Russia Bombs US Allies in Syria

US president apologizes. Because he always apologizes to foreigners. That's his "thing".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11900853/Putin-request-for-use-of-Russian-troops-in-Syria-approved-live.html

So is this the start of a much more complicated relationship with Russia?

Tesla Model X, $132K

So the first one hit the road for its first customer, for the not-bargain price of $132K. It is hard to take Tesla seriously when their cars are so expensive, and still require brass rubbing to recharge when you exceed their range. Yes, charging stations are being built, but you can't drive one to LA without stopping for 19 hours to recharge in Merced or Fresno. Good luck with that.

There's also the problem of limited Lithium, though if you only build a couple dozen cars a year, which is what Tesla is doing, and promoting themselves as "awesome" according to Elon Musk (apparently an egomaniac narcissist according to psychologist reports) but are really just a more expensive Nissan Leaf with a higher snob factor due to price. The Gigafactory in Reno is mostly going to ship batteries to China, not go into cars here. And some of the batteries will go for hybrids for Ford and GM, which is going to be their primary job, not making Tesla cars, even the Model X. In the real world, a 5000 pound car that costs $132K had better be made by Bentley or Rolls Royce. When its merely the level of your average Honda Accord LX or EX trim? Meh.

Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Years ago, about 25 of them, Neal Stephenson was a member of the online association of the Mirrorshades Group. I joined that online group around the time he left to write full time, and his novel Snow Crash came out shortly after. Jim Butcher trolled the group, asking about whether mixing magic and a modern setting might be  a good idea. We weren't so sure, but he made it work. Pat Cadigan used to belong to the group, and her novel Synners sparked quite a few novels, including Mona Lisa Overdrive and SYN, which got made into manga and anime in Japan. Bruce Sterling posted to the group from The Well, and his novel Heavy Weather ended up being about 75% of the plot in Twisters, which James Cameron did NOT credit him for. I hope Sterling got paid for that on the quiet, at least.

Stephenson has two distinct periods in his writing. The early tight, hilarious punk period, in which Snow Crash is his best work, with the best prose, and the neurotic boring period that followed it, in which way too many words say not nearly enough for his Baroque Cycle. I am not sure why he did that, and why there's no serious editing to fix that into something readable. Maybe someday that will happen.

The irony of getting worse is that the wonderful prose depicts a place that's more like reality today than anybody ever expected. It was meant to be highly improbable, and thus funny, but its almost how things really are, if this culture had failed in the exact wrong way. It is wonderful prose, very silly and filled with the passion of pizza delivery to burbclaves. Burbclaves almost exist, as a sort of better staffed and guarded gated community. Few people pay for staffing, much less get them armed legally, and get special laws for their territory so those are enforced with bullets rather than mall cop radios. A gated community is pointless if it doesn't have proper enforcement, and the gate is wide open, as they often are. Also, if you let drug dealers in, your security system is screwed. Drug dealers have frequent visitors, only there for about 10 minutes, at all hours of the night, and gone again. That's how you can tell. Several places I've lived had neighborhood drug dealers. Sigh.

I think America has become most of what's in Snow Crash because we've run out of energy trying to live the American dream and instead people fall back into poverty and debt and feudalism, worshipping whores in coordinated pantsuits and voting by racism. We are exactly what the Founding Fathers feared we would become: a mob of competing laziness demanding raises for ourselves though socialism and pandering. And there's not much to do about it but keep your head down and hope that if the shooting starts, they aren't shooting at YOU. Snow Crash was meant to be a comedy, but we do have old ladies coding while listening to punk rock from the 1980s. Their tattoos gone blue and wrinkly. There's no upside to seeing that. The old nasty drug hags from The Ridge are like that. And they think they're superior to the Squares with day jobs because they've spent the last 60 years high. In a way, the world we live in is worse than Snow Crash. We're a very grim and ugly place, but at least the air is pretty clean, and they still put out the fires. I think that Vladimir Putin dreams of putting the USSR back together, recreating the Czarist Russian Empire, with him in charge, but the population there doesn't want it. And they're tired, just like we are, and not interested in patriotism or death. Putin will eventually get sniped or blown up and that will be the end of the Russian Empire.

The audiobook for Snow Crash is good, btw. I am listening to the narration and think the actor is quite good. Reminds me of an older Wil Wheaton.

