The Franklin Monologues

Enronization

2011-12-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

How, exactly, is it that Jon Corzine is not incarcerated at this moment? Wouldn't you consider him a flight risk? Apparently our Justice Department (or is it the Department of Justice?) doesn't assume that the ownership of a fleet of private jets and continued access to a half billion dollars of other peoples' money could be, in any way, shape or form, construed as risk-worthy.

A parallel: In our electric power industry we are [supposedly] bound by the North American Electric Reliability Councils (NERCs) reliability standards. One example: the loss of a single generator, transmission line, or transformer should not result in the overload of any remaining facility, in that we operate with sufficient capacity to absorb the loss of that one resource. Well, PacifiCorp did indeed have an issue in 2008 where a lockout relay failed to operate, resulting in 15 standards violations and the loss of a few hundred thousand customers. What I was floored by, in reading the report of this event, was how PacifiCorp was fined $4 million but did not have to admit to having failed to meet any of these reliability standards. They violated 15 standards, but do not admit having violated them! And NERCs position is that they didn't violate them, either! But $4 million was levied, $4 million was paid, and everyone's hands have been washed.

Corzine will be allowed to do the same thing, you watch. The SEC will levy a token fine in the coming years, say, fining his defunct company $50 million for having looted $800 million but also not having to admit to having done anything wrong or illegal...and most importantly, Corzine cannot be prosecuted for anything because he did not have to admit to having done anything.

Say there were a string of crimes committed here in Elk Grove. A murder at the Post Office, a kid caught for selling meth on a street corner and a robbery at the Safeway. I'm linked to all of them -- because I drove through that intersection where the kid sold the dope, was caught on the red light camera, as I was driving to the post office to ship a Christmas gift and to Safeway for a 6 pack. But instead of being charged, I meet privately with the county prosecutor and we cook up a deal -- I don't have to admit to having committed any crime, but I'm willing to spend the next 20 months under housal unit arrest with an ankle monitor.

What judge would sign off on that? Did I murder someone or was I just selling a dimebag on Franklin Blvd? Or was I innocent? But these are just the way these sorts of SEC fines are levied -- we don't get to know the true level of fraud committed, and clearly by accepting to pay a fine some presumption of guilt is assumed...but really, this is just the simple cost of doing business, having to work with such a regulatory agency. PacifiCorp did exactly that with NERC...and I argue that my utility SMUD should approach the levying of fines in exactly the same way -- treat them as any other cost of doin' business here in our grand nation where one-eye-open justice reigns on high.

Jon Corzine and MF Global -- if this one case doesn't provide you with all the ammunition you'd need to encourage you to take your money out of their criminal hands, well, continue to chase such hallucinated rates of return and prepare to lose the surplus wealth you think you "were entitled to" based on your "years of hard work." Here's a further example of how Enronized accounting is still a legal form of theft some fifteen years after Kenneth Lay (God Rest His Soul, May Peace Be With Him) started it. Indeed, ratings agencies gave sterling marks to MF Global right up until they declared bankruptcy.

If you can't see how this whole system is geared not to providing needed liquidity to producers and sellers but also to bilk you out of a percentage (yes, sometimes 100%) of your money, well, I'm glad you're there to lose it instead of me, to grease the skids of our wonderful free-market economy.

The Withered Leaves

2011-12-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

Wa-hey! Elk Grove High School gets the honor of a visit by a Real American Hero -- NASCAR driver Robbie Gordon.

Really. Do you really think that some C- average high school senior is somehow going to suddenly spring up and realize he's been fuckering away his last 6 years in middle/school all due to some 35-minute paid-for-speech by a guy who makes consecutive left hand turns at a high rate of speed for a living? Really?

I wonder why Robbie Gordon was invited. Why not Kyle Busch? -- recently arrested for 128mph in a 45mph zone. Kyle would be a far superior motivational speaker at EGHS. Who wouldn't like to not be arrested and not have their license suspended after driving 3x+ the speed limit, huh? I'm pretty sure every damn senior at Elk Grove high, that's who.

I will read the first two minutes of speech notes as prepared by Kyle that would have been delivered, had he not been cockblocked by driver Robbie Gordon delivering his speech here in our small, humble village:

"Greetings, Elk Grove High! This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that although I've had four vodka martini's just prior to taking this dais that I will address you with a candor and a decision which the present situation of my NASCAR career impels.

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from the honesty facing restrictions on our ability to speed today. The ability to drive recklessly will endure, as it has endured, and will revive and prosper.

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is not fear itself -- it's those godforsaken CHP pigs -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terrorists which paralyzes our need for speed. In every dark hour after beating the wife that we are not allowed to drive 3 times the speed limit simply to relax and calm down, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding -- we ought have the right.

"We face common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things such as a fast car that will shit-n-git with 20" rims and a pimpin' sound system that King George himself would find worthy. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"But I ain't no fool, fool! I know how to drive fa-fa-fast! You shouldn't limit my right to drive 128 through your simple 45! My citation comes from no failure of substance. I'm stricken by no plague of locusts! Compared with the perils that our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, I have much to be thankful for. I didn't die like #3 -- plenty is at my doorstep!"

And so it goes here in NASCAR inspired Elk Grove. And so we will graduate several hundred drivers who will think Franklin Blvd. as their own private drag strip, as Robbie Gordon's message sinks in...

CCC-

2011-12-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

I wonder how it is, that we at large somehow believed, even for a minute, that Herman Cain had any possibility of winning the Office of the Presidency...let alone the Republican nomination.

This slow-moving train wreck of a candidate is exactly why Obama will remain in office until 2016. Really. What would you think of a future President Cain, having to make a snap decision with the red button on the desk...when he can't even manage allegations of a consensual affair. A total waste of Republican energy, he was.

A complete, total sham. He had no real intention, along with no real financial support, to win the Republican nomination. An outsider like Cain cannot win the nomination, ever. Proof of this is former Louisiana governor Buddy Rohmer, running for the office who hasn't even been invited to debate, a candidate who's held office before, unlike Cain. There's no reason to wonder why he's an outlier, as he's campaigning against the monetary power structure that infects the current political process.

So you Republicans should focus your energies on 2016. Rubio. Christie. Who knows who else, but certainly not the dumbasses running in 2012.

What do you think this nation would have become, had Ross Perot not dropped out of the 1992 race because of some perceived "shame" to be brought upon his daughter's wedding by the Republican establishment. What a sham that was, too. Some sort of "disgraceful event" foisted upon the ceremony of an unknown daughter of an outside candidate is apparently sufficient to derail the candidacy of an up and comer for the office of President? What is this?

All of this is representative of the shallowness, the ineptitude, and the slow-failure of our once worthy American culture. I will argue (and have argued here on this blog) that we are past the point of no return. We are slovenly. We are lazy. We think of ourselves as entitled above all others. We treat the presidential election as an extension of any reality TV episode nowadays, where we mentally equate Brandi Glanville's most recent tit-job with the Republican field running for president.

I have been, am, and will likely continue to assign American culture a CCC- rating...if I don't rate it at junk-status in the near future. And...just as Standard and Poor's ratings...this is only a opinion...

PIIGS

2011-11-21T22:00:00.000-08:00

A cunning array of protests going on both ten miles away in Davis, CA, and ten thousand miles away in Cairo, Egypt. People, seemingly, are pissed off at something.

I am one who is perpetually pissed off. But I lack the advantage of youth to drive me to join protests. If I were 20 years younger I might be responding to things differently than I do today. I ruminate on our energy intensive living arrangements, our cultural shallowness, and people who don't signal when changing lanes -- hardly things we'd gang together and decry in a public square.

Yet, for all my yammering and contempt for the American lifestyle, and for all my longing for a more European living arrangement such as walkable human-scaled communities, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS) are completely fucking broke. I am left wondering if bankruptcy is inevitable everywhere.

A hundred thousand are assembling in Cairo as I write this, facing down the unknowns of a fledgling, dictator-less government. A hundred thousand are assembling in Athens, too, facing down the unknowns of a lifetime of austerity brought about by financial industry malfeasance. A few hundred are assembling tents tonight in Davis, facing down 21% pepper spray more suitable as a bear repellent than human repellent, and facing 100% tuition increases just since 2007.

I happen to have little debt and depression-proof employment. I have little to protest about, and as such I'm able to comfortably blog about trivial matters such as the lack of a bicycle lane on 65th street. I'm not $92,000 in the hole with college loans. I don't owe more than my housal unit is worth. I'm not unemployed. I lack the perspective of many who are protesting, but they are all doing so because they, like I, believe that things ought to be better. But to what extent is all this our own doing? We've:

Complicity allowed corruption and avarice to take root in our political system.
Never once considered our own culpability in creating the hallucinated wealth bubble of 2000-2006.
Allowed government and public institutions to create unsustainable pension guarantees.
Grew our households over the last thirty years not through the accumulation of capital but the accumulation of debt.
Complicity engaged in discretionary wars to cloak our growing dependency on non-renewable energy.
Grew our debt in periods of growth and in periods of recession we grew our debt.
Allowed 135 separate federal programs for the needy to perpetuate dependency on them.
Cheerfully fuckered away our manufacturing base to save $0.35 on a box of Chinese matchsticks.
Allowed 20% of our GDP to be driven by financialization, where every florist became a real estate specialist and every housal unit owner a flipper.
Allowed ourselves to be classified as consumers, not as citizens.

Yet, for all this, Italians too are entering an unprecedented era of austerity while having not engaged in a fifth of the reckless behaviors we have. Perhaps parallels do exist, and likely they too have promised themselves lifestyles they could not maintain.

Escape From New York

2011-11-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

I am, most certainly, a doomer. I personally cannot envision any reasonable scenario where the next generation of Americans has a better standard of living than us today...or any scenario where the current generation of Americans maintains their standard or even comes remotely close to the hallucinated standard we had back in 2005.

Oh! To return to those heady days seven years hence! A new Escalade in every other South Sacramentan rental unit! And in those without the Escalade, a new plasma HDTV. $21/hour manufacturing jobs at the Kramer Carton Factory with benefits.

This nation has experienced stagnant wage growth for the last thirty years, save for many in the top 1% who have effectively stolen their 250% increases through political machinations. That we've had thirty years of stagnant wage growth is a good thing -- a good thing, because it will condition us for the next thirty years of continuing stagnant wage growth. We'll be used to it, and experience clearly is desirable in such things...it ought to count for something.

I carry no doubt that the working classes of the future will find themselves in a more precarious position than their parents. A father who spent his life working at a canned soup plant in the 1970s earning $21 in today's dollars will find his son working at a suburban Christian bookstore in a strip mall in the early 20s earning $12. The manufacturing of canned soup will have long since been transferred to Uruguay, where cake frosting is already being manufactured (yes, the tub in my fridge is from central South America). The only jobs available in 2022 (for those unwilling to carry $245,045 in college debt) will be strip mall retail workers, which, based on Elk Grove planning models, will be the growth industry over the next fifteen decades. Asian foot massage therapists and Christian book sellers and pool chlorine salesmen and 12-G network compatible iPhone peddlers and spring water kiosk tenders and mother's day card salesladies and seasonal Roni Deutch tax preparers -- all fantastic non-benefital $12/hour at-will non-union jobs.

I worked hard as a landscaper in 1991 following my escape from West Point. I landed a good, hard job and I was willing to work. I lasted five months, at which point I landed an engineering assistant position. Twenty one years ago we hadn't yet had the influx of Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants who today dominate that industry -- no, us white boys did that work. Today, if a white boy is found mowing a lawn in Elk Grove, some part of his upbringing must have broken down. Maybe his parents aren't sufficiently "successful" to afford to hire out that work to "the help." White Americans have become accustomed to "no more dirty work." Fuck filleting Alabama catfish for $11 an hour -- it's hard, it's icky, and that one can receive nearly perpetual entitlements for not working really means that the real wage is only about half of that advertised. The redeeming of Alabama food stamps means that one can buy nearly all the catfish one wants...without spending 10 hours a day/5 days a week in a cold, damp kill room.

I remember well several of the other white guys who worked in that landscaping outfit. One quit after three weeks to find success as a traveling Arkansas carnie. Another would work well only under constant supervision. A third was quite the loafer but quite the stand-up comedian, too -- he cracked Richard Gere/gerbil jokes all the way up until Friday afternoon when he'd suddenly jettison the comedy routine and bitch and complain about his shitty paycheck.

I did my job, got stronger, took the job seriously, and moved on quite soon to be sure. Glad I did, too. That job would have sucked the life out of me. I can't imagine today, can't even imagine, working a single 8-hour shift cutting asparagus or eggplants, let alone two consecutive shifts, let alone a week, or let alone a year. As a white, privileged, middle class male I'd refuse to take that job. Fuck that -- unemployment benefits would have to run out first, which would last me 99 weeks, or well into 2013. Then I'd tap all the social services my cousin in South Sacramento and his neighbors take advantage of, such as a one time month's free PG&E or SMUD bill pay each calendar year, or emergency room visits for common issues like staph infections or testicular swelling. And once all that runs out, sometime in 2016, I'll have learned how to correctly grow hydroponic marijuana and sell two pounds each month to buyers in the Bible Belt whose state's legislatures are holier than thou. Then, by 2020, I'll bank on my diabetes! You think for one fucking minute I couldn't apply for and be awarded lifetime social security disability benefits for my "chronic and acute suffering from this debilitating disease?" What, you don't think I couldn't use my last thirty years with this disease to all but guarantee perpetual payments for my 40 consecutive quarters of work? I'd be considered "totally" disabled by my hand-picked doctor, who will be forced to provide services for my "neuropathy," my "partial blindness," and my "inability to sleep."

There's no way you'll ever find this white guy filleting fish for $11 an hour.

No way.

Too Little Exponentiality

2011-11-16T20:14:00.000-08:00

When the national debt first reached one million million ($1,000,000,000,000), there were no bloggers. The web was still a few decades away. Today it reached fifteen million million. And oh! To hear the conservative punditry! It's all Obama, who raised it four million million just over his term. And! We'ven't even yet hit the coming health care bill in full stride.

I argue here that the national debt is meaningless. $3 trillion meant nothing nothing! to my generation; we easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by our parents in the 1970s. My parents easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by their parents in the 1950s.

And so it will be with our children. $16 trillion is a meaningless number. I'd bet that less than 3% of our youth under 18 can even quantify the debt within +/- $5 trillion. A student in 1987, there was no way I knew what the national debt was; it was as meaningless then as it is today.

We constantly hear we need to grow, too. That if interest on our debt was, say, 3%, we'd better grow our economy by at least 3% just to keep up with the Kardashians. Growth is necessary we're told. But really -- why do we think we need to grow more? Aren't there already sufficient housal units for everyone? Water? Food? Why does my Elk Grove feel that we have to grow more? To the Cosumnes River and beyond? Following three decades of heedless suburban sprawl, can't we survive on what we've already built? My real question is -- at what point will we decide that we've grown enough?

Even 0.2% growth is exponential...yet apparently in our "advanced" Western economy even 2% isn't even close to breaking even with our perpetualized debt based economy. Look at the forecasts for 2012: here's one at 1.4%. Here's another at 3.3%. But really, think about four hundred years from now -- do you really think the next 25 generations can and should expect 3-4% growth? What would this fucking planet look like? Apparently, 0.2% perpetual growth ad infinitium is considered too little exponentiality.

But, grow we will try. We must try, for a reversion would fuck up the entire gambit we're currently playing. Lowe's has to build more tilt-up concrete warehouses filled with Chinese shit for American consumers -- to not do so would squander everything already created. Their shareholders require a rate of return above and beyond inflation. To not grow impacts everything already grown.

To rub salt into the collective wound of the 16% of you who hold no job, I'm up for a 2.3% wage increase in 2012 (after factoring in health care/unemployment insurance/dental/eye/life insurance rate increases)...which according to everything I understand, isn't anywhere close to nearly enough to cover the incremental cost of electricity, water, gasoline, sewer, federal and state taxation, cable, college tuition, garbage and property tax increases. In effect, I'm losing ground with a paltry fucking 2.3% raise. That the majority of the rest of this grand nation isn't even coming close to a 2.3% increase means absolutely nothing to me -- I don't pay their bills. I could care less about them. But me? I'm going to be suffering soon! I'll have to substitute my weekly 2# of sopressata salami with a generic genovese variety? Oh, the humanity!

Make Hole

2011-11-09T21:16:00.001-08:00

I'll offer all sorts of excuses for my lack of activity here, from housal unit maintenance to garden tending to lack of "air-time" due to house guests, but the bottom line is I've really had a block of sorts...writing about the things that used to piss me off. Nothing has changed, really. I'm just finding it more difficult to develop an opinion. Many things continue to piss me off.

My own retirement, or at least a part of it, is tied into a long-held fantasy belief system that says that my contributions and my employers contributions should have 8% returns every year, ad infinitum. If CALPERS, prolly the largest retirement pension system in the world, can't get an 8% return on its own then the State of California covers the gap. Without knowing, I presume that when CALPERS was investing in hot-shit mortgage backed securities in 2006 and earning 15%, they didn't have to reimburse the state for earlier years' less-than-8-% returns. No, 8% guaranteed, and if it did better, well, good for them.

I question the wisdom of people who set up this fucking thing while GDP growth in the US has never, not even once, approached 8%. That CALPERS could invest in things that forever gained 8% while the broader economy at large plodded along at 3-4% (in good years) and that they thought it could be continued forever is unbelievable to me.

How can CALPERS gain on bonds when interest rates have fallen as far as they're gonna fall and can't fall any further? They can't...so my retirement gets sloshed into the stock market, the last and only hope for an 8% return in a 0.2% economy...which of course fuels all those fantastic two hundred million dollar Wall Street salaries.

I'm the 1%. At least, by working as a lowly electrical engineer for a quasi-public utility in California I'm actively taking your taxpaying dollar and funneling it directly to Morgan Stanleys' executors of multi-billion dollar CALPERS investments, earning a slice for each and every transaction along the way. Wait...does MS even still exist these days? I can't be for sure.

Morgan Stanley for decades, decades!, provided a reasonable service alongside the rest of our financial sector -- they used to provide capital allocation, or something that serviced the production of goods, to marry producers with consumers. But geez, the last thirty years has seen this service morph into a leech, skimming a larger and larger share off the economy at large -- through securitization, through high frequency trading, and credit default swaps entirely on margin.

I hear these dumbass right-wing commentators wondering aloud why the occupy movement isn't outside Mark Zuckerburg's office/housal unit, protesting his 1%. Perhaps because he, alongside the 1% from thirty years ago, is/were involved in the production of shit that people want, not involved in vacuuming up the "endless supply of loose nickels" to be had from everyone with a bank account for no net societal gain. Right wing commentators are most decidely in that 1%, and of course want every piece of the pie they themselves have acquired to which they are so entitled.

And I. I get to leech off you, too, Miss Taxpayer, by forcing you to "make hole" the CALPERS portfolio's earnings to 8% in an economy barely able to return 0.2%. Not make whole, make hole, because that's where your taxes are going, down the hole, right into my future condo with the fabulous yacht moored outside.

6 pc

2011-10-20T21:51:00.001-07:00

This post is the last of my "6-6-6" series. 6% was the percentage of employees at my employer who own their homes with no mortgage.

I read yesterday that the entire city of Orlando, Florida -- the entire city -- is underwater. That is, the total outstanding balance of mortgages is greater than the total housal unit value for the entire city. I believe that the city of Las Vegas falls into this category, too.

That's impressive! And, it's exactly what keeps Wall Streeters earning twenty two million dollar bonuses, too. Without all those Orlandans fuckering away their next nine years of collective gross annual product on mortgages that will take that long just to break even, bankers would have to find other ways to garner such profits.

But no. Individually, we love to carry staggering amounts of debt so that we have a nice 3,200 sq ft starter mansion each with his-n-hers BMWs in the driveway and new iPads charging in the docking stations. Locally, our cities and counties are borrowing twenty cents for every dollar they spend, while our states are borrowing nine cents for every dollar they spend and the federal government is borrowing thirty cents on every buck. Government is simply mirroring what we do ourselves.

The housal unit, the pair of BMWs and the iPads all do nothing to add to the value of the Orlando family in this hypothetical example (hypothetical, but real; there must be over 450,000 of them!) -- or more correctly, they are all unproductive assets. They are not employed in any productive fashion, to earn the family income. They do not yield current income, nor will they yield future income -- they are trapped, dead assets. Yet the two wage earners owe $228,356 on the mortgage, $25,790 on the two Beemers and $2,430 on the credit card used to pay for the iPads. That is -- they are working today to service their debts...not their assets. They can most perfectly be described as debt-slaves.

None of the things, not a single fucking one of them, that people in Orlando buy are productive assets. None of them. A BMW is not productive, not in the least...not even when you consider it carries you to work. That $235 iPad with another $97 in accessories is only ever used as a toy, to socialize, to view YouTube videos, to play Angry Birds. And least of all is that housal unit, it is not productive in the least. Indeed, you will lose 6% to a realtor of it if you wanted to liquidate it.

I regard the purchase of tools, even if bought on credit, as an example of a fine way to increase one's productive capital. A hoe can be used to provide vegetables, or a hand plane can build furniture for your own or others' use, or a 15-mm socket can be used to save you $35 on an oil-change. But most Orlandan housal units owners wouldn't even know how to spell hoe, let alone know how to use one. Check that -- hoes as bitches, well, they probably know all about them hoes.

Socking away monies in the 401(k) like we're all taught to do is also a form of sunk, stranded, trapped capital -- we have no access to it to produce anything today, and certainly not to pay off any of those soul-crushing debts Orlando housal unit owners owe.

Orlando ~~citizens~~ consumers will be spending the next decade paying on underwater mortgages to bankers in Manhattan, just to break even on their "assets" and their debts. If this isn't the definition of debt-serfdom, I don't know what would be.

6 Months

2011-10-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'd bet that if I were to apply for a credit card today I might well be denied. I am slowly losing my valuable "credit history."

Losing it, because I no longer make regular payments to anything. I've been mortgage free for six months, have no car payments, and don't carry a balance on credit cards. Six months is perhaps the time frame one might need, as a young college student for example, to establish one's credit. It's also, perhaps, the time frame one might need to lose it altogether, too.

Can you imagine? I spend fifteen years squirrelling away every spare nickel to get out of debt only to find that it will cost me more to acquire new debt because I no longer have a "payment history." A new car that might carry a 4.85% APR might cost me 7.35% because I have such "shitty" credit.

I don't believe for a second that this scenario couldn't happen; no, not in today's credit-score driven society. Thirty years ago this wouldn't have been an issue -- I'd offer to a local banker that I own a housal unit and he'd identify me as an acceptable risk and I'd get a loan. Today, the decision to deny me would be made within six milliseconds (6 mS) inside some Cisco server inside a football field sized server farm in Youngstown, Ohio owned by a too-big-to-fail East Coast based bank who, when they fuck up the lending standards as they will again do, would simply lobby upon Washington to force taxpayers to subsidize the losses.

The cost of assessing risk to a lender has dropped, what with a simple "credit score!" nowadays, a score that you have no goddamn way of calculating for yourself. It's a score...like it's some fucking game, and indeed it is! to those in the financial services industry. No longer does a local banker worry about your risk when he can just shuffle off the mortgage to Fannie Mae. Nothing about the securitization food chain that imploded our economy three years ago has changed -- lending standards are supposedly tightened, yes, but the bank still doesn't care about your willingness and ability to pay that back over the next 30 years -- they'll hold it for no more than 30 mS before it's tranched and sold into another mortgage backed security. These things have not gone away -- no, not even.

I should not want to participate in such a system where I'll be penalized for carrying no debt while trying to gain access to some. Yet such hypocrisy is what built the existing financial services sector into the "industry" it is today.

6 mS

2011-10-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

Been fascinated by conservative pundits who assert that the OWS movement can't possibly not be motivated by some behind-the-scenes interest group. Something like a George Soros, or maybe ACORN, or any name-your-left-wing-propaganda group and insert here.

It's easy to assert, because it's hard to understand how a group of disparate, unorganized, non-violent citizens can act like citizens instead of consumers...where true citizens participate in protests, in voicing grievances, in participating in democratic action.

I don't really like to believe that the OWSers aren't really targeting correctly. It's convenient to protest against the top 1%, yes, but I don't know that it will be particularly eventful, even though it is meaningful. Unless and until this group can express themselves through political action, I don't see how or why the software engineers on the thirteenth floor of the building next to the New York Stock Exchange would willingly halt production on that new high frequency trading algorithm that's designed to fuck the upper forty floors out of a few mils each day, and a few hundred mils from other local entities each day, and a few hundred thousand mils each day from every productive citizen who "plays" the stock market.

You see, the closer high frequency traders are to the NYSE, I mean, the physically closer they are, the faster they can access those few mils before someone else. The thirteenth floor is advantageous to servers on the sixteenth floor. Consider a new $300,000,000 trans-Atlantic cable currently being laid to connect NY with London which will shorten digital transmissions by 6 miliseconds. 0.006 seconds...but hey, this means all the difference to the new breed of high frequency trader. Every 1 mS delay represents a $100,000,000 lost opportunity to a large international hedge fund.

It's a difficult thing to pull out of the stock market altogether, as an individual schmuck investor who thinks that if you just stay in for the long haul (as every investment advisor recommends) that you'll come out ahead, even in the face of such fantastically stacked and rigged odds against you. The financial services industry long ago traded in their function as a service to production and instead opted for short-term parasitic gains against that productive base for fantastic, immediate profits. I witnessed this first hand, while watching California electric ratepayers get fucked over every hour for three straight years by the Enronization of electric markets, companies filled with people who could care less about the long term (or medium term) stake in their organizations and instead self-imploded under their own hubris and greed.

The OWSers -- they can collectively do one thing, and perhaps most have already -- they all should strive to owe Wall Street nothing. It's fantastically easy for me to now say this as I hold virtually no debt, but really, Wall Street would cease to exist if people followed my example and paid off their mortgages instead of fuckering away all their discretionary income on new Acuras ever three years, or new 4S phones everytime Apple says it's time for an upgrade.

We may all well be forced to have health care at some future point...but as far as I can see, there is no law on the books that forces each of us to carry a credit card, and to carry a perpetual $5,975 balance either. There is no law requiring us to maintain a mortgage, or to go into $68,000 in debt to get an education. Without debt, Wall Street would cease to be revelant. Instead, we choose to, I dare say we choose to, and as a consequence the interest rate we pay on a mortgage is 0.03% higher than it would have been otherwise if Goldman Sachs hadn't intervened in some way to broker CDOs that digitally moved your mortage to a suite of foreign investors, and 0.02% higher than it would have been otherwise if AIG hadn't insured it against default, and 0.001% there, and 0.001% there, and...

Being debt free, and thus a free citizen, means that I don't have to occupy Wall Street.

Occupy!

2011-10-08T07:48:00.001-07:00

I'm glad to see that there are scads of peeps marching on Wall Street in these three-week old occupy rallies. Glad to see it.

Take note that the tea party, which immediately chooses to distance itself from the occupy movement, was founded because of profound public resistance to the passing of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008 (among other things). Tea partiers recognized that taxpayers were going to foot the immense losses incurred by the financial industry.

But the right wing has the objectives of the occupy movement all wrong, in my opinion. They ask the ridiculous question to the protesters: "what do you want to replace capitalism with?" to which occupiers "respond with a deer in the headlights silence." They have no answer, conservative pundits suggest.

Wrong. It's an expression of the deep disconnect between government and the people, how influence by moneyed interests have enriched those at the very top. From Bruce Maiman this week:

In 1999, then-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was chairing committee meetings on a bill to further deregulate investment and hedge fund banking. The bill contained language he didn't like and he couldn't get committee members to agree with him. Furious, he left the meeting, walked over to lobbyists waiting in the hall (a common practice in Congress), demanding they get Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill to tell Bill Clinton to call these committee members to get on board or "I'll kill the bill. You have one hour."

Sure enough, the calls were made, all was glossed over to the satisfaction of Gramm, the bill went forward and ultimately, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall and opened a door that allowed rigging of home loans through derivatives and CDOs by investment banking institutions, was passed.

Tell me that any of us can wall into the halls of congress to so much as voice our opinions with such influence others have.

It's not about destroying capitalism, it's about making it accessible to the majority.

In my opinion they are only protesting the symptom -- bankers -- while the real change must come from Washington eventually, such as forcing mark-to-market accounting standards. I'd bet that a large swath of European bonds are now only worth 40% of their face value but the face value stands and we continue to prop up banks that argue their assets are still at 100%. I'd protest that we don't give one more nickel to banks and let them fall on their own, which is something they might be doing soon, provided something like a Greek default occurs.

Banks have destroyed the living arrangements for Icelanders, Grecians, 2.3 million Chinese laborers and about 16% of the US working population. I'd argue that most of the "growth" of the last decade was hallucinated, yes, but if we never had a bubble we would never have had such a meltdown.

There are protests daily in Lisbon, in Madrid, in Athens, in New York -- all with the theme that the bailing out of financial institutions by politicians represents an utterly destructive system perpetuated. It harms many and benefits few.

They don't have a clear, organized message? This sign says it all:

$70,000 college debt
$12, 000 medical debt
I'm 22. Where's my bailout?

Just a loafer? Someone who doesn't want to work and wants to be supported by the system ad infinitium? Hardly. I'd march if I were there and I'm quite a producer. Most want to, too -- and I argue that the financial services industry essential produces nothing -- its role is to service those who do. As we will have fewer and fewer non-college jobs going forward as we fucker away our manufacturing base while the cost of college is rising at double digit rates, the only way to earn enough will be to service, to effectively take a larger and larger percentage from those who might still continue to produce.

Starter Vineyards

2011-10-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

My company used to host an internal chat room. The topics were moderated but any employee could post on them. As is typical of the web at large, my SMUD utility also has its share of ingrate idiots, those few individuals who cannot or will not keep their homophobic, racist, sexist, slurish comments to themselves, and consequently the forum was permanently shut down a few years back.

It was fantastic! We used to host topics regarding energy efficiency, the coming smart grid, SMUD retirement issues, etc., and man, they were a source of excellent discussion. But alas, this couldn't last, as a few fuck-offs decided that calling Obama a nigger was more important than lively discussion, particularly when the discussion revolved around energy subsidies, or other such "leftist" policies that my company embraces.

I find it fascinating how talk radio uses the term "N-word head" when talking about a rock painted "niggerhead" on some Texan ranch somewhere that some people allegedly saw back in 1996. As if there's some moratorium on using the word nigger on the radio when every black rap artist uses it as every other word in a sentence. But there are apparently limits...and the moderator having to pull posts by public service employees using nigger on an internal forum is obviously over that limit -- because of the context in which it was used.

I, however, am not over any line here on this blog. My use of the word is apt, descriptive, and relevant to my argument -- it doesn't take long for any web forum, of any sort, to fall into a "nigga-this" and a "fuck-you-that" back and forth that destroys the value of what could be such wonderful forums for good information.

It's no different to fucker away such a resource than it is to have set it afire and destroyed it by arson, or to have smashed in the windows of a web-kiosk with a brick. It's equivalent...and it's too bad we can't find good discussion on non-moderated forums...anywhere...on anything. I can't go to a Ford truck restoration forum without some poster arguing that Fords suck and Dodges are superior. I can't go to a thrash-metal forum without scads of posts between two dolts bickering and leading to personal insults.

I should not be surprised. Indeed, it only validates my own long-held position that Americans are, by-and-large, culturally bankrupt. The web only reinforces such idiotic behavior that would occur in some other capacity elsewhere if it didn't exist there.

These days, my company's webmaster posts a weekly "poll," where employee's can vote on some random poll topic such as "what does the end of the NFL football lockout mean to you," or "how many employees will SMUD have in 10 years' time: much more, slightly more, the same, less, or substantially less than today." It's been reduced to a worthless, useless, meaningless statistic that cannot generate any discussion because there's no forum in which to discuss it. This is nothing different than our culture at large, whole segments of our "consumers" enraptured by "voting off" contestants on some reality TV-show that has no hint of "reality" about it and no form of discussion as to why actions played out the way they did.

