Fancy Cars

My nephew graduated from high school on Friday. Went to see him, back in the old home town. The place has changed in several ways. There's a lot fewer fields, a low fewer barns. A lot more apartments and houses crammed close together. Houses with room around them, even a little room are $700K or more. And ones with enough acres for a vineyard are millions. It is ridiculous, but with half again more cars than I remember as a youth, the roads are now too crowded to drive fast on them. Sad panda. I loved driving on those roads when I was young. You get very skilled driving multi-apex corners that even Jeremy Clarkson would respect because they routinely kill bad drivers. Literally kill them. There are lots of trees along Highway 12 that have taken lives. They arch over the highway, which also means a twitch the wrong way will wrap you around one at speed. My home town had rough roads, and they are still rough today. The county supervisors were always corrupt and seems they remain that way. Getting bribes and kickbacks for the re-paving projects.

The upside of being California's South of France/Provence that speaks English instead of French is there's so much money pouring in. People have good cars, fancy $100K cars everywhere. I saw so many Audi A8's, Teslas, Dodge Chargers, new Corvette Stingrays, various european supercars including McLarens, Ferraris, and Evos and Suby WRX STIs everywhere. Some of them were even driven properly, but I don't know for how long. Like I said, the roads are utterly ruthless. Many had lousy surfaces so full independent suspension is crucial or it will kill you. The roads are better back here in the Sierras. Straighter and smoother. I think the local civil engineers must be competent here. And not on the take.

It sure was interesting seeing so many really expensive cars, clearly well maintained, shiny, and very new. I wonder what the owners did to earn the money to buy them, and if the people they did it to lived? Not being so young or naive anymore, and having worked in businesses I know that there's WAY MORE WHITE COLLAR CRIME than I ever imagined. So many people wearing suits and ties are essentially serial killers who are less emotional about their crimes that those in prison, and get away with it in the name of profit. Bad people. And they get 22 year old hookers to ride in the passenger seats of their McLaren MP4-12C through the Sonoma Valley Wine Country and make appropriate cooing noises because of the money and the rumble of the engine. I couldn't live in my home town. Even six figure households are poor in Sonoma County.

It was interesting driving through and seeing how much had changed, and how much hadn't. And I still like the fog in the mornings. I grew up with fog, and its very pleasant to the skin. And I still know how to drive the roads without getting killed. I expect that will stay with me forever. But I am not moving back to that place without family reasons or a plague wiping the place out. There are too many people, too many jerks, crowding the place. Its great for tourism, but that's all it is. Once it is built up, the contractors will have to scrounge for remodeling jobs. And once they've found a niche in that, eventually the houses will get as nice as they can before the real estate bubble bursts, something it seems to not have done yet. $700K for a 1200 square foot hovel from 1960 on a street as busy as a freeway with no yard? Pass. No my home town does not make sense. Even fog isn't worth that kind of housing price. And the roads have too many cars driving badly. The politics are crooked. The newspapers are run by militant communists, the kind that plan death camps for re-education, very Pol Pot motivated, and I can only see the stupid when I look around. It does not make sense.

How Legalized Pot Is Turning Liberals Into Conservative Small Businessmen and Gun Owners

I live in a rural Sierra county which stretches from the heavily wooded foothills in the West to the Nevada border near Reno. Interstate 80 and Highway 49 and 20 run through it. There's a lot of oaks and pines and deer and bears here. There's a couple rivers as well. This is the boonies. Around every corner is a surprise. Sometimes that surprise is a bear. Sometimes its a meadow. Sometimes its a gold mine, abandoned when it shut down. And sometimes its a pot garden with a startled hippy reaching for a war surplus rifle to stop you telling someone what you just saw.

North of the South Yuba river is dope grower country, though there's lots of dope gardens everywhere there's tree cover to hide it. Dope became the primary occupation in this county because the electronics industry got shifted to China under the last three Presidents, and caused massive and total unemployment. The poor had the choice to commute into Sacramento for $10/hr and two hours a day on the road, which is quite expensive in fuel and not very much money for all the trouble, and still competing with a million other people with a shorter commute and lower living expenses. $3.50/gal gasoline destroyed SO MUCH of America.

Once you get north of Nevada City, roads get slower and that commute turns into four hours a day on the road instead of two. It becomes too far to commute. Pretty much everybody on the North San Juan Ridge, aka The Ridge, is growing dope instead of driving to Sacramento every day. And many have permits to do it legally, but those who don't can get them retroactively and backdated because the local dope-doctors who prescribe it have the morals of a snake and its a legal loophole that prevents arrest and confiscation. The sheriff, whom I know socially, finds the situation infuriating since the state law violates the Federal law, and he has to enforce both of them while still facing re-election. North San Juan is a 30 mile by 20 mile section of wild territory with gravel roads, no public utilities a little way up, no shopping. It is wild land. Most of the people there are squatters on either BLM or National Forest, which is why BLM has armored cars. Your basic hunting rifle can't shoot through the armored car the way it can a cop car or SUV. And all the pot growers have rifles to snipe the thieving growers who are preparing to invade and rob the grow once the dope ripens in September. Thus the growers are all heavily armed.

