RV Parks and Mobility

Along the same line of thought as my pondering of a life out of a trailer or RV, I also wonder about the value and advantages of better quality RV parks instead of the more infamous and bottom dwelling "trailer parks", the kind that get hit by tornadoes and are populated by skanks and hillbillies in wifebeater shirts and flipflops. I'm not really the flipflop and wifebeater type, you see.

When I was a lad, we would sometimes take camping vacations, with a car and a big tent and usually bicycles on the roof. We'd go someplace with good fishing, and we'd cook meals out of doors and swat at mosquitoes while we ate on a picnic bench, often under pine trees somewhere in the Eastern Sierra. Sometimes these were state park run campgrounds, which in the 1980's were really nice btw and often had flush toilets rather than just pits. They also had water taps so they weren't completely dry campgrounds. Sometimes these were fancier KOA campgrounds, which had a tent side and an RV side, since RVers often run generators all night which is damned annoying when you want peace and quiet while you sleep. Remember that because it might be important later.

The KOA campgrounds have something valuable about them. First, they have hot showers, with facilities that are clean and well maintained. They have proper flush toilets so you don't have to use the one in the RV, and they don't stink. They have a club-room with a TV, usually a ping pong table, a coin-op laundry and coin op video games. The one we went to between Blairsden and Portola had all that and a small shop with a few essentials. You pay extra for that, but I really think it was worth it, so long as it is cheaper than a 3 star motel. KOA was 4 star camping, basically. Ze Germans are fond of KOA because it is very orderly.

The big advantages of those facilities is that you don't have to use your own bathroom on your RV when you want to get properly clean. You can stretch out. You can socialize with other people. You can do your laundry, because no RV comes with a laundromat. Its those crucial things which makes living in such a small space bearable, namely treating the RV as a shelter for sleep rather than a jail cell on wheels.

I have written before of the existence of the very tiny ultralight trailers which can be pulled by a station wagon or SUV. The smallest are basically a picnic table and a sink on wheels so you can get out of the weather and eat in peace when you're going somewhere rough with bad weather for the weekend. I don't think those are properly liveable space. You have to be able to get clean. Dirt is fun and all, but its also full of things that can give you fun infections, and contains parasites and other fun stuff. Best to wash off. We aren't dark ages peasants anymore. Having clean clothes, a clean living space, being able to stretch out, these are important. Trying to picture carrying laundry via a motorcycle... yeah. Not so great. You could probably get away with it on a scooter, though, using that footwell space that will hold 3 bags of groceries.

I think that right now, RVs are too expensive to justify this, and rent at the high end RV parks with all these facilities is probably nearly as expensive as a leased apartment. I don't know that this will always be true, however. When the baby boomers start dying off, their superfluous stuff, like RVs will be selling cheap by descendants who don't want to deal with their fuel economy problems or store those huge things when they're in super-high density apartment complexes with open gates and burglars meandering through (Florida?). RVs are for people with time, space, and money to deal with them. A bit too specialized for the people so codependent that they can't leave their families or home towns. We have to be more flexible than that. Even though Peak Oil is happening MUCH SLOWER than we anticipated back in 2005, it IS happening. Ergo the value of bubble cars.

My current interest in personal mobility is due to experiencing the downsides of being a captive labor market. When managers of businesses think they can exploit the local labor, mostly because that labor won't leave a bad place, they end up with both lower pay and sometimes forced to do either illegal or immoral things.

I am glad that you don't actually NEED to own an RV to escape. Renting a Uhaul and minimizing your stuff, packing up and leaving town for somewhere, if not better, at least different, is often the right answer. Ideally, everything I own should be light enough I can pick up each part of it by myself. I currently own furniture which takes two to pickup. I hope to replace that at some point so it isn't necessary to have help when I move. A small victory, but a victory just the same. You just can't count on people.

The Western States are dangerously isolated without the fuel to run away from bastards and brutes. Peak Oil can really hurt us here. If the oil in the Monterey Shale gets into our economy, the West will stay habitable. If it all goes to China, things are going to get a lot worse, and the suicide rate in the West will climb until most of the towns are empty, and the cities implode like Stockton or Oakland have. I have noticed the Smug claims of arrivals in the really remote mountain hideaways claiming that THEY will be spared from destruction because the community likes them, but go back far enough and you'll find an excuse to cut them off and there's good reason the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi were full of human bones. Many of them gnawed upon by human teeth. If you don't grow food, you are dead meat in the worst case scenario. Every mountain town is under threat of this.