Handy Western Carbine

A Carbine is a rifle that shoots a pistol cartridge. When the Assault Rifle was invented by Ze Germans after research into actual shootouts and recoil, they created the progenitor of the AK-47, which Mikhail Kalashnikov is incorrectly credited with. This was a long process, in point of fact, and the US Cavalry had a version of this 75 years earlier with the .44-40 and the .38-40 carbines. So FU Russia. You weren't first. Not by a long shot. The USA also came up with the small caliber supersonic round first, with the 6mm Jorgensen, a 30 Krag necked down into a 6mm bullet, used during the Boxer Rebellion. Worked, too. There was even an insert device that would let you shoot a 6mm assault rifle cartridge in the bolt rifle that was semi-auto, a huge advantage back in 1900 or whatever it was. In modern terms, the 223 is a fun plinking round, but is not very good beyond 200 yards on armed insurgents. A replacement was invented after several deaths in Afghanistan, called the 6.8 SPC. It is a .30 Winchester (not Magnum) based on the .30-30 without a rim and a much higher pressure of 55000 PSI, like military ammo, but necked down to a 277 bullet. This is important, because this round is like a small, Americanized 7.62x39 from the AK-47, only in a smaller round that goes further. The 277 is an American version of the 7mm which is .284 inch, btw. I spent a lot of time researching this. Way more than most people would, but I was studying to be a gunsmith at the time. The 6.8 SPC is interesting because it is a short round, like the 125 grain bullet in a 310/311 in a 7.62 (misnamed) AK 47 round. The actual bullet is the same diameter as the Enfield rifle fires, and the 7.62x54R Russian (rimmed) rifle round designed by Remington for the White Russian Czarist army right before the Bolsheviks killed them all in 1917. They were angry. It was going to happen. Technology convinces people they can win. That round fueled the Mosin-Nagant rifle. I have one of them. Its not a terrible rifle, but it isn't very good either. I would happily trade one for any .308 caliber sporting rifle, for instance. The round has similar ballistics to a .308, but isn't as fast. The bullet tends to be closer to 220 grains, which ruins its ballistics. A 125 grain bullet in a 7.62x54R is 10 pounds of felt recoil and a killer accuracy at 300 yards. Which tells me more people who own a .308 rifle should experiment with a 130 grain .308 bullet and see if they can't make their wives and daughters frighteningly accurate at the same range. There's no points for missing. And all you get from missing a target is a "snap" noise. Same noise no matter what caliber. I worked "the pits" so I know.

This brings me to my point. If I had to do it all over again, I would have bought a Weatherby Vanguard in .270 Winchester and called it good. That's a nice pointable rifle with a Monte Carlo stock and cheek weld. You put a GOOD scope on it and practice with the round you feel comfortable shooting. Like a 130 grain boat tail match bullet or pro-hunter from Sierra. Get good and comfy. And never leave it. A good rifleman will shoot the same rifle and round and hit stuff reliable. A flexible one, like me, adapts to many rounds and recoil energies from many weapons and adapts to their limitations. I did that, and I have this knowledge forever. However, a single accurate rifle is valuable too. So if you don't want all the recoil or you have a teenager or a wife to shoot a rifle for you?

Simple. A short action chambered in 6.8 SPC, with a bolt rifle. 5 rounds is plenty, realistically in the "shoot and scoot" model described by the US Army sniper manual. You shoot and you scoot. Works for hunting too. The CZ company had one chambered for .223. So get one chambered for 6.8 SPC. It is a light carbine rifle, with good machining, and the right weight, that will handle a good bullet/cartridge that can take game and snipe targets. This is the right answer for most users.

At shorter ranges, I really liked the video of the Glock 20 converted to a 10mm carbine (above). That was a cool carbine, and would be very useful against things like black bears and cougars. They are mostly an issue to peoples pets and their trashcans and for vegetarian women who insist on running while wearing earphones along trails KNOWN to have cougars there (and mountain bikers too), but not so much normal people like me. I eat meat, so I sweat visin which scares herbivores and other predators away. If you eat meat, so do you. I would call that visin chemical the biggest downside for serious Green Berets types, because they have to become vegetarians to avoid scaring game so they can hide properly. In any case, a 10mm carbine would be really useful up to 150 yards.

