How Will They Manage?

I took the afternoon off from work so I could ride the bicycle home before the last rain of the season hit. A good thing, too, as it's coming down pretty good this afternoon, and traffic according to the radio is hogtied. Hogtied. This is always the case around SACTOWN when it rains -- many of our drivers become the next "victims" of "unfortunate" accidents, as these accidents apparently have no correlation to their judicious use of excessive speed.

While Geely in China is ramping up to become the maker of the least expensive car in the world, surpassing the Tata Nano, all we can think about here in the U.S. is how these cars don't meet our stringent, mandatory, and absolutely essential safety standards.

How will the Chinese manage without anti-lock brakes, adaptive headlights, computer controlled stability, integrated child booster seats, supplemental restraint systems, dynamic brake control, lane departure warning systems, backup cameras, traction control, crash resistant door pillars, all wheel drive, blind-spot detection systems, proactive roll avoidance systems, adaptive cruise control, tire-pressure monitoring (too lazy to check it yourself, slick?), side impact air-bags, and the CHIMSL light?

Perhaps we could manage without all this either if 1) we didn't build car dependent living arrangements that require the use our cars for every facet of living like buying a pack of gum or getting a key made and 2) if we didn't drive them like complete fucking idiots.

How will the Chinese manage, huh? How?

Social Carnivore

I saw Food, Inc. the other night, and was a little disappointed that it seemed to take M. Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and E. Schlosser's Fast Food Nation from books straight into screenplay. It didn't do the written material justice.

There wasn't anything more in the movie that can be gleaned from the reading of those books, except, maybe, to gain some visualizations into the manufacturing of our food...but even those weren't sufficient to overcome my own mental visualizations that I've developed over the years while reading those books.

Nonetheless, while there might have been something lost in the adaptation, I know the movie format has reached several of my co-workers who wouldn't have heard about all this otherwise, and in fact, a co-worker clued me in to the movie.

I have again embarked on a vegetarian quest. I will avoid meat, but I won't stop eating it. I will become a social carnivore -- if I get invited to dinner I'll eat the tri-tip, yes, but I'll take more effort to eat the side dishes.

Last year I calculated that the world production of meat is 90# per person -- simply taking the production poundage and dividing by 6.2 billion, and I have tried to keep my own meat intake below the world average. This works out to no more than 3oz. a day, and where I've had whole weeks without meat this is really easy to achieve. I just assumed the U.S. average was twice that, and indeed Food Inc. indicated that our average is just over 200# per person per year. That's a lot of meat -- and a lot of gallstones, colitis, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, and prostate cancer.

Considering how we are admonished to eat a high-fiber low-fat diet, while meat is low-fiber and high-fat, considering how much water and grain is used to grow meat, and considering that I am trying to tread as lightly as reasonable with renewable energies and bicycling, changing away from the standard American diet makes sense to me. We'll see.

Although, I might just live a little bit longer. A lot of good it does trying to "save the world" and all that other green horseshit if I'm just hanging around for a few more revolutions around the sun...

The High Cost Of Free Parking

"The average cost of supplying one parking space in America is roughly $8,000."

Now I'm not quite sure how to process this figure, but deep down I'd bet this is probably accurate. I refer to Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking as a weath of information regarding how parking ain't free, and how this $8,000 figure was derived.

Google Earth over the SMUD campus, where I work, and you'll instantly notice how there is more land use devoted to parking than for buildings, and indeed, there is more area devoted for parking than in total office square footage. So the next time you pay your SMUD bill, stop to consider how much of your bill is being paid so that our employees have unfettered access to free parking 100% of the time.

Funny, SMUD employees hog tie S Street with wall to wall parking of their vehicles while the back half of their campus is a wasteland of unused parking. It's unused because it's a few minutes farther away by foot, and our employees are just as fucking lazy as the rest of America in that they will park as close as possible regardless. Yet, you the ratepayer are still paying for all that unused parking through asphalt, maintenance, line striping, increased storm water runoff requirements, and the social costs of locating the SMUD campus just a little bit farther away from everything else to accommodate all that unused parking. We are required by the City of Sacramento to develop all that off-street parking even though it has never been used and it will never be used. A colossal, stupendous waste of resources and energy if you ask me -- but you didn't ever ask me, did you, and you didn't ever even stop to think about it. Nope. Just keep on paying your bill, slick.

