In the Top Gear Special in Botswana, the three presenters show up with very different cars. Clarkson with a Lancia, which was terrible. James May with a Mercedes, which was fine mechanically. And Hammond with an Opel Kadett, which gained hero status during the trip. It had the least power and size of the three cars, and had some mechanical problems (like brakes and electrical) but it had an important advantage: it weighed 1470 pounds, around half the other two cars. It was only 40 HP when new, but the that light weight was its saving grace. Here in America that car wouldn't be legal when new because it would fail the 0-60 time requirement, needed for getting up to freeway speed. To be fair a Beetle would fail too, because they didn't go 60. Mine would hit 55 if you floored it, but the vehicle was pretty much redlined at that point. This is important because the weight of the two bigger cars was a real problem on the terrible road and lake-mud surface of the salt pans in the special. Watch it if you want to understand. Even youtube has this.
The thing about light weight vehicles is they take less energy to get moving, less energy to stop, and feel faster because their light weight means they have less weight to accellerate. This is great fun when driving. The little Kadett is a very plain car, from 1963, but its still fantastic because when you're just tootling along at 35-40 mph it is easy to drive on most surfaces and doesn't take a lot of energy or attention. It doesn't have A/C or fancy electric toys, but its functional.
When Top Gear returns to Africa years later for a Nile and Lake Victoria trip, Hammond turns up in a little Subaru Legacy Rally wagon and its great, right up until he breaks it, and that road broke the other two cars as well. That was again the smaller and lighter car, and it had the fewest problems during the journey. IN the real world, this is also true, up until you start colliding vehicles. Then the light vehicle dies. Heavy vehicles driven badly by murderous people are a prime example of what is wrong with America today, but those same people have to buy a lot more gasoline a lot more often, so they suffer the consequences of their decisions, and moving and slowing the big heavy vehicle also uses more gasoline, meaning they have to spend more of their disposable income on fuel than people with little Subarus. This is also why there are so many little Subarus where I live. They are the eventual revision of the little Beetle with a water cooled engine and more horse power but the same origin: an Horizontally Opposed 4 cylinder engine, just like the Beetle and early Porsche.
What can we learn from this and apply to modern cars? How about buidling Subarus out of aluminum, to reduce weight, and use lots of carbon fiber for body panels, seats (still have the leather tops and padding, just replace the steel frame with carbon fiber at 1/5th the weight), and the doors and hood. You could probably reduce the weight drastically and use the smaller engine for the same speed and better fuel economy. Also, a lighter car doesn't have to deal with so much top-heavy tipping problems, so they can be taller and still go around corners fast. The terrible variety of road surfaces in Africa are unfortunately representative of the post-mining West. We are still paving main roads and arterials and highways, but the quality of pavement is lower than during the 70's and 80's. Many roads have had their paving responsibility shoved lower, to poorly funded agencies and pretend that the govt has made tax cuts, when actually what they've done is screw over the cities and counties. Its evil, not incompetent. Down at our level, on the edge of wilderness there are road that used to be paved, or graded, and aren't anymore and are going back to nature. Here in the mountains there's many roads that are no longer passable even with 4WD. If you absolutely have to cross them you either bring a bulldozer to rebuild the road in dirt, at great expense, or switch to a light motorcycle and use the deer trails. This is dangerous, but it will get you there if you are really slow and careful and wear sufficient safety gear and don't pretend you can carry lots of stuff on a light bike. But that's another topic.
In another couple days, The Grand Tour will be airing their xmas special in Namibia. Clarkson and company will be using dune buggies in Namibia's dunes. This is a fine idea, and while they can be made legal on California roads, few people bother. A buggy doesn't have a roof and can't be locked or left alone in a state where car theft is common. But given time, as roads worsen, we might end up seeing more of them on the road. The public just doesn't care that much about the poor return on our tax investment. California tax payers still pay for racist school programs and don't say a word about Social Justice being anti-white hate crimes. Maybe that will change one day, but I'm not holding my breath. We are much more likely to just buy more capable cars that can deal with worse roads.
Anime has a number of positive traits, and several odd ones, and several bad ones. The odder trait of anime is the ages are wrong. I will explain.
In anime, elementary kids talk like junior high school kids. This allows them to make funny observation jokes.
In anime, middle school kids talk like high school kids. They're still focussed on kiddy school things, but they're also throwing in romance, which is too young for their apparent age. I think this is because Japan as a whole objects to the imposed age of consent rules. As a culture, and in their constitution, Japan has age of consent rules similar to Utah and Mississippi, though they provincially adjust to older. This means that in anime, they often use the high school behavior to offer up the first innocent steps towards crushes and harmless blushing dates. But they're doing this with middle schoolers.
By they time anime depicts high school kids, these kids are talking and socially behaving like college students. They are also physically developed, and there's frequently at least one episode with partial or full nudity hidden with "steam". But they never kiss, because that is illegal pornography. In many anime, telling the girl you love her is a marriage proposal and the story ends there. In Japanese culture, marriages are starting to get arranged at 16 years old, and happen at 18, 19 or 20. Any woman unmarried over age 23 is considered an old hag and treated like a slut by the entire culture. Obviously, if she isn't married at 24, she's running around with other women's husbands and causing trouble. Japan is not in favor of welfare moms. Abortion is free, and having a kid out of wedlock is a major insult.
High school kids act like college students. Silver Spoon is a great example of this. I keep thinking they're in college but they sometimes have to tell you they're in high school.
I think this is why they treat stories about college students in anime (like Moyashimon and Honey and Clover and Golden Time) as stories about adult life, only with work replaced by college classes, which aren't often shown actually. The social side of things tends to dominate the story.
So basically, Japan is telling you their characters are 4 years younger than they behave or look. Its baffling, but its one of those cultural differences. If you find yourself feeling confused, just remember this.
This is a topic that comes up a lot. Steampunk is the growth of mechanical technology around and after the American Civil War, the time when we decided to invent cartridge guns for rifles and revolvers (allowing rapid and accurate fire), steam engines became useful and common, and we haven't yet learned how to do things with electricity. This period of time, considered "gaslamp" in some areas, is also the time of airships and biplanes. Technology was ornate, and since plastic hasn't been discovered yet, so brass fulfills the same purpose for far greater weight. Leather and canvas and lots of buttons are also a big deal, since there is no zipper invented yet. Ornate handmade workmanship is common, which in the modern times of bland ugly functional technology of today explains their appeal. Clothes fitted then, and took a lot of labor to make, also making them expensive.
