Russia Bombs US Allies in Syria

US president apologizes. Because he always apologizes to foreigners. That's his "thing".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11900853/Putin-request-for-use-of-Russian-troops-in-Syria-approved-live.html

So is this the start of a much more complicated relationship with Russia?

Tesla Model X, $132K

So the first one hit the road for its first customer, for the not-bargain price of $132K. It is hard to take Tesla seriously when their cars are so expensive, and still require brass rubbing to recharge when you exceed their range. Yes, charging stations are being built, but you can't drive one to LA without stopping for 19 hours to recharge in Merced or Fresno. Good luck with that.

There's also the problem of limited Lithium, though if you only build a couple dozen cars a year, which is what Tesla is doing, and promoting themselves as "awesome" according to Elon Musk (apparently an egomaniac narcissist according to psychologist reports) but are really just a more expensive Nissan Leaf with a higher snob factor due to price. The Gigafactory in Reno is mostly going to ship batteries to China, not go into cars here. And some of the batteries will go for hybrids for Ford and GM, which is going to be their primary job, not making Tesla cars, even the Model X. In the real world, a 5000 pound car that costs $132K had better be made by Bentley or Rolls Royce. When its merely the level of your average Honda Accord LX or EX trim? Meh.

Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Years ago, about 25 of them, Neal Stephenson was a member of the online association of the Mirrorshades Group. I joined that online group around the time he left to write full time, and his novel Snow Crash came out shortly after. Jim Butcher trolled the group, asking about whether mixing magic and a modern setting might be  a good idea. We weren't so sure, but he made it work. Pat Cadigan used to belong to the group, and her novel Synners sparked quite a few novels, including Mona Lisa Overdrive and SYN, which got made into manga and anime in Japan. Bruce Sterling posted to the group from The Well, and his novel Heavy Weather ended up being about 75% of the plot in Twisters, which James Cameron did NOT credit him for. I hope Sterling got paid for that on the quiet, at least.

Stephenson has two distinct periods in his writing. The early tight, hilarious punk period, in which Snow Crash is his best work, with the best prose, and the neurotic boring period that followed it, in which way too many words say not nearly enough for his Baroque Cycle. I am not sure why he did that, and why there's no serious editing to fix that into something readable. Maybe someday that will happen.

The irony of getting worse is that the wonderful prose depicts a place that's more like reality today than anybody ever expected. It was meant to be highly improbable, and thus funny, but its almost how things really are, if this culture had failed in the exact wrong way. It is wonderful prose, very silly and filled with the passion of pizza delivery to burbclaves. Burbclaves almost exist, as a sort of better staffed and guarded gated community. Few people pay for staffing, much less get them armed legally, and get special laws for their territory so those are enforced with bullets rather than mall cop radios. A gated community is pointless if it doesn't have proper enforcement, and the gate is wide open, as they often are. Also, if you let drug dealers in, your security system is screwed. Drug dealers have frequent visitors, only there for about 10 minutes, at all hours of the night, and gone again. That's how you can tell. Several places I've lived had neighborhood drug dealers. Sigh.

I think America has become most of what's in Snow Crash because we've run out of energy trying to live the American dream and instead people fall back into poverty and debt and feudalism, worshipping whores in coordinated pantsuits and voting by racism. We are exactly what the Founding Fathers feared we would become: a mob of competing laziness demanding raises for ourselves though socialism and pandering. And there's not much to do about it but keep your head down and hope that if the shooting starts, they aren't shooting at YOU. Snow Crash was meant to be a comedy, but we do have old ladies coding while listening to punk rock from the 1980s. Their tattoos gone blue and wrinkly. There's no upside to seeing that. The old nasty drug hags from The Ridge are like that. And they think they're superior to the Squares with day jobs because they've spent the last 60 years high. In a way, the world we live in is worse than Snow Crash. We're a very grim and ugly place, but at least the air is pretty clean, and they still put out the fires. I think that Vladimir Putin dreams of putting the USSR back together, recreating the Czarist Russian Empire, with him in charge, but the population there doesn't want it. And they're tired, just like we are, and not interested in patriotism or death. Putin will eventually get sniped or blown up and that will be the end of the Russian Empire.

The audiobook for Snow Crash is good, btw. I am listening to the narration and think the actor is quite good. Reminds me of an older Wil Wheaton.

Handy Western Carbine

A Carbine is a rifle that shoots a pistol cartridge. When the Assault Rifle was invented by Ze Germans after research into actual shootouts and recoil, they created the progenitor of the AK-47, which Mikhail Kalashnikov is incorrectly credited with. This was a long process, in point of fact, and the US Cavalry had a version of this 75 years earlier with the .44-40 and the .38-40 carbines. So FU Russia. You weren't first. Not by a long shot. The USA also came up with the small caliber supersonic round first, with the 6mm Jorgensen, a 30 Krag necked down into a 6mm bullet, used during the Boxer Rebellion. Worked, too. There was even an insert device that would let you shoot a 6mm assault rifle cartridge in the bolt rifle that was semi-auto, a huge advantage back in 1900 or whatever it was. In modern terms, the 223 is a fun plinking round, but is not very good beyond 200 yards on armed insurgents. A replacement was invented after several deaths in Afghanistan, called the 6.8 SPC. It is a .30 Winchester (not Magnum) based on the .30-30 without a rim and a much higher pressure of 55000 PSI, like military ammo, but necked down to a 277 bullet. This is important, because this round is like a small, Americanized 7.62x39 from the AK-47, only in a smaller round that goes further. The 277 is an American version of the 7mm which is .284 inch, btw. I spent a lot of time researching this. Way more than most people would, but I was studying to be a gunsmith at the time. The 6.8 SPC is interesting because it is a short round, like the 125 grain bullet in a 310/311 in a 7.62 (misnamed) AK 47 round. The actual bullet is the same diameter as the Enfield rifle fires, and the 7.62x54R Russian (rimmed) rifle round designed by Remington for the White Russian Czarist army right before the Bolsheviks killed them all in 1917. They were angry. It was going to happen. Technology convinces people they can win. That round fueled the Mosin-Nagant rifle. I have one of them. Its not a terrible rifle, but it isn't very good either. I would happily trade one for any .308 caliber sporting rifle, for instance. The round has similar ballistics to a .308, but isn't as fast. The bullet tends to be closer to 220 grains, which ruins its ballistics. A 125 grain bullet in a 7.62x54R is 10 pounds of felt recoil and a killer accuracy at 300 yards. Which tells me more people who own a .308 rifle should experiment with a 130 grain .308 bullet and see if they can't make their wives and daughters frighteningly accurate at the same range. There's no points for missing. And all you get from missing a target is a "snap" noise. Same noise no matter what caliber. I worked "the pits" so I know.

This brings me to my point. If I had to do it all over again, I would have bought a Weatherby Vanguard in .270 Winchester and called it good. That's a nice pointable rifle with a Monte Carlo stock and cheek weld. You put a GOOD scope on it and practice with the round you feel comfortable shooting. Like a 130 grain boat tail match bullet or pro-hunter from Sierra. Get good and comfy. And never leave it. A good rifleman will shoot the same rifle and round and hit stuff reliable. A flexible one, like me, adapts to many rounds and recoil energies from many weapons and adapts to their limitations. I did that, and I have this knowledge forever. However, a single accurate rifle is valuable too. So if you don't want all the recoil or you have a teenager or a wife to shoot a rifle for you?

