As a marksman I enjoyed owning various caliber bolt action rifles. Experimenting with calibers and loading for accuracy was great fun, and rewarded good concentration. If I had it to do all over again I'd have gotten a 270 Winchester Weatherby rifle made by Howa with the Browning-Enfield action. Its very smooth, with a monte carlo cheek plate stock so it was very natural to point.
That was the rifle I should have bought and focussed all my efforts on, instead of all the calibers I bought and perfected. I feel like I wasted a lot of money, though I did satisfy my curiosity learning to shoot each of them to their best, and now have the confidence to know that adapting to a new caliber is not that hard. People tend to be fussy about this, but the most important thing about a rifle is understanding there's no points for missing, so shoot the caliber which hits what you aim at, and understand its limitations.
MANY people who are otherwise sane and logical insist on buying and shooting (once) a caliber which hurts them, being gruff about it, and never touching it again. This describes MOST people who own a .30-06 or .308 rifle, both of which kick like a mule in a rifle light enough for hunting game. It is possible to learn how to shoot those calibers without getting bruised, but it takes a lot of practice, and a lot of bruising before you learn the trick to it, and few people perservere. Most of them would be better served by an AR rifle in 5.56x45 or .223 (can be shot interchangeably with few exceptions). Most people, and most wives and teenage daughters, are better served by a rifle with minimal recoil so they can aim and hit a target without getting a flinch. Big calibers are special purpose, and the various lighter calibers can do 90% of the big ones with less recoil. Few panicking new survivalist-type mall ninjas have any idea. As with most problems in their life, they do minimal research, throw money at the problem, and never touch it again presuming its easy because dumb people do it.
The shape of a rifle is important. That affects how it is aimed, but how you learn to shoot matters a great deal. Most military shooters I know don't really like proper rifle stocks, since they were trained on the M-16 with its pistol grip. I find pistol grip rifles unnatural because I learned on real rifle stocks. This is a great reason to avoid an AR rifle, at least for me. Soldiers trained on them love them. I didn't care for them much. The spring squeaking in my ear wasn't much fun either. Its distracting.
Most video game players don't hold a stock, but they get some experience on movement. Really experienced 1-Bravo (Infantry) learn to shoot while moving over rough ground and that's a specialized skill compared to the range, where you're holding still and reasonably comfortable. Moving around with a loaded weapon requires a high degree of training, particularly a good working safety that's on most of the time, and training to turn that off when a target is in the sights and not before. Few people who panic-buy a firearm "for safety" think that clearly or have that level of discipline. They are the worst possible owners of a weapon, because they'll end up killing someone or maybe themselves through ignorance and stupidity.
I have read any number of forum posts from people who even say things like "ah nevur clean mah gun cuz it shoots perfect already". Wow. Really? I've also read claims from yahoos who claim their short barrel carbine M4 clone will kill hogs at 500 yards when I know damn well that rifle is incapable of the feat so its just another 12 yo boy lying about his daydreams again. I have no time for those morons. They may live to see the end of puberty, or they may mouth off to someone close enough to slap them down and end up in ditch. Stuff like that happens in the real world. School teachers do nobody any favors letting that kind of behavior get so out of hand. They worry about identity politics instead of whether offending grownups might kill them. The real world has little forgiveness, and idiots I knew back in school like that died for it. Not nice, but it happened. I have no time for those idiots and encourage them to remain in the inner city and continue with their opiate habit since that self-corrects soon enough.
The advantage of shooting only one kind of rifle caliber in light enough recoil to be without a flinch and thus focus on accuracy is you only need to stock that caliber, and can reload for accuracy and find the sweet spot, which is different for each rifle. That's not a joke. Each one will shoot a caliber best through experimentation on reloading with bullet weight, powder type, powder amount, bullet seating depth, and even primer and brass brand. You experiment till you figure out which variation shoots the smallest consistent group, then zero in your scope on that spot and confirm it. After that, load to that spec with your fired brass and shoot once a month, year round, so you remain able to absorb the recoil properly. That's bare minimum, but it works.
Naturally, you get best accuracy from bolt rifles, not auto-rifles like the AR or AK. There's less play in the chamber pressure, which matters a great deal. Also, you tend to shoot less rounds and pay more attention to your aim because you don't have the psychological lie of "I can pull the trigger again if I misss so its not that important to aim well". Not having another round helps with this. Internal box magazines are great. They don't get bent or dropped or lost. Unloading them for crossing fences is slightly more annoying, but most hold less than 10 rounds, and many hold only 5 or even 3 if you have a magnum caliber rifle. And that's fine for most needs since you usually just get the one shot at the elk or antelope or deer and then it runs away if you miss, or drops if you hit properly. Holdover, rise and drop offsets, these are part of accuracy too. And if you can get closer to the target, get closer. Rifles are much more effective within 200 yards. A 500 yard shot is going to miss in most cases, and is unethical to take since a wounded animal at 500 yards is going to suffer a lot while you chase it. If you aren't troubled by ethical questions I really don't want you to own a firearm. Stick to video games. You can PVP there to your heart's content. Leave the wilderness to the adults who respect it.
Much like rifles, pistol manufacturers have a need to sell more. They use more machining and have sometimes complex locking systems to prevent them going off until the right sequence of devices are used. In general, pistols are very safe. There are exceptions, but even a 1911 has a couple safeties on it, plus a another one mostly known to the military called Out Of Battery. As a marksman, I am very much in favor of good safeties, but I'm also not very good with pistols and mostly focus on things with rifle stocks. I don't even like pistol grip stocks. I learned on classic rifles, not military arms.
Way back in the 1840's, the 44 and 45 cap and ball were carried into the gold fields and by pioneers heading west for California or Oregon, to be farmers or miners. The Civil War proved the utility of brass (metallic) cartridges rather than paper ones. They worked in the rain. This was a huge advance, and also made for faster loading revolvers and repeating lever action rifles. They are classics, though not inherently accurate and had a number of flaws which were gradually fixed.
There were all sorts of attempts made to simplify support of the cavalry after the Civil War, which was then fighting indians, who saw pioneers moving onto their lands and killing them off, so the indians started killing settlers or dying of plague (typhoid was common then). It was nasty, and raids tended to be sudden and violent, like most Westerns like to depict. Having lots of rounds to shoot back when attacked is a big part of why Westerners are pro-gun, even today. We know stuff goes wrong, and Eastern gangs and mafia types tend to attack in packs. See Legends Of The Fall for examples. There were also Civil War veterans who became raiders, using what they learned to attack towns, with a massacre in Kansas called the Jayhawk Massacre as a famous example.
Black powder was measured in grains, still the unit of measure today, and you had to limit how many per cartridge. The .30-30 Winchester was a 30 caliber bullet and 30 grains of black powder. This round has killed more wild game than any other, period. It remains popular in woodsy area hunters in the East. Its not that popular here because it has a very limited range. Most folks here hunt with a .30-06, even though it is overkill for our small deer. A .243 is plenty. In any case, that nomenclature of the caliber size and the dash, then the grains of powder, got used in a bunch of rounds. The 38-40, the 38-44, the 40-40 and 40-44, and 45-70 and 45-110 are all rounds that existed. The .44-40 Winchester became a popular official cavalry round which was used in their carbines and pistols, both. It wasn't enough range in a rifle, and a bit much recoil in a revolver, but militaries tend to do things wrong before they get them right, usually after lots of people die. The modern .44-40 is popular with historical recreationists in a type of sport called "Cowboy Action Shooting" which is a multigun shooting sport where competitors shoot targets while being timed and scored on that and accuracy for a combine score to determine the winner. Ham and spam shoots are common for this. Most wear a leather glove on their left hand in order to fan the trigger without burning off their fingers by the side-blast. Some of these revolvers had a cylinder set into the gap of a C-shape, with the barrell down the far side. When more powerful rounds were fitted, these would explode. This was fixed with a top strap, and original hinged versions like the Smith and Wesson Model 3, copied by the english Webley revolver, sort of fixed the issue, until strong rounds were fired, making the thing metal shear off and explode again.