There have been some successes with steampunk, like the Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Junior. They're sort of steampunk. They have the technology and the punk, with Downey snarking his way through Holmes' lines. The Lost World (same author: Arthur Conan Doyle) had a TV series about a mesa in South America with living dinosaurs, victorians with rifles and tea sets,
The cause of steampunk's failure is similar to what happened to Cyberpunk when the Hollywood scumbags tried to abuse it and turn it into marketing. The punk side isn't represented when corporate interests take over. And the punk side is important.
The other problem with Steampunk is that its originally based on Wild Wild West, a very corny 1960's TV show with a similar appeal to original TV batman. And the same sort of audience. The most serious approach to the topic was called The Difference Engine (by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling), and later followed up by Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson), which was nearly serious. The problem with both books is the Difference Engine wasn't very interesting, and Diamond Age required a lot of technology that is improbable ever existing, as well as takes place in a strange future. Diamond Age is worth reading, Difference Engine is not. Sorry, Bill. It is not your best work. Stephenson liked the topic and switched to historical fiction from the Enlightenment, which is tragically long and dull so it doesn't have a lot of fan. He's famous enough he can publish as-is, but if it had been edited it probably would have been more readable.
So what happened to the genre after these two breakthroughs? Well, the YA writers, who write Mary Sue tramps that are universally described thus:
She's super popular and not fat and everybody likes her and she gets the boy cuz he's SUPER romantic and mysterious and she beats all the bad girls and always has the snarky comeback, because boys are simple and only girls are smart, and ....
Stephanie Meyer and Gail Carriger are big in this problem, and their work is honestly terrible. And it sells, to girls with terrible self esteem problems and probably doomed to be social rejects and either welfare moms or cat ladies. YA for girls is an atrocity against fiction. It's a reminder that girls are vain and creepy and fans of these books would probably not reproduce in a world without Democrat social services that exploit our taxes. Most YA steampunk is Jane Austen rewritten with gears and coal.
The YA writers took the Steampunk themes, ruined them with Mary Sues, and then dominated all teen publishing. And all of it sucks. I'm not aware of a single example in the modern version that is worth reading. Gail Carrigers's Waistcoats and Weaponry makes you want to vomit. Clockwork Girl was straight communism. Meyers' Cities of Glass reviews as more "victimhood tears" remake of Twilight. I did not bother reading either series since they're clearly for welfare moms. I tried Jim Butcher's Aeronaut's Windlass and did not like it. Read the whole thing... but it wasn't good. Sorry Jim. Any setting with floating islands could be written MUCH lighter and WAY more interesting. The need for fog-monsters and this silly magical system does not appeal to me. I think I would write a more interesting setting with better exploration themes rather than monster-wars.
This reminds me that while there aren't good BOOKS for Steampunk, there's a number of good comics and anime which use the themes well. Fullmetal Alchemist, Heat Guy J, Big O, plus some space based versions like Last Exile all use steampunk and dieselpunk themes and visuals and they do them well. Even Avatar Korra uses a kind of steampunk. Steampunk CAN be done right, and I'll write a separate post about that.
In the anime Sword Art Online (SAO), video gamers are kidnapped by boobytrapped VR game consoles which use low power microwaves to directly interface their brains, but can be turned up to literally kill them. They are then forced to play a video game until they die or someone beats the game and frees the survivors. If you die in the game, you die for real, smelling of bacon. Its pretty much a horror story with lots of teen angst and most of the characters die.
In the anime Log Horizon, video gamers similar to SAO wake up in a game setting based on a post-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, and outside the city walls there are random monster encounters, like SAO they can't log out. They are trapped. If you beat the monsters, you get stronger. If you die, you get resurrected at the chapel in the city, but they start to notice that people who die more start to lose memories and become sort of like zombies. Not undead, but less like actual people. Its odd, and they don't understand what is going on. Stranger yet, they have noticed that the NPCs are probably self-aware AIs, and they aren't supposed to be, and the NPCs are starting to have goals and dreams of their own, but when an NPC dies, they stay dead.
How are these two shows linked?
The best fan theory is that the victims of SAO got recorded onto a server (its thousands of people, so SAO was the story of a mass-murder), and characters of Log Horizon are AI recordings of actual people. They're on a server, waiting because an AI is software, not wetware. It can't really die.
The server may have been shut down, left in a drawer or a vault, and there is no indication of how many years have passed before it has been turned back on again. Now these AIs are awake, in their game world, and whomever turned them on is trying to communicate with them, an ongoing theme in Log Horizon. What if the beings who turned the server on are basically Alien Indiana Jones, or the research lab where AIJ dropped it off is and they're trying to communicate with a lost/dead civilization found on formerly inhabited Planet Earth. The simulation and servers might be all that's left of us, thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future. Light Speed is still a limit, after all. Our signals have been spreading outwards since the 1934 Olympics, as shown in Contact, a terrible movie with some excellent scenes in the first part of the story.
Our signals will eventually spread to the whole universe, but the speed limit works both ways and it could be billions of years before aliens get here, do their archaeology, find the servers, fix them, and turn them on enough for Log Horizon to actually take place. The recordings of people have no idea. They're inside a simulation, and they were already gamers so they just think they're stuck in the game somehow and don't wonder about it more deeply. Its the memory loss aspect that is the clue. If you're aliens do you fly to the another galaxy for a couple billion years or do you record AIs of your best scientists into a ship with a 3D printer, arrive at the destination billions of years later, construct bodies and landing craft, and explore using robot probes with AI brains controlling them? Well, of course you would. That's what we do on Mars. Sort of. Someday we'll land some 3D printers on Mars and construct mining gear for raw materials and build all that stuff, including more rovers etc, to enable exploration without setting foot personally. There's a name for this btw. Its Von Neumann Probe. In scifi movies these often turn evil, called Berserkers because its assumed their mission was assigned by a dying civilization that wanted to wipe out all life in the universe, and build enough death probes to insure that. I'm assuming our aliens aren't here to kill us, merely visit our civilization.
So that puts Log Horizon into an interesting position. It could be millions or billions of years in the future. The NPCs might be trying to act as avatars for the aliens with their very different brains, or they may be trying to communicate with the AI players indirectly during their deaths because we aren't hiveminds, and that could be really alien to the aliens. Whatever the reason, the clues are in the show, and that's why Log Horizon is superior to SAO. Also, Log Horizon is not a teen slaughter fest. Of course, the nature of the game: killing sapient monsters as a form of entertainment might be so horrifying to the aliens that they're still trying to decide if our end was a lucky accident rather than us turning into a progenitor of Berserkers. This would certainly justify caution in communicating with us, and erasing our AI's memories after visits to the moon (season 2).