Yet! Last week's poll question was unexpected (at least by your Monologueonian): "Is your mortgage underwater?" with the following limited, canned options for response along with the final percentages"

Yes. (34%)
No, I owe less than what it's worth. (33%)
No, I own my house outright. (6%)
No, I rent. (15%)
Other. (12%)

The percentages didn't appreciably change over the course of the weekly poll, which is indicative that the poll is accurate, indicative that there weren't outliers that drastically changed the results, while over a quarter of my utility's employees responded. The same percentages on this poll are in rough agreement with my own little work group. That is -- a third of my fellow workers owe more on their mortgage than what their housal unit is worth...if you extrapolate these 25% responses to the company at large. This is an amazing statistic.

SMUD employees likely average $85,000 per year (the best data Ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif could find), which is almost 70% more than the median salary in SMUDs service territory ($47,107) -- yet, a third of us are underwater. I will yet again argue that the more money one makes, the more one is likely to be up to their eyeballs in debt.

All that money made, yet all that money flowing directly to Wall Street bankers, those who hold the paper on some collateralized debt obligation of which some single, insignificant mortgage holder in Sacramento county keeps on paying to help keep it rated "AAA," the same rating as government issued Treasury's. One third (about 700 employees) who are staring down another one or two decades of payments just to break even.

A third. That's the same percentage of people as males who have erectile dysfunction. However, I wasn't surprised by this statistic. I look in our parking lot and see dozens and dozens of $40,000 rigs -- I know that many live in the beautiful gated communities of Serrano, or the majestic highlands of Folsom, or on 25-acre "starter vineyards" out towards Rancho Murieta. On an $85,000 salary? Come on, such lifestyles have been fueled by growing debt burdens over the last thirty years -- upper middle class wage earners are no different than those in the upper poverty class. The more people make, the more debt they carry, and I'd bet that the percentages are roughly the same between classes.

I do not consider myself "lucky" to fall in that 6% "loan is paid off" tranche. Luck had nothing to do with it. I neither inherited a housal unit nor an inheritance. I paid my down payment with US savings bonds I accumulated earlier, and I made massive personal sacrifices for 15 years to put every dime I had left over into principal. You cannot do this if you're buying new his and her Acuras every five years.

The past twenty weekends were spent on ladders replacing fascia and painting the trim. Today I'll be outside in about an hour finalizing the paint on the garage doors. I replaced my car's brake pads last Saturday. I smash my own aluminum cans. I mow my own lawn. These things in the aggregate are what allowed me to have the discretionary income to blow on my mortgage, not to blow on hookers and blow.

I hold no magic key here. Frugality and thriftiness are the sounds of my perseverance. I also know that I could lose it all in an instant, too; there are many unknowns that are coming, as there was and always will be.

The Bank For Americans

2011-09-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

As if Bank of America charging another $5 per month to cover the "loss" of not being able to charge retailers $0.45 for a $1.25 debit card transaction is somehow "news."

It's not.

News is an interesting word, developed from the four cardinal points North, East, West, and South (NEWS). This ain't news. B of A indeed does encompass the entire U.S., from Seattle to Miami to San Diego to Portland.

B of A has no choice but to keep revenues flowing in...to keep their ivory towers in lower Manhattan (and elsewhere) filled with $425,000 vice presidents, et al. A vice president of operations. A nice fucking title, eh? Worthy of more than a half mil per year ad infinitum, making sure the flow of money from you to them keeps "operating." Year after year.

As our manufacturing base will continue to erode due to the lifting of the bamboo curtain that used to shield all us 467,600,350 North American/European workers from the 1,460,300,600 strong labor pool in China/Indonesia/Vietnam/Pakistan, we have no choice but to align out economy on services -- and particularly financial services. Talk about grift. Think of how profitable it is to vacuum up just a nickel each month from each of these 1,460,300,600 workers, along with the other 467,600,350 OECD workers, to provide them access to their own money. This is the base for why Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, etc. exist in the first place -- to suck off a share of the world's productive output as a form of "service."

And $5 per month. Of course, as long term (beyond 45 days) thinking is absent in our nation, we never think that this is $60 per year, just for the right to access your money, alongside the $110+ you'll lose due to their myriad ways to fuck you over with excess charges, etc., like processing large debits first and not in the order they were charged, to drain your account faster so you'll overdraft on multiple items instead of just one.

As a debit card user, do you not think I should have the option to have my charges processed in the same fucking order that I charged them? Wells Fargo has been, unsurprisingly, deluging me with requests to "modify" my debit account so that I no longer simply get "denied" at the local King Soopers for a half pound of salami and instead I'm allowed to overdraft, take my purchases, and pay $35 in overdraft fees for $3.75 worth of meat.

But think. If 7 years ago I were to have used...gasp!...food stamps at the grocery, the shame and humiliation from the other customers waiting behind me would have been unbearable while the clerk spends all that time pulling them from the coupon book, processing each one, etc. Unbearable...but [clearly] tolerable. Now, EBT cards prevent that public humiliation and shame -- they are innocuous, discrete; they make it look like I'm just any other patron paying with my own money. Imagine, then, a situation where...gasp!...your ETC/Debit card doesn't work. Oh, the public humiliation! The stares, the sighs, the foot-tapping of all all! those waiting in line behind you as you swipe that card for the ninth time through the scanner only to be denied again. One might, just might, be your neighbor! Horrors! The shame and humiliation would be so great that you'd gladly pay the $35 overdraft fee in secret just to avoid such shame. You'd only feel worse knowing it's your own money rather than funded from the government. Such shame!

Bank of America excels in this arena, knowing the psyche of the American debit card user, knowing that the avoidance of the shame of a debit denial is easily worth $35+ to most Americans. That's why they are the Bank for Americans and not just the Bank of America.

Early And Often

2011-09-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

One fantastic benefit, at least to me anyway, to having designed and installed my rooftop PV array in 2007 was that I was able to buy solar panels built in Tennessee -- in the U.S. of A.

That I should have these things on my roof for the next 21 years means I should never have even considered Chinese manufactured panels...and indeed, the Chinese weren't major producers back then (like 2007 was last century or something).

Today, the Chinese have taken a significant share of the manufacturing away from the US, and for all you who only think price the sole fucking arbiter of value that should be welcomed news to you. Now you can enjoy solar for a third less than I paid (although the net price is the same, see below), even though you will blow that third on increased stealth taxation providing for jobless benefits and retraining programs to former solar panel manufacturers here in Tennessee and elsewhere...say, Freemont, Ca.

Now Solyndra -- I'm paying, along with you (if you live in California), unemployment benefits for 1,100 former workers for a single company that [presumably] couldn't compete against a flood tide of cheap Chinese panels from such stellar, reputable companies as:

Shanghai Woneng Solar Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd.
Suzhou Shenglong PV Tech Co., Ltd.
Jinhua Dokio Technology Co., Ltd.
JM Solar Technology Co., Ltd. of Hangzhou
Nanjing Baoao S & T Co., Ltd.
Xuzhou Oumeide Energy Saving Technology Co., Ltd.
Shandong Astun Solar Electric Technology Co., Ltd.
Wenzhou Dingwen New Energy S & T Co., Ltd.
Zhongshan City Zhengxin Lamp Decorating Co., Ltd.
and the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

Someday soon the cylindrical panels that Solyndra developed and designed will also find their manufacturing performed in Hangzhou, too, as this concept is probably too good to die alongside our $535,000,000 taxpayer loss on our ongoing losing effort to shore up American manufacturing against $3.50 an hour Chinese labor and 9% annual domestic health care premium increases.

I wonder when our government and its constituents will, once and for all, cave in and accept that our 11% manufacturing sector is destined to become 10% by 2014, 9% by 2016, 8% by 2019, to bottom out at some floor (I'd wager) at about 3-4% -- will stop blowing money on propping up manufacturing, and accept that the U.S. position in the global economy is to consume stuff, not to produce it.

And while we're at it, pin the fact that our consumers only give a fuck about price rather than quality and craftsmanship, and that we cannot compete globally because of this on gasp! Obama. An impeachable act of treason! Fine. Future solar will only be more expensive as this single event (representing one half of one percent of the DOE renewable-energy budget) threatens to kill off all government incentives championed by the Obama administration to build a renewable energy industry in the U.S.

Well, we were never going to get such an industry, my friend. You won't have the luxury of a $26/hour PV manufacturing job and instead will smile as you take in the dry cleaning for other dry cleaners on their days off for $13 an hour. No need to wonder why wages have remained flat for the past decade and will remain flat for the next -- Chinese laborers will likely see a 30-40% increase in that same time frame and they'll be even more grateful that you continue to fucker away domestic manufacturing to save a few more bucks on a plastic salad shooter.

Of course, as PV prices drop due to the continued torrent of Chinese imported shit, the federal and local subsidies will dry up, too, which is exactly how subsidies are designed to work. The net cost of solar is still where it was in 2007, yet I'd argue that with a few hundred thousand rooftops enhanced by Chinese panels the actual cost will be much higher in the long run -- decreased production, piss-poor mounting systems, cracking/shorting MC connections, panel/frame/lamination separations -- you know, the things cheap imported shit always does after a few months/years -- it fails early and often.

Solyndra will fall off the Republican radars in a month or so, some other Obama "scandal" will take center stage, and 1,100 more manufacturing jobs will have found their way over to Hangzhou by that time.

Swords and Tequila

2011-09-27T17:25:00.000-07:00

I wonder when Greece will default.

When they do, they will submerge many French banks into a black hole, which will also submerge many U.S. banks into the same black hole particularly if the contagion spreads to other European nations. Unless, of course, German electrical engineers are willing to pay more taxes to bail out Greece which seems likely in the short term regardless. Along with the rest of Germanic output bailing out these failed institutions we'll see Grecian citizens pay through the nose with more property taxes, etc., in both the short and long term.

The wonderful life we all had between 2001 and 2006! When will we return to such prosperity and wealth?

It's all crystal clear to me how much influence the financial industry in every corner of the globe has over the political system, how much they can influence governments to force their losses onto citizenry. Austerity measures are heaped upon the working class in Athens, while 0.2% annual interest is unloaded on those of us Americans who save while still paying 14+% for credit. It is indeed a form of theft, but we handily accept this because we ourselves have never had any problem thieving from the future -- the many banks that hold stupendous amounts of Italian/Spanish/Grecian debt will simply recapitalize via 2 billion euro worth of "leverage" and we get to continue our charade for a few months/years longer, while these debts will still have to be paid by future production if they don't blow up the financial system before that.

It'd be a good thing for you yourself to limit your exposure to debt, IMO. I've worked for 25 straight years to do just that. I last Friday paid off another small debt, leaving me with just two other minor debts until I'm 100% free. Carrying no debt in a deflationary environment is king, as it is my expectation that deflation is the likely pressure we will face over the coming term.

And what of your equities when Greece defaults, huh? Do you think the markets will respond favorably when this happens, if it tilts us towards a double dip recession, if Morgan Stanley stock falls 22% in response to their exposure to French banks holding defaulted Greek bonds? As difficult as it may be at first, it's liberating to not ride the shock waves of the stock market when such events loom on the horizon. Sure, it's possible Athenians will be happy to pay another 1,300 euro in annual VAT and property taxes while engineers in Dusseldorf will equally be happy to pay another 1,450 euro to keep the system from falling apart.

Saving money is, in my mind, a double edged sword -- the more you save, the more likely you'll be legislated out of any future entitlements you've paid into during your working life. I think you'd be better off buying tequila to carry you through the fight.

The Lost Decade

2011-09-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

I am truly fascinated by the San Diego power outage of last week -- fascinated, because it is my little belief that the root cause will not be addressed, will never be addressed, because to do so would ignite a political shitstorm that cannot be allowed to occur.

I am led to speculate here, as is everyone not involved in the outage, because the details of such an outage can never be released in today's electric environment. Too many lawyers and litigators are involved these days to allow for the release of detailed information that might help prevent another blackout. Data is now no longer made available for public engineering consumption (it's sensitive and confidential these days), so we will have to take the forthcoming watered-down FERC and NERC reports as our only source of information on such events -- reports that are not technically but politically developed. To prevent embarrassment to certain individuals or parties or organizations. To be careful about assigning blame. That sorta thing.

I can speculate, can't I? Here on a blog? I have no more information than anyone else, or so I think. One man's opinion. I can find scads of detailed data on the 1964 Northwest blackout, but I'd bet I will never be able to find one fucking thing about last week's outage, the largest in California history.

I believe that a single contingency occurred, perhaps the loss of the North Gila - Imperial Valley 500kV transmission line, that ultimately caused voltage collapse. I believe that the Southern California Import Nomogram (SCIT) either 1) wasn't followed, or 2) engineering analysis did not correctly evaluate this single contingency as capable of resulting in a voltage collapse under the operating conditions of last Thursday. It is my belief that if either were the case, they will not be made public. Imagine the bad press the ISO would receive if it was revealed that they failed to operate within established limits, or that they failed to correctly establish said limits! Post engineering analysis will be developed that will support pre-determined conclusions about the cause of this event. Oh, yeah, your ratepaying dollars at work!

We operate the electric system, universally I might add, such that all single contingencies and credible double contingencies do not result in voltage collapse, in instability, or result in widespread, uncontrolled outages. This is the work of transmission planning engineers and operations engineers. They develop the limits of operations, etc., such that we can withstand the loss of a single element anywhere, where the result does not cause uncontrolled outages. That is, if studies show that the loss of a single generator, or station, or transformer results in system instability during a hot summer day, we adjust the transmission/generation network at that point to not operate in such a condition.

Today, there are more transmission planning engineers and operations engineers than ever before, thanks to the duplicative nature of the California ISO which employs dozens and dozens and whose member utilities also have to employ dozens and dozens.

I believe that a single contingency caused the additional events, including the loss of San Onofre nuclear generation units. I do not believe that they occurred simultaneously -- that is, I do not believe that this was a multiple contingency condition that caused voltage collapse. It matters not how or why the original transmission line was lost (which according to news reports was some single guy in a substation who inadvertently tripped the 500kV line), only that the system should have been operated in such a manner as to be able to withstand its loss...which in my little opinion, it didn't.

And here comes my lynchpin opinion -- in much the same way credit default swaps and complex financial engineering led to more instability in Wall Street, the introduction of the CAISO and ever more complicated market schemes and mechanisms (including the smart grid) will only lead to more physical blackouts and system instabilities.

The loss of quality CAISO personnel may have been (and most certainly will be in the future) a contributing factor. Engineers who didn't correctly evaluate this single contingency, perhaps, or operators who failed to operate within procedures, perhaps. Just speculation, yes. But having worked at that fucking place for what I call my "lost decade" and knowing the low staff morale the day I left, and seeing my own utility bring in dozens of dozens of former ISO staff (including myself) and seeing other local utilities bring in dozens and dozens of former ISO staff, and the industry hiring generation dispatchers and transmission dispatchers who have never stepped foot into a power plant before becoming a grid operator, and developing market mechanisms for transmission congestion instead of developing personnel with hands-on transmission experience -- these simple things are lacking in today's dispatching practice, and in my little opinion, time will reveal how treating the electric grid like a casino (pull a lever, get a pellet) will ultimately result in more widespread outages.

We saw this in 2000, 2001, with the Enronization of the California electric grid. You can be assured that these same people are still out there, now a decade wiser, still trying to fuck you out of a little more of your ratepaying dollar, by creating complex virtual bidding schemes in forward markets, by endlessly vacuuming up all those loose electric nickels you left floating around thanks to all those NERC and FERC policies. The hiring of legions of lawyers to manage the litigation caused by these market policies is a "soft" cost, too. And if the end result is a grid operated under a patchwork quilt of myriad regulations that leads to widespread outages, well, those "costs" are also "soft," and unaccounted for by marketeers. Not to mention, I'd bet my next paycheck that the CAISO market was "suspended" during this calamitous event! See, even I'm getting into the casino-like spirit of electric marketing, by wagering my last two weeks' output!

I will never be made to believe that more complexity will lead to a safer, more reliable delivery of power. Never. It is an almost unimaginable stretch for me to make the claim here on my blog that complexity was a direct contributor to this particular San Diegan outage, considering I have no more information available to me that you do. But I do have a good sense of things, and I would most certainly welcome a counter viewpoint to argue that "firm transmission rights" and nodal pricing and market designers, and the hiring of thousands of IT personnel (not electrical engineers, mind you) to manage the nationwide smart grid will lead to the most efficient delivery of reliable power.

I close with a quote from the spokeslady from CAISO: "Someone who comes to conclusions quickly doesn’t know what he is talking about." That's me!

Bridges or Roads

2011-09-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

Apparently, we can't have both.

I am interested in language, and how we always say roads and bridges, when clearly from an alphabetical perspective we should be saying bridges and roads...and aren't bridges just another form of roads in the most fundamental sense? All bridges are roads, but not all roads are bridges. But I digress.

Carmageddon, the fake media-induced meltdown that was to turn LA commutes into 5-hour long slogs never materialized. Neither did the carmageddon here in Sacramento when I-5 was shut down for three week stretches. But now, carmageddon has spread to the Ohio River today as steel manufactured in the 1960s (horrors!) is showing cracks as used on the I-64 Sherman Minton Bridge.

I don't believe this to be a toll bridge road. Yet think about how expensive it would be to replace this bridge, assuming replacement is the alternative -- what with unionized workers, steel from Pennsylvania, safety devices, environmental assessments, environmental impact reviews, modern concrete construction with as much reinforcing steel as in the original bridge, water diversion management, pile driving equipment costs, removal costs of the old bridge to include asbestos management planning, steel recycling, concrete pulverization, and the fifty six other things that I failed to mention. We got this bridge built chiefly through federal tax subsidies in the 1940's and 50's, but now the only options are likely public-private partnerships, with the private parts most certainly looking to install toll booths to collect $8 a pop for the 80,000 cars that will use this bridge daily. That's one of the fifty six other things -- a toll plaza.
I am not arguing for or against these things...they are just a function of our mod-durun world, things that were not considered important in 1964. They are today, and today the cost is three quarters of a million dollars per day to operate a bridge.

I would argue that the best course of action, should a bridge replacement be required, would be to ship 635 experienced Chinese bridge laborers over (not in container ships, jeez...but rather first class tickets on Singapore and United airlines), house them in government facilities in floating barges, provide them cots, three squares, and a dental plan, and pay them double what they are making building bridges at home which would be approximately $24 a day for an eight hour day instead of thirteen. In container ships, we could import pre-fab steel, concrete products, and specialized machinery from China (everything except bolts...no one trusts a Chinese bolt). Without the threat of walkouts and the like, the bridge would be completed in 13 months instead of 39, and we'd be millions millions! ahead. We'd easily generate enough "commerce" across that bridge to offset the government subsidies needed to bring in the Chinese to build it.

The Chinese are already building major sections of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco. We saved $400,000,000 to do so because we weren't willing to pay $17 tolls and having to pay bloated American wages to build them, and indeed, we saved probably a lot more than that because we no longer have any capacity to build such bridge sections, and we would have had to create the tooling and fabrication facilities for just for this one-off project. That's why the Chinese were enlisted...because they have the specialists and the expertise these days for building bridges as they are building so many of them for their own selves and their own new cars.

Granted. I'm not considering the "soft costs" of howling unionized American workers and the costs associated with picketing Louisville's city hall, or the unearned wages that won't be spent buying bourbon and Fords and the additional GDP generated by DUI accidents, or the cost of unemployment insurance as we re-re-re-re-re-extend unemployment benefits on borrowed dollars, or the costs of providing emergency dental care to workers who no longer have medical insurance, or the depression in the Kentucky housing market caused by unemployed steelworkers (who were unwilling to work for $24 a day polishing steel) who are foreclosing on their homes and the cost of further Washington bailout programs used to shore up the housing sector, or the cost to savers now making 0.2% return on their savings, or the costs associated with the downward pressure on all wages by the importation of cheaper labor...

These soft costs might, just might, be a tad more than the savings by Chinese workers, making my plan truly untenable, but because soft costs are never calculated in the engineering economics of bridge building or in the economics engineering of Washington, my plan is fucking sterling.

Ninety Years

2011-09-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

My Franklin Blvd. is falling apart between Florin Rd. south and "A" Parkway north. The roadbed is separating over the tire ruts and good-sized chunks are being slowly scattered to the right, towards the edges of the road...right where bicyclists ride.

Chunks of asphalt aren't bothersome to a truck or even a Mini-Cooper but to a bicyclist it's bad news. I tend to ride in the lane these days to avoid these obstacles while motorists tend to skirt the nominal tire ruts and ride either with their driver's side wheel on the median or their passenger's side wheel on the bicycle lane marker. When they do the latter, there's no room at all for bikes.

I suppose this sorta think will become more commonplace over the next few years as Congress and the President fail to do anything meaningful to fix our "crumbling infrastructure" -- and remember, infrastructure means one thing and one thing only to Americans -- Roads. They will continue to deteriorate, methinks.

I got all around Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg a few weeks ago and noticed how it looks just like Greeley, Colorado, but with more humidity. A set of cities completely and totally dependent on imported petroleum and the motorized private vehicle. I didn't see one fucking person walk the entire week I was there, and indeed, neither did I walk. We spend how much to build handicap accessible ramps, push buttons for crossings, digital illuminated red-hands and a simulacrum of a white man walking, and thermo-plastic painted pedestrian lanes? Seems to me that Florida should just simply pass laws that forbid walking in the public realm and by doing so should save a few tens of millions annually by not having to install and maintain such public infrastructure sinkholes. No one walks in August in Tampa -- everything is done indoors under air conditioning, powered by coal or natural gas or nuclear.

I spent Hurricane Irene underneath the foot of the Verrazano Narrows bridge at Ft. Wadsworth on Staten Island:

Interesting to see it shut down, silent, and interesting to have had the opportunity 12 hours before the storm to drive across it without having to pay the $13 toll. This bridge was finished in 1964 and cost $366,000,000.00. I just can't possibly imagine what it would cost to rebuild this bridge, with labor unions scrambling and negotiating for time and a half and night premiums, with whole sections being fabricated in China and shipped through the Panama Canal, with safety measures, with political infighting between the two boroughs causing untold delays -- it's a good thing we knew how to build good shit forty years ago, and we knew how to build them without $3,545,600,000.00 cost overruns. If the toll is $13 today for a bridge built 40 years ago, it'd cost $42 tomorrow if a new one had to be built.

I would suspect that the Narrows bridge will likely never see any major replacement in my lifetime. I'd bet that we'll get a good 90 years of service from this beast if we don't neglect its maintenance. That, however, might prove to be difficult, as maintenance is increasingly difficult to come by these days and I suspect will be even more difficult going forward.

Ninety years. It's just a guess, but try to think of anything around you that was built on or before 1919...there are still some levees that were built by farmers that are still holding up, yes, but I really can't think of much else around here. Most of our big ticket infrastructure was really built up in the 50's, 60's, and 70's...or before. Replacing that work will be ugly and decidedly unsexy to the new crop of Americans who think that five bars on the smart phone represents the ultimate in advancement: New water mains. New underground 230kV electric cables. Flood control measures and new dams. Electrified trains.

It's just that we have no money to build shit like this anymore, nor do we have suitable fabrication facilities in this nation anymore to build bridge sections (why we are outsourcing them -- not only is China cheaper, they are among the few nations with the capacity to build such big items these days). Imagine having had to build a set of facilites just to build the bay bridge sections without any expectation that there would be future work available. Imagine the cost of the bridge, then.

Debt Horizon

2011-09-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

A Jobs speech is coming. No, not from the company with the largest market capitalization, Apple, no -- Steve Jobs is gone. No, a speech from Obama on jobs.

What, do you suppose, a government can do to spur job creation? I am hardly one to know...but I do know that the postal service is set to shave several tens of thousands of people here by 2012. Apple created jobs for the same reason the postal service is hemorrhaging -- a change to a digital economy where no one has to work anymore, where pixels on computers represent the only wealth many of us make claims to...and in my little opinion, pixelized wealth that many of us are making the same claims to.

That a company that produces toys is the largest, most valuable company in the U.S. is telling. Admit it -- iPhones and hot-shit apps are nothing but electronic adult toys (not electric adult toys, he-he). I traveled the East Coast for 2.5 weeks and Lake Comanche for Labor Day weekend without one of these toys while I absolutely required a company like Exxon-Mobil, the company who recently lost the top spot to Apple.

No, we can't find jobs here because we intentionally fuckered them away over the past thirty years, as we migrated from citizen to consumer; as we accepted warehouse mass-merchants at the edges of our towns over myriad local in-town businesses; as we gained an excess 35# on average through the consumption of factory-scaled subsidized dairy and soybeans while requiring 1,500 more calories a day just to get the base level of nutrients we needed in 1975 due to over-fertilization and can't afford double digit health care increases; as we gamble away our wealth today and future tomorrow by building casinos and family entertainment destinations instead of investing it into our own communities.

We've not only a whole generation, but multiple generations, who are now adorned with random tattoos (as some odd display of status? of prestige?) along with attire resembling either the nursery or prison. Whole generations who have lost the capacity for meaningful work. Most jobs are no longer craft in this nation -- all that's available are those that support the ongoing consumption of toys, recreational drugs, or jobs that support the directing of said consumption into landfills -- forklift operators at K-Mart or chip-sealers for the acres of unused WalMart parking lots.

As if Obama wanted to spend $1.6 trillion more every year than the government takes in, but he has to to keep the system from falling apart, while the consumer continues to be funneled towards that debt horizon, the end game of an economy based on ever expanding credit. It's neither Obama's fault nor is it Bush -- it's the American consumer, who cheerfully lost his own job building quality toaster ovens at $16 an hour to a Chinese factory worker making total pieces of shit for a tenth of that. The 600,000,000 of us who were sheltered from limitless cheap labor behind the bamboo and iron curtains have now refused to accept that there are another 5.9 billion who strive for a lifestyle with indoor plumbing, cooking fuel and basic transportation. The American consumer, who refuses to pay $55 for a good domestic toaster oven at a local merchant that would last two decades, and instead climbs into his foreign made SUV and drives on subsidized roads to the WalMart to buy a $19.98 imported piece of shit every three years.

The jobs speech will come and go, with no meaningful results.

Fifty Bucks

2011-08-31T05:52:00.000-07:00

The lowest building in Lower Manhattan is a Wells Fargo building. Looking to retrieve just a few of my dollars I hold there (the singular purpose of a bank is to gain access to your own money, isn't it?) I entered the building this last Monday to a security desk clerk who explained that this was a corporate office only...not a bank in the traditional sense...and was directed to the nearest ATM which was seven blocks away.

I've come to the realization that I'm fuckering away an awful lot of fees, tariffs, charges and tolls to support a bank that puts up a big goddamn sign outside a building but won't offer commercial services inside, and to support the legalized grifting of several million people by vacuuming up an endless supply of loose nickels floating around in our accounts.

I very rarely need direct access to money remotely. These days I can do it all locally, mostly. I plan on going local, finding a local bank here in Sacramento that, while siphoning off fees, yes, won't be going to support the contract limousines of executives who have long refused to take the subway and 60-foot high marble interiors and bigleaf mahogany paneled elevators in an office building 3,200 miles distant that won't let me in to access a measly fifty bucks.

Thurman Heights

2011-08-11T20:20:00.001-07:00

Franklon presumably shot up my cousin's apartmental unit the other night in South Sacramento. At least, that's what the guys who are being shot at are saying.

I've been bicycling through that area for over half a decade and no, I never feel particularly safe, but geez, to sit inside the apartment this afternoon while talking thrash metal, looking at the CSI bullet hole measurement stickers, I really didn't feel good about it. It took a good three beers to settle down, to sit instead of stand inside a doorframe. Yet about that couch I was sitting on -- it wouldn't offer protection from another .38 coming through the door or window. An odd feeling, yes.

But, something that Mr. Cousin has recently brought into his world, through associating with the neighbors across the way, recent renters (recent being 8 months). That world isn't just filled with chronic chemical dependents and loafers anymore, something I've been chatting about here on these monologues...no, add street thugs to that list, now.

I wonder. As we continue our slow march towards debt deflation and as our collective actions to address it will most certainly mean even more extreme wealth concentration, I consider the increase in social unrest that will inevitably result. I am increasingly of the opinion, particularly as I chose today to ride through Thurman Heights, that to not throw bones to those who have none is a bad way to operate, particularly when immigrants tell me this, too.

I can choose to stay as sheltered as I can, I suppose, in white suburbia (well, make that white-feeling suburbia), while this shit continues around me, and simply work harder to keep as far removed from it as possible. I don't like to think this is an option...but unfortunately, it's about the only one that will likely ever play out, based on the way we've built things here in this nation.

I'm hardly advocating living in gangland, but I do think that social policies that ensure economic segregation also ensure the creation of whole swaths of people who will never know the pride of work, who will never have something to strive to attain, who will never understand the value of purpose.

Usefulness

2011-08-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

A notorious slowdown as of late here on The Franklin Monologues. Too many things pulling me away from my business of complaining about everything.

Two weekends ago the high-tank toilet installation took the entire 48 free hours allotted to me. Leaks, leaks, and more leaks...but come 8:00 PM Sunday I was able to wrestle the connections together and since it's been flowing nicely.

Last weekend took me to screw maintenance -- the need to organize a collection of free nuts, screws, bolts and the occasional washer, something I'ven't done since 1994. I will gain more hours in the future not looking for things, having spent eight of them Sunday organizing them...or so I think.

These things are free. These don't cost money to perform; at least, provided the materials are already paid for. My neighbor who rides the bus with me, the one who I fixed a few leaky sprinkler valves last summer, had a recent toilet problem and was quoted $650 to have a new one installed. $650.

I have to think that I've been able to pay off my mortgage and keep some cash in reserves simply because I've not had to resort to paying such money to others to do things around the housal unit. Indeed, I haven't taken a weekend wine/bed-and-breakfast/mudbath spa extravaganza to the Napa Valley in some time, either, because I'm too busy fashioning leak-free gaskets for the new [already leaking] supply valve on my disc sander.

These are the tradeoffs we make. I am fortunate to have learned early on that self-sufficiency is among the most valuable economic traits one can take on as you minimize the number of on-call visits by professionals to fix things.

Can I install a toilet as efficiently as a plumber?

Hell no.

Yet, I can do it.

The thing is a work of art, something worth having in a housal unit. Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Oldsmobile Ohm

2011-08-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

I enjoy criticizing both political parties in this hallowed nation. I criticize...and vote third party. Always. This way, I can never be held accountable for voting in some Republican or cretinous Democrat; I vote third party to never have to worry about what my actions might have done to wreck the nation. It's the equivalent of having not voted at all, and I sleep quite well at night.

Which supports my positions regarding the two major parties quite aptly. I am a personal fiscal conservative, yes, but I cannot support a Republican party hijacked by moronic Christian religionists. I am a dyed in the wool liberal with respect to social policies, but cannot support unfettered "tax the rich" and massive government programs that perpetuate an entitlement state.

I vote third party, along the platforms that most represent the bulk of my interests, and while these represent unelectable candidates at the moment, perhaps they might someday. I'm not holding my breath.

I mention this, because recently we've been subjected to a new 54.5 MPG standard for automobiling by 2025. Not immediately, no, but over time. In fact, over fourteen years -- by the time I'm a decade from retirement fourteen years from now, the standard will require hybridization and all electric fleets to meet the standard. It's not as if we will build a better ICE engine; no, that will slightly improve, yes, but the CAFE standards will be met by allowing a sixth generation 18MPG Yukon to be offset by an all electric Oldsmobile Ohm, or a Chrysler Couloumb, or a Mercury Mho, or a Suzuki Siemen, or a Hyundai Hertz, or a Jianghuai Joule, or an AvtoVAX Ampere, or a Mitsubishi Maxwell, or a Geeley Gauss, or a GMC Weber, or a Volkswagen Watt, or some other predictable, greenish, electric-ish name.