Simple. A short action chambered in 6.8 SPC, with a bolt rifle. 5 rounds is plenty, realistically in the "shoot and scoot" model described by the US Army sniper manual. You shoot and you scoot. Works for hunting too. The CZ company had one chambered for .223. So get one chambered for 6.8 SPC. It is a light carbine rifle, with good machining, and the right weight, that will handle a good bullet/cartridge that can take game and snipe targets. This is the right answer for most users.

At shorter ranges, I really liked the video of the Glock 20 converted to a 10mm carbine (above). That was a cool carbine, and would be very useful against things like black bears and cougars. They are mostly an issue to peoples pets and their trashcans and for vegetarian women who insist on running while wearing earphones along trails KNOWN to have cougars there (and mountain bikers too), but not so much normal people like me. I eat meat, so I sweat visin which scares herbivores and other predators away. If you eat meat, so do you. I would call that visin chemical the biggest downside for serious Green Berets types, because they have to become vegetarians to avoid scaring game so they can hide properly. In any case, a 10mm carbine would be really useful up to 150 yards.

Notice how the bear just stalks forward? That's your clue it wants to eat you. If you don't have a gun, you are screwed. They run up to 40 mph, and they can shrug off most pistol and many rifle rounds with only minor irritation. You have to aim for the nose because you will miss into something vital if you're lucky.

I have noticed that we never see anything positive about the Winchester 94 repeater rifle chambered in 357 Magnum, which is really odd. The round is common, the rifle is cheap and handles easily. It SHOULD be a good one for plinking and the round is well suited to a carbine... yet I never hear of anyone using one. Why is that?

Huh. So there you go. This SHOULD be a good carbine as well. And the ammo is cheaper than a 10mm. And you could probably shoot .38 special as well, since its the same bullet, just shorter cartridge. I suspect I'd want to put a holo sight on that, or a 2x variable on it, close to the barrel. A 2x scope can be fired eyes open and your dominant eye will be able to use the crosshair. I have tested this with one of my other rifles and it is true.

I have personally ENJOYED the peep sight and crosshairs for the M1 Garand rifle, one of the club rifles I shot at Lincoln Range, years ago when I was still into target shooting. A nice rifle, using CMP ammo so it wasn't too brutal, and the action was interesting. My Dad shot one while he was in the army, at Fort Ord in Monterey, California. Their range is in the dunes, between Highway 101 and the ocean. The ruins are still there. He said it was a really cast iron biatch to keep clean around sand, and the marines hated how it fouls with mud and powder, and its a 200 yard rifle, despite the cartridge being 30-06, due to tolerances. This is still better than the AK-47, keep in mind, and hits a lot harder than the AR-15, but wars are fought with checkbooks and with the low bidder. Not with the best equipment. If we swapped ALL our troops rifles with 6.8 SPC rifles, the war would be over in a couple weeks. Maybe a couple months. That round has 600 yards of useful range, not 200 yards like the 5.56. I like the 5.56. Its educational, how finicky it is. You learn a lot shooting and reloading for it. You learn how un-fussy middle calibers around 7mm and .30 caliber are compared to 5.56. You get educated by failure. This is valuable to any marksman. I learned a LOT by reloading for .223.

In any case, the above carbines are probably a good idea, up there with the classic pump 12 gauge shotgun. Try to remember that when you miss with either, the round keeps going. If it goes into your neighbor's house, you are legally liable. If you kill someone with your miss, that's manslaughter. So be really careful rather than stupid. Practice, and keep your cool.

Weekend Supermoon and Sunday Drive

Had a good weekend. Blood moon was last evening. Most people saw it, lots of pictures online so I won't bother posting another.

Did the library thing on Saturday. Came out to warm Fall weather, orange sunlight from faint traces of smoke far away. Lovely. Sunday watched the F1 from Japan, not a super-exciting race but nobody died and there were no serious wrecks, so that was good. Mercedes won again. Either they are cheating or everybody else's engineers are just incompetent compared to Mercedes. They are much faster than everyone else and the other drivers are competent so my suspicion of them cheating is probably right. After we did the usual bacon and eggs, and a short hike around the neighborhood. Then I came back and finished my homework. Afterwards we decided to take the Porsche out for a drive in the country, up highway 20, but only to the Sierra Discovery Trail in Bear Valley, near Lake Spaulding.

Walked the short trail and its silly signs, and enjoyed the water spilling out into Bear River, which the park follows. They have warning signs about sudden level rises, as it is creek small when low, and small river when high, like it was when we visited. There's even a waterfall. Afterwards we went about 250 yards to the South Yuba River, which goes into a canyon that the Bear River misses. The Bear River eventually follows the southern border of the county I live in, near I-80, but the Yuba River goes north, then west, then down to a lake before spilling through the Yuba Goldfields and ending at Marysville, where it used to cause huge floods in the Spring. The Yuba River provides most of the water supply for the local pot growers, is highly contaminated with sewage and some mercury and arsenic, and contributes to the overall insanity found in the local hippies. Sigh. We also visited Fuller Lake and stared at this fishing lake before returning home. That car is really fun at 45 mph. The throttle is so responsive and the car so light you can make it accelerate and apex every turn without getting dangerously unstable like most cars do. And you can do this fun thing at lower speeds so you don't even have to break the law or go very fast to have fun.

I spent my afternoon reading and staring at the Stevenson Project plans for a type of Day Sailer boat called a Weekender, which I am gaining an appreciation of the more I look at it. I still want to do experiments with a homebuilt board sailer with bow-keel type angled daggerboards. I have visited many lakes that are quite shallow and would be interesting to fiddle with boat experiments. The Weekender is slightly weird looking.

Its around 17 feet long, and 500 pounds, and sort of a scaled down sloop sailboat. I could tow a boat like that behind my honda, on a trailer, though my Honda wouldn't like it much. It would be like carrying 5 people in the car, after all. That said, this is a clever design.

 See how small it is? 

Here's the assembly steps. Build your keel, then attach the plywood with glue and screws. All the plywood goes on bent, making it both curved and under tension. This makes it prestressed and extra strong. As it comes together you would then epoxy both sides of the wood to make it both water tight and incredibly durable. While there is TECHNICALLY a cabin inside, I wouldn't sleep in there. Its a place to stow some camping gear or luggage or a cooler. This is a DAY sailer, meaning you use it during the day. I can easily see using a carbon fiber mast instead of a wooden one, and setting up the jib boom so you can adjust it from the cockpit. At only 17 feet long, you can even setup the boom to be higher than your head so it won't whack you. The math is interesting. It would be fun to take out onto Lake Tahoe with Dad. Or my neice or nephews. It is completely unlike their prior experiences.

I do like this design. For the larger lakes, it would be fun. For the smaller ones, a used Sunfish or this other boat, the Wing Dinghy has potential. Its cheap to build from thin marine plywood, and the thinner wood would let me cartop it, which is much lighter than a trailer.

This is a 12 foot version of the International 14, a popular model in the EU on which the Laser is based. A Laser is a fun boat, and easily available used, but it is unnecessarily heavy at 130 pounds, mandatory weight. I want something about 40 pounds less than that so I can car top it. That points me at the Classic Moth.

