a Soap Opera and less like Star Trek. Stargate suffered from this too, sadly. They tried to make it comic though, with the dismissive "Magnets?" from the head hero. I always appreciated that.

 

This gets to another weakness of Scifi which annoys scientists. Space Opera takes advantage of some irritating tropes for pure storytelling convenience.

1. Artificial Gravity
2. Antigravity
3. Flying Cars
4. Faster Than Light Travel
5. Bendy Lasers
6. Techno-Gibberish
7. Force Fields and Force Field Space Suits
8. Everybody the Same DNA-type across space
9. Unlimited Power Cells so Nanotech works
10. Unobtanium Materials for Construction of things like ships and space elevators
11. Claiming ethical superiority despite ridiculous levels of violence in your society

 

Seriously, the moment you allow religious extremists into space with a craft, they're going to use it to bomb the Earth with asteroids because they're relentlessly violent. You can't export crazy people off planet, can't risk it or we'll all die. And our civilization just isn't interested in denying evil people access to weapons. Psychopaths Among Us is a very important article to read. You really must read it. This will give you proper perspective on a core problem in our species, and how we allow hyperviolent individuals to rule us and prey upon us. Sadly, this is NOT science fiction. But it should be accounted for in any setting.

 

I'm a firm believer in "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong". I am a professional Pessimist. I got paid to find problems and fix them before they broke or killed everyone nearby. I'm not a Luddite, but I do look for potential points of failure, highlight them for the Engineer and followup so they don't handwave till they get their check and run away, which happens a lot with the Engineers I've run into. They aren't all like that, but ironclad contracts aren't just a good idea, they can save your company from criminal and civil responsibility for shoddy work. This is a good topic for scifi, called Social Commentary. This is also a kind of idea, but its important too, just like Space Opera provides a framework for metaphor. Jurrassic Park wasn't just a convenient slasher film with social commentary about irresponsible engineering and biological exploitation.

As goofy as the mad math man was, he had a point about life finding a way. Life on earth Evolved. And life itself is unique for at least 60 light years in every direction. And probably the universe. Stable life bearing planets are incredibly rare, despite lots of other planets being discovered. It's easier to build a space habitat than it is to terraform a planet, especially if that planet has too weak a magnetic field, the wrong mix of gases for heat retention and UV filtering (too little and no mutation/evolution, too much and organisms die), wrong temperature range for liquid water, lack of volcanoes so no nutrients in soil... a lot has to go right for life to get a chance. If anything goes wrong, no life. The first 3 billion years there was no life on Earth. Only in the last billion has there been any life detected on Earth, and only the last half billion has there been stuff able to leave fossils.

 

Planetary terraforming is easy in scifi novels, but its really quite ridiculous. Very few authors even consider the potential of engineering people able to live in hard vacuum or copying human intelligence into robots for exploration which sidesteps the requirement for terraforming in the first place. It rarely makes a good story. Its a little too alien for readers conventional tastes. The handwaving that Earth becomes uninhabitable is just pandering to an audience that's never liked science in the first place. They're after religion. This is why I prefer to read stories about the next ice age, rather than magical warming fairies and sea level rise when if you melted Antarctica (all at once, which is specifically impossible and would take decades, and evidence shows we're at the highest levels of sea ice recorded there) levels would barely rise 5 centimeters. Do the math. As for melting the north pole.... its already at sea level, and the water volume would shrink because ice expands when water freezes. That's why it floats. Duh! Religious zealots are misusing taxes, and their acolytes are writing BS novels about 20 foot higher sea levels and apocalyptic hurricanes ravaging the coastlines. I wish they would. I'd have a good laugh, but there isn't that much water on earth, sorry. In the real world, the ice age is coming again. I want to read novels about that. And I will probably write them, too. After all, the audience will be interested. We're expecting more Polar Vortexes this winter. So much for WARMING. Funny thing is, in the 1980's we just called those "winter storms" or "blizzards" and they're standard weather for the Northeast and Midwest. Duh.

 

I expect when authors of warming scifi see their book sales crash, they'll go for the ice age angle. Audiences of buyers have to have money to buy books, and authors write for those who spend. Tracking and predicting market trends is part of an authors job, and researching market trends will help an author of fiction to stay ahead and not fall into disregard and publishing failure. So many books on Amazon are ranked low, for good reason, because the book just wasn't interesting enough to sell to enough people to justify its publication. That's life.

California Republic Driving

California needs to be its own country. One with trade agreements with its neighbors, but its own country just the same. Realistically, most western states are treated like garbage dumps by people who don't live here. This is wrong, and needs to stop. If that means turning the West coast and Great Basin states into a new nation, or series of nations... well so be it. Its not like we'd go to war with each other once jackasses from Kenya Hawaii Chicago have no power over us. Once we stop watching TV from foreign nations like New York City nobody living here will give two damns about them. We have plenty to talk about in our side of the continent. We should get the news from Japan, Shanghai, Taipei (Taiwan), Singapore, Hong Kong, Austalia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico City, Panama canal freight report, El Salvador and Nicaragua... not Washington DC. Who Cares about DC? They never do anything good. These other pacific nations are our trade partners. I want to know what the news is in Boise, and Seattle and Spokane and Reno and Portland. News should cover the nations close to us, not DC. DC is full of evil people who exist to steal from decent people. It's a monument to thieves and parasites.

 

I was watching Top Gear video clips on their website and thinking how great it would be if those hot hatchbacks that we can't buy in America because goons in Detroit decided that allowing better cars to be sold here was unfair competition for their shoddy union work, so they paid bribes to DC officials to ban them.