Fan theories can rock. These are the sorts of ideas which on forums lead to great fan fiction writing, or original stories worth reading. Jon Scalzi has made a career of these kinds of ideas.
Top Gear is a car show, now ended. The guys in it often did challenges with the words "How hard can it be?", which is the English equivalent of "Hey Bubba, Watch this!", which is an actual Darwin Award phrase. One of my classes last semester (semester is over now), was about teaching classes. The upside of this exercise is its meant to teach you to think of things you see as potential ways to get the attention of classrooms of kids, teens, or adults (college) students needing something more educational and interesting than "lecture, reading, report" sort of lessons.
The great thing about this phrase is this was a fine way to introduce examples of really terrible engineering, which they knew were terrible, but made the point by doing it badly, and this was comedy. One of my favorites of these was the Caravan Challenge. These are actually homemade motorhomes, based on really bad choices of vehicle. That was part of the comedy.
So imagine an entry level engineering class at your local community college to improve on this? Form groups, brain storm, and what would you do better?
Use a proper van or truck frame for the vehicle, with a big enough engine. A V8 is a good idea. One with sufficient cooling and the right gears to haul lots of weight. If the top part is wrecked or missing this is fine. Install things like water tanks before you build the rest.
Use common materials for the frame so going around a corner won't tear it apart. In modern times this means either tube steel or aluminum. Either can be welded by a reasonably competent home shop 220 V-AC welder. The frame outlines your living space and provides support for the interior and cover. Make sure it is big enough, but not ridiculous.
Cover the frame with either fiberglass, thin plywood (less common but was a practical option once), and keep the total height below 12 feet. The 18 foot tall example here was for comedy.
Add insulation so it is warm enough for expected conditions where you plan to camp. In the Sierras, this means below freezing, even during summer. In Cornwall, in the video above, 50'F is as cool as it gets. Blocking the wind and a small electric heater should do.
Work out your heater setup, and the battery use if electric, and install the battery and charging so it will work. And make sure the car alternator that charges the batteries won't fry doing this, with a cutoff so it won't overcharge and catch fire.
Work out the propane setup for your stove and heater, if you use it. Remember that expanding propane gas absorbs heat which can freeze up the expansion chamber, creating ice until it seizes. It is common for propane heaters to shut off due to freezing in cold temps, meaning the design is seriously flawed in the real world. Using a light bulb to heat the expansion chamber can solve the problem, but it uses a lot of electricity to work, meaning you need more battery. Sometimes the right answer is not propane, but a smaller pellet stove and a car battery to run its electric system. Keep that in mind.
If you decide to use a white gas stove setup, only do this with good ventilation. The benzene is toxic and the CO (carbon monoxide) will kill you. Good ventilation is a good idea regardless, but it also removes your heat if it is cold. I mention this because it is deep winter and I spent 15 minutes de-icing my car this morning. There was black ice everywhere this morning. Most of that melted this afternoon but if it doesn't dry enough we'll have more tonight. At 83% humidity, I expect more black ice.
Carry enough fresh water for the expected duration of your trip. Also carry enough grey and black water tanks for your expected waste. And setup the thing to be easy to dump without getting dirty yourself, and the cleanout valve/connector is much recommended. If you do this right it is easy to do without getting splashed or filthy with human waste and blue stuff, neither of which is the least bit tolerable.
Seriously consider a prefiltered tank, a filter system, and a pump or boiling system to transfer from grey water and then treat back into clean water. This might not work, so testing should be done. Prefilter tank would be a place to put untrusted water like river or stream water, filled from buckets or rainwater, then slowly treated and shifted into the main clean tank for use. If you can re-use some of the grey water that will allow you to extend your time on vacation before resupply, especially in desert areas like Nevada. Power or heat to do this is the challenge.
Install solar panels on the roof, and batteries to hold the power, with vents so they won't make the cabin explode when the hydrogen released during charging, and heaters on the batteries so they work even when cold.
Also install a traditional gasoline powered generator, a quiet one.
Install an Air Conditioner, with a heat exchanger. This should be simple since they're made for this. Also install a CO and CO2 detector so the heat exchanger keeps the air flow moving to prevent suffocation. If the trailer is too airtight, you can die of suffocation.
Don't drive too fast, and remember to pull over regularly to allow people by.
I'm pretty sure that the above things make up most existing commercial RV's today, especially class C and B types. Despite the video, there were plenty of commercial examples which they could have driven, showing their potential for speed and polite driving. Caravanists don't pull over in the UK, which is why they're hated. They block the highways. Top Gear wanted to demonstrate faster RVs, and failed. If they were a bit more serious they might have succeeded. Winnebago, for instance, has a V10 engine with supercharger or turbo (forget which) that boosts the power enough to haul its own weight up a mountain pass road at full freeway speed.
Climbing over real world passes this is important. While Donner Pass is 7229 feet, there are several passes over 8000 feet along highway 395, which runs north and south down the back of the Sierras. Many caravans and RVs traverse this road during the spring, summer, and fall, and it s a primary route for Snow Birds, the collective name for retired people with RVs who winter in Yuma Arizona (or Florida) and summer in the high country and mountain meadows which are so pretty and peaceful and get tens of feet of snow during the winter months. If you tried to come up with a similar trick in Europe this would be like wintering in southern Italy or Spain or Greece and summer in Sweden.
I am amazed at the whining from the losers of this election. Seriously, either shut up or get the hell out of my country. My people finally yelled "no more!" and Obama is out on his treacherous ass. We will be blaming him and your bad voting for the next 25 years, and we'll even be right. He's scarred and vandalized America during the entire duration of his reign of terror.
And its almost over. The Tyrant Punk is about to be the butt end of the Presidential Porta Potty Library joke.
Biden was really hoping Hillary would get arrested by Comey, but apparently Comey found his own suicide note in Hillary's emails. It caused him to NOT prosecute her hundreds of felony treason violations of the Official Secrets act or whatever the legal name of the secrets law is called.
Obama made Jimmy Carter look successful.
Moving on, things are improving. My semester is nearly over. It hasn't been great. One of the classes was useful. The other two weren't, and the fourth is best forgotten. The problem with teachers is most of them are delusional. They exist in communism. They have no idea how the real world works, and are utterly clueless about real life because they are protected by their socialist tenure contracts. You can't fix what is wrong with education until you end Tenure and fire the communists and lesbians running them. You also have to fire the hippies and junkies and sexual predators of both genders operating there. Schools are too important to allow creeps to run them.
