Winter Solstice

Today is the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. My ancestors, the Gaels (aka Kelts which just means foreign barbarians in Greek, the bastards) had a multi-thousand year culture, trading ships along the coastlines from the Baltic to Ireland, to the Mediterranean and Alexandria and the Black Sea. A big culture. The Roman Catholics destroyed most of what they found because an older advanced culture with serious mathematics and an accurate calendar clearly needed to die in favor of the Emperor's new xtian faith. Ahem.

You can always tell a truly advanced culture that has the accurate calendars. Of course, some of those cultures turned to human sacrifice or ritual killing, so not exactly perfect. Just advanced.

My friend That Guy(tm) suggested how interesting it would have been if during the Dark Ages the Gaels recovered and the Romans collapsed, leaving their accurate calendar but their peculiar time keeping system. Gaels have a 6 hour day, defined as divisions during the light, with mid day being noon, at the sun's height. And since the minutes in the day change every day and you don't have time zones, keeping time becomes both local and somewhat complicated by geography if you try to do it mechanically. Clocks we use have standard hours, minutes, and seconds, and the hours of light aren't relevant to this system. But the Gaels based their math on the solar calendar and knew about the moon and stars and figured out the whole thing in a way the Romans never did. And the Romans killed people who pointed out the flaws. That's the trouble with superior military powers built on violence.

Winter officially begins today, and the days start getting longer again tomorrow.

California is mostly empty

When I worked at the Poison Factory, making DNA, I was miserable. The Bay Area is full of miserable people and they abuse each other to get rich so they can leave the Bay Area. The whole Bay Area is peopled with murderous ambition. So is Los Angeles. Sacramento is more of a core of welfare drug addicts, civil servants and call centers staffed by organized drug addicts, surrounded by suburbs of people who want to get out of Sacramento but can't afford it, and people who retired there because they couldn't afford to retire somewhere better or really like bicycling. Being largely flat, Sacramento is a great place for bicycling.

 

And then you're in the farmland, very suddenly. There's walls, then farmland. It's quite surreal if you haven't been there before. Sacramento's other name is River City, as in the city from The Music Man.

Yes, that musical is based in Sacramento. I live in the mountains, far enough away you can't see Sacramento without driving for half an hour for a view from the mountain. The mountain is largely empty, with pockets of people along the highways that wind through, but once you get east of Roseville, you start seeing more trees than houses, the sound walls vanish, and its boonies with a road racing through, with traffic crossing the Mountains towards Reno and Salt Lake City far to the East. Most of California is empty. There are huge areas of it pretty much wild, too barren for more than Cattle Grazing, for ranching. If there's water, there's fields or orchards depending on soil quality. Lousy soil gets orchards. Really lousy soil gets olive trees. They can grow on bare rock, or soil with no nutrients at all because they get them from the air. This is one reason I admire olives. They are amazing.

 

Much of California is craggy. The map you see on www.wunderground.com is shaded so you can spot the ridges and dips in the land, so you can see the terrain. Google Earth has this too. Once you get beyond those dense hives of California's cities, you quickly get into wild land. Most of California isn't used for anything at all. Its still very much a wild state, with all the potential uses you can imagine, though nobody invests unless they own the land in a county that won't raise punishing taxes, and taxes are raised by elected officials who mostly get the job for the retirement package from "campaign contributions" which they get to keep when they retire. They're in it for the bribes. So if you buy some wild land, put in the utilities and build the property up into some purpose, such as a new town or a factory, better make sure the officials are in your pocket or they'll stall you till they get their money. It works this way everywhere. I think in California, if you want to succeed, you really do need both bribes and personal enforcers with extralegal methods of correcting obstacles. Most of the Old Money families I've run into have those sorts of men employed, and many give off a vibe so frightening, with a coat that bulges under the left arm, I steered clear of them. People don't think of California being corrupt and murderous, but it is. Just because we distract with movie stars doesn't mean this state is about anything less than business.

 

However, most rural counties are less worried about competition and most welcome new business ventures because employed people make the economy better and eventually their being there brings in hospitals, which brings doctors, which brings luxuries and stable incomes and someone to marry their pretty daughters so they have a future without Meth scarring or jail. Everybody wins. Those big empty places in California, especially near railroads, could in theory house car factories, if California was less uptight about "carbon credits" and other scam nonsense. Separation of church and state, remember. No govt support for religion. Especially funding of carbon or warming, because that's religion. Its fraud for the state to fund religion, and that means jail for anybody who sends money or laws to these religious causes. Eventually, people will go to jail, and then the religions will get fined millions to recover the money.