Because city codes require so damn much parking per unit of office, SMUD had to spend more life-cycle energy developing the steel supports for their solar panels for that now-defunct solar-to-hydrogen filling station than we'll ever get back in solar energy. Steel is manufactured by burning coal, shipped across the country by burning oil, welded by burning natural gas fired electricity, all to raise these solar panels in the air so we'd have sufficient parking spaces underneath for our employees cars to meet the city's parking requirements, all while we have dozens and dozens of unused parking spaces 400 yards away that will never be used. In just this one example, parking is stunningly expensive, yet this is repeated a half a million times across not just the United States but increasingly in mainland China and in India and in Pakistan and in Uruguay. Everyone else wants access to their own free parking too, and they're willing to pay more in taxes and in the cost of their blue jeans to get it.

Double Dipping

As a bicycle rider along Franklin Blvd. traffic, you have no idea how much I would love to see a double dip recession.

The assholes are back --two black guys were driving/racing their Monte and Caprice cars and both feigned plowing me over in the bike lane just before Florin Rd. this afternoon, both with aftermarket rims, one with a loud sound system. For whatever reason, this sort of thing stopped as soon as the recession hit in 2008, but it is now resuming again.

I suppose I should stop short on speculating why these people weren't out on Franklin Blvd. over the last two years lest I be held up as a white bigot...but I won't.

No, my gut feeling tells me that if you're an asshole driver, you are also likely an asshole at work, and you prolly ain't quite so employable relative to people with decency. First fired. Maybe that's why these people -- the black guys weaving down Franklin in their POS cars with fine wheels, the white alpha male jerkoffs in Explorers gunning it straight from the right hand turn lane -- maybe they were soaking up those 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and now it's the end of the line, now having to go back to work to keep driving their rigs. They get off work, whatever work where being an asshole is acceptable, slam a few Steel Reserves and pretend to roll over a guy riding his little bicycle.

The market is 10% off, oil is washing ashore in Louisiana, incumbents are being replaced by future incumbents, Greeks are being tear-gassed over some salary cuts -- hey, there's still a chance for a double dip, eh?

You Just Never Know

This morning I carpooled to work with the neighbors, yet instead of their own vehicle it was a SMUD vehicle. As one had to leave early yesterday (to take the boy to his baseball game), the other borrowed a SMUD car to take home.

I've clearly mentioned to them before that there are other options available to them to get home without the need for a company car, but this family can't seem to function without multiple cars. They'd be paralyzed without them. Both absolutely refuse to take transit, even if the cost of a light rail/bus ticket is 75% subsidized by SMUD. Both would never consider riding a bike...although, for this I would prolly give an exception as it really is more of an overall lifestyle choice to ride.

In any event, as I was climbing into the passenger seat of this SMUD vehicle my neighbor clearly, clearly signaled her disgust with it -- not with its condition, mind you, but with what kind of car it was.

Not only is the taking home of a vehicle simply for convenience sake something of an abuse of company property, that she'd feel disgusted with driving a Dodge Stratus (horrors!) instead of their Lexus or Yukon was all it took for me to understand how they think. Then I project this out to all Elk Grovians, and my guess is that the vast majority of our residents think like her -- 100% beholden to a private automobile, insiting it be within 100 feet of his/her physical presence under all conditions and at all times, and totally put-off if their back-up rig ain't up to their liking.

I've heard many co-workers over the years say how they'd feel "uncomfortable" without their car there at work. And you know their number one reason excuse. Yes, of course! Safety! This bullshit notion that if something happened to the child, or if something happened to the housal unit, that without their own car they'd be paralyzed, be unable to respond. This same argument was used nine years ago by everyone who claimed that every member of the family needed a cellularized telephone for "safety."

When was the last time you made a cell phone call under the ruse of safety, huh? Yeah, that's what I thought. Never. It's just a fucking toy.

"But you just never know..."

Fine. You just keep paying your SMUD bill, too.