So what does this mean? Well, dope growing does not qualify for Federal agriculture subsidies. You are on your own. While the risk of arrest is almost gone, you still hide what you're doing from the neighbors and you still have to physically guard the plants. Whatever you have heard about Burning Man being a free drug party, the drugs aren't free. That's a place to sell dope. Large amounts of it. Its a big event for sales of bricks of the stuff, but I expect the cops like to stop them so perhaps they do their selling in such a way that the showy RVs waste the DEAs time at road blocks.

The better place to sell bricks of dope is the Bay Area. The ridiculously brave and foolhardy dope growers carry it to the Bay Area dealers, in Oakland or Antioch or Vallejo or Dublin (Dub-sack is a $20 baggie of dope) and sell for their annual profit, which they live on and grow the next crop with. Getting cheated in the deal teaches lessons about politics and I promise you, no dealer in business wants to give stuff away after suffering in a tent all summer, baby sitting a pot garden and carrying buckets of water by hand out of the Yuba River canyon, several hundred feet below. Not a warm and fuzzy communist joy luck club.

They do a lot of business planning then too. I loan out lots of books on building cabins and repairing RVs and tiny houses to the North San Juan growers. Trimigrants partner up, many of them gay, and buy old RVs with their shares and live out of a 30 year old wheezing Winnebago they manage to get up the road into the boonies where their garden hides. They buy "hydroponics equipment" to help their grow, not realizing just how much energy that needs and the noise of generators and water pumps all attracts attention from the neighbors. There's also land owners who rent their properties at a higher "no questions asked" rate to growers and get a share-crop of the dope in exchange for denying others access to the property. Lots of nasty behavior there. Double crossing, murders, revenge arrests, confiscation of the crop. The black market runs on trust, but everybody involved is evil.

Growers who survive the first naive summer start wearing camouflage so they are less obvious resting or working their garden. Camouflage clothing is one of the obvious identifiers in public when they come down to Grass Valley to buy food and pick up a few books at my library. Some, oddly enough, read the classics. Yeats, Walden, various classic plays. You'd be completely surprised at what people read while watching pot plants grow for four or five months. Most of these camouflaged people have bulgy jacket underarms and overhanging shirts, so are carrying handguns on them. Many look quite suspiciously at everybody around them while in public. They expect to be mugged by other growers or trimigrants. They know those people are ripoff sh175, homeless addicts and losers. The trimigrants started showing up in the county in the second week of May, btw. It is planting season.

Local pot growers may have gotten into growing dope because they liked smoking it and the cool parties that dope buyers throw with the loose women and the groovy music back in college, but eventually the loose woman files a paternity suit because you were the richest of the men she slept with and she's consistently denying your right for a blood test to see if the kid is yours (and that's not good enough. You need a DNA test to be sure, and $1K is cheap compared to $150K in child support payments over 18 years). I never had to go through that myself, being socially awkward but one hears stories about women who sleep around and lie about the father for money. The kid becomes a suicide or a murderer later on.

Anyway, the camouflaged paranoid hippies are carrying guns and do it because people DO try to mug them closer to home. And its really just a matter of time before there's more shootings on the Ridge. Keeping what you earned is a Conservative value. Giving it away is a Liberal one. Every hippy with a gun is a conservative, falling into it because its the only way to survive Manson-family trimigrants. Charlie Manson would totally live in Ananda commune and murder hippy girls and dump them in the woods to be eaten by the local cougars. If he'd been less showy he'd still be out there. Which is why I think his copy-cats still are. But only hippy chicks die and they aren't missed. There's always more showing up from the city.

It is odd, to me, how the growers expect everybody to pretend they aren't obviously armed, and how they can hypocritically vote while being squatters on someone else's land, and still collect food stamps and disability and whatever else they get from the govt. They eat boiled ramen and read Yeats and plan for a cabin and a fence so they can sleep better, and some are even smart enough to build greenhouses and pay to have a well dug so they don't have to deal with hoses to the river. The really successful ones have new cars and eventually stop wearing camouflage but they have a certain sideways glare they never lose and the gun remains on their person at all times. And the more successful they become, the more people they have cheated and murdered to get there. Don't think your dope isn't covered in human blood and exploitation. Its just as evil as the cocaine in Colombia. Only you can forget about the death and pain in Colombia, and you can't ignore the poor up here. You have to see them around town.