I consider this the strongest argument for decade/century scale public works projects to distract the public and its predatory capitalists/socialists so there's always some pressure relief valve, some place to go. The Columbia River canals, and the Grand Canal from the Frasier River through the Rockies into the Great Plains to refill the Ogalalla Aquifer and restart agriculture there, these are worthy projects which will cost billions of man hours in labor and result in major stability in food supply and thus protection from most of the bad 60-year droughts North America has history of experiencing. The Ogalalla has about 40-60 years of water in it. Refill that and you've got enough protection should conditions change. When idiots go on about sea level rise and unstable weather, I point to the actual research into these enduring droughts which have collapsed complex civilizations and require enormous effort to protect against. If I were in politics, this is what I would be pushing:

1. Dredge ports and reservoirs. 
2. Build the Columbia and Frasier River canals. This means making nice with Canada, but America is becoming Socialist like them so this is easier than it sounds. 
3. Fill in the below-sea-level "islands" of the San Joaquin Delta to prevent flooding and water contamination. 
4. Deliberately flood the Kern River Basin farms runined by caliche for wildlife refuges, ending the temporary desert that's formed near Bakersfield and Wasco. 
5. Fund practical desalination for water supply to LA and San Diego, and export that tech to Mexico so Baja can do more agriculture. Make that a major US export for farming and civil use. 
6. Fund State campgrounds and staff them so mobile people have somewhere safe and clean to stay. We did it in the 1970's. We can do that again. Offer tax breaks to private campgrounds which go above and beyond (KOA). 
7. Build more commuter rail and tourist rail options, not just high speed rail. We need BOTH options to survive. Pass the laws allowing safety exceptions for the ancient steam trains. It is currently illegal to start them due to safety requirements, despite them working for decades. 
8. Punish abusive corporations cheating the tax code and harming the population. Make them PAY. 
9. Correct all the things wrong in the state constitution. Currently, every male 14+ is in the state militia, a law from 1850. Every married woman's children are her husbands, even if they aren't and you have DNA tests to prove it. Those must be fixed. 
10. Scale back the requirements for riding scooters so tourists can rent and ride rather than need a full motorcycle license. Allow reciprocity. 
11. Correct for missing alternate routes through passes so slow vehicles can get through off a freeway. Connect frontage roads, and offer signs so routes are marked for bicycle and scooter tourists using them. 
12. Remove fees from state parks which operate fine without them. There are parks which charge a fee to pay the wages of the person collecting the fee, but nothing more. This is stupid. 
13. Admit and accept that California is about Gold Rush history, about Golden Age Hollywood, and play up those looks for the tourists, complete with uniforms appropriate to the era. Living history works to draw tourists. 
14. Rebuild streetcar routes in all towns and cities, and have them run frequently so they are useful. As oil runs out, electric streetcars will become primary transportation. We had them until Standard Oil destroyed them in 1925. Cheap solar provides the power. 
15. Allow lower safety vehicles from EU to be sold here, accepting the high death toll. Gain advantages of high fuel economy vehicles and lighter weight. 

Many of these things will come from state money, from taxes. Many are things which cost little anyway. Some of them are going to employ a fair number of people. If tourists and retirees find more convenience living in more places, the state will get more residents and visitors, bringing more money here and putting the population closer to the food supply. Thanks to all the sunshine, this also means more abundant solar power to run those desalination pumps on the coast, which resolves the water supply issue until the Columbia River canal irrigates Eastern Oregon and Nevada for those real estate booms. The West ends up being the pressure relief valve for the imperfect or ambitious in the East to have somewhere to GO rather than revolt, rather than turn to terrorism to make their demands heard in a place that INSISTS that birth is most important, not ability. The East is all about the Blood. The West is all about Merit. It should stay that way, for national stability. As long as people are having kids, we have a responsibility to offer places for them to go where they aren't trapped and desperate, a place that their talents and ambitions can fuel positive ventures rather than endless wars as we saw in Europe for two thousand years. We can't afford to make those mistakes. We are better served solving the problems with big public works and long term plans with long term payoff. It just makes sense. 