Contrast this with the gunfighter's special, which was a smaller caliber .35 revolver, with better quality workmanship and better accuracy and sights, meaning a gunfighter aimed carefully and shot once, killing their target. .35 caliber is also 9mm, and the Germans made a cartridge in 1880 called the 9x19 Parabellum, still in use today. This round has killed more people than any other. Every military has a gun chambered in this cartridge, even ours, though lots of troops hate it because they want a .45 ACP 1911, despite it being very hard to hit things beyond 30 yards. A beefed up .45 like the 45-70 is too much for a handgun, and rounds in between still suffer at ranges over 60 yards since its big, heavy, and drops a lot being so slow. All rounds drop at the same rate vertically (1 G) but slower rounds drop more noticeably, so anything around the speed of sound is going to have problems. Rifle rounds are typically longer and narrower with more powder so they can go a lot faster and further before the drop is noticed, thus the .223 is magnificent at making nuisances like coyotes explode at 200 yards, and 243 at 350 yards. When you try and combine a pistol cartridge and a rifle cartridge into one or two guns you get all sorts of problems, with the mild utility of exchangeable ammunition and possibly magazines.
You also get lots of muzzle flash in a revolver, so you get one shot then you're night blind. Modern calibers like the 357 Sig is a 9x19mm length cartridge in a wider case with a bottle neck to hold the bullet. This is meant to go faster, but is usually shoved into a short barrel for self defense, utterly defeating the purpose, but adding the problem of severe night blindness.
More extreme bottleneck cartridges attempting to hold onto the power and speed gains of small caliber high velocity carbines result in things like the FN5.7, which is a modified short .223 in a bottleneck case duplicating the power of a .221 Fireball or .22 BOZ, which is a 10mm necked down to .223. A variation of this cartridge is used in the famous P90 Grendel, which is only used by TV shows and Saudi Arabia, much like the Desert Eagle .44 Action Express handgun. And this gets to a side issue of interest.
A pistol caliber in a rifle is called a carbine. A carbine is similar to a rifle, usually having a stock or a folding stock, made popular by paratroopers in WW2, used by both sides of the war. They were usually spray and pray weapons, not known for accuracy. The Nazis had their 9mm submachine guns. The allies had their Sten guns and other similar cheap weapons, and more effective rifles like the Garand. After the War a lot of designs came out with interesting value, like the AK-47, which was based on a captured German concept light rifle called an assault rifle. The Soviet version of that is still being fiddled with and there's been a couple other calibers for it. The Germans and Belgians came up with a roller-lock design for a semi automatic rifle which was picked up and used in big .308 rifles around the world, and shrunk and minified for a 9mm version called the HK-MP5, which we've all seen in those Die Hard movies, especially the first one. The setup is limited by the magazine well, and there's been a lot of variations of it, including the MP40, which is that chambered in a .40 S&W cartridge, commonly used by police. Its too slow for a rifle, but better than 9mm. It is somewhat baffling that nobody seems to make a longer version of this and magazines to support 10mm, .45 ACP, .460 Rowland (like .45 magnum), and various other cartridges to take advantage of the longer barrel and buttstock so you can aim it properly. You'd think there was a market for that, but so many Law enforcement and veterans would rather upgrade to a cheaper AR pattern rifle and avoid the expense of the Short Barrel Rifle single-exception. And the AR lets you shoot a lot more calibers.
Incidentally, the Desert Eagle is a miniature AR system on a pistol frame. No kidding. This is also why they cost $1500 each and weigh in pounds, not ounces. No military arms itself with a Desert Eagle. Its JUST in movies, and IMI enjoys the profits of selling this ridiculous movie prop to rappers and action movie fans. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. Consider a Raging Bull instead. A big ported revolver in 357 is probably as much recoil as you can stand and costs a fraction as much.
When it comes to powerful revolvers, there's a market. The .454 Casull is dangerous junk, due to being based on the .45 Long Colt and having very finicky loading, too much or too little powder or bullet slightly too deep or too shallow and it will explode on your hand like a grenade, taking your fingers with it. I don't recommend this firearm, ever. It is too unsafe. It sometimes kills a Kodiak bear in Alaska when someone is out walking their dog on the island, or fishing. Bears have personality. Bears don't have a trustworthy setting. Sometimes they leave you alone, and other times they eat you. They have a lot of brain parasites, which contributes to this problem. Arming yourself when in bear country is a life-extending move, even if it offends your Vegetarian friends. Be sure you can run faster than them. Quite a few of the above cartridges were used in revolvers against bears. Experts recommend a shotgun with buckshot and slugs if you have to travel in bear country, but a .357 is enough for a black bear, and a .44 magnum will do for a brown or black bear. Just keep in mind that you might have less than 2 seconds to draw and fire, and people with dogs pay for those seconds with the life of their dogs, and are much more likely to survive because of it. However, dogs and bears are enemies so the bear is more likely to attack a dog than a person without one. Just to make things more complicated. And before you laugh about the lack of bears where you live, a tourist in New Jersey filmed the bear that ate him at a park within sight of Manhattan, bears eat pets in Florida. Bears have been spotted swimming in pools in the edges of Los Angeles, and bears run 40 mph, which is much faster than you can sprint, and possibly pedal on flat ground. So don't laugh at bears. They think you are tasty and crunchy, and your kids even moreso.
Surprise! Mama bear with cubs charges cyclist on mountain singletrack trail, no warning, less than 2 seconds to react or die. He reacted and lived. Others try bear spray or the wrong shot placement with a gun and they get badly mauled. Bears have personality. They aren't consistent.
The dangers of the oft-exploding .454 lead to the creation of more safe rounds like the .450 and .460 S&W Magnum, and 475 Linebaugh, or .480 Ruger, all of which kick like a mule in a revolver and are probably safer in a lever action repeater. The .44 magnum is well liked for good reason, because you can load it up or down using combinations of powder and projectile to .45 ACP power (aka .44 Bulldog/Special), or up to full magnum (and hurts your wrist) and anywhere between. The recoil is bad enough but its better than harsh language. The Winchester repeater rifle is available in .357 and .44 magnum for a reasonable sum, though its safety is problematic, and racking the action when a bear is attacking is probably your final action before dying, since they run 40 mph. The shotgun is cheaper and more effective, but a .44 magnum or .357 is much more handy.
Police and deputies swore by the .357 revolver, but they were forced to "upgrade" to 9mm, which was not good enough for bears, and later got to upgrade again to .40 S&W, which they mutter about but admit is "adequate". I think most would prefer a 10mm or to go back to the .357 they all carried for decades and still own as their personal firearm for off-duty. I know deputies used to things here, and they are sensible folks. You don't live to retirement if you aren't sensible, though some of the new guys need to spend more time at the range, practicing.
The 45-70 was an inadequate round on San Juan Hill in Cuba, and Teddy Roosevelt who carried one to great disappointment there, was a big proponent of the .30-06 Springfield, which served this country through two world wars and remains a popular big game hunting round today. The .357 is the pistol equivalent, being effective, popular, hard recoilling but acceptable for most people. It ended up getting fiddled with for size, but longer tends to work better and its a couple or three times more powerful than the old western 45 revolvers. For modern times, the .357 is a peacemaker. If you needed to do this dual-use trick, you'd probably want the full power 10mm. That will drop a target at 150 yards, and maybe at 200, but keep in mind those cartridges are $1 each trigger pull. This is not a hobby for people who care about money. You can buy a nice bottle of wine for 6 rounds of that. Or a quality microbrew 6-pack of bottles for less than a magazine. And when you start comparing the cost of firearms to food, it really does make you ponder your choices. Is it that hard to avoid bears during the time of year when they're most active and dangerous? Give that some thought, before you invest in the perfect calibe for your pistol and rifle.
