BOOK: Unseen Academicals

It is slightly puzzling how someone might review this book poorly, unless they're so detached from life they don't know any war veterans. In modern times, war veterans are everywhere in English speaking countries. Wounds in modern war are even worse than during Korea or Vietnam, and modern technology and medicine means that war wounded don't have to lie in bed after they close up. They are out and about, and I suspect we'll see proper working exoskeletons in under 10 years time, so the paraplegics can walk again.

Unseen Academicals is about a war veteran, though this isn't immediately apparent as the story begins, instead confusing him with a particularly reviled race on the Discworld. It is about how war veterans are treated and distrusted and overall not regarded well enough, not respected for both their sacrifice to keep us safe as for their restraint upon returning home to a world that may need more chlorine in its gene pool.

It is also about how Academics are disconnected from the world outside their ivory tower of publically funded communism, examples of which I found in a university owned set of perfect, maintained, visitor bungalows in Livermore which existed to serve visiting Doctors of science coming to Livermore Labs, home of the Hydrogen Bomb, which is an upgraded Atom Bomb which can flash fry a big city rather than a small one. Livermore Labs and Sandia (Los Alamos) Labs are both cited, like Oxford, as examples of letting blowhards talk themselves into an easy job of pretension and laziness by being so obscure nobody can fire them. Geologists used to do the same thing as USGS but eventually the complaints from pregnant coed field lab assistants convinced then Democratic President Clinton to fire them all. And he did, too. This impacted me by making my career worthless a year before I graduated. I have never forgiven him, but it was their own faults for being such randy, useless bastards. I don't forgive them either. They had it coming. Those same bastards are running global warming research scams and seducing braless hippy chicks at dinner party fundraisers today, while their exes continue to collect alimony or child support and the professors keep a low profile and work off the books as much as possible. Absolute Bastards, but at least they're not the worst sort of bastards. They don't generally kill their girlfriends. Ahem.

They story also contains bits on the start of fashion models and the fashion institution out of a medieval culture that is evolving out of the functional armor stage and into the showy pretty stuff, and why footballers seem to attract fashion models because they're both so very dumb.

Still, the war veteran plot is the key one and how many authors today write about that? Respect to Terry Pratchett, once more. I kinda wish that he'd franchise the Unseen University to diploma mills with actual classrooms, with the stated intention of doing exactly what modern colleges do, namely waste state and Federal money and poorly educate and impoverish the youth who attend them. It would be honest and hilarious.

Polar Vortexing Second Time

I'm a conservative, former Boy Scout, hiker, writer, and amateur snapshot photographer. I'm also, I suspect, a narcissist because nobody else around here is worth obsessing over or talking about. I know this is a flaw, but people here aren't especially nice. Egotism is a natural disease for authors, btw. Every single one of them is an egotist. Even if you're really good at observing people, you can't write about anything unless you believe in yourself most of all, and vanity presses are so cheap these days it no longer costs money to publish through them so you don't have to be rich to be an egotistical author.

 

I think this is part of why I find Jeremy Clarkson so very entertaining. He's one of the hosts of the car review show Top Gear. They do many silly stunts involving cars to show of their designs and sometimes their flaws in ways you don't normally do in a car test drive with a dealer. They also do some hilarious things which piss off the Liberals, like buy used cars and drive them to show off their cheaper to keep running than the taxes and fuel from electric cars and hybrids, which still aren't there yet. All you have to know about hybrids is watch a current Season F1 race and see which cars just... stop. That isn't a normal thing for F1, before hybrid engine setups this year. Some champions have had their cars just die on them. Its been hilarious chaos having F1 insist on being green. When Bernie Ecclestone, current chairman of F1, steps down or dies underneath his latest conquest with a heart attack and a smile on his face, the new chairman should fix the formula back to cars with engines, no batteries, and probably a clutch pedal would be a good idea too. The cars back in the 1980's were faster. Keep the cameras, but lose the team radios. Let the drivers drive. Top Gear makes suggestions on car racing, and why rallysport is cheaper and more fun than golf. They even made a film about it.

See? Better than golf. And you'll end up learning a lot from your car, what makes it go, how to repair it, what equipment is essential and what is just weight that hurts performance. Around here, in the mountains, lots of people have specialized offroading trucks and jeeps, with roll bars and big knobby tires, some of them for the sport of riding dirt roads, but most I think because they have pot fields and that's the only way to get there.

