Tall Trees and Crazy

I live in the Sierras. We grow oaks and pines and such here. A neighbor about 100 feet away had a 100 foot tall pine tree in front of his house. Approximately 100. It had been raining hard for a couple days. 8 inches of rain fell. The ground was pretty soft.

I heard a chainsaw. Its Sunday, late morning. Why is there a chainsaw? Look out window. A man, by himself, is chainsawing this 100 foot tall tree. Then he cuts the safety notch. I can see this because it is pointed exactly our way. He is cutting this 100 foot tall tree down and its going to fall on us, 100 feet away, approximately. A maniac with a chainsaw and no crew is cutting down a tree to fall on our house. We call the police.

The police say they don't care about trees. They don't care about chainsaws. They say get off the phone. They say the city only cares about after the disaster. So logically speaking, if you shoot at a city employee and miss, its okay because you didn't hit them. I shall remember that. I now understand why the city cops have a bad reputation with the county. The Deputies actually care about preventing crime. The city just wants to document it.

The tree comes down and slams its top into the driveway of my neighbors house, about 5 feet from my property line, missing their phone box by 8 feet, crinkling the gutter on the front of the garage and bouncing wood off the garage door but not breaking it. My neighbor normally has his truck, full of gasoline, parked in a spot that is now full of two thousand pounds of pine tree that dropped at 100 mph. If it were 5 feet taller it would have hit the natural gas regulator and lit his house on fire in a huge explosion, and the tree was now on top of the shutoff valve and the electrical panel is right next to the gas, providing the spark. It would have burned down our next door neighbors house, and then ours because the gas was only 20 feet from us and the flames get big.

I'm amazed that the tree missed the neighbors house. It ripped branches off his fire maple, and will take expert trimming to save. I haven't seen if the pavement is cracked, or the sidewalk. Missing the house is expertise and luck in equal measure. The tree, 100 feet long, is now across the street. There's ways around it, but the police finally roll up, lights off, the beat cop annoyed that we'd call the cops for a mere madman cutting down trees. Then other crew members appear from nowhere and a work truck shows up. So do all our neighbors.

The owner of the tree across the street eventually comes up the street to explain that the tree had moved two inches due to the wet ground, suggesting it was going to tip over and fall, and that he was very afraid it would fall on his house or one of the neighbors so called in the emergency tree cutting crew. He did not THINK to tell any of us why, not even the man next door. I can see that would make it an emergency. Not telling the neighbors and hiring a lumberjack with a 5 foot long chainsaw, with no safety crew to indicate this was something other can a panicked homeowner about to make things horribly worse and destroy a neighbors house to save his own? D1ck move.

After the tree came down more people showed up and they started to saw off branches 16 inches across and 20 feet long. This was a big tree. They spent the rest of daylight cutting the branches back to the central trunk, then cut that up and brought in a logging truck to pick up the logs and carry them off. I doubt the crew knew or cared that the neighbors weren't told. That wasn't their job. That was the homeowner's job. He didn't call or walk across the street or next door and just watched this crew drop the tree away from his house. He was saved. Screw his neighbors.

This is the downside to dealing with retired people in a place full of heavy metal poisoning and dementia. The crazy is strong here. This is why I want to get a trailer and move elsewhere, frequently. Crazy is funny when you don't have to live with it. When its as simple as paying off your debts and hitching the trailer to the truck and pulling out of there for the next vacation spot and temporary job. I think that Community is reserved for people born there and never left. If you weren't born there, you can't be part of the Community, and community only extends as far as tiny towns (like here) where it is possible to know the same people for decades. If you aren't born there, you aren't one of us. You're just a Them, an exploitable resource. I will always be a Them everywhere I go. Small towns are always desperate and scheming so welcome Them for their money, until the money and goodwill runs out. Sacrificing myself for a community which plans to curb-stomp me when the time is right is incredibly stupid and self destructive.

I really wish people would think a bit more, but they don't. I am constantly disappointed by the actions of my species and my survival strategy is to keep moving. Staying in one place is asking for it.