If you want to do cowboy action shooting, load your own and save. Making ammo with a reloading press is more fun that knitting, and 38-55 or 38-40 have their followings, much like 44-40, and that might be fun. But after I spent lots of time and money experimenting I got it out of my system and took up photography. I can "take a shot" and post it on the internet. And I suspect most people interested in this would probably do well to take up bicycling rather than buy yet another firearm. Its good for your health, and a great motivation to insure the Communists never gain control of your life. They want everybody to bicycle or stay home, like good serfs. Just keep this in mind.
The trouble with running a gun company is that you need work for your staff to do, and most guns, having expensive ammunition, aren't fired often in practice, and rarely if ever in anger, so they tend to see little use and become heirlooms, handed down to kids and grandkids as time passes. Lots of sheepherders and ranchers in the Great Basin and Sierras do this. This cuts down on your sales. There's also military arms, but I think those are mostly collectors items of dubious quality. Hunting arms are better quality most of the time, easier to fit a rifle scope so you can hit something beyond 100 yards (I find most iron sights suck), and this puts them in the position of drumming up interest, and you get fad calibers to sell guns. Some examples?
6.8 SPC (left cartridge). This is a short .277 bullet fitted to a fatter .30 Winchester, necked down (cartridge neck is placed in a die and the brass opening is reduced to a smaller size through mechanical force).
The SPC cartridge was made to deal with the failure of .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) carbines in Afghanistan for the last 16 years. Most soldiers who want to LIVE through Afghanistan pay for a .308 rifle (aka 7.62 NATO), usually M-14 or M1A (semi-auto commercial copy) if they can't get the LE version with some sort of form. The .308 is brutal in a light rifle, btw, so all full power .308 rifles are heavy. The AK-47 is NOT a full power .308 rifle. Its a .310 (7.62x39mm) bullet, very light for caliber in a similar sense to the 6.8, which is also short. This bullet is better than the .223 at range, but still too light for shattering engine blocks or adobe bricks, like a .308 does pretty well and is needed for pretty often. There are heavier rounds for snipers, like 50 BMG and .338 Lapua, but those take VERY heavy rifles, usually require a muzzle brake which makes a big cloud of dust and LOUD noise when fired. It is possible to put a muzzle brake on a lighter .308 rifle, but the noise is deafening, and most soldiers need their hearing to tell when bad guys are approaching beyond their field of view. Good hearing is important.
Another caliber of interest is the 6.5 Grendel (center), which is a x39 case necked down to 6.5 and chambered in an AK or AR rifle with the appropriate bolt face. These vary based on the bottom of the case size, called the Case Head. This was created to be a caliber with similar intent to the 6.8 SPC and competed with it in the military contract. Its a heavier bullet, so retains energy further, but is slightly slower as a result and needs more correction in its arc. The downside is the bullet is seated deeper into the case, and this is inherently dangerous as the round might decide not to move and kaboom instead. That's very bad. Shrapnel in the face, probably horrible or deadly wound resulting.
But lets step away from the STANAG magazine of the AR platform, a huge limitation. Upgrading the rifles to the AR-10 or something similar gets into a bigger magazine which takes .308 length bullets like the 6.5 Creedmoor, famous for accuracy, and 264 USA, which is too long for STANAG and shorter than .308, but also lighter recoil so can be fitted to much lighter rifles without all the noise issues. 6.5mm isn't used much in military rifles recently, but was in the past. The rifle that shot Kennedy was a 6.5mm Carcano, which is a smaller version of the Russian bolt action rifle adopted by the Italians, with a heavy bullet in a low velocity, which meant bullets didn't deform much, ergo "magic bullet" later debunked by simple geometry and examination of the film. There was also the 6.5 Arisaka, which was also too slow and put in a really badly made rifle by the Japanese. The best 6.5 was the 6.5x55 Swede, made by Nobel (yes THAT Nobel peace prize), and beloved of moose hunters in Scandinavia and the USA too. Light enough recoil but full rifle power able to shoot big non-dangerous game like moose and elk. That round was magic, and its the origin of many attempts to duplicate it. The .260 Remington was a .308 case necked down to .264 (bullet actual size) and get the same ballistics. The 6.5x284 was what happens when several stories cross. The .284 was a necked down .300 something, with a rebated rim to fit into a .308 bolthead and length magazine, but having the powder capacity of a .30-06. This was unnecessary and didn't sell. Necked down to 7mm, it became the .284, which was more interesting, since it was a hotter and shorter version of the 280 Winchester, which is what you get when you take a 270 Winchester and open the neck slightly from .277 to .284 for 7mm bullets. Effective, but not enough to justify owning instead of a .270 or .30-06. And by then there was the 7mm Remington Magnum, which was a really fast 7mm with lots of reach and hitting power, and recoil and noise, too. Only time I got a concussion firing a rifle was a 7mm Magnum in a Savage hunting rifle. Thankfully it wasn't mine, but the headache was noticeable. Worse than an '06.
The 6.5x284 was a darling of 1000 yard rifle matches. It was a nice balance in power and reach with heavy bullets (140 grains), and less destructive than the 264 Magnum, famous for melting barrels in less than 1000 firings. That gets expensive. I was quite interested in this one. If you wanted to snipe a villain in Afghanistan this would do the job, but the military has upgraded to 338 Lapua and 50 BMG since anti-material weapons are legal against terrorist since they aren't Geneva Convention signatories.
Another foray into advertising was short magnums (and super short magnums), a magnum power round fitted to a short action rifle, which is cheap to make. The .25 WSM and WSSM were hype and useless. The 270 WSM was apparently much better than a .270 Winchester, faster and more accurate, but not enough to justify rechambering or selling off your family heirloom. There was a .30 WSM, but not a .338 WSM that I can remember. It was created by wild-catters. A wildcat cartridge is one spec'd up and tested by hobbyists. The 6mm Creedmoor is like that. So is the 6x45mm, though its somewhat production in weird places like South Africa. The 6x45 is slightly slow so makes less meat damage and mostly gets used for poaching game. Loaded with a lighter bullet it fits nicely in the AR rifle magazine and holds more energy downrange. It was tested by the Army for use in their FN machineguns but was eventually discarded because of Reasons like caliber confusion and stupid grunts. You don't want too many calibers in the military. They ended up with lots anyway.
The weirdest of the WSMs was 325 WSM, which was an 8mm bullet, not very popular in the USA. There were lots of 8x57 German rifles brought back during the war. Its a fine round, though there's a lot of variation if power thanks to being around for more than a century, and the oldest rifles would explode with new ammo, like the IS or JS loadings in the Small Ring Mausers. They aren't strong enough. Kaboom. I have a VZ-24, able to comfortably fire IS and JS 8x57 ammo. It has a lot of range in ammo you can fire, from 170 grain to 220, able to take a polar bear. I still prefer the .308 for pure accuracy at the same recoil. And I liked the 7mm08 BLR for pointable rifle, even if the Browning action was begging to fail with that LONG pinion gear. The 7mm08 was another wildcat, a .308 necked down to 7mm, duplicating the 7x57mm, the round that the Spanish were using in Cuba against Teddy Roosevelt over a century ago. Those captured rifles were modified into the .30-06 Springfield, and failed to win their court case against Mauser so the USA paid fines to Mauser while we were fighting WW1. There was also a 8mm-06, once upon a time. It was a wildcat but wasn't really needed. A better round is the 338-06, which is a .30-06 case with a .338 bullet mounted, able to duplicate .308 ballistics but hits hard, mostly used for bear defense in .30-06 length rifles, like the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and was chambered in it a few years for Alaskan fishermen. In Alaska you can die while fishing because Kodiak grizzlies also fish, and don't always like competitors. Its common for a fisherman in Alaska to bring a guard with a serious rifle to protect them. A .338 Winchester Magnum is a lot of rifle for most people to deal with, but a .338-06 is less recoil.
