Local Dollars

I'm going to suggest we all spend, (if we spend,) buying local merchandise and services this holiday season, bypassing all the large format retailers.

Instincts tell me that a larger percentage of your money is recycled back into your community when you utilize local retailers. It is something I always perceived to be correct. Today I took the time to research this opinion and found several published studies, the foremost being the Andersonville study that confirmed my instincts.

Apparently, for every $100 used at a locally owned shop $68 will remain in the community compared to $43 if you use a chain. I can see why -- a local sandwich shop will buy its sourdough from a local baker, unlike Subway, which relies on its vast network of perpetually motoring tractor-trailers to deliver a precisely uniform remotely baked product to each of its franchises.

Yes -- there are economies of scale that favor Subway...but you're only gonna get what the suits in Milford, CT say you're gonna get, based on their R&D CLT (Central Location Test) studies at formal taste events. A local shop has a greater ability to cater to their customer's wants. What price do you put on that?

Additionally, the local baker is employed and his dollars are cycled right back into the economy. Local businesses keep neighborhoods vibrant and unique, and they are fundamentally tied into the future of their community. Subway doesn't give a damn about your local community -- aside from it meeting their demographic criteria and you meeting your franchise sales quotas. Now...perhaps I'm too harsh, and quite likely I don't have all the facts straight about what Subway does contribute to the local economy. But I can be absolutely assured that every Milford executive has no clue how unit #22,303 operates in Elk Grove, and what they might be doing to support the Thundering Herd.

I would like to know, when I buy a $5.99 footlong wheat veggie, how much of that six dollars is funneled to Connecticut to support all the Invoice Auditors, Market Report Administrators, DAI Invoicing Assistants, Paralegals, Customer Care Representatives, Field Consultants, Tax Accountants, and Packaging Technologists needed to keep the franchise axles greased. All I want is a fucking sandwich.

Adopt A Highway

While biking around Nimbus Lake last week in Folsom, I noticed that the American River Parkway has put up little signs where you can adopt a section of the trail. There's a little space for individual financial sponsors, and a space for corporate logos.

This is horseshit. We've clearly failed to spend our tax dollars, wisely enough, that is, to maintain the parkway without having to resort to corporate advertising to foot a portion of the maintenance bill.

The public realm, which is continually being chipped away by private enterprise, is the first thing on the chopping block when local or state governments fiscally run short. The American River Parkway is the most accessible, most significant public realm we have in Sacramento...and there really aren't a whole hell of a lot of maintenance costs associated with it. Sure, there are asphalt trails that require regular work, but there aren't guardrails that continue to get smashed, Oleander bushes that need constant trimming and spraying, resurfacing due to overweight 7-axle tractor trailers, new overpasses, on-ramps and off-ramps to support ever distant, far-flung subdivisions, CHP overtime pay to cover floating holidays...

We don't hesitate to throw billions into the 'public realm' of the California highway system but can't pony up a few hundred thousand or so to throw at the few real civic places we have left. No...corporate advertising is forced upon us even on the bike trail. Honestly, I really wouldn't expect anything less from my Merika.

I doubt that outside the U.S. a corporation could adopt a carriageway, freeway, or Autobahn like U.S. companies can adopt a highway. This is galactically stupid...adopting a highway, and this one is particularly galling:

The Cracker Barrel touts itself as an Old Country Store. The problem is, we're running out of country because we're paving over every damn acre we have left to make room for more highways. What's the message here? A lady leaves her city and drives seventeen miles on a six-lane thruway to get to what remains of the country, only to find her Cracker Barrel subjected to the same damn building code ordinances that plague the urban city she just left. She arrives at her "old country store," (as all old stores are), surrounded by a quarter acre moat of illuminated asphalt parking spaces with never more than 35% of them occupied. She doesn't dare walk...although there are several dozen empty parking spaces available, she circles her motor vehicle and waits for a spot nearer the entrance:


This is Adopt A Highway. Corporate sponsorship of litter removal for a section of highway. She climbs back into her car with a fat belly from the restaurant and a twine-handled bag of country trinkets from the store. She gets back on the thruway and as she's driving she reaches over to get a head start on removing the plastic wrapping and price tags on the shit she just bought...she passes the Cracker Barrel adopt a highway sign and throws the plastic wrap out the window. Two weeks later, maintenance workers, now subsidized by the Barrel, remove her roadside trash.