My problem with that is I won't want an open transom (put a board across the back end) or have to wear a wetsuit when sailing on a warm day. Screw that. I'm willing to put up with Stays (those lines that run from the boat to the mast) because then you can adjust your sail and raise and lower it, and the weight of the Moth is only 75 pounds, which is fantastic. That sort of lightness is easily placed on my car roofrack and taken out for those shallow lakes and sailed around for an hour, then picked up again and removed, no hassles with boat ramps or fees. I like the curves on this boat. Its very simple and ergonomic and light. You can't row this, or carry lots of cargo and a second person onboard would need to counterbalance you and sit in the right places, but it would be a good boat, at least as good as an RS Aero 9.

At $8500 and too new for used boats, this carbon fiber and fiberglass wonderboat is amazing, and only 80 pounds rigged and ready. But its a boat you sail wearing a wetsuit and being so light is tippy as heck. They are promoting it at West Coast Sailing in Portland. The used ones will turn up in 10 years, probably. I don't want to spend that kind of money on something that's eggshell thin and likely to crack when grounding on a rock. For some of the local lakes, a rowboat or kayak makes way more sense. Sardine Lake, for instance.

This is Sardine Lake, at the Sierra Buttes, at the north end of the Sierras. It is all downhill north of here, once you get past Gold Lake. This is used for trout fishing, and freezes with several feet of ice in the winter. The trout get huge, around 3 feet, and are really the landlocked Rainbow trout-version of Salmon, called Steelhead. I don't like the taste, myself, but anglers like them. The smaller trout are the ones to eat, but only after they've had months to just eat bugs so they don't taste like bait. Lately, all the trout taste like bait so I suggest not eating them.

Something I like about sailboats is you don't have to invent reasons to get in the boat, like fishing, which is mostly an excuse to hold a rod in one hand and stare into the distance while you drink beer with the other one. Not that beer isn't great fun too. I love a good stout or porter, myself. Lager? Meh. Belgian white? Bleah. IPA? There are good ones. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a very nice ale, with a nice balance of hops. I suppose a day sailer would be a good place to stash a cooler and sip a beer as you gently circumnavigate a lake for the day. Downside is if I drank more than one driving up that curvy road and then down the curvy highway 20 would be dangerous. So, sensibly limiting oneself is key.

And I certainly wouldn't fish in Scotts Flat, since the water is contaminated with mercury. Still, it is recreational to sail there, and I like the humor value of regattas, and the economic value of being able to park my boat (and trailer) there as part of the club fees. We'll see. If I sail the Sunfish to its full potential next Spring and Summer, I might be satisfied.

I'm pretty sure that any librarian in this area needs to connect youths with recreation and the library as a source for making recreation better. Its also important to convince the local college to offer courses in Documentary film making (using things like a GoPro Hero camera and teach editing and narration), as well as materials manufacturing of stuff like carbon fiber and machining so the toys (and bicycles and motorcycles and boats) can be built and repaired.

I've also been reading through a book I borrowed on small wooden boat construction. Building Small Boats by Greg Rossel, Woodenboat Publications, Brooklin Maine, copyright 1998. This book is journeyman level woodworking with general descriptions of a lot of boat building techniques for serious wood ship construction. While these are technically "small boats" they're probably several thousand pounds of wood and takes a huge amount of effort to build. Planks are heavy, and take a lot of effort to shape, trim, align, etc, compared to marine grade plywood which weighs a fraction as much.

Skerry under construction

Skerry finished hull

Skerry with sail

This region is a little far for commuting to Sacramento for work, but people do it. And they are getting poorer when they do. Wages are frozen or falling, thanks to inflation, and the price of gasoline is a major expense. When you think about this area rationally, you realize that mass production is a bad idea. You can't be competitive because the cost of getting materials here makes your product more expensive. However, small scale construction of luxury goods makes sense, plus this is a recreation area so manufacturing to take advantage of local expertise and testing means that luxury manufacturing makes sense. Thus the guy with expensive 4WD popup RVs, one every couple months, is working in the right place. Right up till his heart attack kills him. That's what hypertension and cocaine will get you. But I digress. We ought to be making mountain bikes here, for the serious hills. And dual drive motorcycles. There are shops that do serious Rubicon trail mods for jeeps and other vehicles. One of my neighbors runs one. Why aren't there small boat building companies here? We've got a local lake, and a bunch of other ones. There's a trailer manufacturer around 10 miles down 49. Mostly utility and horse trailers, but they sell. That skillset leads to making Teardrop trailers, and trailer rentals. There's some boat sales and RV sales in Penryn, which is next to Granite Bay, which borders Folsom Lake. Normally Folsom Lake gets used for bass fishing and water skiing, but it could be used for sailing too. Right now its very low due to drought. Once it rains properly it will return to full size.

Another market that needs exploitation is motorcycles and motor scooters. There's one place that sells them, but their markup is severe so they sell fewer than they might. If they offered markDOWN they'd sell a lot of them. Vespas and Piaggios and Honda scooters. Shouldn't bother with 49cc models, however. They are pointless. Can't even climb the hills. And the twin cities are on stair step hills, with a big ridge between. Everywhere hills. If a local shop were modifying and improving motorcycles to operate better here, such as upgraded brakes and appropriate gearing to climb hills and extra lights for visibility under the trees to oncoming cars, more people would ride, and the more people who ride, the fewer accidents people have. Especially once you realize that a motorcycle is more fun ridden SLOW rather than fast.

If you need to go fast, join a racing club or build a race car and participate in official events. Or just get a car that's closer to the road so it looks faster. That's how perception works. Or you know, buy an Xbox and drive their Forza simulator. Its pretty good, and you can get a chair that rumbles or moves, depending on how authentic you want things. In any case, luxuries can be as expensive as your market can bear, so carefully adjust as needed.

Finally, I think the locals should be making stuff to sell to tourists. Penn Valley raises llamas and alpacas, and make wool from them. They sell in local shops for big profit to yarn snobs. Good. Same with local junk jewelry, artists, wood workers (sculptors and cabinet makers). Real jewelry too. They sell through galleries on Broad Street in Nevada City. And that's fine. When something sells, they make the profit and share with the gallery.

The old furniture store that closed really ought to be a Vespa dealership, run by the Grass Valley Cycle Shop by the Save Mart grocery store. If they had a sales room displaying Vespas, and offered free delivery in northern California so a tourist could buy one and have it turn up at their house over the next week? That works. That would sell. For many people, a Vespa is a romantic thing, like an old car or one of those wooden power boats from the Italian Lake District you sometimes see driven on Lake Tahoe by the very rich. Scooters really ought to get free parking at the college, so people would have an excuse to use them. Sierra College is missing an opportunity there. There's no downside to increased enrollment.

The local college should be teaching carbon fiber construction, 3D printing for lost wax casting of jewelry, fiber making so all the local alpaca wool can be turned into $200 sweaters, and boat building so people with interesting designs can build them and test them at Scotts Flat Lake or up at Tahoe. Why the heck not? It is better than them moving away after they graduate high school. It's the tragedy of this place that only unwed mothers and trimmers stay behind. You have to offer more than minimum wage retail if you want your youth to build a life in your town.