In the fantasy world, military rifles are wonderful. In the real world they're often heavy, clunky, with bad safeties, and very difficult to mount a rifle scope. In the real world, sporting rifles are more accurate, lighter, cheaper, more comfortable to handle and point and hit targets at range, and mount any number of good rifle scopes to. The only thing sporting rifles lack is spray and pray and big magazines of bullets. The upside is sporting rifles actually hit things if you do your part to aim and cooly fire. Sporting rifles are in the exact caliber you need for the things you intend to shoot. Here in the West, that means our small blacktail deer and coyotes because they attack cattle and sheep. For our needs, a 243 Winchester is enough, but most people have more. A 6.5 caliber round makes sense for a first time shooter, and bolt action is usually just fine, and much more accurate than an auto-loader. The 260 Remington should have been more popular. The 6.5 Creedmoor is slightly different but largely identical performance. The name is better, and its selling well. There aren't many critters in the lower 48 you can't hunt with this. Canada north is another story, but that's what the .338 is for.
I started learning how to cook when I was four years old. I had to be lifted onto the counter, but I measured the ingredients with spoons I still have four decades later. When you start learning early, you start paying attention to what happens when you vary a recipe. You learn what upping or lowering the temperature does to the food, and whether its a good thing or a bad one. You learn a lot of things which can be described in the C.I.A. cookbook (Culinary Institute of America), but most people never bother reading in Joy of Cooking despite lots of useful information in each section. Nowadays people go online for recipes. Many of these sites also have videos showing what to do. These really help get you started on cooking. You won't master it from a video. You have to pay attention if you want to succeed.
Lots of newbies think cooking is easy. They are wrong. There are easy recipes, but cooking itself is a skill based on lots of experience. Being a good cook is all about that experience, and the willingness to experiment and find the limits of what works, and what improves the recipe in new ways. Most of the recipes online have duplicates. It is often a good idea, when deciding on a new recipe to actually try yourself, to look at all of them, compare the different options and remember that Sunset Magazine always uses exotic ingredients even when they have no flavor, and adding really spicy things to every dish is a great way to get indigestion and wipe out the flavor profile of those fancy ingredients or concentrated flavor caused by slow cooking a dish. Fast food is bad food. Slow food is the way to make food delicious. Restaurants don't do a lot of slow food, they mostly do things that can cook in less than 10 minutes because a 25 minute or 35 minute turnover in tables from group to group makes more money. And restaurants are a money business. At home you have no such restrictions, and slow cooking should always be preferred.
Good example: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spiced-Pumpkin-Bread-840
A good one for Fall. In a few months I'll be cooking this. It combines pumpkin, pound cake, and spices. You can also, once you are good at this, add sliced almonds, chopped dried apricot, and chocolate chips. These flavors give you the oil from the nuts and allspice, sour from the apricot, and bitter from the chocolate, which is a drastic improvement to "just pumpkin spice" and pumpkin itself. These tricks also work with banana bread. The result is loaded with calories, enough that a half inch slice = breakfast. Goes down a treat with strong coffee.
This is only one example, and there are endless more where you can cook something, taste it, and if you take the time to develop it further through additional ingredients or cooking method gets you a better result. That's the difference between a home chef and a mere technician.
Sometimes the right answer to the crappy politics dividing America is to start with finding places which agree with you and live there. The second step is to ignore all the propaganda coming from New York City and the whining of elected sociopaths in DC. Ignore those people.
Vote when it is time to vote, the rest of the time you can't do anything about them. Go fishing instead. Truck campers exist because men get married, and women go mean every month, so getting out of the house, with a flask of whiskey, a case of beer, and a quiet weekend away from her rage and fury is the right answer to avoid paying a divorce attorney.
If you have a big 1/2 ton or 3/4 ton pickup, or a Superduty duallie, one of these is a great way to get away from the wife during her lunar psychotic episode. These go for $10-14K, and while they're small for more than a couple days of camping, they are ideal for a couple days of camping next to a river or lake or car campground. They also make these to fit smaller pickups, even a Toyota Tundra or Tacoma, and the most modern ones carry a webcam so you can see behind you, acting like a rearview mirror. That's a kit you can install, btw. It doubles as a door security system.
The next thing you need is one of these. Motors are cheap enough, and it will mount an outboard. Or you can just use oars to get to the fishing spot, since most of the lakes around here aren't that big to take very long to reach a particular spot with oars. The sail is for fun, if you aren't into fishing.
I think one of these boats, and one of those truck campers, would be a pretty good place to weekend every month.
American education used to be good, but it was good because it mandated literacy and basic math. Beyond that, it expanded into more esoteric wastelands of philosophy. And then the teachers union got something called tenure and the very worst teachers could no longer be fired. They became social cancer, demotivating quality and driving the schools into the toilet. Things have gotten bad.
The end product of moden education is the snowflake. That is a lawyer with a child whining on the front of a fishhook as bait. Snowflakes have ruined public life for civil servants like librarians. They reject free speech as offensive, just like Nazi SS-Gestapo. They have temper tantrums wearing black hoodies and ballistic nylon, assaulting people in attempted murder.
They are no longer civilized, and are now insurgents. At this point, anyone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" should be treated as terrorists, but the current Republican administration is unwilling to act on this threat, much like the prior one ignored Muslim terrorists until they became a daily threat at airports and public gatherings around the world.
The bigger problem has expanded past public schools and liberal colleges. These are now training grounds for leftist thugs. UC Berkeley has inadvertantly made its graduates unhireable. Allowing violence on their campus, by their students and professors creates an unreasonable risk for company insurance, so hiring a Berkeley grad puts your insurance rates so high you go out of business. You are better off refusing them without explanation, and those Berkeley grads are going to know this soon enough. Other schools with similar famous snowflakes or riots are also experiencing #blacklist problems. Social Justice Warrior are another kind of ethnomasochist terrorists. Harvard has banned clubs, associations, sororities, fraternities, etc and you can now be kicked out of the school for belonging to anything at all. Harvard is on my hiring #blacklist too. When I have the power to hire, I won't be hiring people from those schools.
Business today is mostly done with overseas cutouts, and other nonsense to avoid paying taxes. What used to be good paying jobs with that college degree now gets you a PT job for minimum wage. Voting to raise minimum wage has resulted in kiosk computers with ATM card readers to replace all those retail jobs. Fewer and fewer people are needed to run industry today. Automation has defunded everything. Without jobs, there's no money to buy stuff. The youngest generation is screwed, and they're pretty much in revolution. They aren't worth hiring, and robots don't complain.
The problem here is since education doesn't make a better paying job, and it doesn't with few exceptions, the point of education is largely lost. Higher education today is actually a negative. Both to time lost, and to your total income because you have to either pay off loans or work for years to catch up to those lost while you were listening to Leftist moron professors lying to you in a classroom.
In the real world, you only get a job when the work you do is both profitable and cheaper than a robot can do the same work. Or software. Maintaining robots that do work is one of the few growth industries, but the pay rate is falling, so whatever you think you'll earn when you start learning that job, it will keep getting worse pay and higher stress the longer you keep at it. Just like IT jobs. Expect to drive long distances to places without A/C in the worst weather, where a stressed out manager full of threats, looking for empty promises to blame you for breaking when the problem they've got is worse than expected because they cheaped out on replacement parts or a bad repair contract or sabotage causes these problems in the first place. You don't need a degree to do that. You may as well get hired on right out of high school.
