Zhu Zhu

I wonder if there was any consideration, any at all, for Russel Hornsby and his small company, Cepia LLC of St. Louis, to manufacture his Zhu Zhu Pets in the U.S.

I'd bet the decision to manufacture elsewheres took less than a picosecond.

For a host of strategic reasons, the manufacturing was offshored because of the financial realities of taxes, financial incentives, and cheap wage labor. But I'd bet also that today he would have an inability to borrow to expand production of these little robotic hamsters.

Imagine trying to go to a major bank to proposition them to finance a manufacturing facility in St. Louis. Horrors! Imagine trying to secure capital from private investors to fund the ramping up of domestic production. No way.

Even if Missouri provided some sort of tax break or other financial incentives, it would likely take eighteen months to obtain all the environmental, health, and safety permits to build the facility. By then the Zhu Zhu craze might have waned. Imagine the costs associated with employee health and vacation benefits, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes, and compare that with $2.00 an hour Han Chinese immigrants in Hangzhou. Imagine next Christmas, when employee health benefits will cost 7% more than today.

Imagine having to build a supplier network here in the U.S. from scratch, to get all the raw fuzzy material, stuffing, electronic and plastic components necessary to build the hamsters. If all these suppliers are only overseas to begin with, why do the end manufacturing here anyway?

Imagine the host of complaints and ensuing litigation that neighbors would raise if St. Louis adopted this new manufacturing facility anywhere near residential housal units. Imagine smokestacks near your housal unit! Nope, can't have that, so the residents will demand the location be put way out on the margin, with no hope of any sorts of alternative transportation to it other than solo occupant motoring, enslaving the workers to thirteen years of life working to buy and keep their cars.

Can you imagine any resurgence in American manufacturing? I didn't think so.

H1N1

Whatever you might think about an electrical power engineer put near the top of a very short list to receive the hog flu vaccine because my work is considered "important to national security," let me tell you -- the shot was painless compared to the seasonal flu shot.

I asked the nurse if I could see the vial. He said OK. I just wanted to see where it was made.

Liverpool, England.

Sigh...we don't produce anything here in the U.S. anymore.

The Decade Of Aggression

I wrote extensively last year about our total apathy and complete disregard toward our two wars, that what most Americans are doing is the least they could do. Truthfully, we aren't really at war. Congress has never declared it. Nonetheless, a trillion dollars and a few hundred thousand lives later we are on the edge of a paradigm shift and we'll finally abort our mission(s) overseas and get back to whipping our consumerist economy in shape.

Ha.

I doubt it. We are so entrenched that Obama will be mired in these two campaigns well into the end of his first term and if the economy stays flat, well, he'll be mired until the end of his one-term presidency. This is American warfare of the 21st century: bomb, attack and surge, then get bogged down in perpetual insurgency until some arbitrary and capricious date when we declare victory and pull out.

Question is, when is that arbitrary and capricious date?

Friday?
Next week?
December?
2010?
2013?
2031?

I could care less about our wars. In lieu of giving a shit, I was instructed to go buy a car, which I admittedly didn't do. I didn't follow the instructions. Perhaps I failed America by not doing so. Did I fail America?

Do I fail America by not caring a whit about Afghanistan and Iraq? Do I fail America by thankfully realizing the amazing luck that 1) I contracted diabetes and got out of the service before our decade of aggression, 2) my oldest son was just old enough to land a steady job before the economic slowdown/perpetual wars and 3) my youngest son is just young enough to likely escape all this when he comes of age?

Perhaps I fail America. Perhaps that old "Love it or Leave it" slogan should be hung around my neck while I'm pilloried on the public square for being so anti-American. Wait...there aren't any public squares here in Elk Grove...thank God for that!

I will likely refuse to accept any rationalization for our continued presence in either nation and, as Obama will likely announce at West Point this Tuesday, another thirty thousand troops to be sent to Afghanistan. I think I am entitled to an opinion, and this opinion -- particularly when I have made [recent] efforts to live a life not predicated on continued private solo motorization, the importation of cheap Chinese consumables, and the gross volumes of imported energy required to keep it all running. I firmly believe that our way of life is at the heart of a great many problems -- supposed climate change, a wholesale lack of meaningful places to live, a finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) economy not based on building anything anymore, exurban sprawl, poor social interactions, cheap consumerism, lack of places worthy of our visiting, the increasing importation of energy from foreign sources, $12,000,000,000,000 in debt and counting, and money-for-nothing expectations from the lowest class (entitlements) to the middle class (housal unit flipping and NASDAQ) to the upper class (CDOs & default swaps), from the youngest ($8,000 housal unit credit) to the oldest (cash for clunkers).

