Steampunk

If you like steampunk, you're a Conservative. You might not realize that's the underlying message, but it is. A lot of people these days are going through pretty severe future shock. Few people realized, back when being progressive meant following a man with a funny mustache in Germany who planned to bring technology and order to a chaotic world for the greater good, that those same ideas and demands would continue like an in-bred 5th column today and result in apocalyptic visions of disaster like Elysium, the ultimate end of Obamacare: 2 tier health care. Nice.

Steampunk was utterly different. Steampunk is pre-plastic, so all plastic stuff is either wood or cast iron or brass. This makes it heavy and requires maintenance and its not the most durable but its also expensive enough in labor that someone gave a damn about it when they were manufacturing it, so Steampunk has art on it. Not just simple plain beams or covers. People cared about their work. Art Deco, like these Decopods, is all about beauty AND function, and nevermind how long it takes to make.

This is an example of steampunk, more or less. Harley Bikers are getting into diesel punk, though their Rat Bikes are mostly just ugly and often loud, and wrapping fireproof bandage cloth over exhaust pipes is not a great look. Same with hard-tail frames with no rear suspension. It makes you go even slower or wreck even faster. I wish they'd think hard about their choices and maybe start building hot-rods. Hot rods are usually pretty. Rat Rods aren't, but nobody admires them either. People admire hot rods. That's the sort of dieselpunk people can get behind.

Steam punk is neat because there's often lots of steam powered stuff, clothes that fit, with buttons, trains and biplanes and early radios and horsedrawn buggies and early jalopy cars. Art deco and the relevant mix of gingerbread and modernism made for some really odd art, especially in stained glass and tile.

The downside to cheap labor is the man who makes the ornate AND functional part takes longer than the one making the purely functional and it costs a lot more. We're still obsessed with cost when so many people only care about showing off. Top Gear is about showing off how little you care about money. Most of the viewers will never own a supercar, even a used one that breaks down all the time. Many will own a sedan or hot hatch, however, and those are fun. They make them ornate and pretty, much as Harley Owners fiddle with their bikes to make them unique chromed art pieces they can ride around the country, showing off. Years ago, when I was working Retail in the Bay Area, I met one of the original chopper builders from Livermore. I've since seen him on the highway headed out of the Bay Area at 95 mph with his friends weaving through traffic. His bikes work, though their quality varies with build. They're as expensive as a supercar, $100K. But they're reasonably unique so could potentially be an art investment.

Steampunk is also in favor of airships, which unfortunately have a ton of important flaws and that is why they aren't used much in the real world. Pity. Biplanes, however, are. Biplanes, or planes with an upper and lower pair of wings, have twice as much lift as a monoplane, and go half as fast. The upside is sometimes having twice and much lift and slower maneuvering is a good thing, such as with crop-dusting. As I'm a fan of Silver Spoon (anime) and No-Rin and Moyashimon, all of which are about agriculture schools, something Japan hopes young people will go back to doing since most of Japan's GDP goes to importing food from California, rice specifically, because Japanese rice is usually Calrose grown about 40 miles west of me, it would help Japan's economy if they grew more. Most of Japan's rice paddies are empty, fallow. They don't have the people to do the work, probably because it doesn't pay for beans. It SHOULD, but it doesn't. If Japan mechanized their rice growing like we do, they could be feeding themselves and export some to China and Korea as well. Folks who can pay. Steampunk isn't about rice farming, but since the combines haven't been built yet, there's no reason they can't be fancy and ornate works of art, or rice can't be planted by biplane they way they do here.

Isn't that cool? Now imagine you did THIS for a living instead of stood behind a retail counter smarming at people you'd rather light on fire. A better life could be yours.

Another good area for future employment of the steampunk variety, beyond the obvious Bed and Breakfast hotels with frilly maids and valets, is proper first class train stewards. You see, heavy rail passenger transport doesn't have to be miserable, filled with measles infected Patient Zero vectors, like a recent train on BART.

First Class can be nice. Depending on qualifications and services, a steward may end up a very well paid job. If you're going to be smarming, you may as well be paid enough to do it properly. Financial incentive is win.

It is somewhat ironic that the town I came from has a fair bit of rail-based steampunk going on there. Festivals with the defunct railway that hasn't been torn up for scrap yet. When I was a fresh high school graduate, they were still shipping lots of lumber out of there, roaring through town rather faster than is safe, but still, few were killed. People were more self aware of danger then. ADD and ADHD wasn't the universal answer to stupid people. Anyway, folks dress up and display penny farthing bicycles and rail-scooters. Its fun.

The essentials are fitting clothes and mechanical rather than electrical gizmos. Good times. Better than today in many ways.