What this means to librarians, like me, is that communists in our field with dreams of running a public pool or drug treatment program or cafe with Rasberry Pi tinker toys, all those non-librarian jobs, is lots of libraries are going to be closed, entirely. They are killing our public civic institution. The books will be sold off or discarded or given to charities who are still doing those basic jobs like store books for loan, and the public funded librarians are doomed. In places where there is oversight and strict limitation of library work to actual librarian jobs, not all this nonsense which most of my professors wrongly believe to be important. I suspect half the people I know in library science are going to end up serving coffee. Most libraries are going to end up as servers in a closet somewhere.
The other aspect is that colleges are becoming hostile work environments and could very well end up defunded by the Federal government, and lose their accreditation when the lose their libraries. And it won't matter, because colleges are a business, not educators. What they sell is adult babysitting for teenagers, not functional adults like they used to produce in the old days. And even when they create adults from the #SJW-Taliban trash that so many public schools produce today, there are few jobs for adults anymore, and those which exist don't pay enough to buy a house. Thank the Dodd-Frank act for that. Dodd-Frank is the big reason for the boomerang kids. And why I'm so in favor of homes on wheels. It avoids a bunch of the problems in home ownership, especially all the taxes or being trapped in a collapsing economy. You can hitch up and go. And so much of the Western states are really about Boom Towns. They boom and they bust. That's life.
This is what a motor scooter looks like underneath the plastic. This is its bones and guts, and what makes it work. It has inherent flaws.
The frame is a bent tube, which flexes. The wheels are usually around 10 inches outer diameter, usually with 3 inch thick tires to deal with bumps rather than the normally 1-2 inch of vertical suspension travel, which where I live is about half what they need. We have 4 inch deep potholes, tar snakes, and bigger wheels could save your life because they won't stumble in the hole. The other big problem here is that the engine is mounted to the frame on a pivot, and its weight is also the swing-arm for the rear wheel. So what? It adds to the rear wheel's weight, which means when it goes up it has to overcome the inertia, and when it goes down, the same problem. This wrecks its handling on rough roads, which where I live is ALL OF THEM. Despite this, people still buy scooters, and in Nevada City or downtown Grass Valley they make sense since these towns both pre-date cars and streets are narrow enough to spit across. Many houses were originally miner's cabins and have no garage, and most of the carriage houses got turned into more houses rather than a garage. Yes, they had carriages and wagons and buggies here. Mine carts too. The advantages of the scooter is its around 100 mpg and only costs around $150 in parts to make. Maintenance on a 2-stroke engine is around every couple thousand miles, or less, and requires changing the flapper valve, similar to a chainsaw, and cleaning the evil burnt oil out the combustion chamber and possibly the piston and rings if it has them, as well as the belt, pulley-weights, and bearings of the transmission. The whole process is around 45 minutes of work, which is not much.
Honda Wave 125cc EFI. Successor to the SuperCub
Why does it have to be such a stupid mess? How do you fix it? Well, a frame can be changed to be more rigid, with a longer base so the engine is firmly mounted and removed from the trailing arm of the suspension. This will drastically improve the ride and safety of the bike. The drive chain goes to a transfer cog, possibly with a belt drive like a motorcycle, itself on a pivot in line with the axis point of the trailing arm, which reduces complexity. This is such a no-brainer fix I am baffled why this isn't an industry standard. Another one is the transmission should have a type of mechanical lockout so you can use the engine as a brake going down steep hills.
Bigger wheels exist, and you can still have them and retain the looks of a scooter by scaling up the tires and suspension to deal with non-fantasy roads with real potholes and problems like the real world has. The frame flex is best fixed with a low profile box frame and retain the flat floor with the grocery bag net/hook, which all riders agree is one of their great features. I'm kind of surprised there's no open-source project for these.
As for the pollution, there IS a solution. First, direct oil injection, and fuel injection in a 2-stroke engine avoids all the smoke. You don't have to premix the fuel and 2-stroke oil. They go in separate reservoirs. You also avoid the engine blowback into the crankcase, which is what makes it so dirty and damages the bearings till the engine destroys itself. This is not a problem we need to keep having. Switch to the mastervalve setup on the muffler, which racing 2-strokes do, or just upgrade to a 125cc 4-stroke with EFI, preferably one that's programmable or multimode so you can test a new one without losing your existing one.
From what I have seen, the above solutions would fix most of what is wrong with a scooter, beyond the rider herself/himself. A scooter that doesn't try to kill you and starts every time, that's a vehicle which a really progressive California should have be in favor of, and would have cost less to give to every single person in the country than the money already wasted on the bullet train to nowhere. If California had good government this wouldn't be an issue. But we have terrible government so solutions are illegal.
Science fiction has a big problem. It is written by men, for men. Women who write scifi don't tend to do well. It is mostly a male genre. Much like Engineering, its a male thing.
The big problem here is that women characters written by men for men to read are not like real women. Most scifi authors tend to be pretty autistic, or chuuni fanboiz, and so have little comprehension of women or how they think. Scifi authors can't write women characters that act like women. They write male characters with women's bits. When you read scifi, or fan fiction of scifi, you keep running into women warrior characters, who don't mind being friends with other women, or share a boy who is mildly accomplished or worse a Gary Stu for whom the bubble gum has run out so he's been kicking asses all over the place. And that's the sort of character that teenage boys and man-boys like to read, unfortunately. Their decisions matter and save the world and feel WAY too proud of themselves for being ethical when it mattered. This is pure fantasy escapism.
That's not to say there isn't a corrollary for women and girls. They have Romance novels, which allows women to cheat on their husbands or boyfriends without actually losing the weight or getting all dirty or having a personality of their own. Romance novels are a big part of what libraries are actually for, btw. Women trade romance novels around. They started doing this well before we made official public libraries over a century ago. Japan's first novel, 1000 years old, was a romance novel traded around by serving girls, hookers, and nobelwomen alike.
In the YA section, most of the books are about teenage girls coming of age only to fall for a Boy or two, get talked out of their panties, and end up pregnant and abandoned, weeping. That's the major of YA girls books, right there. Put them in a setting with vampires, zombies, werewolves, or post apocalyptic ritual murder cults and you now understand 90% of all YA books. They're nearly all written for Girls, btw. Boys won't find much there they want to read. Most of what is called Steampunk isn't punk, and barely touches on steam or engineering, though there's plenty of Mary Sue posturing, Boy romancing, and childish behavior. Its the inevitable consequence of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen books being endlessly sighed over into some terrible distant remake.
Nobody even remotely sane would want a woman fond of those books. They are rotten spoiled princesses and the remakes are written by fat women with disgusting fantasy lives. 50 shades of grey's author is nobody's idea of a good lay. Its the physically unattractive and lonely people who end up being the writers of fiction. This difference explains a great deal about both their motivation and why the people they write are often better than they are themselves.
In books your characters have all the strengths you don't. They compensate for our failures, and allow us to imagine how much better our lives would be if we were someone else.
In science fiction, nerdy unathletic people read books about people who are athletic and popular and capable and have all the best tools to get stuff done, and are popular with the opposite sex in all the ways that real people aren't. That's the biggest problem, because getting raised on scifi or YA-Romance will give you unrealistic expectations from the opposite sex. When you try for a relationship you're going to end up disappointed.