Art Collector

My best friend collects art. Ever since he was a kid, he collected pocket knives. The little ones for trimming the tip of a quill pen or whittling as stick, or trimming a vegetable from the garden for dinner tonight, or gutting a fish you'd caught in a sunny brook in the meadow. These carefully crafted hand tools are objects of art, of a more peaceful and less violent time than today.

My ex-wife loved many kinds of art, collecting Japanese kimono, old cameras including duplex lens and baffle types, now sitting lonely in her storage space because she didn't take them with her when she fled our marriage years ago. She even collected scents, which I came to appreciate in my prior job, though their snobbery was a little childish. My ex was a woman fascinated with history and liked owning pieces of it, documenting them when time allowed, seeing historic places and photographing them. I hope she's still doing that. It made her happy.

I like mechanical things. I'd love to own an old all-metal Vespa that I could restore like a hotrod. While many mock the Hipsters, I appreciate the effort required to return ancient mopeds to working condition and using such stylish and under-powered vehicles for general transportation. My electronics are discreet and functional, extra durable so they'll last. There's style to be had in respecting good engineering. There's so much brutal and bad engineering today, stuff designed to break right after the warranty expires so you'll buy it again. That is the kind of thing which should not be rewarded.

When I view the art photos of restored and converted motorcycles, saved from rusting apart in some barn and turned into elegant rolling art with functional engine and suspension I have high respect when it is done well. I see these kinds of motorcycles the same way fans of old cars love hotrods. This is one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of BikeExif and Deus Cycles. Minimalist street trackers look extremely practical to me. They have the right suspension and tires to go pretty much anywhere, yet have the classy looks to gain a certain respect. They aren't junk or overweight Milwaukee (or is it Tennessee now?) iron. I've been really impressed with the finish on nicely done street trackers. If you're going to spend money on a bike, it may as well be one that's pretty rather than losing half its value when the first wheel leaves the lot where you bought it.

These days quality is all that truly lasts, and your reputation is more important than your address. As a technician and lover of art, what I collect had better be portable. And my life had better be portable too, because staying in a place that's going wrong is a good way to end up very unhappy and go down with the ship. I don't respect people who go down with the ship, especially when there are perfectly good lifeboats and oars to go somewhere else. I see motorcycles and RVs as the lifeboat and oars. A means to escape a bad place, full of bad people and a bad economy. Forgiveness is for masochists.

Leaving a stupid place behind, or treating it with sufficient caution, could be a life and death level choice. These days, with elderly Baby Boomers retiring and even ending up in rest homes there are a lot of old RVs for sale, some of them pretty tired. Its a pity I'm not proficient as a mechanic to restore one of those. A person who knows their big engines and wood working could make a career out of buying and restoring old RVs for sale. The money from selling them should pay for a decent income and lead to a retirement. The best part about an RV business is its mobile. You aren't stuck paying some ridiculous lease or taxes when a town starts going under and punishes the local businesses with unfair taxes in order to give preference to WalMart, which pays none in most cases. Town councils can be dumb, corrupt, or both. Voting with your feet is one of the best ideas I've heard for dealing with modern corrupt government. There's probably good reason many of the Native Americans the European invaders found were living mobile lives. On this continent its just a good idea. In modern times, we do this with backpacks, cars, motorcycles, RVs, trailers, whatever it takes to escape a bad situation. I just recommend keeping your job history and finances clean.

In my sad experience, telling a bad employer "No, I won't break the law for you" is a good way to get fired, and prospective employers tend to weight being fired rather heavily. On the upside, an employer that wants you to break the law for them so you go to jail rather than themselves... that's a job you don't want. So not getting a job after you explain you refused to break the law? That's a good thing. Some sucker may get that job, and that income, but how much will it be worth in jail? This is why protecting yourself from crime is so much harder today. Many potential employers seem to be looking for victims. Don't play along.

