Living in California as I do, you might assume I'm surrounded by communists. And that's almost true. This map shows how counties voted in the last election. Notice all that red? Even in California, most of the land is conservative republican, even the farmers. The blue areas have the most population, and illegals who vote 4-6 times each.
Commies have been self selecting to move into my state as they flee from other regions under the perception that California will lead the way into the kind of communism they've been dreaming of ever since Trotsky, who was a follower of Marx but more extreme and was killed by Stalin for being too out there. Its tempting to use historical examples to crap all over their dreams, but I feel like that's a little too easy, and too distracting. I want to explain what their ideals believe as best as they've explained it to me. I think they are wrong, but they rarely sit down and explain things.
Their primary reasoning for thinking communism is inevitable is the fact that most jobs used to be manufacturing, but automation removed most of the jobs and replaced them with robots. A win against drudgery, sure, but a loss against the American dream of a job a poorly educated and unmotivated American can do and still bring home the bacon, pay the mortgage, and allow the wife to watch the kids rather than work. That dream is dead. They are right about that, and it burns me.
The problem with removing all the jobs and replacing them with software, AI, automation and robots is fewer people will have the ability to buy houses and raise children under the best environment. The worst socialists tried discarding men, and the resulting black genocide has been a national point of shame. Clearly, marriage remains the best environment to raise children. All conservatives, which is more than half the country, agree on this and ignoring this firm principle is asking for civil war. Communists might get some traction if they admitted this is true.
The communists think that the answer to automation removing jobs is a guaranteed minimum income. There are big problems with this, starting with "how much per family" and the issues of both fraud and paying people to be useless eaters, which has so far not resulted in the arts but has resulted in the national shame of welfare moms, drug dealers, crime, and useless breeders. The bigger problem is also "who pays for it?" Taxing working people to pay for lazy scum is going to create civil war.
The farmers growing the food don't work for free, and stealing their food is a great reason to stop growing more, which is exactly what happened in Zimbabwe, right before hyperinflation and starvation and death. Similarly in Venezuela, which is just short of cannibalism as I write this. And before you claim that Norway is awesome socialism, remember they paid for it with oil from the wells in the North Sea, and those wells are empty now, and Norway is deficit spending on socialism. Its going to fail. So how do you pay for this guaranteed income? How do you feed a population that's 99% useless eaters? Liquefy the dead to feed the living? Soylent green is made of people?
It is those questions which are really stumping the socialists. And the obvious violence which will arise when the food trucks don't show up, and the meal ticket stops working because those eaters are a problem to be rid of rather than a resource anymore, that's where it all goes everywhere it has been tried. The money always runs out. The numbers add up to civil war, and the conservatives are better armed.
In 2003, following the Tech-bubble collapse, quite a few people my age decided they'd lost too much money gambling on the stock market, most around half their savings. "What now?" they asked. They got married and bought houses. This was collectively called "Nesting".
At the time interest rates for loans on mortgages were really low, and a new type of loan called an Adjustible Rate Mortgage would delay its rate change from a low rate to a higher one, by around 3 years. This meant that you could afford a much bigger loan and buy a much bigger house on the wages you had NOW on the idea that you'd have a higher wage in future to afford the difference by the time it changed to the higher rate. This was a terrible idea and while a few sane people like me avoided it as the mad plague it was, tens of millions of people who failed math signed up. This was a legal scam, and the suckers caused unintended consequences to the entire housing market, something we are still living with today.
Home prices dramatically rose because loans would let you afford more. People who bought houses at $200K found they suddenly owned a property worth $600K, enough to pay off their initial loan AND buy a better house worth $400K tax free if they sold it. So they did. That money would also pay for a $1M mansion with that $400K as the down payment. Again, on an ARM loan whose interest rate would reset in 3 years to a higher rate very few people could afford in even the most optimistic projections, but Optimism was what was used to falsify wages to qualify for these loans, and the agents selling the loans got a percentage of the total value. They were making lots of money, enough to buy houses they weren't living in, just long enough for the market to rise so they could "flip them" over to the next buyer and take those profits, pay the taxes, and repeat for further increase in their personal wealth. It couldn't go on.