 

Then I drove cars in my Xbox simulator, Forza 4. You know, I liked the Golf GTI. It's fast. But I loved the Lotus Evora, right up until the rear wheels spun loose and it killed me, over and over. But up until the wheels get loose, which you can feel in a real car but not in a game, it was fantastic. I also found that since I'd once owned a pre-M3 BMW 320i, I still know how to drive the newer M3 fast. Fantastic.

 

When I was a lad, there were many better cars available, but then the whining safety fools moved here from DC and Massachussets and destroyed everything good about California roads. It has never bothered me that people died driving stupidly. Its only natural. And it ridded me of competition for food, water, and resources like jobs. Death on the highway was Darwinism at work. The solution to Idiocracy is to remove safety labels and warning signs for a few generations. Do that and the dumb ones die out. And people start thinking again. None of this irresponsible BS and whining.

 

The only good thing Nerfherders have done for California driving was Bot-Dots in the centerline and that white line on the edge of our roads, and yellow signs instead of white. Those are easier to see in the fog and at night. Driving in fog still kills foolish people who refuse to slow down. I suspect Jeremy Clarkson would be wrecked driving fast in Fog in the Russian River Valley. Those sharp turns sneak up on you if you can't see them coming and brake in time. I wonder how he would feel about wrecking a Ferrari in a road test in my home town?

 

America, or rather California, should embrace risk and not make such a fuss over death on the highway. So what if people die? Everybody will eventually. If they die while they're happy, isn't that better than dying miserable and sad, having never experienced joy?

 

I would love for the new states of California, like Jefferson and North California, to carefully digitize the neat roads with the hairpin turns and get them into DLC (Download Content) for Forza 4 and 5 and the competing Sony Playstation game called Gran Tourismo. If you can drive the classics and the new cars on these fancy real world roads, like Hwy 20 from Clearlake to Williams, which is FUN, or Hwy 70 up the Feather River Canyon from Oroville Dam to Quincy, or Hwy 49 from Auburn to Cool (a 3 mile sprint with hairpin turns down and then up, crossing the American River at the bottom), or the Trinity Grade from Valley of the Moon to Napa Valley over the Maacamas Mountains. I'd love to see these games include weather and variable grip from water and moss and algae on the road. They have the technology. So why not? This would be good road training and really cut down on deaths while allowing the best cars of Top Gear onto our roads to actually drive them. And with all the practice, speeds should be better. Even with Six Californias, driving would be better, so long as they can afford to pave roads.

 

Did you know that Ford Fiesta STI 2-door is a couple hundred pounds lighter than the 4 door, which is the only model sold in the USA. The 2-door is the one you want. Idiots. "But....SAFETY!" Bugger off your safety. And that the Eurodiesels are both fuel efficient, clean burning, and comparatively faster than say a Prius, scale up because they need no batteries, and affordable. Honda and Subaru make them, were going to sell them here, but the Big 3 paid a bribe offered concerns to certain senators and congressmen who then blocked their import. And why aren't they sold in the USA? It made the American car companies, two of which bankrupted and one of which barely exists anymore, look bad because our diesels are monsters, noisy, and gutless. The Japanese diesels are 60 mpg, all of them, modern, dead quiet. It made the Big 3 look bad and would hurt their profits. This is something that should be fixed. If California were its own country, the Big 3 would have NO PULL HERE because they don't manufacture here and offer no jobs. The last car builder shut down. Now its only Tesla, and they're not exactly busy. I'd love to see a Caterham builder in Colusa, and a Subaru Outback plant in Chico. And maybe a Nissan GTR plant in Red Bluff. Why not? There's people to do the work. There's cheap land. Local hydroelectric power plants. Why not? Give people jobs building cars that people want.

 

I keep wondering about ultralight versions of the Subaru, built of Aluminum and carbon fiber, with most of the design focused on a street-rally car, able to deal with crappy roads at speed. I think most vehicles should be built that light. That allows a smaller engine and saves a ton of fuel. Selling cars with steel wheels, for example, is ridiculous. Aluminum wheels are readily available and cheap. They design cars for that weight, so the suspension works right. So it grips the road. Once the 6 states happen, actual budgets will get very interesting. Chaotic as they figure things out, would be a good description.

 

I'd love to see a cheap importer in California for the ultralight convertibles like the Ariel Atom, the Crossbow, and the Caterham. Those would be fun here. With only 60 days of rain a year, you could actually use them as intended. To drive. People say nasty things about the Mazda Miata being for gay men, but its actually a British Convertible that works, that starts. That doesn't die on you partway into your drive like the British ones do. For this reason, they're much cheaper. And no, that isn't logical. I saw plenty on the roads in the 1990's, winding back and forth between wineries and they were having lots of fun. In a time where there was more respect for other's property, it was a fine vehicle for California. Trickier now. But that depends on where you live, and if people there don't burgle each other because its easy. Right now that seems unlikely, so an open top roadster is something you park in a garage or you won't keep it very long. A pity.

 

I'd like to see the new Republic drop the 3-wheel DMV requirement and allow ultralight 4-wheel cars so inventers can experiment with very small engines, very light chassis, using new materials and worrying less about crash safety. Who cares that James Dean died in a race car? He was happy. He loved racing that car. Lots of other movie stars have owned unsafe cars and LIVED. And they're just movie stars. There's always a new face to replace them. Stop fussing about it.

 

If someone chooses to die, give them the respect to make their choice. People are all bent out of shape over Robin Williams, but he was old and had Parkinson's Disease and it was killing him. So he'd be the one to know to choose his end and we should all respect his choice. Everybody riding around in unsafe vehicles is making a choice too. Respect it. And if they die from that choice, respect that too.

 

In the meantime, think about the business opportunities of manufacturing in California, somewhere other than the Bay Area or LA, and how domestic sales will benefit from employing our population, once the safety bigots are out of the way.