Notice how the bear just stalks forward? That's your clue it wants to eat you. If you don't have a gun, you are screwed. They run up to 40 mph, and they can shrug off most pistol and many rifle rounds with only minor irritation. You have to aim for the nose because you will miss into something vital if you're lucky.

I have noticed that we never see anything positive about the Winchester 94 repeater rifle chambered in 357 Magnum, which is really odd. The round is common, the rifle is cheap and handles easily. It SHOULD be a good one for plinking and the round is well suited to a carbine... yet I never hear of anyone using one. Why is that?

Huh. So there you go. This SHOULD be a good carbine as well. And the ammo is cheaper than a 10mm. And you could probably shoot .38 special as well, since its the same bullet, just shorter cartridge. I suspect I'd want to put a holo sight on that, or a 2x variable on it, close to the barrel. A 2x scope can be fired eyes open and your dominant eye will be able to use the crosshair. I have tested this with one of my other rifles and it is true.

I have personally ENJOYED the peep sight and crosshairs for the M1 Garand rifle, one of the club rifles I shot at Lincoln Range, years ago when I was still into target shooting. A nice rifle, using CMP ammo so it wasn't too brutal, and the action was interesting. My Dad shot one while he was in the army, at Fort Ord in Monterey, California. Their range is in the dunes, between Highway 101 and the ocean. The ruins are still there. He said it was a really cast iron biatch to keep clean around sand, and the marines hated how it fouls with mud and powder, and its a 200 yard rifle, despite the cartridge being 30-06, due to tolerances. This is still better than the AK-47, keep in mind, and hits a lot harder than the AR-15, but wars are fought with checkbooks and with the low bidder. Not with the best equipment. If we swapped ALL our troops rifles with 6.8 SPC rifles, the war would be over in a couple weeks. Maybe a couple months. That round has 600 yards of useful range, not 200 yards like the 5.56. I like the 5.56. Its educational, how finicky it is. You learn a lot shooting and reloading for it. You learn how un-fussy middle calibers around 7mm and .30 caliber are compared to 5.56. You get educated by failure. This is valuable to any marksman. I learned a LOT by reloading for .223.

In any case, the above carbines are probably a good idea, up there with the classic pump 12 gauge shotgun. Try to remember that when you miss with either, the round keeps going. If it goes into your neighbor's house, you are legally liable. If you kill someone with your miss, that's manslaughter. So be really careful rather than stupid. Practice, and keep your cool.

Weekend Supermoon and Sunday Drive

Had a good weekend. Blood moon was last evening. Most people saw it, lots of pictures online so I won't bother posting another.

Did the library thing on Saturday. Came out to warm Fall weather, orange sunlight from faint traces of smoke far away. Lovely. Sunday watched the F1 from Japan, not a super-exciting race but nobody died and there were no serious wrecks, so that was good. Mercedes won again. Either they are cheating or everybody else's engineers are just incompetent compared to Mercedes. They are much faster than everyone else and the other drivers are competent so my suspicion of them cheating is probably right. After we did the usual bacon and eggs, and a short hike around the neighborhood. Then I came back and finished my homework. Afterwards we decided to take the Porsche out for a drive in the country, up highway 20, but only to the Sierra Discovery Trail in Bear Valley, near Lake Spaulding.

Walked the short trail and its silly signs, and enjoyed the water spilling out into Bear River, which the park follows. They have warning signs about sudden level rises, as it is creek small when low, and small river when high, like it was when we visited. There's even a waterfall. Afterwards we went about 250 yards to the South Yuba River, which goes into a canyon that the Bear River misses. The Bear River eventually follows the southern border of the county I live in, near I-80, but the Yuba River goes north, then west, then down to a lake before spilling through the Yuba Goldfields and ending at Marysville, where it used to cause huge floods in the Spring. The Yuba River provides most of the water supply for the local pot growers, is highly contaminated with sewage and some mercury and arsenic, and contributes to the overall insanity found in the local hippies. Sigh. We also visited Fuller Lake and stared at this fishing lake before returning home. That car is really fun at 45 mph. The throttle is so responsive and the car so light you can make it accelerate and apex every turn without getting dangerously unstable like most cars do. And you can do this fun thing at lower speeds so you don't even have to break the law or go very fast to have fun.

I spent my afternoon reading and staring at the Stevenson Project plans for a type of Day Sailer boat called a Weekender, which I am gaining an appreciation of the more I look at it. I still want to do experiments with a homebuilt board sailer with bow-keel type angled daggerboards. I have visited many lakes that are quite shallow and would be interesting to fiddle with boat experiments. The Weekender is slightly weird looking.