Legalized Grift

My Bangladeshi co-worker doesn't hold our banking system here in the U.S. in high regard. Indeed, he's borderline paranoid regarding the whole system, coming from a country whose financial institutions would never loan money for thirty years for a housal unit. Of course, this stems from a lack of political (and thus economic) stability to engage in such long term contracts.

I'm not quite so paranoid, yet I'm not shy in folding my hand by saying I think our FIRE economy (finance, insurance, and real estate) should drop from its current 11% of the workforce down to 5%.

One out of ten of us are employed in managing the financials of the productive affairs of the remainder, presuming that those other 90% are engaged in productive affairs. Each day that goes by an increasing number of Americans are turning to services, becoming wards of the service sector, becoming car rental salesmen, hotel managers, human resources analysts, and yes, legalized grifters through our large financial system:


I most certainly do sleep good at night knowing that we've the finest cadre of investment professionals and bond raters taking care of my CalPERS investments, my 401(k), my self directed IRA, my world growth mutual fund, my future social security benefits, my money market account, my checking account, and my 457. I understand how I need these people to direct my monies and investments and how they each deserve a piece of it for all these valuable services they provide.

I most certainly slept well over the last decade knowing that if I sold my housal unit the 6% commissions paid would be well spent, knowing how difficult it was to match buyer with seller during the boom times, knowing how housal unit prices went up 20% per year ad infinitium while the same 6% commission applied. I felt good knowing that real estate professionals (former flower arrangers who took the California RE exam and suddenly were experts in VA loan processing) driving white Mercedes sedans were there to help me if I needed them.

And as I snored soundly, knowing that even before I woke up here on the west coast those financial wizards out in the east were already hard at work securing my future, I dreamed good dreams.

If I don't like it, I could always move to Bangladesh, eh?

Testify For My Victims

There are 29 new foreclosure listings in our local Elk Grovian newspaper today, alongside 44 others amongst the 6 pages of legal notices. All listed right behind the local sports coverage. I wonder -- how many prospective major league athlete's families drove away from Elk Grove over the past three years? But I digress...

The striking difference with these new listings is that many are now for housal units sold in 2007 and 2008; that is, after the initial crash. These people at least had the sense to wait out the manic equity boom, yet still they find themselves now 2-3 years later underwater, or for whatever reasons they choose they are deciding to drive away from their mortgages.

Another thirty odd units will soon be available here in our fine city. Wonder who will snatch these up, huh? Investors? New, newer entrants into the housal unit shell game? Will they find themselves foreclosing in 2013/2104 if unit values happen to fall another 10/15/20%? If prices continue to fall why wouldn't they? They got upwards of $18,000 in credits to move in to a new unit this past year, credits that were used against their down payment requirements, but there's no reason to think they'll ride out a price drop. Wouldn't they also consider driving away?

Isn't it at all possible, at all, that we might not see any property appreciation for a decade? That we might still see a decrease? Granted, I am personally wishing for such an outcome for reasons previously stated here on my Monologues but truthfully, I don't expect it. The wish for economic disaster, not for disaster's sake but for the resulting change in American behavior is what I'm after, and as a consequence I seek out news stories/blogs/articles that reinforce this wish. This is just like religion, where people group together under a common belief system as it reinforces their own faith. Testify.

But I'm wise enough to understand this phenomeon. I wish for it, yes, but I'm wise enough to take in all viewpoints. In that regard I must say that I think we are well off the mark for any true economic collapse and I will have lost, in that my depression I so longed for will probably fail to materialize, and my hope for a renewed post-depression America will soon get drowned out by the thrum of a thousand bulldozers when we resume our Elk Grovian suburban sprawl building to the Consumnes River.

29 new "victims" who've lost the American Dream of housal unit ownership with a patch of grass and a two/three car garage.

Seven Eighty Nine

I wonder what the average credit score is of people who click on these ads, looking for their free credit score:


Do you think the average is above, at, or below 789?

Seventy Dollars

In between posts this evening I mowed my lawn, and every time I do it, every time, I think "$70 dollars."

That's what my co-worker told me, in 2005, what he was paying monthly for mowing/blowing service, along with the occasional fertilization and sprinkler head replacement. He told me it was the best seventy dollars he spent all month. So in doing the math most of us educated folks do, we determine that we make $50/hour, it takes more than an hour and a half per month to keep up the maintenance, so the logical choice, based on our own wage, is to hire out the work to others making a fourth of that, so we can get on to the other joys of life like, I don't know, watching Law & Order or shopping at the Galleria.