Next semester I'll be taking more practical courses and some programming classes required for graduation. These should be more useful when turning up for a job interview, and getting the job interview in the first place. And while the leftist panic mongers are screaming that libraries will lose their funding because only leftists have been running them for 8 years, what they ought to be saying is "we are going to lose our leftist jobs and be replaced by right-wing librarians who know a library is not a machine shop or drug treatment center".
For the last 8 years, Republican gun owners have quietly carried on despite the abuses of govt that actively hates us. Eight Long Painful Years. We have gotten by, quietly, and kept our heads down, and adapted and survived. It has not been a nice time.
The racists of the left are really ticked off their racist candidate lost the election because the majority did not vote for her. We held our noses and voted for Trump and that is that. So, leftists, what do you do now?
In prior elections where leftists' side lost, the economy dramatically improved because leftists were no longer screwing it up. Seeing that the economy was better run by someone else, the leftists went on to start small businesses like bakeries and wineries and breweries. They learned how to operate a business, and a balance sheet. This is a great use of leftist energy, making and selling things, and far more productive than complaining. Republicans kept our heads down for 8 years of misery under your racist hate monger, and its party platform of racism and hate for black people. Democrats hate the poor, which is why the keep them that way. Now it is your turn to shut up and get back to work. Do something useful.
If your useful skill isn't building a business in a physical site, or you can't stand where you live anymore and think you want to see more of America, do that. There's plenty of businesses which can happen on the road. Truck driving and delivery driving is interesting and rewards people who can do math. There's also outside sales. Selling stuff to people who need it, like selling scanners to hospitals, and arranging payment and delivery and training etc. That makes money. That is useful to people in a very direct way. Far more useful than rioting because you lost, you hypocrites.
Women like to stay in their home town, surrounded by relatives and familiar faces. They're really big on this sort of culture. Many women consider men to be a sort of accessory, and not actually important to their lives long-term. Once they have the house and a good lawyer to seize it in the divorce, that is often the end of their marriage. This explains a great deal about what is wrong with America today.
Men don't care about home towns. Men like fast cars and motorcycles and uncomplicated friendly women. Men like seeing new faces and are more content to live without all the social requirements that women prefer. We find beer more satisfying than women. Men go fishing because their wives are obnoxious on a regular basis, and fish and mosquito bites and freezing cold or sweaty heat are less annoying than dealing with her. There's not much advantage for men staying in their home town. Home towns are for women and raising children.
Two story craftsman home, built by one guy on weekends, with a hammer, nails, saw, tape measure, and level.
Men used to get a job, buy a piece of property, then build their own home on the weekend. It was a called a Craftsman House, because you bought the plans from the Sears and Roebuck Catalog for about $4. That's around $100 in today's money. It had plans and instructions on how to build it with hand tools: hammer and handsaw and square and plumb bob or spirit level. After they finished the house they would get married, and have a family. That was 100 years ago. Before rampant divorce and DNA tests that prove her kids aren't yours. Women want houses, but they won't build them for themselves like they should.
Building a house isn't actually that hard. I've done portions of it myself and even someone with weak arms and clumsy can still do this job. Most of the parts can be bought at Home Depot, Lowes, and your local lumber mill.
Women love to declare their independence, but I have never witnessed one building her own home in the real world. An independent woman should be able to do everything a man can, everything from change her car's oil, mow her lawn, and build a house. The same as men did 100 years ago.
Women insist they are equal or better than men. This is conceited, but they can certainly stop whining and stand up for themselves. Get a job. Save your money. Buy some land. Get some house plans online for a house that will suit your actual needs, with room to house your accidental pregnancy results. Pay for the building permits. Where I live that's $160,000 for the permits alone, which is too much and a great reason to move somewhere else. So don't do it here. But build your house, at least 700 square feet, not this tiny house crap.
A tiny house is not a house. Its a wooden tent, and just as unliveable. At best they are a detached guest room.
Build your house legally and don't miss any steps or hammer in a screw (something I HAVE witnessed women do).
Get the house inspected with building permits as you go so it is legal, and pay the fees and taxes like men do. Every woman should be able to do this job. Stop needing men to pay for your conceits. Pay for it yourself so you can stand up and have legitimate pride. When you build your own house, with your own money and your own labor you then have the right to do what you want.
I am happy that the Hag lost the election. She was evil and utterly unsympathetic. A terrible leader, and a bad liar. With the Community Organizer leaving, America can restore jobs, fix our trade imbalance, and repair a lot of infrastructure abandoned by the Community Organizer for the last 8 years. Remember this?
Dozens of people died. Why did it happen? Minnesota is run by Socialists. Keeping infrastructure repaired is a Republican problem. Democrat-Socialists are all about the pregnant hookers and legal dope. And if you're high, or pregnant, what do you care about working people dying? Right? This is the primary difference between the parties, and events like this are the reason Trump won. Normal people care about this.
I do hope that Trump restores bankruptcy protection and returns Credit Cards and Student Loans into bankruptcy, since that fixes Millenial debt burden, allowing them to start businesses instead of pay for useless educations that didn't provide jobs. Collapsing those banks and scammer credit card companies from all the bankruptcies of those debt agencies will ALSO end credit card fraud, since it becomes the issuing agency's problem again. Bush W caused this problem. It needs to be corrected. And restoring bankruptcy also ends the protests, since most of these disenfranchaised kids are only disenfranchaised because they're in debt slavery. Fix the debt, fix the problem. Besides, those agencies all gave money to Clinton, so screw them twice.
See? Solve this problem. Give them the right to walk away from bad investment again.
The flood of Trump-fearing American liberals snaking across
the border into Canada has intensified in the past week. The Republican presidential campaign is prompting an exodus among left-leaning Americans who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray, pay
taxes, and live according to the Constitution. Canadian border residents
say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors,
global-warming activists, and "green" energy proponents crossing their
fields at night.
"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there
was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said southern Manitoba farmer
Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota . "He was cold,
exhausted and hungry, and begged me for a latte and some free-range
chicken. When I said, I didn't have any, he left before I even got a chance to
show him my screenplay, eh?"
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected
higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed
loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just stuck
their fingers in their ears and kept coming. Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet
liberals just south of the border, pack them into electric cars, and drive
them across the border, where they are simply left to fend for
themselves after the battery dies.
"A lot of these people are not
prepared for our rugged conditions," an Alberta border patrolman said. "I
found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier water, or any gemelli
with shrimp and arugula. All they had was a nice little Napa Valley cabernet and some kale chips. When liberals are caught, they're sent
back across the border, often wailing that they fear persecution from Trump high-hairers.
Rumors are circulating about plans being made to build
re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer, study
the Constitution, and find jobs that contribute to the economy.