Its around 17 feet long, and 500 pounds, and sort of a scaled down sloop sailboat. I could tow a boat like that behind my honda, on a trailer, though my Honda wouldn't like it much. It would be like carrying 5 people in the car, after all. That said, this is a clever design.

 See how small it is? 

Here's the assembly steps. Build your keel, then attach the plywood with glue and screws. All the plywood goes on bent, making it both curved and under tension. This makes it prestressed and extra strong. As it comes together you would then epoxy both sides of the wood to make it both water tight and incredibly durable. While there is TECHNICALLY a cabin inside, I wouldn't sleep in there. Its a place to stow some camping gear or luggage or a cooler. This is a DAY sailer, meaning you use it during the day. I can easily see using a carbon fiber mast instead of a wooden one, and setting up the jib boom so you can adjust it from the cockpit. At only 17 feet long, you can even setup the boom to be higher than your head so it won't whack you. The math is interesting. It would be fun to take out onto Lake Tahoe with Dad. Or my neice or nephews. It is completely unlike their prior experiences.

I do like this design. For the larger lakes, it would be fun. For the smaller ones, a used Sunfish or this other boat, the Wing Dinghy has potential. Its cheap to build from thin marine plywood, and the thinner wood would let me cartop it, which is much lighter than a trailer.

This is a 12 foot version of the International 14, a popular model in the EU on which the Laser is based. A Laser is a fun boat, and easily available used, but it is unnecessarily heavy at 130 pounds, mandatory weight. I want something about 40 pounds less than that so I can car top it. That points me at the Classic Moth.

My problem with that is I won't want an open transom (put a board across the back end) or have to wear a wetsuit when sailing on a warm day. Screw that. I'm willing to put up with Stays (those lines that run from the boat to the mast) because then you can adjust your sail and raise and lower it, and the weight of the Moth is only 75 pounds, which is fantastic. That sort of lightness is easily placed on my car roofrack and taken out for those shallow lakes and sailed around for an hour, then picked up again and removed, no hassles with boat ramps or fees. I like the curves on this boat. Its very simple and ergonomic and light. You can't row this, or carry lots of cargo and a second person onboard would need to counterbalance you and sit in the right places, but it would be a good boat, at least as good as an RS Aero 9.

At $8500 and too new for used boats, this carbon fiber and fiberglass wonderboat is amazing, and only 80 pounds rigged and ready. But its a boat you sail wearing a wetsuit and being so light is tippy as heck. They are promoting it at West Coast Sailing in Portland. The used ones will turn up in 10 years, probably. I don't want to spend that kind of money on something that's eggshell thin and likely to crack when grounding on a rock. For some of the local lakes, a rowboat or kayak makes way more sense. Sardine Lake, for instance.

This is Sardine Lake, at the Sierra Buttes, at the north end of the Sierras. It is all downhill north of here, once you get past Gold Lake. This is used for trout fishing, and freezes with several feet of ice in the winter. The trout get huge, around 3 feet, and are really the landlocked Rainbow trout-version of Salmon, called Steelhead. I don't like the taste, myself, but anglers like them. The smaller trout are the ones to eat, but only after they've had months to just eat bugs so they don't taste like bait. Lately, all the trout taste like bait so I suggest not eating them.

Something I like about sailboats is you don't have to invent reasons to get in the boat, like fishing, which is mostly an excuse to hold a rod in one hand and stare into the distance while you drink beer with the other one. Not that beer isn't great fun too. I love a good stout or porter, myself. Lager? Meh. Belgian white? Bleah. IPA? There are good ones. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a very nice ale, with a nice balance of hops. I suppose a day sailer would be a good place to stash a cooler and sip a beer as you gently circumnavigate a lake for the day. Downside is if I drank more than one driving up that curvy road and then down the curvy highway 20 would be dangerous. So, sensibly limiting oneself is key.

And I certainly wouldn't fish in Scotts Flat, since the water is contaminated with mercury. Still, it is recreational to sail there, and I like the humor value of regattas, and the economic value of being able to park my boat (and trailer) there as part of the club fees. We'll see. If I sail the Sunfish to its full potential next Spring and Summer, I might be satisfied.