In the same way that the carbureted engine simply couldn't match the performance characteristics of fuel injection, ICE engines will concede to electrics...in my little opinion. I just hope, really, that we don't have to suffer through shitty worksmanship and piss-poor production, that we'll have the ability to buy a car that will last twenty years of mild use and get better mileage.

The thing to remember is that increased efficiencies will not, I repeat will not, lead to less foreign energy consumption. It will only result in more energy use. Only more. If American families will save $8,200 on fuel as touted by the Obama press release, please note that each family will simply go out and buy another fucking vehicle with that savings, so Billy and Martha, both teenagers in the same middle-class suburban familial unit, won't have to share one vehicle but will instead have one each. This is what efficiency gains give us -- more energy use and a "better" standard of living, per the metrics used to gauge such things in this consumeristic nation of ours. Take note -- increased efficiencies have only ever, ever!, led to more energy use...never less.

Because Billy and Martha have never lived in a community where the family vehicular unit(s) weren't requred for every facet of living, from mailing a letter to a treat at Baskin Robbins, they will never be able to live without one or two or three of their own, and yet we tout "MPG efficiencies" as somehow decreasing our reliance on foreign energy.

This is among the biggest lies of them all...but one that's been told by every president since Nixon, but it's no longer a lie if even the constituents believe it, is it? Our dependence on foreign oil has only increased every year since. Our dependence on foreign manufacturing has only increased every year, too. Our dependence on foreign nations purchasing our debts has only increased every year as well.

The Oldsmobile Ohm won't, I repeat, won't reduce our dependence on oil.

Fit And Finish

2011-08-02T19:21:00.001-07:00

So. Consumer Reports, the arbiter of all things consumeristic, has declared the new Honda Civic unworthy of a rating.

I could have told you that. Indeed, I have told you that, here on this blog. My little Honda Civic, while a fantastic car regarding fuel efficiency, is a complete piece of shit regarding fit and finish.

The obvious problem is the American Consumer. Any consumer who wants a well-built car also doesn't give a rat's ass about fuel efficiency; if they are willing to pay good money for a vehicular unit the cost of operating it is immaterial and the manufacturers know this. The most fuel efficient cars are also the worst built.

You will never be able to find a 45 MPG car whose windows won't fail to retract in a few short years, or whose roof paint won't completely disentegrate in five years' time, or whose radio will inexplicably short out and fail to work in hot weather, or whose cheap interior vinyl trim won't begin to crack, or whose road noise at 57MPH isn't equivalent to a 1979 Ford F150, or whose rear shocks won't whine in protest over every pebble in the road, or whose trunk fails to open with the manufacturer's specified key. No. You won't. To buy a car that gets 45MPG means it's gonna be shittily built.

All these things are currently in play with my Honda Civic, and it's not anywhere near 45 MPG. More like 31.

Against the backdrop of an Obama administration that's mandating 52MPG by 2025, I know that these future cars will all be completely fucking worthless based on the way the world builds fuel efficient cars today. There is no ability to buy a 40 MPG car today without it being built of the cheapest pot-steel and inferior Burmese rubber components, because any American willing to buy good things doesn't give a shit about fuel efficiency.

And, consider how every well-to-do American immigrant seemingly buys the most expensive rigs known to man. That someone spent the greater part of their lives working and educating themselves to escape the living conditions of their former nations means that fuel efficiency is about as low a priority as a snake's ballbag. Status is all that matters -- and indeed, if you were to take the median vehicular unit's price driven by the 45% employees at SMUD who are foreign born, I'd wager it's close to $39,000 -- far in excess of native born employees, and a harbinger of where developing nations are headed.

Going forward, I still won't drive all that much, not with my biking and my bicycle commuting, but I will refuse to buy a cheap car again. My Honda Civic represents a throwaway, consumerist, economic paradigm that I will refuse to continue to support, and I will spend my money on something that is simply built better...and that means something that ain't gonna get great miles per gallon as I see things going forward. So be it. Environmentalism isn't just pinned on MPG -- it's as much about only having to buy eight cars over your lifetime rather than nine, or simply not driving as much.

Fragiled

2011-07-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

I've been arguing for three years on this blog how the national debt means nothing to no one...yet for whatever reason the debt is taking center stage now. Why now?

An interesting political dynamic is going on, and it has nothing at all to do with reducing the national debt. I maintain that we will never never! pay it off. We can't possibly fathom fifteen trillion dollars... fifteen million million; $15,000,000 million; $15,000,000,000,000,000.00. And it's not at all appropriate to pay it off in any event -- debt powers America, it's a place for investment institutions to park capital, and it's become a number so large that we simply have no capability to manage it.

And today we're supposed to be frightened of gasp! Moody's, downgrading our sovereign debt? The same agency that rated Lehman Brothers as sterling just before its public bankruptcy? The same agency that is rendering a simple opinion on our treasurys, nothing more, an opinion not to be indicative of a security's suitability as an investment?

We're supposed to be frightened because debt might, just might, cost a little more to carry? Here's the same Bush-era fear-mongering about Iraq coming to roost with the debt ceiling...the cost of borrowing for a new housal unit or vehicular unit may increase? Dear God!

Well...good. Interest rates have been artificially kept in the dirt as a consequence of the financial "crisis" and it'd be good to see them rise again as I carry no debt, and that I might get more than 0.2% return on any savings I stash. For whatever reason, we elect to ignore the positive side of higher interest rates and make the bold claim that it would kill our fragile economy.

Our economy has been systematically fragiled over the better part of my lifetime, with securitization, with the destroying of our manufacturing base, with our reliance on debt fueled bubbles as the only things providing value to our markets these days. Fifteen trillion in public debt and thirty trillion in private debt while destroying the productive base of our nation means, in my little opinion, that bankruptcy is inevitable.

Today we're embattled with the idea of our national debt simply because a supposed black liberal is in the white house, nothing more, and white Republicans don't like it. Didn't give a fuck when Reagan raised it seventeen times while in office, all as a matter of public financial housekeeping, and neither did they when Bush Sr, Clinton, or Jr raised it multiple times either. Didn't give a fuck that the debt doubled following the crisis of 2008 just as Obama was entering office...but now, whoa. Can't raise it again.

Hypocrisy

2011-07-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

I had to make an on-site visit to a substation Tuesday, to retrieve relay settings from relays protecting transmission lines. I used to be able to do that remotely, but thanks to NERC reliability standards, our remote access was yanked away, causing me to sign out a vehicle and having to physically travel to the station. Don't bother complaining about higher electricity rates in the future -- you can thank NERC for a goodly piece of that.

And now, another reason not to complain about higher electric rates:

I traveled with a co-worker who has never had any problems telling me how he really wants Obama and his communist cronies out of the white house and Congress. You can guess which side of the isle he stands on. As I arrived at the substation gate I was a bit surprised to find it unlocked, but saw another truck inside the station. Still a violation, yes, even considering how NERC won't let me remotely log into a damn relay but copper thieves finding an easy way in due to a poor decision by a worker...that's overlooked?

I opened the control room door, the action of which rudely awakened two journeymen electricians who were napping in the comfortable conditioned air. It was indeed pretty warm outside, yes. While I gathered relay settings my co-worker and one of these two electricians then went to town, catching up on events, bitching about our management, relaying how one will retire in 340 days, and cracking racist jokes about Obama, as both these men find that nigger destroying the country with his socialistic agenda and giving money to people who don't deserve it.

As if taking a nap in a ratepayer subsidized air conditioned control room and getting paid $46 an hour to do so while bitching about giving money to those who don't deserve it doesn't represent the ultimate in rank hypocrisy.

This wasn't the first time I've seen this, nor will it be the last, and nor will it be the last time I'll get to hear well-to-do aging white men bitching about how they're getting taxed to death to support black deadbeats while fuckering away your electric rate-paying dollars sleeping inside an unlocked substation.

The Rockies

2011-07-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

Recall that I became an engineer, in part, due to the Challenger accident in January 1986. My path wasn't all that direct, mind you, and any number of events might have derailed my efforts but I eventually did become an engineer. I was in trigonometry class when I heard of the accident...interestingly, I use trig almost daily in my work as a power protection engineer. I hate to say that it was the death of several astronauts that spurred me on, not the space program directly, but nonetheless it was a national topic for months and kept me wanting.

I wonder about what events today will inspire teenagers to want to become engineers. Clearly, we can now forget about manned space exploration, not unless our youngsters speak fluent Russian or Chinese. Not likely, not in this nation. In addition to the budget cuts associated with NASA come budget cuts for powerful school programs like woodshop, autoshop, music, and foreign languages. Our kids have become wonderful standardized test takers yet will never be able (or more correctly, will never want) to change out their own vehicular units' oil filters. We are a services nation, so we ought to pay others for such "services" such as oil changes so we don't have to get all that icky, icky oil under our fingernails.

I will attribute the loss of this nation's manned space exploration through an anecdote -- a guy named Rocky.

Rocky has not held a job since I met him in 2008, living amongst dozens of other non-working citizens within a forty-yard radius of my cousin's rental in South Sacramento. He had an operation to attach some sort of plate to support his neck bones, and now, obviously, cannot work. Obviously. Two weeks ago, he received a lump sum settlement from social security disability, and now, going forward, he has no problems telling me how he finally feels secure about the future, now that he'll be receiving a $1,200 check every month ad infinitum.

The next day after receiving a check for the 2.75 years of back social security payments the government owed him, he rolled up in a [fairly new] 725i BMW and paid my cousin $15 to have it detailed. I rolled up in my little piece of shit Honda Civic. Granted, I have options, yes. But I felt quite a bit of jealousy, I will freely admit. I am not one to spend money on such things, but still, I couldn't help but feel some degree of unfairness in all this.

Unfairness, particularly when I learned that Rocky decided to spring for a Lodi skydiving adventure, satisfying a long lifetime dream of doing it once. Granted, it was a tandem jump...but didn't that motherfucker pay for the skydive with funds supplied by a taxpayer funded governmental check due to disability?

There are millions of other Rockies out there in the broad land of ours, and each one contributes his/her part to this nation's loss of manned space exploration.

NASACAR

2011-07-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

I spent the greater part of last weekend touring a relic of a former economic powerhouse, the USS Hornet. The Hornet was the exact vessel that retrieved the two Apollo 11 & 12 capsules.

It was indeed highly coincidental that I spent hours admiring the NASA Apollo displays while the last manned space mission by our nation was underway with Atlantis overhead.

I am deeply and profoundly saddened by the turn of events that have led to our dismissal of manned space exploration...even if they are only earth-orbital missions these days. I am as deeply and profoundly pissed off at how conservative commentators suggest that it's all Obama's fault, when clearly the end of the shuttle run was committed many years earlier.

It has not one thing to do with Obama. It has everything to do with the direction this nation's constituents have taken over the last forty years, over a period managed by Democrats and Republicans alike, who have:

Happily cheered on the opening of thousands of WalMarts and Targets to save a few dollars on hairdryers and plastic storage bins while cheerily supporting the death of local, independent merchants/manufacturers and good paying jobs.
Looked to the real housewives of Atlanta for daily entertainment.
Developed not a manufacturing economy based on the scientific prowess of NASA and other related technologies, but on perpetual suburban sprawl, the accessorizing of 3,200 sq ft starter mansions and garage majals with jet skis and his-and-her SUVs, and the advancement of money-for-nothing ventures such as Indian casinos, Las Vegas, credit default swaps and collateral debt obligations.
Spent the greater part of two generations getting tattoos of their favorite NASCAR drivers, "pictures" of barbed wire on their biceps, and outfitting their rigs with 24" rims and low profile tires.

Not one of these cretins could give a rat's ass about our [now defunct] manned space program. To the extent that it deprives yet another soul access to an EBT card, or to half a social security check to be spent on alcohol and cigarettes, or to free indigent medical care down at the Broadway clinic...well, NASA is simply a waste of precious resources. I do realize that NASA is attempting to focus instead on future manned missions rather than shuttle missions with their limited resources, yes...but jeez...

If I had the ability to control where my tax dollars flowed, I would gladly gladly! pay 40% more if I could be assured that NASA would have direct access to that differential. I find space exploration to be among the most worthwhile uses of my tax dollars, and I am at odds with a nation unwilling to pursue it any further.

This is simply symptomatic of a nation that has lost it's way, in my little opinion, and a harbinger of things to come. We will give up our efforts to advance ourselves for the sake of enabling so many of us to fucker away our potential as citizens. We will continue, over the next few decades (i.e., over the rest of my lifetime), to prosecute wars to support our gluttonous energy requirements, to suppport the payouts of unsustainable entitlements to increasing swaths of our constituents, to lose another 5-6% of our manufacturing base to Bulgaria, et al, to cheerily lose a $21/hour real job and replacing it with a $17/hour financial, insurance or real estate (FIRE) services job all because we are unwilling to pay other Americans the wages they demand for shit that they produce.

I had immense pleasure to gaze on the intricate, detailed wiring inside an Apollo capsule that was launched unmanned in 1966 to test the control systems, the re-entry, the deployment of parachutes, the splashdown. An electrical engineer, probably my age in 1964, designed the wiring for this capsule, for the lunar landing module, for the command vehicle, and he had a small piece in developing this future national treasure. He was probably easily able to provide for his family with his one salary. He didn't necessarily get rich but lived an extraordinarily comfortable life and one with meaning. The sheet metal worker who attached the radio systems atop the island on the deck of the USS Hornet -- she was a small contributor to the building of a device that had the unplanned benefit of supporting a manned mission into space. These were valuable jobs. They had meaning. Work is noble, and work is craft, yet these ideas have been slowing eroding away here in this nation, what with the only possibilities for local non-college-bound Elk Grovian teenagers being Kohls' forklift drivers or Del Taco managers or Auto Mall janitors or strip mall security guards.

I am exceedingly fortunate to have a real manufacturing job that I love...and this all came about as a result of the 1986 Challenger accident (while I was a junior in high school) that spurred me to eventually become an engineer. While I never pursued any dreams of working on the systems to get people into space, I nevertheless did indeed find a worthwhile endeavor. I feel a bit of shame that my nation will now be less capable of developing such programs as NASA to spur future constituents to aspire.

We are now aspiring to be either NASCAR pitcrewmen or grips on the set of Jersey Shore, hoping to catch a glimpse of Snooki....

Billy Goats Gruff

2011-07-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

Big hubbub regarding a recent Sacramento Bee article describing how Bay Area commuters are saving $400,000,000 dollars by outsourcing pre-fabricated sections of the new bay bridge to China.

The usual claptrap in the letters to the editor -- indeed, the same claptrap I often argue here on my blog: "How safe will you feel driving on Chinese made roadbeds?" or "Thanks to our state government we're continuing to feel the effects of 12% unemployment," or "we're only perpetuating wage-slaves in Hongzhau," or other such banter.

No letter writer bothered to write the obvious : "The use of Chinese labor and manufacturing will allow each of you to pay only $8 at the toll booth instead of $12."

No discussion about that. None at all. We bitch and we bitch and we bitch about the loss of good wages or the use of slave-labor or the unregulated emissions released by thousands of Chinese coal plants, but then we climb into our Japanese-designed vehicular units and drive to Walmart and marvel at the wonderfully low prices on a new color-matched Chinese made blender that will fit quite nicely on the new countertop as the old one, while perfectly usable, doesn't quite match our new kitchen.

We don't seem to mind cheap Chinese household appliances. Yes, let them rat-bastards employ slave-wage labor to build shit like that over there, but a bridge section? Whoa. No-no-no-no-no-no, we have to drive on that, and would you trust taking your children across that bridge now that you know who built it? I wouldn't.

I only point out the hypocrisy of Americans who seem to think that we're getting taxed to death (with the lowest real rates over the past eight decades) and that we ought not pay a $12 toll to keep manufacturing local. We want cheap plastic hairdryers and refuse to pay American wages to make them. We want unrestrained services from our governments (for roads!) but we refuse to pay for them.

We are a services nation, not a manufacturing nation. We don't need to be building bridge sections -- leave that icky, icky work to developing nations. No, our job in the global economic hierarchy is to consume shit, not to build it. Our job is to spend the workweek in a cubicle in some too big to fail bank trying to make insolvent borrowers and insolvent lenders both appear solvent, then wake up every Saturday and pay the lowest possible rate for a toll so that we can comfortably drive the 99 miles to San Francisco in an Asian car on gold-plated out-sourced freeways (they're "free!") to enjoy Vietnamese farm-raised clams inside that "Manhattan" clam chowder in a bread bowl while enjoying touring the relics (WWII submarines and liberty ships) of a former manufacturing powerhouse.

And all the while we're adding a million dollars more every forty-eight seconds to our $14,472,276,393,201 national debt, telling the next buyer of our Treasury's "Mr. Troll, please let me pass -- there's a bigger, fatter, more capable future generation ahead of us who will have even better means to pay down the debts we're currently incurring."

Our debt, which we are continuing to add to by building half-trillion dollar bridges using federal matching funds, our debt which we will never pay back, is indeed the troll under the new bay bridge.

Airport Art

2011-06-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

Had the first opportunity in an unimaginably long time to drive out to the Sacramento International Airport this afternoon -- at 4:30 PM no less, in an odd late-June downpour causing chockablock traffic in both directions. A wonderful first visit to the new several billion dollar terminal B facility.

Well, the terminal isn't actually completed yet; a few more long months of tweaks and the pull of some levers and the rotation of some gears and the thing will be ready for public consumption by 2012.

Just in time for systemically higher oil prices.

Airplane travel is one area where the smart grid, smart phones, plug-in hybridization, personal windmills and rooftop solar PV systems will mean precisely dick. Getting a plane up in the air only ever came about due the introduction of a suitably powerful engine a century ago -- nothing in the ensuing eleven decades has decreased the reliance of air travel on petroleum. Nothing. It won't take off using batteries and solar cells. Shit...it probably wouldn't even come close to staying aloft on batteries and solar cells, assuming we could even build a hybrid plane using kerosene to take off and renewables for everything else. We'll have to drill in 7,000 feet of Gulf of Mexican water and then through another 14,000 feet of rock to get the future oil needed to power these aircraft -- in my little opinion, it's not going to be cheap, yet we built out a fantabulous new terminal designed to handle dozens of additional daily flights under the assumption of a cheap energy future ad infinitium.

I dropped off a passenger this afternoon. Come 2025 we might get light rail out to the airport, but I'm not holding my breath. If you're gonna fly from Sacramento you had better be prepared to drive, too. I'm imminently pleased that I did not have to fly today. I'm not mentally prepared for the back-of-the hand security maneuvers and the dumping out of all but 3 ounces of insulin because I didn't happen to pack my prescription label. No, not today.

I would like to build the following aluminum plate for my next stroll through the Sacramento airport x-ray device:

I wonder if it would even garner attention. It most certainly couldn't be construed as "domestic terrorism," you think? That's the problem with airport security -- no sense of humor. It's not like I'm making any threats...

I'm hardly joking about bombs or other such shit. I just want them to know what I really think of their security procedures, because to actually vocalize my thoughts would cause alarms to go off and large men with guns to appear. I don't feel particularly safer knowing the five year old boy in front of me was frisked for undergarment explosives or that his shoes' lasts were examined for Semtex-1A. I do feel particularly safer knowing that I and a few dozen others will ignore the seat belt sign (much to the consternation of the flight attendants and the FAA) and dogpile any would-be terrorist before he'd have his opportunity to light his wares or fill the fuselage with lethal gas.

Most decidedly a he. And, most decidedly a young he. And, most decidedly a swarthy young he. It is for our failures to openly practice such profiling as a viable means of terror enforcement, at least as it pertains to the largely-symbolic act of airport security, that I offer my contempt. I do believe its intention is just to make white people feel safe. Every time the news reports on an individual who agrees with such measures it is always either an old white woman or a middle-aged white woman. "I feel safer knowing the terrorists are now leaving their bombs at home" they say.

Remember boarding a Southwest flight from Burbank to Sacramento in 1998 and having to answer the "three big questions?" Imagine that today:

One -- Did you pack your bags yourself?

"No. My wife packed my bags. I was too busy fuckering around on your website trying to print out our boarding passes that you used to do for us passengers twenty years ago. No. I get the enjoyment of being rejected because it's 10:22AM and the flight is at 10:25AM tomorrow and for "reasons of national security" I can't print this fucking thing out more than a day in advance. You used to send them to me in the mail six weeks before my flight...now I'll be charged five bucks if I ask you at the counter."

Two -- Did anyone unknown to you ask you to carry anything on board the plane?

"My Muslim Bengali co-worker did indeed! ask me to carry a package to our associates in the southland, and I did indeed! find it somewhat odd with its plain brown wrapping and that older model cellularized telephone fastened to its side...but what, exactly, is an unknown person? Surely everyone is known to someone. He's a known person -- as are all the 6.9 billion others on this planet. So no."

Three -- Have your bags been out of your possession since you've packed them?

"Yes. After my business travel we vacationed on the fabulous Carnival Splendor cruise ship, where we just disembarked for my return flight home and where I left my bags out in the #3 hallway unattended for several hours. They were hastily loaded into my trunk by three swarthy 26-year old bearded men who were clearly Carnival employees -- in fact, I remember their names: Chad, Jordan and Al Bania -- it was clear as day on their nametags. I remember, because they refused my tip. I always remember the tip refusalists so I can find them again on my next trip..."

The Unit

2011-06-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

I have often lamented the erosion of "social."

With television, Xbox-360, two wage-earning families and suburban sprawl, there really is no longer any sense of social.

At least, certainly not within my own familial unit and the other units around me. I have to think that among other units across the US this is probably also true, not just here in my Elk Grove. We find that fewer and fewer of us relate to the Shriners, the League of Women Voters, or the Ladies Auxiliary these days. The notional arrangements of social capital are eroding further each and every day...at least, the arrangements of what passed two or three decades hence are no longer valid...or at least, are less important than they once were.

As I grew up, family and friends were important. As kids we used to band together and play in parks, in the streets, but I could easily see the erosion of this idea as early as 1983, when the family unit no longer held sway as it likely once did a generation earlier. Technology and fossil fuels have allowed for each member of the family to migrate out separately...and earlier...than what used to be the case.

Nine year olds are now texting one another within the confines of bedrooms, instead of actually having to venture out of doors. Interactive gaming has taken the place of getting on the bike, cruising to your friend's house and playing the console for hours.

I suppose what I'm really lamenting is my own closed-in notion of social, my own dated expectation of what people these days ought to do for social engagement. This blog is an example of energy shunted away from social interaction -- time spent to post meaningless monologues to myself. This has value, yes, but in the larger context it really is more a means towards further isolation. I post alone.

As I'm neither a gen-y'er nor a millennial, I don't think I will ever fully accept the practice of mom on Facebook, dad playing Angry Birds, sis on Twitter and bro with his iPod while ~~at the dinner table~~ at the fast food outlet. This is the new normal, but it's too new for me.

At work, I can hardly enter a cube (both those of co-workers and management) without some form of Internet media taking away a fraction of your electric ratepaying dollar. If not using the corporate resource, private smarte phones are becoming more common, where everyone can keep the outside world apprised of your everyday activities.

Without personal interactions, it is my belief that Americans are more likely to presume that the TV figment called Snooki is more a real-life figure in their worlds than they'd like to admit. I do not see this as beneficial for a nation about to fall off the cheap energy cliff, a nation that cannot grow its way out of $15 trillion in debt. These things that are passed off as social do not lend themselves well to any form of real calamity. I don't see them improving our situation should our situation turn ugly.

If the familial unit, while completely connected yet completely disengaged can't seem to find any common purpose, what do you suppose the community means to anyone? What do you suppose our culture means to anyone?

La Raza

2011-06-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a white guy. Raised in white Sacramentan suburbia. I attended grade school, middle school and high school in the 1970's and 1980's where 2% were black and 3% were Asian. (I am supposed to capitalize Asian, but not black, yes?)

I was among other whites growing up; indeed, all the way through college. West Point in the late 80s was predominantly white. CSUS in the 90s was also predominantly white -- at least, as an electrical engineering major it was.

The segregation has, in an odd sense, prevented me from ever holding any racial bias against anyone. I say odd -- because Mexican Americans that I know now in later life are among the most racist people I've ever, ever! known. There rarely, very rarely, is a Mexican American around me who doesn't treat Asians, blacks, or whatever completely different than I. Our upbringings contribute to our racisms.

I write this now as I live in the most racially diverse neighborhood than I've ever lived in anywhere else in my life, here in Elk Grove...and I have no issues with it. I don't think the neighborhood is going to go uphill or downhill just because "some nigger" moves in next door, or if "some chink" does. I use this authentic, American language here on my blog as this is the language used by everyone around me. I've really never had any reason to do so.

What reasons are attributed to such language/actions, I ask? I don't know. I've never felt compelled to treat others differently based on their race...at least, not that I've been aware of. I've a new Mexican American engineer working in our group but I think he's a shitty engineer -- not that he's Mexican. Race has no bearing in my judgements on others.

At least, so I think.

I will argue that among all the Nigerian and Ghanaian electrical engineers I've ever come across, all have been substandard...relative to my own abilities. I have yet to work with an African American electrical engineer who I believe is a talented individual. Does that make me racist for stating such an observation?

I really don't give a shit if you do or don't classify me a racist based on my 20 years of empirical observations. I have yet to work with any who I hold in high regard. Today, I hold the highest regard for an Indian engineer. He's one talented engineer, and to label me a racist simply for decrying all African electrical engineers fails to respect my 20 years in the industry as someone who knows and respects talent when he sees it.

I argue this, because we've a young Indian engineer in our group who routinely denigrates Pakistanis. He does so in a jovial way, yes...but deep down, I have to believe that he harbors extreme prejudice against them. He's grown up with that idea in northern India. Two nations in perpetual disagreement over what I consider to be the most trivial of reasons...over uninhabitable land in Kashmir...among other disagreements. What I'm saying is that this young Indian engineer is fifty times more racist than I...yet as a white guy, any single hint of racism and I'm out the door, off to find my own way again in a diverse work environment.

Jovially suggesting that earthquakes and American drone strikes in Pakistan leave a few fewer Pakistanis in the world and the world is incrementally better off. If I were to suggest that in any environment I'd be chastised up and down, be handed letters of reprimand, get fired, what have you. Yet, coming from another "minority," this is somehow deemed acceptable.

I offer that my own observations are true to form. I don't sugarcoat them. I suggest, without racial interest whatsoever, that electrical engineers from Ghana are among the most unqualified engineers in my field. This from observation. I argue that stereotyping is acceptable where prejudice is not. I argue that my beliefs about Ghanaian engineers is based on factual evidence, not on an assumption on a group of people before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy. I have adequate knowledge -- twenty years in the field -- I think they are bad engineers.

I do not suppose I fall into the same trap as my Indian coworker because I base my beliefs on empirical observation -- I do not do so simply based on their nationalism, heritage, or belief system. He bases his beliefs on the fact that there are inherent differences in Pakistanis traits and capacities simply due to their race. He justifies his different treatment of Pakistanis because they are Pakistanis. It is a belief system he's grown up with...and one I did not grow up with.

I often mention racism here on my monologues as 1)it's a monologue, not a dialogue, so I post whatever I want, and 2)it cuts to the core of how we've developed our social arrangements here in the U.S., and how it will impact us going forward in my expectation for eras of resource shortages. It will not be pretty. Blacks will blame Asians, Mexicans will blame blacks, and whites will blame everyone who's not white. This is not conducive towards managing national trials in my opinion, but this is what we're gonna get.

I am not a fan of La Raza as I don't hold my own white skin in any way different or superior to anyone else...as I really do see La Raza promoting such ideas. Contributions mean the most to me -- contributions as social animals, as respectful citizens, as caring for others regardless. I, really, do not see our nation following these ideals under any calamity or suffrage, and La Raza will be among those willing to promote our differences during calamities rather than our commonalities.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

2011-06-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

I noticed two Sacramento County sheriffs eating lunch today at a table just down from me. What I didn't notice then, as I noticed as I walked out into the parking lot, was that they chose to leave their vehicular unit running (presumably) with the AC running, too. It was a pretty scorching afternoon here in the central valley, yes, approaching the century mark.

Really, I don't care too much about these wasted tax dollars; these officers need to be comfortable, yes. No, it isn't the loss of a dollar or two of a non-renewable resource that pisses me off, nor is it that my Sacramento county is among one of the few counties designated as non-attainment for the 1-hour federal ozone standard, nor that I have to ingest their exhaust emissions as I ride my bicycle anywhere in Elk Grove -- it's the fact that if I were to do that in my driveway, to leave my car idling while unattended it would be a crime.

If the correctional peace officers association (and whatever organizations associated with law enforcement) fails to meet their annual goals for fundraising or charity or assistance for wounded officers' families, whatever, you can rest assured that it'll have been in part to me going out of my way to never offer an additional dime to these arrogant pricks. I wish I had the wherewithal to go back inside to chastise these men for their actions. I was with others and hadn't the opportunity, but I'm fairly well assured that it wouldn't have made one bit of difference, that they would have either ignored me (their most likely response after having heard my argument), offered that it's a function of security or responsiveness or some other bullshit retort.

It is for these sorts of actions that I, a generally law abiding individual, always votes down public safety initiatives. Always. I will continue to do so. I have blogged many times how firefighters spend the vast majority of their time responding not to fires, but to vehicular accidents, accidents that they've indirectly caused by the mandate that roads be wide enough to turn their big fucking firetrucks and allowing drivers to comfortably drive 65mph down 35mph streets. That the only interaction I have had with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department in the last decade is that they left a cruiser idling in the heat is enough for me to hold the entire "public safety" field in contempt.

This, along with that asshole CHP officer who told me, completely contrary to the law, that I couldn't take the lane on my bicycle, has left me with a lifelong disdain for law enforcement.

Disdain, even while I had the enjoyment this last Saturday night to walk from my housal unit 1.5 miles to the corner of Franklin and Laguna Springs to watch said law enforcement conducting a sobriety check point, the first I've ever witnessed on my Franklin Blvd. I sat at the bus stop (waiting for a bus that doesn't run on Saturdays) and got to witness the drawing of a few sets of handcuffs, the hauling away of a few cars for who-knows-what -- suspended licenses, expired registration, whatever. I would have liked to thank these law enforcement folks for what they were doing, yes. I worry about being plowed down by drunks on my bike, yes...which is why I never, never! ride at night.

I know it takes a certain level of ego and arrogance to perform their jobs; however, leaving a car running unattended for 35 minutes because "it's really, really hot outside!" represents the ultimate lack of judgement and lack of respect for their public funding. They can never count on me for support.

Balancing Authority of Northern California -- A "Too Big To Fail" BANC

2011-06-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

"Just ask yourself; if you were to walk into any corporation, would you find faces brimming over with deep fulfillment and authentic delight -- or stonily asking themselves 'if it weren't for this accursed paycheck, would I really imprison myself in this dungeon of the human soul?'"

This comes from a recent blog entry on the Harvard Business Review website. Just think to yourself - how many 2011 Harvard graduates are truly concerned about the social ramifications of their actions as future cogs/spokes in the corporate machinery...particularly when faced against $171,455 in student debt? Come on, they'll be the first to become corporate slaves and soon-to-be managers -- 1) to pay off their massive educational debts, and 2) to seek to transfer the wealth of the poor to themselves, to transfer the wealth of the elderly to themselves, to transfer the wealth of the powerless to themselves (the most privileged group among us), and to transfer the wealth of communities, people, and society to their corporation which is nothing more than a "human equivalent" in the eyes of the law, laws they manipulate via campaign contributions, funds provided to political action committees and corporate sponsorships, all to eliminate taxes and to favorably alter regulations that benefit their own existence.

Why would anyone post such a blasphemous statement on that hallowed website? Certainly whoever did so wasn't a Harvard Business School undergraduate or graduate.