This is Obama's economy. This is his legacy. A pity that the economic losers continue to vote Democrat.

Wet Summer

Summer in California is typically very dry. We are cold-monsoon type climate here, meaning it rains in the winter months, not the summer. Usually. The trouble is, and this is where my studies of the last ice age comes in, we used to be a place that got rain (and snow) year round. The storms that hit the PNW used to hit here, alternating with hurricane thunderstorms out of the Sea of Cortez (Mexico). When a hurricane breaks apart after hitting land, it spins out thousand mile arms of energetic cloud, which forms thunderstorms WAY UP HERE, slamming into Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and drift over the top of the Sierras to drop a bit over here too.

We've been in a weird pattern all month with those sorts of storms forming and flowing, plus there's been moist air from the sea filling the valley, then accumulating into thunderstorms over the sierras starting around 4000-5000 feet and dropping rain and hail on the high country. I'd read about this type of weather and understand its fairly typical for Sierra summers, very different from the Coast Range which merely get fog in the summer, not thunderstorms or rain. Different weather here in the Sierras, which run parallel to the coast range, only with a valley between them.

We were warned as kids not to trust the weather in the Sierras and told to always carry a jacket when hiking because it was possible to get a blizzard on the fourth of July in the Sierras and die frozen on a hiking trail. This is a KNOWN weather problem, nothing new. A fairly significant thing to know, considering that white people have only occupied the Sierras for the last 155 years. We only got here with the Gold Rush. Before that it was quickly crossed and forgotten, and before Gold, nobody cared about California since all it offered was beef cattle and leather goods.

I suppose I should mention that I've noticed some upsides to the stupidity of the California govt.

1. For one thing, the state is running out of water because they refuse to do critical maintenance on the reservoirs. Those need to be cleaned out before the silt plugs them up and they turn into a series of waterfalls. 
2. They're spending billions on a bridge between Oakland (which is like Detroit) and San Francisco (which is like New York) without the valuable businesses and much more expensive public utilities costs. Why? The governor also conned the state into paying for a train from Los Angeles to San Jose, but is building it to stop everywhere along the way so its super slow instead of fast and thus pointless. The train was supposed to be a bullet train, an express that was as fast as flying, going up I-5 in an hour and a half. So much for that plan. So it is doomed. 
3. The governor is also building an underground water tunnel from the north side of the Delta to the South side, in theory so that it will save the delta smelt (fish) but it won't. It will suck them in just like the Tracy pumps do and kill them, same as ever. Only they'll be doing it through another set of pumps that can be plugged up. This is a stupid plan. 
4. The governor allowed the banning of fracking in counties which have oil bearing shales underneath them, which will essentially end energy supply in this state. The oil is there, but laws are never overturned in California, and can't be removed without a 3/4ths majority. Whoops! That never happens. This means that California residents had better be able to buy an electric car for $85K (each) or ride a bicycle. The buses and trains are going to stop running since there will be no diesel fuel and natural gas is a benefit of fracking, but that was banned. 

The consequence of these acts of stupidity is Los Angeles and San Francisco bay areas will be abandoned eventually. Delivering their water without a way to power it economically is doomed. It will soon be cheaper for San Francisco to use a nuclear reactor to desalinate water for the city's very rich mansion residents and ignore the poor than try to maintain 250 miles of canals from Hetch Hetchy reservoir. California is going to end up mansions surrounded by feral wilderness. A place for the very rich. Even the poor need drinking water and jobs, but with the infrastructure maintenance largely abandoned by this governor, a man who should know better, this is doomed. 

I mention this because I notice that Kim Stanley Robinson has made a series of books about California getting wrecked by "climate change". That doesn't mean he's a True Believer. Scifi writers are people who can consider an idea for a story without believing in it as "truth". Its an idea with a market you can sell to, so him writing about worst case scenarios of climate change just means he's selling books and making money for a temporarily popular topic. And that's fine. The library where I volunteer puts Al Gore's scifi novels in the Non-Fiction section, but they put Bibles and the Quoran there too. I understand his "truth" series are being sold as burnable trash in many states, cheaper than firewood. His novels in a good wood stove will burn for a couple hours. There's another idiot who very publicly lost his mind. So anyway, KSR wrote some books and I haven't read them. Few scifi novellists will put in the effort to really learn a subject before writing about it. If the climate changes back to ice age pattern California will see summer rains and winter rains and snows, and nature will come charging back. It still won't be enough water to fill the reservoirs in Oakland, mind you, and still won't be enough consistent rainfall, not at first, to offer much to a human population. Hell, if it gets up to 100 inches a year again, that will kill the crops in the Sacramento Valley and end agriculture. The grapes will rot, so the vineyards and wineries would be abandoned in many places. And the old people would stop moving here because the sunshine will be clouded over. They'll go to other places, maybe even buy into Baja resort towns with heavily armed guard perimeters and deals with the Mexican army to stay out. 

