479 who's running this show, anyway?

There are some screencraps lying around on my phone. I don't even know what had me excited at the time. So here goes, with a post that an editor might tell me to skip.

The city resurfaced the street down a couple blocks from us. For years you could see some of the original granite setts through the pavement. When they scraped up the black top, you could see more.

The scraper damaged some of the stones, but they're still there, history in the making. Unlike some granite curb stones. I often wonder about that, what happens to the granite curbs they're taking out to replace with those yellow plastic ramps. Each of those pieces of granite is worth a few thousand bucks.

There's been a fair number of these wheat pastings put up around town. I like them, and also, we used very similar frame clip art for a fundraiser video for the Barbary Coast Revue back in 2012.

With a few embellishments.

And now for those screencraps.

More walkers are dying on the streets of the United States. Why?

Bigger vehicles. Especially taller vehicles. It's scary to think, but before the ubiquitous popularity of the crossover, a pedestrian who got hit had some chance of getting thrown over the car.

Now, more and more of us are getting the smackdown. 

And this is a deliberate thing, car makers are building cars with bigger and bigger noses, because consumers think they look tough. Deb's truck has a huge grill, a big blind spot, and about a foot of empty space under the hood.

Part of this has to do with more efficient engines. Higher compression has led to more power out of the same size motor, and car makers compensated not by making motors smaller, but by making cars bigger.

(Ok, Ford has actually made some smaller motors, but their trucks certainly haven't shrunk.)

(Ok, except for the Maverick. Go Ford!)

(Relatively speaking. I'm still anti-car.)

I didn't agree with some of what this young writer had to say in a libertarian vein, but I do approve of his thinking about the "scarcity mindset."

But I do believe it is possible for us all to enjoy great abundance without continuing to expand the economy endlessly. There's this thing called "efficiency" and we have a lot of room for improvement there.

And certainly he's got a point that the economic struggle in California is real. While I believe that most real action happens in this world because of love, and it's helped me survive in the debatably world's most expensive city for two decades without a full-time job, it certainly is discouraging to look at house and rent prices around here.

And this is probably true, if even by accident.

Recently, this housing shortage has gotten me interested in mobile homes. I knew about 4% of America lives in one, but I didn't know there are about half as many new ones made every year as there were thirty years ago.

Based on my limited experience, I'm guessing this has to do once again with zoning. Particularly zoning against singlewides, the most efficient kind of mobile home. The town we fixed up a doublewide in banned singlewides sometime in the eighties. 

While a doublewide is still an efficient home choice, transportation and set up costs are more than double those of a singlewide, and the home itself is also more expensive, even for about the same square footage. (You would be surprised how much space they can fit in a singlewide, three bedrooms and two baths is pretty common.)

Speaking of, here's a sneak peek of the before and after pictures. There will be a whole post of them once the start to finish video is done in the next few weeks.

Amazing how we turned that grass white, huh?

Why on Earth us semi-smart monkeys think we're the beginning and end of consciousness just baffles the bananas right out of me.

Recently, I've been struggling with writing my next piece of fiction. My last one was set on Mars in two hundred years, and while it was fun, I think it was a mistake. We don't really have a shot at colonizing Mars, not any time soon. The radiation off the sun, with no magnetosphere, would kill us pretty quickly.

So I'm thinking of rethinking the next story I had in mind, and moving the action to Earth, in about 70 years.

Although I don't know whether I should have the young protagonist wear a mask.

Also, remember, most of our elected officials work for the ultra-rich. Democrats aren't terrified of governing, they're terrified of losing funding. By the time you've kissed enough ass and raised enough money to run for a big office, governing is about the last thing on your mind.

File under: #singularitynow

I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, space junk. On the other, weaponization. 

On the third, the machines want room to work unimpeded.