Adaptive Curmudgeon

Plumbum et Circenses posts this:

(Click image to see source.)

Yes, it’s exactly what it looks like.  A warning printed on plywood that sawdust causes cancer in California.  Sawdust = death!?!

Actually this shouldn’t surprise me.  California exists to give the rest of us something to laugh at.

Like France, California is the punchline to a joke that began long ago.

Everything in California has warnings.  None of which bear resemblance to actual risk.  Luckily, nobody (and I mean nobody at all) takes it seriously.

My last encounter with “Californicated warnings” in their native habitat was a few years ago.  I’d ridden all day through the homage to air pollution and illegal immigration that is the San Joaquin valley.  I stopped at a mechanic’s shop for an oil change.  On the door was the list of things known to California to cause cancer.  It included everything but sunshine and metric wrenches.

Obviously mechanic’s shops have lots of icky chemicals.  That’s why intelligent folks go somewhere else for their picnic.  Only the Sacramento haze of egghead detachment would imply that internal combustion engines need nothing for maintenance but hope, medical marijuana, and rosy assumptions.

The ironic part was that I’d gotten there on a motorcycle.  Yes, I could somehow ingest brake fluid and get sick.  Or I could make a misstep in traffic and wind up fucked by a  Kenworth on I5.  Which one is more likely?

I never liked the San Joaquin valley so I rode hard for a locale more appropriate to my personality.  I spent the night near Furnace Creek in Death Valley.  What a nice place!

Curmudgeons, when sick or injured, will run for open space. When seriously ill I headed for this road. It made sense to me!

They had air conditioning and water.  In a land where the snakes won’t kill you because the heat will have you dead and collapsed over the handlebars first…water was plenty to make me happy.  There were no warnings on anything.  I was happy.  I wanted to stay longer but was out of time.

I was out of time because somewhere amid the San Joaquin smog I’d developed a sinus infection.  It was getting worse by the hour and there are no doctors in Furnace Creek.  (You think you’re tough?  Put on a full face helmet when you’ve got a killer head cold!)

I made like a Cowboy and rode at dawn.  Things would have been much worse if I’d stayed.  None of which involves drinking brake fluid or the zombie death sawdust of Sacramento’s id.  California will kill you with air while warning you about the lead content of your battery posts.  No wonder politicians thrive there!

The rest of the trip was better as I limped along on antibiotics and grit.  I was happier in Nevada and Utah because I’ll take “reality” over useless warnings amid the air pollution any day.  You know the left coast has gone bonkers when deserts, strippers, and creepy polygamists seem conservative and reasonable by comparison.

Once upon a time I was searching for a particular book.  There was a huge imposing bookstore near my house.  Rather than muck around on the Internet I’d buy from actual human beings in the real world.  Mostly I wanted Instant gratification!

They had coffee, lattes, CDs, maps, gifts, magazines, chocolate, and DVDs, but not the title I wanted.  I asked the reference person to look it up.  Nope, definitely not in the store.

“Fine, I’ll I’ll order it” I said, reaching for my wallet.

“It’ll be two weeks.”  She replied.

Sheesh.  So much for instant gratification!  “OK fine.  Just ship it to my house and I’ll pay now.”

“We can’t ship it to your house.  You’ll have to come to the store to pick it up.”

“Uh…really?”

“Well there’s another way.  You could order it from our on-line store, then it’ll come to your house.”

“Great!  Do it!”

“I can’t.  All I can do is ‘in-store’ orders.  You’ve got to do it yourself.”

“You want me to put my wallet back in my pocket and go home?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re doomed.”

“Why?  What’s wrong with our on-line store?”

“You’re telling a customer to put his wallet away and then go home to place an order from the host of every on-line store in creation?  You’ve heard of Amazon.com haven’t you?”

“Well our on-line store is good too.”

“Yeah but nobody ever got rich telling customers to put away their wallets and go home.”

“I don’t make the policies.”

“Certainly.  Well have a nice day.”  I stuffed my wallet in my pocket and went home.

That night I placed the order with Amazon.  The book was in my hand a few days later.

After that I stopped going to the bookstore in question.  It had become a coffee shop with books for scenery.

Why am I mentioning this?  Because their demise was already a done deal and I could tell with one single book order.  The attitude and business model was a losing proposition.  That encounter was about six years ago.  Maybe the company could have been saved but I doubt it.  At any rate it’s over now.

A.C.

Update: I wrote this several days ago but planned for it to go live several days later.  (WordPress calls it “scheduling” but I like to call it “ghost in the machine”.)  I thought I was the only one who noticed or cared about Borders’ demise.  Luckily The Ultimate Answer to Kings posted an opinion.  Now I know there are two of us.