One of the more clever and obvious solutions to bad employers is contract work, with a lawyer on retainer to enforce that contract, and include significant financial penalties if the other party violates them. Enough to cover your losses. And never drive into a job without gas money to drive out of it again. You don't get all the facts when you take a contract. Usually, a contractor is called in with some critical and expensive information not disclosed which may make the contract impossible to fulfill and still make a profit. Self employment is the future, but its also very difficult to accomplish if you are naive and trusting. Get a good contract and pay your lawyer to review it before you sign. If you don't you're going to get screwed. That's just how things work in the real world.

The smarter answer is contracts with stages built into them, with payments and signoff of work accomplished at key points. This protects both sides and won't leave you hanging, unpaid, when the project is finished. I have worked with people who would LEAVE the office when they were supposed to collect payment for a week's work, then complain the client didn't pay and essentially stole the work. Why do business with such people, knowing this in advance? What the hell were you thinking? There's a lot of insanity and desperation in the world. It is hard to avoid it, it's so pervasive. Get your ducks lined up, knock them down and always be ready to leave for the next contract if the one you're on gets sketchy and the other side looks like they won't pay or are cheating you. Always do the inspection before you sign, or leave a clause which allows you to walk away if the inspection shows they lied. There's a LOT of that in the real world.

At every one of the temp jobs I've worked, the temp agency mis-represented the working conditions and job duties, then claimed it was the contractor that lied to them. My choice was to work the job anyway, for less money than I deserved based on the requirements, or walk and never work with that temp agency again. I think this is half the reason why temp agencies don't really exist anymore. That and they charge 3 times what they pay the employee, and the contractor expects what they're paying in labor effort, but the temp is getting barely more than minimum wage, and shows their contempt by working exactly that hard. When elderly people complain about this today, I sometimes remind them that minimum wage is a great motivator to under-perform in retaliation. And shopping at price-cutting retailers is why you put up with bad service, so be polite to the employees because they won't be polite if you're rude. Its just common sense, after all.

These days, mobility seems to be the answer. Tying yourself to a community that has no viable business model is just asking to be exploited, to be harmed. Don't be a masochist. Pull up stakes and move on.

Thunderstorms

They've been threatening thunderstorms and dry lightning, the kind that starts forest fires, for days now. Yesterday was grey and overcast, humid, and smoky. The sun never quite came out, but there was no rain here. The big thunderstorm that started in Nevada flowed over the mountains and passed just north of Nevada City, missing us. Normally storms come from the Pacific and flow East, disappating in the high Sierra and usually vanishing over Reno, or turning into Virga (rain that doesn't hit the ground) across Nevada. The storms this summer have rained a fair bit in Nevada and crescendoed their violence into the Eastern Sierra, which is usually dry and beautifully bare away from the rivers full of trout and mosquitoes, all summer long. Its been peculiar. California is in drought, but Nevada is getting more than is usual share of rain. Arizona too. The Monsoon weather coming up out of the Sea of Cortez has been really interesting and is likely a pattern that will stabilize. Take that, "Global Warming". Maybe some of those pleistocene lakes will get some water in them after all. I still think they'll need human help, in the form of the Columbia River Canal through Oregon and down into the Carson Sink and Lake Lahontan, but that's a big project it would be worth suffering immortality to see happen.

This morning, around 6 AM, it rained, big thunderstorm drops, for about 10 minutes. Really lovely, strong smell and all. "Is your sunroof closed?" my Dad asked. "Yes, two days ago." It was the day he'd washed his car. The family car washing-rain curse affects the whole family, not just me. Back when the first warning was issued and the blue sky was covered in Grey, I closed my car sunroof and waited for hail, lightning, and big rain. I would welcome more rain, even though it isn't showing up on radar. It would help put out the big fires burning, and knock the smoke out of the air. Both Dad and I have sore throats from the smoke. Its very irritating and listening to him clear his throat and cough for an hour every morning is worrisome. He's been doing this for years, but even so, its worrisome.

I wish the economy in the foothills was strong, that it was more than lawn mowing services, medical, and a skeleton crew of govt and retail to keep the bare minimum of care available for the retirees. Business is not good here, and its worse everywhere else. You have to go down the mountain into the Flatland to find anything resembling actual business, and there's so many people, so much competition, its hard to find a niche with any safety. As a risk-avoidant person, the whole thing is frustrating.