I'm pretty sure that any librarian in this area needs to connect youths with recreation and the library as a source for making recreation better. Its also important to convince the local college to offer courses in Documentary film making (using things like a GoPro Hero camera and teach editing and narration), as well as materials manufacturing of stuff like carbon fiber and machining so the toys (and bicycles and motorcycles and boats) can be built and repaired.

I've also been reading through a book I borrowed on small wooden boat construction. Building Small Boats by Greg Rossel, Woodenboat Publications, Brooklin Maine, copyright 1998. This book is journeyman level woodworking with general descriptions of a lot of boat building techniques for serious wood ship construction. While these are technically "small boats" they're probably several thousand pounds of wood and takes a huge amount of effort to build. Planks are heavy, and take a lot of effort to shape, trim, align, etc, compared to marine grade plywood which weighs a fraction as much.

Skerry under construction

Skerry finished hull

Skerry with sail

This region is a little far for commuting to Sacramento for work, but people do it. And they are getting poorer when they do. Wages are frozen or falling, thanks to inflation, and the price of gasoline is a major expense. When you think about this area rationally, you realize that mass production is a bad idea. You can't be competitive because the cost of getting materials here makes your product more expensive. However, small scale construction of luxury goods makes sense, plus this is a recreation area so manufacturing to take advantage of local expertise and testing means that luxury manufacturing makes sense. Thus the guy with expensive 4WD popup RVs, one every couple months, is working in the right place. Right up till his heart attack kills him. That's what hypertension and cocaine will get you. But I digress. We ought to be making mountain bikes here, for the serious hills. And dual drive motorcycles. There are shops that do serious Rubicon trail mods for jeeps and other vehicles. One of my neighbors runs one. Why aren't there small boat building companies here? We've got a local lake, and a bunch of other ones. There's a trailer manufacturer around 10 miles down 49. Mostly utility and horse trailers, but they sell. That skillset leads to making Teardrop trailers, and trailer rentals. There's some boat sales and RV sales in Penryn, which is next to Granite Bay, which borders Folsom Lake. Normally Folsom Lake gets used for bass fishing and water skiing, but it could be used for sailing too. Right now its very low due to drought. Once it rains properly it will return to full size.

Another market that needs exploitation is motorcycles and motor scooters. There's one place that sells them, but their markup is severe so they sell fewer than they might. If they offered markDOWN they'd sell a lot of them. Vespas and Piaggios and Honda scooters. Shouldn't bother with 49cc models, however. They are pointless. Can't even climb the hills. And the twin cities are on stair step hills, with a big ridge between. Everywhere hills. If a local shop were modifying and improving motorcycles to operate better here, such as upgraded brakes and appropriate gearing to climb hills and extra lights for visibility under the trees to oncoming cars, more people would ride, and the more people who ride, the fewer accidents people have. Especially once you realize that a motorcycle is more fun ridden SLOW rather than fast.

If you need to go fast, join a racing club or build a race car and participate in official events. Or just get a car that's closer to the road so it looks faster. That's how perception works. Or you know, buy an Xbox and drive their Forza simulator. Its pretty good, and you can get a chair that rumbles or moves, depending on how authentic you want things. In any case, luxuries can be as expensive as your market can bear, so carefully adjust as needed.

Finally, I think the locals should be making stuff to sell to tourists. Penn Valley raises llamas and alpacas, and make wool from them. They sell in local shops for big profit to yarn snobs. Good. Same with local junk jewelry, artists, wood workers (sculptors and cabinet makers). Real jewelry too. They sell through galleries on Broad Street in Nevada City. And that's fine. When something sells, they make the profit and share with the gallery.

The old furniture store that closed really ought to be a Vespa dealership, run by the Grass Valley Cycle Shop by the Save Mart grocery store. If they had a sales room displaying Vespas, and offered free delivery in northern California so a tourist could buy one and have it turn up at their house over the next week? That works. That would sell. For many people, a Vespa is a romantic thing, like an old car or one of those wooden power boats from the Italian Lake District you sometimes see driven on Lake Tahoe by the very rich. Scooters really ought to get free parking at the college, so people would have an excuse to use them. Sierra College is missing an opportunity there. There's no downside to increased enrollment.