To counter such corporate whoring, I take efforts to use cash where I can, to eliminate the 3% haircut that my local businesses like Corti Bros. take to simply sell their wares via MasterCard. I take efforts to patronize local establishments, to prevent my dollars from flowing to corporate headquarters in St. Paul, MN to enrich attorneys and tax lawyers and their management analysts who are tasked with maximizing corporate (and their own) profits, who don't give a damn about their outlets' contributions to "community" here in Sacramento or elsewhere. I try to spend local as my dollars stay close and have the side-benefit of being returned to me in myriad but often subtle ways, such as better buildings, better services, or simply as a nicer place to live, better interaction with others, along with potentially nicer architecture...instead of miles of tilt-up concrete walls encasing consumptive warehouses filled with cheaply manufactured Chinese shit.

I am exceedingly privileged to work in an electrical engineering department (my department, not my organization) that values my contributions and expertise in a specialized field, a field that cannot be manipulated to extract more from electric ratepayers, and one that I find so enjoyable that it is no longer considered work. Contrast this to people like Severin Borenstein of the Hass Business School in Berkeley. He more than likely also immensely enjoys his work, too; however, he goes to work everyday devising market mechanisms to skim profits from electric ratepayers under the guise of free-entry markets, or hedgability of retail electric pricing, and applications of financial arbitrage between day ahead and hour ahead markets...all the while working to enrich top tier management at the California ISO whose jobs are to siphon California ratepayers to support their $870,000/year salaries. Remember, the ostensible purpose of such entities as CAISO is to encourage competition, to promote "equal access," to decrease the wholesale cost of electric power so decreased costs will "trickle down" to retail customers. Tell me. Do you really think that the California ISO has worked to decrease electric rates for Californians, what with their 620+ staff and duplicative transmission planning, operations engineering, settlements and energy management systems? If these functions which were traditionally at the utility level were eliminated and consolidated at the ISO then yes, we'd certainly find efficiency gains through such actions. But PG&E, SDG&E and SCE have all had to increase these departments and had to develop new departments just to interface with the ISO...along with entities such as SMUD that isn't even a mandatory participant but who also has to maintain considerable staff (and expense) just to interface with CAISO at the periphery. The California ISO has only enabled the role that traditional energy providers have had in providing their services. The ISO is comprised of staff derived from member utilities who are now paid 28% more than what they were formerly earning doing the same jobs at their former utilities. The ISO has transmission planners; so do the member utilities, and indeed, both organizations now have more planners than before the ISO ever existed, while the number of new "planned" facilities has only decreased. Edit 9/11: And ask yourself: has "reliability' been improved over the last fifteen years of the ISO existence when, today, a single contingency (the loss of a single 500kV line in Southern California), led to the largest blackout in the history of this state? I wonder what most ratepayers would think.

I see the same thing occurring with the smart grid. You, the electric ratepayer, are lulled into thinking that the grid is archaic and "rusting away," and you're bombarded with adverts by utilities, including SMUD, arguing the benefits of this smart grid. It has nothing to do with you, the electric ratepayer. It has everything to do with enabling SMUD and every other utility to increase their role in providing the services that they already provide. Take note how neither the California ISO nor SMUD explicitly states the economic benefits of their actions upon ratepayers. SMUDs latest annual report does not even remotely suggest that the "smart grid" will reduce rates; indeed, it's not supposed to. It's supposed to enable SMUD to become more relevant in providing their service. It's not as if we (the collective we) have to endure extended power outages. It's not as if we (the collective we) couldn't already respond to tiered energy pricing. Smart meters and the coming smart grid are intended to create dozens and dozens of positions within SMUD to manage the wireless networks to aggregate customer data, to manage the 18 additional terabytes of customer usage data, to hire and retain senior smart grid managers, to create an entirely new IT staff simply to stop hackers from fucking with the networks, to employ another group of people as contractors to maintain the AMI networking and to build and test these meters (although we can be assured the actual manufacturing will eventually migrate to Eritrea), to hire people to develop automated routines to restore power on the distribution network fourteen seconds faster than we already do, on and on and on.

And so ends my rant on the vaunted "efficiency gains" that the California ISO was to bring to electricity markets and the vaunted "efficiency gains" that the smart grid is supposed to bring to the physical electricity network. I will stop here, and allow you to accept smart metering into your life, allow you to remain enraptured by technology like you are with your new hot-shit 4-G cellularized telephone, allow you to accept the ~~flawed~~ notion that you are better off for them, all while passively accepting 2.9% annual rate increases ad infinitum on top of all other rate increases just for the right to access these "smart" privileges. While I might argue that the upper management of Silver Spring Networks will personally gain far, far more from the smart grid than will all of SMUDs ratepayers combined, I will end my rant and accept that this shit is coming and there's not much I can do about it. Sure, system reliability may increase through "smart grid solutions" that restore the system incrementally faster, but tell me if you are willing to pay 34% more for power that's already available 99.97% of the time for an additional 0.01% reliability improvement. Actually, it doesn't matter what you are willing to pay, you're going to pay it regardless, because corporations such as Silver Springs are far more influential in the debate than ratepayers and will either pay/bribe/influence board members/senior staff/politicians to sway development of the smarte grid that favor their positions.

I personally see smart grids as incrementally drawing your ratepaying wealth directly to me, an electrical engineer for an industry bent on becoming smarter. In that sense I suppose I ought to wholeheartedly whore for such "improvements" to our "outdated," "rusting," "nineteenth century" electric infrastructure. The more electric utilities are empowered to provide that electrical service, the more relevant my job becomes.

It's not just smart grid, either. I see the creation of the Balancing Authority of Northern California (BANC) as a way for SMUD to develop itself as a mini-California ISO, as a way to spend millions of dollars to save hundreds of thousands. A mini-ISO. Call it CAISO-West. Uh-huh. A mini-ISO formed by a distribution company that happens to own transmission. Sure, the benefits appear benign on the linked slide presentation, but take my commentary as well...and with a grain of salt please:

Strengthens local control and independence from the California ISO. Hmmm...if the CAISO was such a good fucking establishment as we've all been made to believe these last fifteen years, why, exactly, should SMUD seek to further distance itself from it? Shouldn't we seek to work even closer to this 620+ staffed behemoth rather than attempt to distance ourselves from it, particularly as we have no option but to interface with it every hour of every day? I do find it particularly revealing that if and when BANC develops itself as an independent entity, ~85% of its staff will come directly or indirectly from the CASIO. Uh-huh. A great way to strengthen its independence from it.
Reduces members' exposure to risks of NERC non-compliance. Hmmm...seems to me that SMUDs last two NERC audits were sterling, yet they have since hired several quarter-million dollar staff members, analysts and managers, oh, for various needs. That is -- SMUD will spend millions millions! over then next several years to manage the political risk of a few hundred thousand dollars in potential NERC fines that have yet to be levied and that will likely never be levied if staff members continue to do their fucking jobs and simply follow the NERC reliability standards. Political theatre, but hey, perception is indeed everything, and particularly perception that shines negatively on management, because you can be assured that the mitigation costs to prevent such direct public exposure to phantom fines will be without limit.
Gives MID, Redding and Roseville an ownership voice. Hmmm...seems to me that these smaller entities stand to lose in their association with BANC..assuming these phantom NERC violations ever come to light.

Just opinions, nothing more. I am obviously not a fan of the California ISO, smart grids, and the Balancing Authority of Northern California. In my small opinion, and make no mistake it is indeed small, they all seek to enrich a handful of individuals at the expense of ratepayers, to promote utilities' influence in providing electric service, and to empower utilities and their staff. But they are all led by influential individuals with individual mandates, and while on the surface these concepts may appear beneficial, I see them all as a simulacrum of noble purpose -- their real purpose is to support their own structures, their own efforts, to build their own empires. I would remind you that electric power provided by SMUD is a public good, that the introduction of these sorts of concepts into the delivery of that power ("unfettered markets," "long-run efficiencies of real-time electricity pricing," etc.) will be a net gain to a few and a net loss to the majority.

You don't have to take my word, the word of some semi-anonymous blogger; no, just review the history of deregulated electric markets in California (meltdowns) and review your own electric bill and review the fiscal carnage brought about by overlaying Borensein's electric market fundamentals upon housal unit market fundamentals. Time will prove me right -- these concepts will invariably produce a few winners and a whole lot of losers.

I saw the following occur at the California ISO:
and I see the very same thing occurring at SMUD. Based on my arguments above, you can easily gauge where I think we are on this timeline -- somewhere between maturity and bloat. Anyone not wearing blinkers can see the end game coming a thousand miles down the road...

If you think that the highbrow ideas of smarte grids, etc. have SMUDs ratepayers' best interests in mind, you are on the wrong fucking planet my friend. In the same vein, if you think corporations have the best interests of American consumers in mind, if you think that the immense profits skimmed from local communities aren't conferred to the elite enclaves of those who own the vast majority of this nation's financial assets but are instead conferred back to private investors or the public at large, you aren't going to find your way back to this third rock anytime soon.

Illigitimi Non Carborundum

2011-06-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

When I blogged the other day about my disdain for bicycle commuting, I did so for three distinct reasons. The first being that I am getting older, and riding doesn't come as easily as it once did. There's not much to be done about that I'm afraid, but I accept this and hopefully will be able to accept the fact that I will not be able to ride as much as I once did.

The other two facets, really, are things that are the reason this blog exists in the first place -- one being the other drivers on the road, and the other is how the road is funded.

It was a combination of me being tired and the "feel" of traffic the other day that ground me down. That day, with two bad drivers worthy of the finger and a host of others that also deserved it, I was worn down by those bastards, felt as if bicycle commuting was nothing but grinding work, not a pleasurable act whatsoever. But I've recently discovered that the "feel" of traffic is indeed a real phenomenon.

I've tried to pinpoint when and why traffic feels threatening and why it doesn't on other days -- maybe on full moons, on Mother's Day (the day EBT cards are credited), during hot weather, or based on some other specific reason...but I have never been able to find it. But it's there. Some days I get shirtless blacks feigning running me over in their Dodge Neons and white alpha-males racing past me in their Ford F250s, while most days this doesn't happen at all. It comes in clusters, or so I think. But it's not just me on a bike who's on the receiving end of these posturing male impulses from 159,000 years ago: my best friend also gets it on the San Fransisco Bay.

He noticed how, while anchored at Point Blunt off Angel Island on his sailboat, power boaters would accelerate around the point as soon as they notice him anchored, and would let off the power as soon as they knew their wake would no longer impact him, providing the greatest wake possible just to screw with him.

My friend at work with whom I goose hunt in the winter did the same thing against a female bicyclist on Tomales Rd. when we were driving from Pt. Reyes to Santa Rosa. He forgot for a moment that I was in the passenger seat, me, the outspoken commuter bicyclist, and mumbled how "she was going to eat my exhaust" as he punched it past her while giving no clearance whatsoever. "Do you suck or fuck?" was his rhetorical question to her as we raced past. Really, I had never been in such a situation before, but it became clear to me that alpha males, when alone or in groups inside the carapace of their own fossil-fuel powered vehicular units, intentionally create bad environments for non-motorized users of the roadway...or the waterway.

Today riding home was fun, because these sorts of people weren't present. They are out there, presumably, but they just weren't on Franklin Blvd. the same time I was today. I had the wind at my back, 89 degrees and no assholes on the road; a good day. It's days like today (and yesterday, too) that compel me to ride. And I do.

The second facet, that of how roads are funded, took another turn following the disclosure of the new California State "budget," passed onto the Governor to sign, which increases the vehicular unit registration fee another 12% to manage these "tough economic times."

One more reason why commuting by bicycle is a net economic loser, and why it's becoming increasingly hostile to even attempt it in this most golden of states. It should be obvious to most that 96.3% of those riding a bike to work cannot jettison their ownership of their cars; far from it, particularly in our land of low-density suburban sprawl where car ownership is compulsory for all and used for every facet of living by most. Riding a bicycle is but a hobby for me, and as you know, hobbies cost money; only interests are free. I go out and save the world by not driving and get screwed by the state to pay more to register a car that sits in my driveway. A real worthwhile endeavor, that bicycle commuting, eh? No -- can't charge the real users of the road through gasoline taxes; no, can't do that. We have to siphon tax dollars from the general fund to support the roadway and siphon car registration fees to refill the general fund. When we increase registration fees instead of user fees, the guy driving 34,000 miles per year in his Honda Civic to commute from Lodi to Sacramento pays the same as I do to use the road who drives 4,000 miles per year and who rides a bike.

I should hope that the bastards don't continue to wear me down...but there's precious little evidence to convince me that they won't still continue to do so...

Greatest American Hero

2011-06-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will mount the bicycle for the first trip of the week into work by human power. Both Monday and Tuesday I drove, both because I woke up so late as to miss the bus and to pick up a lighting device after work, something that isn't possible on a bicycle.

One reason why bicycle commuting will forever be a third-tier transportation medium -- you can really only transport yourself on one, nothing else.

Sure, on occasion my panniers are filled with produce from the CSA or other such wares but in reality it's obviously impossible to fill up your propane tank, to bring home a lawnmower from the service shop or to shop at Sears on a bicycle. Nowhere to attach a 20# tank to your bike, can't drag a lawnmower behind you, and Sears demands patrons drive as they don't have a single bike rack near any of their three entrances. The bicycle as a mode of transportation is really just a wealthy-white-boy concept here in America -- immigrants don't ride bikes, poor people don't commute on bikes, and women most certainly don't commute by bikes.

At least, Elk Grovian women don't. Never seen one in nearly twenty years of bicycle commuting. A fair number of Sacramentan women ride, yes, but they live in areas that are expensive and are near valid destinations. They reek of wealth. Bicycling is more a recreational function than a true mobility function for them.

No middle class Elk Grovian woman would be caught dead commuting by bicycle. Not caught dead. They are far too deserving and privileged to ride a bike, and if she's an immigrant woman, whoa! there's no way she'll be caught dead riding a bike. She immigrated for the precise reason not to ever have to pedal around under her own power again. I say it once more -- she didn't immigrate to America to ride a fucking bike.

Elk Grovians didn't move to Elk Grove to ride bikes, either. The median income prohibits it. Bicycling as a viable mode is really only for those with 2+ DUIs and those who can't afford the reasonable registration/insurance costs on a vehicular unit or two, and these types of people generally don't inhabit Elk Grove...at least not yet. Nonetheless, Elk Grove is slowing becoming such a "community," where $3.85 gas begins to interfere with our God Given Right to Perpetual Motoring. Some of us gasp! are actually beginning to use the e-tran bus services! Some are limiting their recreation use of motoring. This is a slap in the face to the energy intensive lifestyles of extreme suburban commuting that we've become ~~entitled~~ accustomed to.

This is a mad, mad world! $3.85 gas! Oh, shimmering future, where are you! Aren't our best days supposed to be ahead of us? Aren't we entitled to perpetually cheap energy?

I drove to work today as there was no other option available to me for the sin of having slept in an extra hour. I fought with traffic the entire way, while it was not lost on me that I was traffic, that if I weren't there driving to work, traffic would have been incrementally reduced. I took advantage of the drive and completed two errands that I couldn't do by bicycle, such as picking up that light. I merged the two activities of consumption and commuting, and for that I should be recognized as the Greatest American Hero, reducing my carbon footprint by combining trips and enabling our economy..you know, the one based on 70% consumption.

Yep. I am the Greatest American Hero. I drove. I consumed. I feigned environmental consciousness. I did everything I could do to support our American ideas. I am but a humble Hero, yes...

Engagement

2011-06-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

I am waiting for the heretofore unknown concept of peak oil. I'm anticipating it because if it were to happen, my expectation is that this nation of ours will fall to pieces as we are unaccustomed to any notion of resource shortages, but that we will emerge stronger, we will emerge a better nation, one suddenly willing to accept the strange notions of community and fraternity that have eluded us for the past several decades of our existence.

I asked the rhetorical question a few months ago here on my blog: suppose a Fukushima event occurred here; suppose a tsunami-style event occurred here in the Midwest, or the Southeast, or here in my Northern California. What, do you suppose the liklihood that community or fraternity would prevail over riots, lootings, and general disorderliness? I'd put all my marbles on the latter.

My gut feeling is that there'd be no order whatsoever, that we'd only consider number one, that we'd sooner fuck our neighbors out of any meager assistance such that our own excessive comforts are secured. This is the America that we live in, where we discount our neighbors, where we only look out for ourselves, where we will totally fail to accept any notion that community is stronger than individualism, that we might just persevere by joining together.

I do not recall any media coverage of looting in Shichigahama. I do not recall hearing about hordes of teenagers smashing windows in Matsugahama for all those Sony/Samsung flat screens in all those window displays. Perhaps because it never happened. Fifty bucks says that if a similar event occurred here, anywhere here in the U.S., we'd be reporting on the $40,000,000 in natural damage and the $52,650,000 in material losses due to theft, looting, and robbery.

I await a resource shortage so that we go through the arduous, painful process of exposing the hyper-individualism of our NASCAR-crazed populace for what they are as quickly as possible, so that we might sooner develop real communities, communities based on relationships instead of private automobiling, communities based on engagement rather than individualism.

The Nineteenth Floor

2011-06-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

I like to argue that I hold a manufacturing job here in the United States -- manufacturing electricity.

It's a pretty weak argument, but I do actually produce a physical something, a tangible good. I am engaged in the technical craft of protecting transmission lines, bulk power transformers and hydro power generators from destructive short-circuits. Without protection engineers there would be no power. There are no Mennonite protection engineers.

Compare this field with, say, a woman involved in raking fees and/or percentages from the financial churn of mortgage backed derivatives for a large investment bank on the nineteenth floor in some glass warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her profession can more suitably be referred to as extraction, rather than value-added production. Her livelihood is based on the skimming and churning and shuffling of digital digits representing the physical production of others inside a server-farm in Madison Park. She makes her living by having increased the cost of interest on a lath and plaster worker's mortgage, by enriching an already wealthy layer of managers and other financial winners including herself.

I recently watched a video of a production run at the JunTing power transformer production facility in China. The workers were shown layering the laminate steel core by hand. For emphasis, take note that this detailed level of manufacturing cannot be done by low-wage, low-skilled factory workers or robotic devices. Chinese labor is not just endless arrays of dour women in matching grey uniforms in football-field facilities sewing buttons on a 650,000 production run of apparel accessories for the next hot-shit doll for the 2011 American Christmas...although of course that does exist. No, it's not just that -- their manufacturing today is comprised of thousands of small facilities supporting an ever larger global industrial directive, which represents the loss of similar manufacturing jobs here.

Just as important is that the entire chain of assembly has also moved elsewhere, the entire value-added chain that feeds the worker layering the laminate steel -- steel manufacturers, insulation developers, tractor-trailer drivers, factory janitors and HVAC engineers...

In this nation we denigrate the skilled industrial worker and hail the CEOs of gaming software, smart phones, social media moguls and financial operators such as Citi and Chase as the only possible avenue for future wealth for our citizens. Germany and Japan have never lost on their skilled workforce. We've been doing it for forty years, through the new-found dominance of short term profiteering through quarterly earnings as the sole motivator. Fail to meet the next quarter estimates and management won't last long enough to pursue any long term capital investments in people or in facilities.

And then! Base your economy on housing and perpetual automobiling after you've fuckered away your manufacturing infrastructure. Develop new incentives in real estate financialization through favorable influences to government, such that the woman on the nineteenth floor can reap immense profits from the churn of perpetual re-fi's and HELOCs. Subsidize ever-larger, more wasteful homes on the suburban fringes by unlimited mortgage interest deductions, taxpayer funded road expansions and cheap gasoline, and fill them with non-productive citizens managing finance, insurance and real-estate related fields.

If you have any doubts that we've based our entire economy on the endless cycle of new housal units on the suburban fringe and the hollowing out of city cores through the wholesale dismantling of former productive jobs and the lack of investment in existing neighborhoods, then just review all the headlines of the last three years regarding "housing starts," Case-Shiller, and how far down from the hallucinated peak we are with respect to housal unit valuations.

I find this an enjoyable topic here on my little blog, because in many of the same ways we squander our energy, we also squander our future. I am a personal doomer -- prepared for the worst, but able to live comfortably in the moment. I like the idea of our "empire in decline." I like the notion that less than two out of every one hundred of my neighbors believe that our best days are still ahead of us. I've been positioning myself for the "best days are behind us" prospects for the last twenty years -- maintaining little debt, being more valuable to my employer than what they are paying me, holding physical assets, mentally equipped to live a lowered energy lifestyle as necessary, ability to ride a bike, ability to trade skilled woodworking labor with neighbors...

What, exactly, would those 2% be bullish about? Our $14,345,000,000,000 national debt and our $1,205,000,000,000 annual deficits? Double digit health care increases ad infinitum? Gas at horrors! $3.87? Some future economy based on vaporware or some other hot-shit 6-G smart phone? 43,000,000 on food stamps? Housal unit prices expected to crest 2006 valuations sometime in the spring of 2034? 120,000,000 new green jobs building windmills?

If you are one of those 2/100, what are you bullish about?

The Florin Adventure

2011-06-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

I am struggling to find enjoyment in the bicycle commute these days.

I had to take a different route the other day leading me into the left turn lane of Florin onto southbound Franklin, and what a zoo that was. The left turn signal only turns green after the thru-traffic on the right has been green for about 30 seconds, so there I am on my bike, trapped between stopped traffic to my left in the turn lane and 45-mph cars to my right.

There is no good that comes from bicycle commuting; I'm beginning to come to that realization. After six years on Franklin Blvd. and ten years before that in Elk Grove proper I'm reaching the end of the line with the bicycle. Elk Grove was not, is not, and will never be accessible by bicycle, ever. This I've known, but only now at my advanced age does it become more axiomatic.

Advanced age! Ha! Forty one! But yes, there's a complete difference than fifteen years ago when I could ride to Folsom somewhat comfortably compared to today where I can barely walk down the stairs first thing in the morning. I've some substantial left knee pain along with a right heel plantar fasciitis and then I'm just simply tired and weak and unwilling to do anything around the housal unit for the entire weekend.

The Florin Road adventure yesterday left me distraught, because for the first time ever I reached a point of disgust on the bike. Twice I couldn't contain myself and flipped off two separate drivers -- one who advanced in front of me and turned right into the Home Depot parking lot, cutting me off, and the second was right after the turn onto Franklin where a woman yelled at me for being in the road. "Fuck her," I muttered, and proceeded to raise the finger. She entered the Valero to gas up the Pacer, and it's problematic for me to now know that I'm likely forced to be doing the same as her going forward.

A point of disgust and total capitulation regarding my two-decades-long experiment with alternative commuting. I knew that someday I most certainly wouldn't have the legs to do it, yes, but right now I'm wrestling with both physical and mental issues.

If the mind isn't configured for bicycle commuting, well the legs don't really matter.

Nineteen Months

2011-06-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

Like adverts in an early-November newspaper ringed by sleigh bells and red ribbon, so too comes a presidential field well in advance of the actual election, still some nineteen months afar. Nineteen months.

We're going to have to watch Mobile Palin for that long? Romneycare attacks for nineteen months?

Palin indeed has a brilliant plant, though...creating the meme of a demoralized population living in hollowed out cities aching for a return to their former greatness. She most certainly can rile up hundreds of thousands of people whose manufacturing jobs have vanished overseas, never to return, or tens of thousands of families who've lost their homes, or who can't pay for $3.75 gas for their birthright to private automobiling fifty five miles a day. No problem with that, I suppose. It makes for good political theatre, particularly for someone who hasn't even announced her candidacy and who most certainly has no chance whatsoever in taking the GOP nomination. But man, nineteen out of every forty eight months in this nation we have to endure the slow torture of presidential politics. I kinda wish, by law, that campaigns were shortened; then, perhaps, lawmakers might get around to balancing budgets ha! or some other nonsense such as that.

Romney's announcement yesterday, among a crowd of exclusively-white New Hampshire geriatric residents, was indeed interesting. Not for the single race crowd directly, no, but rather for the indirect fact that we have a black president in office who needs to be removed not for being black no! but for being a socialist. Which I find compelling, because this crowd cannot and will not support socialism...except as it pertains to their Medicare, to their Social Security. Back off, all those who dare touch my entitlements!

You could argue the point that they've paid into these programs for life and now have the entitlement to receive benefits, but if you do the math, simple really, take note how within eight years of receiving the benefits as structured today their entire lifetime contributions have been exhausted and for every minute they live beyond they are on the public dole. Hmmm...sounds suspiciously like the government lavishing money on people who don't deserve it. In Palin's terms, "that sounds like socialism" (sound it out in your head with her Alaskan drawl, please.) But who, exactly, are the people whose money is being taken to be handed over to those who don't deserve it?

All those on Medicare?
All those on Social Security?
Wall Street?
The forty three million on food stamps?
Investment Bankers?
The 13.4 million unemployed, those on extended, extended, extended unemployment?
Our troops mired in endless decades-long wars?

None of them directly...but they are indeed handing money right back to themselves by way of a falling dollar and rising commodity prices as a consequence of their entire set of county, state and federal governments hopelessly broke. They pay for $3.50 gas horrors! yet get paid back with a food debit card. They pay for a $1.09 fast food taco horrors! but get paid back with week seventy eight's unemployment check.

Taxes on the middle class have only been reduced this year. I'm paying, as you are, 2% less this year thanks to the great compromise. We're hardly being taxed to death to support all those transfer payments to those who don't deserve it. I'm spending my 2% buying Chinese made shit, making sure Americans never again never! have to work in icky, icky manufacturing jobs. Nope, I'd say that I'm already doing my part for this nation, and yes, I'm willing to help out some more.

I'm helping out, yes, as I receive two shiny Lincoln cents each year for every ten dollars I save thanks to the bailing out of our investment banks, and I will surely get to watch my retirement savings melt away under inflation (or deflation, take your pick) that's sure to come once Moody's and our other stellar credit ratings agencies (you know, the ones who accurately bestowed AAA ratings on all those wholly defunct collateralized debt obligations) downgrade our nation's treasurys.

This is the perfect time to be debt free. I'm not completely debt free, but I'm not all that far away. The perfect time to not have to worry about being taxed to death to support all of you who don't deserve it -- I can handle it. But what I'm really going to struggle with is each one of these next...long...arduous...nineteen months.

The New American Standard

2011-05-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

Nature blessed me with a bladder roughly the size of a Rainier Cherry. I visit the latrine many times more often than the average Joe, and since the installation of my new dual flush toilet I have been saving around 0.6 gallons per flush compared to the 1.6 gallons used per flush for the last twenty years in this housal unit. I'd wager since Saturday about 5 gallons have been saved. Not too bad.

It should come as no surprise, no surprise at all, that my new American Standard dual flush toilet tank was made in Mexico and the bowl was imported from China. Yep -- this is the new American Standard for you -- a nation comprised chiefly of has-been manufacturers, now demoralized and underemployed service sector wage slaves working in mass retail warehouses on the suburban fringes while living in bombed out, hollowed out cities -- well, this applies to those who can actually find service jobs. Wages have been flat since the end of the Great Recession -- no surprise there, as four people pining for the same job opening creates incentives for employers to pay out less. It's a seller's market in the industry of jobs.

I'm still taken aback that a 60# toilet bowl can still be more cost effective to be manufactured in China and shipped 9,200 miles to my water closet rather than somehow being manufactured here. If I wanted a dual flush unit, I had no option available to me but to buy imported as there was only one model available.

I think the name American Standard for a product made in China is perfectly acceptable, as it is the most correct designation for all the things we purchase these days. And you can see American Standard's point -- good fucking luck trying to sell a toilet in California called a Shih Tzuhan Standard even though this would be a more correct name. We buy Chinese made junk, yes, but only when we can conveniently ignore that it's Chinese by pretty packaging with the word American in 150 Times New Roman font on the box.

I still cannot believe that a 60# porcelain bowl is still cheaper to import. Well, I suppose my Buy China program had a significant addition this weekend. Recall that my goal with my 2% payroll tax deduction for 2011 was to buy imported shit from China, further eroding our manufacturing base and making this nation effectively poorer...although I'm doing OK, as I'm in a professional position actually manufacturing something that cannot be outsourced.

I'd be an idiot to save this 2% social security windfall, because not only would I not receive any return on it thanks to our Fed-engineered investment bank bailouts and 0% interest rates, it will only work against me in 2028 when I try to retire and my assets will be deemed "substantial," reducing my Social Security benefit under means-testing that will sure to be installed by then to manage the crippling insolvency of our government.

I'm glad to have bought a Chinese shitter, glad to have helped turn a former $19/hour American Standard factory employee into a $13/hour big-box forklift operator moving pallets of Chinese made American Standard toilet bowls. Glad to help!

This is the New American Standard.

We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us

2011-05-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend for me usually involves the burning of petroleum. Lots of it. If I wasn't trying to take advantage of the hot weather and to get out on the river, I'd fire up the barbecue. If I wasn't driving to a new campsite, I'd burn oil on a long visit elsewhere.

Not this weekend, though. I stayed home and didn't burn oil directly. Instead I burned oil invisibly, through the installation of myriad items for the housal unit and ribs on the barbie. Instead of using charcoal lighter fluid I used a new chimney-style fire starter for the first time (and indeed, I will be using this thing forever, where has this been all my life?). The ribs? Who knows: they were likely shipped in by diesel truck from a processing plant in Greeley, CO after the animal was raised on corn on some Nebraskan feedlot...about as energy intensive as you can get.

Thing is, there's this tremendous background energy use in the way we do things here just to feed me, and I feed myself some pretty bad things. I tried to counter future heart disease from these beef ribs with a large green cabbage salad, reducing the chances of future colon cancer. I have no ability to grow food myself, not without chopping down several large trees that would completely offset the loss of food energy inputs by increasing my cooling costs. I am totally and completely subjected to the whims of our global food supply network. Shrimp from Vietnam, cherries from Fresno, tomatoes from a hothouse in Canada, Mexican cantaloupes, wheat from Eastern Washington state, beans from Louisiana...on and on.

I only barely scratch the surface with some locally grown produce, but the bulk of my food supply is awash in cheap fossil fuels.

Again, I'm not going to be made to feel guilty for this -- this is simply a function of the way we've built things here -- extreme energy intensity is built into all our social and physical arrangements in this nation. I may personally feebly try to reduce my own consumption, yes, but in the grand scheme of things I can only reduce my own direct consumption efforts, my end-use efforts.

That said, I didn't directly burn much energy this weekend, the so-called start of the driving season. Admittedly, I've not once ever spent this weekend memorializing fallen soldiers, not once. Ever. Historically, Memorial Day for me has always been about consumption, and this weekend is no different. I can pick up my Sunday Bee and spend the rest of this morning thumbing through sales events at virtually any consumptive depot, and spend the rest of this day driving around to these depots to save a few dollars on any number of things. There will be a lot of blue, red and white displayed on these ads, yes, as the message is clear: "Consume, American." I am absolutely doing my part.

In the background of all our barbecues and our parades and the Indy 500 this weekend lies wanton energy consumption, either directly or indirectly consumed. Every American holiday is not complete without the gross consumption of resources -- Easter and Halloween candy/lawn ornaments, Christmas gifts, 4th of July fireworks, on and on. Pogo said it best in 1971 for a poster for the first Earth Day festival. Now some forty years later it still rings true -- we have met the enemy, and he is us.

People-less Cities

2011-05-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

“The motorcar shapes and forms. Mutilates and deforms might be better words. We have the naïve belief that we can satisfy the demands of the automobile by building more expressways, building bigger expressways, by widening existing streets, by trimming sidewalks. We are exchanging the meaningful and varied life of the cities for our increasingly monotonous life on wheels. The heart of the city should be served chiefly by rapid transit, buses, taxis and above all the human foot. The choice is clear and urgent: Does the city exist for people, or for motorcars?” -- Lewis Mumford, 1963.

"Does the City of Elk Grove exist for people, or for motorcars?" -- Insania, 2011.

I'm pretty sure we've already answered both these questions...

Smart Toilets

2011-05-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

I've done every fool thing I could think of over the past six weeks, spending money hand over fist, acting like a standard American consumer. New windows for the housal unit, new wall studs, new fascia, a gallon of paint, a gallon of primer, twenty tubes of caulk, a new timer for the secret garden, a few new tools...and two new toilets.