At least the weather is good. While we get wildfires in summer and fall and heavy smoke, we also get cooler weather than the Valley. It was 104'F in Sacramento yesterday, but barely 95'F here. Big difference for 2600 feet. They're closer to the Bay and the Delta Breeze, but we feel it more. Just heard a big rumble of thunder. For Easterners and Midwesterners, thunder is so common as to be unnoticeable. Here? Once or twice a year. Conditions are usually wrong to get thunderstorms with actual lightning. A bit too dry, and the valley isn't wide enough to build the big clouds before its hitting the Sierras and either dropping the rain high up or crossing over and turning to Virga across Nevada's many mountain ranges. We still get weird storms, and sometimes tornadoes in weird places like Marysville, but its rare. The blizzard early this year was a good example of very weird weather, but that's California. People pay extra for that, and ignore the lousy economy for basic business. I think the weather is just about Agriculture and Tourism, and that's all it allows. A pity. I don't speak Spanish, and that's much of the population in farm country. It would be nice if the folks with the amazing talents in metal working were building businesses and making their ideas into real products, but they don't seem to do that. A pity.

I just heard the first firebomber of the day head past, going to the Swede's fire near Lake Oroville. 2000 acres and growing. If the last bit of lightning, plus the bits I can't hear because they're further away, sparks more fires, the crews are going to be extra busy after this storm. The most hilarious part is the storm, and the lightning, don't show up on the radar. But they're happening. How's that work?

A Glimpse of Fracking the Monterey Formation, California

The Monterey Formation in central California, running from the Bay Area down to Santa Barbara, inland to the start of the Sierras (map below), contains as much oil as Saudi Arabia did, without all the problems of working with Arabs.

It's a domestic site, and requires fracking to get it out since most of the oil is in shale. To frack, you drill a well, inject a million gallons of water for each well, and some chemicals and sand. The effect is limited to around 150 meters from the bore hole, so a honeycomb grid of wells every 300 meters is necessary, though directional drilling probably works best and will run dozens of holes out of one borehole. Maybe. That's a LOT of drilling and a lot of water. We're talking millions of wells for that large area. It's years of work. Significant lakes worth of water. And all of it here in California, safely away from the Muslim terrorists. We can tell them "thank you, no" to further oil sales and work with what we've got in our own borders.

The payoff from fracking is a fantastic reason to get cheap desalination, and a really potent political action committee going after the water needed. Downside? The US Federal Govt won't be letting California gain independence with this still being untapped. The gold they might ignore, but not this. Oil is too valuable. Upside is cheap solar will happen because there's finally an industrial reason to have it. All those water pumps. Same with cheap desalination. It will be necessary to get the water for the fracking, and all the pipelines and pumps, well, when this is over in about a century, there will be a lot of scrap materials for other use available.

With so many oil wells, there's going to be jobs for geologists and drillers and petroleum engineers, but they'll be moving site every year or so for each group of wellheads. I expect trailers are the easiest, that or RVs. Some sections are flat and hot. Some are mountainous near the coast. All will involve many drilling rigs being setup, used, put away, and a massive number of pipes to catch the natural gas and the oil, for use, and probably re-use the water at the next well. The formation is up to 1900 feet thick, which means there could be a LOT of oil to recover there. The current estimate is just under 16 billion barrels of oil. That's not a small number.

So say they figure out the water and get the pipes and spill basins setup and capture the natural gas to funnel off to our underground storage near South Sacramento (no really, that's a real thing). Say that this whole thing works and makes enough money and produces sufficient oil to keep our cars on the road, at a higher price. What is the impact on Peak Oil preparations? We'll have fuel for jobs, those still working domestically anyway. We'll have jobs building the wellhead sites, running them for years for the last drops of oil, and making them pretty while that finishes, and more jobs decommissioning them after it's done.

Who is an enemy of this?

1. The Arabs. They'd attack it just to keep eating. They trade oil for food because they don't grow their own. 
2. The environmentalists, Earth First! and ELF in particular would attack it to create a catastrophic spill and blame the oil industry, despite actually destroying the environment in the process. 
3. The fishermen (anglers) would be against it, since the rivers would drop and hold less fish. 
4. Agriculture would be against it. That's their water supply. 
5. LA would be against it, because it would be using the water they were planning to wash their driveways with. 