Girls want to marry Mr. Darcy, but the rich romantic guy doesn't exist in the vacuum. He's got a wife, kids, and a couple other mistresses. Romance novel fans get who they get, and they'll cheat on him or mistreat him because they still want the romance they don't deserve and haven't earned. Most women get fat and unattractive and find themselves failing to inspire a healthy sex life because self control and exercise is too much like work. That's how women really are. And men, too. We find our wives getting fat and ugly, and their personalities are revealled to be crap after all, once she gets a ring.
Cheating becomes inevitable (70% for either gender), and the consequences result in a broken marriage two times out of three, even if there's kids. Some couples stay together for the kids, making everyone miserable. Kids of divorced parents are usually unable to have stable relationships themselves. And guess what? Men warn each other of those kind of women. And we listen. We want nothing to do with Bridget Jones, the cheating skag.
Unreasonable expectations, that destroys so much in our society and I have to say we have, as a culture, failed. We want too much, and the stable, rational, woman is a unicorn. She does not exist. She's every scifi heroine, but she's myth. No scifi author can write a plausible woman with moods, rages, resentment, and frequent infidelity they actually do in the real world.
No female author of romance novels will tell women the cost of their bon-bons is a bored husband who won't touch her fat thighs. Or that their sex drives increase with age and their years of teasing and spite in their teens and 20's irreversibly changes their personality so the ugly inside will show on the outside by they time they're 30. This ugly personality shows in their wrinkles, in their faces and bodies, and men look for it to avoid. It will put men off them for life, just when they need us most. Mothers should teach this early enough to matter, but no luck. Schools skip straight to lesbianism, which is a Darwin award. Bad wives get traded out for the younger model. They behave unforgiveably so men may as well find a pretty body to sleep with rather than deal with bags of fat and anger.
The ugly on the inside will eventually become the ugly on the outside, and men watch for the signs, and avoid women like that. The downside is women who are already ugly on the outside could have a great personality, but end up alone anyway because men are superficial that way, or have stricter breeding requirements. Women get around this with surgery, painful exercise, and infidelity, breeding with any man they fancy, not just their married spouse. Women are strongly opposed to mandatory DNA testing, and block it in divorce suits to prevent proof of infidelity invalidating their child support claims. In medical studies of infidelity and STDs where DNA tests are performed, 25% of all children are from a non-spouse, born during the marriage because she cheated on him. Only 10% of those are admitted to in surveys, however. Men pay attention to that too. This reality is a fantastic motivator to avoid marriage. Women marry men for money, not for love. Love may come eventually, but I personally doubt this myself. Lots of long-term couples find serious love and survive the infidelity, and raise the children regardless of the father's identity. The species goes on. Even if a quarter of all couples are infertile, and many marriages fail before two years, almost always due to money, with infidelity just a symptom of the bigger problem.
In light of these very popular media genres it is a small wonder that men avoid women with romance novel fetishes, and women avoid men who like scifi. We are incompatible because of our tastes, and both end up Darwined though inability to breed. You don't have to die to get a Darwin Award. You just have to deny yourself the ability to reproduce. Advertising your tastes in the impossible is a great way to do it.
One of the nearly-free-standing Discworld novels by Sir Terry Pratchett, humorist and folklorist author is Monstrous Regiment. It is the story of women going to war. Most are young, all are ugly and easily mistaken for boys, and their nation is losing the war. Most join the army to find missing family or lovers, or just to get away from the horrors at home. It being Discworld it is also comedy, and has monsters, and references wars on Earth. The style of war is similar to Napoleon, only before guns, so they're at the level of pikemen and crossbows. The comedy is largely along the lines of hiding by thin disguise and acting like the other gender, and people being Shakespearean level of dumb. Its an enjoyable book and surprisingly tender on the subject of civil rights, and the cruel stupidity of bad religion.
Certain soldiers in Syria fighting stupidity today might appreciate this book.
The latest map of a divided california is this one:
Note the yellow line, somewhat hard to see. I got this from the UK Daily Mail, which is like the Enquirer. An English politician came to Orange County (LA suburb) to raise $1M in funds to help pay for a campaign to get this division on the ballot. This turns most of the coastal counties into a new state, and the eastern and middle parts into a different one. We'd be East California. They'd be West California. Fine. So what are the problems?
We do a lot of shipping here. Most of the state's ports are on the coast, and most of the water is here. I'm not sure we'd be willing to give them water at the same rate after they stole from us for 100 years. If we turn off the water to LA we save a lot of energy for the rest of our state, and they get to pay for desalination, which is very expensive, and requires many nuclear power plants along most of the state's fault lines.
A friend from France, fighting the ISIS bastards in Syria (woohoo!), said a friend of hers living here in PRK thinks that Sacramento should be lumped in. I have a problem with that. Hwy 99 and Interstate 5 both go through Sacramento, and the borders are likely to be patrolled and somewhat hostile, since WC is full of BLKLiesMurder and AntiFa assassins and UC Berkeley and Nancy Pelosi, the demented hag of evil.
She's proof there is no God, you know. Or that God is evil. Its one or the other. Which makes you less uncomfortable?
I looked at several other options for dividing the state. The one I came up with (LC/RC) doesn't take the entire North Coast, which hates San Francisco and Sacramento quite passionately. They've been abused and abandoned and would not want to be part of the same state as Antifa, since those bastards murdered their parents working as loggers in the 1990's. I might be convinced that Sonoma and Napa counties would join the commies, but not Lake County or Mendocino. Those are very rural and right wing. And the county with Vallejo might joint the commies too, since they mostly drive into the Bay Area for commute. However, Tracy is screwed, and I would absolutely expect roadblock stations for all the border roads, particularly once the water turns off. The LC will respond by blocking ports and barring travel through the bay into the RC, since Stockton and Sacramento both have ports for container ships despite been 80 miles inland. They aren't as busy as they used to be, but they still operate.
The other options proposed by some Silicon Valley billionaire type is the 6-Californias plan.
This is probably too complicated and "borrows trouble". Giving most of the water supply to Jefferson, which is largely dominated by Meth Junkies and pot growers and teen pregnancy isn't a good thing. Central California crosses the sierras but lacks good roads from west to east. The highest parts of the Sierras dominate, and those mountains are 13,000 feet for 150 miles NW to SE. West California contains LA, but doesn't contain the eastern part of the basin or Orange County. The rural parts like SLO get screwed by race-baiting murder hoboes and billionaire porn kings in Hollywood. South California is 90% desert and 10% San Diego. It would end up very poor and struggle to pay for paving all those desert roads. It might not try, turning the desert communities into the equivalent of Indian Reservations, only with white people. Silicon Valley likewise would ignore the southern part of their area, which includes half of Big Sur, Monterey, Salinas, and the Salinas Valley. It also has the South Bay and Peninsula. San Francisco itself is incredibly evil. Let me say that again. It is EVIL. It is multimillionaires in poverty, and poor people dying as a laugh. Its water and resources are all imported. Only natural air conditioning and port facilities are local. It doesn't make sense if you aren't in shipping. It is due to implode, like a zombie apocalypse. Possibly with cannibalism. I don't care much. I've visited the place too many times to forgive it for its EVIL.
Another option is 3 californias. This is divided up more by actual differences in politics. The Southern California is LA and San Diego. They can argue about rights, etc. It also holds half the desert. Central includes Sacramento and San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley and Delta. Its big enough to argue payment for the various parts funding, and keeps two good roads over the Sierras. Three if you include the southern Route. The Northern section, possibly Jefferson, is the Sacramento Valley starting in Yuba City and up to the Oregon line, covering mostly rural places and no cities with lots of population. Chico might be the biggest city. Yuba City possibly the other. Most of the water is there, but there's enough agriculture need to keep water flowing south.