In the California context, I think that summer rains will slightly help our drought. And the reservoirs aren't full yet, but we'll have to wait 15 years for the next drought to actually remove the silt, and summer rains brings thunderstorm based wildfires from the lightning strikes. That also brings more silt into the rivers. One of the things I disagree with the Jefferson State movement is their objection to CalFire clearing understory brush to prevent wildfires, since understory brush is called Ladder Fuel. Non-Californians don't care, but that's a big deal here. Ladder Fuel leads to Crown Fires, were are very bad and kill entire forests in a day or two of burning. They kill people too. Crown Fires are supposed to be rare, because in nature, summer lightning fires burn forest undergrowth every 2-5 years, which is often enough to prevent the ladder fuel from getting big enough to reach the crown. These fires burn slow and low, over weeks, and the places they burn sprout with new growth that is edible for the deer and is good for the land. The local indians used to do this labor themselves, clearing brush, and taught the gold miners how when they showed up. This practice continued into 1920, at which point Democrats cut their budget because California always votes Democrat anyway so why spend money there, right? There is every reason to vote Republican in California because that's the only way to get spending here. And preventing wildfires is something all Californians support. 

Yesterday morning was clear, but by afternoon I was hearing distant thunder and the clouds built up at 4000 feet, just east of town. They didn't show up on radar, but you could see them with your eyes. Today the overnight low was 60'F, which is summer temps, and we'll possibly see 80'F today. And probably 90'F down in Sacramento. And that's good. Its nearly June, after all. Summer gets serious in June. I might even ride my bicycle to the Library one of these days, if I feel ambitious. I think this is going to be a wet summer. I am okay with that. 

Gum Drop

I've been watching Agents of Shield every week. Its my one concession to television. The finale saw the nerd girl eaten by a black rock that turns liquid every 5 minutes in the last seconds of the final episode. Tough luck. What comes back from that might not be in shape for a date. Probably able to kill inhumans or fight wars, but probably not still have XX chromasomes or want to cuddle with nerd boy. Pity. We spotted the death flag, and then reminded ourselves this is Whedon so of course he'd reverse the flag, and he did exactly like we predicted.

After all Whedon did an entire show for seven years that takes place on the coast of California and never once mentioned the fog, never went to the beach, never talked about the strong west wind that rips through the area, and most of his fans were unaware that Sunnydale was Santa Barbara. As someone who grew up near the sea, you don't miss something like that.

The other opportunity missed in the name of drama is the girl Skye. She now has the ability to make earthquakes, controlled quakes. Like she's the ultimate subwoofer. She should totally hang out in clubs and make the building shake with the music. It would set off seismic detectors, but it would still be pretty hilarious misuse of powers, especially since she could be the ultimate Drop. Thus why we think her name should be Gumdrop. Or just The Drop.

The final interesting discovery is the Chinese woman playing Agent May is a Yinzer, who went to Carnegie Mellon U in Pittsburgh, my buddy's alma mater. He wants to see if she can still pull off the accent.

I suppose this show was a lead in for Captain America Civil War, which is about mutant registration and its rejection by patriots as morally wrong. But that's not even being filmed yet. So it kinda ends in a weird place. I wonder if they'll have more of this series someday, or if this was enough to keep attention up for the various Marvel movies?

End of Semester Pondering

I did my last final yesterday and have finished my first semester of librarian school. I have another year of this to get the AS degree and certificate, but I'll be starting my Masters next Spring if all goes well. I don't expect to get a serious job at the library with only the Library Technician certificate. You need a full MLIS to get paid a living wage, one that covers rent and food, and a car payment. I do want to replace my car eventually. I bounce between the cheerful fun of a Ford Fiesta STI (turbo) because it is small and fun, or the more complicated combination of an Airstream trailer, a puller truck, and a 350cc motorcycle on a rack. Most of the places I've been looking at working as a librarian are in snow country. I look at those places because people like me live there, and tend to be more sane than lowlanders.

Figuring out whether to have a little car that's fun to drive and deal with house rental costs and moving from one to another with a 1500 pound trailer on the back, with my stuff inside, is probably the right answer. As I reduce my stuff and find ways to get down to proper minimalism, it becomes easier to be properly mobile. You can fit a big library onto a PC and the Cloud (servers), which is less stuff to carry when you move. I don't need a huge bed because its just me, so I'm settled there at least. Insulating a trailer or RV and setting up the heaters on the water and drain pipes is important too, since that makes year-round living possible. The bigger problem is safe hookup locations, with people who aren't malignant and evil so I can be there and not get robbed.