PG and E bill

A post title like this will remind me:

October 2007: therms per day 0.7
November 2007: therms per day 0.7
December 2007: therms per day 1.3
January 2008: therms per day 2.3
March 2008: therms per day 0.7
April 2008: therms per day 0.6
June 2008: therms per day 0.4
August 2008: therms per day 0.4
September 2008: therms per day 0.5
October 2008: therms per day: 0.5
November 2008: therms per day 0.7
December 2008: therms per day 1.4
January 2009: therms per day 2.5
February 2009: therms per day 1.8
March 2009: therms per day 0.7
April 2009: therms per day 0.8
June 2009: therms per day 0.5
August 2009: therms per day 0.7
September 2009: therms per day 0.7
October 2009: therms per day 0.6
November 2009: therms per day 0.8
January 2010: therms per day 2.1
February 2010: therms per day 1.6

Landfill Gas

Several weeks ago a group of energy professionals from India were touring central Californian renewable energy projects and I suddenly found myself as the SMUD representative on a tour of the the Kiefer Landfill. I was tasked to provide information on how small generators interconnect with utilities. In exchange, I received a tour of the landfill...and garnered some fantastic information about how landfills extract methane and burn it to provide electricity.


I discovered that the California Air Resources Board will not tolerate the release of methane into the atmosphere. If we don't use it, it will be flared, because to not do so risks explosion. If it isn't captured for a secondary use like power generation, waste gas is always flared and lost:




Kiefer flares the gas if its not burned in ICE engines. I now have a much larger appreciation about my role as a protection engineer responsible for the transmission line from the landfill to SMUD. If the line is out of service, the gas is flared and the power generation is lost.

The reason I'm blogging about all this is because SMUD calls this 'renewable' energy. We market landfill generation as 'green' which is a complete crock of shit. A crock of shit because we universally fail to recognize the vast volumes of cheap Chinese shit that end up in the landfill to begin with, and the massive fossil fuel inputs necessary to keep this over-consumption waste stream moving. This is merely energy efficiency, not renewable energy.

Only dumps on the scale of Merika and her excess consumption are able to generate enough methane to fuel power plants...which is why India is just now sending over engineering delegates...because they are now developing their own massive landfills and see the potential electricity generation.

Traffic

I commuted by single occupant motorized vehicle today because I am attending a training class in Folsom this week. Because the entire Sacramento region lacks multi-hour public transit, I was forced into single occupant self-motoring as there is no public transit available to me beyond 5:15 PM from Folsom. The training class breaks at 5:30 PM.

And I can't really bicycle in the dark...or there won't be a blog post the following day. Too dangerous with our complete lack of bicycle options beyond the traffic lanes.

I've not seen traffic like I saw tonight since 2003. Sorry, there is no recession going on, based on the number of vehicles I saw this evening. With gas at ~$2.10, people are driving more now than ever. More than ever.

The volume of traffic I witnessed today...Elk Grovians should be celebrating the 'recession'. Each of these fuckers, cocooned in their own private vehicle, should be praising the fact that there aren't another 6,000 commuters vying for the same roadway. 6,000 less because they were foreclosed on, fired, or laid off. Elk Grove has lost nearly 8% of its pre-crisis population.

Affluenza

I have often wondered about life insurance, and how they are able to offer the two different rates, non-tobacco and tobacco....who, exactly, will determine that your bladder cancer was due to smoking? And how?

This question cuts to my biggest concern with any nationalized health care system...how does one take into account personal Merikan lifestyle choices? Or should we?

Should we? Should a 46-year old female vegetarian triatheletic Dartmouth educated Volvo driving taxpayer subsidize the triple bypass surgery of a 39-year old 14-oz.-a-day flesh-eating sedentary two-pack-a-day smoking out-of-work recently paroled grade school educated diabetic alcoholic male?

The truth is, we are a nation of overweight, overfed, overentitled, excess-animal-protein laden clowns who deserve every one of the affluenza related diseases we suffer from. How do we rectify this truth with any ability to provide for a baselined nationalized health care system? At what point do lifestyle choices become a factor in what level of health care each of us would be entitled to?

The Auto Mall

I like knowing there will be five million fewer cars built this year than last year. This is a good thing for anyone who gives a shit about their local environments, their global environment, total energy drawdown...but this is not a good thing for Elk Grove, who just lost 34 jobs at the Elk Grove AutoMall Saturn dealership when it shut down Friday. In addition to the lost jobs, Elk Grove loses additional tax revenues from lost sales and service.

