Movie Review: Elysium

Wow that was bad. Good effects sometimes, but the plot had more holes and logical failings than Hillary's defense of the US embassy in Benghazi. It was racist, hateful, nonsense. I'm rather surprised it wasn't picketed, but who cares if nobody sees it? I won't bother to list all the failures, but there were so many it was most of the film.

1. Why did they irradiate robots inside a metal door with glass windows?
2. Why don't the shuttles burn up when they go from the space station which seems to hang directly over LA rather than orbit?
3. If you can heal people in minutes with magic beds, why not have those in hospitals?
4. Who is growing food?
5. Why do the rich speak French but the poor speak Spanish?
6. If you can build fancy robots, you can build robots to do things like farm and operate space weapons.
7. Why did they fire missiles from the GROUND at space shuttles that were heading for a habitat nearly in ORBIT, creating clouds of debris headed for the station like shotgun blasts?
8. If you have magical bullet shields, why don't the robots have them?
9. Why are the robots shaped like people? Spiders and other vehicles are more effective and terrifying.
10. Where's the roof of the space habitat to keep the air in? What's the point of a hub that space vehicles never seem to land in?
11. What do the space people eat? There's no farms or greenhouses on the space station. Just parks.
12. Why isn't the space station further up, away from Keppler debris in LEO?
13. Did the author of this crap know any science at all or were they just a Paul Verhoeven fan and that was enough?
14. After the space hospitals land, how many of the teeming billions get treated before their power runs out? Not billions? Thousands? What about everybody else? So the hospitals work a few hours, maybe even a day and then die from power blackout. Now what?
15. It's been a 140 years. Why isn't there massive green across the Sahara and other deserts from desalination plants and major irrigation projects to feed the teeming billions? Dust and flying paper debris doesn't feed overpopulation. Where's the lights of 10 billion people's homes on the night side?

Those are some of the more glaring errors. Maybe its because I've been writing scifi longer than this director seems to have been alive. Funny how the Socialist Message of the film is so racist I have to wonder if that was the point, why it got funded? Considering that The Bourne Exoskeleton would be a better name for this 90 minute commercial for Obamacare, which unfortunately points out that good medical care is a la carte in space and the rest get socialized medicine on the ground that kills you, was this an unintentional snark at the results of socialized medicine? And was this the original ending? Whatever the case, it was crap. Avoid it.

Rains

While we are still in drought, I will relay that California got 10 inches of rain last weekend, and we're expecting more rain tonight. It is blustery and damp with lots of clouds right now, but the rain is still up near Eureka and Crescent City, working across north of here eventually. It looks like its putting a lot on the ground in Oregon, all the way to Portland but heading Southeast. Hopefully there will be plenty to fall down here in California.

The last storm raised the lake level of Folsom Lake from a historic drought low by 14 feet and counting. This storm should add lots more, and hopefully more snow in the high Sierra so ski resorts can recoup some of their losses this season. Skiers are paying $75 a day for lift tickets, which is quite a sum, however it is their passion and their money and the locals who serve them are very grateful for the income. While there are more and more summer activities at resorts, its skiing that brings in the big bucks and justifies the facilities in the first place.

I'm more of a hiker and cyclist, using my camera to snap photos of eye catching images. I'm glad I worked up here a dozen years ago. I've seen a lot of the Sierras from places most people don't. I look forward to better trails map uploads so my GPS can enjoy them better, and I'll know where I'm going and not simply meandering between bushes optimistically. The paved bike trail running from the public parking lot near Squaw Valley up to Tahoe City is a great place to bike with family, even small children, because you can stop anywhere you like and the traffic is well separated from the trail over most of its length, meaning your kids can't get into much trouble. The bike rental shop across the street also does brisk business, and the rafting company about a mile up the road is also very busy. These and the sandwich shops and burger-bars keep Tahoe City and its many places to stop and sightsee near Lake Tahoe totally worth summer visits. Being attractive to Tourism other than skiing is important. Hopefully these rains will also keep the water levels up at Tahoe. The Truckee River spills out at Tahoe City at the coffer-dam, and if the levels drop too low, no water, no rafting, and less interest for bicyclists.

Normal rains for this town in the Gold Country is 48 inches a year. We've still got 30 something to go. I am hoping there will be many more storms.

Townie Bicycle

The Arko Bici Townie is a bicycle rescued from the scrap heap, once a mountain bike, it was painted and converted into a nice looking townie bicycle in its home in Slovakia, formerly the eastern half of Czecho-Slovakia. Its got nice subdued colors, comfortable handlebars, and really very pretty leather pannier bags. A proper townie should keep the street mud off your clothes, so they require fenders. This bike reminds me a lot of my own, and gives me ideas on what to do to correct it. For now, my bicycle is ugly dark grey, not the best color for riding in traffic, but despite its looks it is very comfortable to ride. I have similar handlebars, being the most comfortable and upright so my wrists and neck aren't hurting despite the loss in uphill power. On flats, its great. Unfortunately, I live in a place with hills. Steep ones.