UPDATE: We paced it off. The tree was 4 feet diameter at the base and 165 feet tall/long. We were 25 feet further. Considering we thought it was 100 feet tall and it was 65% larger (error), we were completely justified to be upset about this maniac dropping it without notice or consideration.

REVIEW: Anime: Dagashi Kashi

This anime is basically Amelie, only with candy instead of schitzophrenia. 

vs Amelie

They both have a manic glee to them, but their drives are mysterious to the viewer. These are Manic Pixie Dream Girls, alright.

TV: Chuck and Flash

Millenials have particular tastes in television. They are more cheerful than my generation since their cynicism comes from groupthink rather than personal experience. They don't BELIEVE in cynicism, merely flirt with it for the sake of convenience. This shows up in their preferred TV programming.

Chuck is the story of an accidental secret agent. It is an action comedy on a TV budget, and its strengths include that the main character is a computer nerd with a broken heart who ends up a spy by accident. This lets him date a lovely blonde spy girl with issues of her own (turtles all the way down!). The first season also includes some good details, such as his best friend the bigger geek, the other nerds he works with being less functional than he is, and his bosses are hilarious and realistic parodies of people I've worked for in the last 20 years. Harry the creepy assistant manager is playing people I worked for. I really appreciated that this is a common trope now. And that corporate HR will hire this type and not realize it is demotivating staffs to give power to that kind of personality. They are directly harming their company, and including this character is a wonderful poke at the generation ruining America.

Chuck remains a charming show until he gains superpowers sufficient to defend himself, his spy-girl gets more emo, and even Adam Baldwin can't save the mess from itself, after which the show loses most of its appeal. The musical numbers are pretty funny though.

Jeffster was awesome. So was Captain Awesome, Chuck's brother in law. It does make many references to the 1980's, which I appreciate having grown up in that decade. I generally think that the decade when you're 10+ is the one where you are growing up, and should be the one a generation is measured by. So Millenials are nearing 30 at this point, having grown up with the Internet and cellphones. They don't memorize things because they can Google it. And they have a panic attack when their phone breaks or there's no signal, and can't even tolerate the idea of being alone, or going to places where you can't see people everywhere you look. It frightens them.

Another popular show for Millenials is The Flash. This TV show on CW network, which is programming created mostly for the flyover states and aims at the people MTV used to make programming for is relatively fun. Most of the cast are 18-30 years old, with the old guys my age either comic or evil or a source of wisdom if they are lucky. The wise are mostly doomed to die so the youth can rise up and take our places. This is the general theme of humanity, after all. Until such time as we can stop being bastards to each other, control our own birthrates without reverting to war to make room for the babies we're too irresponsible to feed otherwise, and take up the mantle of engineered bio-immortality (you can still die, but if you are careful and avoid accidents, the suicide gene and cancer never happen so you can theoretically live forever in a balanced state of health and fitness) or possibly upload your consciousness into a machine-space simulation instead of having a physical body (another option, and one that's cheaper than agriculture), both options being unlikely so long as we're warlike and evil. Still, shows like the Flash, a many times updated character from DC comics, this version being a relatively nice guy and pretty nerdy like Chuck, only with abilities without wisdom. Thus he needs a support team and learns from his many mistakes as the story goes. Often, when The Flash does something decent or offers redemption, the villain kills someone he cares about in response. I think the meta-meaning there is the Millenials are warning older generations are cannibalizing the young for our petty needs and short term gains. This is... true. And awful. The generation older than mine has been actively raping and pillaging the young in most of the businesses I've worked. I've been appalled. That media aimed at Millenials incorporates this as a regular plot point in most episodes is rather damming and serves as a warning for the future.

Another good example of this is Firefly, and the movie Serenity, using the same cast as the TV show. Note the presence of Adam Baldwin, being Adam Baldwin again. Once more we have an example of wealthy older people preying on the young struggling to create space they own and can improve for themselves. In this case the older people employ space nazis in actual jackboots (nice touch, Whedon!) whose effort to control their population and make them into sheep literally kills a planet and makes space zombies, that rape, kill and eat, in random order, the poor. The space nazis also torture teenage girls and slaughter settlements for fun. Because that's how you keep control. You scare the rest by killing some in very showy ways. That's how China long dealt with rebellion. They'd kill a whole province (30 million people) to scare the other 8 provinces into paying their taxes on time. This worked for generations, and what's 30 million peasants, after all? They're only peasants. Just like you and me. TV shows have homed in on this successful theme and its now present in much of the media aimed at youth. The most successful YA books have the theme of youth-exploitation and child-murder. Maze Runner, Divergent, Hunger Games are each about youth being slaughtered ritually to please the older people in power. This resonates because there is truth in it.