The toilets weren't planned. I had a major street-side clog Tuesday that flooded the downstairs bedroom/closet/bathroom, resulting in a broken toilet while trying to gain access to the drain to powersnake it all the way to the street.

I had already decided that I was one-day going to get a high tank toilet for the downstairs...I just didn't know it was going to be so soon.

There are a few reasons for this extravagance. One -- this thing is handmade here in California, and sold through a local restoration store on Elvas Ave. in Sacramento. I am employing a local woodworker, much like myself...that is...if I actually did that for a living instead of a hobby. Two -- "have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" -- William Morris. I think this device satisfies both ideas.

That quote is something that I used to hold dearly, but over time I've lost much of that belief, what with the hub-bub of daily living; however, I am attempting to return to a housal unit worth living in. In much the same way I wish I had a neighborhood worth living in, too, but there's little I can personally do to change the arrangement I live in. What I can do is to maintain the exterior of my unit, to make it look nice, so that people who actually walk by recreationally have something to look at other than broken roof tiles and broom handles propping up fence panels. Or, as people visit, they'll have the enjoyment of pulling a handle on a ninety year old device.

I countered this new toilet with a dual-flush device to be installed in the upstairs bathroom. In 2009, my last visit to Germany, I remember wondering how to flush that damn toilet in the hotel room, but my mammalian curiosity quickly took hold and I discovered the low flow rate for liquids and higher flow rate for solids. Brilliant. Yet, as I scoured the usual places yesterday for a dual flush unit sold in the U.S. here mid-2011, I find only one dual flush model against forty other regular single flush units.

If we are so damn uptight about the conservation of resources these days, I wondered why I had to wait three years to see a dual flush unit even show up for sale here in this country. I wonder why, if we're mandating the use of CFLs, why we don't also mandate that 50%+ of all toilets sold be dual-flush, saving scores of billions of gallons each year, water that requires heroic inputs of energy to treat, distribute, and then just flush away.

Nope. I guess smart-shitter doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as neatly as smart grid, and indeed, because smart-shitters won't cost billions to develop the infrastructure as will the smart grid, they don't empower anyone such as a local electric utility. I've maintained that the smart grid is all about expanding the role the electric utility has in providing that service; only secondarily does it have to do with expanding the role the consumer has in accessing their electricity. It will cost billions and save billions, nothing gained, except that Silver Springs Networks and the like will employ thousands of IT professionals needed to manage the smart grid. No IT guy will be needed for a smart-shitter; no corporation will need to wirelessly access your water closet. As dual flush toilets don't require the enabling of companies like Google or Trilliant or GE to develop such things as home-area-networks to enable smart dishwashers and the like, they aren't mandated by law like CFLs and smart meters are...at least not yet.

Nonetheless, I didn't have the opportunity to buy a high-tank/dual-flush unit. Someday I might be able to, but I'm not crossing my legs waiting.

Forty Five

2011-05-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've oft mentioned here on The Franklin Monologues just how many Elk Grovians choose to treat Franklin Blvd. as their own mini-NASCAR oval. Although Franklin Blvd. is anything but an oval, it being a semi-major 45mph north-south collector road for a few thousand thru-commuters, many of my neighbors love to open up their minivans, sub-compacts, and SUVs up and down Franklin as they pretend they're Kyle Busch of NASCAR fame, passing competitors to grab that checkered flag at the end -- the flags being their 3,200 sq ft starter mansions off Whitelock Parkway.

Coincidentally, the same thing occurred last Sunday in Newton, Iowa as my dad was trying to return home from a long east-coast trip. He telephoned me as he was under siege from throngs of NASCAR fans pining for the Nationwide Series Race. Although Kyle Busch wasn't racing there in Iowa that Sunday, he was racing a new sports car and got carried away in North Carolina, ticketed for going 128 mph in a 45 mph zone...on a street probably not much different than my Franklin Boulevard.

These are the sorts of people who kill other people with such acts. In some sense, and I'm sincere here, I almost wish that this Busch would have either killed himself, wound up paralyzed, or better yet, injured or killed another North Carolinian while driving his new car at 130 on what was [presumably] a suburban collector road. It had a posted limit of forty five -- just like my Franklin Blvd. It would have been good for the sport of NASCAR (in my myopic view) if one of its crowing jewels would have had to be extracted from the shell of his now-totaled hot-shit vehicular unit, air-lifted to the regional medical facility, and handcuffed to the bedrail while having his rights read to him regarding the four counts of vehicular manslaughter he's about to be indicted for. So much for the perpetual reputation of speed-without-limit, that NASCAR should find its way alongside public schools and residential neighborhoods every hour of every day.

I post this alongside a few thousand other on-line commentators who echo similar thoughts, as can easily be found on myriad chat rooms and newspaper comments. This is barely newsworthy and hardly warrants a post to begin with, really, considering that several thousand of us do this everyday as it is, and that he'll never be properly held accountable for his stupidity. Not that I could escape jail time if I were to drive three times the speed limit on Franklin, but Kyle obviously can, as I'd wager the North Carolina trooper likely pursued an autograph for his wife, his 9-year old future speedracing son, and to hang an autographed 5x7 in his locker at the precinct. "After all, it's not every day you get Kyle Busch!! coming through our little burg! Hee-Haw!"

Perhaps someday a former NASCAR "professional" will indeed get smashed at a local bar and plow himself underneath a flatbed tractor-trailer...perhaps it's already happened. I enjoy watching racing, yes -- indeed, I'm all set for the Indy 500 this weekend; however, I'm not prepared for it here on Franklin Blvd. in Elk Grove, but as a car dependent species we love to open up our rigs, love to get from B to A as fast as humanly possible. Busch is just mirroring a larger public infatuation with recklessness with our motorized toys.

Sub-Four

2011-05-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

Well, as I predicted, gasoline here along Franklin Blvd. has dropped to under four bucks a gallon before the end of May. That North African "democracy" was forcing us to pay another nickel per tank, well, we most certainly us consumers weren't terribly interested in promoting the freedoms of those oppressed, now were we? If it causes us pain at the pump, well, no democracy is worth that.

I indeed find it intriguing how we assume the Libyans and Egyptians are fighting for democracy -- I'd bet it has more to do with a whole lot of people trying to ensure yet one more day without food shortages. We flatter ourselves thinking that they're rioting in Syria and elsewhere for our two party form of paralyzed governance, two cars in every driveway and two dollar gasoline. Please.

I don't consider myself eco-guilty. While I am aware that based on my affluence and the technology that surrounds me I consume a greater share of the world's resources than the rest of humanity, I do not allow that to create guilt. I have tried to reduce my footprint, yes, but really more for personal reasons rather than some lofty, globalized vision for a carbon-free world. I am hamstrung in any serious quest to reduce resources because I live in Elk Grove-- with its stupendous infrastructure that demands the use of a private automobile for every facet of living. This is among the most energy intensive lifestyles possible...and we flatter ourselves thinking that 23-year old Egyptians in Tahrir Square are rioting for the right to consume 23-barrels of oil each year as we do.

Their demands are much more profound.

Meanwhile, we're getting our reprieve from those icky, icky high gas prices, and as such our interests in the affairs of the Middle East and North Africa is waning while our attention drifts back to the top two finalists who are now vocaling it out on Idol...or take your pick from our vast catalogue of reality programming. If we don't hear another peep from North Africa, meh.

A Domestic Affair

2011-05-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, three of us commissioned two new 230kV transmission lines into the Elk Grove substation, doubling the number of lines that have fed the entire region since 1990. We now have four lines and six breakers feeding the city, whose electric use yesterday afternoon was 150 MW (150,000 kW).

Last year, a particular switching arrangement led to the entire city being fed through a single circuit breaker, and had it opened or otherwise failed (which they do), well, the two transformers that feed the city would have deenergized, dropping (my guess) 55,000+ customers. So we elected to loop-in another line into the substation that used to run from Rancho Seco to Hedge -- Now we have the new Rancho Seco - Elk Grove #2 and the new Hedge - Elk Grove #2 lines, vastly increasing the dependability of serving load in my little burg.

And with all these computers (like this one), HDTVs, cellularized telephone charging units, streetlamps and indoor marijuana ~~farms~~ gardens, well, Elk Grove's per capita use is most certainly higher than the City of Sacramento. And wait until SMUD starts emitting greenhouse gasses on your behalf when you climb into your Nissan Leaf thinking you're producing zero emissions -- those two new transmission lines will be needed to power all our future cars from remote natural gas fired turbines...and yes, from a pittance of wind and solar, too.

The interesting news is that electric cars, if produced domestically, would have entire energy life cycles that remain domestic -- electricity is most certainly a domestic affair, as we have little need to import energy to supply the electricity. I don't think unit coal trains are coming from Canada, but I may be wrong about LNG; some may be brought in by supertanker, offloaded in Tijuana and piped to natural gas turbines generating electricity for Southern California consumers. I guess electricity is mostly a domestic affair, which is a good thing for a nation who cheerily and intentionally hollowed out its own domestic manufacturing capacity to save a few dollars on a hair dryer -- electric power cannot be outsourced.

Thus, so long as I do my job well as a protection engineer (and I think I do OK) I should have a job for life, regardless of the economic cycles around me. I think if we melted down into a depression, or if peak oil prevents perpetual GDP growth going forward, or if we grow our economy by 6% per year ad infinitium we will all still want our electricity, to some degree or another.

I have never once seen an electron. I can't even be so sure they even exist, but I do have faith that my instruments are indeed measuring something. Yes, even atheistic engineers have to have some degree of faith. I have to take the work of Maxwell and Gauss and Tesla on faith as I've never performed those experiements myself. That I engineer the movement of an invisible product and get you to send me money to buy that invisible product, well, I'm more like clergy than engineer.

The Neighborhood

2011-05-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Still going strong, there's 5 full pages of notices of defaults in my local Elk Grovian newspaper this week. I'm pretty sure the Elk Grove Citizen paper is hanging on largely due to the revenue produced by banks (or whoever it is) that are required to post these in a public record three times. It's good news for newspapers and banks...bad news for homeowers.

Yep, you read that right -- home owers. The notices this week were varied, from 2004 to 2009. I wonder how it is that there are people who managed to pay on a mortgage for almost eight years and now are going to foreclose. I will never know the individual circumstances, but I'd wager that cash-out refinancing had just a little something to do with it.

While failing to pay a mortgage may be something of a moral issue, it is exactly what we should expect given the way we reward behavior in an economic system built for private gain. The consequence of this is why, in my little Elk Grovian "neighborhood," we'll have a nicely manicured lawn right next door to four foot tall weeds with a leaning "for sale" sign and "default notices" in the windows. Neighbors are not necessary in such an economic environment; they mean nothing.

When neighbors mean nothing there really is no concept of a neighborhood any longer, yet we still call it this for some reason. I suspect that most of us don't want to interact with those directly around us, and it's quite interesting to observe. But I do believe that it has more to do with the way we've arranged suburbia than most people would argue, even though people don't want to interact with their neighbors in mid to large cities, either. We don't have to. So we don't.

I've spent the better part of the last two weeks on my roof fixing dry-rotted fascia around several new windows. This morning I can hardly walk down the stairs, having gone up and down the ladder fifty times yesterday. We had a significant water ingress problem over all our south facing exposure which led to the removal of interior sheet rock to replace damaged structural studs.

From a person who genuinely values maintenance, I deferred it until it became somewhat more expensive to repair. Granted, it was going to be expensive regardless, but had I addressed the bad fascia 5-8 years earlier it may have been just fascia. My point is, I have a bad feeling about the rest of my neighborhood (filled with unknown neighbors), now 20 years old, and I wonder about the condition of others' housal units filled with people who care even less about maintenance or who simply are in so much mortgage debt that maintenance is the last priority. My experience is that those with means will simply find newer units to move to, because as the neighborhood is meaningless anyway and as maintenance is a difficult and constant undertaking, it's easier to simply move farther out to the newer units. And my experience is that absentee landlords, whether they be banks or actual humans, perform the absolute minimum, too.

What will my neighborhood become in another ten years?

Guaranteed

2011-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

"It's axiomatic that the more weary you feel the more kindly you look on fossil fuel." -- Michael Pollan

This is exactly what took hold of me yesterday, Friday, as I intended to mount the bike for yet another slog into work but I just couldn't do it. I slept in a little longer and commuted by the Silverado Chariot instead.

I had no other viable option -- the last E-tran bus left at 7:34, I wasn't going to ride the bicycle, the next RT bus was a full 55 minutes away, so I drove. Ho-hum. Just another day in suburbia, I told myself, as I motored out of the driveway towards work. I was physically tired from the bike riding earlier in the week, and most certainly I felt kindly towards the benefit fossil fuel provided. I would have done the same thing had it been $8 instead of $4. I had zero consideration for the cost of my fuel, directly or indirectly.

Which is too bad. I continue to fall into this complacency mode, as do most of us, yes, but I continue to fall into it more and more the older I get. I have not the energy to ride 5 days a week (I've only ever done that once) and 4 days a week is a fucking chore. Three is about the max...and sooner than later two is going to be the new norm as I approach 50. That is, so long as I still have legs and a back that work that won't get broken from a car-bike accident. That is, so long as I have lungs that still pump oxygen that won't sullen from automobile exhaust.

I am hopeful that my personal and expected fossil fuel allotment guaranteed to me as an American (24 barrels per year, or 1,872 barrels over my lifetime) will be available as I wane into my sunset years. I've not burned as many during my formative years as have my contemporaries, so I should hope they will be made available to me as an elder.

To Catch A Thief

2011-05-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'd say that my electric utility has about 1.5 break-ins per month at our bulk substations, people cutting a hole in the chain link to steal copper.

There's a fair amount of visible copper in any substation, as each metal structure is grounded via a 4/0 or larger copper cable. These are cut off, yielding about two feet of grade-A copper each, which at, say, one pound each would yield $4, enough for three 24-oz cans of 211 malt liquor. Yeah, baby. While we may store rolls of aluminum wire and conductor at a substation, we'd never store any copper outside as it would grow legs in less than a fortnight.

The obvious problem with these thefts is that the equipment is no longer grounded, which could lead to a ground potential rise during a fault that'll kill anyone in contact with the ungrounded gear. Not a likely event, no, but one that we always protect for. The same thieves can do the same thing on nearly every utility pole -- we always have a copper ground wire running the length of the pole, so that lightning arresters have a path to ground when conducting. Someone with an axe or a hatchet can easily chop off a 7-foot section of copper at the base and as high as they can swing. Utilities generally cover the copper ground wire with a wooden U-channel simply to keep the copper out of view, but many people know it's there.

This sabotage at $4/copper highlights one of the things we'd experience in mass volumes if this nation underwent an economic depression, or if commodities rose up even more. Infrastructure of all sorts would be subjected to thieves, cars couldn't be left outside on the curb lest their fuel lines be cut and gasoline drained into five gallon buckets, on and on.

I'm taken aback at my local news this evening, highlighting two thugs with a modified van stealing 400 gallons of diesel, as diesel is so expensive.

My question is, are fuel thefts rampant in Europe where petrol is twice as expensive as ours? I recall not once seeing any hint of that when I was there twice over the past six years, not that I really would see it to be sure, but no, I wasn't made aware of it when I was renting a car, for example -- the lady behind the counter didn't warn me to keep the car garaged or some shit like that. No, I'd wager that at $7 a gallon in Europe theft still isn't a big deal...yet we can't even handle four dollars. This is America for you. Wonder what it'll be like when it goes to $6.

We have a huge maintenance bill on our infrastructure. Think about how much oil is used everyday to maintain hydroelectric generation stations, to move fuel rods for nuclear plants, to repave a thousand odd miles of old road every week, to inspect power lines, to maintain gas pipelines, to perform levee repairs. We've spent an entire century building this stuff and I'd bet that we blow a million barrels of oil each day out of our consumption of twenty million barrels just to maintain it, let alone use it.

This is why we need a higher level of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) in this nation than virtually every other. If/when energy becomes scarce and more expensive, we will have to blow expensive energy just to keep the sound walls erected between the suburban subdivisions and their freeways. If we move to electric cars, do you think we'll still even need all those tens of thousands of miles of 16-ft cinder block/concrete/steel sound walls we've built? How much oil will we have to burn to power the backhoes and dump trucks to remove all those broken, unmaintained walls in 45 years time?

Our energy intensive lifestyles are the real energy thieves.

The Second Coming

2011-05-06T18:50:00.001-07:00

My sister-in-law disclosed her $400 per month gasoline bill to shuttle herself from South Sacramento to Rocklin 5 times a week for work. $400 a month.

This in a Ford Explorer, a rig that was pretty cheap to operate when they purchased it in 2006 at the height of our hallucinated economic boom, when gas was what, $2.39 & 9/10ths? Even if gas drops 50% to $2 a gallon (which is highly probable) it'll still cost two bills to operate each month.

The job in Rocklin wasn't part of their program in 2006, part of the cheap oil lifestyle. And even if commuting to Rocklin was part of their everyday living back then, well, $2 gas was just a simple cost of doing so, much like tires and oil...just another small expenditure to live the hypertrophic extreme auto dependent Californian lifestyle.

I wonder. How many Rocklinites grind out commutes to Sacramento each day to work at $22 an hour jobs? I'd wager that more make that commute, because Rocklin living is far superior to Sacramento living. It's the wealthy suburbs. It's beyond Roseville, the red-headed stepchild of Sacramento. Rocklin residents are superior in every metric: higher per-capita income, higher white-collar crime but far, far lower liquor store hold-ups, $37k imported sedans are the norm rather than $19k domestic minivans...life is...simply...superior in Rocklin. No mixed race issues to bugger things up, no visible drunks, just affluent people who look like everyone else living the good life, drinking Chablis on the porches of $445k custom housal units. The way life ought to be.

The commute in and out of Rocklin is a total bitch on the best of days and slit-your-wrists on, say, Tuesday afternoons as everyone tries to motor along two-lane collector roads to get in and out of all those myriad cul-de-sacs...living at its finest. Then! The commute down I-80 through that chockablock Roseville turn! $400 a month in gas is nothing, nothing! to $135k/year real estate professionals, financial planners and insurance saleswomen. Their FIRE jobs can easily support $10 gasoline, if need be. So long as they are able to stay one step away from urban dwellers (a politically correct codeword) they are willing to pay any price for gas to keep them isolated.

I argue these points, not because I'm in awe of what these people have that I don't. What, a pair of leased BMW's in the driveway of a $445k custom housal unit with a mortgage balance of $311,257 remaining? Sorry, I'm not in awe. I argue these points because cheap energy allowed many more of us to economically segregate ourselves miles and miles away from each other. They don't ever have to mix with people who don't look like them...and truthfully, I could easily see their point. However, what passes for community is eroded down even further with such living arrangements, and while sheltered in 3,100 sq ft units with granite countertops and gold plated showerheads feels safe, it is incredibly energy intensive.

And completely unsustainable.

I still believe, in the same way that many believe in a spooky invisible father figure, that we are reaching the limits of growth in energy. We won't run out of energy; no, but the costs of growing our energy supply to support Rocklin commuters and indeed commuters of all sorts is likely going to become prohibitive for many. It is a belief, yes. I can observe things around me and form some opinions. And I believe that with the observable North Sea, Mexican Cantrell, Indonesia and the Alaskan North Slope all producing less and less oil each day going forward, while China and Brazil and India and Bangladesh and South Korea all trying to mature their economies on a western-style approach (read: cars, cars, and more cars), we are going to reach the limit of maximum extraction. Demand will exceed supply, and the moment that occurs, we'll be locked into an oscillating price run up, demand destruction, price drop, increased production, price run up even further, and on and on.

Holding this belief is like waiting for the second coming. It is very nearly a religion of sorts, yes, because I'm taking the word of a few thousand petroleum experts on faith, in much the same way parishioners do.

But as I do hold this belief, I am trying to adjust today for an expensive energy tomorrow. I am one to believe that if it costs $400 a month for gasoline today to commute to Rocklin five days a week, if energy doubles in price tomorrow, even buying a fuel efficient car won't offset the total cost of living this way. Now you've got a $400/month car payment for six years in addition to a $200 fuel bill. These aren't the things I want to face, and so I've learned to sit next to Asians, Blacks and other Whites on the bus. Contrary to the prevailing Rocklin opinion, you won't get knifed or mugged. I've learned to ride a bike. Contrary to the prevailing Rocklin opinion, cars aren't all that dangerous -- it's the pedestrians and wrong-way bicyclists who are the most dangerous. Not to mention, a twenty-nine mile one-way bicycle commute from Rocklin into Sacramento is hardly something you'd be able to sustain for any length of time.

I am awaiting the increase in energy as you may be awaiting the second coming. One substantial difference is that we've had two energy shakedowns in the '70s that portends another one. I guess you could argue that hurricanes and tornadoes portend the second coming, yes. But I do see another storm looming on the horizon...

Not One Thing Different

2011-05-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

Gasoline prices have peaked and they are on their way down. Enough with the unrest in North Africa, the "fear premium" is overdone. We're going to see sub-$4 gas here along Franklin Blvd. by the end of the month, methinks.

As it has been, as it is, and as it soon shall be, prices rise and fall over time and we yank our chains as they do because it's the thing to do. The thing is, gasoline is $8 a gallon in Europe and all their cars are predominately fueled by petrol. So it'll take a whole lot more than $4 gas to get us slovenly, out of shape, overweight Americans to drive anything other than big cars to get us around for every time horizon I can possibly imagine. The notion that we can tax the excessive profits of a few multinational oil companies who produce a sliver of the world's production and expect a wholesale change towards renewables is among the most naive suppositions imaginable. We're going to use gasoline to power our automobiles all the way through $20 a gallon and beyond, and if the poorer among us can't afford it, well, they'll simply be the first to be priced out of private personal automobiling.

The Chinese aren't building electric cars and electric scooters for their burgeoning suburban middle class, either. Gas is still the preferred energy medium.

Come on. I didn't change one fucking thing, not one, between $2 and $4, to curb my energy use and neither did you. We all grudgingly accepted the increase and simply didn't spend that money elsewhere. The same thing will happen in 2013 when gas rises to $5. It will still be cheaper than bottled water, so we won't bother with changing our behavior.

It will have to get a whole lot more expensive for us Americans to do anything about our profligate energy use. A whole lot more expensive...and that's years away...

Apps to Save Gas

2011-05-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

Always looking for ways to save a few cents, eh? Try this hot-shit new app for your cellularized telephone, Bankrate's gas calculator.

It'll let you know if the distance to travel to that station with gas at $0.04 less than your normal station is worth the trip. You might just spend more in gas to get there and back than you'd have saved.

I wonder why we need smart phones to tell dumbass Americans that it's going to be a net loss to drive an extra nine miles to fill at a cheap station because a GasBuddy! told us so. And I wonder if this Bankrate calculator also factors in how much gasoline you're burning while idling at the side of the road entering in all this information into your smart phone, with the air conditioning on, with the windows down...

This is why I love America...

Carbeque

2011-05-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

Two interesting items during today's bicycle ride into work. First, the carbeque at 41st and Franklin. As I was downwind of it I began smelling burning plastic a good 3/4 mile away, and approached a fire truck just finishing the dousing of said SUV. Totalled, as all carbeque's are, but unlike the movies they just burn hot, they don't explode. This is the third carbeque I've witnessed in my life...another one here near my Franklin Blvd.

Two miles up the road I had to "take my lane" to pass this teenager on a bicycle with another teen on the handlebars. Oddly, they were going in the correct direction (going with traffic) as most teens are never taught to do. I passed them and in doing so, was bitched out by a car's driver who yelled at me to ride on the sidewalk. He possessed such powers of observation that he failed to notice that there wasn't one there on that section of MLK Jr. Blvd. He also failed to respect the law that states that I have the right to take the lane, I have the right to do what I did, so fuck him. But as I was trying to get past that confrontation, the two teens on the one bike came out of nowhere and hit me from the back left and I almost wiped out. I regained my ride, but these two knuckleheads ate pavement having flipped over the front wheel after it hit my bike. I got to witness a pretty cool faceplant on the roadbed.

That looked pretty damn painful! But I didn't stop; no, they didn't announce the attempted takeover, I was already back in the lane, they were already on their way down to the asphalt by the time I even knew what was going on, they weren't wearing helmets and it's almost to be expected when you're riding on handlebars that you're gonna eventually get yourself into trouble.

My first "accident" in over 5 years, and wouldn't you know it, I got hit by a bike instead of a car.

You Must Be The Change To See It

2011-05-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

I've been left wondering what happened to the global warming discussion. Many others have as well. How is it that a topic that not five years ago seemed unstoppable, that we were finally going to get mandates for reducing carbon emissions enacted on a global scale, is today foundering in a rising ocean of distrust and failed cooperation?

Today it's not even referred to as global warming anymore; no, call it climate disruption, which is a "more appropriate" term to explain to those looking for answers in the aftermath of a dozen Alabama tornadoes.

What I believe, and indeed it's just a little opinion on a monologists web log, is that it failed because the representatives for the movement refused to adopt the low-energy alternatives they argued the rest of humanity had to follow. Understandably so -- I find myself arguing against the unsustainable lifestyle of suburbia while blogging comfortably from within its realm. I refuse to take meaningful actions regarding the profligate use of energy to support my suburban life...the only life I've ever known...

Yeah, I attached a couple of solar panels on the roof, and yeah, I bicycle to work 3-4 days a week. I've only partially adopted a less energy intensive living arrangement. I have no illusions about how I'm nowhere near a break-even energy lifestyle and I'd argue that the inertia of my existing way of life is still far too much to overcome.

I would argue, nonetheless, that to get on a bicycle and commute 88 miles a week is a step very, very few other Elk Grovians will ever take. The inertia of extreme auto dependency is just as powerful. It has become so powerful that Elk Grove mothers routinely forbid their children from walking and cycling to destinations that, when they were children themselves, were easily accessible via these modes, and instead are now shuttled about in three-ton Yukons for the sake of their children's safety.

To take that first stroke on the bicycle pedal is the hardest stroke to engage -- "you must be the change to see it," as Gandhi would have said. To mount a bicycle to commute to work is an active action, signalling a change to an entire lifetime of car dependency. But this is the one thing that we don't do, but it is the one thing that actually matters. This blind spot is what's plaguing the climate change movement and what's leading to riotous outcry over $4 (and someday, $5) gasoline.

I am taking baby steps, but they are important steps nonetheless. I simply cannot yet afford the high prices commanded by walkable, human scaled, transit oriented neighborhoods in Sacramento. Until I can, I'll continue to mount my 11-lb aluminum chariot, and I hope you wave to me as you drive by me on Franklin Boulevard.

Don't Demand It

2011-04-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

As oil is a global product, how is it we should expect our government, one government among three hundred others, to be able to do something about the price of gas?

Outside of the $.18 per gallon federal tax which I suppose could be altered, the price of crude is set on the world market. Peruvians are paying the same price for a barrel of crude as are Moroccans as are the Chinese, as are we.

Then we love to lambaste our multinational oil companies like Chevron and Shell who are "gouging us," "taking advantage of us," or otherwise sticking it to the little guy. Interesting. They produce only about 6% of the world's supply -- the rest comes from state run oil companies -- ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, PEMEX in Mexico, etc. If indeed we enact legislation to seize the "excessive" profits from Exxon et al, the net result will hardly effect a change in the price of petrol at your pump.

For someone who has lamented the tragic state of American suburbia and its energy intensive requirements, your Franklin Monologues author takes great pleasure with $4 (and rising) gasoline. I enjoy being spot on regarding the actions this nation will take, almost in lockstep -- step one, we'll go after "fraud, waste, and abuse" in the oil markets, ensuring that there's no price gouging, or that ruthless speculation gets weeded out. When that fails to produce any meaningful results, as we all know it will, we'll then (step two) rhetorically ask why we're not investing in the development of the ninety three Saudi Arabia's worth of oil locked up underneath North Dakota in the shale plays. When that fails to produce any meaningful result, as we all know it will, then in step three we'll ask for drilling rights in ANWR, rhetorically asking why migratory caribou seemingly have more rights than extreme commuters who grind out daily commutes from Stockton to Milpitas cleaning the next hot-shit Internet company's buildings after hours. Step four involves Republican grandstanding, asking why Obama hates America, hates our way of life and asking why he's out to destroy our economy and the good folks of America. Step five involves discussions on a gas tax holiday. Step six, however, is the only meaningful step-- people simply decide to drive less. Demand falls in response to $4.50 diesel, which raises inventories and lowers prices.

If you want lower gas prices, then drive less. The price will fall if you don't demand it. That's pretty simple, really, and this is already happening.

Friday's bicycle ride down Franklin Blvd., all 25 minutes of it, was indeed wonderful. A massive tail wind and $4.19 gasoline both acting to make my ride a beautiful thing -- little effort needed in pedaling and fewer cars to potentially mow me down.

Weather Is Not News

2011-04-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

Or so I used to think that weather was not news, not until I saw the southeastern tornado devastation over the week.

Under most conditions not involving death or dismemberment, the weather is simply not news. It rains. It gets windy. Hail falls. Snow melts. These are natural things and are often reported excessively, with a camera crew up at Blue Canyon, watching the snow fall, or a camera crew on a bridge overlooking a swollen river.

I can blog about them, however, as blogs are opinions, not newsworthy outlets. Thursday and Friday were awful days to be riding a bicycle between Elk Grove and Sacramento -- 17mph winds from the direct north. I arrived at work both days with completely bloodshot eyes full of debris and the ingestion of a sufficient quantity of pollen to stun a cape buffalo. I'm not normally allergic to trees (grasses, yes, which peak here in another three-four weeks) but all this flying at me at 27 mph (10 on the bike + 17 from the wind) left me wheezing for a few hours each morning.

It is not at all worth the 25 minutes each afternoon I get to ride at 22 mph down Franklin Blvd. home with the wind behind me. Fun, yes...but it doesn't offset the misery of the mornings.

A question was posed on the NBC nightly news about how bad our weather has become, and not so subtly the answer becomes "man's contribution to global climate disruption leads to exacerbation of extreme weather events." That's interesting. Still, the worst tornado "event" occurred in 1899, worst in total deaths, that is. Seems to me this was still pretty early in the industrial revolution, although coal had been consumed in great quantities even then.

We are always looking for a reason, for a rationale for why a tornado comes in an wipes a quarter of a town off the map. Survivors thank God for his mercy, while those killed are now thanking God directly, too. I will argue that, because the earth spins around the sun at a rate of one revolution every 24 hours, tornadoes and hurricanes...just...happen. Weather happens. A tornado in the year 1325 in Oklahoma was presumably just as bad for any Native American as it is for an American in 2011, and presumably will be just as bad for any American in 2208.

Express Pumping

2011-04-27T21:56:00.000-07:00

So, I filled up the truck this morning at the Arco at Franklin and 47th...$92 bucks, and of course I'm expecting to pay $392 as I'm expecting a real oil/gasoline shortage sometime over the next decade or two.

I watched three others this morning fill up with $5.00 worth of gas...somewhere around a gallon and a third, I'd reckon. I've always filled completely up every time I've ever entered a gas station simply to reduce the number of trips I have to take there, regardless of whether or not I could afford a full fillup. Nowadays I get to jack off in my truck for ten minutes each time I go to the gas station, waiting in line behind the myriad people who fill at $5 a crack and visit the station six times a week. I visit maybe six times a year in the truck. I bite the bullet and pay the bill all at once.

Three people filling $5. I admit that represents a few minutes of work for me and 2/3rds an hour for a lot of people, but the fill station doesn't discriminate between those willing to fill up and those who are just trying to get to their next gig.