I am not a fan of this way of life. I am not a fan of the exportation of this way of life at the cost of a trillion dollars and more to the point, the wasted national effort in lives, resources, and energy. We are about to engage Thanksgiving and I will be thankful for the fact that my sons aren't overseas. These wars aren't about national defense -- they are about the continuation of a lifestyle (see above) that is wholly unsustainable. If you think that the defense of this way of life is indeed worthy of such wars, well, I suppose we will never agree.

Franklin Crossing

By the time my career is over, by the time I'll be sipping pounding Mai Tai's on some foreign beach somewhere, I will reflect back on my life and silently cringe, knowing that I took part in the complete destruction of a small town on Franklin Blvd. -- the town of Franklin.

I've been reviewing the land acquisition for the future SMUD Franklin bulk substation, to be located just south of the town of Franklin on my Franklin Blvd. I also received a map of the future Franklin Crossing subdivision, a wholly wasteful, grossly proportioned, and energy intensive piece of shit that will surround the substation, and indeed, represents one of hundreds of other subdivisions scheduled to be constructed once our economy gets "back on track." Our economy -- you know, the one that is solely comprised of the building and accessorizing of low density suburban sprawl, the creation of retail and myriad service jobs necessary to support it, the re-assignment of manufacturing to Asia, while we financially engineer the whole thing from San Francisco, Charlotte, Seattle and New York.

Franklin Crossing. This is almost a correct name. It really should be called the Franklin Burial Grounds, because I will bet my house that someday that entire town will be razed to the ground and paved over for a corner strip mall/shopping complex (call it the Franklin Crossroads or Franklin Marketplace) to service the sixty thousand thru commuters from all those eastern subdivisions...all those commuters heading towards I-5 to get to their Bay Area or Sacramento jobs.

What a waste. A total waste. Someday I will set the protection on the transmission lines and the bulk transformer in the Franklin substation and instead of feeling a sense of worldly accomplishment I will sit on that beach and think about how I was one small cog in the gigantic wheel of progress that rolled over and obliterated that small town out of existence. This Franklin Crossing -- a perfect example of a living pattern wholly devoid of the notion of a community, the notion of connectedness, nowhere near jobs or natural resources, and will in fact destroy what value the land had for agriculture or open space or wetland habitat.

Franklin Crossing -- a living pattern that owes its whole existence to the acquisition and timely, consistent delivery of cheap gasoline. I am going to write future chapters in my Franklin Monologues devoted to what $3 dollar gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $4 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $5, $6, and $7 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing. It's development is predicated on the continuing cheapness of gasoline so you might understand my wholehearted desire for oil to climb in price so rapidly and so consistently such that we rethink our plans for this stupid development and rethink our plans for continued exurban sprawling madness. I cannot think of anything else other than energy depletion that would crimp this eighty year experiment of national waste, because cheap energy underwrites all of it. All of it. When I mentally envision a future of energy scarcity (or at a minimum, energy at a premium), I see a future worth living in, because we will finally build worthy urban arrangements.

Kilo, Mega, Tera

I do believe we are about to get yet another foreclosure here on my street in Elk Grove.

A couple bought a housal unit here on Moonlight Way in about 2003, yet moved out of town in 2007 (to a better, more exclusive place no doubt). They opted not to sell...how could they in 2007? So the rental began. After a year and a half of renting the tenants packed up and moved on, leaving the couple today with a second mortgage payment.

I last saw them a few weeks ago, helping the guy strap down a chest freezer he was hauling to their newest home in another county. Their tone of voice said it all: "We don't know...(long pause)...we might just sell it or rent it out again..."

Codespeak for "The keys are already in the mail."

I am aware of several people around me who were dumb enough to buy in 2003-2006 but smart enough to have purchased a second house in late 2007/early 2008 after the asset bubble had burst, only to abandon their first home and its underwater mortgage. This is clearly the most desirable economic thing to do. I fully admit, had I also fell into the speculative frenzy of housal unit flipping, reaching for a drink from that chalice of easy-money -- leveraged real estate -- or fell into the bigger debt trap of a better, newer housal unit (with its larger mortgage), I absolutely would have been one to do the same thing. Absolutely.

Imagine what more would come if credit was still as easy to get as it was five years ago. Alas, but it almost is! Perhaps you weren't aware that the recently extended $8,000 federal credit to spur "new" owners to buy a housal unit can be used as a down payment. That is, keep allowing people with no skin in the game to keep playing the game. That the statistics say that the 2001-2006 no-down-payment 'programs' resulted in higher default rates apparently doesn't register with current policymakers. That the remote possibility of further housal unit value declines and the remote possibility of further unemployment might spur these late entrants to also say fuck it and walk away also hasn't registered with current policymakers.