In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of
crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus
trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen
young vegans in blue-hair wig disguises, Canadian immigration
authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens
about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in
the '50s.
"If they can't identify the accordion player on The
Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age," an official
said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants
are creating an organic-broccoli shortage, are buying up all the
Barbara Streisand CD's, and are overloading the internet while downloading jazzercise apps to their cell phones. "I really feel sorry
for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them,"
an Ottawa resident said. "After all, how many art-history majors
does one country need?"
Ordinarily, Trump and Dope are not related things, but both passed in the same election here in California. So the Democrats can all smoke dope now that they've lost the election. The big upside of Trump is way more jobs than under Obama and what Hillary was planning, the even if she hasn't yet been charged with alleged crimes of treason and mishandling official state secrets, collusion to hide the mishandling, corruption, and bribery. She hasn't been charged yet, but after Trump is sworn in? I wouldn't wait long.
The thing about recreational dope is there's important local consequences.
Around 25-30% of my library patrons are into growing semi-legal dope.
The new dope law means anybody can legally grow it without having to hide they are. This means all people who want it will be growing it.
This shrinks the market for buying dope, lowering prices and thus money in the industry.
Less money and less market means less the local jobs in dope are about to go away.
Plantation dope in the lowlands will happen now. That means mechanization and even higher yields.
Philip Morris was alleged since the 1980's to have dope plantations waiting for the day it was legal here. Now it is.
Expect a HUGE surge of cheap dope in cigarette stores for over the counter sales.
Dope can now be refined into honey oil legally and used in those e-cigs and sold there too.
Dope seeds will probably be a major sales item at this point. And books on growing it will be big at the library where I work.
Previously, you couldn't ask an employee who was high if they were high because it is illegal to inquire of an existing medical condition and medical dope was legal. It is also illegal to test one person for dope, and testing everyone is expensive. Business owners would either deal with doped up workers or fire them under another pretense.
Locally, many workers were high while on the job. It was obvious, they stank, and you learned not to do business there because they screwed up every job. This drove business out of the local shops and businesses.
Locally, dope inebriation causes more car crashes and fatalities than alcohol, according to the highway patrol.
Statewide legal dope should cause even more crashes. Part of the problem with prosecuting dope inebriation (DUI) is the tests only reveal the user has had some in the last 3-4 weeks. Not in the last few hours. So proving inebriation at the time of a crash is a major technical challenge. Heavy users will share tips to avoid DUI prosecution for dope driving.
Any business interested in quality control will avoid California since the population is high, or can't be proved otherwise.
Taxes here are already really high. Taxes on businesses are punitive. This reduces the available jobs to chain stores and is pushing out lots of other businesses.
Trump will help a lot of businesses but probably not here. Repealing Obamacare will help a lot, but people have gotten used to serious increases in poverty, and we've had 8 years of that, and 8 years of employers abusing their staffs by cutting hours and benefits. I doubt we'll see happy times from this around here. It will probably be a lot better most other places. Just not in California.
I am a scientist. I am an observer of people. What I see I must not ignore, for evidence ignored is tainted. As a librarian, we've been learning about filter bubbles, and how social media harms your access to clean information. Being logged into Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Yahoo, etc, skews any search you do, using your profile to filter results, and this profile tracks you and everything you do, every link you click, and even the ones you don't. Allegedly this is to sell you stuff, but Google started with money from NSA. This is public information, although it is somewhat hard to find these days.
Will I see more evil or less evil when the filter bubble isn't blocking the truth? I think I need to see for myself. Maybe I'll feel a little better about people once I do. Or maybe this will simply confirm my plan to avoid getting entangled with the evil around me, and further remind me to keep my relationships shallow to avoid harm.
There's plenty to distract a Californian from evil news in the East. This is why I recommend ignoring the national news and focus on the local and regional. We are having really nice weather right now. Take advantage of it. I like walking. There's audiobooks on chilly mornings, as the sun comes up over the Sierras. Those are really nice while gardening, too. There's also mountain biking, road biking, and hiking. Those are popular here too, though I DO recommend blinking lights and bright colored clothes so cars can see you in time. I've never been hit by a local, but I do my part to be seen. Some of the local junkies ride wearing black or camouflage and have accidents because of it. Some fatal. So use your brain if you ride.
The Sierras are also a great place for hiking and picnics and BBQ on the back deck. Lots of good places to enjoy that here in the Sierras.
There's twisty roads to drive on, and grilled steak with a good but inexpensive Lodi Zinfandel. Thanks to Cesar Chavez for destroying the farm worker's jobs and convincing Americans it was unethical to eat table grapes. Instead those were ripped out and replaced with wine grapes. Zinfandel was the popular one, and the wineries that replaced all those raisins and table grapes farms that Chavez put out of business ended up producing really good Zinfandel. Zinfandel is a spicy red wine that goes well with pepper-steak, but also hamburgers and BBQ. Here in California those go for around $3-9 a bottle, though you can pay more. I find that around $5 a bottle is the sweet spot for value and quality. It tends to have more variation and fruit than Cabernet, and more flavor and sharpness than Merlot or Sangiovese. It is too strong for chicken or fish, however.
The other sport here in the Sierras is boating. That means power boats, row boats, kayaks and canoes, even sailing. Yes, sailing, usually small boats under 20 feet long known as a sailing dingy. Lake Tahoe is a huge lake, and on a breezy day has sailboats crossing its deep waters. Quite a few sailboats anchor on its shores, and more boats are pulled out or put in from the various free or pay boat ramps. It is over 1000 feet deep so does not freeze in the winter, even if the shore gets piled high with snow and icicles. Tahoe holds more water than the Great Lakes combined. Tahoe has lots of public access, as well as fancy pay-docks for those who want to pay for better privacy and security. The catch is the winds aren't very reliable in the Sierras, and there are days it is utterly calm, so a sailboat would be pretty useless then. There's also days when a storm surges in and it would be dangerous to sail on the lake. Having oars on your boat, and a boat light enough to enjoy rowing, would be a good idea if you plan to use one on lakes in the Sierras.
Lake Tahoe is below the map, to the right side. The above lakes are in and around Truckee.
And there's plenty more lakes than Tahoe, though most are smaller and all are shallower. Between all the Subarus with kayaks on their roofs, or bicycles, and pickup trucks with a camper on the back and a boat trailer towed behind in the various campgrounds around the various other lakes, like Stampede Reservoir or Lake Davis, both of which are known for their trout fishing. A motor or paddle or row boat is great for those.
Grouchy wife? Go fishing.