Here's my thoughts: someday there'll be an express pump at most stations for fill ups only, much like there's business class on airlines. People willing to fill their tanks will get priority over those who only want a coupla bucks worth of gas. Yep, the price per gallon will be a little bit more, but as we know that people will make illegal u-turns to get to the station with gas that's $0.01 cheaper, a full quarter differential for Express Pumping will draw those in their Mercedes, their Beemers, their Land Cruisers, and their Chevy Trucks (me) into these express lanes such that the wait is minimal, the gas is pumped by a professional, and the commoners (whose unwillingingless to pay so much as another nickel per gallon) will never entering the query.

We are creating toll roads across the U.S. for the exact same reason -- the rich whose time is more valuable than yours, more valuable than sitting idle on congested freeways, willing to pay a premium for the right to commute 72 miles a day to their financial, insurance, or real estate jobs from their 3,700 sq ft housal units on 1/2 acres 37 miles down the interstate.

Toll roads are already here. Toll gasoline stations are next, you watch. Rich people unwilling to fill their Land Cruisers next to $5.00-paying people, but who are willing to pay extra for the right to fill first, amongst other expensive imported rigs. If this would be considersed discriminatory, then perhaps a simple express lane can be created for those willing to pay a premium for expedited service, at a price premium that eliminates most others from contention.

That'll be the line for me...oh yeah...

I Am Global Warming

2011-04-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

I fought my way to work and back on the bicycle today against two wrong way riders, a small truck driver who told me to get out of the road as I was entering the left hand turn lane at 59th, 16 mph headwinds and concomitant allergens, a good dousing in the morning soaking the equipment, and a left testicle whose incision following surgery has opened up, is oozing, and is extremely painful just sitting here, let alone straddling the saddle.

What a miserable ride...but I did it anyway. I have to lose some weight. I have to get prepared for the Eppie's Great Race in July, and another run beforehand. I am struggling...

I didn't ride to save gasoline today. No way. Do you really think that saving five measly bucks is worth all this? The risks from bad drivers and wrong way cyclists and lung disease? This is exactly why 99.934% of Elk Grovians drive or have to be driven to work.

I'm pretty sure I'm the real cause of Global Warming by riding my bicycle. Yep. I'm a constant, visible reminder to thousands of you Elk Grovians as you drive past me on Franklin Blvd. just how shitty it'd really be if you weren't burning those twenty one million barrels of oil each day, if you didn't have your two point five cars to get you around. You look at me, thinking "glad I ain't him," and drive just a little bit faster.

I can see it now -- you're fidgeting uncomfortably at the Valero pump station at Franklin and Meadowgate, wondering if you should stop at $65 or if you should accept the possibility of overdrafting and just fill up the tank on your minivan. You see me bicycle by into that headwind. "Glad I ain't him," you mutter to yourself, as you squeeze that handle just a little bit tighter -- "fill 'er up...fill 'er up."

I Am Global Warming.

Ought Six to Ought 'Ait

2011-04-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

Blogger has been acting up lately -- a few errors here and there that make posting a real chore. But one error, the broken gadget that used to be at the bottom of my web page, the National Debt Clock, may not be blogger's fault.

Perhaps it's because the number has gotten so damn big that computers can't process it anymore...

Since I've been a protection relay engineer at SMUD, if I were to add up every relay, each calculating voltage and current signals at a 240Hz rate since I've become a protection engineer five years ago, if I were to add them all up they'd still be less than the national debt. 325 microprocessor relays * 4 intervals per cycle * 60 cycles per second * 60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 12 hours a day * 365.25 days a year * five years = 12.3 trillion while the national debt is $14.3 trillion.

Indeed, for the foreseeable future the processes of all the relays in all the substations in Sacramento County will stay behind the debt. The debt is growing at a rate of $686 dollars for every Hertz of the North American electrical system. Now that's a Hertz donut.

Is is no wonder why the S&P credit rating agency recently downgraded our treasury debt from stable to negative? Of course, this coming from an institution whose AAA ratings of millions of worthless fucking collateralized debt obligations helped spur the mild slowdown of ought six to ought 'ait really shouldn't mean a damn thing...but for some reason we still like to think they are the experts at rating stuff. Fine.

Personally, I'd rate our nation well below AAA. But that's just me, and I'm just an observer, nothing else. I had the sublime experience to wander about the South Sacramento Super WalMart this afternoon looking for canned whole peeled tomatoes. The New Asian supermarket not 1/8 of a mile away from my in-law's house doesn't carry that, no. Tomatoes in a can? No way. Canned eel? Well, which species among the dozens they carry would you like?

As I exited the parking lot (I could only turn right when I really wanted to go left...ahhh, to wish for my bicycle...) I was then forced to commute all the way down through Little Saigon -- not that this was a problem, mind you, just that I was pretty sure that every supermarket for the next three miles wasn't going to carry canned tomatoes, either, so I found myself at the Super WalMart. As I took note, there wasn't a single Vietnamese person shopping there that I could observe. No, most apparently must shop at the specific Vienamese shopping stores. And as I further took note, a good 65% of WalMart patrons were clinically obese. Hmmmm...didn't seem to see a single obese person at the New Asia Supermarket except for me.

I wondered to myself in the checkout line -- this is AAA? This? I should expect to rate the $14.3 million million dollars in debt held by all these Americans as triple A? Really? Slovenly, unkempt, potentially riotous should WalMart run short of retro Air Jordan shoes, endlessly circling the parking lot in their Expeditions looking for that prime-cut parking slip yet willing to walk the equivalent of three miles through the discount bargain bins?

I am not a fan of what passes for culture these days. I perhaps tend to see the negative, because to blog about the positives would be pretty damn boring, if I could even think of a few. I most certainly see the negative in our national financial outlook. I most certainly see the negative in our utter failure to develop any coherent energy policy in the face of a looming oil crisis that can be seen from four hundred miles down the road. I want to stay one step ahead of rioting Elk Grovians/South Sacramentans should the Chevron station turn up empty one cold winter morning in 2019 or if the retro Jordans disappear.

But for want of canned tomatoes for Easter salsa, I drove 6.5 miles in my truck, hastening the day some real energy crisis arrives, wondering why anyone would rate my own debt as sterling, someone consuming a half gallon of $4 petrol for a $1.29 can of whole, peeled tomatoes. I found myself just as culpable as every other American I decry for wanton energy wastefulness.

My rating: BB-

Temporary Reprieve

2011-04-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

I think we absolutely ought to 1) seize oil company excessive profits as they are announced this week, and 2) eliminate the federal gasoline tax.

Wouldn't you agree?

Uh-huh. This would absolutely drop the price at the pump, most certainly. Bus as these profits are sure to be the biggest political football this year, I am eagerly awaiting the next twelve weeks of congressional bipartisan grandstanding to arrive at absolutely nowhere and to perform absolutely nothing here. This will give me a lot to blog about, he-he.

I'm a regular Elk Grovian bicycle commuter, perhaps one of nineteen others in this city of one hundred and forty three thousand auto-dependent consumers. Come on...bicycling has always been a nice way for me to get around but hot damn, it's again fantastic to be a bike commuter! I only wish for even higher gasoline prices. I don't do this to gloat...no. I could easily argue that because we fail to charge the user (through gas taxes/charges) the true costs of extreme auto-dependency, bicycling makes no financial sense until the price exceeds $7.25 a gallon. At least. Until then...fuck yeah, I'm gonna gloat.

But, as I've heard grumblings from those around me about how we ought to cut out that federal gasoline tax to lower prices, I'd be particularly pissed if this came to pass...but I could easily see a spooked Congress vying for their 2012 elections pass something like a "temporary reprieve for the good folks of America." Pissed, because just more of my general tax dollars would then be plowed back into the maintenance of a gold-plated roadway system designed to function on $3.50 gas and below. We already don't tax the user sufficiently; watch, a sustained high cost of gas would most certainly prompt such legislation, just you wait.

Then, Obama might just want to take this week's opportunity and push for an "excessive profits" tax on oil companies. To which I'd also be a bit pissed, but mainly because my 401(k) holds perhaps ten thousand dollars worth of Exxon, Mobil and Valero shares. It would be another tax on me, yes. Not only that, we're clamoring for more drilling -- what, exploratory wells come free? They have to take their profits (save for a few dozen billion for the top brass and us shareholders) and plow them back into finding new reserves. Go ahead -- tax the shit out of them, gain for a few months/years, then scratch your collective heads in 2019 in wonderment, asking why domestic production is 9% lower than it was back in 2011.

It's a good time to be an Elk Grovian bicyclist, indeed. I just wish my crotch was fully recovered from the surgery! For some reason a stitch or two blew out last Friday and I'm really worried about the ride tomorrow morning. It's not as if I can ride every day, and it's not as if I will be able to ride when I'm 61 around here, either -- not with a planned population/suburban housal unit explosion that will turn Franklin Blvd. into a 6-lane expressway in 20 years. It's not as if I'll be able to take Light Rail either, certainly not when federal tax dollars being diverted to road maintenance to compensate for the ~~temporary~~ permanent "gas tax holiday" will no longer be available for things like national parks and public transit.

I'll just have to climb into one of my several vehicular units and remain angry to no end:

Riding Out The Storm

2011-04-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

A Sacramento area cameraman, looking for a 2.5 second sound bite for the evening news, might just catch me in passing the several gasoline stations along my route on Franklin Blvd. If I were to be interviewed I'd end up on the cutting room floor because I'm not doing it to avoid the $4 gas. Well...I am, but really, I've been riding underneath $1.70 gas, too. My guess is he'd simply show my picture in passing, edit out the part where I actually say anything (like gasoline would have to be $7 a gallon to make bicycling cost effective), and simply state that "there goes another brave person weathering out this high price storm on his bicycle."

The terminology on the NBC News the other night, showing a guy riding his bike in Denver, was exactly that; he's "riding out the high price storm."

Like riding a bike is only valid for as long as a storm passes -- a temporary condition like bad weather.

Perhaps high prices (if you really call $4 high...really?) are temporary. But to conclude that riding it out on a bicycle, "just waiting for prices to go down," is so damn shortsighted.

Whatever happened to global warming, huh? Suspended, as soon as we have to pay over $3.87 a gallon. Not that I'm a particular fan of global warming (and neither am I a skeptic), but doesn't a reduction in the burning of fossil fuels improve the situation? Say 100%? The only way to prevent it would be to reduce burning them. But that discussion is apparently only valid at $3.00 or below.

What do you suppose will happen if prices remain at $4? There's a lot to consider why they might -- We've devalued our dollar to bail out non-productive segments of our FIRE economy; not gonna be rising anytime soon methinks. We've lobbed a few hundred cruise missiles into a nation responsible for 2% of the world's production but we aren't willing to support regime change, so we're perpetuating the shut-in of Libyan oil supply. There's always been Middle East tension, jeez! What, a coupla hundred Syrian protester deaths are spooking the market this time? They're spooked all the time!

I heard again this evening another Republican congressman's intention to pursue domestic production in the hinterlands...say, even farther out in the gulf, or ANWR. Sean Hannity loves to speak of the 18 Saudi Arabia's worth of shale oil we have underneath North Dakota. Perhaps, yes, we do. But to extract out a barrel's worth would cost $200 each...and if you're bitching about $4 gas now...and every one of these cretins has not yet demonstrated any knowledge that U.S. production peaked in 1971 and has decreased every year, every year, since, while U.S. imports have increased every year, every year, since. To raise domestic production is heartfelt indeed, but completely ignorant of the realities of a finite, non-renewable, declining domestic supply.

Thinking About Public Transportation Just A Little Bit More

2011-04-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

"I'll probably start thinking about public transportation a little bit more." -- Wealthy San Francisco SUV female driver filling up with $4.79 gasoline as reported on NBC Nightly News this evening.

This is why I love nightly news reporting on gasoline. It's fake. They intentionally edit for rich women in SUVs, with well manicured nails, a large wedding ring, nice clothes, an expensive watch, a diamond bracelet, and a late-model $43,000 rig, bitching about gasoline prices. She'll start thinking about public transportation? Are you fucking kidding me? And the way she rolls her eyes saying "public transportation..." says that what she's saying is a total lie. She'll never intentionally sit next to a commoner.

This woman would never never! pay bus fare to get to her FIRE (Finance, Insurance or Real Estate) job in Palo Alto. Are you kidding me? This kind of reporting makes for a good sound bite to be sure, but well-to-do white San Franciscan women are among the last class of people in this nation who will willingly go without their SUVs. The day they mount a bus or a BART train to save a dollar or three is a day we'll not see in our lifetimes.

After having spent fifty grand on a vehicular unit and nine hundred and twenty thousand on a loft in SoMa, do you really think this woman gives a shit about another dollar per gallon? No way. She'll be burning gasoline in her rig all the way through $25 a gallon. She didn't spend her life working to live in San Francisco and spend three day weekends in Napa Valley to ride a fucking bicycle.

Ironically, San Francisco is among one of the best places in this nation for those willing to live a low energy lifestyle -- it's built compactly with most amenities within walking distance, and has a vibrant, spirited atmosphere. This is why it costs eight hundred thousand dollars just to buy a brick shithouse -- people want to live there. I want to live there, too...but it's too expensive for my income. Instead, I opted for an extreme energy intensive cheap Sacramento suburb where I have to drive everywhere for everything...as 40% of the rest of America has done.

Indeed, tonight I really, really wanted to take light rail to the Amon Amarth metal gig in mid-town Sacramento. The venue was only two blocks away from the 16th street light rail station...but the last light rail train on weekends leaves at 9:26 PM, thanks to service cuts implemented during our little economic slowdown in 2008. The show ended tonight at 11:35. I had no option available to me other than solo occupant commuting by private automobile if I wanted to see the show. So I drove, consuming $4 gasoline every twenty miles driven.

With no mortgage and a $50/hour recession proof job, you can be assured that I will continue to recreationally use oil at the same level I currently use it all the way through $25 a gallon, too, and as our civic, state, and federal leaders continue to fail to deliver viable alternatives to private automobiling, well, there will continue to be no other options and there's nothing that's going to stop me. I'm no different from that rich woman on the news -- only I won't "probably" start thinking about public transportation a "little" bit more. I think about using my bicycle or public transportation every time I leave my housal unit. I think about it ahead of time, even thinking about how I could work around RTs shitty scheduling, but alas, if I wanted to see the show I had to drive myself. I exhausted all other carpooling options. I cannot ride my bicycle in the dark around here because we 1) have no safe north-south bicycle-only option, and 2) there's no bicycle parking outside the Ace of Spaces venue. I'm not risking my life bicycling on Franklin Blvd in the dark, never. I'm not risking losing my bicycle by having to chain it up to some lamp post in the back alley because there are no bike lockers or dedicated bicycle parking areas.

The presumption among the Ace Of Spades venue and the rich woman filling her SUV in a San Francisco fill station is that we are supposed to drive ourselves. Our national identity hinges about solo-occupant private-automobiling. My mom, my two sisters and brothers-in law and me and my wife all commute by private solo occupant motorized vehicular units. The more affluent, the more this rings true. We are not conditioned to take a bus. Many simply won't do it, regardless of the price of gasoline.

This is why I love America. Fat, overweight, out of shape solo-occupant commuters commuting 36-miles to their national defense jobs designing predator drones to kill pro-Qaddafi Libyans so that oil production resumes and their commutes are each a nickel cheaper than what they otherwise would have been. This is why I love America.

Medical Consumers

2011-04-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

I loved Paul Krugman's complaint this morning about calling patients "medical consumers."

"The prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong...with our society's values."

For three years now on my little blog I've made mention how Americans are referred to by every institution -- not as citizens -- but as consumers. I don't know how medical consumption should be seen any differently...particularly not when 70% of our economy is consumer spending and 16% of our GDP is consumed by health care. I have to think these two areas overlap to some degree.

Without verifing, that Krugman is an economic wonk he's most certainly referred to citizens as consumers two dozen times in just the past week alone. Yet somehow, as citizens become patients, whoa! Back up the trolley! The consumption of medical products and services should somehow be exempt?

I like the idea of people as consumers; what it does is take the "human" out of the equation, and gives me something to blog about. Consumers have no responsibilities towards other consumers. Hmmm...just like Americans today. Consumers have no responsibilities towards making habitable, human-scaled places to live. Hmmm...just like Americans today. Consumers' only job is to make a corporation's pile of money into an even larger pile of money. Hmmm...just like Americans today.

We've created an "education industry," for-profit institutions that leave outgoing students mired in debt while corporate shareholders sit on a beach making 20 percent. (I'm one of them, to be sure. I've money in mutual funds that most certainly invest in Phoenix (NASDAQ: APOL) My retiremental future is dependent on sucking even more monies out of the next generation of students...well, at least to become more profitable. So long as it makes me money, I don't give a damn about what value this institution provides to society. That's for a citizen to think about, but I'm not a citizen, I'm a consumer.

Jeffrey Immelt has created a wholly owned subsidiary, GE Healthcare, whose sole purpose (at least to me) is to extract profits from sick people. So long as my holdings of GE stock makes me money, I don't give a damn about a healthier citizenry. I only care about fixing up consumers so that they live longer to consume more, obviously increasing my holding values of Best Buy, Home Depot, et al. Indeed, sick people are immensely profitable -- the most profitable segment of our population. And we have the most sick people of any advanced nation on earth and the percentages are growing. Imagine that -- built-in growth. I'm not certain how my mutual funds invest on any given stock, but I can be damned sure that both Phillip Morris (lung cancer producer, NYSE:PM) and AstraZenica (lung cancer drug manufacturer, NYSE:AZN) both find themselves in my portfolio.

Interestingly, my last blog post indicated a desire to move away from equities. However, I'm just a dumb blogger (an Internet consumer, hehe) -- you think I really ought to double down on a systemic collapse, on an economic depression? I admit I'm moving in a more secure direction to be sure, but I didn't take all my 401(k) and purchase T-bills or gold with it. What I wish for and what I get are too often two totally different things. For now, medical consumers are powering my growth in wealth. A healthier citizenry is not, has not, and will not be on any horizon in my lifetime, for we are both far from healthy and we are far from being citizens.

Citizenry has faded. We cannot fall behind a Democratic president, regardless of his party. He's a nigger to a great number of white Republican consumers around me. Bush was a dolt to a great number of white Democratic consumers around me. We see ourselves on one side of the ideological fence or the other. We don't give a damn about our 2.1 wars; they mean nothing to us as consumers, save for our stock in Raytheon (NYSE: RTN). I count on not a single neighbor for anything, anything at all, here in sterile white suburbia. If and when a resource shortage ever comes I'm hoarding, and I'm going to get mine. I've got no reason to become a citizen, to band with others to trade skills, labor, or assistance. I don't even know their fucking names -- why would I suddenly ask them to trade a cup of sugar for a little charcoal fluid?

"This kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong..."

We already use this kind of language. We've been using it for as long as we've debased the citizen and exhalted the consumer.

Decline

2011-04-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

There are fewer of us working today as a percentage of our population:

My guess is that this number won't be increasing anytime soon; I think that as more boomers retire they will only offset the number of currently unemployed people re-entering the workforce. Besides, the great run-up in the percentage already occurred as women entered the workforce in the 70s and 80s, to counterbalance their insatiable lust for their own cars, another 800 square feet of housal unit space per person than what they grew up in, and of course their own cellularized telephones, iPods, and laptop computers.

Notwithstanding a steady or perhaps declining percentage of workers comes a fifteen trillion dollar national debt that will, perhaps, someday have to be repaid. Or perhaps not. But clearly, maintaining even a balanced budget is harder with fewer workers, because as the percentage decreases fewer will be paying taxes and more will be sucking off the public teats of Medicare and Social Security.

But why, would you at all suppose, our labor force would increase? There are at least three reasons I can think of why U.S. labor will only find itself on foreign shores over the coming decades:

Labor in Asia and Latin America is cheaper, primarily because they burn less oil. They don't have the same massive overhead of benefits, don't have to get taxed as much to gold plate their roads to get them to work from their 45 mile distant housal units, etc.
The cost of electricity to be used in manufacturing is cheaper; coal is powering all of China's growth and they're exempt from climate legislation. The air in Beijing is so fucking dirty as a constant reminder how they've not yet implemented the same expensive pollution measures as the U.S. has.
Taxes and benefits are most certainly lower, probably in both real and percentage terms. They don't have the same massive, massive social programs as we do here, which could by themselves bankrupt our nation without some controls.

So, going forward, the former power transformer welder in Pittsburgh, PA who used to make $37/hour will find the voltage to his own housal unit transformed by Brazilian and South Korean transformers, while he shuttles himself off to work as a forklift driver for Target making $16/hour. Along with a flat participation rate, we're also seeing a flat wage rate as good manufacturing jobs are outsourced and lower quality service jobs fill the void.

So not only are fewer people working to pay taxes, their wages are flat while government expenditures for social programs is rocketing upward. We are indeed heading into interesting times to be a decent wage earner here in the U.S. -- we're going to have to support all this overhead somehow, lest it come crashing down over us. Can we do it?

Six Hundred To One

2011-04-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

As the story goes, in 1960 my co-worker earned $10,000 a year and gasoline was $0.40 a gallon. Today he earns 10x as much, and gas is 10x as much. At four dollars a gallon, he has to work the same amount for a gallon; about one minute and fifteen seconds each.

That's a pretty fair return, eh? For one minute and fifteen seconds of working, he'd be able to purchase a gallon of fuel that could power a tractor auger that could drill 62 post holes. He'd spend three days' effort if he had to do that by hand, creating about a 600:1 ratio increase in human productivity. That's a pretty good return for four dollars.

But...we're bitching about the price because we don't just use oil for productive uses, to take advantage of that 600:1 leverage. No, we instead squander that leverage to work like hell in the country to live in the city, where we work like hell in the city to live in the country, and all the while we commute 49 miles a day in an oil powered vehicular unit for that privilege.

We built our infrastructure on cheap oil. At work, I've created a special protection scheme to protect an underground 230kV electric cable underneath Carmichael that was installed in 1976. We find the cost of replacing this cable to be so prohibitively expensive that we absolutely have to do everything we can to keep it in service as long as possible. The problem is, there is no way, no way, to reduce the level of service this cable provides from, say, an "A" rating to a "B" rating or lower. It has to remain in service; without it, another outage somewhere else could outage tens of thousands of customers for extended periods.

The same thing would occur with our highways -- if we reduced and deferred maintenance on them at even a slightly lower level than today (which everyone thinks is already pretty fucking low), they would deteriorate at an exponential rate -- they need to be maintained at a high level of service at all times, or else one more chink would make it unusable.

A nation like the U.S. needs cheap oil, because we overbuilt our infrastructure, our mega-schools, our fleets of school buses, and most perniciously, our insatiable demand for private automobiling. We need cheap oil because so much of the energy we burn is used simply to keep the system maintained. This is not yet the case in developing nations who have fewer paved roads, smaller schools where kids can walk to instead of being delivered by mom every morning in the minivan.

The supposed nuclear renaissance in the United States ended this last March 11th with Fukushima. We won't build another nuclear reactor here in my lifetime, methinks. If we are to be expanding our economy, we need power to do it. Expanding power won't be coming from nuclear; indeed, I would argue that renewables might not expand at a fast enough rate to even offset the decommissioning of existing nuclear plants over the next few decades. Do you have any idea, any idea at all, just how many wind turbines would be needed to replace the energy production from just one San Onofre reactor?

Which is somewhat too bad in my opinion, as I still believe that nuclear energy will eventually become the only true non-intermittent resource we have 125 years from now; oil, coal, and natural gas will all be substantially reduced in that time frame, and what do you suppose will then power all the tractor-trailers and heavy equipment needed to maintain the electric grid, bridges, and roads?

Borrowing From Tomorrow To Pay For Yesterday

2011-04-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Chatting with a contemporary in the electric consulting field last week, he made mention of a number of acquaintances who, after having paid off their mortgage fell into severe non-mortgage debt. Presumably because as the thinking goes there's all this disposable income now floating around to pay off that new automobile unit, the granite counter tops, the Monte Carlo vacation.

Only problem is that income streams in somewhat slowly compared to your streams of wants; this has always been an issue, but somehow it gets amplified as you think you can pay it off sans mortgage but you simply grow your debt too fast. You then start borrowing from tomorrow to pay for what you spent yesterday and today becomes the same as it always was -- still mired in debt.

I am not a fan of either Obama's or Paul Ryan's budget proposals as both fail to address debt; Ryan's perhaps may get to a neutral deficit, but neither stems the increase in future debt.

There is no better way, in my little opinion (and it is indeed little) to weather the storm of looming deficits and debts at the federal, state, county and local levels than to hold no personal debt. For many of us, this means renting...not a bad thing. I am acquainted with several older couples (say, 10-20 years older than I) who carry as much mortgage debt today as they did in 1987. The standard line is refinancing; they all continued to refinance with higher levels of debt than the last. But this makes supposed sense -- if you have a $16k bill on that new Tacoma at 7.2% and a few $4k credit cards at 13%, just roll those into a mortgage debt at 5.15% and write off that interest. In some respects, our tax policies have encouraged more mortgage debt, but then, with only a $45/month increase in mortgage payments now spread over three hundred and sixty months, all that remaining disposable income can now be used (you guessed it) to drive up even more debt. That Tacoma? Four years, max. Getting a bit used, eh? Trim is starting to fall off the passenger door, a coupla pebble dents in the quarter panels...time for a new Land Cruiser! And hey! And hey! Mortgage rates are now only 4.65%! Refinance yet again!

A couple I know, roughly my mom's age, owes $200,000 on the housal unit she's been living in since, perhaps, 1978. Another couple, down in the town of Franklin, in the same unit since, perhaps, 1985, still owe $220,000. A pool. A new addition. New windows. A paint job. All things driving perpetual debt.

I will continue to argue that going forward, with an entire set of governments all unwilling to agree on how to lower debts, will all fail to do so. The good news is that we are borrowing from tomorrow to pay for yesterday, but today is still lookin' good! With this reprieve, reduce your debt, hold cash instead of equities, consider metals if you've already reduced your debt, gain better control over your own requirements for living and above all, be worth more to your employer than what they are paying you. These are not things that most of us can do in a bubble, so be prepared to work with others; not easy in the land of endless suburbia where we don't depend on anything else by anyone else...

I would fail to see how following these things could possibly go wrong even supposing we have 3.8% growth for the next fifty years and some tech breakthrough yielding unlimited energy. I obviously don't see this happening, but hey, what could go wrong with being more valuable to your employer, even if you are your own employer, huh?

Leave The Recession Alone!

2011-04-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

NBC News today mentioned how gasoline prices during this recession has led to higher food prices, is hurting families, blah blah blah blah blah.

How they've failed to report that the recession ended in June, 2009, almost a good two years hence.

Remember, the recession has long ago ended. It's no longer. To make reference to families suffering today due to the consequences of a minor economic slump that happened two years ago is just wrong, according to those at the National Bureau of Economic Research and to the author of this monologue. Families aren't suffering due to any recession; their suffering is due to their own doing, not to the economy at large. That any given family has endured a layoff or a foreclosure or a repossession or a cut in hours or a takeback is their own damn fault, not because the economy is dour. Laid off? Shouda worked a bit harder, slick. Shouda been more valuable to your employer than what they were payin' you, slick. Shouda landed a recession proof job, slick, not selling pianos, mortgage insurance, microwave ovens, Kirby vacuums, kitchen cabinets, speculative real estate, hot tubs, financial products or pool tables...

I'm tired of hearing about how the Great Recession is still to blame. Might as well keep on blaming Bush. Indeed, some are. But regardless, the recession is over...and it's been over for nearly two fucking years. Get over it. If you can't find a job then you, obviously, aren't looking hard enough. There are plenty of corporate $9/hour wage ~~slave~~ positions available around Elk Grove in this Target/Walmart/Best Buy/Lowe's/Radio Shack/Burger King economy of ours. Go out and get one instead of bitching about how the Great Recession has you down.

Nine dollars an hour. One hour's work will get pissed away each day as you drive your 2006 Ford Expedition with the $6k rims to your front desk managerial job at the freeway Hilton Garden Inn, some eleven miles away from your rental. Won't matter really -- you spent $860 for that in-dash nav system for those twice-a-year trips outside Elk Grove that could have perhaps been saved or invested, but no, your income is below Federal poverty levels for Sacramento county and you obviously know you'd be better off not declaring any assets lest you be denied free assistance, so two thumbs up for in-dash navigation. So much better than those outdated, archaic paper maps, too. Spending a full afternoon folding them up after the weekend dash to Infineon Raceway for the Toyota/Save Mart 350? No way...

Yep. Sick and tired of the recession! It's over, but all you alls don't want to believe it. What, you don't trust the PHDs at the National Bureau of Economic Research? They're doctors, you know, and everyone trusts doctors. They're right. It's over. Been over. Leave The Recession Alone!

Growth has resumed. Deficits have quintupled, yes, but growth has resumed. Regardless of your little unemployment figures (which is a lagging indicator, by the way) we've been growing for almost eight straight quarters. Stop blaming the recession! Leave The Recession Alone!

Regardless.

2011-04-21T18:46:00.000-07:00

Absolutely love the top story tonight on NBC News regarding the outrageous, insane, ridiculous, criminal prices us Americans are paying for gasoline. Four whole dollars per gallon? Someone should be hanged.

Indeed, Sadam Hussein did get hanged, in part due to our Elk Grovian desire to drive everywhere for everything. So now we're looking for someone else to hang: today the news reported that it's speculators who are causing the increase in prices, so apparently they're next up on the dais.

Perhaps speculation has something to do with the run-up. I don't disagree; however, I question the NBC reporting that fails to argue that other causes may indeed be a falling dollar due to bailing out top financial firms and an insatiable lust for oil that far, far exceeds our domestic capacity to produce. Instead, Obama wants to crack down on speculators! Crack Down On Waste! Crack Down On Fraud! Crack Down On Abuse!

How about cracking down on 260 lb. Minnesota snow cows commuting 68 miles a day to their jobs in an oversized vehicle burning foreign oil driving on asphalt roads built on foreign oil subsidized by taxpayers? Both you and I know that would be politically incorrect, and that's why I know that we will never address our profligate internal energy usage until the day we run into a true resource shortage.

I'm looking forward to that day. I am waiting for another 1973, or 1979. Another "shortage," real or imagined, would be good for this nation in my opinion. We'd focus our energies on things other than what we are supposed to power our cars with. The Elk Grove City Council, wondering why developers won't build mile after mile of tract homes along the banks of the Cosumnes River, might finally adopt transit-oriented developments (TOD) instead of the energy-intensive madness of continued suburban sprawl.

But...I'm pretty sure we're not headed there. Not with Obama lambasting oil speculators in his speech today in Reno. Have you been to Reno lately? Do you have any idea how much energy people there use to commute from their homes on the 13th and 15th tees on the Arrow Creek Country Club to their jobs in the city proper in their 12-mpg diesel powered F250s?

Doesn't matter. These owners will drive regardless, as that's what they're conditioned for. That's what they've come to expect as citizens of the most energy intensive nation on earth. That's why they chose to live in remote areas. They didn't work their entire lives in the financial/insurance services sector to take a fucking bus to work. They deserve more, and they're going to consume oil regardless of price. Regardless. They know that if they didn't burn that petroleum themselves, those damn Indians or Chinese or Brazilians will do it for them...

This is America, goddamn it. We're going to exploit the world's petroleum whether they want us to or not. If they choose not to sell it, well, that's what the U.S. Navy is for. If they choose to ask for a few more dollars for it as it's priced in dollars and the dollar has fallen, well, then our leaders will scapegoat speculators, abusers, traders, and oil companies and their wicked Arab co-conspirators.

Everyone but the end user.

Inflation

2011-04-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

Having put my first tax-deferred dollar into my retirement account in 1994 when I was still a college student, I look back at the Dow industrial charts and wonder how in 1995 it began an until-then unprecedented steep upward climb. Of course there have been some spectacular retreats between 1995 and 2011, but overall I think the Dow is much higher than it historically should be. Historically, compared to the eight decades that preceded my entrance.