And we should be worried. These aren't comedies, not really. They are a warning.

Early Spring, Briefly

We're having a brief few days of warm weather here in the Sierras. It snowed here last Tuesday. I got to drive through it down the canyon past Rough and Ready before the rain started to hammer down the rest of the way to my internship/job at the Yuba College library. Today its 67'F outside. I got to drive home from my local library volunteer job with my windows open. It was lovely. The sun is shining, people are riding their motorcycles and bicycles or driving with the top down on their sports cars. Dad took his Porsche to the local club meeting near Kmart, had "cars and coffee" and talked with the various porsche owners and hot-rodders who meet there. Hot Rodders aren't US-only snobs here. They will say nice things to the Mini owners, and the Porsche guys because its still about cars, after all. We'll eat burgers off the grill tonight, always a favorite, and I think I'll bake some fries too. Tomorrow is the Stupor-Bowl, and I suspect I've seen most of those ads on Hulu already. Still, I'll watch some of the game. It will be fun. I even bought good beer for the event: Black Butte Porter by Deschutes Brewery, started by a marine veteran who created lots of jobs in his home town, near Bend, Oregon. Its a very consistent beer and I appreciate its flavors. It is not for sissies or pounding. This is a heavy beer.

So, with my window open and a porter to sip I am enjoying the rest of my day. Cheers.

Ban, With Local Impact

So last week the newspaper reported that the county supervisors and sheriff Royal (whom I know), got an outdoor pot ban which took effect immediately. No delay, no denial, no screwing around with permits. If its outside, its an arrest. This should hopefully stop most of the illegal grows and get most of the illegal growers to flee this county. Neighboring counties did similar things already, which is why they were coming here. One of the pot heads claimed (hilariously) "But pot growers create $350 million a year in this county!". Hahahahahahahha. No. They're dirt poor and shop at the same grocery as the welfare moms. Combined there's probably a million to three million for the whole county. Pot prices have been dropping like a stone since it was partially legalized, and the murder rate has gone way up. Worse, when the season ends the trimmers, a pot growers season staff that wander in like bums, start robbing houses or getting into bar fights or attacking the locals. We don't like that. And we give our law enforcement permission to shoot them, beat them, and throw the book at them. They get harsh prison terms because we're a consevative community by the time it gets to jury selection and the local hippies, most of them with felony records, can't serve on juries. Whoops! So if you break the law here, you are getting a bad prison experience. Or dead.

I am glad to see this and want them to come down on the growers like a hammer. I want those "hydroponic supplies" people to vanish. I want the potheads staggering out of the brush and attacking old ladies shot. I'd also like the welfare moms to leave but we can't have everything. Its socialism that created them, and they're everybody's problem thanks to the local schools being full of communists. Until you fire those "social justice" clowns you won't solve the problem.

The 1950's and Manufacturing Jobs

Following WW2, reconstruction using the Marshall Plan meant that the US factories were operating at full capacity, meaning there was full employment for the whole population. Wages were relatively high, housing was cheap as suburbs expanded outside the rotten city cores, the loan payments coming back from the Marshall Plan could fund construction projects and redevelopment at home. This period of time was the greatest wealth and happiness my country has ever seen. But eventually the payments ceased as the loans were paid off and by 1970 most of the money was gone, as was the oil. The nation had to start spending its money on oil to pay for the commutes from the suburbs to the city centers which still, tragically, held the jobs, of which there were now many fewer thanks to all the factories in Europe competing with us. Our economy tanked, and it has never recovered properly, merely shifted into a series of Bubbles. Bubble economies are temporary by nature and rely on popularity and self-delusion rather than firm financial foundations. Every bubble eventually bursts, and the victims of the bubble lose their shirts. If you ever wanted to know where rebels and crime families come from it is people who had wealth but lost it and are desperate to get it back and will do whatever it takes, and shed lots of other people's blood, to get it.