 

Strip those out and a lot of those weird punitive to manufacturing law and problems go away. Renault, Peugeot, Acura, Subaru, Nissan, Yamaha, Honda, they can all have factories between Woodland and Redding. Plenty of people to do the jobs in car assembly, lots of cheap water and hydroelectric power, and the trains can carry the finished cars away for sale. Good deal, right? And as those companies adjust their cars to available fuel, they'll swap engines for biodiesel or natural gas or alcohol or even electric, if the Chinese don't get all that Lithium from Tesla in Reno. Which they probably will. Those jobs will give the people fleeing LA somewhere to go. A reason to stay here. And get them away from a very long and expensive supply chain that wastes lots of resources just existing. LA is too expensive to continue existing.

 

Railroads are easier to maintain than paved roads. While they require good quality steel, they're usually just a few of them, and they last for years. The maintenance equipment runs on the rails, too. You can spray down the weeds in a few passes rather than send out huge crews to stop the travel and seal pavement that's going to crack more next winter. None of those problems.

 

Between Woodland and Eureka, out at the coast, in the Coast Range mountains, a region with lots of canyons, ravines, faults, and rivers and stream. Plenty of ground water and rain to recharge the aquifers. There are towns up there, but not nearly enough of them. You could put a lot of population up there if the businesses in LA were moved to the water supply, which that region has. As the place is empty, the land is also cheap. You could build, using the locally available lumber, entire planned communities, warmer than Portland or Eugene, but overall similar weather, with affordable housing prices ($70K for a 3 BD, 2 BA) suitable for a family and a proper lot for a garden if you wanted, or hobby business. California has the space for adapting to the post oil world, but we have to start with abandoning Los Angeles and San Jose, both of which require water pumping at massive scale and costs millions a month. There are empty places which are better suited than the false promise of educated workers that Silicon Valley lives on. Its turned into racist ghettoes. And how is that beneficial to a business anymore?

 

When I look at those big empty areas of California, I see all kinds of potential development that will cost less in the short run AND the long run that supporting the existing failures of San Francisco and Los Angeles. People living there aren't getting rich, not as a whole. They're getting poorer, and sometimes DEAD, living there. Too much vicious competition. Too close together. Too few jobs, too few resources, too many costs and expenses. Its smarter to build a new factory and close the old one. Let your workers move to the new site, or hire the locals. Either way is better than operating in a cesspool like San Francisco bay area. Anyplace that supports those sorts of evil politicians deserves what they get.

 

I don't know if California will split up its budgeting into six regions, a sort of half-assed approach to the 6 States of California thing which would serve the same purpose. Even changing the laws of the Bay Area to suit business better won't fix the water pumping problem which costs households $300/month to import heavy metals, once-used medications which the purification process doesn't remove (birth control and Prozac for example) into everyone's drinking water. I fully detoxed after leaving there entirely. It got easier to breathe and think clearly. The Bay Area is toxic to human beings. It needs to go fallow and heal through nature. A good earthquake and fire should do the trick. Turn it into a special disaster zone, the whole place. Let the ultrarich build their own mansions after the quake, but leave the neighborhoods as ruins, a warning to the future. I should put that in my next novel. It would be a good setting point, actually. A very good setting point. The economic implications of a Federal Govt that CAN'T bail out the rebuilding, so there's no money to rebuild? That's huge. The Big One really COULD cause the end of the USA, and its currency, because T-Bills might get dumped over the costs of $2 Trillion in public utility costs for the Bay Area alone. "God Hates California" is what they would say. And they'd be right.

 

In that situation, building new towns entirely, with cheap real estate close to water supply is cheaper that trenching, removing ruined pipes and installing new ones just to supply water and sewer to a trashed out slum that's falling down from the quake and needs demolition anyway. Why bother? Build a new place. Build a new town. California has always been about booms and busts. The Bay Area and LA are just ghost towns people are lingering on with because there's no reason to leave yet. Flatten them and present with them with the bill, personally? They'd go. When you don't own the land you're renting, why stay? Duh! Earthquakes. That would fix California. Laws are tied to places. Flatten the places, wreck the corruption into the ground, and the laws are discarded. Just like that.

Book: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is probably meant to be a Young Adult (YA) title in Science Fiction, about a subject which is near and dear to my heart, use of the Schroedingers Cat experiment to move from the earth you're born on to the one in the next universe, next door. In this story, the devices they use are a device built with simple radio shack electronics, a switch, and a potato for the power supply. If you're holding the box, you get carried to the universe next door when you flip the switch. As it happens, the boxes only take you to empty Earths, thus the "Long" part of the title. The reason this is near and dear to me is I think this avenue of research is more useful to humanity than space exploration. If you can WALK to an empty earth rather than build enormous and expensive space ships than travel hundreds of years to find other planets, then terraform them for centuries or millennia... walking to an inhabitable planet earth is much better. We already have maps and everything. We are evolved to conquer what we'll find there. It is a much better option for solving the overpopulation problem than war or starvation or disease. Walking to an empty earth and building how you want. Just walking into that peaceful place appeals greatly. I can't tell you how much I despise being dependent on insulin to stay alive. But at least I've got books like this so my mind doesn't run in circles, bored.