Along with an inflated Dow, we have inflated educational costs, too. I'm amazed at my good fortune to have graduated college in 1995, just before the "education industry" discovered how to graduate students with $90,000 in debt, how tuition has risen three times faster than the rate of inflation to ostensibly cover the costs of state education where 2/3rds used to be covered by the state of California but now only covers 1/5th. I had the good fortune to have landed a technical engineering position that paid enough for me to 1)cover my rent, 2) pay tuition, 3) transport myself to school and work, and 4) save enough in U.S. Savings Bonds to buy my first housal unit before graduating. What do you suppose the likelihood of this happening to a Sac State history major today, huh?

Along with an inflated Dow, we have inflated medical expenses, too. In 1995 I didn't even carry medical insurance; I was young enough, healthy enough...or so I thought. Exactly sixteen years ago today I joined the rolls of the medically insured and I've easily easily! sucked off at least 45 times more than I've paid in premiums through numerous surgeries and insulin. In 1995, a box of syringes and two vials of insulin ran $45 a month. Now, in 2011, with an insulin pump and its associated infusion tubing and reservoirs along with $130 vials of insulin, I draw $1350 a month from a $200 premium, a 3000% increase in the monthly cost of treatment and 6.75 times more than I am asked to pay. This doesn't even yet consider the upcoming costs of cancer drugs like the $93,000-a-year Provenge we're soon to consume.

Along with an inflated Dow, we still have inflated housal unit prices, too. Look at the Case-Shiller index, and even though unit prices have dropped since their hallucinated peak in 2007, they are still well above historical norms. I'd like to say that it was good fortune that allowed me to pay off my mortgage this month, but good fortune played no role -- it was simply hard fucking work to defer paying for that $45k Yukon with the $6k tires/rims and paying down debt first. Nonetheless, I did have the good fortune to have bought in 1997, just before the exponential and unsustainable increase in unit prices, just before DiTech Miracle Loans and 125% loan-to-values and cash-out re-fi's. I remember sitting in the backyard in the summer of 2000, wondering how could I possibly buy my own house if I had to. The answer: I wouldn't have. I couldn't, not based on my income. But what someone shouldn't do and what they do do are two totally different things, and a few tens of millions of us did buy between 2000 and 2006 for some reason or another, thinking it was either going to only keep going up ad infinitium or they wanted to use it as their personal ATM, and today either they've lost it, cashed-out re-fi'ed it above current market value, or otherwise owe more than they've started with or what it's worth.

Along with an inflated Dow, we have inflated energy prices, too. I had the exceptional good fortune to have understood the dynamics of energy early-on, as I work in the electric industry, and I have set myself up to (possibly) live in a constrained energy future. This is no small feat. I hear the constant, incessant yammering from co-workers and acquaintances bitching about gas prices and about how they'd conserve energy if they had to, but it takes a hell of a lot more than yammering to mount a bicycle 3-4 days a week instead of the Land Cruiser -- it takes a mental attitude above all else. Immigrants from low-energy intensive nations will continue to drive here regardless of price, until gas is simply not available; they didn't immigrate to America to ride a fucking bike. White suburban women will argue successfully to their husbands that it's simply too dangerous for their kids to walk to school, lest the child rapist drags them into the bushes, or that they themselves cannot take the transit bus to work lest the nasty black man drag her under the bus for a raping, too. They, too, will drive until gas is simply not available. They didn't move to suburbia to ride a fucking bus. Our national identity and our values hinge around private automobiling, and we will continue to do so regardless of cost. I have the exceptional good fortune to know how to ride a bike in bad weather and alongside bad Elk Grovian drivers. I also know how to ride a bus. These require a mental setpoint above and beyond the vast majority of Elk Grovians who cannot think past their three-car garages.

I do consider myself fortunate, yes. Going forward I intend on continuing to ride the bicycle, even though I have all the disposable income I need to hire someone to drive me if I so wanted. I intend on saving money, having a reserve, owning things to barter, owning tools and materials to work with my hands for myself or others as necessary. I intend on becoming closer to true energy independence, with the ability to take the full jump if absolutely necessary with some carefully planned arrangements.

Nonetheless, following these modest preparations, I'm still a member of the most wasteful, arrogant nation on earth, and I will continue to act like an American for as long as possible. I will recreationally burn oil for the rest of my life, regardless of cost. I will hop in my private vehicle to eat lobster in Stockton if I feel like it. I will perhaps jet-set across the globe on the smallest of whims someday. I'm amazed at my good fortune...

I Hate Democracy

2011-04-11T19:52:00.000-07:00

NBC news this evening began its broadcast with the awful, hideous, painful, budget-busting, economy-sapping news that gasoline is approaching four dollars a gallon.

I particularly enjoy the 1.5-2.0 second clips from motorists at fill stations. I always do. Why? Because the reporting is fake; it always is. Assume for a moment you are the reporter looking for these clips -- you're gonna ask for and then edit for those people who decry prices, who think it's "ridiculous." What, you think they'd possibly broadcast an opinion like mine that would argue for $8 gas? Not in my lifetime.

As the Fed-engineered bailout and Americans love affair with deficits both lead to a declining dollar and as oil is priced in dollars, oil producers want something for their product so they are asking for a few dollars more.

Remember, you're getting screwed out of any interest you would have gotten on your savings because we bailed out the financial industry, the titans of our "new economy" that produce nothing of value. Bailing out our financial industry was done at the expense of millions of savers who now get next to nothing in interest. Bailing out our financial industry was done at the expense of everyone who buys imported gasoline as we've eroded the value of our dollar against other currencies. These are the consequences of those past actions and now we don't like it.

I really, really like to hear reporting about whining Americans at their local gasoline stations. It makes me feel good about being a member of their ranks; a privileged people who should not have to suffer the consequences from the democratization of North Africa. Do you think NBC news could possibly broadcast a 1.5 second soundbite of a bitter, overweight, middle-class woman in Aurora, CO, filling her SUV with $3.89 gasoline while muttering "I hate democracy" as she watches the pump register $72 for a tank?

I don't think so.

This is the real America.

Wrong Way Feldman

2011-04-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

I jogged three miles yesterday afternoon but more importantly (at least to me) I then hopped on the bike for nearly three miles, the longest attempt yet since crotch surgery.

I am really looking forward to commuting by bicycle again, even though it will mean riding side by side with several hundred cars again, too. It's too bad I can't run to work... But no, the bus has provided a good ride, and indeed for a few months there I hardly ever took it I was riding the bike so often.

Interestingly, the buses are crowded, yes -- the entire aisle is usually chock-a-block with people -- yet these are all the same people as when gas was $3.00 a gallon. Not anyone new that I could tell.

My larger concern, however, isn't with having to stand on a bus but rather having to face wrong-way bicyclists on Franklin Blvd. They are dangerous, would cause a serious accident if engaged (crashing together at 30+ mph), and they know it's illegal...but they do it anyway. I spoke with one of these assholes at my cousin's house a few weeks ago; a pretty nice guy overall, yes, but even after successfully arguing all my points he simply refused to accept the idea that riding with traffic is safer. He said "I hear ya, but I'm still going to see them coming at me."

Here's my standard talking points against someone riding the wrong way:

Closing speed between you and a car doubles, increasing four times your likelihood of getting killed if you do get hit, as the energy of a crash is not linearly related to speed;
If a car has to slow down to not hit you, it has to slow down to zero mph instead of just your bicycle speed (say 14 mph). This gives a motorist much less time to react, who likely isn't reacting to a bicyclist anyway.
A crash between you and another bicyclist going the opposite direction is going to happen; it will someday happen.
Cars entering the road do not look against traffic before pulling out into the street.
Furthermore, cars turning left off the road do not look against traffic before turning from the turn or traffic lane.
You put at risk the right-way bicyclist who invariably is the one who gets to enter the traffic lane to avoid you.
You absolutely increase your chances for an crossing accident with a car, which occur 15 times more often (45%) than getting hit from behind (3%).
The white arrow on the road tells you, and you know, that you are going the wrong fucking way.
It's illegal.

This is just like religion -- you can't argue reason against faith...even if faith in this case will most likely get you killed. "I hear you, but I'm still gonna ride facing traffic."

Sigh...

Robo Signers

2011-04-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today again, as it was 18 months ago, the Elk Grove Citizen newspaper chalked up 7 pages of default notices; another 30+ Elk Grovian familial units are about to be foreclosed upon.

Last weekend's 60 Minutes show made mention of another one million foreclosures scheduled to occur in 2011, on top of the one million that occurred in 2010. This on the heels of the reporting of $10 an hour robo-signers signing the name Linda Green to a few hundred thousand documents each month -- big burly guys and little Asian women whose job it was to sign the name Linda Green as fast as they could on documents intended to foreclose upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands...most certainly to include a few Elk Grovians.

I just pulled out the documents from the foreclosure on my first housal unit that I sold in 2006 -- the name signed was Bethany Hood, assistant secretary for Deutsche Bank Nation Trust Company. Not surprisingly, the signature of Bethany Hood on the form has no resemblance whatsoever to the spelling of Bethany Hood. I'd wager that it was indeed a bunch of $10 an hour people in a warehouse in Patterson, NJ signing off these things as fast as possible. Indeed, you can Google search "Bethany Hood Robo Signer" and you'll find a dozen references to mortgage fraud, and you'll find a .gif file with her signature that doesn't at all match the one on the document I have here at home. Indeed, on this one, she's VP for MERS, not Deutsche.

Fascinating. This in our land of the free.

I had a disposed installment note due to this bank's foreclosure on a property I sold five years ago that arguably was fraudulently signed, yet I filed my 2010 income taxes taking a $17k reduction in ordinary income based on it. This in our land of the free. I took the deduction and I already received my income tax refund, all based on a fraudulent loan doc. Not that I did it, but of course Deutsche Bank will never, never! be held accountable for this or a coupla hundred thousand other fake loans. I got a massive refund this year because of the disposition of this note. Knowing how Deutsche bank made a profit selling this property at auction and how the federal government is both complicit through failure to prosecute said banks for fraud and how taxpayer monies are and will be continued to be used to bail them out, I think that I'm going to file the same goddamn disposition each and every year from here on out on my tax returns and take my chances at getting caught.

Here's what I'll do:

I will ~~forge~~ create a new substitution of trustee document every April with Bethany Hood's name on it -- each year she'll be the Vice President of a different bank, just like today! as she's the VP of 7 different banks including Deutsche Bank National Trust Company and Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. That is, she will have effectively defaulted on the same property year after year, just like she's doing today!, only that I will have a different junior installment obligation that's extinguished each time her new bank defaults. Each year I will claim that as my note becomes unenforceable due to the default, I will write down ordinary income against the basis of my note.

I will leave it to the IRS to prove that the default didn't occur. Good luck with that. I will have a new default notice every year. I have my original installment note that I can continue to use as proof that I have an extinguished obligation. I will offset an awful lot of taxable income this way. As we fail to prosecute robo signers for fraud, I will join them and become one myself.

Remember, this sorta thing is what passes for an economy.

Cheaters

2011-04-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

As gasoline continues its relentless, remorseless march towards four whole dollars per gallon, I'm even more bummed that I can't mount the bicycle yet. Still trying to recover from a crotch surgery less than a month ago, that's left me hanging.

I've been reading how many environmentalists "cheat" -- they throw up a few solar panels, recycle a little plastic but then believe that these actions offset excessive leisure driving, or that they "did good here so I'll take a little there." Like this is some sorta game.

So long as it's treated like a game it will never reach into the realm of relevance. We have such a high degree of affluence and technology in this nation, two multipliers of population (PxAxT), that really, the contributions from a PV array or eating kale from a local farm once a week pales relative to the overall human impact we have.

I've been driving a lot more than I'd like in part due to the surgery, but also in part due to the inconvenience of the bus. It takes effort to ride the bus; it takes virtually none to jump into the car. I'd have to stop blogging right now to clean myself up for work so as to make it on the last bus...or I just continue blogging and drive mysel

Debtquity

2011-03-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

And I thought I was a doomer.

I drove my Indian co-worker up to Loon Lake powerhouse the other day, among 14-feet of snow on the first brilliantly clear day in weeks. The conversation, however, was quite dark.

We've differing perspectives on things, having spent the first 35 years of our lives 13,000 miles apart. He is much, much more socially conservative than I, but we share in interest in fiscal conservatism. I think it is this facet that has turned him to the dark side -- he's effectively bankrupt. He got caught up in the bubble/boom as did a few other million ~~consumers~~ Americans and now owes much more on two Elk Grovian housal units than they are worth. He didn't just stop at one; no, he decided that the two of them needed 3,000 square feet instead of that ridiculously cramped 2,300 unit, and "purchased" it two years ago. Today even that unit maintains a fair degree of debtquity, having also fallen in value since 2009.

Nonetheless, I was taken aback at how the world is going to fall apart over the next ten years, in a completely different way that I had envisioned, according to him.

I enjoy opposing viewpoints; not that I'm very good debating them, but man, this conversation led me to wonder how, exactly, is this blog viewed from the outside...I like to believe that I'm not really that far out in left field, more like shortstop. But I do know I take a position that doesn't fall within general consensus. Maybe because it doesn't feel good to read.

He's lost most of his wealth since immigrating, and most certainly that contributed to his jaded outlook. Perhaps that was the basis for such a position; he does so because he fuckered away ten years' output on bad investments. I wonder, then, how is it that I maintain a fairly similar prediction for this nation without having had such an experience.

My Garden Of Eden

2011-03-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Harvest time is near.

I took a few horticulture classes at the local Cosumnes college about fifteen years ago, trying to extend my interest in learning after I graduated.

I was terrible at it.

I did learn that I'd starve within weeks if I had to coax food out of the ground, so in some respects it was a valuable education. I realize how totally dependent I am on others who have carried on the culture of growing food, and I suppose this isn't a good thing for someone who thinks we're going to enter a long period of austerity in this nation, what with double digit health care increases and triple digit deficits. Nonetheless, I am able to grow weeds pretty well. Harvest time is indeed near.

With that in mind, I was thinking today about how our American culture chooses to invalidate nature. Why do we have these double digit health care increases? I'd argue in part due to our failures to see value in plants. We eat fewer and fewer of them as they come straight out of the earth, the tree, the bush or the vine. Wheat and sugar beets are taken by diesel machines and processed into Pop Tarts and sprayed with just the essence of strawberries. The strawberry is no longer the source of provision for most of us; the Pop Tart is.

Marijuana is a plant that can (or could) provide, too. I find the paradox interesting, how a conservative Republican can choose to declare war on a plant yet will swill several vodkas on the rocks each night -- and will make the rocks pills.

I've oft mentioned how I do not fear getting run down on my bicycle by a stoned driver but obviously worry about someone laden with prescription drugs or/and alcohol. In all cases, impaired driving is illegal, but it's a plant that gets outlawed outright. Interesting.

Interesting, indeed...but not without precedent. We have a long and glorious history of suppressing plants. The religious right ought to know all about this: not only do they enjoy taxation to suppress the possession of a dried flower, they know that Eve was busted out of the garden trying to extract knowledge from a plant. Were it not for plants (and talking snakes), there'd be no original sin.

Today we look to Big Pharma to provide the same knowledge an apple from a tree of knowledge may have provided....er, rather, to provide ignorance -- we want to ignore our high blood pressures, ignore our low blood sugars, ignore our pain. Pharma does this, and does this well, but with a steep price. Steep, both in dollars and in overall health. If Eve could just have been allowed to finish that apple...

If we could reconnect our health care system to a good plant-based diet, nutrition, and fitness, we'd perhaps not have to worry about it absorbing 16% of our GDP as it barrels towards 30%. I'd also argue that emotional well being and community would go a long way towards that as well...both of which are advanced through the use of plants. If we chose not to subdue them, as we have been told to do in Genesis, we might have an out.

But the odds of that happening are zero. Along with hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at a million+ a pop, we're well on our way towards insolvency, financially and socially. I shall hope that I learn from my little garden of eden, where I can go to reflect on nature, my garden a place where I might find wisdom. I sure as shit won't find inside a box of Pop Tarts.

Disposable Razors, Disposable Income

2011-03-20T15:10:00.001-07:00

I use Sensor razor blades and they're expensive. I noticed some time ago that the blades I use at work (following my bicycle commute) stay sharper longer than those I use at home, but I just accepted it for some reason.

I recently decided to investigate this phenomenon and discovered that blades will last much longer if you simply dry them off afterwards. The blades at home are in the shower and subjected to continuous moisture while those in my bike pannier get dried off, consistent with this dry-it-off theory. I now dry the blade off as best I can at home. I use a razor blade as an analogy with all my consumption. I have more than enough disposable income -- I could easily just buy more disposable razors with that disposable income. But I don't. Indeed, I'm willing to take efforts to extent the life on a razor simply to save a buck or two each year.

Yet, I counter these savings by throwing every penny I get in change into the garbage. I'll extent the life of a razor but I don't want pennies in the cruising kitty. I probably throw out 650 to 700 pennies a year, 'cause I hate 'em -- you can't buy a newspaper or a candy bar with them and you can't pay your Bay Bridge toll with them. They cost the government more than a cent to produce. They are inherently worthless because of that; this is the real reason I toss 'em. I earn 10,000,000 of them each year, so this represents a loss of about 0.007%.

My hope is that in forty seven million years, when the next generation of curious mammals decide to chip away at shale formations created by several thousand years of human waste looking for fossils, they'll no doubt think that historic man was a small, half-inch, single-eyed, bearded, bodiless creature. But getting back to the present, when a clerk decides to offer me a quarter instead of the $0.23 cents I'm due, when I see she also realizes the idiocy of pennies, I throw that quarter into her tip jar. Otherwise, the three pennies will find their way down the storm drain.

Today I smashed aluminum cans and carted off the plastics into a garbage bag. I save a few cents a day by doing this. I have enough disposable income -- I could just as easily dispose of them and get on with the NASCAR race. But no, I take the time to do this. I believe that these small acts, like maintaining my 16-year old lawn mower or reusing a bolt -- when aggregated, demonstrate a belief system in the slow, gradual accumulation of wealth through frugality, mindfulness, and thriftiness.

Mr. Fusion

2011-03-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

Ask yourself -- how is it that the only country in the world that was on the receiving end of two intentional nuclear detonations would today derive a third of its electric energy from nuclear? Probably because Japan knows how utterly screwed they are without it, what with their feeble global energy allotment. Just like South Korea that imports 98% of their energy, nuclear is an increasingly growing segment of electric production in those two nations.

Japan's electric demand approaches 170,000 megawatts, or 170 gigawatts. To provide scale, California, last I recall, was ~60,000 MW. California derives 20% of its total electric energy from nuclear. It is wholly relevant to the discussion -- without it, this blog wouldn't exist...at least not in its present form. Without nuclear today, we'd never be able to power our iPhones or our high-definition colorized television sets to the extent we do. Sorry, but if we want these things we need to power them.

I mentioned this earlier, but the moment even the most stalwart anti-nuclear, anti-coal, anti-oil environmental activist has to endure one snowy New England evening without power for light, but more importantly to charge her batterized vehicle, nuclear and coal will cease to be such bete noirs. In my mind, for the foreseeable future nuclear is the only scalable base loaded electric energy resource for 1) a western pacific rim nation tethered to their personal electronica 24/7, and 2) an eastern pacific rim nation tethered to their personal electronica 24/7.

I argue that we as a species will crack every last hydrocarbon chain for its stored energy, regardless. Regardless. It's perhaps only an issue for how long. There is no doubt in my mind that we will extract every last shovelful of West Virginian coal over the next 400 years; every last drop of Angolan crude; every last wisp of Indonesian natural gas; every last grain of sand in Alberta.

I again got into a lively discussion about 400 years out with my co-workers. Each one felt that because 400 years ago, in 1600, as the same issues of energy weren't in play, it's ridiculous to suppose anything about 400 years from now. In their eyes, Mr. Fusion is on that horizon -- banana peels and coffee grounds will power Mr. Fusion and personal, mobile power will be at hand. Yes, perhaps. But what about the more immediate future, say, 30-60 years?

I asked them to consider the past 30 years, to look at the range of all of our technological achievements. Thirty years is forever. In 1981 you actually had to get off the couch to adjust the vertical hold on the back of that gargantuan tele-box. But then I asked them to realize that the same thing powering TVs then is the same thing powering iPods today -- coal, natural gas, hydro and nuclear. They are smart guys; they know this. The energy sources haven't changed, and over the next thirty years they still won't change...not appreciably. We'll perhaps have higher penetrations of wind and solar, yes, but no Mr. Fusion.

I want to forward the notion, again, that technology is not energy. In 2041 our technological advancements will still be powered off 74.2 million year old coal, just as they were thirty years ago. Coking coal will be needed to smelt the iron ore to build the wind turbine pedestals and solar array frames, and natural gas-powered generation stations will be needed to provide for the 75% reserve requirement for intermittent wind and solar, and diesel will be needed to power the large Bolivian vehicles needed to mine the earth's surface for lithium for car batteries or to dig the holes for hundreds of acres of diesel producing algae pools or nano-biologics.

The Japanese are on the leading edge of technology yet they still need 7 billion year old uranium to power it.

Tomorrow Is Here

2011-03-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow has arrived.

I received an unexpected bonus at work, and by this time tomorrow I will have ended my lifelong quest to pay off my housal unit mortgage.

I chatted with a co-worker from Bangladesh over a cheese steak lunch today (yep, a poor dietary choice, I know), who is somewhat distraught regarding his purchase of his Natomas housal unit in 2007. He lived in Dhaka for most of his life and from 10:00AM to 10:PM every day, trucks were allowed to rumble down his street. Tens of millions of people. He hated the noise. Now, twenty years later, he cannot stand the sound of the silence of suburbia. He longs for the ability to walk his girls to the park, but the park is too far. He drives. If he does take them outside after work, they get mosquito bites, much to the consternation of his American wife. He knows that cable television, the Internet, and various other forms of personal electronica will consume his young family, alienating themselves intentionally in their own electronic silos, inside their own rooms, inside their own housal unit, inside a "community" where no one talks to one another, where no one visits because no one knows their neighbors' names, inside a nation that could care less about real social interactions outside of Twitter and Twatter.

I'm ten hours away from my final payment on a housal unit I have no real attachment to, because it's firmly planted inside Elk Grove, a city with no future. Suburbian housing provides a living arrangement that has no future. While I intend on continuing to make this housal unit my home, while I intend on taking the time and care to fix things that break and to make it presentable to the rest of the world, I know that many of my "neighbors" won't. Indeed, they already aren't. I enjoy their company, yes, when they make themselves available outside of just opening the garage remotely, driving in, and closing it behind them. But I also know that they are generally mobile, moving from one unit to the next, with absolutely nothing nothing! to pin them down to this community. If they want a better unit, they'll have to leave. If they want a smaller unit, they'll have to leave. If they change jobs, the new commute would be even more unbearable and they'll have to leave. When their unit ages, they'll leave to newer units afar. When maintenance calls, they'll have to leave because to perform maintenance on "maintenance-free" housal unit materials like seamless gutters or vinyl siding defeats the purpose of buying the stuff.

Truthfully, I cannot hope to live here for the rest of my days. I will be forced out someday. I think that as energy becomes scarce the true cost of building shit miles from everything else will be revealed. I think that as this neighborhood ages, people who have even less attachment to things will move in, to rent, to care even less for the place they inhabit. This is the endgame of suburbia.

My plan going forward is to finally save some money for a change, to allow for the future possibility to live in a desirable, human scaled, walkable, architecturally relevant neighborhood, but all those places around here are so fucking expensive because people know their value and people care about them. I'm forced to live in sterile, lifeless, stucco-clad suburbia until I can amass enough wealth to afford a real community.

Tomorrow marks the first day towards that new goal, now that my seventeen year goal has been reached.

Wa-hey.

Optimus

2011-03-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

So. Have you sprung for that new dual-core cellularized phone, or will you hold out 'till 2012 when quad-core phones are released? What will you do?

Huh?

What will you do?

Looking at what the new LG dual-core phone offers, I wonder why I'm not out bidding up the price for such electronica. I mean, I've been anticipating 1080p HD video playback for forty one years and it's finally here. Wa-hey. Not only is the beautiful 4" screen in HD but I can view all my digital videos recorded in 1080p on my compatible HDTV at home via HDMI. I should thank our all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise God in heaven that this new LG Optimus 2X phone supports Android 2.3.

A phone that can support mobile gaming. A phone that can support multitasking, such as mobile gaming and browsing. A phone that can provide smoother web browsing with little to no screen lag to make mobile gaming even more enjoyable. Yes, this is what our "new" economy is based on; a coupla different high-end cell-phones so we can play Angry Birds in high-def.

This is our new economy.

Exit, Stage Left

2011-03-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

I surmise that [the gains from increased productivity] are flowing to the multinational/political machinery.

This statement from my post To Get Rich Is Glorious led me thinking this morning on the bus about how pernicious money in politics has become.

For those of you living in California, I ask you, when have you last heard/read/thought about Meg Whitman, the most recent major party gubernatorial candidate to lose? For a woman who spent the most money in history on an election to gain her first elected seat, indeed, one of the most powerful seats in this nation, she's completely fallen off the radar.

It seems to me that only the financial elite, the top 1%, ever stands a chance to win against the backdrop of a nation far more interested in the affairs of the Kardashians than anything in reality. And by financial elite, I don't necessarily mean that the candidate falls into that category per se, but regardless, he/she still requires the financial backing of those in the top 1% to even enter the party.

This is a vicious cycle and it's amplifying; it's growing geometrically. The ever growing concentrations of wealth creates a feedback loop, and it's obvious to any casual observer who's eyes are not glued to Kim's ass that for every additional election cycle the cost of competing rises dramatically.

Meg Whitman enters, stage right, and drops a colossal deposit (money, by the way, earned not in a truly productive activity but earned by a digital vacuum sucking all those loose nickels from what would have been yard sales) just to enter the fray. She gains the support of a small cadre of other 1% Republicans organized in political action groups or other front groups. She also contributes mountains of her own wealth above and beyond her initial "investment" to chug forward.

Jerry Brown and company needs to raise a shitload of money to counter the $178,500,000 this single wealthy woman raised, and he himself is forced to draw on contributions from the wealthy elite on the other side. State-level groups such as teachers unions and other PACs form the other side of the power balance equation.

Jerry wins, due in part to Whitman's inability to appeal to non-financial elites like my co-worker, who as a registered Republican chose not to support the overt buying of an election. Nonetheless, he failed to realize how Brown only won based on the covert purchasing of the governorship by the California Corrections Union et al. Meg Whitman, a la Snagglepuss, exits, stage left, never to be seen or heard from again.

The real issue I have is that, if wealth wasn't so concentrated in that top razor-thin tranche of well-connected people, then all these political candidates couldn't amass such huge sums from such a small cadre of people. They would have to seek campaign contributions from a broader base, like people who read this Monologue. But more critically, any new candidate, trying to counter the war chest of an incumbent, is wholly reliant on an ever decreasing number of wealthy elitists on his/her political side to raise even more money to compete, much less win.

And more critically still, the influence of that small financially powerful group over the elected grows as well.

A teacher's union is only ever interested in maintaining the status quo. I'm simplifying things greatly, I know, but their focus is to ensure they remain in the debate. Witness the power these sorts of groups have had in Wisconsin recently. Here we have several immense, politically powerful groups competing for a dwindling resource base. If any candidate alienates any of these competing factions their millions will simply flow to others who won't.

The next level of Snagglepuss Politics now enters, stage right, when we have the Supreme Court ruling that unlimited sums of contribution cash can now flow from corporations who are "individuals" who are simply exercising "free speech." These are, obviously, boarded and CEO'ed by the very same top 1% (who own as much as the bottom 60%), and so the dependence of political candidates on these financial elites is only strengthened.

This is how, when someone like Chris Dodd gets a sweetheart deal from Countrywide as a Friend of Angelo, Congress overrides the will of the American ~~consumers~~ people who, by a 600-1 margin, did not want to bailout the financial industry in 2008 to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars. The American consumer exits, stage left.

I like to think about such things on my bus ride. I think about the coming energy constrained future, but it's clear to me that there is far, far too much inertia in the existing form of democratic ~~repression~~ representation for us to galvanize any rational energy policy. Thus, I plan things around a possible future of resource constraints, financial implosion, and subsequent social meltdown. I have conditioned myself to these Snagglepuss Politics, and I'm conditioned by riding the bus.

Buy China

2011-03-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

American appliance salesmen are full of shit.

Before my recent purchase of a replacement dishwasher the other day, I just wanted to know where the dishwashers were built. I just wanted to know where these things were built. Are these appliances just final-assembled at that location, are the parts actually sourced from there or from elsewhere, etc. Simple, basic questions. That's all. But no! They have no idea, no idea!, about the origins of the products they are selling. Perhaps because I'm the only one in the U.S. who asks. Just because a dishwasher's label is written in the Latin alphabet and model number is written in Arabic numerals doesn't mean the damn thing wasn't made in China.

I absolutely needed to know that whatever dishwasher I bought wasn't made in China. The reason is obvious; I want a dishwasher that won't have to be replaced again in three years' time. The Chinese manufacture such god-awful junk that I refuse to subject myself to the pain and discomfort of trying to fit a poorly spec'ed Chinese dishwasher into an exact 24" hole, of trying to fuck around with a door that won't latch correctly every eighth try, of stripping a cheaply built plastic 7/8" nut on the water hose flange, a lower rack that falls off the rails on its plastic wheels every ninth withdrawal, of having to replace a malfunctioning drain solenoid at quarterly intervals...I am willing to pay five to six times more for a well-built dishwasher so that I don't have to endure such torture, so that I don't have to enable the perpetual conveyor belt of Chinese junk to landfills in the United States.

That means I have to buy outside China. It means my Buy China program stops short at major appliances. I have an $1800 bill burning a hole in my pocket from the 2% Social Security payroll tax cut Obama gave us last winter and I blogged about how I was going to spend that on imported Chinese junk to goose our economy, but admittedly I can't do it when it comes to important energy consuming housal unit items such as dishwashers. I just can't do it. I will spend that $1800 on other less-important stuff from China like tuna, duct tape, alligator clips, tweezers, telephones, cuddle soft fabric softeners, barbecue tools, tackle boxes, dog grooming brushes, lead-laced toys for donation to disadvantaged American children at Christmas, shower curtains, compact fluorescent light bulbs, paper clips, erasers, sheet rock screws, flip flops, door knobs, carpet tacks, 9-volt batteries, gutter guards, binoculars, flower pots, zinc screws, American flags, toilet seats, shop towels, watering cans, spray bottles, shop vacs, scissors, latex gloves, envelopes, non-toxic fine tip markers, solar calculators, candle holders, mini-screwdrivers, backpacks, salt shakers, bicycle chain locks, liquid soap dispensers, fishing poles, NFL licensed wall clocks, boat fenders, jumper cables, personal space heaters, window coverings, toothbrushes, playing cards, thumbtacks, lip balm, #2 pencils, vinyl air mattresses, plastic rubbish pails, digital answering machines, staplers, hex nuts and magnifying glasses.

So all I wanted to know was where Bosch dishwashers were made. The answer I got from the salesman was "Germany."

Bosch, yes, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Gerlingen, Germany, but I had already looked over the labels affixed to the inside of the prospective dishwashing unit. I am fully knowledgeable regarding Bosch products because most of my woodworking power tools are Bosch and I'm completely satisfied with their production, with their fit and finish, with how they are built. I knew ahead of time that the Bosch dishwasher model I was pining for wasn't manufactured in Germany; indeed, this model was final assembled in New Bern, North Carolina.

The point is, we are not conditioned to think about such things as where stuff is built. As consumers we aren't conditioned to ask and consequently salesman are not conditioned to know. In much the same way the Dodge salesmen in 2006 had no fucking idea what gas mileage their products drew when we were buying their car; they were never asked before.

I suppose I shouldn't be so astounded at the level of willful incompetence around me. After all, I do live in the United States; I do live in the most feckless, consumerist nation on earth. I do live in a nation that gives not one consideration towards quality in consumerism, but a nation that gives price the only nod.