The ARM adjustment period began to ramp up 3 years after the start of the bubble. This was obvious, predictable, and caused the absolute collapse of the real estate values of homes when people DIDN'T get raises like they expected. In 2006-2008, in combination with $4.50/gal gasoline and power blackouts, the bubble burst. Or halfway burst. Then the President at the time claimed he'd fixed the whole thing by taxing the hell out of all of us.
He was lying, or at least mislead our population with statements which were only partially true, at best. Prices on homes are still WAY above wages. This is because the President ordered the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates down to avoid collapse of the economy. They ignored signs of inflation, a change instituted by President Clinton and kept up by W Bush, who should have reversed that decision and excoriated his predecessor over the size of the lie. He didn't, and neither did Obama. All were greedy and lazy men, and we are suffering because of this.
Homes are still too expensive, and this is because interest rates are too low, and because of that people with low wages can get long term mortgages to buy houses at inflated prices. So houses haven't reset their prices to a fair interest rate that reflects our ACTUAL inflation rate. Cheese is $4/lb for the basic cheddar or jack. Bread is $3-4/loaf. Milk is $3/gal or slightly more, depending. This is roughly three times the price they were before 2003. That's a 10-12% inflation rate, btw. Not the 2.6% the Fed is pretending at. The liars. Treasury is supporting the lie, as well. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is being lied about using these BS numbers based on deliberate and political lies. Its not okay, and its making more poor people, which is bad for the Republican Party, who really needs to act on this. This is a major topic with Rand Paul, but hardly anyone listens to him because its pain for us and the Democrats will take more seats repeating the lies to get votes. People are dumb, and vote for liars because those words comfort them.
The housing crisis is due to these low interest rates allowing massively overpriced homes to sell. If they couldn't get the money on local wages, that means the houses will have to appeal to rich people willing to pay too much, and you don't get rich paying too much. Housing prices need to fall about 50%, possibly more.
Rather than raise wages, which increases demand for illegals who work for less than minimum wage because they can't tell authorities about kickbacks and extortion and unfair labor practices like actual citizens do, Democrats are in bed with what are basically plantation slavers in modern times, using these cheats to scam slave labor from Mexico. The wall keeps them out of the hands of these slave traders and exploiters, but Democrats are elected by people who vote 4-6 times each. This is known, even if its uncomfortable to admit. Too much corruption causes this. The Plantation owners don't want to pay higher wages for their workers to comply with the law because that also impacts their selling price and their personal profits and everyone they compete with is cheating too. Without a hammer coming down on ALL OF THEM TOGETHER, there is no hope of fixing labor rates in agriculture and maintenance jobs being done by illegals. And without fixing these jobs there's always going to be problems with wages. Raising minimum wage just encourages businesses to hire more illegals and risk arrests and ICE raids. It isn't fair to focus on $15/hr burger flippers. You SHOULD be more concerned with jobs which employ both legal and illegals together and the implications of that industry paying fair wages which then provides actual home buyers rather than renters and felons. People who work for less than minimum wage can't get ahead in our society, and their kids know it. They also watch their parents break the laws in the country they're living and and develop contempt for law and order, and resent those who benefit from the law. You end up with outlaws in our society and they vote Democrat for life. Usually several times each per election. Famously true.
We can't raise wages until we get a wall. We can't fix the housing bubble to reasonable prices until we fix interest rates and enforce labor laws in all industries. We need the wall, and we need to expel the invaders so they stop polluting industries with their illegal labor rates. Get rid of them and we have a chance. Leave them to pollute our society and we'll continue to fail. This has to end. Keep in mind that anybody saying it is happening at some specific date in the future is full of poop. It doesn't work like that. It takes actual signals and usually laws or trade issues cause it to burst. If the President or Senate passed a law forcing Banks to dump their inventory in bad debt mortgages or pay taxes on them, then the market would suddenly collapse. That refusal to report or pay taxes on bad mortgages, btw, is why its still inflated. That's probably where things will change.