This bike looks good, which means it will be stolen. That's the trouble. Only ugly bikes are left alone. Nice bikes are strictly for fun rides and never parked in public.

Samuel Vimes

I've been reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels lately. I started reading some of them long long ago, about 15 years ago, when I was a library volunteer. Pratchett got knighted for writing 50 novels before his death from Alzheimers last year. He's got great instincts for humor, similar to Douglas Adams, and the same wry accusations about human nature. I agree with both, as they're equally cynical about people. Most of the things schoolteachers say about people are meant to create more victims in society, and they call it Optimism. I find that rather upsetting but there isn't much I can do about it. Sam Vimes is a character in Discworld, an officer of the Watch, which is the city police force. He mostly solves mysteries and attempts to avoid being a fool, though that is somewhat difficult as Discworld has Wizards and Gods and neither is terribly kind to people.

There are a couple movies/miniseries based on Terry Pratchett. Wait, three of them. Hogfather, The Postal Service, and The Light Fantastic. Hogfather is very well done, as is Postal Service. Hogfather is a nice story of Christmas, with the actual origin of it buried, the Celtic origin complete with animal sacrifice and bloodletting. Most of the charming holidays have grim histories. Remember that. Europe has Martial Arts too, they were mostly lost when we started using guns, but they're being rediscovered from old books and such, some most of a thousand years old. Just to give you perspective. English Broadswords are WAY more useful than Katana, which are only interesting because they are made from inferior steel with hilarious excessive amounts of labor and given to psychopaths who merrily murdered any peasants they could reach. Small wonder Japan had so many civil wars. Knights did the same thing in Europe, btw. A knight was a murderer, a brigand/pirate with a horse. Funny how it has come to mean something completely different in 1200 years since the Dark Ages.

I could see it would take a lot of work to write as well as Pratchett, but there's an audience to pay for his kind of writing and I'm just not interested in Mall Ninja audiences or writing porn for women, so no romance/blood novels for me. Humor, that sells well for a good long time, if it is done properly. Shock value just doesn't retain its shock, on a long enough timescale. My old novels were too shocking then, and too common now. That's the trouble with accurate social predictions. On a long enough timescale, you become boring.

On my walks, with my music player cheerfully informing me in heavily accented French of the joys of Nouvelle Vague, I ponder if I could take my ideas of using biotech to create immortals and all the trouble you can get into by not dying like you ought to. You have to live with your wrong ideas for a really long time, and your grudges, collected over decades and centuries, become your very definition. And how those definitions can become humor, twisted just the right way. The hardest part is deciding if you portray the character from inside his own head, or outside it with little explanation. Particularly since I feel inclined to jump around the character's life, back and forth in time, because the points to be made are rather awkward otherwise, and I want the reader to understand just how long a timescale he's dealing with. If I can make a Pratchett-sized setting, I can write within that framework of insider jokes and references and maybe build a following without trapping myself into Power-Is-Over-9000 nonsense which irritates me so much. That's where Clancy went wrong, after all, and Butcher seems to be going as his setting broke in the last couple books. I want something a little easier to write for. A little less demanding, and a lot more amusing.

Good Jobs To Start Training In Now If Your Social Skills Suck

I will begin this with the warning that all jobs are headed for Minimum Wage and Part Time. Some of them will end up On Call Part Time. In the near future, everybody is going to have to get used to this. It is the new normal. If you voted for the Current Offenders, this is your fault.

That said, when all jobs pay the same, you should only work where it bothers you being there the least, or you find enjoyment in the work itself. I like books. I'd like to be a Librarian in the age of Google search and Amazon.com. The more people using those, the fewer people come to physical libraries, except of course that the more poor people there are, the less they have to spend on disposable literature (fiction) so lending libraries make sense over the long-term, at least until such point as Amazon can figure out how to pay every author and publisher their schilling for e-book loans. When that happens, all bets are off. Until then, a library is a sign of a prosperous community with civic pride. And the amount of work done by the librarians is really easy stuff, most of which is done by volunteers like me.