Pure mobility rather than stay and get abused by an employer, that's what I learned from my last decade in the Bay Area. People are scum, and they hurt each other because they enjoy it. Why stick around? Get in, do the job, get paid, leave. That's the answer to evil human beings. If you stick to that creed you can avoid the worst of them, who like to get their hooks into you before they up the ante. If you don't stick around, they can't accomplish as much evil on you. All they can do is superficial things. And then you leave and they'll find someone else to hurt. Its human relationships that cause the most damage, after all.

Something California teaches us is that if you stay here, you are asking for it. Whatever it is. Nevada is pretty awful too, though the views are better and the population density is lower. I don't put my faith in finding a "good community" because I already know that having people in it means you'll find nastiness and economic factors offering the excuses for the evil that grows there. Its never the direct cause, because the cause is people themselves, but its an excuse. People are nasty because they like to be. All contrary statements are self delusion, or the efforts to sell something.

$100K and a fair bit of room in 29 feet. Do I need this much space?
How much is sanity worth in year round living?

I need to keep looking after my Dad, and that's forcing me to stay close to him. I can't be super-mobile with an RV until he's in a home, or has someone else to look after him. If I have to work at a library within commuting distance, then I do, but that's at least the opportunity to buy an Airstream trailer or RV and fully renovate it from the frame up, complete with doing proper PV panel roof and water heater and cleanout valves so I can actually do the maintenance on it to keep it clean and habitable. From what I've seen, letting your trailer get dirty drives you insane, so keeping it really clean inside, and a comfy temperature, is crucial to living in one year round.

If I am careful about my renovations I can distract myself from the various far-left politics that mire the local libraries in trouble. I can build a beautiful place to live when I am finally free to use it. I wonder if my neighbor would rent me a parking space in his spare garage? He just might.

Well, I have more semesters to work through, and another school to apply to for that Masters degree. I need to keep thinking about this in the meantime.

SNAFU: The Outcome is in the Title

This week's episode of My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected (SNAFU) continues with the theme of Hikki realizing he's screwed up at least twice, and having to live with the consequences and wondering if there is anything he can do about it. The books show there's some compromise coming, but that's not the same thing. Solving a problem is different from having healthy relationships, as much as those are possible in a high school. Some of the most important lessons in life are learned in high school, and the trouble with Hikigaya is he learned them already. The people around him haven't, and what he knows to be true are hard to deny in the face on nearly constant reinforcement. The trip to Kyoto got nasty comments from the popular kids who just want to maintain power over others for their own comforts and amusement. The anti-date with Orimoto in Full-Bitch mode was perhaps meant to show solidarity, but whose idea was that? Haruno's? Hayato seemed pretty angry with the whole effort and the comments from the bitches didn't make him feel better about women. What was the point there? Telling Hikki he is worth more than he thinks is useless. The election goes wrong thanks to lousy planning by the former president who SHOULD have told them what was up but failed. So Yuki is hurt, Hikki is doubting himself, and Yuigahama is confused in the middle. That mess continues, and this sort of agony is typical in post-high school relationships and never ends well. Even knowing the outcome of the xmas party planning committee arc isn't going to fix their relationship and I still get the feeling that the entire series is going to end with Hikki even more bitter over being forced to interact with these messy kids, more convinced he was right in the beginning, that Youth is an insult and a lie. I found the text online. Here it is: 

Youth is a lie. It is nothing but evil.Those of you who rejoice in youth are perpetually deceiving yourselves and those around you. You perceive everything about the reality surrounding you in a positive light. Even life-threatening mistakes will be remembered as single page proofs of your youth.I’ll give you an example. If such people were to dabble in criminal acts such as shoplifting or mass rioting, it would be called ‘youthful indiscretion.’ If they were to fail an exam, they would say school is not only a place for studying. Their pursuit of ‘youth’ excuses even distortions of commonly held beliefs and social norms.Under their discretion, lies, secrets, crimes and even failure are nothing but the spice of one’s youth. And in their corrupt ways, they discover something peculiar about failure. They conclude that while their own failures are generally a part of relishing in youth, others’ failures should be shot down as just failures and nothing more.If failure is seen proof of one’s youth, isn’t it strange not to consider those who fail to make friends as experiencing the height of their youth? Not that they acknowledge that.It amounts to nothing. This is simply opportunism. Therefore, it is a sham, full of damnable lies, deception, secrets and fraud.They are evil.That is to say, ironic as it is, those who do not glorify their youth are the truly righteous ones.
In conclusion: Youth, go F&&& yourself.