 

Top Gear has also reviewed ATVs, which I appreciate, since they're the modern equivalent of the Willys Jeep that hasn't been made for years and was the sort of quality steel you'd find in a Lancia, most of which currently fits in a small bucket due to the rust.

ATVs do what little jeeps did but don't anymore due to modern car safety standards. Yes, modern cars are very safe, but they're also very heavy and unsuitable to offroading. Subarus are mostly AWD to help with slushy snow conditions, not actual offroad. They can deal with gravel, which is slightly slippery, and graded dirt roads, but nothing more severe than that. As graded dirt is one rainstorm away from rutted dirt or stream or mud bog, Subarus just don't cut it in real woods. They're good for snowy places like here and Tahoe, which is about an hour away over the crest, as we call it. Nobody has a lancia, and while there's plenty of Priuses around here, I don't see many moving when it snows. Mountains are special conditions. We don't get many 49cc Vespas either. It is mostly bigger bikes, and I see more Dual Sport bikes than scooters on the road here. More useful. Like a jeep, only you can hurt yourself a lot further away from help on one. Still, better than walking 20 miles.

 

The Polar Vortex is coming again, because we're having a double-dip El Nino. El Nino is not human caused. They've been happening for at least 100K years, predating coal burning, people as we are today, and even the most recent ice age. And they keep happening and I think most of the global warming hysteria is a mix of religious nihilism by masochists like Al Gore (or con men cashing in on the panic to make a lot of money and attend parties with breathy hippie chicks who don't wear bras or panties) is just more El Nino weather. There's tons of data on El Nino, how it works, what makes them and what ends them, and nobody confuses El Nino weather events with people because its ocean currents responsible. Way bigger than us. And going on longer than we've been us. You can't sell the idea because its ridiculous.

 

Polar Vortexes, before they got the silly name and eviscerated public support of Warming, costing the Greens this election and their control of public funding to their environmental causes, which is still about hippie chicks not fixing any part of the environment. Its a fund raising scam, and the funds are going into Freds Bank, which is his left front pocket, not the thing they're "saving". They never "save" anything. Its ALWAYS a scam. That's one of those truths. This is one of those fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives do the work. Liberals raise money they don't care to see where it goes because it always goes to a scammer they fool themselves into trusting. Idiots. The Polar Vortexes are going to slam global warming again this winter, and its going to make the Liberals look even stupider, and cost them more support and I'm going to laugh, even though this means more drought for California. We need the water. This years El Nino should be weaker than last, so we should probably get more rain and snow than last year, but still not normal levels of it. California hasn't had many Top Gear visits, and Clarkson has avoided the wine country and the Pacific Coast Highway north or south of San Francisco. I am not sure why, I'm sure there's a reason. Maybe he'd get bogged down racing on the curvy roads that he thought American's didn't know existed.

He likes to say American cars flip over at the least sign of a corner, and he's not completely wrong. I saw lots of 1970's musclecars in ditches when I was a kid. Live rear axel meets bumpy pavement requiring all independent suspension? Duh. When my Dad bought an AWD SUV for mountain roads in the snow because he had friends on gravel roads and holiday dinners are socially mandatory here, he couldn't find an American one without a live rear axle so went to the Japanese who understood them newfangled Wishbone thangs. This gives you all independent suspension and prevents many kinds of crashes, provided you do your part. When people who are fans of SUVs and Trucks insist the live rear axle is "good enough" this just tells me they live on very straight roads or lack imagination or perhaps haven't heard that other options exist.

 

Someday events like the Polar Vortex are going to be called "winter" again like they were back in the 1980s and those kinds of blizzards happened weekly during the long Eastern Winters, and the Midwest didn't fuss about Chicago being closed down by snow because this happened every year. The brief period of slightly warmer and drier winters we've had in the 1990's and 00's has returned to more normal patterns. This is new to the 20 somethings, but old hat to me. And justifies the taxes and crap economy here in California, though that will change as normal winters will prompt more old boomers in the Midwest to sell out at market price and move here to warm up their joints and reduce that winter arthritis pain. There are lots more areas in California where we can build houses, provided we build water pumps to supply their lawns, sewers and swimming pools. I could easily see Cloverdale, Willits, Ukiah and such getting huge retirement communities, hospitals and jobs, with RV maintenance, storage and sales for those hot summer months when the locals get out to the coast and enjoy seeing America and not being in the 115'F heat. Lots of California has much better weather than the Midwest in the winter. You don't have to spend a fortune buying in Palm Springs to take advantage of it. Polar Vortexes should kickstart the next housing boom here, and that will mean jobs and development.