Things Survivalists Get Wrong

1. Roads are going away. Few survivalists understand this. 
2. Water is more important than ammunition. Clean water is nearly as important as water. Get a good water purifier, and use commercial soda pop container because they don't leak like canteens do. 
3. A cookpot is more important than a weapon. Much of survival is about waiting for the violence to run down when the violent people kill themselves fighting each other because they are violent idiots. 
4. Physical fitness requires frequent effort. Get a sport that makes you exercise. And do this often so you aren't a heart attack waiting to happen. 
5. Get used to a wood stove. Operating one correctly is not easy. 
6. Get used to a gas generator. And get solar panels YOU control, going to your fridge backup battery, and shunt the excess into your water heater. 
7. Fill your pantry with food you LIKE to eat, and eat from the pantry every week. Food spoils, so your pantry should be colder to make the food last longer. Watch out for bugs. MREs spoil in 3 years. Canned food loses its proteins over 5 years, but jam lasts forever if the seals don't fail. White rice lacks nutrition, but it is cheap carbohydrates and last indefinitely if bugs don't get into it. Brown rice spoils in 6-9 months. 
8. "Vegetable Oil" is best as a spare fuel source and spoils in a year or two. Canola (rapeseed) oil spoils in 3-6 months. Olive oil lasts indefinitely if kept cold. Use spoiled oil as a source for biodiesel. 
9. Methanol is toxic to humans, but an essential ingredient in making biodiesel so if you get into making hooch (hopefully with a local/agriculture license). Methanol is about 1/3 of the yield when distilling alcohol. Alcohol is the source for making vinegar, which essential to curing meats, canning food (stops browning of peaches), and various sauces that make food taste better. 
10. Spices don't keep forever but they do make boring food edible. Learn to use them and become a good cook. Much of survival is about getting enough to eat regardless of supplies. 
11. It is much cheaper to buy eggs than deal with the hassles and expense of raising chickens. 
12. Do not raise chickens AND pigs at the same farm/ranch. They transmit viruses from bats to chickens to pigs to people. People with both spend more time with the flu. Having both is a serious biohazard. Better to buy eggs and buy hams and bacon from others. 
13. Alternative transportation starts with feet. Bicycles are also essential. I know few preppers who ride bicycles regularly. A commuter bicycle is good practice, and an easy conversion from a mountain bike using slick tires instead of knobby ones. Ride to work once a week, if you can. Otherwise ride around on the weekend for a few hours a couple times a month. This will also give you a chance to fix any issues and get it really comfortable to ride. 
14. Every prepper should own a dual-sport motorcycle, preferably between 125cc to 400cc. 250cc motorcycles with knobby tires. Why? Because these can cover dozens of miles an hour on dirt singletrack trails through the woods or around roadblocks or whatever else the future holds. You need between 18 and 30 hp to make it agile enough. A 9hp bike is too slow. A 4-wheeler is safer, but less able to work on these singletrack trails. 
15. Automatic rifles are a suicide machine. They aren't very accurate and go through ammo too fast, and have feeding and pressure limitations. Don't bother. Lever Action are mostly inaccurate (exception is BLR due to stacked magazine). Marksmen use bolt action. Best choice are middle calibers (6.5, 7mm. 270, 308). If you don't have the range with these, you should be avoiding the target or getting closer. In hunting, many species don't notice you till you're around 70 yards away anyhow, so you really don't need a .300 Winchester Magnum to hunt a deer at 70 yards. 
16. Don't be a Mall Ninja. Most have very nice automatic weapons and lasers and holographic sights and too much ammo, like they're geared up for a costume party, but no water, little food, and no firewood. A real prepper is more like the old folks that survived the Great Depression. Strength in depth, extra food, sensible clothing and doing proper maintenance and exercise. 
17. You can buy a lot of meat at the grocery store, and turn it into beef jerky, for the cost of a hunting rifle and permit and time spent hunting somewhere. 
18. Learn how to cook with eggs and make them taste good. Eggs are the most digestible protein other than milk. 
19. Someday the roads will fall apart, and refugees with lawyers from racist metropolitan areas are going to cause problems where you live. Most of your neighbors will vote to have the sheriff setup armed checkpoints to keep those people out and stop them from stripping your community of food, rape your daughters and kill your sons. Stopping them getting in will save a lot of lives. Be prepared for "travel papers" when that happens. 
20. Someday there will be gasoline rationing, and mandatory (state or federal) GPS tracking of your vehicle. Its big brother, but it is coming. Understand what that really means. And why moving around without a GPS tracker is important. Bicycles and motorcycles will be most able to avoid these. And local ordinances may officially refuse to enforce those kinds of laws. Local law enforcement has better things to do. Rationing is the next step in turning us into peasants with no civil rights. 
21. Forget about heading for the hills. You cannot store enough food to sit out the entire Great Depression, and this time there's no WW2 and rebuilding and loan payments and gasoline to restore things. 
22. Join your community. Become too useful to abuse and discard. This is often very difficult for preppers who got into it because they can't stand how awful people really are. You can't change people, but you can adjust your personal exposure to them, and help in ways which risk you the least, yet are visible enough to establish yourself as a "good guy". When it all goes Local, you won't become an exploited resource that gets raided and killed off "for the good of the community" like the rich punks from the City, or the refugees that manage to get inside the local area before the roadblocks go up. This detail is very hard for a prepper to understand. 
23. If you find yourself wanting to carry a handgun every day, you live in the wrong place. Seriously consider paying more of your income to live somewhere a lot safer. Or change careers/job to a safer clientele or location. 
24. You still need a job. This is the hardest point to get through to Preppers. Even collapse requires income. There will always be taxes. You still need to eat, and shower to keep the diseases off, and you literally cannot store enough food to stay home for 10 or 20 years or the rest of your life. Remember that most of all. You can't just hide in the house. You still need to get to work. You still have to pay your bills. 

Kit Boats

Some of the boats that I've looked up were semi-traditional designs you can build out of modern thin plywood using the stitch and glue method. One of them was a rowboat with a daggerboard well/slot, and a mast mount and a rudder. This means you can sail when there's wind, or row when there isn't. Its a 2000 year old design that was popular in the British Isles, which means England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man, and the various Scottish islands like the Hebrides and Orkneys. It has also been used in Norway and Sweden, and has crossed the North Sea, though I find myself wondering about the sanity of people doing that. The North Sea is shallow and gets really terrible storms and huge waves.

This is a 2000 year old design. You have to admire the simplicity and ruggedness. It is probably quite slow, however. Hard to tell, and its not like the guys selling the plans/kits will say.

Assembling the hull

Racing version, with a sloop sail rig

Finished hull. Note the beautiful exposed wood interior. Isn't that pretty?
I think I would want to put in some seats along either side, however. 

Of course, I can buy a Sunfish, and a trailer to tow it, for less than a grand, used. And I can build a taller mast and sail for it to make it faster, as well as install a railing around the boat to keep the water off, and a longer dagger board to deal with the higher energy of the taller sail. I've seen examples of Laser and Sunfish with modified rudder and winged/lifting keel which will allow the boat to "fly" above the water at a certain speed. I am not actually very interested in that, but such things are possible. This boat is a day sailer, rather than a board sailer, so you don't necessarily get wet while running it, and the taller mast and larger sail area will make it faster than the 2000 year old design and primitive sail setup. They say you row while you sail, adding to the speed. 

