Chatsubo Turned into Bartending Game on Steam

http://kotaku.com/cyberpunk-bartending-game-mixes-waifus-with-great-story-1782429629

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.

On Soils and Dry Coasts

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.

1. Few cultures learn how soils work before ruining them. 
2. The best soils grow grains, so meadows/plains/deserts have the best soil, not forests. Forests and orchards tend to have bad soils. 
3. 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. 
4. 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. 
5. 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. 
6. 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. 
7. 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. 
8. 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. 

High Real Estate Prices Push Millenials into RVs and Trailers

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.

Mountain Tractors

Here in the Sierras, there's a lot of heavily modified Jeeps, but they aren't the most common 4WD vehicles. It's actually the Subaru Forester. This is a large tall station wagon.

They tend to be slow and heavy and lumber around in the twisty mountain roads with a motor that sputters and groans like an old tractor engine. Most are under-powered for better fuel economy, so they also tend to have a lot of traffic behind them, like VW buses used to back in the 1980's. The Forester is a good vehicle for moms to do the school run, or people with dogs to carry them to a mountain trail. They work well on gravel roads and snow, but they aren't fast.

Their best feature is excellent ground clearance so they can go up and down pretty rotten roads without getting stuck easily. I've always been annoyed with Toyota and American trucks for having straight axles and only a few inches of ground clearance under the rear transfer case which is exactly where the high-center of the rutted road is. Even slight rutting of the roads makes these get stuck, and many insurance plans do not cover damage on unpaved surfaces, meaning that off-road damage is your problem. And good luck getting a tow if you're in serious boonies. The Subaru avoids it, and can go cheaply to more places that require serious road maintenance to admit ordinary cars. This means they can do less and still get there and back, and opens up a lot of these ridge and canyon ranches, some with magnificent views down into the Valley, so they're very popular here in the Sierras. When Jeep says it is the Car of California, they're lying. It's this beast, sorry to say. Folks who like the outdoors put roof racks and carry bikes or boats on them. We're only an hour from Lake Tahoe, and about 90 minutes from Reno or Downieville, both of which have specialized attractions. Provided the owner drives safely, these cars last well. Provided the owner isn't in too much of a hurry, they last a pretty long time too.

Ecological and Economic Potentials of Lake Lahontan

I like this subject. Refilling Pleistocene Lake Lahontan has a number of physical and financial upsides, starting with water supply and real estate, moving onto general rainfall for the Great Basin. The lake effect thunderstorms would provide water for the rest of the state, including the mountains and distant valleys, all the way through Utah and Colorado. Its a civil engineering project worth doing. Nevada won't do it, but it is worth doing. If done right, including engineered outlet into California and eventually down to the Feather River, all that salt can be drained out too. I like that sort of solution. You do want MOST of the water to stay in Nevada, even as evaporation, but having an outlet is important too.

Also remember that this lake has around 3000 miles of shoreline, all of which will get top dollar as real estate, dock space, resorts. The varying depth of the water also means excellent fishing, water skiing and boating. This is worth around $2 Trillion in real estate and annual billions in tourism, particularly in a state where both gambling and brothels are legal. All that water also benefits the cattle industry, since the rain will provide lots more pasture, and the tourists will buy steaks and beef after getting bored of fish in thousands of shoreline restaurants. There's also all those building contracts, roads, trains, and fancy decorative bridges crossing the many narrows and inlets. So much money. You'd really think the Nevada Mafia would be really into this, and pressuring the Federal government to get this going. Right now most of that area is empty desert, struggling cattle ranches, and dry lakes. The lake would also refill fossil water reservoirs and provide a source for irrigation of other areas.

Utah really should refill Lake Bonneville, around ten times the size of Great Salt Lake. That would turn Utah from a dry place to a wetter place, right up the western slope of the Rockies and associated mountains. Lakes make rain, and the humidity is better for plants. It stabilizes temperatures too. That's the secret of lakes, and why big lakes have huge advantages to the places that have them. Lake Mead has tourism and water supply for Las Vegas, which has made enormous advantage from this. If Utah fills the lake they'll need to either put levees around the city or relocate buildings upslope. Lake Bonneville spilled out NORTH into the Snake River, through a tiny Red Rock Pass that's got a road on it now.

From Wikipedia

Chilly June

We've had some hot spells, and expect more in coming days but the last couple nights have been cold. We're getting moist air from the Pacific, about 175 miles away, and the Delta Breeze has been a Delta Wind instead. This means that instead of 70'F as our summer low it is 51'F instead. That's 10-20'F less than normal, though I will point out that Normal is not normal. Climate in California is erratic. There's snow falling in the high Sierra, and the weatherman predicts snow in the next couple days at Donner Pass. It will rain all day tomorrow, according to this prediction. We'll see. I suppose it is possible. And we'll have 98'F here Tuesday onwards. But right now? It is snowing on Donner Pass and raining about 20 miles up the hill. Eventually it will reach here, probably in a few hours.

Map courtesy of Wunderground. 

The pink is corn snow (sleet), the blue is snow. Green is rain, obviously.

Stupid Questions

There ARE stupid questions.

1. Never Ask: "Are you stupid?"
2. The answer is self evident. 

This is Guu. She's a goddess of the jungle.
She can EAT the entire world.
And then puke it back up again.
From Jungle wa Itsumo Hale nochi Guu.