 

As for the Midwest? Getting normal cold winters again supports splitting cords of firewood, having a wood stove and a blower run by a couple of deep cycle marine batteries. That will heat your house. It means putting up the storm windows, and probably winter curtains too, and those silica absorbers at the base so moisture doesn't ruin your floors and walls when its really cold out. Serious winters justify serious preparations and a deep pantry and probably a generator. We used to get those, back in the 80's. The weather is returning to normal. Calling it a Polar Vortex is just more media politics, more bias. More propaganda. More reason to get your news elsewhere. And the public voted and slammed the entire agenda. Bring on the snow. Snowmobiles are fun. Skis are great exercise. Cuddling up to your spouse makes more babies, perhaps ones that won't be conned into warming nonsense when they play in the snow every winter. This is normal weather, not "extreme". Extreme was the mild warm winters of 20 years past. That's over. Back to normal.

Show Your Resolve

A few years ago I was denounced as a traitor by Liberals when I suggested that Republicans should drop out of the economy so they couldn't be taxed on income they weren't making, add to the burden on social services to bankrupt them and prevent layabouts from getting any kind of benefits by refusing to work, and appear in protests holding signboards that mock liberal hypocrisy with signs like "Gun Control Makes Rape Safer For Rapists" or "Natural Lifespans are 29 Years" and "Good Liberals Don't Need Dentists". The Liberals really thought I was being a bastard, but my parents were married to each other well before my conception. Maybe they meant that as some kind of welcome? Non-bastards are so rare these days. Anyway, this is my suggestion to the Liberals whining and pining and trying to spin this official denouncement of Obama by America. I found this hilarious because I am not a Liberal. I am a Libertarian which is like a Republican with social aversion. I'm perfectly willing to applaud people killing themselves, and morally opposed to volunteerism. Time passed and I realized my hermitage wasn't finding my jobs and my bitterness was making me bad company, so I took up a volunteer job shelving books and having minimal interactions with people who weren't actively trying to hurt me (as my last 4 paid jobs have been). I have a suggestion to the Upset Liberals who saw their politicians fired on Tuesday.

Stop working. Get fired so you can get unemployment, go on the dole, be a burden to society and get back to college and become that carpet weaver or painter or potter or poet you always knew you were meant to be. Stop contributing to the tax base that allows Republicans to fix everything broken in America. Act locally. You can do it.

Become a social volunteer, sit with old people and listen attentively while they tell you about that one time they were really high back in 1969 and pulled a train. This is totally for you. This is you time. Drop out of the economy and just take part in the best of your community, and show it your appreciation and love. Cancel your cell phone and talk to your fellow human beings in person. Volunteer at the soup kitchen. Shelve books at the library and teach literacy. Read stories to children. And do it all for free because you're so generous. You don't need other people's money to be generous. Do it with your own savings. Sleep in your car. Liberals don't believe crime can happen to them because all people are just misunderstood and need love. That's what you tell rape victims who want a gun to protect themselves the next time some huge hulking guy tries it. You're totally right. You should prove it by sleeping down by the railroad tracks or get drunk at frat parties. I'm sure it will go swimmingly.

Once you follow your karma and leave the economy, people like me will work very hard in your now-vacant jobs rebuilding the America your laziness destroyed for the last 6 years. Just saying. You made things worse by voting in that Hawaiian fraud who made Jimmy Carter look effective and accomplished. Make up for all your failures as a human being. Your karma requires it or spend the next twenty generations as a bug. Expand your social conscience and actually do something for others instead of profiting by other's misfortune.

Even someone as curmudgeonly as ME has done more than you have. Out of my own pocket, unpaid. Can't you do more than little old grouchy me? Don't you want to keep feeling superior?

University Of California to Raise Tuition Costs 5% Per Year

In a concession to inflation, University of California announced today, after the election, that they will be raising tuition costs 5% a year for the next 5 years. Which is not to say they won't raise it even more after, or anytime during. I attended the California state college system, which required passing a course called "Critical Thinking" before you were allowed to graduate. UC has no such requirement, and only requires a minimum of general education courses, allowing the student to focus entirely on a specialty, something which helps explain why so many UC grads are so very DUMB at everything else, since all other knowledge is high school level. CSU grads are better educated and thus smarter. And CSU costs a small fraction of UC. I also note that in 1998, CSU dropped Critical Thinking and CSU graduates are getting dumber every year. I think things started slipping when they made the SAT too easy to score high and getting into harder colleges, ruining the colleges that accepted these inflated morons. Social promotion taken to its extreme has lead to a generation of simpletons. UC is raising its fees and if you want their name on your diploma, you will pay. And in the end, UC is about MONEY.