That said...I wonder if lawn mower sales are up here in my Elk Grove during this mild economic stoppage. Now that people supposedly have less disposable income to be blowing on hired hands performing work that they were too fucking lazy to do themselves, I wonder if they are now doing the work themselves. I wonder how many Elk Grovians, over the past decade of irrational exuberance and housal unit re-fi's decided to jettison their lawn mower at their yard sales as they determined that the good times must be here to stay and decided that lawn maintenance performed by others was now a perpetual feature of Elk Grovian living. "No more! Let the commoners perform those tasks! I'll watch them from my kitchen while enjoying fine Bordeaux without ever having to engage them. I've better things to do than pull weeds."

My co-worker died that year. I think about him every time I'm out sweating and swearing at my lawnmower, but then I stop and realize that since 2005 my mortgage is $4,200 closer to being paid for, for having not hired out this service. I push the mower a little further.

Sadly, my suspicions are such that more of my neighbors are doing this degrading, shameful work themselves. I was doing mine this evening...with head hung low. Oh, the humanity! Is there no justice in this cruel, cruel world?

A Solid 4%

I will miss Furlough Fridays...

Traffic is so much nicer around here when our state workers aren't jostling with each other getting to downtown Sacramento from Elk Grove. It's a lot nicer for me on a bicycle, most certainly. My crude analysis (as crude as BP's estimation on the volume of their Deepwater Horizon well leak) is that my chance of dying has been reduced by a solid 4%. This includes time on the bus as well as when I'm being carpooled by my irresponsible driving neighbor.

Chances of dying, though, were 100% for a man yesterday morning on Highway 99 who, upon exiting to assist an accident ahead of him, was plowed into by an (alleged) drunk driver and was flipped over the median and into oncoming traffic. I rode the bicycle to work thinking of this death, wondering how many other people driving up Franklin Blvd. were drunk on their way into work. Methinks at least a few are each day.

I often say, rather callously but honestly, that I'm glad that many road fatalities occur on days I'm riding the bike. It is not a crime to want smooth flowing traffic on the days I'm being driven. We are so beholden to our precious automobiles that there's gonna be a whole lotta deaths whether I bike or not, so there's nothing wrong with not wanting to be stuck behind these things for hours.

Same thing goes for Furlough Fridays! I love them! I choose to work 5 days a week while all my co-workers do that 4-nines shed-jool, so I'm on the road more often and Friday's around here have become so much better. Back in 2006 and 2007 there was a very, very discernible difference in how traffic behaved on Fridays when everyone was employed, everyone was driving $41,000 rigs with $5,000 rims and $4,800 stereo systems (all financed, of course) and how the assholes driving them would blatantly feign running me down, would drive down the bike lane past the stacked line of cars to bolt past the intersection light. It was very clear to me as I'm forced to be sensitive to traffic -- lest I end up on the pavement, staring up at the catalytic converter of one of these beautiful rigs. Today, however, it's much nicer, as these rigs have [mostly] been repossessed, the assholes driving them are still unemployed, and state workers aren't grinding out as many commutes.

This is one of the few overlooked benefits of our little economic slowdown. And I'm here to point it out to 'ya...

Who Might It Be?

Being driven home by a co-worker last week, I noticed a brand new Range Rover in front of us, heading westbound on Florin Blvd.

These things are, what, $65,000? $75,000 out the door?

The combination of the tinted back window and my wandering, imaginative mind conjured up a host of possibilities of who, exactly, was driving this rig. A pro-golfer's wife? The owner of Folsom Ready-mix? Just a successful South Sacramentan? I didn't know if I would ever actually see who was deftly commanding all 375HP under the hood of that handsome vehicle. Impressive...in an unexpected way. The owner brought the autobahn to South Sacramento!

Just the presence of the rig on the road, of course, made me feel insecure. Shouldn't I be driving one of them? I suddenly felt embarrassed to be riding in a compact truck...indeed, it wasn't even my truck. I didn't even have my own vehicle. Boy, I felt so lonely and emasculated. Did I ever.