If I were an appliance salesman, I would take the same care as I do in my job as an electrical protection engineer -- I would understand the fundamentals. I would take the time to know about the stuff I'm selling, about who made it, about why one product is better or worse than the other. I would go beyond. Perhaps this is precisely why I don't sell appliances -- because I would care, while no other American would.

The Oil Century

2011-03-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

The Oil Century
South Belridge, California
Discovered in 1911, this field pumped on as cities were rebuilt for cars and as ancient petroleum molecules were spun into household products such as plastics, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. South Belridge today produces 32 million barrels a year—enough for nine hours of world demand. In this century the world's supply may plummet.

Are you at all disquieted by the notion that this Californian oil field, one of the oldest and most productive fields in the state, annually provides just enough oil as used by half the people of the world for half a day?

To Get Rich Is Glorious

2011-03-13T08:16:00.001-07:00

I remember in 2003 calling for the bursting of the housing bubble. I couldn't have been more wrong. The inertia of our collective hubris, of our intentional, willful ignorance of the avarice and folly of a housing market rising 20% per year ad infinitium blinded us as our retirement funds were goosed higher by a rising stock market, our lives were made more comfortable with the purchasing of new 3,200 sq ft housal units on historic volumes of abundant, cheap credit, when local, state, and federal governmental services were adequate and flush with tax revenues, when gasoline was about as cheap as it was in 1989. We began a war in Iraq that year? Really? Ho-hum.

I have often commented here on The Franklin Monologues that all this wealth was hallucinated; all our prosperity, our economic growth, our wealth, all an illusion. Housal unit prices have fallen closer to their norms (well, I'd really argue that they would have fallen to the norm if not for the trillions in government intervention). They are still above the historic norm yet we ache for a return to the valuations of 2003...even though it was all fake.

What I find interesting is that the prosperity we felt between 1995 and 2006 was fantasy, yet the pain of this last recession and current jobless recovery is quite real.

Here's a nice, real statistic for you -- our productivity has statistically increased 2.6% in the last quarter, but real hourly compensation dropped 0.6%. There is no doubt that, on balance, we are earning less than what we used to, even though:

Medical premiums are higher than a year ago;
Gasoline is higher than a year ago;
Public utility bills are higher than a year ago;
Eggs are more expensive than a year ago;
Housal unit prices are higher than a year ago;
Government debt is substantially higher than a year ago.

As I understand things -- if productivity is increasing faster than wages, then the gains from such endeavors aren't flowing to the worker. I surmise that they are instead flowing to the multinational corporate/political machinery. This makes sense, when you realize that the inequality in wealth has only widened over time, is wider than at any other time in history.

I post this like I've a dog in the fight. Nope, far from it. Outside of the loss of two bus routes and slightly higher fares, I've remained completely insulated from the actions of these bubbles growing and bursting. I like to think that a modicum of my own preparation has led to this condition, along with holding the contrarian vision that our economy is as unsustainable as is suburban sprawl and dependence on foreign energy. To this end, I've:

Remained employed in a recession proof industry, electrical power generation, that has zero chance of being outsourced;
Not once cash out re-fi'ed my housal unit, even though I've refinanced multiple times;
Not engaged in speculative flipping, not getting stuck with an inflated property at the crash;
Not transferred all that hallucinated wealth into goods that demand real repayment, like waverunners or dot-matrix printers;
Held on to cash and cash equivalents, not subjecting all my assets to stock market bubbling;
Ridden a bicycle to work in the wind, rain, snow and ice.
OK, not really snow and ice, that's just hyperbole to see if you are really reading this shit;
Lived within my means, lived with single-zero Federal and State withholding, my non-interest bearing winter accounts;
Not developed $10,000 in credit card debt, at which bankruptcy is a probable option;
Lived in the same housal unit for fifteen years, paying property taxes at a lower rate than all my neighbors;
Remained more valuable to my employer than what I am being paid;
Held little to no revolving debt, and paying down my mortgage;
Held physical assets that offset losses in equities;

These are things than many of us could do, but we choose not to...because they aren't sexy. Riding a bicycle to work is work, and among the most un-sexy things one can engage in. Wearing a helmet, padded shorts, with panniers and fenders...god, I look downright awful on two wheels. But I digress...the slow, methodical method of gasp! saving to create future wealth pales compared to flipping a unit for re-sale, to winning the mega-jackpot at Red Hawk (kree-ee-ahhhh) Casino, along with countless other methods for deriving unearned riches.

This all has bearing on an energy blog because the way we squander our personal energies is similar to the way we squander physical energy. We've been left with an impressive panorama of devalued towns filled with demoralized people because we chose to save $30 on a dishwasher by outsourcing its manufacture to Asia and not having to pay an American worker a bloated living-wage to manufacture it. We've been left with miles of asphalt leading to defunct communities where the consumer lives in one place and consumes in another, requiring heroic volumes of energy to function. We have a Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) economy that produces nothing of real value -- it's simply a large, cyclonic vacuum sucking up an endless supply of loose nickles earned by the dwindling number people who still produce things of value in this nation.

To get rich quick is glorious in our society. However, this isn't new, nor is it much different in other societies:

The difference between the U.S. consumer and the Chinaman, however, is that we pin our economic hopes not on the slow, gradual accumulation of assets as he does, but on bubbles, on fiscal stimulati, on the privitatization of fast gains (think high-frequency stock trading) and the socialization of even faster losses.

I like to think that the difference between financial speculation/unearned riches and the slow, gradual development of riches will only become more apparent in the coming years as our economy, built upon the sands of services and financial avarice, falls apart.

Inertia

2011-03-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

I rode shotgun thrice today; once on the bus to work, once with an Indian born co-worker to lunch, and lastly with my German born co-worker home.

On the bus ride I sparked a conversation with my neighbor. As we passed the Shell station at Laguna and I-5 I commented on the price of gas. He claimed it was all political.

Rakesh, at lunch today, after I sparked the conversation by commenting on the price of gas at the station at 16th and W street, suggested that it's all politics...with a little finanacial speculation thrown in.

Hagen, driving me home and after sparking the conversation by commenting on the price of gas as 65th and 5th, suggested that it's not an issue; when he worked for PG&E in the late '60s he earned $10,000 a year and gas was $0.40 a gallon. Today he makes ten times as much and gas is ten times as expensive. It hasn't changed in 40 years, so $4.00 gas is about right.

In a way, all three don't shoulder any beliefs that domestic demand might have something to do with the price of gas. The cause is either natural or political. That we all live energy intensive lives, that we all consume three gallons of fuel each day on average (directly and indirectly), that we all simply expect cheap energy...well, none of this has any bearing. I understand our collective ignorance. I blog about its consequences; it's what keeps The Franklin Monologues going. If we didn't maintain ignorance on our energy use this blog would cease to exist.

Regardless, $4.00 gasoline is nowhere near the price at which U.S. consumers change their consumptive habits. There is far, far too much inertia in suburban sprawl, in mega-malls, in single-use zoned "office parks," in personal mobility, such that a few nickels more for a tankard of petrol is hardly worth changing our habits for. We don't adapt; we don't adjust; we don't overcome. We don't need to. We just sacrifice a little. Here and there.

Inertia is going to be a critical point going forward in my little view. Think -- what would it really take for you to get out of your car and use the bus, light rail, train, bicycle, or your two legs to buy groceries at your local store? $4.00 gas? $5.00 gas? $6.00 gas? More?

This is where I have an advantage, I believe. I am already conditioned to think outside the car. If I'm willing to ride a bike in the rain to work when gas is $2.78, I think I'm willing to ride anytime. I believe that the biggest hurdle most U.S. consumers will face in the coming years of convergent predicaments such as peak oil, climate disruption and economic peril is that they simply are not psychologically prepared to do things differently. Inertia is so strong even the most stalwart environmentalists are only thinking of alternative ways to power our cars - not thinking of ways to live without the mandatory use of one for every facet of living.

Look around Elk Grove. In fifteen years of bicycle commuting, in fifteen years of driving my own car, I've not once ever seen an Elk Grovian woman commuting by bicycle. Inertia in car-dependency is just too strong to get a woman on a bicycle around here. This isn't misogyny, it's observation; there simply are no suburban Elk Grove women riding bicycles. I think that their belief in the entitlements to an auto-centric lifestyle prevent them from engaging such an activity. They didn't move to Elk Grove to ride a fucking bike. Women will not ride bikes at $4, nor at $5 in my estimation, and by that I mean riding for utility. It would take $7.82 gasoline to find an Elk Grovian woman riding her bike to the Safeway to buy groceries.

Neither would you find an Elk Grove immigrant commute by bike. None of my immigrant neighbors has ever, ever! mounted two wheels instead of four. Many left countries where the bike is the primary mode of movement and they immigrated to leave that behind, among other reasons. They would need $9.56 gasoline to even consider ditching the Mercedes, Land Cruiser or Acura for a bicycle. They didn't immigrate to America to ride a fucking bike. Often the Elk Grovian immigrant spends an inordinate amount on his/her private automobile, showing just how important car culture is.

The inertia of such cultural things or of sexual orientation; these are impossibly difficult to overcome. This is why, in my opinion, that trying to assert my little minority view against an entire population willing to roll over and tacitly approve the invasion of an oil rich foreign country is not worth the effort. I'm the minority here. I'm a white guy; indeed, a member of the only group of people in Elk Grove who commutes by bicycle, yet I also hold a minority position on why I do it. I hold it, apparently, because I'm a member of a group who has access to everything, whose neck has never been pinned down by the boot of someone else.

I believe that this inertia will cause us great harm; we will enagage in foreign wars and occupations to preserve our energy intensive suburban way of life, when it becomes clear that the rest of the developing world also wants access to the same extravagant lifestyles and we have to competed for the resources to power them. We will compete for these resources; indeed, we already are. The Elk Grove immigrant, the Elk Grove woman, the guy on the bus and my co-workers all think they are six degrees removed from the actions we collectively take to ensure our liberal, timely deliveries of Nigerian and Canadian crude but indeed they are only one degree separated. Both of their actions and inactions contribute to a nation that can't support itself.

Inertia is strong, yes...

A Return To What?

2011-03-10T14:08:00.000-08:00

Now that we are on this supposed upward arc of economic revitalization, the question becomes "what exactly are we to revitalize?" 25% gains in housal unit valuations each year? Massive, perpetual increases in tax receipts by governments? A continuation of debt-based suburban sprawl? Another round of bank lending fakery and cash-out re-fi's for every housal unit owner?

I wonder what year most Americans would pick as the year they'd like to return to -- 1958? 1963? 1987? 1995? 2005? Underlying the assumption that our economy is being "restored" is that there's a benchmark to compare it to. Restored to what? Which one of the above year's economic and social measures would you like to return to?

I remember my extremely liberal state government professor at CSUS pined for 1958; he was convinced that year was the pinnacle of US culture, and he made the argument that every year since we've fallen farther away. Uh-huh. 1958 was possibly pretty good for him, yes, as a white man. It wasn't quite so good if you were a Jew, a negro, a woman, were gay, or otherwise a non-white non-Christian, non-male.

Any year in question is subjected to bias, to personal preference, or personal history. 1958 marked the peak of familial units, the peak in domestic oil production was still a decade away, all our global economic competitors hadn't yet fully recovered from near total devastation from war a little over a decade earlier; the U.S. had all the good manufacturing jobs, and one good job held by the white man could support a middle class family. But imagine you were an atheistic Black lesbian. 1958 would hardly have been the peak.

I believe that most people now in 2011 probably think that a return to 2005 is what they'd prefer...at least economically. Their housal unit values were on a tear, everyone had access to cheap credit, access to multiple vehicular units, they could pick amongst a litany of service jobs, gasoline was cheap and readily accessible, the engagement of our two wars went un-noticed unless you happened to be in the service, liberalization of homophobic laws was on the horizon along with the decriminalization of marijuana -- things were bright and beautiful.

I wonder if we've reached our economic pinnacle. No matter what you may believe, there's always the possibility that 2006 represented our peak. I argue that there's a possibility that the constraints of global oil might prevent us from surpassing 2006. We may discover that the lack of credit, the deflation occurring, may presage a decades long economic calamity as has befallen Japan. Or perhaps any of a number of other things that might occur; war, disease, destruction, or corruption.

Look to Wisconsin, whose constituents can't accept that a perpetual $3,000,000,000 state deficit might require a change to the way things have been conducted in the past. Here in my little state of California our governor has eliminated the use of 55,000 cell phones by state employees; a drop in the bucket but cumulative droppings do count; there's a $20,000,000,000 deficit to undo. The point is, there's been consideration for a change to the way things have been done.

In my estimation, if we indeed do emerge from recession, we will inherit an economy that's less able to weather any future calamity. We will continue to build new bridges and freeways per our highway lobby's prerogatives just as the era of cheap oil wanes, expecting technology (like batterized cars) to pull us forward. We will continue our suburban sprawl madness, building housal units 32 miles from everything, forcing each "owner" to charge his batterized car twice a day just to get to work and back. And all these things we import will be built by foreigners and all the things we build domestically will be built by foreign born laborers because we've lost our ability to build shit ourselves. We will have lost our ability to weather 1)an oil supply disruption, 2) global wage arbitrage, or 3) another financial "scandal".

M preference for which year we should return to would be 1987. My natural bias shows. I'm 41. This was a pretty good year for me. If we returned to the economy of that year we'd 1) likely find a domestic job producing things of value, 2) the relationships between the top 1% and bottom 20% were narrower, 3) domestic energy wasn't at the forefront but we still had the chance to alter our ways, and 4) thrash metal was at its heyday.

When our economy revives, what period do you think it look like?

The Day The Music Died

2011-03-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

Sitting in a chain restaurant this evening, after ordering I asked the waitress if the music could be turned down -- it was just loud enough to be distracting. I determined it wouldn't have mattered where we sat -- it was loud everywhere.

She claimed "No, we can't lower it, it's too hard. Lots of customers have asked but there's nothing I can do. Sorry."

I thought this was a pretty ridiculous answer. But then I thought about how this woman has no real incentive to manage such things. She likely has no real connection to the restaurant. "It's a job, man," she's not the owner. If business boomed she'd do OK, yes, but if it tanked she'd just find another job down the thoroughfare.

I thought about how this parallels our use of energy, too. If this were a matter of energy consumption she again doesn't have any incentive to manage such things. Leave the lights on in the broom closet? No matter, she doesn't pay the bill. I know I'm simplifying things greatly, but I have to think that if this weren't a chain restaurant, if the real management were local, indeed, if they were actively running the place, she might take a different tack. She might care.

There are a hundred million such people around us, everyday arguing that there's "nothing I can do" regarding their energy use. This is the consequence of building cities such as Elk Grove whose zoning codes mandate auto-dependency, whose citizens generally aren't old enough to recall past events such as 1) world instability, 2) depressions, 3) resource scarcities, 4) oil embargoes. This leads to complacency in extreme energy use, but it's not as if this didn't make sense. Our pattern of living is profitable and creates millions of jobs. We choose to remain ignorant of the chance that energy may become constrained because this whole system is utterly dependent on cheap, reliable energy.

I live in suburbia. I enjoy what suburban living provides, yes; however, for 41 years it's the only place I've ever lived ; it's all I know. The nature of such low density living along with profligate energy consumption, I believe, has led to many of the ills now manifesting: the assignment of cheap labor to Asia to manufacture goods for the rest of the developed world, destroying the manufacturing base in our country; depot sized consumption centers destroying the old sense of town centers and meaningful destinations; social degradation through solo-occupant motorized commuting, no sense of "we" anymore; sterile, lifeless suburban living where no one has any "obligation" to their neighborhoods...

We have invested so much into this way of living that we're now forced to continue to support it even as energy rises in relative price; we seemingly have no other options. We'll pull up to the fill station, murmur to ourselves and feign frustration but in the end we have no choice. Neither do we have a choice regarding the price of romaine lettuce at our suburban grocery depot, or the tax increases needed by our local governments to pay for the cost of busing students to centralized educational depots.

It's not as if we can stop driving. It's not as if we can stop eating. It's not as if we can allow our kids to walk 3.5 miles along a suburban freeway to school. We have never accepted these things and we will do everything we can to never have to do them. So we internalize hope that technology will rescue us; batterized cars.

This has to work, because there aren't many good alternatives. Indeed, it might. I remain skeptical, but it might. We're like the waitress who can't do anything about the loud music -- too set in our patterns to want to do anything about it. If energy becomes an albatross around the neck of our suburban way of life, well, we'll gladly listen to the music until the day it dies.

Gas Buddy!

2011-03-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

I, for one, am in total agreement that we extract some oil from our vast, vast strategic reserve storage facilites to goose the gasoline market lower. Soccer Sally in Laguna Vista needs some relief. So does Joe the Plumber out there in Old Town Elk Grove -- his work truck's fuel appetite is really straining his small business. And, they vote.

Rachelle the Elk Grovian Realtor, boy, does she ever drive a lot for business. Suburban-sprawl housal-unit salespersons -- a car dealer's ideal customer. Her white Mercedes isn't sold in a hybrid version, nor would she find it acceptable to show a house to prospective buyers if she arrived in a Smart Car, a Fisher-Price version of a real car. Not very professional. She eagerly awaits our government tapping into our strategic reserves, as this would signal all those on-the-fence exurban buyers that cheap gas is right around the corner again. If they continue to buy in the burbs, well, she'll make healthy commissions on each one. As she spends a large portion of her day inside the carapace of a motorized vehicle, luxury is paramount.

Each story saddening. Each consumer at wit's end. As gasoline and diesel rise due to all those wicked oil companies and their Arab co-conspirators, well, at least we, like, have technology, dude. Gas Buddy! dude, the hot new app on the 4G. Just scroll on down, dude, and you'll instantly find the cheapest gas in all the land.

Gas Buddy! Man, what a fantastic solution to soaring prices! It's like having an invisible concierge riding shotgun! Relief is at hand. In fact, the second lowest price in Sacramento is right here on my blog's namesake, Franklin Boulevard, at the Franklin Gas & Shop. The absolute lowest price is, of course, at the WalMart affiliate Sam's Club.

Without being entirely sure, I would suppose that WalMart consumes more oil than any other American company, even more than, say, United Airlines. They've an awful fuel requirement to keep their warehouse-on-wheels in perpetual motion, delivering junk from Asia to large depots for us consumers to motor to, to consume. As the largest private purchaser of refined oil products I'd suspect they they have a significant pricing advantage over everyone else, thus they can offer it a few cents cheaper...

And of course, in our broad land, Lowest Prices, Always should be our new national motto.

I'm interested to know -- do you think that Gas Buddy! is self defeating? Assume this scenario: a foggy Elk Grovian morning, and you break California law by palming your iPhone in your lap while driving, looking to your favorite new buddy, Gas Buddy! to find the cheapest gas for your commute to the Bay Area to your telemarketing job. You know Gas Buddy! is updated by other purchasers of gasoline, and you discover that a station not six miles out of your way has the cheapest gas, updated less than 30 minutes ago. So you drive the additional six miles to purchase it, but you notice it's a full penny lower than what was posted by your other consumptive buddies. You stop for a second -- you ponder whether it's in your best interests to post the new lower price to Gas Buddy! If you do, then more people will show up there, spoiling your future chances of getting timely access to a pump. Higher demand and the station owner might jack up the price! Do you hold this station a secret? Do you intentionally withhold this economy-saving one cent differential? If this information got out, you know you might have to wait behind three other cars on your next visit, while you idle away all your new-found savings.

Maybe you intentionally post a one cent increase! Yes! That way, other buddy users will flee for even cheaper gasoline, leaving your station high and dry for your next visit.

Man, all these things running through your head as you exit the station, wondering how to post a new price to Gas Buddy! on your iPhone while commuting to Oakland that morning. You smile as you board I-80, realizing that technology = energy. You just saved yourself thirty two cents, after adding the savings but subtracting the additional six miles. You chortle how that imbicile over at Gone Solar has been arguing that technology <> energy for three years yet here's a perfect example of how that dumb blogger doesn't know shit.

Pharmer's Market

2011-03-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

Having had my first surgery in thirty nine years, I finally reached into the higher tiers of health care -- the most expensive tier III...

17% of our GDP is bound up with health care, a much larger percentage than most other advanced nations spend, although as I look around I find it rather hard to imagine we are a much healthier group of people than we were in 1969 when I arrived on this third stone:

When I was born health care required 5-6% of GDP. I know that there's a lot more to it, but we've tripled the share we spend on health care since then, but we most certainly haven't seen a tripling in our actual health.

This is an unfair argument, I know. The truth is, well before 1969 we had already cumulatively spent trillions to develop "public health infrastructure" that provides good bang for the buck -- vaccinations, clean water, sanitation networks, food safety, emergency medical facilities -- things that by themselves separate us from second and third world status. This is the first tier in health care. To expose my ignorance on this topic, I have no idea whether or not sanitation/waste water treatment should be included in that 17% or not. You could argue it either way.

The next level of health care is basic primary care, the second tier: Dental check ups, cavity filling, tooth extractions, turn-and-cough hernia identification, prostate exams, gynecological visits, prenatal care, sleep studies, ingrown toenail extractions, gonorrhea shots, nutritional guidance, lower back pain management, asthma medication, insulin delivery, arthritis care, high blood pressure medicine, alcohol and substance abuse treatment, admonishments to exercise, admonishments to eat fruits and vegetables, admonishments to avoid trans-fats, stitches for knife wounds, elderly care, tetanus shots, well-baby plans, physical therapy....

The problem is, primary care is affordable. The other problem is that it has major health benefits. It provides the biggest bang for the buck. These pose huge problems. It interferes with the ability to turn 8-15% annualized profits for for-profit pharmaceutical, biotech and health care organizations. I argued some time ago how we could hire teams of $50,000 preventative care specialists to assist people to live more correctly, but instead our government subsidizes corn syrup and dead, processed food production for mass consumption while consumers are then carted off to $384,000 surgeons and specialists to pull out gall bladders and perform gastric bypasses and knee surgeries for the chronically obese...

Gastric bypasses, boner pills, CAT scans, acid-reflux disease solutions, breast enhancements, MRIs, botox, Paxil & Zoloft, hydrocelectomies -- This represents the third tier of health care, the high-tech solutions, the first of which I participated in last week. If things go well for the rest of my life, I should expect to consume about $837,360 in tier III care for all my future diabetes and elder care management. Even while declaring my ignorance of the true breakdown of health care costs, I'm pretty sure this third tier is the most expensive, produces the least benefit, but man, is it ever profitable. I argue that most of these ailments come as a result of failures to manage basic primary care. Failure to get out of our cars and walk to the corner stores...um...er, scratch that; we don't have any corner stores. Failure to get out of our cars and bicycle to our consumptive depots.

Republicans sold us the idea of pre-emptive war in 2003. Not surprisingly, Republicans today are not trying to sell us the idea of pre-emptive health care; no, campaign contributions & quarterly reports from Astra Zeneca trump long term health care sustainability. They are also doing everything they can to upend the latest health care bill, to ensure continuation of an unsustainable trajectory in existing health care that makes most of its money from third tier care.

There's no doubt our health care lobbies would argue that if we just ate from the Pharmer's market rather than the farmers market we'd all be healthier.

Indeed we are healthier. Just look at yourself in a full-length mirror...

Call It A Tax

2011-03-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

I find it quite interesting how, when gasoline rises in price, pundits always refer to it as a "tax on American consumers."

Really?

When a loaf of bread costs more do you think of that as a "tax?" When your next $599 iPad 2 costs more to replace your iPad just because you want the latest gadget, do you think of that as a "tax?" No, you don't.

To suggest that the rising cost of gasoline is somehow a tax shows just how arrogant and mindless this nation is regarding energy consumption. It shows how we don't understand that someone else's resources are theirs, that if they elect to charge more for their resource, or if the dollar falls, it simply will cost more. To call it a tax is blockheaded.

But we routinely do it, allowing us to ignore our complete, total dependence on foreign oil. Doing so implicitly suggests that our government is creating this tax increase, as only governments levy taxes. It shifts the burden of our own failures to live sustainably with our own domestic resources to the "failures of government" to keep the price reasonable.

A no-fly zone over Libya is being considered. But had Mubarak decided to quell public unrest via air bombing we would never have considered a no-fly zone over Egypt. Why? Libya has oil, represents an astonishing 2% of world oil production, and if a new student at Pomona can't fill her graduation gift, her new car, with reliable cheap imported fuel, well, the government has to step in. Aircraft carriers and destroyers and no-fly zones and naval escorts for supertankers all to keep Isabella's fuel bill modest. If it does rise, it's a tax, and it's the government's fault.

What I do enjoy about all this is that the use of oil is so democratic -- Financial services CFOs and high school janitors both have to heat their homes, and both have equal access to our gold-plated roadways. In this sense, both are equally liable for why we consume 25% of the world's oil with 4.5% of its population. This isn't something that we can freely blame the rich for causing, and because we can't, and because we ourselves refuse to acknowledge that our 52-mile round trip commutes to our florist's or real-estate jobs may be the cause, we call it a "tax," and passively assume our government ought to do something.

Like drain our strategic petroleum reserve to shave a nickel off a gallon of gas! There's a smart idea if I ever heard of one! Let's use our reserve to quell pending domestic social instability when Los Angelino's have to gasp! use the bus to get to work or pay $4 to drive around the most auto-centric city in the world.

This photo took up nearly an entire page in the Elk Grove Citizen newspaper two weeks ago, as the article went on to say how gasoline rose $0.02 that week. Like that's fucking news. But...it's news around here, boy. It's news to a city that pinned its entire future and economic health on the cheap, reliable, and timely delivery of Norwegian/Libyan/Canadian/Mexican oil. Every resident is affected, because every housal unit needs two or more cars just to function, just to live here, just to buy a pack of smokes or watch a soccer game at a friend's house. The city council approved acre after acre of low density sprawl with no jobs and no meaningful destinations that forces its residents to contribute to global warming even if they don't believe it, to contribute to two foreign wars and no-fly zones even if they don't support it, to depress Nigerians rights even if they don't know where Nigeria is on the map, to set ourselves up for economic calamity when oil begins its inevitable decline while we happily motor ninety miles a day to our Bay Area jobs.

Yep, call it a tax.

Disgruntled Commuters

2011-03-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

Over the next few weeks I'll be riding the bus to work instead of my preferred bicycle on Franklin Blvd. I'm going to miss it, while trying to recover from crotch surgery. That's something any bicyclist can't simply get performed on a Monday and jump back on the saddle on a Friday. It's going to take some time.

I expect that my e-Tran bus service from Elk Grove to Sacramento will be packed up beyond reason over these few weeks for three reasons:

1) When the "recession" ended in 2009, that same year Elk Grove couldn't stop funding its precious freeway over crossings, and when tax revenues tightened, the city council instead elected to curtail two of my bus routes. Remember -- funding public transit is a "subsidy" while funding freeway expansion is a "Republican mandate." We conveniently ignore the tax dollars used to ~~subsidize~~, er, encourage-free-market-enterprise like Target's warehouse on wheels, but cry havoc when we fund transit routes for all those slack-jawed yokels sucking off the public teat riding buses. E-Tran bus #52 now runs less often while ridership has increased.

2) The cost of gasoline is approaching "painful" levels. An economy-busting, job-killing $3.65 a gallon. When it broached $4 bucks back in 2008, Elk Grovian commuter bus services were stretched, filled with a whole lot of new faces, and interestingly, a whole lot of disgruntled commuters. An awful lot of people didn't like the "public" part of public transportation but they didn't like $4.25 gas, either. Now that gasoline is a wee-bit more costly than it was a few months ago I'm gonna see crammed buses full of disgruntled riders again. Wa-hey.

3) I'm riding the bus, leading to more congestion on the bus. I am traffic; I am congestion. If I could ride my bike there'd be one more seat available, or more importantly, one more "hole" such that the afternoon Elk Grove bound bus will not have to strand one less passenger because the bus is so damn packed.

I'm really going to be yoked if the weather over the next six weeks is sunny, warm, and inviting, with no rain and wind. Just like I would prefer to ride my bicycle when there's a fatality on the freeway (so I'm not stuck in traffic), I would prefer to be riding my bicycle when the weather is good. These are perfectly normal human responses, and I won't be made to feel guilty due to my "insensitivity" towards drivers losing their lives on the roadway. There's nothing wrong with hoping they lose their lives on days I'm not behind the wheel; when I'm not near them; during holidays and weekends when I'm not commuting. They are going to kill themselves and others regardless, the way we [collectively] drive.

I will be bus-bound for a while.

Saving Bryan's Privates

2011-02-26T22:15:00.000-08:00

I made mention of the hundreds of thousands of dollars bicycle riding will cost you, if you choose to commute by bicycle along Franklin Blvd. like I do 3-4 times a week. Yep, the inevitable car-v-bike accident will occur, and if you're lucky you won't become dead, but will only have to suffer through a series of painful surgeries to pin your bones back together.

In my case, the sum of all the gasoline I have saved and will have saved, along with all the gasoline my evil twin in our parallel universe has saved will all get fuckered away next Wednesday, when I go under the knife to manage the hydrocele that, (I'm speculating here), was caused by bicycle riding.

I dare you, dear reader, I dare you, to travel away from this monologue and google-image hydrocele. It will leave you with a weak and uneasy feeling...

Yep, the cost of bicycling is presenting itself rather starkly here. I suppose I could attach a before-and-after set of photos, yes? No?

Now, this issue may have presented itself regardless; if all I did was ride the bus this still might have developed, but hey, I need something to demonstrate how commuting by bicycle is among the most fiscally irresponsible behaviors one can engage in. Indeed, let me assume this surgery will cost $14,600 to perform, shouldered by my medical insurance company and ultimately shouldered by you, the electricity ratepayer. If I had driven to work instead, in my little Honda car using a gallon each day, I could commute 7 days a week for ten straight years at $4.00 gas for what this one surgery will cost.

How's that for trying to save the world by not driving my car, eh? No, instead of saving the world by bicycling I have to spend energy trying to save Bryan's privates.

One Job & Two Houses

2011-02-26T14:26:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that most Americans are muttering to themselves, "Screw North African democracy; I want my $2.75 gasoline back."

Not a single U.S. consumer was likely aware how much oil Libya produces, at least not before last Tuesday.

Libya sits atop ~40 billion barrels, the largest reserve in Africa, which to most American consumers seems like a lot. "Dude, I only use, like, one tank a week." But this grand nation of ours burns a billion barrels every 50 days to keep our WalMart shelves stocked with imported plastic consumables from China. Every fifty days.

Go back to 2005. Remember that year? Back when we were living large, when our housal units were rising 20% every year, when that guy who stocked those WalMart shelves could live quite comfortably with his one job while flipping two houses he bought on margin. Since then, this nation has consumed the equivalent of all the oil underneath Libya. Just this one nation -- not considering the other 6.5 billion people in the world.

And since then we've gone from one job and two houses to two jobs and no house, if you were one of the lucky ones who still had a job stocking shelves. Between 2005 and today we've consumed all the oil underneath the country with the most oil in Africa.

Yep, Libya produces just 2% of world production, but as oil is priced on the margin like kilowatts are at the California ISO, small supply disruptions can have wild effects on prices. The $100 a barrel is for that last barrel bought -- it's not as if all barrels are priced at that point. I'd bet that 75% of all oil is bought and sold through bilateral contracts, while the remainder is purchased at spot or near-spot. $100 represents fear that two percent might be curtailed.

Of course as a monologist who decries our suburban layouts, our extreme energy dependence, our hallucinated non-productive economy, and our failures to think and act sustainably, $3.70 gas brings a tear to my eye. I'd probably find more joy in $7.30 gas, but hey, I'll take what I can get. This isn't anywhere near enough to get people to change their habits and actions but at least I get to chuckle a little. It'll be reported that "nobody could see this coming." Uh-huh. Just like nobody could see the housal unit crash. We'll just take it that a little instability in the Middle East, er, North Africa, was what's causing this...not our total dependence on foreign energy.

If it weren't for the extra nickel it costs for gas, we'd still be wondering where Libya was on the map...