The problem with most of these is that you first have to get the state population to vote to divide. Then get the support of the congress and senate to agree to this. Which is possible since its been done a few times in history. There is precedent. If you deny access from ports inland, you have to ship around that, and the cost could be prohibitive by rail. The Western coastal counties are just this side of eating their children in a frenzy of violence, and most places in America think that's going a bit far. If they divide from where I live, and then decide to become another country, then block free access through the Bay for "taxes" or "tariffs" to keep their dreams going a little longer before the BBQ sauce runs out on the baby back ribs of cannibalism (because communists always kill their own eventually), if that happens we could see hostile borders, border patrols manned by drones and FLIR sensors, smugglers risking actual death crossing those borders while the commies invite in Mexicans and ISIS terrorists, and us deciding what to do next. PRK is my home. I was born here. I was raised (badly) here. I survived anyway. Dividing the state into two or three makes sense, and if we go for more I can only hope we don't come to blows if the Coasties go mad, as they likely will without water supply. They think everyone else should pay for their lifestyles, which is exactly the argument that makes for Libertarians in the rest of the state.
When I was in High School, I learned how to design houses. I was in the ROP Drafting program. I wanted to go to college and get an architecture degree. This is the sort of skill that should be taught at community colleges, and the tight rein that Architects hold over several kinds of home design only hurts their field. Drafting a home is not very hard work. There are software programs which do it, cheaply. Architecture is not very complicated, and their numbers are limited because they're one of the remaining guilds still extant, and they rob their young of money and talent, taking credit for the work of the young after being mugged themselves during a similar period of exploitation. I learned this around the same time as I was rejected for the major application at Cal Poly, which unofficially was "not accepting white people this year". Racism and sexism for the communist policies of university scum. Duh. This disappointment helped me to become the curmudgeon I am today.
The Uniform Building Code (UBC) is a list of the requirements in a house. They are rules. These are also guidelines written in plain English. You can use them to help you build your house, setup plumbing and wiring, calculate spans for ceilings and floors, and otherwise build a sturdy house. In 1990 you could build a house and half the material cost was the concrete pad, the rest was the lumber etc. Labor costs added onto that. 110 years ago a man could build a house over a summer of weekends and some evenings, and it was perfectly liveable, usually around 800 square feet, with a wall left blank for a future addition when a child is added, the general consequence of marriage.
Building a house on the weekend to prove you have arrived is a longstanding tradition in America, going back for centuries. It is terrible that this is no longer possible due to regulations and bribes and land costs. Housing has become a manufactured crisis which helps create more Democrats. The actual work is trivially easy, and restoring the right to build a house to live in would literally fix most of the problems in our economy.
Quite a few older Craftsman Homes were literally built by young men after graduating high school. The original Craftsman houses predate cars, so have a carriage house out the back, which later got converted to a garage. Back then, the future was Flash Gordon, home electrification, ice boxes, and streetcars. All that got lost by later advances and realization of the costs and failures. However, the benefits of that house design works, if you only have one car and room to park it off the street. A house without a garage dominating the front is a house which looks nice over the long run. Where I live, those Craftsmans sell for only slightly less than a big Victorian, and its better scaled to smaller living. Victorians are big, hard to heat, hard to clean, and have a higher tax rate due to size.
In stick lumber, you build a structural wall using 2x4 inch by 8 foot tall wall using vertical sticks 16 inches apart, with one crosswise stick at the bottom and two overlapping at the top. The roof and ceiling joists go on top of that. Corners sometimes get strapping. Bottom plates sometimes get anchor bolts, though those often go under the floor joist bottom plate so earthquakes can't throw the house off the foundation. These bolts protected millions of homes in the 7.5 quake near Olympia a few years ago. There wasn't much damage because all the houses were built with the expectation of the quake.
Insulation in a house is rated as R followed by a dash and a number. The higher the number, the better the insulation. R-2 is a single pane window. R-19 is the average ceiling. A 2x4 wall doesn't offer much space for insulation, usually R-11 fiberglass. If you want more insulation, you have to use thicker walls or exotic materials for insulation. Some states allow spray foam in the walls, but it burns to cyanide and kills with inhalation so its illegal in many states. Its usually easier to move up to 2x6 exterior walls and thicker fiberglass insulation. That cuts your heating and cooling costs quite a bit. Interior walls don't get insulated often.
The other trick to insulation and cooling is surface area. The more crennelations and bumpouts on the house, the more surface area, the more problems you get with insulation. Beautiful houses with dormer windows are terrible for heating and cooling. They sell well because that sort of thing is stylist. And style costs money.
Big windows are also terrible for insulation. The most expensive kind, with 3 layers and argon gas inside which acts like insulation, only gets you to R-8, which is still much less than the wall next to it. Most people want pictures windows, but most of those windows are looking at a neighbors bedroom or kitchen 10 feet away. Those suck. You can put in obscured (blurry) glass so you can't see out, but the insulation of R-2 or R-4 if double pane, remains. Exotics like glass block turn out to be R-30, but rarely get used properly. They are great for semi-privacy and letting in light, and the vacuum inside prevents the transfer of heat. They are also durable and not particularly expensive, and appropriate in Art Deco and some Craftsman houses. These really ought to be used more often.
Another trick is that while holes in the roof for skylights eventually leak, they can be a great way to light up a home if used correctly and the well is narrow enough but painted while to reflect the light down into the room below. As for insulation, while lots of surface area like crennelations and dormers look really pretty, every bit of exposed area is another place to lose heat. A house looks uninteresting when shaped like a barn, but adjusting its exterior with shapes, color, and textures won't impact its insulation like crennellations do.
A little 2-story bungalow like this Craftsman uses the roof and its large dormers front and rear to break up the visual flow, yet still be energy efficient and retains a chimney. The trick to chimneys is that their flue sucks the heat out of the house and engineering studies prove than an open fireplace cools the house, though this is obviously wrong. Teaching wrong things is exactly the sort of problem which plagues schools today, and should be curtailed. The smart answer to the problem of fireplaces sucking heat out of a home is to use a sealed insert or a wood stove, with an air intake from outside, feeding the fire with fresh oxygen, extract the heat through the walls of the stove, and then venting the remaining fumes outside again. Some clever designs also include a water heater on the back of the stove which circulates around the house to radiators. A modern take on this is a pellet stove or hybrid which can use pellets, firewood, or even sawdust or wood chips. This gets you heat even if the grid goes down temporarily.
A fully modern version with appropriate efficiency makes good sense. Returning the ability of high school graduates to build a home to live in without paying lots of money in bribes (permit fees) also makes sense. It immediately removes all the inflation of home prices, which is a big problem that needs to be dealt with very soon.
In a series of several linked novels I wrote in the 1990's I included a bunch of gun stuff. A bunch of it was wrong. I didn't actually learn to shoot until 2000. Then I learned a LOT of things. Including that I was wrong about many things I'd previously put into my prior writing.
Since then I've been fiddling with theoretical designs and adapting mechanisms, some in the real world and some based on readings, photos, and videos. I even got into various calibers, wildcats included, to try to figure out the appropriate ones for my region, and thus my stories. I eventually came up with some good ideas, but now I'm afraid to post them because there's a lot of scum out there who would use what I invent to hurt people on my side. And that's the trouble with good design. It can be used against you. Even vague descriptions would be useful to the bad guys. This is frustrating.
Even knowing the SBR rules, and the workarounds to a good carbine without breaking that, and the workaround for suppressors using porting and heat shields. And the counterweight piston to create smooth action to reduce felt recoil, and a telescoping bolt, and the trick to fixing both op rod weight and bullpup trigger flex, and forward ejection, and even multistack magazines that work without tumbling. I know how to build all of that. And when I move to another state I will get the license to do so, a Class 3. I'm even reasonably sure I can mod an AR-10 into a bullpup with the above features so I can finally build and shoot 270 ARM. And 6x45 PDW. But I don't want gangers and Islamic murderhoboes having access to them. So I can't build them, to protect us.