This was the opening essay in the opening scene of the first episode of SNAFU. And what got his teacher's attention and forced him to join the service club and suffer further proof, episode by episode, that he is right about people.

I think that at the end of this series Yui and Yuki will be broken hearted, Hikki even more alone than before, and everybody even more angry at the tragedy of their own hypocritical greed. High School is nasty. It isn't something one should miss. I think his teacher may not be evil but instead incompetent. She THINKS she can reform him through exposure to frail humans needing help, but instead each person just confirms how debased they are, and it makes him feel more cynical about them. Her efforts are making him worse, or more realistic. I think in psychology they call this "confirmation bias" actually. The concept of objecting to life experiences contrary to your wishes is delusional, however, and is also bias. Whatever the case, he's going to end up alone and even more bitter for trying.

Jefferson State Recruiters in Town

So the Jefferson state recruiters came to town and gave a short informal talk at the county supervisors chamber on Tuesday. They are trying to convince the voters in this county that we would be better off.

While initially I felt positive about the potential in separating from California, they have not developed a viable economic plan. Bland assurances always set off the warning bells and mine are ringing rather loudly now. And as was pointed out in the ensuing debate this county is better off than the rest of the poor counties to our north and west who want to form Jefferson state.

It looks pretty unlikely this county will leave California and join Jefferson state, and I'm not sure that Jefferson state is rational about its economic plan. I'm pretty sure they aren't, actually. Taking 33% of the tax base here is more than all the other counties combined because they are just that poor. Realistically speaking, if you are going to form a state you NEED to know what everything costs, very specifically, and any cuts need to be listed, as well as what you're going to do about them.

If Jefferson state is really just a cry for help, as "Keep It California PAC" puts it, wouldn't the energy be better spent documenting and publishing the specific ills to shame the governor and legislature into doing something useful about it? The individual counties DO have valid grievances and the state isn't fixing what's wrong either. The big problems are that the counties in question are victims of being agricultural in a time of drought, and drought hurts California pretty badly.

The catch is that the drought might be ending this summer. It is MAY and we're getting snow up the mountain from here, for the last 3 days. The wind is icy and damp, very much like a normal February. This is the opposite of WARMING. Its more like what you'd call "COOLING". MAY, and snow. In prior drought years it was in the 90's and 100's this time of year. Just saying. Despite the usual weather patterns of snow falling into the Blue Canyon gap, up where 20 and 80 join, above Bear River. And if the drought ends, there's suddenly jobs for all the farmers to plant crops and most of the financial support behind division ends and the entire point of the exercise evaporates.

It is somewhat unfortunate because those counties, and this one, would benefit by spending the taxes on things with more local value. People are poorer. That's not going to be fixed immediately, but once we get rains again things will improve.

Bicycle Through The Apocalypse?

Well, not exactly, but while bicycles are the coming transportation choice, post affordable oil (because the current dip in oil price is nearly over), the roads that they rely on are going away. So the fancy bicycles like these?

These are going to end up as historical markers, in museums or possibly used in townie races. Real roads are going to become like this:

Narrow, gravel, overgrown with grass, bushes, heavy brush, and possibly with waiting cougars that see people as a meal to consume that just pedals by, gasping and slow. Gravel roads like this as the future. And in this future, which is the present in about half the roads where I live, mountain bikes are the right answer. At this point, I ride on slick tires because they are really fast on smooth pavement, but I hung onto my knobby tires for the future when having those will be crucial again. The trouble with olduvai gorge model of human civilization is you have severe drops in technology, very abruptly, then things mellow out again. A road like this can wash out in one nasty rainstorm, and landslides can erase parts of the road, and culverts can fill, overflow, and the road gets erased, leaving an empty culvert there eventually but the road just fragments above it. That's erosion in the real world. Stuff grows in, stuff collapses, unnatural shapes get overgrown and disappear. While I totally see the real value of Enduro motorcycles to climb that stuff and cross huge distances of these kind of crappy roads, if there's no fuel, they are dead. This is why I still insist that having a mountain bike is the sane preparation for our future. Not guns, but a mountain bike. If you need guns, you are living in the wrong place and kidding yourself about it.