Chicken Tinga is a spicy slow-cooked chicken thigh, broth, onion, and chipotle pepper-sauce and a can of tomatoes. You first cook the broth, onion, and chicken together for an hour. I suspect more than an hour would be even better. Then you shred the chicken with forks and set aside. Then you take the tomatoes, chipotle pepper-goo, and a cup of broth in a blender and puree. Sautee another finely diced onion, add the spicy sauce and broth and chicken, then slow simmer for about 90 minutes so it all soaks in, with the lid off so it reduces. Be sure to stir every so often to prevent burning. Serve in a tortilla, sort of like a buritto or enchilada with cheddar cheese and top with sour cream and more sauce.
On the second day, take a half cup of this spicy tinga sauce and simmer in a pan with one raw egg, heating slowly and scrape bottom and sides until noticeably thickens. Remove from heat. You just made a savory and spicy custard from that egg. Serve over English muffin or toast, with your choice of meat. I suggest a chorizo or sausage patty with more cheddar cheese. This is healthier than Eggs Benedict, and tastes exquisite.
F1 racing has just announced on Motorsport.com yesterday that they were now adding body panels to cars which slow them down in exchange for more advertising space. F1 is a business, but its foremost a competitive racing series. If they're making them worse, why do they expect people to watch? And ticket prices are really high, often one race per country, and the best seat is on TV. I've been following IndyCar and F1 since the 80's, when I was old enough to start having more opinions than "NO!".
F1 has been through a lot. I loved a lot of things about it. They used to have wonderful screaming V12 engines, and stop for a splash and go of fuel and tires every 15-20 laps. Accidents in the pits happened, but it was racing. They had fire extinguishers and ambulances. F1 has gotten a lot safer over the years. A crash at nearly 200 mph lets the driver get out and walk away afterwards. That's great engineering. The problem today is they've made the engines too small and unreliable, and shoved a couple hundred pounds of lithium battery right behind the driver's back, leading to actual burns from the heat according to live driver reports. They have these batteries to give a torque boost so the F1 cars can pass each other under certain circumstances. Its hackneyed. They also force drivers to be starving in order to win races.
They've also removed cylinders from V12 down to V10, then V8. Now they're V6 engines, and severely limited in capacity and RPM and fuel supply. Its not as fun as it used to be. Modern drivers with a simpler V8 or turbo V6 and no hybrid and bring back the variable geometry aerodynamics (moving wings and flaps) would return straight line speed and better cornering, and when the flaps fail, a wreck.
In 2014 after years of good safety, following decades of two deaths per year in F1, a driver died in a freak accident of extremely unusual circumstances. There was a typhoon, the track got flooded, a car slid off the track and the tractor came out to lift it off the course. Under Yellow, a driver going around the corner lost control and hit the tractor in a really awkward angle and died when his head hit the boom in JUST the wrong place. Its a million to one accident, if not worse odds. Ridiculous, really. F1 has responded to this accident and lawsuit by the drivers family by ruining the cars, adding a roll bar to the top of the car. Alternative option is a windshield, which has more drag. Both options are ruining the car. F1 is OPEN TOP racing. Open top, open wheel, no fenders, maximum lightness, minimum safety. Like bullfighting, F1 racing is supposed to be risking your life. It isn't supposed to be safe. I suspect the drivers ghost is pissed at his family for ruining the sport he loved.
If you want to race under a roof, go to Le Mans. Or IMSA, which came back after a couple decades rest. There's even a series based on it, called ALMS (American Le Mans Series). The high end of computer simular racing is the game Forza (versions 3-6) racing. The video game is based on ALMS, and the cars are licensed through the series. Those are fun to drive in a simulator, and the race tracks are interesting, what you can see of them. IMSA has been around for decades. I used to watch IMSA races with my Dad, and they were fun. Paul Newman raced in IMSA at Sears Point, which is the name of the track near Sonoma, CA. They gave it a bunch of different names since then, but its always been Sears Point, named for the rancher who sold the land at the south end of the Sonoma Mountains. Its a hard track to watch a race because its a road course, and somewhat narrow. IndyCar finishes its series at Sears Point in September/October. I think they'd benefit from a few more races in the series, and more of the tracks getting smoothed so speeds come up. Some of the tracks are pretty bumpy, and that hurts the racing. This is a really good idea, track owners. You can then sell more race day tickets to private car owners who want to see how fast their M6 goes. The Nurburgring isn't the only place to drive really fast. We could do more of that here. Willow Springs has track days.