I have worked several manufacturing jobs. In the old days, manufacturing was about repetitive motion and being the machine. In modern manufacturing it is more about documentation, filling hoppers, and babysitting robots. Successful manufacturers try to get their costs down and their prices to all the market will bear, often by claiming higher quality than then can actually do, and paying the lowest wages they can get away with, using the most abusive management they can train. That's how things actually work in modern factories. Turnover rates don't matter much provided the equipment is relatively easy to operate. It is better to spend money on maintenance than pay high wages to the staff that can make it perform when its out of kilter. Of course, in the real world, the manager pockets half the maintenance budget and makes the staff do the maintenance, badly, and then blames them when the product is bad, since firing staff for your own mistakes is a time honored tradition. I have worked in that kind of manufacturing too. Any company which claims to have "high standards" or one of those greasy acronyms like 5S? Avoid them like the plague they actually are. They are miserable to work for.

The big problem with bringing manufacturing back to the USA from China is that most of the work will be done by robots and much of which can be made here isn't of particular demand in this country. You can only make so many spatulas before everybody has one. Then what? The US car industry shifted out of badly made economy cars, ignoring all the ways the Europeans made them faster, more efficient, cheaper to manufacture, better handling, and fun to drive, and instead we got SUVs, which are heavy and inefficient like a battle tank, but not actually safe. Most rifles shoot right through an SUV, even the structural steel barely slows down the bullets. All those housewives feeling empowered and vicious on the road with a big SUV? Its just a fantasy. People bought them after the Dot.com crash, and drove up the price of suburban homes while nesting with whatever they held onto from their Dot.com investment winnings, paying too much for a house with an Adjustable Rate Mortgage. And then time passed and the adjustment came through, often doubling or tripling the mortgage payment, causing the owner to foreclose or go bankrupt. They lost everything, including the SUV and the money to buy another one. So the auto industry in the USA collapsed, along with their parts makers. This caused Detroit to turn into a ghost town. The pictures of homes being overgrown by vines and streets abandoned and disappearing under grass and shrubs is pretty amazing, but a number of cities will lose various parts that way. The 1950's and the big car culture just don't hold up in the long term.

There's a fantasy that everybody will have a Tesla or equivalent electric car to keep the suburbs relevant but that's a lie too. It requires more lithium than actually exists, and the Tesla is $100K with all the toys. A Nissan Leaf is $45K to manufacture, the price of three hot hatchbacks or fifteen high end motor scooters with working fuel injection and replacement parts to keep them on the road. Electric cars are a fantasy by rich 1%er snobs. They also advertise the owner is someone worth kidnapping for ransom, which is something that will happen here if the next president can't get more jobs created for our countrymen.

I do think there are things we could make here better than the Chinese. China makes low-quality engines because they use cheap CNC and pay the lowest possible wages, up to and including the use of actual slaves operating them. Everybody knows this. To be fair, we pay a tiny wage to slaves in prisons making license plates, and ex-convicts get parole jobs making street signs. So we're not ethically perfect either. We don't expect convicts to make engine parts, however. And the Chinese do, which is why their engines lack power or won't run or break down. You need careful tolerances and heat treating and the correct alloys to make a good engine. You can contract for that in Chinese factories, but then you have to pay someone else to try and catch them cheating, and that person might be bribed or threatened by the factory owner, who can always bribe the local commissar to order the army or secret police to lean on your inspector. So you still get crappy engines from China. We could build them here, using all those auto parts workers, and sell things like good reliable gas or diesel generators to Africans and Central Americans for a price they can afford. We don't have to go there to sell them. We just make them and put them in a shipping container, sold to the ship or his company and off it goes. We're good at water pumps and public works, and most of the Americas could use those, right down to individual farms and neighborhoods. These are ideal locations for co-generation plants, wells, power, and cellphone towers. And possibly this would bootstrap them into stable economies that don't result in gunmen invaders or crooked police. Populations get sick of that, and even a 90 year old 8mm Mauser can kill a corrupt police captain or thug. We don't need that 1970's endless cycles of communist coups and military juntas anymore. Poor people want clean water, and Americans know how to do that. Why aren't we exporting that?