But alas! My chance had come! The new rig unexpectedly made a right hand turn just past the highway overpass. The driver didn't even signal, obviously knowing that everyone around would have eyes glued to their vehicle such that signaling wasn't required. My eyes were glued, too, wondering what demigod might show their profile as we drove by. Would it be one of the Tsakopoulos boys? Might it be the pastor of the Radiant Life Church?

The rig pulled into the choicest parking spot not 2.7 yards from the entrance to the Money Mart Payday Loan shop (you know, right next to the Stop & Save Liquor store) and out stepped a rather short, sandal wearing Filipino, and as I was being driven away I had just enough time to see him entering the storefront. Was he the owner? Was he perhaps the regional manager of the string of Money Mart's that have sprouted up and are flourishing in all the depressed neighborhoods of Stockton, Clovis, Merced, Whittier, Sacramento, and Visalia?

Was he?

We'll Never Even Notice

Yes, the credit crunch of 2007-8 was an anomaly; it was "impossible to foresee." If I were blogging back in 2003 I would have said that the credit/housing bubble was upon us...but of course I would have been wrong, in that I was a full three years premature. I've been blogging about a looming energy crisis for the past two years, and, likely, I'll have also been wrong by about three years.

It's coming.

In my opinion, the supply of cheap and easily exploited oil is already behind us. While we won't "run out" of oil in my or your or our great grand children's lifetimes, I believe that the heady days of easy energy are already past and that going forward we are going to see energy that is much more expensive to extract, to deliver, and to burn.

Although you'd never believe it based on the information delivered from our heads of state. While they profess an affinity towards "green" energy, it's clear it's political suicide to do anything that would hamper the status quo regarding diesel trucking, freeway building, or automobile manufacturing. We've already decreed that diesel emission reductions are on hold until the economy recovers. We've already decreed that any climate change provisions will be on hold until the economy recovers. If the "green" isn't there, then damn the environment.

I've already assumed that we won't do the correct things going forward, that we will attempt to burn every last drop of oil in our cars and trucks, that we won't change a damn thing until we've consumed ourselves into a corner -- we will have lost all our manufacturing capability overseas; we will have less to offer the rest of the world as they themselves rise up both educationally and financially. Consequently I've prepared to live in an expensive energy future, and I will thrive in any energy constrained world. The good news is, if I'm wrong, I will still thrive.

This BP oil leak will only work to constrain that energy future even more:

Disasters such as these are the inevitable byproducts of a nation so beholden to their motorized vehicular prosthetic limbs. We demand hydrocarbons so incessantly we are willing to sacrifice our natural environments to get at more and more of it. This rig represented just a single variable in the gigantic energy equation of progress, but this time the calculation resulted in an undamped oscillation -- a blowout 5,000 feet below its waterline, and a resulting leak? A good half-order of magnitude larger than what BP will admit.


We will reset our ideas on drilling in ANWR and off the California coast, at least for the time being. We will let the Nigerians, the Angolans, the Ecuadorians, the Canadians, the Venezuelans, the Mexicans, and the Iraqis all fucker up their own environments first, out of sight and out of mind from our Elk Grovian strip malls and our subdivisions and our jobs twenty five miles away. We will refuse to extract oil 200 miles away...that is, until those wicked Arabs and their wicked oil company co-conspirators demand $200 a barrel. At that point, we're just gonna say fuck it; Elk Grovians will vote for anything, anything! that brings their costs of commuting and their costs of living the American Dream down...we'll start drilling in those sensitive areas; we'll use predator drones to bomb the next "evil" Venezuelan dictator who chooses to embargo the U.S.; we'll vote to take whatever Angola will contract for, while looking the other way as they rape their women and commit ever more human rights violations. So long as there's gasoline at the pump here in Elk Grove, meh. We'll never even notice.


As Mexican imports fade away with the decline of Cantarell, as the costs of Canadian syncrude increase to accommodate the rise in water and cleanup costs, and as our own U.S. production continues to produce less each hour that goes by, gasoline will inch up three cents, back off two, but it will continue to march upward. We'll respond by buying Priori -- the price will fall -- we'll respond by buying Denalis -- the price will rise. Some of us will buy $32,000 plug in hybrids -- the price will fall -- then others will buy new boats -- the price will rise. All the while, China and India will add another 1,200,000 motor vehicles each year. The Indian Dream; The Chinese Dream; starting to look a lot like our Dream, eh? The dream of perpetual slavery to your car(s).


