569 mind the step



It's time for another dispatch from the frozen north.

Where the skate park has been turned into a skating rink. 

And the lot next to the fire department was turned into a rail slide exposition for an event called Winterfest. It was a fun day. This is a new event and definitely showed it's greenness, but still fun to see the community rally together.

We're slowly meeting people, mostly skiers, but the big news is, kittens!

(See "A Mobilehome Makeover" on YouTube for more exciting furball action.)

At the top, one of the new guys meets the old guard. The old guard isn't nuts about the new recruits, but fortunately it hasn't escalated beyond a hissy fit.

Ok, now for some screencraps. This one is a bit about our relationship with cars, but I think the insight is much bigger. And true. We really do shop for the worst case scenario, even tho it rarely comes true. Deb and I bought a package of surgical masks back during the early aughts, during a flu scare, like swine flu or avian flu. 

Remember those? Anyway, that package of surgical masks sat unopened during an entire fucking pandemic, when we also bought all kinds of cloth fashion masks and N95s. 

Eventually, we threw it away. (If you're not going to use your emergency masks during an actual pandemic, when are you going to use them?)

Remind you of any "emergency supplies" around your house?

These are a bit all over the place. And my SFGate habit is dwindling, so I'm a bit out of the loop. Has the Salesforce Tower been turned into an SRO yet?

Welcome to the future of fashion. There's kind of a fun trend emerging in AI, which is, using AI to defeat AI. In this case, the sweater design was created by AI to confuse facial recognition cameras. We're looking at the camo of the future.

So what does all the bluster about not raising the US debt ceiling add up to?

If the US dollar is destabilized, ie, we threaten to stop paying our debts, it runs the real risk of not being the unit of international trade. 

Losing our status as the "Petro dollar" forces all kinds of new realities. Without owning the world's reserve currency, we no longer have the ability to print money, or add money to the mainframe, or whatever we do now to "quantitative ease."

But don't worry, even if we lose the ability to by plastic Chinese doodads, Wall Street will still rule the roost. For a while, at least.

Of course, there's always the question of, what would the world look like without a bunch of F-350 drivers running the show. 

In the meantime, a reminder: if you need a sign, it's bad design.

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