Right now there's efficient solar panel designs that use domestic materials that aren't being made anywhere. Not in China, not in the USA, not in Europe. Why is that? They're also cheaper, but do have one important requirement to run properly, which is cooling. You might get them to work with aluminum heat sinks on the back to spread the heat around, but the preferred system is liquid cooling pumped by some of the power generated by the panel, and then drawn off for cogeneration purposes (heating, power generation, whatever). The Cheap Chinese solar panels require rare earths, are expensive, and mostly get installed for looks rather than effective power generation to any real degree. They are like electric cars. They are for green snobs. The efficient panels nobody is making would actually power a building with those on the roof. Not just light a few low power bulbs, but the actual power needs. In the African boonies, or remote villages in Central and South America, where there's no hydroelectric power or long distance power lines like in the USA? That would enable all sorts of critical industry and infrastructure. We should be making these modular setups and selling them, at a profit. Not giving away junk but selling stuff that works. They will pay for things that work.

We should also take what has been learned in Europe with their cars and use that here. Buckboard leaf springs and straight axles on modern trucks? Really? Yes, that's stupid. Why do Subaru's and jeeps have cast iron transfer cases when aluminum will do the job for half the weight? We do we still use cast iron engine blocks when we know how to make the blocks in aluminum? Duh! The more weight you remove from a car, the smaller the engine can be for the same acceleration, resulting in better fuel economy. Duh! We also know that you can make a silica based fiber that is 4% the cost of carbon fiber to manufacture, uses the same kinds of resins, and is tougher in accidents, resisting shattering. Rather than invest millions in aluminum body panels, why not use this fiber for car body parts? Why not make a hot hatch body tub out of this, so you get a baby-MacLaren running a 1.0 L turbo that gets 70 mpg because it only weighs 1200 pounds and seats your kids in the back for the school run? This is a DUH! answer. Ford imported their 3-cylinder diesel, the one they've been using in Europe for several years, and if the weight of their hot hatch were reduced using silica fiber tub and body panels it would perform like the Honda it is meant to compete with but get double the corporate average fuel economy, actually meeting the requirement of the law and allowing them to sell more of those big work trucks. These are things American manufacturing can actually do with existing technology and would put us ahead of China and at least tie with Europe, while employing Americans. We should be doing this. Trump says he wants this sort of thing, but I think Trump is a blowhard. Hillary doesn't say anything positive about capitalism.

America needs jobs. Any jobs like hopper filler and robot operator isn't going to employ many people, and we need as many people employed as possible. Employed people buy houses and consumer goods, and if the houses are reasonably priced they can spend more of their wages on goods that employ more people. The Housing Bubble was a terrible tragedy, caused by ARM greed in the financial sector, and the people who did it avoided jail. They are still out there, waiting for the next financial con game. We should be wary of them. In the meantime, think hard about new technologies and ask yourself if your current career and skillset have value to a local manufacturer, or if you know of a product that would make a good business. Manufacturing may end up a bubble, but like Amazon, it may be a persistent one with a future even if the money is nearly translucent.

Rains Update

This month we've gotten 1-2 inches of rain per day. This is pretty typical for an El Nino year. The drought is ended. Note that the local weather station on Wunderground.com only picked up 18% of the real rain total. They show .58 inches. Wrong!

Last night it stormed hard and gave us 3 inches of rain in 10 hours. That's a lot. There were flash flood warnings down in the valley relating to this storm. It is snowing up on Donner Pass right now. A big storm. I just checked the live webcams on I-80 and there's around 6 inches of new snow at Soda Springs, which is near the top of the pass. It is dawn so its pretty, but I'm sure glad I'm not trying to drive through that.

It stopped raining a few hours ago so I'm heading out for a walk while I can. You need your exercise when you can get it when the weather is like this, and my walks are very healthy. I've got The Fifth Elephant on my ears (nothing like the Fifth Element).

Here's a review by some guy on YouTube. Its a good book.