There's also other kinds of boating, though few people do water skiing anymore. The waters are either too cold or too dirty. Houseboats are great for parties on the reservoir lakes like Oroville and Shasta, being warm in the top foot, and freezing below that. Many boaters in the Sierras and Valley like to fish. More than the classic aluminum rowboat, there's other kinds too. Lots of people have a Bass Boat, which is a dual hull boat with a motor and a swivel seat or two. Those are great for guys who want their lure, beer cooler, fish finder, and use this excuse to get away from their wives. I can't blame them. The heat in the Valley is NASTY this time of year, and even Folsom Lake, which generally has really good bass fishing, and is barely 30 minutes from downtown Sacramento, with several boat ramps, the water temps help cool you off. There's a number of good bass-fishing lakes in the foothills, and a person with a truck and trailer towing one of these is in good shape for a weekend of peace on the water.
Stephenson Project, Weekender (model). Built by hand from plywood, for a few thousand dollars. Weighs only 450 pounds, so can be pulled on a trailer behind any passenger car with a class 1 trailer hitch.
Paddleboarding is going out of style. I still see some, but most have figured out its not Zen so much as clumsy. If you want to try it out, renting them is cheap at many lakes. You can also rent rowboats, motorboats, and sailboats like a Laser or Sunfish. The Pico rents at Donner Lake. Tahoe City (north shore) rents out the Melonseed, which can be sailed or rowed. Building a boat out of marine grade plywood is another option, though I recommend renting one first. There's no point building a boat you don't enjoy sailing. Much like an RV, you have to be comfortable with it.
Ultra-light, carbon fiber hull, mast, and sails, only $8500 and weighs 85 pounds.
Some people are just happier with a wetsuit and a really light boat that flips over twice an hour, and that's what makes them satisfied. I've found that a used Laser sailboat (aka a board sailer) and a trailer made for it that will pull behind any car with a Class 1 hitch, is around $500 used. These have common parts and are easy to maintain. The hull weighs 130 pounds, the mast and sail another 30 or so, and you are most of the ballast. They flip over easy in gusty conditions and most people who sail them wear a wetsuit. I learned on a Laser. I liked it, but they only really go fast when they are about to flip over. They're olympic boats, and you'll see them in Rio. Only 14 feet long, they're called a Dingy, or racing Dinghy.
Hand built classic Moth, weighs around 85 pounds, made of 6mm marine-grade plywood.
Conversely, the Classic Moth is a boat type that has been modified almost annually and weigh around 80 pounds, are often made of thin bent plywood with floatation chambers and has wires to reinforce the mast. They also have a bit more ergonomic seating setup than the Laser but you mostly have to build one from scratch. They are most popular in Europe, particularly in the UK and France. However, this is another boat where wearing a wetsuit is typical. I think I'd like a boat a little less likely to flip over, and I researched more types of boats, and boat construction, and learned that whomever knows the math for boat design never shares it. Much like electric cars, its all craft secrets. I have learned that Day Sailers, like the above Weekender (Stevenson Project) might be a better fit for me. While it looks big and bulky, it uses bent and tensioned plywood for its strength and actually only weighs 450 pounds, which is pretty similar to a bass boat.
Weekender on a car trailer, with a flat tire.
I could easily see owning one of these, and with club membership at the Gold Country Yacht Club ($70/year) I'd have a place to park it, legally and cheaply, rather than cutting down a tree and building a gate and a ramp and all the fuss involved with storing it here. That said, a Laser would be easier, though much less comfy on Lake Tahoe. An O'Day day-sailer will be cheaper, since those are common used, but perhaps less entertaining than one of these you built yourself. Just not in the basement, unless you can afford to dig out a wall to extract it.
North San Juan is a ridge that runs from the covered bridge at Bridgeport, near Lake Englebright, all the way east to the top of the Sierras. It is around 35 miles or dirt and gravel roads, chapparal oaks, pines, and the three branches of the Yuba River. Its rough country, nearly undeveloped, and most of it is BLM or National Forest. Pot growers squat there, camping and growing dope for processing and sale after the harvest in the Fall. The nearest grocery stores are in Grass Valley and Nevada City, so these people rub elbows with us when they come into town. They also borrow books and DVDs so they have some entertainment while they rest. Most of these places have no power or water, so the trimigrants don't have any to spare for washing, thus stink. I'm grateful when they bathe before visiting my library.
Pot is a cash crop and while there are permits which allow for a certain amount of plants for those people licensed to grow, most of the growers only use the license system to protect themselves from arrest, and to play shell games with the deputies coming to seize the plants in excess of the legal limit. Modern pot is 1000 times stronger than the stuff in the 1960's, thanks to selective breeding, and it is possible to OD on it, like with Hashhish. Honey Oil is hash oil, if you didn't know. Making honey oil requires butane and a pressure vessel, and these tend to overheat and burst, causing really bad fires. Most of the structure fires in this county turn out to be honey oil lab fires. Renting out your spare guest cottage to a college graduate could result in the place burning down. This has created serious distrust between the owners and renters, for good reason. The local apartment buildings often reek of dope smoke, and honey oil fires there risk the lives of everyone inside, which could be 50-200 people and all their belongings. Of course, the police don't bust them for smoking dope because the law lets "medical marijuana" exist, so the honey oil fires will keep happening.
Deputies hunt for the violators. Unfortunately, most of the growers are clever and have multiple sites, keep the plants in 1 gallon or two gallon plastic pots so they can move them from site to site and thus sell more than they admit to having. It is all profit for them. Attempts to tax pot growers have failed. They underreport their crops and sell the excess for cash so barely pay any taxes. Despite the risk of major fires (and there's been HUGE fires) caused by processing pot plants into honey oil, these people were processing in a rural area with no fire suppression. It could have burned up a lot of land and cost the county and state millions to fight, just like the Trailhead Fire, nearly out, did. The Butte, Lake, and Alta fires were all caused by honey oil processing labs, and homes were lost. But Democrats remain convinced that dope is harmless and my county suffers. Screw you, Democrats. I hope you get cancer from your dope.
Another American institution was destroyed this week through officially endorsed corruption. And she'll probably be the next president despite being shown incompetent or evil. Apparently, all Democrats in my state don't care and will vote for her since they can't vote for Bernie the Communist. Federal government is a laughingstock. Sigh.