Either kind of sail. The more triangular one is faster. 

There is also the Nor'Easter Dory, which is merely 150 year old design rather than 2000 years. This is a modification of the longboat used by Grand Banks Fishermen and Whalers. It can carry 800 pounds. I think if you add up all the things I own, which aren't my car, it comes to around 1200 pounds. So I would need a second boat. Ahem. Anyway, it is also light weight at only 100 pounds for the hull. And claims to be fast in light air, which we get at the local lake. I could see it, though its 17 feet long and will need a trailer to move around to other lakes, I'm pretty sure. All of these would work on the various lakes in this area of the Sierras, as well as Lake Tahoe, which will happily take ships and regularly handles powerboats and steam boats. And it would carry several passengers or lots of camping gear, if I wanted to. 

This is an interesting topic. We'll see about sailing on a Sunfish next spring, after the rains refill the lake and I join the yacht club. It looks like it will be good times. 

8 Dead, 45 Wounded in Chicago Massacre

Video removed

But #blacklivesmatter is silent because all involved were black people, so their lives, apparently, didn't matter. This hypocrisy should have #blacklivesmatter treated suspiciously, as racists just like the KKK or Aryan Nation.

Read the facts from the Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-weekend-shooting-totals-20150921-story.html

This is so disappointing. #alllivesmatter

Novel Ideas

During my hikes and walks I think about story ideas for novels. When I hike at Donner Pass, where the trees are dying from bark beetles and the view goes about 80 miles over Donner Lake and off to the far mountains west of Reno. Visibility gets better when you go further east. The "technology" of Star Trek, which is essentially magic with with gobbledegook to explain it, would be really fantastic for science research and recreation. Star Trek has forcefields and antigravity and micro-fusion generators and food materialization. Now, imagine being able to combine those into say an old-fashioned looking Airstream trailer... which flies from site to site with the aid of a computer and the air-equivalent of Google-cars. Give it a destination it gets you there without hitting anything. So when I stand up on Donner Pass I realize that that sort of flying trailer would let me take a remote location, and let me stay there for a week or a month and just breathe in the view and hike around without having to depend on anybody else? That's nice.

Other Star Trek technology that's useful is I could wear a hat with a force shield so a falling tree branch would not brain me and kill me. Same with the 3 pound pinecones that fall 100 feet off the tall California pines. Those would brain you too. They make quite a sound when they hit the ground. Its like a wooden brick. Imagine a lift belt harness to catch you if you fall off a cliff. It only kicks in if you really fall.

Another thing that Star Trek technology should allow is an exoskeleton with mind controls so a person with a broken neck and paralysis could still walk around, somewhat normally, while the robot brain handled the balancing and movement and maintained medical health of the patient being carried by the frame.

We never see that in Star Trek because its creator was an avowed pro-Soviet communist (Roddenberry) and his world had the Russians win the Cold War. This is also why his series went off the rails with Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise. His stories are too violent. You never see any peace and quiet in Star Trek that something isn't about to explode in the next 45 seconds. What an awful place to live. And that's the IDEAL world of a communist. Sudden murdering death and explosions. That irritated me, and I eventually stopped paying any attention to the series.

Even a total babe like Miss America in a rubber fetish suit wasn't enough to keep me watching Voyager. Though finding out she (+jeri ryan) was a professional chef running a restaurant after-hours made me a fan of her as a PERSON. I gotta respect that level of "respect" for the show that treated her like a walking sex toy, a model to pose and distract fans from poor writing, and to treat her restaurant as her JOB, yeah I respect that. Its a very un-subtle f-u to the producers of the show. Part of the problem with Star Trek is it used to be scifi, but it turned into egos and mania and bad writing.

The other thing I keep thinking about is lakes. The Western USA used to be filled with huge lakes, that supported a hundred million migratory wild birds, mostly going back and forth between here and Alaska, up on the tundra. These lakes, some of them deep, dried up over the last 8500 years as more of the water shifted into the oceans. The current intraglacial epoch isn't especially long, or short, compared to the many before it, and the glaciers always came back. There's a hypothesis called Global Warming which claims that people are emitting so much CO2 that the glaciers won't come back, everything will dry up and die, and we'll wipe ourselves out. This hypothesis is most popular with drug addicts, the elderly, and Democrats, which are often the same person. As a REAL scientist, the evidence for their claim just isn't there. What we DO know is the glaciers always come back, and we also know there's 33 other factors in the feedback loops, beyond CO2, which have a larger or similar impact on climate, so blaming it all on CO2 is not scientific whatsoever. Its a political scapegoat because it is easy to sell to a crowd of ignorant people who don't want to learn more. They want easy answers, and stuff given to them for their vote and chanting and murder-impulses. Star Trek fans, basically.

The thing about the desert lakes is they're mostly dry salt pans now but they don't have to be. Ideally it would start raining and refill them naturally. This is not an idle hope btw. This has happened before. There's even a paper explaining that if Reno stopped watering its lawns and evaporating that water into the air, the water from the Truckee River would be enough to refill Lake Lahontan. It would take decades, but it would refill. Pyramid Lake would first overflow into Black Rock Lake, turning burning man festival into a raft/lake-boat festival. I suspect the attendees would prefer that, actually. More glitter covered inner tubes, less bicycles. I think they would like that just fine. And the real estate moguls and the ranchers who own that land, at least the ones who own the shorelines, would have a field day. That's 3000 miles of coast, you see. That's really huge. Picture all the fishing and wild birds and water skiing and sailboating there. That's serious vacation country. Better than somewhere crass like Las Vegas, which is for crass people and I'm glad it exists. They need somewhere to go so they won't bother me. This is a huge deal. I hope to live long enough to see it.

The other thing is this is so much water that it will provide a basis for thunderstorms that carry the water upslope, onto the mountain peaks and ranges across Nevada, and refill the aquifers up there, giving the mountain sheep, antelope, bears, coyotes, foxes, pika, hares, and even cattle something to eat in the high country. It will also make the state's glaciers regrow. There's one near Ely. There's also places that had glaciers that don't anymore. Those could restart. Getting water into the Great Basin is a big deal because mostly water passes over it too high to fall, getting stopped and heated by raining and snowing on the West Slope of the Sierras and Cascades. The east side gets adiabatic heating (banana belt) effect and dries out instead. The rivers flowing out of the mountains are all the water they get normally, plus snow that falls far enough, and those summer thunderstorms from broken hurricanes. This summer was the weakest hurricane season in a couple centuries, which is the OPPOSITE of predictions from the Global Warming cultists.