 

UPDATE: 12/21/14

So I'm halfway through and its raised some important points, namely that with millions of empty worlds and super cheap technology to get to them, it is actually possible to make humanity extinct by spreading us out into them so far apart and so few to each that no viable breeding population (you need hundreds) exists there, and if the technology to get back is wrecked, you are stuck there, waiting to die of old age or eaten by a cougar or bear or wolf. In most cases. Some of the characters don't need the technology to "step" to the next world. Most people need it, and get very nauseous once they go.

 

Another point they raise is that since you can't carry steel or iron to the next earth, you have to mine it once you get there or use bronze or various other metals instead. Aluminum comes across fine. And they say iron won't go because it has the most stable nucleus so can't skip across the boundary through this quantum tunneling bubble effect that the device uses to carry a person to the next world. The iron in your blood is okay, but not iron metal. Not having steel is an amusing plot point because it keeps coming up. Steel is common in most objects we use, but not all of them.

 

The authors also talk about Daniel Boone Syndrome, which is the lack of anxiety about being separated from people. I'm not sure how that's a syndrome, but mad doctors often claim that human beings need to be around other human beings and insist this is true... but I don't see how or why that would be. Claiming people HAVE to be social is a bit of an unfounded reach. Its a claim without proof. Still, its proving to be a good read.

Another Crappy Disaster Movie: "San Andreas"

Here, watch the trailer and see the best parts of the film:

There's been a lot of movies about earthquakes. Most of them are terrible. The Earthquake 1974 movie pretty well covered the subject. And it was mostly drama about the disaster rescue efforts. Oh, and they shot looters rather than gave them water bottles and blankets. Sigh. I miss the good old days.

But thanks to digital special effects, essentially computer generated cartoons, you can get the cinematic feel in a few moments, then revert to the typical soap opera crap which bores audiences to tears. 'A troubled family, struggling to pull together through a journey across a desperate city destroyed in a fit of mother nature..." They're like slasher films and just as dumb.

 

I have NEVER seen one that talks about the cost of repairs, about the tax rates to rebuild all the public utilities, which is where things get expensive. Not the high rise buildings, which nobody actually needs. Its about the water and sewer pipes destroyed by the quake, and the power outages, and trying to replace all those transformers when only the Chinese make them anymore. New Jersey is still recovering from Hurricane Sandy after many of their transformers melted from the flooding. Salt water conducts, ya know? They were buying them surplus from Detroit, who was salvaging them from neighborhoods shut down and returning to nature by that city's full collapse.

 

Telling the story of no power, no water, no flush toilets, and useless fedgov getting in the way to kill more people and prevent rescue? That's drama enough. Oh, and overpasses and bridges ALSO get wrecked in quakes. They don't necessarily fall all at once, thanks to wrapping the columns of concrete in plate steel welded around them, but they still crack, and they still have to be torn down and rebuilt, so those huge interstate interchanges? Destroyed in many cases. Easterners won't understand this until New Madrid destroys them and sets back everything for about 450 miles from Memphis to 1900's living. The well drilling companies will be busy, and trenching companies installing septic systems too. Why rebuild big sewer systems when last time New Madrid Quakes hit, there were 7.5 aftershocks for 80 years? They'll just get wrecked again.

San Andreas wasn't made for Californians. It was made for Easterners who enjoy hating California weather and are jealous to see Californians die on screen. Its a certain type of blood lust. Another bit of human darkness exploited. Slasher films are snuff films, after all. Same kind of thing. They are for people who enjoy seeing nubile teen girls murdered. Think about the morality of that. That's an awful lot of darkness. People who like them are murderers, or Democrats which is sort of the same thing.

 

I have seen a bunch of these natural disaster movies, mostly to count all the things the directors get wrong. Its not like there aren't a bunch of geologists who can correct the scripts so they don't suck. I just think that Producers find educated experts inconvenient to their release schedule. Not that geologists can't do it quick and still be largely factual, its just that Producers want to crank these out without engaging an audience's higher brain functions. Or ANY brain functions. Who cares if the suicidal girl in "Volcano" gets rescued or finally dies? I mean, you can see she is doomed. All that screaming and she doesn't just stand up and walk away? Its not like the lava is FAST after all.

Remo Williams: not good at disaster management.