BTW, it was a picture like this on the evening news in San Francisco, during the early 1980's drought that forced us (in the North) to put bricks in our toilets which got the Divide California movement some traction. Those of us from the North remember it and remain angry. That is our water washing off their driveway to make it pretty.

Water is a very big deal in California, and the place most of the oil resides is quite short of fresh water. What goes into the ground must be fresh water, too, not salt. Eventually that aqueduct will leak out into someone's well or get into the rivers and the cost of poisoning a river, and all the land downstream, with salt? Trillions in fines and lawsuits is just the start. So, it has to be fresh water. And the wiki isn't clear as to what chemicals are put into water to make it frack better than just water itself.

California is about Agriculture and Tourism, with retirees just being a kind of tourist that stays longer, perhaps think of them as a crop that pays you to care for them. Nice weather in the rest of the state, but crappy down by Bakersfield, complete with heavy pollution. It rains about 1-3 inches a year there. Its a desert, slightly drier than most of the Mohave Desert, actually. If it wasn't for the reservoirs capturing rainfall in the Sierras and carefully feeding it into the irrigation systems by gravity, there'd be nobody living there.

So the biggest challenge of the Monterey Formation Fracking project, and all that oil, is getting the water to extract it. I suspect this will happen the way I've described: cheap desalination and cheap solar to pump it. However, there's another way, just a LOT slower.

• You can empty LA and use all their water for the wells. LA won't like that. 
• Or you can crank up the water pumps near Tracy and run the aqueduct system at maximum, killing all the fish in the delta and draining the SF bay into the system. 
• Or you can use salt water when fresh water isn't available and bribe the govt to overlook the poisoning of aquifers in California with Salt Water. 
• Or you can build the Grand Canal from the Columbia River down through Oregon, Nevada, and finally the Owens River before diverting it through Tehachapi Pass into the San Joaquin Valley and provide the fresh water for the wells. That's the larger water supply, but it will lose a lot on the way. Or it will after the rights revert, year by year, to allow real estate deals along the canals in the Oregon and Nevada High Desert. Not ideal, but it could happen. 

These are not ideal solutions, but they are solutions. Grand civil engineering projects, like extracting a Saudia Arabia of oil from California without causing the greatest man-made publicized ecological catastrophe in history... well, them's is the cards. What do you think? 

America's Cup

So I mostly just follow Formula 1 racing, but I also have a soft spot for America's Cup sailboat racing. They aren't exactly standard transportation, but they're really interesting designs, extreme ways to mess with rules and produce boats that go very fast. The current crop are catamarans with 100 foot high hard wing-sails rather than fabric, and they have hydrofoils to allow the boat to lift out of the water and fly across it, using the hydrofoils and the sails with manual tuning through human powered winches, to zoom 5-10 feet above the water, mostly. Truly amazing. I really respect the engineers who came up with this, and the people who actually built and tested these sailboats, and the crews who eventually learned how to run them for races. I don't like that the course in SF Bay is too damned small. It should be much bigger, going around bridges and into the Sacramento River current near Angel Island, not just back and forth a few laps from the prison to the end of Fort Mason. It would be more interesting with a bigger course.

See how cool that is? This is technically the Louis Vuitton Cup, which is a semi-final race before the America's Cup itself. Its still cool. Some of this technology can be applied to cargo ships, just like Formula 1 race technology eventually because Fuel Injection and Variable Valve Timing (VTEC). Race technology DOES end up in more boring vehicles, if its reliable and a good advantage for commercial purposes. I applaud that application. Good show!

LOL: SacBee Predicts 5 foot sea level rise (up to 2000 years from now)

Articles like this deserve to be mocked. Its so simplistic, utter fear mongering to ignore the 660+ dead in the riots in Egypt, riots paid for by our current President in spite of the law that makes it illegal to do so. The coward who wrote this wouldn't even cite the study by name. What a jackass.

I'm glad I watched a Saturday afternoon scifi-comedy called Iron Sky, which has space Nazis on the dark side of the moon. It was like a Uwe Boll film, only one that didn't run out of money so it got all its special effects and the direction was slightly better. Many of the actors were old hands from actual Uwe Boll films, btw.