Elk Grove is as car dependent a 'city' as you can possibly find in this great nation. Without a regional shopping mall or high paying jobs to capture sales and business taxes, and without any discernable local economy of its own, its major source of revenue is its Auto Mall. The Auto Mall.

90% of its inhabitants commute in single occupant vehicles to jobs outside the city. So if 90% of Elk Grove is utterly, completely, and wholly dependent on multiple motor vehicles to perform even the most menial tasks such as getting a spare key made or getting a haircut, and the largest tax base is the sales of said motor vehicles, and 90% of the shit in their housal units is made in a foreign land because Merkian wages are non-competitive, what's the problem with evicerating the Big Three and letting 90% of their vehicles be foreign made, too?

Wrong Way Feldman II

I have to admit that I was completely wrong about Obama's Latino vote. I had made the assumption, from casual conversations from my Hispanic relatives, that there was no way Mexican Americans were gonna vote for a black man.

You can tell I'm a white guy. I use Latino, Hispanic, Mexican American, and Chicano interchangeably. There are differences, I know, but for my purposes, I don't make any distinction...and I don't need to know the difference when I'm walking down Wooley Road in Oxnard at 2:12 AM on a Friday night.

The distinction that needs to be made, however, is of the Hispanics who actually voted. These Latinos didn't care about race. I am glad that a black man was able to garner the lion's share of the Latino vote, and that any inter-minority distrust that I might have personally witnessed was either pushed aside or perhaps that view isn't represented by a large percentage of Latinos. What this does, viewed from my white eyes, is to further believe in the ability of people, any people, to overlook race as a salient point in someones ability to advance.

However, I personally harbor prejudices. For example, I don't think US educated Nigerians make effective electrical engineers. You can say anything you want to me about this statement, but until I work with a good Nigerian electrical engineer, I will continue to hold this position. My experience, background, and interactions with past Nigerian electrical engineers has given me no choice but to assume this.

Because of this bias, am I any less prejudiced than my wife's uncle who "will take the RV and move to Mexico when that nigger is sworn in?"

I don't know. Perhaps I am the same. The thing is, I don't know how to undo the bias I've created. Suppose I was a supervisor...how would I work around this bias if I was trying to fill a position?

These are questions/character issues that I'm honest and candid about yet deep down I know they aren't acceptable. This blog by itself would be sufficient ammunition to keep me out of any supervisory or political position.

I think race and energy are highly related. I earlier blogged that environmentalism is the domain of white people only. A stereotype. Anyone who lives near the Long Beach port and near the 710 freeway is most certainly not white and not affluent. Another stereotype. I have yet to see a black bicycle commuter or a brown Prius driver. An Elk Grove minivan is always driven by an Asian. Filipinos prefer Acuras.

How else am I supposed to value different cultures if I cannot make statements regarding their differences? Stereotypes allow me to accentuate those differences. If I stepped outside my door this morning to get the paper and a loose pit bull was sitting there, why would I act any certain way? Is my decision based on any information about that individual dog, or based on what I've heard or seen elsewhere about pit bulls in general? I would stereotype him; I would not endeavor to gain any additional information about that dog...all I need to know is that it is a pit bull. The cost of trying to get additional information on that particular dog might exceed any benefit I'd get.

I did the same thing with my Latino relatives when I projected their sentiments towards all Latinos in general, but in this case I was wrong. So? Polls are also wrong. With such information scarcity about how any individual Latino was going to vote, I economized with what I did have.

Used Bicycles

I'm considering chaining a used child's bike to the front bumper of my truck parked on Frye Creek. Frye Creek is a suburban collector road made wide enough so that people feel comfortable enough going thirty miles an hour faster than the posted speed limit.

I have a feeling that the presence of a child's bike might force people to slow down...something new to the 'environment.' I can place the bike just to the outside edge of the truck, almost in the traffic lane but not quite, but enough so that car drivers from either direction will see it.

I have to chain it up because within a few hours it would be stolen, no matter its condition. However, I can test this hypothesis with the introduction of an unchained really shitty first bike(and thus I can claim plausible deniability). I will set this bike up about three feet in front and about a foot and a half outside the truck's driver's side and I'll bet that cars will slow down in an apparent assumption that a child might be lurking just in front of the truck. I can put the bike behind the truck in a few days to keep the illusion changing.