The local college should be teaching carbon fiber construction, 3D printing for lost wax casting of jewelry, fiber making so all the local alpaca wool can be turned into $200 sweaters, and boat building so people with interesting designs can build them and test them at Scotts Flat Lake or up at Tahoe. Why the heck not? It is better than them moving away after they graduate high school. It's the tragedy of this place that only unwed mothers and trimmers stay behind. You have to offer more than minimum wage retail if you want your youth to build a life in your town.

Things Survivalists Get Wrong

1. Roads are going away. Few survivalists understand this. 
2. Water is more important than ammunition. Clean water is nearly as important as water. Get a good water purifier, and use commercial soda pop container because they don't leak like canteens do. 
3. A cookpot is more important than a weapon. Much of survival is about waiting for the violence to run down when the violent people kill themselves fighting each other because they are violent idiots. 
4. Physical fitness requires frequent effort. Get a sport that makes you exercise. And do this often so you aren't a heart attack waiting to happen. 
5. Get used to a wood stove. Operating one correctly is not easy. 
6. Get used to a gas generator. And get solar panels YOU control, going to your fridge backup battery, and shunt the excess into your water heater. 
7. Fill your pantry with food you LIKE to eat, and eat from the pantry every week. Food spoils, so your pantry should be colder to make the food last longer. Watch out for bugs. MREs spoil in 3 years. Canned food loses its proteins over 5 years, but jam lasts forever if the seals don't fail. White rice lacks nutrition, but it is cheap carbohydrates and last indefinitely if bugs don't get into it. Brown rice spoils in 6-9 months. 
8. "Vegetable Oil" is best as a spare fuel source and spoils in a year or two. Canola (rapeseed) oil spoils in 3-6 months. Olive oil lasts indefinitely if kept cold. Use spoiled oil as a source for biodiesel. 
9. Methanol is toxic to humans, but an essential ingredient in making biodiesel so if you get into making hooch (hopefully with a local/agriculture license). Methanol is about 1/3 of the yield when distilling alcohol. Alcohol is the source for making vinegar, which essential to curing meats, canning food (stops browning of peaches), and various sauces that make food taste better. 
10. Spices don't keep forever but they do make boring food edible. Learn to use them and become a good cook. Much of survival is about getting enough to eat regardless of supplies. 
11. It is much cheaper to buy eggs than deal with the hassles and expense of raising chickens. 
12. Do not raise chickens AND pigs at the same farm/ranch. They transmit viruses from bats to chickens to pigs to people. People with both spend more time with the flu. Having both is a serious biohazard. Better to buy eggs and buy hams and bacon from others. 
13. Alternative transportation starts with feet. Bicycles are also essential. I know few preppers who ride bicycles regularly. A commuter bicycle is good practice, and an easy conversion from a mountain bike using slick tires instead of knobby ones. Ride to work once a week, if you can. Otherwise ride around on the weekend for a few hours a couple times a month. This will also give you a chance to fix any issues and get it really comfortable to ride. 
14. Every prepper should own a dual-sport motorcycle, preferably between 125cc to 400cc. 250cc motorcycles with knobby tires. Why? Because these can cover dozens of miles an hour on dirt singletrack trails through the woods or around roadblocks or whatever else the future holds. You need between 18 and 30 hp to make it agile enough. A 9hp bike is too slow. A 4-wheeler is safer, but less able to work on these singletrack trails. 
15. Automatic rifles are a suicide machine. They aren't very accurate and go through ammo too fast, and have feeding and pressure limitations. Don't bother. Lever Action are mostly inaccurate (exception is BLR due to stacked magazine). Marksmen use bolt action. Best choice are middle calibers (6.5, 7mm. 270, 308). If you don't have the range with these, you should be avoiding the target or getting closer. In hunting, many species don't notice you till you're around 70 yards away anyhow, so you really don't need a .300 Winchester Magnum to hunt a deer at 70 yards. 
16. Don't be a Mall Ninja. Most have very nice automatic weapons and lasers and holographic sights and too much ammo, like they're geared up for a costume party, but no water, little food, and no firewood. A real prepper is more like the old folks that survived the Great Depression. Strength in depth, extra food, sensible clothing and doing proper maintenance and exercise. 
17. You can buy a lot of meat at the grocery store, and turn it into beef jerky, for the cost of a hunting rifle and permit and time spent hunting somewhere. 
18. Learn how to cook with eggs and make them taste good. Eggs are the most digestible protein other than milk. 
19. Someday the roads will fall apart, and refugees with lawyers from racist metropolitan areas are going to cause problems where you live. Most of your neighbors will vote to have the sheriff setup armed checkpoints to keep those people out and stop them from stripping your community of food, rape your daughters and kill your sons. Stopping them getting in will save a lot of lives. Be prepared for "travel papers" when that happens. 
20. Someday there will be gasoline rationing, and mandatory (state or federal) GPS tracking of your vehicle. Its big brother, but it is coming. Understand what that really means. And why moving around without a GPS tracker is important. Bicycles and motorcycles will be most able to avoid these. And local ordinances may officially refuse to enforce those kinds of laws. Local law enforcement has better things to do. Rationing is the next step in turning us into peasants with no civil rights. 
21. Forget about heading for the hills. You cannot store enough food to sit out the entire Great Depression, and this time there's no WW2 and rebuilding and loan payments and gasoline to restore things. 
22. Join your community. Become too useful to abuse and discard. This is often very difficult for preppers who got into it because they can't stand how awful people really are. You can't change people, but you can adjust your personal exposure to them, and help in ways which risk you the least, yet are visible enough to establish yourself as a "good guy". When it all goes Local, you won't become an exploited resource that gets raided and killed off "for the good of the community" like the rich punks from the City, or the refugees that manage to get inside the local area before the roadblocks go up. This detail is very hard for a prepper to understand. 
23. If you find yourself wanting to carry a handgun every day, you live in the wrong place. Seriously consider paying more of your income to live somewhere a lot safer. Or change careers/job to a safer clientele or location. 
24. You still need a job. This is the hardest point to get through to Preppers. Even collapse requires income. There will always be taxes. You still need to eat, and shower to keep the diseases off, and you literally cannot store enough food to stay home for 10 or 20 years or the rest of your life. Remember that most of all. You can't just hide in the house. You still need to get to work. You still have to pay your bills. 