Really, this is hilarious. And its so much better than the usual inland sea crap. When I write about an inland sea, I don't call it a sea. I call it a lake. A flooded estuary of brackish water, which is a mix of fresh water and salt, though the amount of salt water will change depending on tide and season, since high floods from the rivers pouring out are likely to drive away most of the salt. I also point out that the levies are there because the fools who grew vegetables on pure-carbon of the drained estuary literally turned the soil into vegetables and air because it wasn't soil to start with. This is why its below sea level. NOT due to magic global warming chemicals. Sigh. Such idiots.

I find those people really frustrating. They bought in to the nonsense and now they preach it and believe it. Its their religion. Kinda like the Nazis in the movie. They believe in peace through superior firepower and annihilation of inferior peoples etc blah blah. And they lose. Bring the next ice age. I will enjoy watching sea levels fall, bays empty, and coastlines rise out of the sea. It will be hilarious.

Got snowshoes?

A Naked Ninja Is Not Sexy

The current trend in motorcycles is plastic shrouding, ostensibly for better stability in the wind at high speed. These are called fairings. On a Ninja 250 or 600, it enables the bike to go 100 mph and not kill the rider, on a straight anyway. A naked bike has a lot of wind buffeting above 55 mph and windshields and fairings stop being girly and start being necessary. When the first 4 cylinder Honda motorcycles got fairings and big windshields, they were immensely popular with highway tourist riders because they were stable and reasonably comfortable, provided the rider was poised, balanced, and didn't mind paying as much for the bike as you would for a decent small convertible. Between the Honda Goldwing and a Mazda Miata, I'd rather have the Miata. That's not to say its the only choice. Between a Geo Metro and a Suzuki Bandit 650, I'd rather have the Bandit. As road bikes go, its nearly perfect. They were, of course, discontinued, but used ones are around and are good for riding up here.

The primary problem with a fairing is that a motorcycle's natural position is on its side, and eventually it will end up there. A plastic fairing isn't strong so it will break with the weight of a bike on it. The fairings are slightly expensive to make, but not nearly as pricey as the resellers make them out to be, the majority of the bike price. Ergo, there are people riding around on Naked Ninjas, which is about as unsexy a bike as you can imagine. Underneath that fairing is ugly functional tubing, wiring harness, zip ties, and no thought to looks at all. They built it cheap and the fairing covers all the ugly. Its still a bike under there, but LORD, the 250 is a mess. A naked bike from the 1960's is better looking because it had to be or it wouldn't sell in the first place. They didn't really have plastic yet. This is also why they're desirable for restoration because they have CLASS and look good when they're done.

As much as I like the Bandit for being nicely sized and a good balance, that trailing arm suspension is just a simple aluminum rectangular box-tube with holes in it for the rear axle. That is NOT a nice looking trailing arm suspension component. It is cheap, it probably works okay. But its nice to see that there are aftermarket guys building proper trailing arms for the Ninja and the Bandit out there. Fixing all the ugly on a Ninja is so big a deal I have never seen one that looked good. That said, people try because you can convert them into Enduros and there are lengthy trips done by folks up through Quebec on dirt roads using a Ninja 250 with knobby tires and panniers (hard saddlebags). Since it has 5 inches of suspension, its just enough to make it work on crappy roads. I see Bandits up here in the Sierras, curving through the side roads and enjoying the lean. With drought being the normal state of things, this is an excellent place to ride a road bike most of the year. That's the upside of drought. Dry roads. For now.

Why so many choices? Well, it's like this. We can't afford to buy new stuff. We're all too broke. Artisans and craftsmen are the future of America, at least for non-farm and non-hospitality jobs, and they'll be less broke if they find a way to use their crafts to get funding through tourism and agriculture. It's tough. It's easy to rant and fingerpoint at who destroyed America, but the sad truth is we did every time we picked the cheaper option when we bought something, because that cheaper option shifted jobs away from Americans and out of the country. We caused Globalism to destroy us by being cheap. And now we suffer the consequences. We can't fix that, but we can fix what we've already got and live through the mistake.