 

What this means is that UC is going to lose out to both private schools and CSU schools, as well as self education, online certificate diploma mills that pass through hiring boards without objection, and actual on the job apprenticeship programs, which tends to teach the skills best of all. We are shifting into a small business and craftsman focused economy because big business isn't hiring and there's no reason not to stomp them with taxes and trade tariffs since they employ nobody we like, and those they do are either overpaid bastards lording it over us Peasants, or insuring only poor people are paid as little as possible and then churning through employees to keep the wages low. That builds retaliation, and with law now in the hands of the people rather than the bribery party (Democrats), we can finally hurt them back. Hahah!

 

I do hope anyone reading this is not attending a UC and does not plan to. They're not really very good, after all. Cal Poly is hype as well. I've met graduates, and 3 our of 4 were dangerous morons with engineering degrees they shouldn't have. Yes, that's a small sample size, but some nearly killed people because they did not think. I am often astonished at just how stupid people are. Most of the marijuana growers are either self taught druggies with determination or college graduates working for them as "trimmers" and often getting ripped off in the process. A college degree today is nearly worthless because the people who get them are at the lowest standard for education in a century. America would be better served by no further state funding of colleges and let them go private and shut down when their bloated egos translate to no jobs so no students go there. Colleges need Glass Door reports. Prospective students need to know that colleges are a scam out to get student loans and leave the student 4-5 years later with a huge debt they can't escape and can't pay off on minimum wage, part time, on call jobs of today. You don't go to college expecting to push a broom as a janitor when you get out, and that's one of the better jobs these days. UC has failed, as an institution and I'd like to see their doors closed.

The Lamest Duck

I voted yesterday. Real Americans over 18 mostly did this, one time each. The communists voted many times, and helped the illegals vote many times because voter ID cards are mandatory in Mexico and India yet are somehow considered unfair in the USA and just impossible to produce here. No ID or registration allows the Democrat party to retain power in the USA through the evil phrase: "Vote early and often". Chicago votes the dead, which is part of the reason why Dresden Files takes place there. After all, if the dead are consistently voting in Chicago it MUST be a supernatural hub, right? Its a tongue in cheek reference.

 

So anyway, after 6 years of the Anti-American president and his communist cronies stomping all over human rights, crushing the Middle Class into poverty, taking bribes from Outsourcing international corporations, and blaming the people who aren't in charge for his mistakes, and actively using racism any time they don't get their way, because his party are evil narcissists and don't mind a little genocide to insure their bad ideas become law. This is because they hate you and want you to give them all your money, and your house, and die so you can be replaced by someone more loyal to the party. Hurry up, sucker.

 

Well, the real Americans don't like that and they voted yesterday. Today, the Senate and House are ruled by the Republican party and the Anti-American president is now what is called a "lame duck". As he has personally, professionally and internationally offended even more people and powers than Jimmy Carter, he is now the Lamest Duck so I think I'll call him that from here on. He doesn't have the power to be anti-American anymore. I expect he'll spend more time golfing and asked by his party not to participate in fund raising since just being associated with him cost Udall his governorship of Colorado. I personally despise everybody who voted for him. I blame Democrats for destroying the Middle Class and wrecking our economy. It is small business that makes jobs. Govt takes them away. This is not complicated. Attacking small businesses through taxes and regulations is a great way to bankrupt small businesses which can't afford to hire fancy regulatory compliance experts at $300/hr, much less build all the unfunded mandate nonsense when they really need to be worrying about getting and completing contracts for a profit so they can pay their employees and keep their doors open.

 

Maybe I should write to my congressman and ask him to support trade tariffs on Chinese imports so we can bring jobs back to America. Maybe it hasn't occurred to him, with a Republican House and Senate, finally, that this critical and easy step is time to happen. Who TF is WTO to me? Is that one of those UN cronies? Are we being taxed so they can attack us? Can we stop that now?