Formally planted tree lined streets don't suffer nearly as much from speeding because trees provide friction for drivers, something never found in the modern suburban planner's repertoire. Because these fuckers won't plant trees, I'll plant old, used kid's bicycles.

The Big Zero

How can I argue for bailing out the big three with my clear bias against this auto-centric nation?

The truth is I can't, and in lieu of a few tens or hundreds of billions of taxpayer supported bailouts, I suggest Congress do nothing and allow these companies to fail. Turn the Big Three into the Big Zero.

American auto worker wages/pensions/benefits are one of the two main reasons, IMO, that the big three are failing. I understand GM and Ford pay more per vehicle in health care costs than steel. This seems weird to me, but then I also know Starbucks also pays more for employee health care than it pays for coffee beans. The way I see it, instead of Congress forking cash over to 'bailout' the big three, how about Congress creating a single payer health care system that might make it possible for us to be competitive against foreign workers? Honestly, I don't know much about the arguments for or against government health care, but I do know that we cannot tolerate double digit health care increases ad infinitum along with growing ranks of the uninsured.

The second reason is their own damn doing, particularly the truck/SUV market.
They made $10,000 profit per SUV yet tolerated losing money on small cars. They kept small cars in the mix only to meet CAFE fleet requirements. The truth is, they've done every fucking thing they could to ensure the SUV/truck segment kept going as long as possible. Creating SUVs on a 'truck' chassis instead of a 'vehicle' chassis to keep them free from mandatory CAFE requirements and luxury taxes. Intense lobbying to keep the Section 179 tax deduction in place. Further intense lobbying and lawsuits which culminated in the prevention of California from implementing its 2002 law requiring a 30% GHG reduction by 2016.

The Chevy Volt -- will it save the Planet? Shit...it won't even save GM.

The Sarah Palin of Elk Grove

We had a changing the guard here in Elk Grove, what with the ousting of city council member Leary and the installment of Steve Detrick...the Sarah Palin of Elk Grove, out to clean up this town...out to create new jobs in Elk Grove...out to continue to the fight against new Wal Marts in this town.

So said his campaign materials.

Detrick had to raise $150,000 to get installed. This figure is the new minimum floor to get your foot past the city chamber threshold. Leary raised $128,000 to lose. Between these two and the other loser, nearly a third of a million dollars were blown in pretty glossy fliers, radio ads, signage, burnt gasoline, lost productivity, and my own lost time wasted blogging about it afterwards. All for one council seat among five.

What can Detrick really do, really, in the grand scheme of all things Elk Grovian? What could one council member possibly do, now, 20 years after we began this failed auto-centric suburban shithole experiment, to modify this worst jobs-to-resident-ratio 'community' into a livable, job-filled city?

He earned his political chops fighting a proposed Super Wal Mart near his house in East Elk Grove. For this I give him credit, considering how I believe large format retail has eviscerated local communities and local economies. The majority of his campaign funds came from local sources. Indeed, from only one local source -- $107,000 came loaned from himself and his wife! That's what it takes to fight Leary's contributions from the Committee for Homeownership of North State Builders Industry Association ($10,000), Feletto Development Co. ($1,500), William Niemi, a frontman for Dunmore Homes and the advancement of more suburban sprawl ($5,000) Granite Bay Capital Group, more hopeful development ($6,000)...all of which are not located in Elk Grove proper.

Will he be responsible growth? He wants jobs...but fights off a Wal Mart. I am fully aware of this absurd statement because I know that the only jobs currently available in Elk Grove are strip retail jobs. Did you notice that Wal Mart is the only major retailer above water? If we continue down our present suburban strip mall madness, pretty soon Wal Mart will be the only employer available. Where's Detrick gonna find new employers, huh, that aren't strip retailers such as PetSmart, Best Buy, Old Navy, or Target? How is he going to integrate these new employers into the zoning restrictions that mandate strip retail and low density sprawl?

If you are anti-sprawl like me, it is amazingly simple to find and follow the money trail and vote accordingly. If you ask any Elk Grovian, no one looks forward to the new four thousand home development across the street. But...Elk Grovians apparently prefer more sprawl, congestion, traffic, and lives of perpetual motoring, because the other two incumbent members who are pro-sprawl, with no discernible competition (i.e., no challenger with $107k of their own money), and bankrolled by external, pro-development sources, were re-elected easily.