Artisans and craftsmen are already finding old machines, cheap, rusting and missing parts, and restoring them to operation. This is easier with the motorcycles made of metal rather than plastic because repairing metal is pretty easy, but few of us have plastic molds or the skill to "weld" plastic. Bikes than are built to fall over, Enduros, and ride on really bad roads are the easiest to keep working. Standard (upright seating position) bikes with no plastic are the next best and will probably be around in another century. They will be maintained through parts replaced using a library of downloadable CNC part designs and laser sintering on demand at a fabrication shop. It will get cheaper, eventually, and heat treating will make it just as good, or better, than the original. Yes, we'll eventually get around to building new bikes from scratch, and new ultralight cars that are cheap, using download CNC and open-source designs, and to hell with safety testing, but that hasn't happened yet.

Other than the hotrod community, which I follow because its a local thing here with free shows, most car makers are less than enthusiastic about taking risks on new models. Safety standards and high dollar lawsuits against car makers for daring to sell a vehicle which isn't perfectly safe in all conditions... well, you'd be a fool to risk that under standard car-dealership rules. There's too much money involved, and those who got into that business and PAID so much to get there do not like a new cheapskate builder to show up and undercut their business by building light vehicles with good fuel economy.

There was a story published that turned out to be wrong in many details, from the San Francisco Examiner newspaper this week about the 1L from VW. They said it was going to sell for $600. Not a typo just plain wrong. They did print a retraction later. A cheap Chinese scooter that works for about 90 days is $599. No way in Hell is China going to be building cars for that. They didn't even do the basic fact checking to realize it's the 1L, which is going to sell for $45K, but gets 240 mpg on diesel, but only has a top speed of around 45 mph, is 3 feet tall, and is built to crash standards at that speed, not actual freeway traffic. It's a concept car, one that runs on back roads and tracks, to prove it can work. It just isn't practical. The basic car is a carbon fiber bathtub, and the engine is a tiny diesel suitable for a motorcycle or scooter. It gets great gas mileage and is more comfortable in bad weather than a bike, but at 3 feet tall it is likely to get run over in traffic by a texting coed in her Dad's SUV (because it's safe and she's a ditz). And run over is literal. This is a death-trap car. An EXPENSIVE death-trap car. With that low ground clearance I doubt it can even get into or out of a parking lot here in California. We have these fairly steep cuts through our sidewalks and that looks like it would scrape. Who will be buying that? I think this is why they aren't actually in production or for sale in the real world. This is not going to sell very well.

I do see a future in TIG welding cromoly steel tubing into a race frame, attaching mounting points and fitting very minimal parts salvaged from the junkyard into a working experimental vehicle. Like a dune buggy. Covering that with basic weather protection and eventually fiberglass or carbon fiber, if it gets cheap enough, will result in many unique homebuilt vehicles. Most of the weird ones from car shows are basically sculptures with no internal mechanics and often with 1/2 inch of ground clearance. They're meant to make you stare. I'm talking about working experimental vehicles, ones that break down and you learn something from what failed. Realistically, any vehicle with less than 5 inches of ground clearance doesn't have a future. That forces many of the weirder experiments to settle down a bit and a middle ground of efficiency will result. That's what we really need.

Of course, experimental vehicles are not comfortable or crash tested and likely unsafe in interesting ways, but its still cheaper than the 1L and accomplishes the same job: a ride to work with good fuel economy. A clever and skilled artisan will build something that belongs on Top Gear, either in the joke category (Eagle iThrust or Hovervan) or the budget supercar one.

They will take longer than building a bike, of course, or modifying a golf cart to run faster, which is what most people are going to end up with: a golf cart with some plastic sheets to keep off the rain. None of these vehicles are ideal, but they'll get the job done, if the operators are willing to put up with the extra time and discomfort to get there. Four wheels is allegedly safer than two, right? There are conversions of ATVs with fenders and turn signals which makes them street legal, even here in California. Not ideal, but better than pedaling up a steep hill.

I still think an Enduro is the easiest answer. They're ugly, but they'll run forever on any road, no matter how badly maintained that road becomes. So long as we have roads and reasons to use them, there will be a means to do so. I just wish the Socialists weren't so damn cheap about road repair or so insistent about safety. It's our choice to die in fiery auto crashes. Not all of us are content to be useless eaters.