 

The Millenials are fans of Maker Culture. They'd support jobs making electronic gizmos here, independently from the big slave-contractors like that fruit computing one, or the others like it. That could employ a huge number of people who show up for work on time and sober. Those jobs could offer wages to people that might buy into a housing market and keep it from crashing. That could fix the economy that the Democrats have done their best to crush forever. And they've succeeded in forcing Baby Boomers to sell out or shut down their businesses, try and sell their houses in the cities, and retire, perhaps on less than they wanted. If the boomers end up in trailer parks smoking dope and sleeping around, why should that bother me? These are the results of their decades of poor life choices. This is what they deserve, after all. Not a big house on a golf course with a wine cellar. They voted to create debt, then shove off paying it back onto me and the younger generations. This is their fault.

 

The upshot is the Millenials don't have to hire Baby Boomers as they start their own businesses through hard work, ignoring loans and debt thanks to Kickstarter, which is very much not like a bank and removes a lot of fears about economic reprisal from failure. Working out of your garage avoids the lease rental ripoffs, provided you can ramp up production in a small space not designed for it. Retrofitting is a key trick to productivity on the cheap, and dovetails nicely into my post-apocalypse economy, which is all about walking to work rather than commuting 30 miles to the job you like and spending all your profits on fuel and lost time. Neighborhood jobs are the future. Folks need to think hard about what they can make in their home, for profit that sells. In their kitchen or garage or basement.

 

I have thought about some businesses which might work in a local neighborhood. Around here, there's a website that largely replaces the local newspaper which is currently operated as someone's hobby. The competition is a website bulletin board, often with pictures, which gets locals to contribute and offers more news, because it is free, but also some noise from the North San Juan junkies and loonies. Drink mercury a few years and see how sane you are. Since the big papgers are owned by big corporations that export jobs for profit, everything they publish is biased. "Ebola? Harmless! Don't worry!" is something you see on the headlines of the big media these days. And Democrats believe it because loyalty is more important than thinking about all the dead people. So local competition for the propaganda rags is really important, and leads to local jobs.

 

Encrypted packet radio networks, covering the difference between Wifi and WiMax in a neighborhood and below the power limits placed by the FCC would allow a local server to provide a neighborhood library, streaming radio, alarms, jobs bulletin board for the small stuff that gives teenagers spending money for lawn mowing or gutter cleaning or basic IT drudgery or queries for help with babysitting or "does anyone know someone who can do this task" kinds of things. Neighborhood networks save lives. Considering how many police departments in cities show up late or not at all, they could save a lot of lives.

 

Programming websites and applications for specific paying tasks rather than advertising scams or malware (most Android apps take huge amounts of data bandwidth for the banner ads which can themselves contain malware in the flash or Java programming and can be argued as malware), and software to block these is an ongoing war worth fighting. Eventually everything useful gets a competent free app without banners, mostly as an advertisement for the quality of the programmer and acts as a resume for their eventual paying job. If you can program apps without banners, apps that can work offline and are useful, you are improving things for a lot of people. 

 

Engine or vehicle repair there's a huge future for, however they are low paying jobs. Low paying because with the population mostly poor now, thanks to Democrats, people can't pay shop rates anymore. The mechanic up the street who works in his garage for $12/hr and takes a week instead of a day to fix your car but doesn't charge for the time he's waiting for the part to arrive, is way cheaper and you can afford that. He's going to stay in business while big shops will have to lay off their mechanics and close their doors. When you price yourself out of the market, you are screwed. Any business that only hires people to turn around and tell them they're "on call, part time, no benefits" inspires no loyalty and will find themselves with a no-show and probably competitive bids for the contracts they were counting on. Never pull that crap on a craftsman. They get even. Inspiring Disloyalty is a modern business practice every bit as insulting as not replying to a submitted resume and guarantees retaliation. And you just can't afford that if you want to keep your doors open.

 

Another useful garage job is building teardrop trailers, so people can have cheap vacations on something light enough you can haul it behind your compact car. The Sierras, where I live, is full of campgrounds, both along twisty highways as well as rivers and lakes with trout and boating. Teardrop trailers let you use them in the rainy season because they are more waterproof than a tent, and you can throw a standup tent with a canvas chimney over the kitchen hatch that folds up for stowing when its dry. Building these costs from between $2000-10K, depending on the size and amenities, but most are made from wood over a cheap garden trailer with the heavier duty frame so it can take the weight. If the total weight is under 1000 pounds, all passenger cars can tow this, even the little ones. As the profit margin for such a specialized trailer is too low, and the gizmo too bulky to make profit shipping from China, they don't make them there. This is still something Americans can do. Great for fishermen, photographers, bird watchers, campers, herdsmen, and pot growers. Some people turn them into portable bars for hiring out to parties or street events. Because they are light, any vehicle can tow them. This is the crucial bit of their value. Don't make them too heavy for your market.