If F1 is going to become IMSA with smaller engines and international courses where they demand a billion $$ in fees for the right to have the F1 circus race on your track, I just don't see much of a future for the series. It got bought out by Liberty Media but they haven't fixed all its problems. They're keeping the batteries. They're keeping the high ticket prices. They added rollbars and ruined the spirit of the racing series. The haven't even considered returning to refueling and getting back better engines. Its all about the tire compounds and pit delta. Boring!
F1 could save itself if it did the following:
No Roll Bars. Death is always a possibility.
Active Aero, not just the rear wing.
Refuelling.
Choices of engine format: V8 normally aspirated or V6 with turbo, and increase to 2 L. Possibly more to get the torque back.
Allow drivers to have healthy body weight. Most are starving.
In comparison, for open wheel racing in the Americas, we have IndyCar. IndyCar is also a cart racing series, and use bigger enginers than F1, which also means they're faster, despite not looking like it. They have better aero downforce so can pass easier, and go faster on the straights than F1, a fact which is embassing to the World Motor Sport FIA bosses. The problem with IndyCar is their ability to promote themselves isn't as good, and their camerawork isn't as good either. These are fixable problems and will probably continue to improve in time.
A local boy from the town where I live won the Indy 500 race in his rookie year after a couple years being 3rd fiddle in F1. He convinced Takuma Sato to join him on the Andretti Team (Michael Andretti is the son of legendary F1 world champion Mario Andretti) which runs something like 6 cars. Sato won the Indy 500 last year.
IndyCar is also a business, and the cars have hilarious sponsors specific to the USA or Canada. In the old days they used to have some races in other countries, if I remember correctly, but most were here in the USA, within reasonable overnight driving distance of most of the population for at least one race. That and all the TV coverage has kept the series alive, even through its problems with Indianapolis Speedway suing the series, and drivers refusing to compete in unsafe cars. Stuff has happened which hurt the series. The current limitation for IndyCar is all of them race on a single-maker chassis, and a choice of maybe 3 engines. Its not as interesting as F1 used to be, back when there were more choices and not so much obvious and boring cheating, though to be fair, F1 has always had cheating. And some teams become dominant and stay there for years. Red Bull used to win all the races. Then it was Ferrari. Now its Mercedes. It isn't fun to watch and the cameras have been ignoring the leaders of the F1 races til the final lap. This is a clue that the interest in F1 is waning.
IndyCars have largely identical cars, but different drivers. They have a running start rather than a standing start like F1, which is less exciting, but also less likely to cause a crash. Identical cars keeps the cars close together. Winning is based on driver skill and mechanical circumstances like damage or blowing an engine or using too much fuel. Rossi won at Indy 500 because he did an economy run and coasted to a stop just past the finish line, which is what matters. Being first is still being first. There's also tire wear and fuel stop dropping your position, since the stops are relatively long compared to the 2-3 SECONDS in F1, which only swaps tires and sometimes a nose.
Indycar is a different sort of event from F1. When you watch IndyCar they basically throw a big concert and party first, then you watch the race, then there's another party after. In comparison F1 is almost religious. Before the start it has a model-holding-a-number-sign by each car, and the crews of mysterious mechanic-priests in their identical uniforms scamper around doing mysterious priestly mechanic things. News crews from around the world circulate. There's announcers for the major languages there. This being the USA, we see the English language broadcast, which is mostly English announcers in their booth, and their lad on the ground with a camera crew, chasing down drivers after their car breaks during the race. Then the drivers get in and strap on all the safety harnesses. A mechanic with a battery and spinner rod starts the car, which has been running preheated cooland fluid to warm up the engine and get the parts to unseize, since at room temperature they are locked up. They have to be hot to move. The cars do a parade lap, and the tires previously under heating blankets get cold. That part is important.