This city gets what it deserves.

My 401(k) is Worth $4.01

I had some fun with streaming internet radio yesterday, to hear the opening monologues from Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage. All said the same thing...this nation didn't shift to the left as much as was feared, and Obama moved the market down the most in post-election history.

Come on, we all expected stocks to gain 20% per year, year after year, ad infinitium, as we expected house prices to do? Now we're screaming that this expectation was only a false promise? We were lied to!

But that's OK, you say, you'll just defer retirement a few more years.

Um...no, you won't, not if the layoff department at work has anything to say about it.

In The Red

A buddy of mine at lunch the other day wondered aloud what the difference was between the deficit and the debt.

I think I'm fairly well up to speed on these sorts of things, but the reality is I don't know Jack. I couldn't answer that question with any degree of certainty. Both certainly sound like borrowing, eh? The only thing I said is that the deficit is the difference between this year's government income and spending and the debt is the cumulative difference. Probably not correct, but it's all I could offer.

We are into a $455 billion (that's four hundred and fifty five thousand million) deficit for 2008. One thing I know about the deficit -- it's just an indicator of the mismatch between what Merikans want from their government and what they are willing to pay in taxes to get it.

The thing about the national debt, as my investment manager once told me, is that as long as you grow your economy faster than you grow your debt, it doesn't mean shit. If you take on more debt but are able to use that borrowing to grow your income faster than your debt servicing, you can carry trillions in debt, no problem. Now that we've gone into 14 digits, the debt clock has run out of digits:


Apparently, no one gives a shit because it doesn't mean shit. No one knows what it means to be this much in the hole, even people like me who try to understand it. Should I give a shit, and why, exactly, should I? As it grew from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, I didn't hear anything about it. And as it grows to $100 trillion, I will still likely not hear anything about it. The old story line is "let our grandchildren deal with it." The good news for them is that's exactly what they'll to say to their grandchildren about their $1,000 trillion (quadrillion) debt -- just take in the dirty laundry from the next village and pass yours to the next. I'll bet a chicken dinner that people in the 1930's used to say "we're just passing this generational debt to our grandchildren." Well, their grandchildren did pretty well with all that debt, now didn't they?

The State of California is into a $10 billion state deficit this year, the difference between what we want from the state vs. what we're paying in taxes to get it. The City of Elk Grove is planning on a $1.4 million city deficit for 2009, on top of a $1.1 million 2008 deficit.

So every level of government that represents me, the Monologueonian, is operating in the red. On every level, as well as on every personal level, we are living beyond our exceptional status.

Sugar, Butter, Burlap and Rubber

I have too often mocked our American sacrifices we've made for Afghanistan and Iraq. I am facetious...but only in my presentation.


We presumably don't have war material supply issues or lack war making capability, but we don't seem to have a whole hell of a lot of money or the will to be waging two simultaneous wars ad infinitum, do we?


What I continue to ask is "what have Merikans done, in the name of sacrifice, to support our war efforts?"
The answer is that we haven't done dick. I am of the opinion that if we are to wage war, we should do so with as much prejudice as possible. Yet we don't prosecute wars that way anymore. So I spin the argument around and suggest that its our Merikan non-negotiable way of life that causes wars...that if we changed our behaviors at home we would never have to wage wars to begin with.


This is an extremely polarizing position to take. Likewise polarizing, I will not hide the fact that I view our nation with extreme disregard, that I think it's a paved over cesspool overpopulated by perpetually motoring, overweight, over-entitled consumers. There is nothing wrong with my opinion. Indeed, it's an opinion shared by a shitload of non-Americans. But holding this opinion automatically means that I am pissing on the graves of the 4,000+ who've died to defend my freedoms?


Please. Like my personal disgust with certain aspects of our culture has anything to do with condoning troop deaths or that I'm un-American.


In 1994 this nation did precisely dick to stem Rwandan genocide. We would find a way to categorize it as a non-genocidal internal political struggle. But we never, not once, considered Hussein's gassing of Kurds as an internal non-genocidal act -- it's what we used to sentence him. The point is, we clearly view middle eastern resources as fundamentally ours, or perhaps not so boldly stated, as "resources necessary for the continuation of our way of life." We now have an AFRICOM because we will soon view West African oil and gas as a global resource that's a vital interest to our hyper consumptive "way of life." Did you know that by 2015, 15% of our oil will be coming from Nigeria? You betch'a, more than Alaska will supply.