 

There are also jobs you can do in your kitchen. Home canning and home brewing makes for great trade items in a neighborhood barter economy. Eventually, I expect to hear about home distillery, since the govt is so insistent that we should ignore pot laws. Perhaps not with the new govt, but the last six years certainly favored getting high. Explains so much, too. Anyway, canned preserves from local fruit trees is a great way to pay for favors like someone watching your kids for an evening date with your spouse. I expect, if eggs get difficult, eggs will be a great one for barter, provided they have date stamps from soy dye. For now, just buy your eggs. It is less of a nuisance. In the future, someone will raise chickens in the neighborhood like its their job, and make deliveries door to door. Maybe by golf cart.

 

But that's all in the future, as our energy winds down. Several counties were voting to ban fracking because of contamination threats from the benzene and radioisotopes. This will make the oil companies upset, and eventually everyone upset, but for now it is preventing leukemia in cute little children. The new power shift in the govt is going to cause a lot of changes.

 

I won't say this is "morning in America" yet. We have to get rid of the Lamest Duck and not replace him with the Hag. "What difference does it make?" is really not something a presidential candidate should say about their own mistake. Mrs. Stevens thinks it makes the world of difference. That was her son killed in Libya, and Hillary who snarked that it didn't matter to her. Is that the sort of political party you support? The kind that murders sons through incompetence and then laughs about it like a psychopath? Mrs. Stevens is a friend of a friend, btw. She lives here. That Ambassador went to the high school half a mile from where I'm sitting. All politics is local. I consider it astonishing there are any Democrats left in this region, but they do have unlimited capacity for self-delusion, don't they? I suspect that once the Baby Boomers die in their trailer parks and rest homes in the coming decades there will need to be a new party to replace the Democrats that die with them. One without the stigma of treason and hypocrisy and exploitation. The one that got slapped down in the polls yesterday.

 

Anyone else wonder what will change when the new congress and senate are sworn in this January?  

Elio, Tesla, and Vespa

Little known fact: It takes about 17 minutes to assemble a Vespa scooter. Most of the components are made in China, most of the bikes are assembled in China but certain models are built in Italy. The components cost $150, approximately. The labor is around $20. So a Vespa actually costs around $170 to build, plus shipping to the dealer in a small crate. If they were built here, a lot of people could afford to buy them because we wouldn't be charging $2-4000 markup like Vespa does. That markup is so insulting it really puts me off. Particularly since I live in a place with steep and twisty mountain roads, so the 49cc engine is pointless. Also, we don't have the 49cc exclusion from motor vehicle licensing like all other states in the USA. You have to pay registration and put a plate on it and carry motorcycle insurance just like any motorcycle that goes 100 mph. Yes, the local motorcycle laws of California also allows lane splitting, and we have fewer motorcycle deaths because of the mandatory training program, and the best weather for riding because we're dry 300 days a year. Still, a scooter is slow and very easy to ride it would be nice if they backed off the expensive requirements so more poor people and students could ride them. They're really fuel efficient, take little space, and allow people to ride to paying jobs so they can gradually climb the ladder of prosperity rather than stay trapped at the bottom of the electric car wall.

 

A proper Tesla S goes for around $65K, fully equipped. This is what a good Porsche sports car goes for, or the fancy racing Jag and the next up class of Mercedes Benz. These real cars can be refueled at gas stations dotting the landscape. The Tesla needs a charger. Battery swapping stations are supposed to be built in a few places, but the costs are higher than a gas station fill up, though I think I've read they plan to make the swaps free, eventually, and the stations for them everywhere. And they might, but the economic value of green technology is always tightly tied to Federal grants that run out because only a few rich loonies end up able to afford them.