The Brexit vote for the UK is still having a ripple effect in the stock market. I remain unclear on which businesses will be impacted by trade and currency-influenced pricing changes and tax differences now that Britain is leaving the EU. Some say it will take 2 years for Britain to exit the EU, but others a few months. I suspect its closer to months. The impacts I've read about so far that actually matter are import and export paperwork increases. That means Carney-paperwork so cross-border excursions get more expensive and slow, thus reducing such projects. Top Gear benefitted from the EU agreement, according to Clarkson and May. Every camera needed Carney paperwork before the EU and they'll need them again. This may affect planning for the Grand Tour program since they'll be crossing borders often, and it might be beneficial if they move their headquarters to an EU country, officially, and retain mobility and simplicity.
The Grand Tour, the new motoring show from the Top Gear staff now on Amazon, is still going to be about cars and travel, and while the new Top Gear on BBC has flopped spectacularly, which is unfortunate, the old crew with new funding and no feminist Man-Haters screwing with their budget or trying to get them killed, Clarkson and May and Hammond should be offering a proper show, eventually. As a fan of their prior program I await it with interest.
Other impacts of the Brexit are less certain. Britain is a major grain exporter to the EU. Increased taxes on their grain, often a retaliatory consequence in such cases, will mostly hurt the EU poor rather than British farmers. Famine and food riots can be avoided by money, but the UK escaping the Derivatives Bubble in Spain, Portugal, Italy and most especially Greece, caused by German bankers investing in bad real estate scams in those countries, then demanding that British and French bankers bail them out? Could France exit the EU next? What about the Scandinavian countries? The Southern EU nations, with all the real estate bubble debt, are the ones who gain the most by bailouts of their bad investments, although in many cases the investments were by foreign bankers and real estate scammers who funded the purchase of land and construction of all those apartments and homes, many of them empty today. As a resident in a region famous for Ghost Towns, I am quite familiar with this. Cities only exist when there's either a resource or geographic reason to stay there, preferably both. When its ONLY a resource, that place empties when the resource is gone. In California that often means either gold or water supply. And water supply isn't often enough by itself. Geography is usually more important, thus the old Real Estate Agent saw: "Location, location, location!" Paying for these apartment complexes in Spain and resorts in Greece, which only existed because a plane ticket from Heathrow and Berlin to these warm and sunny resort towns was cheap 10 years ago (and that price increase ended the trend), is the primary boondoggle of the entire derivatives market mess for the EU. And its still trillions of Euros, which basically bankrupts entire currencies and means instant replay of the 1929 stock market collapse, only today there's way more unemployed young people, religious extremists, and serious potential for both genocide and nuclear weapons use. It would be bad. Islamic fundies have made themselves and their families targets for the rage of all those Catholic youth without jobs. They could be utterly wiped out, not just from Europe but possibly everywhere. As far as Europeans are concerned, a war of religious genocide is better held overseas than turned into ever more vicious wars at home. WW2 could be replayed, after all. It was the German Bankers that caused the collapse. I don't think the young people have forgotten that, even if their banker-owned media don't talk about it. Angela Merkel was elected using German Banker money, and its why she's so loud about demanding EU bailout money for her sponsors, rather than letting them Eat Their Failure. Sigh.
The USA and UK have reasonably good ties, and I suspect that the Jaguar and other UK cars will get cheaper thanks to the falling Pound. This will be good for them and us. While Clarkson and May tend to mock America, they also express a certain awe for just how LARGE America is, and how many roads there are to drive on, and how you can cross borders without stopping, unlike the EU. I know that neither candidate is likely to make much headway on maintaining those roads, since most of that work is contracted, and managed by the states involved. Still, I can hope that sane people will ignore the collapsing federal government and stick to maintaining the critical infrastructure as long as they can. Our roads and bridges need to stay up. Collapses like the St. Paul bridge shouldn't happen again, but probably will. It was typical communist indifference that caused that. The inspection funds were diverted to more populist socialist programs like children's cheese, and 80 people died. That sort of viciousness is what Socialism is really about. Think about that the next time you vote.
There's an adaptation of the Elfstones of Shannara called the Chronicles of Shannara on Netflix. MTV made it, of all people, and managed to do a quality production, 10 episodes, 40 minutes each, covering the full contents of the novel, which is 576 pages long. It read it back when it hit the paperback shelves in 1982. The adaptation was done with full permission and involvement of the author, and a few changes were made to some of the characters. The human rover girl is more desperate and talented and interesting than she was in the book. The downside is the first season covered the contents of the entire book, and from what I read of the second season it is unclear if they're going to do the next book, which takes place 20 years later, or if they'll turn this into a mushy teen drama like Game of Thrones, a show I ignore. I liked the actress they have playing this girl, Eretria. Turns out Ivana Baquero was the girl in Pan's Labyrinth, only she grew up hot and sexy and offers lots of enthusiasm for the role. I hope to see her again, which could certainly be the case since her (character's) daughter, Brin, is described as the spitting image of her mother so if they do the next book (Wishsong of Shannara), she can play the character without any problem.
Ivana Baquero (right)
In any case, I firmly support this having been made, properly, and such things are so rare.
A cyberpunk bartending game based on my old online writing haunt, the Chatsubo. This is seriously weird. Not sure why there's japanese girls there, because we only had a couple, and the Chatsubo is for expatriots. No Japanese there. Still, its really a weird concept.
I studied soil science as part of my geology degree. I aced the class because it was fascinating. One of the points brought up is a common sequence that occurs in Archaeology regarding soils.
Few cultures learn how soils work before ruining them.
The best soils grow grains, so meadows/plains/deserts have the best soil, not forests. Forests and orchards tend to have bad soils.
Soils that won't even support trees are often infertile, dead things. This would include sand dunes and bare rocks. Most of the middle east and parts or Ireland Scandinavia are like this.
One big cause of soil infertility is lack of proper proportions of materials to make good soil, and lack of microbes in that soil. Very cold places often have bad soil because it is too cold for the microbes, and the chemical breakdown of clays and silt never happens so they end up useless for plants.
It is possible for fertile soil not to grow plants when rainfall is too low. This explains many desert soils, including in the Sahara and Mohave deserts. Even modest increases in water supply causes massive fertility and plant growth. Deserts breathe as their oases swell, and die back when they retract. The El Nino and La Nina events have been going on for millions of years and both deserts have evolved to take advantage of these, or resist their worst.
Irrigation from non-conventional means has produced fantastic agriculture production in California and parts of Mexico, and is the primary reason for construction of major dams.
When soils are abused too far, few cultures learn how to fix their soil in time and end up turning to the sea for sustenance. This is often fatal for a large percentage of those who venture there, so cultures that give up on the land die out for the most part.