My mountain bike is a steel frame. It lasts and lasts because it is not carbon fiber (so it is not worth stealing and doesn't crack), and has no suspension. It takes a lot more skill to ride it, but the frame is not taking away from my pedaling either. That's a major flaw in mountain bikes. Since the suspension frames flex mechanically when you pedal, something like 15% of your energy is wasted by the frame, thinking its going over bumps. So you're 15% slower than you would be, and 15% more tired. Also, those bikes are heavier due to the suspension components. People correct this by going to carbon fiber frames and aerospace hardened aluminum, which does not do well exposed to common silt like you find on dirt roads. The bearing surfaces of a suspension need to be covered or they get wrecked, and even then they have "operating hours" which is not the same as "days" or "weeks" or "months". Hours. This is problematic unless you happen to own a machine shop that can make the parts or can stock a lot of them up for use. Tricky in a post-apocalyptic scenario. While it is possible that the period of time, of the fuel emergency, may be short, a few months or a year before fuel comes back, it is not wise to bet on this. Much like the essential failure of gun fanatic survivalists who buy more bullets than food and own complete libraries of survivalist movies from the 1980's, you might still face a time where unpaved roads and washouts make them impassible by car and a bicycle is the smart way to cover the distance. In the local canyons that is largely the case. There are gravel roads within the city limits of both Grass Valley and Nevada City. No kidding.

So with these issues and limitations, mountain bikes remain the best choice when roads fall apart. You might even be able to outrun a bear, if you know its coming and you aren't going up a hill at the time. I have considered the front suspension which helps with the nasty bumps, and a disc brake because those work in wet terrain since standard rim-brakes fail when mud gets on them. This means you can ride a mountain bike when its wet out, or on seriously muddy roads. And that's a good idea. It is a lot easier to buy a mountain bike now and get all the fitting and adjustments worked out while parts are available than to wait until there's suddenly no fuel and the commies are saving it for Herr Fuhrer's motorcade. Easier to get a bicycle now, work out what accessories are actually useful, and develop the riding skill. I don't mean go nuts and commute to work daily. Around here that's a nasty climb at least one of the directions, but you Flatlanders have it so easy, so go nuts.

I like that there's many options for bicycles, and that riding rewards strength and endurance. The Amgen Tour of California, pictured above, went past my house at 45 MPH, at the start of a 120 mile day with strong crosswinds of damp delta breeze coming through the Golden Gate, off the Pacific. From here to Lodi is a really seriously long ride. I would find that exhausting and its hard to imagine. Today they're doing a leg through San Jose, and good for them. If this race were with mountain bikes they would be hard pressed to do 30 miles in the same time. You have a go a lot slower, and be more cautious in the corners since gravel isn't known for its grip.

Having the bike and not needing it is better than needing it and not having it. If you don't have it and need it, you either walk or you pay someone to carry your groceries, whatever they charge. Weight being an issue, that can get very pricey, and you gotta eat. It is possible for there to be no fuel, yet still have an economy, still be bill collectors and utilities working. You don't get a free pass because gas stations are empty, suddenly. You still have to get to work and pay your mortgage, even if the mailman comes by with a bicycle or goes back to walking. Real life is hard, and getting to work is your problem, your responsibility. If you don't show up, you don't eat. You get your house repossessed, you get evicted into the street. So think about that the next time we see a huge increase in fuel price, or you change the TV station rather than listen intently to why Iran having nuclear weapons is a bad thing. Are you fit enough to bike to work? If you had to bike to work, would you keep your job? I wonder about these things because I'm often thinking about the future, as a scifi writer should, and its hard to turn these harsh consequences into humor. It needs to be, however. Terry Pratchett has died, and there's a need for humorous scifi and fantasy that doesn't suck. Dealing with poverty is our future because Iran's nukes WILL lead to nuclear war in the Middle East, and radioactive glass doesn't keep our cars on the road, maintaining our comfortable lifestyles of the last 70 years. Our civilization may have peaked, but we still have to live on after the fuel and the roads go away. Our kids and grandkids need us to keep it together.

Tour of California

They just whipped past at 45 mph and were gone again. An exciting minute. They are really fast and it was around 10 minutes from the start to getting here, about 6 miles away, and up a decent sloped hill. These guys must train super-hard to reach that kind of fitness.

Special Agonies of SNAFU

I've been reading the light novels behind SNAFU, trying to understand the implied subtext in the current season that's so much more complicated than the previous one. The first two episodes are a story arc where the hero is asked to solve a problem for two people who want opposite things. And he does this, with the encouragement of the two girls he's in service club with, after a couple days of dates in Kyoto, considered a romantic city in Japan. Its full of history and architecture and temples, so people go there on vacation. Schools also do trips there, and in this case, its the setting for potential romance, and foiled romance, and failed romance. This is important because all the weight of this situation comes down on Hikkigaya, the unfortunate hero of the story. And its not very nice how he's the one to humiliate himself to solve everyone's problems, and then he's blamed for the solution working. It never should have happened, but this is an obligation culture, where the very symbol for "people" is one figure LEANING OVER another. The abuse is implied, right in the language. He's been right, from the very beginning, that people are horrible monsters. They even call him a monster of logic. And his classmates resent him for this.