 

So bad. So very bad. The continuity errors. The idea that the ocean would flood the Mojave Desert, which is 2000 feet up, rather than stop after filling the Salton Sea, which is below sea level. Sigh. So much dumb. Its stuff like this which has turned teens away from the Movie industry, and so they keep remaking movies, using old scripts rewritten to be edgier and include more black characters out of racial exploitation. It stops being art and is just business. Earthquake movies COULD be good, if they were about earthquakes and all the rippling invisible damage, and how people have to live afterwards, and all the people who will abandon California after The Big One because the taxes to rebuild really are the last straw, and how those bankrupt people will Reverse Okie back to the Midwest and try and restart their lives with tornados and the eventual New Madrid Quake. It isn't NICE, but it is better drama than a "journey from LA to SF to save their daughter". Sheesh. Who cares!

 

Show us more CGI movies of damage, and add CGI to the scenery to subtly emphasize all the broken stuff. I don't care about ex-wives. That isn't drama. That's America today. Its not edgy. Its boring. Show railroad lines twisted and trains waiting at the damage, having prevented being derailed by modern brakes. Show the dust and smoke and the little landslides. I'm pretty sure the Hollywood sign WON'T dramatically fall down in a quake. Its pretty well anchored and not very massive. In a really big quake it will flex a lot and remain standing. I can't say the same with the LA freeways. Show the cracked overpasses cars are driving around all the way up I-5. Show the frustration with every single water spigot being off, and the flooding into the streets with broken sewage pipes. Offer some heroic bulldozer operators pushing the rocks off the highways so cars can escape the damage North and East. Show the lines of cars leaving LA for Arizona, heading off to Midwestern relatives rather than wait for the Fedgov to declare "best response to disaster ever!" while people die of dehydration. The Whitehouse is so lost to reality. They really would say that while people are dying. Declare victory when everybody can see defeat on live TV and a few million videos on YouTube. Show the packs of wild dogs hungry and insane. Show rescue ships trying to bring in supplies after aftershocks wreck the port facilities so they can't unload. That's some irony drama. And the aftershocks of a big quake really do go on for ages. Survivors get used to them pretty fast.

 

The other thing about big quakes is they can provide just enough stress to set off quakes far away. The planet rang like a bell for both the xmas quake in Thailand and the Japanese quake a few years ago. Japan has rebuilt most of its damage, btw. It cost them a fortune and caused more recession. So people fleeing from LA might get to drive into New Madrid breaking not long after. It IS due, after all. My friends in the Midwest will get their rude awakening someday, probably in their lifetimes.

I avoid predictions of quakes other than very general because you just can't predict specific dates with them. Trying is an act of self deception and humiliation, and people who post them as video blogs are a step away from tinfoil hats and needing anti-psychotic medications. I only post general warnings because they're agreed upon by seismologists, who are a type of geological scientist, rather than fundraising scammers like say "climatologists". Seismology is lots and lots of math. Its very boring, not sexy, and they don't get invited to the good cocktail parties or have sexy interns or good scotch. All that money went to Cultists. This also means that most seismology data is fact based and the general predictions are based on prior quake cycles, which are generally true, with certain exceptions. New Madrid quakes happen every few hundred years. We are due. San Andreas quakes happen every century. We are due. Oregon quakes happen every few centuries. We might be due. Convergent plate boundaries are weird. Deformation is one of those things which prevents quakes, by twisting the rocks. The Poleta Folds, east of Big Pine, California in Deep Springs Valley, CA, has rock deformation along a faultline which is visible from space. This sorts of things do happen, and over a longer timescale than people normally think, the earth moves a lot, and has quakes often. I have never seen a disaster movie that begins with someone staring up the hill from Bodega Harbor and counting the mega-quakes visible on that hillside. It would be a clever way to begin such a story. Hollywood has no idea what Clever is. They still think Cocaine makes them Better than everyone else. Cocaine is the driving force of Hollywood and it explains so very much.

 

Oh, and in case you wondered how to prep for a quake:

1. Enough stabilized gasoline in cans to get your car out of state.
2. Enough drinking water for a week, around 21 gallons. You'll spend days in denial before deciding to leave town.
3. Camp Stove, freeze dried or dried foods, cast iron pot to cook in with lid. Kettle, cutting board, spare cooking knife, plastic plates and cups, detergent, paper towels, sponge, box of tea, iodine tablets, water filter. Fuel for stove.
4. Soap, towel, bandages, ace bandage.
5. Various clothes and blanket. Socks and underwear. Laundry detergent.
6. Maps on paper, waterproofed, grease pencil to mark map.
7. Cell phone charger for car. Backup battery.
8. Handheld emergency radio.
9. Tire puncture kit, bicycle pump. Air pressure gauge.