So...did Merikans do anything, anything, between 2003 and present, to reduce our dependence on foreign energy? Remember: Energy Independence IS National Security. We would have never gotten involved in Middle Eastern power struggles, never inflamed radical hatreds, never have spent a chunk of our nation's wealth on "nation building" if we never tore them down to begin with, never have spent another chunk of wealth to build floating Dubai hotels or to quietly support other non-Western governments. Did we do anything?

No, we didn't. The extent of Elk Grovian sacrifice was to place a small plastic 'support our troops' ribbon on the back of our SUVs and minivans. Then we quickly took them off because they were starting to damage the paint jobs and resale values on our precious rigs. It was the least we could do. And if that weren't enough, with heavy hearts in April of 2003, the people of Elk Grove climbed into their cars and drove to the mall to do a little extra shopping. That was our contribution. That was our sacrifice.

Changing our behavior is sacrifice. It's about using less sugar and butter, burlap and rubber...important in 1943, and in my view, just as important 65 years later.

Left Of Center

I made mention here of what I thought it means to be Republican. Thinking about this further driving home in the rain this afternoon, I think that the political right's position is that they should be able to gather/control as much wealth as they possible can (via legal means). But what is wealth? The only things I can think of are equity from others (wage labor), and natural resources.

Thus, we should be allowed to do so, and the government should not meddle with our rights to do so. When the government does, this is what I referred to as restricting choice. No government is the Republican mantra. Period...except for waging war. Waging war, as we've seen it applied in our lifetimes, is seemingly used to extract/gather/control other people's wealth or to protect our concentrations of wealth. So the right says "no" to government economic intervention (no taxes, free markets, no regulations, unrestricted land use) but "yes" to bombing the shit out of brown people: Panamanians, Libyans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Somalis, and Afganis.

Almost everything I think Republicans despise boils down to limiting their ability to choose. Drill ANWR because to not do so prevents the ability to choose to extract these resources in favor of others. Stop illegal immigration, not because we shouldn't use them to extract surplus value from their cheap labor, but because they suck from the public teat. Don't tax because to do so prevents the ability to use wealth as we see fit. It is the contributions of the few concentrated wealth owners who's achievements and accomplishments allow our society as a whole to be bettered. And Joe Plumbers like this because they either envy a larger wealth pie slice for themselves or they like the right's position on bombing brown people military security.

What I can't figure out, though, is how evangelicals have worked their way into this crowd when all they do is espouse a viewpoint of restricting choice (the One Way Only Crowd). No choice on abortion, on gay marriage, on teaching evolution...I have to think about this further...



But then, I think of the left. Here is an idea that people are obliged to share wealth and that society is bettered when wealth inequities are minimized. Here, government has the responsibility to help equalize access to resources...and perhaps to provide a minimum to all people.

When I look around, we follow many, many tenants of this philosophy. Progressive taxation instead of a flat tax. Those who have more are progressively taxed more as they have a greater access to resources. There are not many people who really, really think progressive taxation is a terrible thing -- they simply don't like the rates. And driving. Everyone from Big Joe Stud all the way down to little Sam Sausage (to mock Mrs. Palin) has equal access to the roadways, no matter who does or who doesn't own shit. All you gotta have is a car, and you don't even have to own it to drive.

Is it because I now have access to a greater slice of the wealth pie that I decided to take on voluntary collective self-restriction and now espouse the view of the left? I don't know. I am much more receptive to that philosophy now...and I wonder, would I still be a Republican if I still didn't have shit as before? What caused me to change? Am I suddenly a left wing radical ACLU ACORN anti-corporation anti-globalism Marxist commie liberal?

Hardly. No, Dubya certainly cemented my shift with these stupid fucking voluntary wars, but as I mentioned here, Republicans are roadblocks on everything I take issue with on my Franklin Monologues: unfettered suburban sprawl, CAFE standards, bad urban design, wanton consumerism, alternative energies, energy policy, air pollution, and local agriculture.

I think that as wealth is shared and decisions are made cooperatively there can be tremendous potential for error. I am not so far left as to assume we can ignore human variability...it is in this facet that collectivism fails miserably, IMO. So perhaps it's fair to say I fall to the left of center.