 

Tesla is building a battery factory, eventually, in Reno, processing lithium salt brine into lithium batteries and selling them to car factories around the world. This will become their biggest product and source of profits outside of collecting Federal matching grants in compliance with various "green" laws passed a few years ago. It is possible they won't end up making many cars after all, since selling the batteries will be bigger profit. And the batteries won't require building all those charging stations at a loss. The Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans are all very interested in Tesla's batteries. And that's a fine thing. But it also means that Tesla cars aren't going to be a huge player in the general car marketplace after all. You and I won't own them because we can build a decent house for $65K, and the house can't be carjacked by all those people who can't afford a $65K vehicle in the Post-Jobs economy the Democrats have created for us. Remember that at the polls. It was Democrats who had control and Democrats who got rid of everyone's jobs.

 

The Elio Motors reverse trike car is interesting because it was engineered to use as many off the shelf components as possible, a respected and reliable engine from the 1960's (Triumph 3 Cylinder, water cooled and fuel injected), offers a crash safe tandem car body with antilock brakes, works in the snow, has a roof, windshield wiper, A/C and heat and doesn't require a helmet to operate, yet gets 80 mpg. And it costs about twice what a Vespa does. And is probably much harder to steal. The Elio has a lot of potential for basic transportation, since its freeway capable, unlike the Vespa, and cheap enough to buy outright, or with a loan even if you're only making minimum wage as a janitor or waitress. Provided Elio actually makes the cars rather than folds, it will probably become a major player in transportation. Right now, the shift from showing off and taking orders to building the cars at the plant in Shreveport Louisiana is the thing they need to do next. Build the cars. When they're on the road they are advertising. The key thing about the Elio is they are built with as many off the shelf car parts as possible. No exotics, nothing to go to war over. Its efficient because it is light, and it is cheap because all the components are common. It will work, if they build it.

The Elio car will be a tough sell for the Soccer mom doing the school run with a car full of kids. She's going to have to drive a regular hatchback or pay through the nose for gasoline in her SUV until the kids are grown and we see more ultralight cars that carry more people, at lower fuel economy and probably speed, but the school run can become the school waddle if need be. Convincing Soccer Moms to drive a stick shift with a clutch will be the tough part, but birth control options are cheap and relatively effective. Having lots of kids is a choice, after all, and the cost of raising them is the cost of raising them. She can drive a hybrid till the batteries stop working and then convert it with either new expensive batteries or rip them out and find its faster, more economical, and handles better without them. The Toyota Yaris is similar to the Prius without batteries, though its a more conventional engine, and gets around the same fuel economy. If it has the Atkinson Cycle engine it would do better, but Toyota doesn't allow that engine to be tweaked or sold in junkyards, as I understand it. It might prove to Embarrass their Prius if fuel-economy-racers could tweak it to better performance. Sadly, my driving game doesn't allow the option of real fuel economy races. I expect there will continue to be hybrids for the next few decades anyway. Its just when the batteries don't do much but increase the vehicle weight and a existing tweaks to large engines like shutting down cylinders on demand has been around for 60 years, and works well, we should be using these options instead of building a car fleet out of lithium, which is rare and expensive. Scalable technologies matter. The Elio car is great for solo commuters going to work or school, and is double the fuel economy of the Prius, realistically speaking. While some people get 55 mpg with a Prius, most are down in the low 40's. The Elio will reach 60 faster, as well.

 

Things are going this way because the writing is on the wall about fuel economy, fuel costs, wages, and jobs. There is no recovery. Quantitative Easing is just delaying the crash, and using up international good will, and the internationals own a lot of US bonds, which are a big part of the value of the dollar. Dumping those bonds is changing the exchange rate. Eventually we won't need trade tariffs to end dumping of Chinese goods below cost. We won't be able to afford them anymore so we'll HAVE TO restart domestic manufacturing because it will be cheaper here. How's that for Irony? By that point I expect that Baby Boomers will have wasted their last dime buying Mass Quantities and no longer have enough majority to vote themselves more debt for the future they won't have to pay off because they're planning to die first. That is their typical playbook approach. Leave us to clean up. Every soccer mom straining to haul her babies out of the back seat of a subcompact car will curse them forever. 



Halloween Costumes

I had this idea for a Halloween costume, since I would be shelving books at the local library. I was going to take one of those name stickers and write this on it:

ASK ME ABOUT MY

SELF QUARANTINE.

I decided, after some thought, not to do that. With all the druggies around here someone would panic, and many of the library patrons come in the door stoned out of their minds. Tasting colors and smelling sounds. The deputies would respond to the 911 call with guns and I'd be arrested so I decided that would be a bad idea, even if its a genuinely scary costume on the appropriate day for costumes. That's the trouble with education. Its often a bad idea to use it.