 

You don't have to carry them in your car every day, but having them packed up in a couple boxes for the trunk makes leaving a lot easier once you need to go. Some disasters are so big you can't get away from them, but most disasters are regional and many cars will work fine on gravel roads provided you drive slowly and sanely. You can go around collapsed bridges in many cases. The motorcyclists will have it the easiest. Well, not Harley Riders with their 3 inches of ground clearance and dragging pegs. Cruisers are NOT good on gravel. But Enduro bikes are made for this. They don't weigh much, they are tall with long suspensions. They can cover a lot of ground. They just don't carry very much. Still, getting yourself out of California is the important thing after a really big quake. Not a teaser like Napa, but something nasty like Loma Prieta, only worse.

 

If you have the money, of course, securing your home to its foundation (anchor bolts are standard in all California homes built since 1970), drilling a well, and digging a septic system for backup is even better, assuming you aren't living somewhere stupid and pointless, like behind a levee or downstream from an earthen dam. Leaving may be your best option in those cases. If you get the chance. Few people died in the 1906 quake and fire. Few will die in the Big One. Its mostly the damage to infrastructure and public panic that are the problem. And that's the reason to leave.

RV Irony

Why are Millenials buying RVs and moving into them instead of buying houses? The housing market is inflated, that's why. About 4x inflated.

Housing is market based. They sell for what the buyer can pay, not what the seller is asking. The seller, of course, does not sell for less than they want until they have to sell because they've run out of options. This is key to understanding the whole dynamic market because those who own houses, Baby Boomers and their remaining elders, have caused a whole series of boom and bust economic cycles and the last one, the Housing Boom, they managed the collapse on and stopped it halfway by unemploying the largest number of people ever, mostly through shipping their jobs to China, and gutting the "Knowledge Economy" by shipping that to call centers in India, currently famous for both interrupting your dinner and trying to con your computer password out of you. Spammers, mostly.

Who has money to buy a house? Who gets paid that much to afford at mortgage where the jobs are? Even where the jobs aren't, houses are still too expensive. The entire market is inflated. Buying when the bubble is still going to lose 75% of its value is just stupid, and even obsessive Facebook posters know this. Somebody told them to wait, so they're waiting. And the Baby Boomers, who planned to sell their $680K houses they bought for $40K back in 1983, continue to sneer at the younger generations who won't pay $350K much less the $680K asking price, because know the market is still collapsing and anything over $70K is ridiculous. Especially since these places also need repairs. So, most of us rent an apartment, but that's throwing away money for a place to sleep, and apartments are often leased, rather than rented, to stop the apartment companies from jacking up the rent every month till you leave, in retaliation for the tap water so full of rust it looks like its bleeding and the electrical system that shuts off when that one switch is flipped because it corroded thanks to the cheap Chinese drywall full of sulfuric acid in the walls. And they want to charge the renter for the repairs. Yeah, don't think that doesn't happen.

Instead of being a captive market in a massively fluctuating economy, more and more Millenials, with nothing to lose, are shifting into RVs and moving with the jobs. Not just pot growers, though this is the dominant model for them. You'd be surprised at how many don't read Thoreau while sitting on the mountainside tending to pot plants.

No, RV living makes sense for IT and for contractors who are there to do a job, get paid, and leave for the next job. RV living makes sense where the climate isn't horrible, but can work even if its bad when they're installed with sufficient insulation. This includes field work, from botany surveys for National Forest or growing industries. In the 90's, most "bioremediation" was a con game, where the result of millions was a report telling you how f'd everything was in a given area. Often, this meant nothing further was done since the assumed cost was shifted to the Fedgov and why would they care about your local problem? However, some volunteer organizations are starting to actually fix these things. Unemployed veterinarians donate time for wildlife rehabilitation, and now we have more peregrine falcons, more owls, more red tailed hawks, all of them eating the mice which reproduce in a few weeks. So it isn't all bad. I suppose this is better work than giving coffee for $5 each to bored soccer mom's frantic to restart their careers after birthing 2.4 children and getting them to school age. I have no idea how women make that choice without guilt. Kids who come home to an empty house don't turn out right, ya know. Is your career worth so much you can sabotage your kids? Why have them at all if you are that selfish?

Another job that rewards houses on wheels is fracking. Fracking may be banned in several California counties with oil underneath them, but that still leaves others, and a mobile city of RVs and trailers that follows the fracking drill sites is still better than building homes or living in tents for a year. There's little point in boom towns when you KNOW the work will end. Better to leave. I also see RVers camped in car lots, acting as security. A good job for a veteran with all the job experience they got peace keeping in Iraq or Afghanistan. Most public storage companies offer housing on site, which also means they are a good place to restore an RV or trailer. Use it or sell it when you're done. If you have the skillset for restoration or updating a crappy old run down one with mice in the walls and give it Wifi and 6 inches of foam insulation and wrapped pipes so everything still works in the winter, it becomes a home that can be unplugged and put away and hauled off in a few hours to a better town that hasn't committed suicide by legal means, which far too many towns DO, often through short sighted greed. But Greed is a defining feature of the Baby Boom generation, even if individuals can be less horrific, overall the generation has been the worst in Centuries.