I don't really care much about all this...the results, that is. I highly enjoy thinking about the possibility of financial implosion if only because I think I'm much, much better positioned to survive any financial calamity. As an electrical power engineer I often think in large numbers (kilo, mega, tera) but I no longer even know how many zeros are in a trillion anymore. If forty is the new thirty, a trillion is the new billion.

I can't say I don't really care much about all the foreclosures around me, though. I do care. It's not that my own housal unit value might decline -- I could really care less about that; what bothers me is that the endless cycle of people in/people out cannot possibly lead to any real sense of community (not that low density suburbia has any hope of that to begin with). I cannot live in a vacuum regardless of how financially stable I might personally be. I am better off than most, I believe, through lifelong prudent fiscal responsibility, but that doesn't mean I could live correctly without a stable community for reciprocal support.

This isn't something anyone else thinks about. I believe it prudent to consider the remote possibility that things aren't going to immediately get better. We are all beginning to believe that this is was just some sort of V-shaped recession, now with a 50% return of the stock market and 3.5% GDP growth. Give it another eight months, following that logic, and we will be at 100%, having not lost any nominal stock value with growth at 7% with all our former problems passed away.

The Housal ATM

Whenever I go to a restaurant these days, I'm paying cash. I take the effort to get cash ahead of time to try to eliminate the 3% loss the restaurateur would take if I paid with a debit card. For me, it's not about some faceless corporation stealing money from a small business -- banks do need to charge to allow for this service -- but I figure that the 3% that stays and circulates in the local economy is much better for both me and the small business owners, so I take some efforts to work mostly in cash.

Amid the endless suburban shitscape of the Sacramento region, I am unbelievably privileged to be able to work in a building within 400 feet of a light rail station and within a quarter mile of a bank, pharmacy, independent grocery, a hardware store and twelve restaurants. It takes zero effort to hit the ATM first before patronizing everything else.

If I do use a card, I always ask which is cheaper for them, debit or credit. The pricing structure that processors charge is so convoluted and opaque that it's often impossible for them to even know beforehand, but I ask anyway. It might be only a matter of a few nickels. I don't care. I do it anyway.

Quite recently, three three! co-workers have received letters in the mail from their credit card companies indicating their rates are going to be jacked up. I believe this to be a preemptive strike against the coming 2009 credit card act which will limit their ability to change rates. Two of them have said fuck it, they're closing their account. One asked me yesterday if it would hurt her credit score, and while I am one to hardly know, I believe it will -- closing a long standing account in good standing would not likely improve one's creditworthiness, you think?

Easy credit is what fueled our pre-2007 boom, which ultimately led to our current mild economic slowdown. Personally, I hope that going forward credit becomes much harder to get. Bear in mind that we homeowners pulled out $5,000,000,000,000 from our housal ATMs over the last decade to buy shit we didn't need with money we didn't have. To buy shit we didn't need with money we didn't have. I am extremely hard pressed to figure out how a 70% consumer spending economy such as ours is going to dig out any time soon if consumers aren't consuming more consumables on credit.

Larger Than Themselves

I am stuck in my ways. I prefer riding my bicycle the same way to work and back every day, along the exact same roads, the same exact paths. I am one to think that if I rode the same way every day for the next twenty five years I will always find some degree of pleasure in the routine. I will never bore of my commute.

This afternoon I detoured off Franklin Blvd. to my ophthalmologist's office on Florin Rd. to retrieve my new pair of glasses. It was lunacy navigating a bicycle alongside the wretched surburban madness of Florin Road in South Sacramento. But I did it anyway.

I guess I did it to prove I could. I did it to show that it's possible -- to make a statement. I understand why people do the risky things they do. I understand why the old black lady at Martin Luther King and 22nd Avenue risks her life every morning as a crossing guard. I understand why every weekday morning the retired black guy rises and dresses and volunteers as a crossing guard at Franklin Blvd. and G Parkway -- they are making a statement that pedestrians count, that they are worthy of guarding against the two hundred thousand asshole drivers in our city.

I am hardly comparing my bicycling to the noble deeds done each morning by these two. But I think I better understand why they do it, why the subject themselves to the elements, to inattentive hurried drivers, to getting trash thrown at them and insults hurled at them (it happens all the time). They do it for reasons that are larger than themselves.

I started bicycling primarily to keep my diabetes in check, but over time I've come to realize how marginally better my living environment is because of it, and I like to think about what Elk Grove could have been had more of our decision makers also had type I diabetes, and also discovered the benefits of exercise, and also discovered what a hostile city they've created for people without cars.

But they aren't diabetic. They don't walk anywhere anymore. They require campaign funding from pro-sprawl sources to remain decision makers. And while I claim that I don't care how all this plays out, under the assumption that I've got no power to spur change, and how I immensely enjoy blogging about our wretchedness, I look to those two crossing guards and I see that they are making a substantial contribution to a better environment.