1. However, there ARE jobs out there which will allow people with crap social skills to work.
2. The guys who stock the grocery store shelves early in the morning.
3. The guys who pick books etc off the warehouse shelves and put it in a box or on a truck.
4. The janitors and gardeners, depending on how they want to use their daylight hours.
5. Every time there's a drought or a freeze, there's work for gardeners, and the guys who grow the plants at nursery supply companies.
6. Driving a forklift safely keeps lots of people employed, even if they're awkward around other people.
7. Fry cooks tend to stay employed and only have to deal with other fry cooks and waitresses, leaving the customers to other people. Dishwashers end up interacting with customers and waitresses, so need more social skills than cooks, but cooks just need to work on a speedy schedule. They don't have time to think so if you're the sort who prefers not to have philosophical ponderings, learn to fry.
8. I see a bright future for machinists and repairmen and people who can operate a Volt-Ohm meter. They don't need to talk to others much, and if your conversations end up embarrassing you or the other party storms away or you get fired shortly after, this may be the place for you. Be good at math. Mostly simple math, but still math.
9. If you want the better jobs out of the weather, be good at spectroscope operation, since electronic devices rely on wave forms and curves etc. I briefly used these in Physics Lab in college and never touched one again. It was really pointless. I really don't get them, but part of maturity is knowing what you don't care to do again, no matter what.
10. Truck driving is going to get interesting. The market in the USA is saturated with NAFTA drivers from Mexico, and their accidents are both notorious and common. Apparently, a Mexican can get a NAFTA license if he bribes the right official, with no training, and gets to learn on the job hauling triple trailers out of Mexico to the US border and sometimes unhooking them, sometimes not. Wise drivers pull off the highway to get away from these because triple trailers have some big physics problems that result in flipping over and death for anybody in the way. Very unsafe. NAFTA is one of the things we got both parties approved of because it gave the Saudis the Finger since it requires Canada and Mexico sell oil to us, by law, first. On the upside for Canada and Mexico, this pays for a lot of graft and villas and perks, but for the common man, not much at all, over there. Here, our gasoline is a buck a gallon cheaper than it would be. Ponder that. And all we have to do is sacrifice lives on the highway. So if you opt to become a truck driver, be aware that sleep comes in 4 hour blocks, by law, and you'll be out of business if you take 5 hours at a time. Schedules, you see. Teams of truckers avoid this, but split shares of the profits by half and truckers by virtue of sitting still for hours at a time have the highest incidence of Diabetes of any job anywhere. They also get heart attacks. Until NAFTA ends, you can't make much of a living at this, long haul, but short haul is a different kettle of fish, pays far less, and lets you sleep in your bed, see your wife, and have more back injuries because you touch way more cargo. You also need more social skills because you're dealing with warehouse docks and sometimes shop keepers. Shop Keepers are extroverts and usually narcissists filled with lies and sales techniques and greed, so remember that when you tip your cap after they sign the papers. You've got your rounds.
11. Govt employees have very special advantages. Most are union, most get paid a lot more than others during bad economies because their union negotiates year on year or decade on decade. Govt employees have economic inertia to insulate them from collapse. Raises come slower, but pay cuts are rare and more often, you just get pink slipped due to budget cuts, which always have a long time coming. No overtime in govt, either, with few exceptions. These are hard jobs to get, unfortunately. Some require you to take tests that are offered once a year, but the job for it only comes every 2-3 years. This straining process is meant to turn people away from trying for govt jobs. The other way to get a govt job is to be a volunteer who isn't always available due to other work contracts, but is there enough that the skills you have make you valuable enough to make room in the budget for  your employment to solve those particular problems, usually in some unsavory or punishing task that the senior employees would rather not do.

And remember, all wages head for minimum. Ergo, raising minimum wages DOES help you. It also increases inflation and cuts hours so you will find yourself with less hours, less money, less benefits. This is what you voted for. You voted for Less.

Little Race Car

Ya know, the ultimate little race car would have certain features. I've been enjoying the Ford Fiesta turbo, the ST, and that's nice in the driving simulator. I like it enough I'd get one if I had the money. I've also driven the Hyundai Veloster Turbo, which is similarly powered.

One of the things I like about both cars is the turbocharger. It's low pressure so has almost no delay between stomping the throttle and the power kicking in. Very different from the normal turbo chargers in older cars which usually kick in after 4-10 seconds and often at the worst possible physical place, like somewhere after the apex of the turn or right where you meant to start braking for the next one. That surge of power when you didn't need it tried to kill you. It was a complaint by widows of old Porsche Turbo drivers in the 1980s. And anyone who has driven the BMW 2002 Turbo from 1973 (in the simulator again, the real ones are collectors items). The new F1 engines have an electric turbo that's kept spun up all the time to remove the issues with Turbo Lag, yet retain high pressure advantage. I think that an electrically spun turbo should be a standard feature.

I really like the sound of a 12 cylinder engine with a turbocharger. Its got this impressive whine, and revs high because its properly balanced. A sign of good engineering. I find V8's to be an annoying roar, and their fuel economy is crap. Presumably a V12 is even worse fuel economy, but there are ways around this. First, make them small. You could probably use the cylinders from a motorcycle for this, since they're balanced and can rev high. Multi-cylinder engines can be made to have the ability to turn off certain cylinders and shut off their fuel supply with the valves open so they aren't wasting fuel and allow the other cylinders to carry the load. Thus you only use all cylinders when you need to. Modern engines can compensate for this on-off business too. You might not even realize you're not firing on all cylinders they're so good.