I am proud that Generation X hasn't sold out yet. I hope we don't. I think having the Boomers for parents insures we have excellent examples of bad people not to emulate so when the time for choices comes, we shudder in memory and do the right thing instead. Until the housing market corrects itself, and employers stop being sadists, we are better off driving away from dead end towns where all the vested money is in decay and abuse. Leave that behind. Any place is likely to be smarter. And a house with wheels is a definitive rejection of the abuse that crams us into them. We can't fight the fires lit by the Baby Boomers, burning down our civilization, but we can certainly drive off into the sunset to get away from the smoke, thanks very much.

Oil To $57 Crashes Dow 300

A little Peak Oil commentary here. Haven't written one in ages.

Its about both Fracking and ISIS and Ukraine, and they all get attacked the same way. Lowering the oil price hurts all three. Fracking only works when the price of oil is more than the price of extraction. When it stops being efficient and profitable, the companies doing it have to stop and wait till the price rises again. If they don't have the funds to wait, they go under. Fracking companies that go under are at risk of being bought out by international conglomerates, such as those owned by the same Saudis dumping oil onto the market. It makes sense as a deep play because it helps them retain control of oil in the long run. And it will eventually make them rich.

ISIS gets most of its funding, after the initial executions and beheadings across Iraq and Syria, from selling oil. They were counting on the oil to keep their cult of murder and mayhem going, because ISIS always says that Islam is a peaceful religion. That's why they keep beheading people and executing Christians and other Muslims. Peaceful, they insist. Every muslim says that, but muslims hack people's heads off. The last time America dealt with this sort of recalcitrance there was carpet bombing. I suspect that might be necessary, however the Saudis have dropped the price of oil by nearly half and ISIS doesn't have easy money anymore. I think we should blow up the dams we built so they all die next summer, but that would be rational. And the power plants. And any kind of public utility. Don't rebuild after, either. If you are fed up with bad people, don't help them kill you. Just wipe them out. Be sensible for once.

Russia is still seizing most of Ukraine it can reach. Whether they leave a little behind for the last Ukrainians or kill them all is unknown at this time. What is known is that Russian billionaires get most of their money from oil sales and holdings, and they are leveraged to the hilt. Suddenly, half the value of their oil is gone, and Russians frack too, which isn't cheap. The collapsing price of oil means these billionaires have even more reason to assassinate Putin and put somebody sane on the throne of the Russian empire. Of course, Putin still lives, so they aren't trying very hard. Yet. After yesterday's crash of the stock markets and oil price, Putin has more reason to cower in a bunker, but his ego won't let him. So sooner or later, he'll be popped into hamburger or explode in a booby trapped car or see his motorcade destroyed by IEDs or Fire Ants. There are many ways to kill a Putin. And he did run Lubyanka prison for political torture. They have a big laugh about Americans slapping and splashing prisoners. Oh noes! LOL.

So this is why Saudi is dumping oil, and why there's been this big spastic reaction, and why over the weekend someone will remind brokers that the Saudis can't keep dumping oil forever and this is now bargain season. Lots of deep discounts on stocks. Those who buy them will see their prices come back very soon. And the price of oil will rise again. Probably back to $80 or $90/bbl.

After Roads

I live in the mountains. It is full of tall trees, canyons, rivers and streams. Roads twist and wind around these canyons, and the ground tends to move when there's been fires or deluges, or just the wrong amount of erosion. As a trained geologist, I am VERY good at spotting the tops of landslides, before they slide. A local arterial road here is going to collapse soon, which will be inconvenient to me and others, and destroy several houses and possibly an important fire station. You can pave over the top of these things, but they'll keep moving until they've physically balanced out their weight from one side to the other. This is intro-level Civil Engineering, btw.

I have written before how dangerous it is to stop paving your roads. Paved roads deal with water relatively well, provided the ditches are cleared and concrete is used in areas of high ground water, such as springs. If you do these things, the roads last pretty well and can be travelled during and after serious storms. The water hits the surface, runs off, and is steered away. You don't get serious erosion from a rainstorm of pavement made of asphalt or concrete. This is what people are used to. Change that pavement surface however, to something which can erode from rushing water, like gravel or dirt? Transportation becomes a serious challenge. "So what?" you say. "The road is already paved." Well, yes and no. See, concrete breaks under tension, such as from passing trucks with 100 PSI tires and heavy loads, and asphalt is also made of pebbles, some of which dissolve in water. The tar in asphalt also evaporates at higher temps, such as a hot day, which is why you can smell a hot road. It is "outgassing" hydrocarbons as they break down in the sun. Eventually the tar stops being tar and the surface pebbles are released and roll away. Left alone a few years a tar road can actually evaporate to nothing. This doesn't always happen, but I have seen it in the desert. Anywhere it rains, like here, you get great problems from either line springs underneath, frost swelling to break the asphalt when it is cold, causing pot holes, as well as other problems such as tearing and shifting which opens cracks through the pavement to further erosion. You generally treat this by pouring and painting tar into the cracks. This is a temporary fix and is famous as a road hazard to motorcyclists, scooterists, and bicyclists, what are colloquially known as "tar snakes". They are very dangerous, moreso when wet. Hit a tar snake on a wet road into a corner and your front wheel loses all grip and you fall onto the pavement, possibly sliding off the road into a tree and find out of God exists or not. Tar snakes are in the top 5 serious road hazards for motorcyclists.