Kit Boats

Some of the boats that I've looked up were semi-traditional designs you can build out of modern thin plywood using the stitch and glue method. One of them was a rowboat with a daggerboard well/slot, and a mast mount and a rudder. This means you can sail when there's wind, or row when there isn't. Its a 2000 year old design that was popular in the British Isles, which means England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man, and the various Scottish islands like the Hebrides and Orkneys. It has also been used in Norway and Sweden, and has crossed the North Sea, though I find myself wondering about the sanity of people doing that. The North Sea is shallow and gets really terrible storms and huge waves.

This is a 2000 year old design. You have to admire the simplicity and ruggedness. It is probably quite slow, however. Hard to tell, and its not like the guys selling the plans/kits will say.

Assembling the hull

Racing version, with a sloop sail rig

Finished hull. Note the beautiful exposed wood interior. Isn't that pretty?
I think I would want to put in some seats along either side, however. 

Of course, I can buy a Sunfish, and a trailer to tow it, for less than a grand, used. And I can build a taller mast and sail for it to make it faster, as well as install a railing around the boat to keep the water off, and a longer dagger board to deal with the higher energy of the taller sail. I've seen examples of Laser and Sunfish with modified rudder and winged/lifting keel which will allow the boat to "fly" above the water at a certain speed. I am not actually very interested in that, but such things are possible. This boat is a day sailer, rather than a board sailer, so you don't necessarily get wet while running it, and the taller mast and larger sail area will make it faster than the 2000 year old design and primitive sail setup. They say you row while you sail, adding to the speed. 

Either kind of sail. The more triangular one is faster. 

There is also the Nor'Easter Dory, which is merely 150 year old design rather than 2000 years. This is a modification of the longboat used by Grand Banks Fishermen and Whalers. It can carry 800 pounds. I think if you add up all the things I own, which aren't my car, it comes to around 1200 pounds. So I would need a second boat. Ahem. Anyway, it is also light weight at only 100 pounds for the hull. And claims to be fast in light air, which we get at the local lake. I could see it, though its 17 feet long and will need a trailer to move around to other lakes, I'm pretty sure. All of these would work on the various lakes in this area of the Sierras, as well as Lake Tahoe, which will happily take ships and regularly handles powerboats and steam boats. And it would carry several passengers or lots of camping gear, if I wanted to. 

This is an interesting topic. We'll see about sailing on a Sunfish next spring, after the rains refill the lake and I join the yacht club. It looks like it will be good times.