Cheap desalination could restore arable land from dry coasts like the west coast of Saharan Africa, Namibia, Baja California, and the dry Chilean coast. It would also offer tremendous value to most of Australia, though many areas need better soil to justify desalination costs. Experiments with mechanical windmills driving vacuum pumps to assist in evaporation of sea water brines into fresh water, dumping the brines afterwards back into the sea, are iffy and expensive. They may be a way forward, but maintenance costs might prove this unfeasible. The Altamond Wind Turbine debacle has shown that coastal wind surges cost more to repair than the product of years of stable operation are worth.
I do think that eventually we'll see cheap desalination because drinking water is valuable and converting it from salt water is SCIENCE! Modestly priced desalination would still work, but cheap has a lot more benefits because more poor people can afford it and your can use it on more things. If there were Monaco type towns every 20 miles down the coast of Baja Mexico, on both sides of the Peninsula, plus the mainland that's around 4000 miles / 20 = 200 Monacos.
Imagine one of these every 20 miles from Canada to the tip of Baja
Perhaps diluted by different focus, as there's such a thing as too many casinos, but if each were running useful businesses and port facilities? Wow. That's better than most of Mexico has now. And its mostly empty at this point, just bare desert rocky shorelines, exactly the sort of place you would want to construct a jetty and harbor for commercial and sailing boats, and commercial sail-powered fishing boats. If you used a sail to push around a boat, and solar panels for water and ice, even if the wind dies you're still okay, especially if you run an electric motor off those panels to get home if the mast breaks or something like that. Electric winches and proper design can take classic galleys and other ships designed around a sail and cargo hold and make that work.
It won't look like this, but simple single mast sailing ships and modern electric winches with a computer to help control them? That's possible. Add radar and radio and onboard desalination and you can fish quite a lot of the ocean, though cold water holds the most nutrients, so cold water with good sunlight makes for the best fishing grounds: thus California and Peru have the best fishing in the world. We've abused it, but if fishing was only licensed in those areas for sailing vessels, the time it takes to make new boats to meet the licensed higher catch limits would give the fish long enough to recover their numbers. The Coast Guard and Navy would need to arrest or sink any crews with illegal boats however, which is a bigger problem. Japan and other nations cross the ocean to steal fishing well over the limit and then cruise all the way back for big profit. This harms US here, and local fishermen rely on the fish to make their living and pay the costs of their boat loan and wages for fishermen. I'd want to learn a lot more about this. The important thing is it is possible to have a viable city on a coastline with cheap desalination and your protein from fishing without using any diesel fuel. A nice future is possible.
Real estate is broken. Houses which SHOULD cost $90K are on the market for $680K, and they sell for that higher price.
For Sale, 2 BD, 1.5 BA, on street parking, EZ yard, 0.17 acre
Nobody with a minimum wage job, or even double that with dual incomes, can afford to buy a home and raise a family with a mortgage based on that price. Normal people cannot buy homes on normal incomes in normal places.
Why are prices still so high? The housing bubble did not burst all the way, only half, and inflation is making the prices come back up, exploiting desperation, greed, and ignorance. Home prices are supposed to be based on market price, on the ability to pay a mortgage. They aren't. The ARM mess screwed it all up.
The problem with communities that won't pay enough at the jobs that maintain them is those communities gradually lose the people who do that maintenance. Working a job with falling wages is great motivation to go elsewhere. The ones they get to replace the locals drive in, cheaper, and do a less good job because it isn't there community, just another contract, and contracts are all about the money. Without young families, those communities age, and those aged people eventually require medical care, and then funeral services. These communities that became destinations for the retired gradually get poorer and more depressed without the vitality of young families. Without good enough wages for good enough employees, businesses close and pretty soon that community dies. The medical staffs are the last to leave.
Here in the West we call those Ghost Towns. I've met people who worked in Bodie before its final resident left and the town turned over to the state and become a tourist destination. People think of ghost towns as cute. They don't understand its an actual outcome for locations without drinking water and geographic value to remain populated and supplied. San Francisco doesn't have its own drinking water, and is only valuable as long as its harbor remains important for shipping. The "brain center" is BS. They don't have any smarter people than anywhere else. When that con runs down, they'll pull out the rest of the big companies, and without those, the area will collapse like Detroit. So owning a house in the Bay Area is a bad idea. Its doomed. Renting there is a better idea, until you can relocate with all those 2000 businesses that already fled the Bay Area in the last 5 years. Follow them to the Midwest or Texas. Dealing with heat and tornadoes isn't fun, but its more cost effective than Socialists who want to tax every exhale here in California.
Millenials I know are getting to be more open to the ideal of material Minimalism. That means owning as little stuff as you can. Its a rejection of the materialism of the ARM-Housing scandal. All the garbage from Walmart is just trash now. Minimalism opens up the possibility of mobile living. Mobile living can be as low-rent as getting your stuff down to fitting in your car trunk, something travelling salesmen do. A bit more might be down to a light Teardrop trailer towed behind your car or SUV, if you go that route. They're not fun to sleep in, but better than a tent and they don't weigh much.
Built from common plans and a basic metal trailer underneath.
Or even a bigger travel trailer, parked at a fancy park for the duration of a work contract. An RV works too, for the right kinds of work. Contract labor jobs protects you from the worst sorts of managers, many of whom are the dominant examples today. Bad people with a little bit of power tend to take personal joy in emotionally and physically abusing employees because they CAN. I have had several bosses that actually coerced female employees into sex with them in exchange for favors, or more often, as blackmail payoffs to overlook performance problems on the job. It was really a kind of rape. Don't stick around for these kinds of bosses. They exist, they are common, and they like to hurt you.
Do the job, get paid, move on. Too many of the jobs I've done only deserved that much time in a community. Since we're in a post-community world, leaving the wastrels to die of their greed, well that's fine. We gave them so much, and they mostly left us with debt. A pity. I suspect we'll see a lot of Millenials becoming Work-Birds, sort of like snowbirds, but working various kinds of jobs and making the best of their travels. For now the most common kind of workbirds I see here are Trimigrants, migrant pot field workers. The come to town to grow dope, often in restored or cobbled together RVs, but I think that eventually such things will spread into more legal forms of employment, and it will become useful for towns to offer nice trailer parks for these sorts of mobile yuppies, who want to make an honest living but can't buy into a community which believes a 3 Bedroom house deserves to be worth $680,000, but whose grocery clerks earn only minimum wage, and only get 20 hours a week so no benefits, F-U very much. This is a story I see again and again here in the Western states. Its irritating and tragic, but its just how things are. We adapt, and I hope to live long enough to see my state freed from the abusive Baby Boomers and violent socialists. This place was better in the 1980's, even with all the loonies running around. At least the parks were maintained. Sigh.