I want to write novels about the lakes coming back. I'm not sure how I want to cause that for the sake of the story. I'm tempted to include mention of Paris, Rome, and DC getting nuked by Muslims with Iranian nukes, because DUH!, and not really mention them again, only that the US capital gets moved to Denver, which has its only liberal socialist problems as well. Maybe have the New Madrid quakes so the rest of the nation is distracted by rebuilding and more quakes while the West ignores Denver and just does its own things. Like refill the lakes. Kern Lake needs to be refilled. Same with China Lake, and Owens Lake. If Owens Lake and Tulare Lake were full, that would change things, giving birds somewhere to go. Refilling the Mojave lakes would be a huge big deal, and totally change the environment (back) in the desert. Not so dry, way nicer to visit. more things alive. More farming too. More interesting weather. Rather than relentless heat, there would be thunderstorms, because you need water to make those happen, and water gets moved to mountains and refills aquifers and suddenly stuff can grow up high, and living up there becomes attractive. More towns like Jerome Bodie and June Lake have reason to exist. This matters and would give me several books to write. This is probably a good idea in my early career as a librarian. It is certainly less offensive than being annoyed with Muslims and Catholic communist Popes from Argentina. Fing Democrats. They just don't understand how evil they are. They honestly believe that intentions are more important than outcomes. That's so annoying that I need to write books about something else, to distract me.

Finally, I am researching small sailboat design so I can find the math to understand how to design a sailboat that is light and has the right shape and sail size to "plane", yet isn't as likely to flip over. So far I'm having a hard time location this information. I know that Day Sailers mostly don't tip over, but I still want a boat that is fast enough to get moving and able to handle the 3 foot swells they sometimes get on lake Tahoe. I have a lot more research to do to accomplish this. And I don't want to wear a wetsuit, and I'd like to keep from tipping the boat over because my insulin pump isn't waterproof. So how do I make this happen? The obvious answer is taller sides on a boat like this. And I don't buy the claim that taller sizes on an 80 pound boat suddenly makes that boat weigh 350 pounds. No way. F-u lamers. I can do math. I need a 3D model and might just build one from cardboard, though figuring out the math on the mast is somewhat harder. You want the top to flex in the wind to spill gusts, yet remain strong enough to hold the sail properly. I need more engineering information to accomplish a design that would work.

Fuel Efficient Cars and VW Cheating

The trouble with cars is they are too heavy, so require big inefficient engines to move them around with any speed. The trouble with green cars is they're even heavier, less comfortable, even slower, and require exotic rare earth elements to work so only a few people can actually have them.

When I interviewed at Tesla several years ago I raised the issue of peak lithium and the unfeasability of invading Bolivia just to make enough cars for 2 million people, total. I didn't get the job. A couple years later Tesla was advancing their gigafactory idea and eventually chose Reno for the site, hauling the lithium brines from the only active US mine site (in Nevada) via truck. Brines are not the most compact of substances, and the water in the brine is basically waste product they're hauling, at great expense, several hundred miles via diesel truck. This is better than the 20 thousand miles they were going by sea to china and europe and then japan to become lithium battery packs, but since most of the lithium batteries that will be made at this plant in Reno will be loaded onto shipping containers for China, we won't get the benefit of the lithium here in the first place. And Tesla won't be building many cars. As best as I can tell, Tesla's business model is about collecting Federal funding while making as few cars as possible, and keeping the price at $100K or close to it. There are three of the Tesla S cars in my town, all owned by millionaires that look as smug as Jeremy Clarkson because their vehicle costs as much as a vacation house.

And Prius drivers are so aggressive, mostly due to being very angry drivers behind the wheel of very slow and heavy cars, that there's always one passing you unsafely. This is common enough I was thinking seriously about turning it into a Trope in my next series of novels, about the hypocrisy of Greens and how hateful and destructive Hippies are. My first car was a VW bug. It got 25 mpg. That's not very good. It also had pretty lousy brakes, suspension, and couldn't go faster than 57 mph without dangerously overrevving, and was a road hazard to other cars. The defrost didn't work for the first 20 minutes you were in the car, so it started working around the time you arrived at your destination. This meant you needed a mildew towel to wipe down the windshield, and another mildew towel on the outside, if you wanted to see at the start of your journey. It sucked.

Green cars and the green industry are a scam. They aren't used by everybody because they aren't efficient. If they were efficient, they wouldn't need subsidies or special perks to sell. They would sell because they were efficient. This is why the third world all have either scooters or motorcycles. Those are efficient. They aren't very safe, but life in the third world is short to begin with. I think the northern nations, like mine, are going to drag the last of the oil to us so we can keep driving smug-mobiles as long as we can. Because when the oil is gone, so are the roads and highways and our way of life, with easy travel and smugness? That's all going to end. I expect to live to the end of oil, and possibly beyond that if insulin keeps getting delivered to where I'm living. It is possible to ship medicines around with renewable energy, just at great expense. And people will still move around via bicycle, but it will be mountain bikes with knobby tires, and motorcycles with knobby tires, because we don't have the oil to pave the roads once we've reached that point. And maybe not the natural gas to make the concrete either. It will be mostly gravel roads, and those require even more maintenance but only a fraction of the oil, mostly just diesel fuel to run the bulldozers. That's our future. And its maybe 20 years away. It is somewhat ironic, but the legal attacks on fracking, because fracking is being done stupidly with benzene and diesel fuel contamination, means that the fracking will be done slower, saving the contamination for a time when its foreign invaders from China running the rigs, with bribes and military support, and will contaminate even worse because we won't be able to stop them. The only defense from Chinese frackers is American frackers emptying the oil shale of oil first. So you get some contamination now, or lots of contamination later. Which is the worse evil? I can tell you that China doesn't care other people are human. They've moved past that into institutional psychopathy. They consider EVERYONE competition to be killed when it gets in the way. So if you have nothing they want, you probably won't be killed by them. But if you're in the way when they get here... well, look what they do in Africa. They only build roads to get their mines emptied faster. Then it is left to rot. China is the true Capitalism, the heartless and vicious version we used to have a hundred years ago. China has no enlightenment, and has no use for "human rights". They don't believe in it. They believe in competition, and that competition is the thing you crush to reach your own goals. There is no "fair". No justice. They know better. If you can understand that mindset you can understand why VW cheating is not as big a deal as you'd think, and why the US market crash makes little sense. VW is not America. VW is one company that got caught cheating on "green" cars. Duh. Hippies are evil. It is what they do. Their entire motivation is smugness and superiority.

MOVIE: Ex Machina (Pygmalion)

There's a wonderful greek myth about a master sculptor who makes a perfect woman out of clay. Or carves her out of marble. She's so perfect, and he puts so much of his soul into the work that she becomes alive. And kills him. Because that's how Greek myths go. Its all about the hubris and punishment. Trying always leads to failure and suffering. This explains Greece really well.

Ex Machina is a scifi version of Pygmalion. Its also how Millenials view my generation. If you happen to be a Millenial this movie should embrace or enhance your existing paranoia and hatred to older people like me.

Its also very artsy. Like swedish crime dramas. Filmed in Norway in the Fjords (which we pine for), and on sets with green screens in the background and a certain amount of blue filters, it reminds me of Moon with the soundtrack from the new remake of Tron. All electronic ambient throbbing and minimalism. It works for the story, but its also very dry. This suits the picture, because there's only a few characters so its like a play. More than Pygmalion, but less than My Fair Lady, which is Pymalion's more recent remake in the 1960's, based on the comedy rewrite by noted author George Bernard Shaw, who set that version in London. And nobody died in that version, though the musical gave us a cockney version of Audrey Hepburn singing "wouldn't it be lover-ly".