I'm probably better off taking most of these skills and applying them to aerogel fiber and weaving machines that will make canvas for car panels and boat parts, and knit for personal bulletproof vests and jerkins (pullover that hangs past the waist). Cheap enough, it will stop rifle bullets and still be comfortable to wear daily. Aerogel is sort of like the polysaccaride in spidersilk, but it is silica, not carbon. It is a wonder material, and really useful for many kinds of vehicle parts. It is safer to distribute in the world. It is harder for gangers to use against me. The ideas I have using these materials would make for a truck camper that weighs half as much. Same with a teardrop trailer, or an A-frame popup trailer.
I have also given real thought to applying these materials to RVs and trailers, upgrading their existing vacation capacity and minimalist living features to something a bit lighter, more portable, and better able to provide utilities for longer while you dry camp (without utility hookups). Most have no suspension, or very primitive suspension. They could go faster if it was better. A really modern suspension could be based on the McLaren MP4-12C, scaled up to the trailer weight. I also thought about applying using that same system to apply lean to the trailer. It wouldn't take much to make it corner better. Finally, I thought about using electric motors to charge a battery onboard and then release it into the wheels to assist in climbing steep mountains.
And how about processing grey water into clean, either for reuse or for dumping (dumping clean isn't harmful). Or using that same grey water into a second stage process into distilled so it is safe. You need lots of solar panel power for that. And you need a serious pack of LIFEPO batteries to hold it.
These are solutions to existing problems. Better answers to the direct confrontation that mostly results in helping evil, and wiping out the best of us.
There is a special kind of freedom in a mobile lifestyle. You don't have to stick around and deal with the fallout from bad public policy when your house has wheels. You also don't have to make excuses when your boss crosses the line and wants you to come with into breaking laws that will see you in jail. Just say no, give notice, and move on. This is the sane response, especially here in the West where the evidence of failed or expired towns are all around us. Poor civic policy or exploited resources are the cause of most of the ghost towns.
I need a house on wheels to avoid getting nailed down to a community doomed to failure. Ever since I left home I was an outsider, and everywhere I go I see the insiders getting a pass on breaking laws, but the outsiders get exploited and discarded like trash. That's just how people are. Its always been an Us vs Them paradigm. So I want a house with wheels to avoid those problems.
If I had the money I would probably own one of these. This is an Airstream Land Yacht. It is pure luxury inside, and they cost around $148K. They are mostly trailer park queens, as they are known, hauled into place and parked for years at a time. They need a seriously powerful truck to haul them. Because of the weight they don't get moved often, so while this is the most luxurious, it doesn't actually make sense for a truly mobile life. And I like the high mountain passes. I like mountains. They have lots of peace and quiet. The lowlander color gangs mostly don't go there.
I think I might enjoy life with the right view, but I keep thinking about certain dirt roads climbing to remote mountain tops, where you get serious peace and quiet.
While I might be able to make a smaller Winnebago work for me, they're really expensive for being a van that sleeps more people than I want, and their kitchen is really too small for my needs. Also, their ground clearance is fine for paved roads but I can't help observing that roads aren't what they used to be. The best mountains do not have paved roads. Quite a few really nice places to visit are on gravel or dirt. For that you sort of need a 6-wheel-drive RV with knobby offroad tires, and a suspension capable of powering up largely non-maintained roads, most of which were made by logging companies for cutting down trees, then turned over to the national forest service. They only keep the roads they can afford, and that's based on budget limitations. The headquarters for the Tahoe National Forest is in Nevada City, down the street from the library where I volunteer. It has a couple satellite offices, one in Sierraville, a town I would love to live in for a summer.
While these really expensive options exist, I'm more inclined towards this shorter Airstream. I think I could pull that much easier, and park in way more kinds of campgrounds. I could also pull it with a bigger SUV (or smaller truck) rather than a huge truck with a loud diesel engine. I realize that diesels have great torque, but very poor torque range, which means they can pull things over mountains at one speed, which isn't so great when you need to speed up and slow down for the curves and hills, etc. From what I have seen, it makes more sense to use either a V8 or a V6 twin turbo powered pickup truck. They have the torque and power to accomplish pulling one of these trailers when it is time to move to a new town, a new campground, or new park. As I said above, I don't want to help people who hurt me, and the surest way to avoid harm is to avoid engagement in the lives of those who pay you. Do your job, get paid, move on.
The Baby Boomers have a problem. They have several, but this specific problem is huge. Most of them know about it. Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme, and its managers don't have enough money to pay for all those retiring onto it. They were counting on my generation being bigger and better employed, so we could pay for those wages, but my generation is less than half the numbers of the Baby Boomers, so the 2:1 ratio of retirees supported by workers is going to 16:1 and later higher numbers. The high Obama-Poverty rate also meant that far fewer workers were paying into the Social Security scam for the whole duration of his tyranny. Most of my generation knows, since 1990, that we'll never see a dime of the Social Security we paid in without a choice. We've been robbed, and the Baby Boomers are bankrupting it. The only good news is that the Baby Boomers aren't going to see all they paid into it. and when they get older they won't see any either, no matter what they vote. I figure 10 years and we'll be unable to bail it out by voting.
The second problem, which is more of a California problem, is all public service workers (teachers, librarians, clerks at the bureaucracy) are screwed. CalPers, which is the single biggest chunk of money in the world was heavily invested in Housing Derivatives. They lost half the fund when it collapsed in 2007. The money remaining is no longer enough to pay the pensions on all those state and county employees because the original fund was based on paying 12 years of pension, at which point they would die at 75. Now people live into their 90's and even 100 years, getting pension all that time. The fund isn't large enough. And the amounts adjust with inflation against minimum wage. Remember that minimum wage is going up to $15/hr by 2022? That's a 50% increase over 4 years ago. That also means the pension payouts have to rise 50% by 2022. That makes them collapse even quicker. The Ponzi Scheme is doomed. The Governor, never one for admitting his own failure when he can party with Hollywood Communists and Billionaires in Silicon Valley, keeps raising taxes to "fix CalPers" but then the money goes to the Bullet Train To Nowhere. This is not good news for all those public employees. Their unions are bought and paid for, so do nothing. Most estimates predict 6 cents on the dollar invested. 6% return on their investment is terrible failure. That's 94% loss. All those public employees, much like the Bonus Army in 1932, may choose to protest, and they'll get maced, tased, and arrested for "unlawful assembly", the current crime for using the First Amendment. Socialists don't like being mocked for failure. All these old guys are going to be looking at terrible poverty in their final years of life. They served, possibly not well, but served California, and they're about to get screwed.
Realistically, we are looking at a future where the things we enjoy now we won't be able to afford for much longer. We're going to learn to get by with library books instead of TV shows, with walks and bicycle trips instead of vacations by air. We're all going to be eating government cheese and getting a lot thinner. And we'll pretend its okay, but it really won't be. Part of the reason that older people don't transfer power to my generation running the businesses they founded is they can't believe that the economy sucks, or that the methods they used 40 years ago don't work anymore. So when we manage them under the modern laws and taxes, they complain we're doing it wrong. Then they retake control, FAIL HARD, and the business collapses. They give up, sell off, and we're out those dozen or hundred jobs because Boomer Senility is responsible. Its very hard to make new jobs and businesses thanks to all the regulations created by Boomers to limit competition. They are the Worst Generation, after all.
Work till you die. About the only good news here is when you move on to another town, you can escape a lot of taxes that enable the survival of those who caused this apocalypse. We don't have teepees. We have Winnebagos and Airstreams, but the movement of Natives isn't just the immigrants from 10,000 years ago. Its those from the last two centuries, too.