 

Tar to make roads and patch roads isn't free. Tar is oil, and it can be turned into gasoline, which is higher profit than tar so refineries generally do that. There is less tar available and roads cost more to pave and repave so nice smooth paved roads are going to be a fond memory, sort of like 70's musclecars with big throbbing V8 engines which makes the wimmins excited.

 

Unfortunately, while fracking COULD provide sufficient tar to keep the roads paved, most of the California counties with oil beneath them have outlawed fracking entirely in the last election, largely due to fear of benzene contamination of their water supply, which is unfortunately justified. Benzene doesn't break down, it just waits, and it is a transport mechanism to bring chemicals through your cell walls, many of which will kill you. The choice to ban Fracking will likely lead to punitive costs for paving to all state residents in California. And punitive costs leads to stricter resource allocation, such as cancelling future road paving, and more importantly, current road repaving.

 

That means we probably have the most paved roads now, that we will EVER have, forever and ever. Or at least until a suitable paving material can replace tar in asphalt which is cheap enough to bother with at that scale. And by the time something becomes available we'll be used to having dirt roads so repaving probably won't happen. This is a bad thing, but it is, I suspect, the future. By then many of the roads we see today will have lumber growing in them and we'll have abandoned many routes and places thanks to that difficulty.

What's so bad about unpaved roads? Roads without asphalt or concrete wash away in strong rain. Normal rainfall in the Sierras is 60 inches a year. A heavier year, which we get every 6-7 years, is 100 inches a year. That's rainforest levels of precipitation btw. During the last ice age California averaged 180 inches of rain a year, and its rivers and streams surged with water, our deserts were grassland savannah with active trout streams draped in willows and cottonwoods and those flowed into wide lakes full of birds, including migratory geese, ducks, pelicans, and of course flamingoes. One does not normally think of flamingoes in Nevada and the Mohave Desert, but they were there and not all their corpses have had time to petrify. I personally found one merely dried in the desert near Tecopa. A single forlorn flamingo. Very odd, but the Great Basin is a good place to migrate through and its wide shallow lakes lacked the alligators of the east. Most of those lakes are salt flats much of the year, however if the big rains came back, including more summer hurricane based storms sifting out of the Sea of Cortez and Eastern Pacific down from Mexico you could refill those lakes again, and the birds would come back. But I digress.

 

In a good storm, runoff can shift gravel off roads into runnels and piles and spray off the road surface, downslope and away from doing any good for travelers. Hauling more gravel and spreading and compacting it is an ongoing expense, something to be done with nearly every storm. Gravel also does a great job of trapping seeds and providing a good growing environment for the MANY plants willing and able to take advantage of open sky to grow like... weeds, particularly lupin which is a nitrogen fixing bean that self seeds and requires no soil to grow, just bare rock. Lupins were spread along all California roads to stop erosion onto the road surfaces and reduce the costs of clearing runoff. This accidentally caused more wildfires since bare rocks don't catch fire from cigarette butts but lupins do. The nitrogen soil created by lupins gives a place for weeds and grasses to grow. And weeds provide space for bushes, and bushes for taller shrubs like 12 foot high manzanita and the various trees that grow here and in a mere 3 years after paving with gravel, you can't find the road anymore. And it really is that quick. I have seen it personally. So now the road department has to cut away brush from the roadside rather than sweep debris off the road surface. Six of one, half a dozen of another.

 

Few people think it is their problem to spend days clearing a road they use all the time, and will call up the county to do it instead, but a county that can't afford tar roads is also a county that can't afford thousands of man-hours clearing brush several times a year from your road. They'll use their available funds to focus on the main arteries that carry food and medicine and possibly ambulances, and ignore the rest. This may be unfortunate if you live out there and have a heart attack, but moving into town is your problem, and might save your life when the time comes. Eventually encroachment by nature will turn a road into a doubletrack, with inches of topsoil blowing onto the surface, grasses rooting, their roots becoming another place for topsoil to be expand and before you know it there is a faint grassy lane, perhaps with blackberry brambles taking over that too. These things are reality in many parts of this country, and the world itself. Road clearing can become a major issue. It may become easier to ride around the mess on an Enduro bike rather than spend weeks with a shovel, particularly if your neighbors won't help because they're busy growing pot and think you're nuts to make it easy for the Po-Leez to arrest them using those roads you want to clear. Screw that, they'll say. It is easier to learn how to ride a motorcycle than it is to devote weeks a year to clearing a road that will overgrow again in a few months. Nature never gives up. Those movies with cities burnt to the ground? Those overgrow with vines and such really quick. Do an image search for the area around Chernobyl, or even Abandoned Detroit. Green takes over fast. One of the important things one learns visiting Alaska is that man is still at war with Nature, which is still trying to kill us. You forget that in New York City, but it is a fact.