It's really sad how Yui, a girl that's almost certainly based on a real girl the author knew in high school because her actions are too varied to be a purely invented character, likes Hikki, acts like she cares about him, even acts like she might love him, but we know, as the audience, and from Hikki's point of view that this is a temporarily high school feeling that she'll get over. Women don't love, or if they do, not for long. Whatever feelings Yui expresses to Hikki, he's smart enough to realize she will change her mind soon enough, and these feelings, even her tears, are just momentary experiences girls have. She's not going to stick around when it matters. Its just high school. EDIT: Even moreso as I read volume 9 do I see this to be the case. I suspect that the initial essay in EP 1 S1 about youth being a lie? I think he was actually referring to this specific situation with Yui, because its entirely possible the entire series is referential to that essay's rejection of people. I don't think that Hikki is going to get a happy ending here.

This leaves Yukinoshita. She's pretty, and knows it. She's arrogant and distant, and runs this service club to help people, but it mostly just makes them dependent and grateful, and for what? In the books, after the Kyoto fail-romance and the anger over Hikki solving their problem by playing a role, they deal with the student council vote. Its in the books, and an unconventional solution, and it backfires on the club. And Hikki is left feeling more cut off, and feels actual regret over his solution and the long-term outcome, for the first time. At this point in my reading I'm not sure this is going to get better. Much like the characters in Golden Time, things can get worse, but they probably won't get better. Continued efforts to spare the feelings of the girls results in Hikki dealing with even more irritating problems, and a Rental American (tm) with a taser or cattle prod would be completely justified. Maybe some duct tape so a certain idiot would be unable to talk.

If I met Hikki, if he was a person, and we had a translator, I am not sure I could offer him any real and useful advice to his situation. He already knows that high school is hell, which is a good baseline. He's going to get out of this prison soon enough. And then he's off to college, and can hopefully avoid making any friends and enemies there by using his skills to keep his distance, which is what he wanted in the first place, and maybe have any easier time of it. Things aren't going to get better with people. I can't tell Hikki's character to stay positive because that's a really cruel lie, and its wrong to lie to children. Hikki has come really far to understand these things, and his popularity as a character in this book series indicates a LOT of Japanese people, millions of them, agree with his assertions. The entire point of the series seems to be to justify his initial essay as right after all. Youth is a lie.

I really think that SNAFU has been an important series for this honesty that's so incredibly rare in Japanese media. Maybe the culture is finally moving on past the violence and the ridiculous optimism. I wonder if its too late to matter? Japan is the first place to literally have a quadrillion dollars in debt. Its 100 quadrillion yen, in case you wondered. It was just in the financial news on Monday. Ain't that a thing?

I still feel like I should be rewatching the episodes with the scenes where Yuki's sister turns up, because she's so political her insults are deviously twisted and hidden contexts and subtle meanings. She even mocks Hikki for being perceptive enough to recognize that other's motivations are evil. This is something she knows to be true because her Dad is a crooked Japanese politician. Bribery in Japan is not a scandal. It is SOP. It is normal behavior.

Plotting Novels

I have plotted out the general points for two novels. One is longer than the other. I plan to stick the characters from the first into the second, to illustrate points about how lifestyles have changed, and how expectations from civilization (and these are expectations, even conceits), have changed. It is good to do this sort of thing. I have enough plot there for these two books and a friend of mine thinks I should create a dollar a month subscription setup for readers. I am not convinced I could get a following like that. Its a wonderfully optimistic idea, mind you, but I'm a Pessimist. Things always get worse. That's how life is. Anyone who says different is selling something.

I'm almost done with my semester of classes and need to finish up a few more projects, cataloging being the most annoying of them. I have learned that cataloging is currently done in a stupid way. I'm definitely from the "get it done and post it" school of thought.

The thunderstorm on Wednesday night turned into clouds and scattered showers on Thursday is now clear and breezy today. There's going to be a formula 1 race in Barcelona on Sunday, and there will be qualifying Saturday. I've driven the course on my Xbox many times and its rough on tires because it is smooth and fast but has long and sharp corners so they get pretty damaged when you try and pass people. The best place to pass is a long sweeping turn, since most cars driven by the AI hug the inside of the turn there. If you can pass there, you can win. I'm curious to see how these hybrids do on this course, since braking overheats their batteries, causing the rear brakes to fail, locking up the fronts and wrecking cars in really dangerous ways. Honestly, the new hybrids are quite dangerous. Dad is right that they should lose the electronics and go back to V8 and V6 turbos. That removes 200 kg of battery weight and means the drivers can eat a meal sometimes.

Anyway, better get back to my studies. Intellectual property quiz and an essay on the same. Sigh. Done soon, at least.