I believe we are entering, not an energy scarce future, but an expensive energy future. That future is upon us.

Fixed Costs

My guess is that the price of gasoline would have to reach $4.75 to truly make bicycle commuting pay for itself.

Today, I'm paying more to ride. I'm paying because I still have to insure a car that sits in the driveway all day long, I still have to register the same car that sits in the driveway all day long, I still have to maintain it, still have to replace the wiper blades each winter regardless of how much it was used, and still have to smog it. Didn't catch any break from Allstate on my insurance. They could care less about how little or how much I use it. I pay roughly the same as if I drove the fucking thing 400 miles a day as a courier. It's a fixed cost, not variable.

Then on top of that I have to spend money to fix bicycle flats, to buy new tyres, to get the wheels rebuilt, and spend time adjusting the brakes and derailleurs.

Over ten years I've commuted by bike almost 14,000 miles. If I assume that over that period gas averaged $2.40 against a car earning 25 miles to the gallon, I saved $1,344 dollars. Over ten years. I spent way more than that on the bike, panniers, shoes, gloves, helmets, shorts, tyres and tubes.

You can easily see how bicycling would only ever "pay for itself" if you could divorce your car, which is an impossibility here in Elk Grove, one of the most car dependent cities in the most car dependent state in the most car dependent nation on earth. The other way would be if the variable cost of oil and gasoline rose at least another one to two bucks per gallon (in today's dollars.) But that will never happen.

We elect to subsidize the cost of freeways through higher income and payroll taxes so we all can save a few nickels on a gallon of gas. So not only am I not fully using these gold plated national resources to the extent I could because they are "free," I get to shoulder the burden of being excessively taxed so you can drive on these gold plated freeways of ours while commuting your 36 mile one-way trip to work.

Now that I think about it, even $4.75 wouldn't be enough to break even. It'd prolly need to be closer to $5.25.

Just Gadgetry

While holding a yard sale today, trying to destroy the evidence of two decades of my family's heedless, mindless consumer consumption, I had an opportunity to speak with three neighbors about my solar PV system.

One worked for SMA, the manufacturer of my Sunny Boy inverter, and the other two were just interested neighbors, with one going home and returning with his recent quote from a solar installation outfit.

Based on that recent quote, I am seeing that prices are coming down to levels that compete with my own self-installed system, at about $3.50 per DC watt. I am also discovering how my own solar panels (Sharp NE165U1) aren't even manufactured anymore, not 3 years after installation. The SMA guy even said my own inverter is also obsolete -- that is, it's just not manufactured anymore...although mine has been flawlessly working since the moment I flipped the switch.

There have undoubtedly been many changes to solar retrofitting, and admittedly I am not at all up to speed on what's out there. With my inverter, I understand that there are new means of access via the web and wireless connections, able to gather all the production data off the inverter. Truthfully, though, this is just gadgetry. I can read if off the meter via a short forty five foot walk. It's the same as getting an OnStar in-car navigational aid-- a $1.50 paper map works just as well, slick. It might take a little bit longer because of all that bothersome folding, but hey, think how much less you'll have to work in your lifetime while not having to pay for all that superfluous shit.

Speaking of superfluous -- through a half hour converstation, I discovered how the guy with the solar quote has been trying to negotiate a writedown/modification on his housal unit mortgage from his lender, and if he's successful he'll go solar. The guy has lived in the same housal unit for twenty one years. He's a good fifty five years old. How is it that he's getting "screwed" on his mortgage? The thing would be 2/3rds paid for and less than a thousand a month had he not fuckered it all away by buying gadgetry via housal unit cash-out re-fi's. I tried to convince him that it is still far more cost effective to reduce energy consumption first before going solar. He really didn't seem to care much about any of that.

I won't regret my own solar installation even as/if prices continue to fall. People have to start somewhere with these things, and while I wasn't a pioneer, I did take that second step which is more than most Americans will ever do. Most are thinking about that one step forward but are still taking two steps back regarding their energy consumption.