I've driven the Subaru STI in the simulator and the engine noise rumble annoys me. It shouldn't. It is meant to be a good car, but the other thing that annoys me is its so powerful and its tires suck so bad that it tends to shift lanes due to tire spin, like a swing in the breeze. That's the sort of thing that would kill you, hurling you into oncoming traffic because while it feels planted, it isn't. Very annoying. I'd like to find an all wheel drive as serious as a Subaru, but loads lighter weight and meant for mountain road cornering. Something as small and light as a Fiesta, basically. I've gotten used to digging out of corners with the Fiesta's power, but I suspect in the real world, that would be head on with a tree or off in the ditch a bit too fast to survive.

A good car should have all independent suspension, so double wishbones and disc brakes all around. Anti-roll bars and horizontally linked suspension are a good idea too. Keeps the car level around corners.

For body style, take a hot hatch, cut down the boxy back end so it slopes towards the real wheels and tail pipes. cut the body in so the rear wheels are in a risen-flared arch like an old corvette rather than a big flat ugly rear, keep the window present so you can see out, but remove the weight of the rear seat and any rear doors other than the hatch itself. May as well build something to fit. I haven't found the right body style for this yet, but I'll post it when I do. Keep the overall weight around 2500 pounds, less if you can manage it, and its height reasonably low so it can avoid all that wind drag. I have to admire the hot-rodders who keep experimenting with finishing cars the way they were meant to be finished, not the way the engineers specified them for economical production. Most hot rodders turn how to be men who can't stand crap and want to fix it. And the usually do, at a terrific financial loss, but they are quite proud, and deservedly so, for having corrected the fit, finish, reliability, and power of these various American cars. Sometimes British cars, since Prince Of Darkness, Lucas Electrics, ruined many British cars. Now that cars are international, and some of the best ones are made to Japanese Specifications in American factories by Japanese trained workers rather than American Union laziness (as soon as lawyers get involved in mass production, things are ruined), you get neat things like an Acura RS or Honda Civic RS (same car, different badge), which is a front wheel drive that does a surprisingly effective rendition of sports car, being low, fast, and able to corner. In the old days of heavy engines, you needed to put it in the back or middle to balance the car weight, but in modern times, aluminum engine blocks and active engine suspensions (Porsche, Audi), vehicles become less and less dependent on engine placement, at least as far as weight.

Its a pity that the Toyota MR2 was stopped in production. Same with the Celica. Both were good cars. The MR2 needed a better rear suspension, because it tended to break loose at a turn apex and then try and kill you, and the Celicas mostly ended up wrecked because they had too much power and weight and not enough brakes. I liked the Noble M400, not the 600 which was utter madness, but the 400. A fun car, like the Lotus Elise, or the Mazda Miata with sticky tires. I've found myself really disliking Front Engine, Rear Wheel Drive cars when the engine is heavy and the rear wheels too narrow. Those try to kill you, backwards off the corner that a front wheel drive would have sneered at in the rear view mirror as it churned away. The MR2 and Celica might come back one day. There's been rumors and articles. I hope they're true. I'd love to see Chevy build a SMALL corvette again instead of all that supersized crap. A small one would be fun instead of huge and never being able to park anywhere because you can't fit in a space AND open the doors. Small cars are light and therefore fun because light means better power to weight ratio. Big vehicles have their place, but they aren't fun.

I think I'll fiddle with the MR2 in my simulator some more and see if I can't make it more enjoyable.

UPDATE:

Turns out that the Focus has all independent suspension and 252 HP, twin turbos. Might be better than the Fiesta despite the extra 500 pounds of weight. The back seat in the Fiesta is so small as to leave me wondering why it was built in the first place. So I'm looking at the Focus and pondering whether it would be fun enough to drive on twisty roads. And keep in mind that the Subaru WRX STI is about the same price.

Zonda C

I've been playing the Forza Motorsport 4 driving simulator, which includes all those supercars from Top Gear. I just finished driving the Pagani Zonda C.

This is NOT a car. Its a boat. It goes sideways around corners. It has so much power its more of a force of nature than it is some kind of steering. The tires are merely a suggestion, and roads are impassible obstacles without liberal use of the "Rewind" button. Even 2 seconds is enough, but you have to keep using it if you turn off the traction and stability control buttons, gameplay cheats that don't work in the real world. Sigh. I think I want to go drive an unmodified slow car again. These fast ones suck all the fun and realism out of the simulator. Having to hit rewind again and again because the car can't actually stop is no fun.