Julie Andrews did the play in London for years and was banned from the movie role because she was already up for an Oscar for some movie called "The Sound of Music" which came out that same year. They said it would be too confusing to moviegoers. So they hired a blue-blood from Belgium, Audrey Hepburn, technically a dutchess I think? Something like that. And her parents were Nazi sympathizers, but she worked for the resistance, because childhood rebellion. Whatever.

I think this is why the android in the film Ex Machina sort of resembles Hepburn. She's just winsome enough. I think this is a decent scifi take on the ancient Greek myth, and we'll probably see more of these in coming years. AI scares people. The technology to make them doesn't exist yet, but maybe someday. And even then, they might not be stable enough to last very long. Or even very plausibly human. The AI in this story is an android, which is much easier to design for, but silly in computer science. If you want a more complex version of AI, read Neuromancer, from back in 1983. That's an AI to be concerned about. That one is more alien and plausible than a machine in a body that wants to be free.

Everything on Fire

So California is on fire right now. And there's smoke between the trees and houses, right down here on the ground. Had to spend the day indoors because the smoke is so thick.

My brother sold his house in a rural area early this year and moved to a new house back in our home town. The house he sold burned down in the Valley Fire yesterday. That fire went from nothing to 50,000 acres in about 10 hours and continues to burn and grow. Some or most of Middletown burned down, though information is sketchy since the disaster is still ongoing. It was a cute little town, in the mountains north of Napa Valley on the way to Clear Lake. Its oaks and grasses there, very hot and dry for most of the year. My brother used to live close to that. I am glad he doesn't live there anymore. It would have been terrible to try and rescue 5 children and a ill wife and two dogs on a single road so blocked up that people were abandoning their cars and doubling up to move away from the flames. Those abandoned cars will be burnt husks now, much like their homes. He moved and saved their lives.

Easterners smirk about this kind of regional annual tragedy (because Easterners are a55H01es), and they just don't understand how we feel about it on this side of the continent. We are a bit clueless about why they build expensive homes in the path of hurricanes, and who pays for that.

Fires don't burn the same places every single year. In the old days lightning used to burn up the underbrush in the forest every 2-3 years, before the brush grew tall enough to reach the tree tops and cause a Crown Fire, which is what we're having now. Crown Fires burn really hot, really fast, and destroy forests. They happen because the lightning fires aren't allowed to burn out naturally. We put them out as soon as we spot them. This has filled the forests with unnatural amounts of undergrowth, which is normally controlled by lightning fires. The cleared ground grows food for deer, which the local indians hunted. They learned through experience to clear sections of the forest by hand, and burn the piles and spread the ashes, which provided the nutrients to get more grass and more deer. Until 1921, the forest service was doing this too, but public policy changed and the "no tolerance" approach to forest fires have created the current annual tragedy.

Also, stupidity. It is dumb to allow trees all over your house. Nice for shade, but terrible in fires. I say this with trees hanging all over the house, but the roof and siding are both fireproof. The deck, however, will burn along with the fence. When the next fire comes up here we'll see those destroyed, most likely. But the house will probably survive.

Until more aggressive and frequent forest clearing happens, fires like this will keep happening. That is expensive, and there really are people who insist that clearing the brush is everybody else's problem, not theirs. People can be really stupid. This is why Darwin Awards get cheered.

Heat Wave and Post Oil Life

It is traditional in California to have a brief rainstorm in early Fall, around the end of August or beginning of September, followed by about 6-8 weeks of heat. We call this Indian Summer. That is its name. It is not Native American Summer. That kind of language gets you shanked and lit on fire.

The sun comes up later and the shade, with the breeze running through it, is warm but not unpleasant, however the sun is scorching hot. This is important because the difference in heat and shade makes the weather very schizophrenic, and the breezes pick up during this time to get stronger and colder and sharper off the Pacific. You start to notice them more, even as the sun burns. You can take mid-day walks in this, if you stick to the shade. I mostly walk in the early morning, before the sun comes up, because as soon as the sun hits you, even at 7 AM, it burns with heat. You really feel it. We also get winds from both directions. Right now there is downslope wind out of Nevada, over the top of the Sierras. This summer there's been more rain in Nevada than in California, mostly due to hurricanes shattering off the Mexican coast and their moisture surging into the Mohave desert and through Vegas and north to Idaho, or sometimes over the peaks of the Sierra to rain up there. But not down here. Down here we get heated air. Warm winds.

The north coast, from around Fort Bragg north to Canada has been getting rains all this time, and most of the weather that heads for California from Hawaii merely makes clouds here actually rains up there to my northwest. The North Coast, as it is called, is very weird. Its mostly commercial fishing, until the California Aquaduct killed off the Sacramento River delta salmon in 1980 (by Gov. Brown!). California used to eat a lot of salmon before then. There was plenty to go around. But when Brown turned on the pumps it cuisinarted all the baby salmon, killing them entirely. There were no new fish to grow and harvest. All the fishermen lost their boats. That bankrupted all the north coast and central coast fishermen reliant on them, collapsing both areas into horrible bankruptcy and divorces and crime.

The north coast turned to logging, which only employed some of them. Redwood decks were popular with liberals in Berkeley, who hypocritically build their own decks, then joined the anti-logging movement and actually started murdering loggers (spiking trees shatters saws operated by loggers) who cut the trees that built their decks. This really happened. The movement died by Judi Bari blew herself up with a bomb in her car in San Francisco, between hate rallies where she was bragging that it was justified to murder loggers. I saw video of her saying this on my local news, which her followers denied, but it was on video. It was on my news. I saw her lips move. She really did say it. Her death ended the killings. Good riddance. Unfortunately, at this point the fishermen had lost their boats to bankruptcy, and their homes to the logging jobs being shut down by hypocrites and murderers from Berkeley who returned south to a well earned IPA on a lovely redwood deck, content in their hypocrisy. And that's why I hate Hippies. They are murderers. 

The north coast is heavily faulted, being a location where the Juan De Fuca and Pacific Plates meet with the North American Plate and make complicated geology, and seismology. The Volcanoes start north of that point too. The ones south of there are dying out because the Pacific Plate is underneath us and has cut off the lava source. Unless there's breakage of the plate edge, which happens, and would cause huge surges of volcanism in weak spots, as well as new volcanoes all over the place. When a subducting plate (edge) breaks all bets are off. That would be worth studying, provided you moved fast enough not to get stuck in the way of all the eruptions. *geologists gleam*

Anyway, this heat has had me pondering small sailboat sailing on lakes. Most of them are missing half their water so this is not a good summer for that. I am waiting for the rains to refill them, then I plan to join the yacht club, sail their boats and see if I really like it or not. It will be my additional practice time. Sailing is a special kind of fun because it is exercise, but also requires your brain, like driving a car. You need to develop special skills to listen to the wind, to feel its direction and use its strength. This is tricky in the mountains because there's lots of surges and gusts rather than steady blowing, though you sometimes get that too, just to be difficult. I've been reading about Day Sailers and Cabin Cruisers, which are popular boats on the California coast. San Francisco Bay, is HUGE, lots of places to sail in relative safety, though the gales make it more challenging, and the water is both cold and polluted.