 

Getting around on roads going back to nature becomes a seriously challenging problem. Getting through the mud bogs and ruts without having a wreck, and getting used to riding slowly enough to not die is crucial there. Gravel is not a very good surface for braking, as the rocks are loose and don't offer much grip. I have wrecked on my bicycle trying to brake down a gravel slope. Learning experience, right there. Dodging broken off tree branches waiting to impale you is something I've seen in many offroad motorcycling videos. It is a good reason to wear plastic armor over your rib cage. It does what it says. Eventually people living in the suburbs are going to find themselves in the boonies because the roads are largely gone and the critters are wandering around, especially when the take out the garbage. Someday there won't be that wonderful garbage pickup service. You'll have to deal with hauling it yourself, burning, and hauling the recycle to their center yourself. Sucks, but that's what happens when a civilization collapses, like this one is. We overextended. This is just one of those things.

And lets not even talk about the bears, cougars, coyote packs, feral dogs, highwaymen, and others who dislike travelers passing through. Mountain bikers have been killed near LA by pouncing cougars, which then ate most of them. Some poor hiker was eaten by a black bear in a park near New York a couple weeks ago, and took pictures of it before it chowed down. This is what a world without guns is like, btw. Animals eating you. There was a case of an Iditarod trail competitor getting his dog sled attacked by a moose, which are natural enemies of wolves and can't tell the difference between those and huskies in the dark. His gun mechanism froze (revolver, everything is exposed), so he had to fight the moose with an axe. And axe. It took 45 minutes of exhausting battle to kill the thing, and it destroyed 3 of his dogs. He lived, obviously, to tell the tale. How happy would you be to have a hungry black bear chasing you down on your bicycle towing your little kids to school for the day? Are you sure voting for "gun control" is in your personal interest? Bears live everywhere, and they are adapting to the new world. The fewer cars moving around, the more places bears can go in daylight so they are.

There's a fair number of trimmers around here who are riding dirt bikes out of the boonies for groceries and visiting friends, town errands, then back into the boonies from the highway onto narrower and worse quality roads. This is a poor county with many roads, due to the slightly higher population. A lot of the timber logging roads have squatters living near them, growing pot all summer so they have a means of buying ramen the rest of the year. They're in true poverty. That poverty is what most people are going to end up with, eventually. Poverty is funny that way. Like the man said in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: "And the money always runs out". It's the nature of groupthink, of consensus, to harm the individual and defend the majority for its many atrocities and failures. This is why individual artists accomplish great works, but committees only demolish the catering and any artistic effort is muddled and boring. Any real artist will verify this too. And this is also why people who like committees, such as Democrats and Communists, hate Ayn Rand. Because its rather easy to point to great works of art created by single devoted artists and architects (The Golden Gate Bridge), and boondoggles created by committee, such as Galloping Gurdy and the Chicago Housing Projects.

Success vs failure. Duh. And before you point at the space program, recall that the entire mission was based on a scifi novel written by Robert Heinlein, but did so uncredited because he married a hot communist babe in 1929, rather like a certain father of the atom bomb. That's the trouble with communists. They employ honeytraps that are good in bed and can ruin a man's reputation. All Heinlein did was poke a pretty woman who was willing to be poked, after all. Committees make mediocrity. If the artist had been left on their own it would have taken longer but been perfect instead of adequate.

 

I suppose we'll get used to gravel and dirt roads because its that or ride trains, which are easier to maintain the tracks for. Clarkson won't like it much, but England has way more railway lines than we have. And building comfy passenger railcars is easier than hundreds of supercars and paving all those roads. The UK is running out of oil and natural gas, so they'll be going back to gravel before we do. Top Gear may become Top Cart before you know it. Or Top Buggy. Will they build Amish horsedrawn buggies with blue underlighting and HID lights, maybe a bouncy suspension and carbon fiber with a linked F1 type suspension? Drawn by a horse, whose butt you stare at and have to smell. That just doesn't sound like a fun time, but it will likely be one people opt for in place where there's enough pasture. Will there be a land rush onto the Great Plains again, Post Oil? One has to wonder.