Then they line up the cars in order and some officials certify they're lined up right for the start. Then red lights glow one after another and when the red lights vanish, the race starts. This start is unique to F1. They go from a resting stop to 100 mph by the first corner, sometimes even faster. Their tires try to warm up in that distance so they are sticky enough to grip around the corner, but by the first or second corner, several cars will be wrecked. This is very typical, that first corner wreck. It has to be heart breaking for all those teams having gotten to this point and then the driver either hits or gets hit by some other driver with a similar problem or minding their own race. The course often goes to yellow behind the relatively slow AMG Mercedes pace car. The cars line up behind it, in order. Some pull into the pits to change tires and go to the back of the column and will need to pass cars, who will also eventually pit and lose positions. Then pace car goes off the course when those first wrecks are cleared and then they race again, until the next wreck leaves debris on the track. The debris is sharp, and punctures tires. Race series are LOST on getting a flat tire, or that first corner wreck. At Singapore last year, Vettel and his teammate Raikonnen drove around a slightly slower car and wrecked all three, removing Ferrari from contention in the series for the remaining two dozen races. Hamilton, ahead of them, won.
This is the crash that prevented Vettel from having a chance to win the world F1 championship. He tried. He got close, but Hamilton won by not being in this wreck.
Not all car racing series start the above two ways. Le Mans used to have the drivers RUN to their cars from the pit wall, jump in, start the car, and put on their belts as they drive. Le Mans is amazing, and dangerous, and the track has been slowed down but there are American tracks with a similar layout where the cars hit 170 mph for a minute and then slow WAY down to make the turn. Le Mans actually used some farm roads closed for the race day, and the houses it goes past are actual people's homes, not set decorations. Its only two days a year, so why not? Lots of racing series have some city street courses, including F1 and IndyCar. Le Mans is one 24 hour race a year. F1 drivers who are getting mocked in F1 can win at Le Mans and shut down the complaints. Sometimes cars aren't very good. Fernando Alonso has been suffering through Honda's engineering problems with the Hybrid engine. Keep in mind that Honda won F1 with its first car engine because Soichiro Honda liked racing. He also built scooter motors for the SuperCub and the CVCC engine and later 4-cylinder that made his car company famous. But his first engine was for F1, and they won for a long time with variations of it. A great engineer can do that. Not so much today. With Soichiro dead, Honda is full of apologies and excuses and their engines have to be detuned to "slow" or explode. That's not good engineering. Alonso has paid the price, and in non-hybrid Honda engines he's lead laps at 240 mph at Indy 500... at which point the engine exploded. So did another Honda on that same team. Sigh. At least it didn't just stop because it was tired like in F1. When a car stops for no obvious reason during an F1 race the audience jeers and boos. This is another thing F1 organizers should pay more attention to. So far, F1 has been a negative demonstration of hybrid car technology. It has shown it to be unreliable junk most of the time.
F1 has become about tire wear and pit Delta. They don't refuel. They rarely pass. It isn't interesting enough. Bigger engines and refuelling would restore the fun of the series. Active Aero would help a lot too. Even supercar makers have that now. Why not use it? Its neat, and it works reliably enough. Maybe ALMS will use it first. I hope so. It is interesting. I don't see Liberty Media caring about all the different fans writing to protest the boredom of F1 racing today. It used to be better, more fun, louder, more exciting. It used to be a sport.
Living in California as I do, you might assume I'm surrounded by communists. And that's almost true. This map shows how counties voted in the last election. Notice all that red? Even in California, most of the land is conservative republican, even the farmers. The blue areas have the most population, and illegals who vote 4-6 times each.
The communists think that the answer to automation removing jobs is a guaranteed minimum income. There are big problems with this, starting with "how much per family" and the issues of both fraud and paying people to be useless eaters, which has so far not resulted in the arts but has resulted in the national shame of welfare moms, drug dealers, crime, and useless breeders. The bigger problem is also "who pays for it?" Taxing working people to pay for lazy scum is going to create civil war.