The Pacific Ocean is cleaner, though it has a couple odd points. For one, sharks bigger than the movie great white from Jaws actually exist. They eat Sea Lions, which are bigger and meaner than seals. They sometimes bite people. So do the sharks. When a person gets bit by a shark on my coast, they usually die screaming. Only rarely do they live. The sharks here are BIG. 25 feet is not unusual. Jaws was 18 feet long in the movie. They can eat a sea lion whole in three chomps. And sea lions are about 350 pounds. So that's one particular thing about the coast. Another is the water is very cold, around 54'F. That's hypothermia in around 20 minutes, possibly less. If you go into the water, you stop moving in about 10 minutes and die in around 20. Or the sharks get you because they are attracted to blood and low voltage electricity from metals in salt water.

Another thing about the coastal waters is there's a north wind, which makes the water this cold and blows the fog inland. So going north you have to tack a lot. And going south you can go very fast. But the ocean swells also grow very large so the beaches are small, if the exist at all, and wash away without a source of sand, which is why Big Sur is all cliffs and no beaches. Same as south of France. They don't have beaches either. Claiming to sit on a beach in the south of France is proof you have never been there.

Cold water is full of nutrients. Especially dissolved gases. So cold water grows great fish. This is why there are sea lions and sharks. The north wind drags cold water to the surface and physically enriches the water, and that wind can also, post oil, provide the energy to power sailing ships with fishing nets. And rather than spend energy hauling lots of sailors, and their living quarters, you can spend less energy running electric winches and batteries. This lets you have a smaller boat, or one that carries more fish. Prior to steam powered boats, fishing was done with small boats and nets and men. Long journeys to catch fish go back over 1000 years. Cod, for instance, was popularized due to the discovery that Iceland has shoals to its southeast full of cod, which fishermen pulled out, cleaned, and doused in salt in barrels, which they then sold down in London as general protein. They did this, and kept records of how many were caught and sold, since around 800 AD. And this was all done with sails. That is quite amazing.

And more importantly, it is a way forward post oil. When we're exporting fuel for money, and saving the rest so our military can protect us from invaders and pirates and saving lives (fire fighting, air ambulance). Rich people won't pave the roads. They'll live near airports and just fly to their vacation sites. This is sensible if you have the money to protect your family. Hire veterans to run your airport and protect it. Same with the ranches and closed towns you visit at your destination.

Rich villages for multimillionaires, surrounded by ski slopes in the winter, and mountain biking in the summer, 10 miles from Lake Tahoe, a fine and safe place for boating if you have the money. If you have the money. I think Feudalism is coming to America. Inheritance laws support it already, and some families train money making a lot more effectively than others. You get concentrated wealth, and erosion of Federal law through deliberate abuse by the last two presidents means that local rule, and local money, changes the rules in the most important ways. So we'll see more of these, and more mansions with point fences, and veterans with rifles guarding them. Veterans don't hesitate to shoot. They know better. Picture that. That's our future. We'll be in this kind of thing in about 20 years.

Post Oil Age of Sail Reboot

It is important to remember that just because cheap energy is expensive, that doesn't mean all the things we learned when it was cheap are suddenly gone. We have libraries (and librarians) to keep track of these things. Someday I may be running a library that still works when the power goes out.

In the post oil world, SUVs won't be moving around, much less supercars. And with the lights off, charging up your $110K electric car isn't going to happen either, unless you own expensive solar panels and don't mind walking home from where you got car-jacked by someone who objected to you having an electric car when everyone else is on bicycles. Just keep that in mind.

Four masted schooner. 

In the post oil world, coal powered steam engines will mean something again. As will coal powered ships, come to think of it. And nuclear powered ships, too. Those still work post oil. But the most majestic and interesting will be clipper ships, 2-4 masts, plying the ocean but built of modern materials and hauling shipping containers or nets and ice makers in the insulated hold. We'll also have electric winches and computer controls so you can haul more cargo with fewer men to do the work. Higher profits. More efficient. Throw in radios, GPS, and cellular buoys and our coasts can be very productive fisheries after the oil is mostly gone.

While tempting to go the retro-route of Steampunk, we won't be seeing lots of airships, and brass goggles are probably not coming back into style. The types of bicycles we ride now, with multiple gears and upright seating and both wheels the same size... those are staying. They exist for good reason, and their parts are cheap. Penny Farthings flip forward for horrific injuries, which is why the kind we ride now were originally known as the "safety bicycle". Hilarious, but true.

Salmon in Lake Tahoe during Spawning at Taylor Creek.

I have long held that the answer to economic instability is strength in depth. That means filling your lakes with fish, your forests with deer, and your parks with fruit trees (though the bird crap means you don't want a table in the shade!), and improving the soil of your marginal lands and filling every pantry with a couple months of food. This is something California used to do back in the 1970's, but after the "homeless" were invented by President Reagan via shutting down the mental hospitals and releasing the patients onto the streets, many of them dying, some of them committing crimes against innocent people (and kids), the money to maintain fish stocks in lakes and campgrounds worth visiting, with a veteran in an Airstream Trailer to manage it and keep the peace (complete with 1911 for when the drunks need putting down), all that ended and the parks closed and its become the crap it is today. Less than 1/3 of the campgrounds I knew as a kid exist anymore. And that sucks. Those were nice. In the old days you could stop all sorts of places along 395 or 89 and find a campground every 10 miles. Now? Not so much.

Also, and on a side topic, Hobie 16 catamaran, which is famous for flipping over, obviously needs a smaller sail. 26 feet of mast is kinda ridiculous. The person above is using a cable attached to the mast to counterbalance the energy, called a trapeze. This generally means you need a second person to steer but this one has an extension on the tiller, which you can see. A flexible carbon fiber mast to spill wind gusts like the Butterfly (sailboat) does would help the design too, though a 22 foot mast and a sail that's got a lower center of energy (midpoint of the sail in vectors) and a furling sail would help a lot. From what I've seen a Butterfly is like a Laser with most of the flaws removed. And a blunt scow nose, too.

Advantages of the Butterfly (above) are the sail furls, the mast moves, more comfy for two people. Reasonably simple setup.

There's also the Classic Moth, which I like because its beautiful. That has a stayed mast (lines attach the mast to more points on the boat) so the sail goes up and down and is adjustable. This is important because the adjustments shape the sail and help it deal with gusts and odd wind directions. These boats are used on the ocean and bays by people wearing wet suits. I am not interested in wearing a wet suit. I am way more interested in staying dry while sailing. And I'll sacrifice some of the speed for that. And also haul a trailer, since if I join the local yacht club I'll be parking it up there anyway. This avoids the great expense of paying for storage elsewhere. That's quite important, financially. I'm still looking at around 18 months before I finish my Masters degree and can get a serious paying job. Probably down in Sacramento. I really like the look of the Moth, though. Its very pretty.

Boats that don't soak you or flip over are heavier, and have higher sides, with bench seating. I have read they are called Day Sailers. That is probably the kind to have. This Stevenson Project day sailer is a 500 pound keelboat with a pivoting mast. And this trailer has a flat tire so won't be moving very fast. I think I'd see about making it with a kick-up rudder, and possibly replace the heavy keel with dual keel-boards like a shark's fins. Possibly. Maybe not. This is a pretty good design, after all. Something for after I get the job. Plenty of time to consider.