Post Oil Real Estate

Post Oil, lots of things change. The obvious stuff is rich people move into the cities to be near other rich people, and the cops shoot or evict the poor, because they annoy the rich people and poor people don't really matter. They are obstacles and sources of crime. Get rid of them. That's what rich people think, and money talks. The coastal cities will eventually be nothing but rich people and their approved servants, all very polite.

The countryside, on the other hand, will change a lot. Right now, most of the countryside is either farms or wild land, at least here in the West. The countryside is largely empty. It doesn't have to be. Most of the interesting farming towns that should be filled with happy families only have a few disgruntled Mexican farm workers and pensioners too poor to move somewhere else. Its true the Central Valley towns are hot in the summer and very dull all the time. However, they do have UPS/FedEx making deliveries, and real estate there is cheap, along with rents. A company that works with Brains, making Inventions, would be well served to move there instead of pay too much for facilities with no advantages and terrible traffic in the Bay Area, for example.

Back when I had a wife who liked me, we did lots of exploration of the Northern Sacramento Valley, north of the Sutter Buttes. Remember those?

Yeah, those. Volcanoes in the middle of the Sacramento Valley. The only real landmark. The Sacramento river swings around the West side. The Feather river around the East side. Both rivers have flood control from really big capacity dams. The Feather from Lake Oroville dam. The Sacramento from Shasta Dam on Lake Shasta up near Redding. Those two dams allow for the productive orchards downstream, and the rice fields responsible for feeding 1.00 Billion People give or take two hundred million people any given year, most of whom are in Asia, Japan and China in particular. Japan would starve without that rice. That would be sad.

The towns near there are either rice farmers or the farm workers, or from the orchards growing various fruits or almonds or walnuts. The almonds grown here are mostly sold to the Europeans, who are crazy about almond butter. I dunno why. Its nothing special. Not peanut butter good, for example. Or cashew butter, which is much tastier but really expensive. I really should find a local source for that. But the towns are half empty. They USED TO be full of families, businesses, people doing more than farming. But then the 1980s destroyed the world and the towns largely died. By the 1990s they were pretty well dead, with just a few old timers still there, the rest of the homes empty shells, the businesses boarded up. All that potential and cheap water and cheap real estate wasted, waiting for vision and someone smart enough to realize that good sushi isn't enough of a reason to pay 3x as much for your office space in the Bay Area. Much less the terrible murderer commutes. I am NOT FOND of Bay Area traffic. I tried to avoid it as much as possible. Its one of the things my wife and I agreed on: drivers in the Bay Area took stupid-moron pills, daily. Peak oil is the best thing to ever happen to Bay Area traffic. It will force those dumba$$es off the road. They can wallow in their stupidity alone, as they well deserve. Bay Area traffic is one of the strongest arguments for involuntary euthanasia... Yeah, I really hated driving there. Its not a positive place.

If I lived in say... Colusa or Gridley, I'd have all sorts of business opportunities. Imagine if Facebook were headquartered there. Cheap housing, local fresh vegetables, 65 minutes to Sacramento if you really must go there to party, see a movie, shop. 63 minutes to Davis, which was honestly a nicer town, just more expensive. Still, it's got real potential despite how far it is from cities. And being far from cities is why it's affordable.

Work the last two days has been furiously busy. We're dealing with sales backlog, plus other backlog. I want to be caught up. It feels bad going home after 9 hours with no real breaks but you just make mistakes when you're exhausted.