They always struck me as a good idea badly done.

Farewell Borders; I’d miss them if they’d been a bookstore.

Update 2: Monster Hunter Nation has an admirable take on it too.  Far more inside information than I had as just a customer.  Hat tip to Bayou Renaissance Man.  Perhaps “ghost in the machine” is Curmudgeon Speak for “scooped by everybody”?

A few days ago I posted Things You Need To Know Before You Buy The Farm and promptly forgot about it.  I’m used to obscurity.  I expected a few people would read my post, nobody would comment, and my dog would pee on my shoe.

Instead, something unusual happened.  I got a bunch of hits.  Bayou Renaissance Man had linked to my sleepy little site.  The Smallest Minority piled on too.  Huzzah!

Then came links from folks I’d never read before and whom I’m happy to hear from; The Travis McGee Reader, Les Jones and The Mellow Jihadi.  (There may be others too.)  My ego is well and truly inflated now!

All this time I thought I was just pissing into the wind.  Thanks to everybody who linked and everyone who reads this shit my carefully worded essays.

Update:  Another link!  This time from the cheerily named End Of Civilization.  Plus a few forums; I’m not sure how to link to a forum but thanks anyway.

The lovely and talented Mrs. Curmudgeon has given me a gift.

This is my mug.  You can’t have it.  If you want one get your own.

If you don't have a mug like mine your life is hollow and bereft of meaning.

There’s no obvious word for what I do. I have a homestead and aim for self reliance…but I still have a day job. Is that “homesteading”? Who knows? Homesteading is a spectrum between Grizzly Adams and the banker’s deluded trophy wife who hires illegal aliens to plant tomatoes for her. I haven’t gone as self-reliant as I’d like but that’s probably good. It keeps me from going too Mosquito Coast and/or starving in a mud hut.

I don't know who this guy is but he has the wild eyed look of a homesteader. (Photo linked.)

Another thing to know; it’s a bigger challenge than you think. Too many lessons are learned the hard way, most of what you read is bullshit, and half of what you actually know won’t apply to your situation.

I probably don’t know what I’m doing but I do know plenty of stuff that’s wrong. I’m always happy to help folks avoid obvious pitfalls (many of which I’ve experienced first hand). So I’ve written an unordered and incomplete list of things you need to know if you’d like to homestead.

1. You have much less money than you think.
2. Don’t quit your day job. See #1.
3. Baby skunks are the sweetest cutest little fluffballs you’ve ever seen. Shoot them; in the head.
4. Every redneck with a spare acre of overgrazed farmland will put a cow on it. If you automatically buy a cow, you may be a redneck. If you ponder the best use of your pasture you may be on the path to homesteading. If you buy a llama you’re doomed.
5. If deer eat your garden; eat the deer. Humanity evolved to be a bad ass. Rise to the occasion.
6. Hippies, God bless them, become a lot more realistic after raccoons kill their chickens and the pipes freeze.
7. Squirrels, birds, snakes, and other woodland creatures enjoy ruining your plans. It is your job to demonstrate your superior position on the evolutionary ladder. After a while they’ll learn that you’re not nature’s bitch and back off. Unless you are; in which case they’ll take over your house and party like the Green Bay Packers on acid.
8. Get this month’s copy of Mother Earth News. Then burn it.
9. Jackie Clay is smarter than you.
10. Tools, chainsaws, buckets, mauls… you need a whole lotta’ shit to reduce materialism. Go figure.
11. The closer you are to “carbon neutral” the more ridiculous the concept will seem.
12. If you need to consult with zoning rules before buying a chicken… move.
13. Debt will beat your ass like a tambourine. You’ve been warned.
14. There is a vast gulf between the critter you’re raising in a barn and dinner on a plate.  Cross it.
15. When all else fails and you think there’s no hope; swallow your pride, drive to town, and eat at the diner.
16. It is entirely possible to know six languages and have mastered advanced particle physics yet screw up planting an apple tree.
17. Pay attention to geezers. A lot of old people know their shit.
18. A lawn is not landscaping. It is a flexible use storage facility and a defensive perimeter between you and nature.
19. Ideally a dog should be roughly the size (and possibly the intelligence) of an eight cylinder engine block.
20. It is entirely possible to spend two grand making a gallon of maple syrup that you’ll sell for $60. Do not try to explain the logic of this to your accountant.
21. You have an accountant? Well lah de dah! I suppose you’ve got a butler too?
22. If you find a real mechanic treat him well. Ladies, you may want to consider marrying him.  The rest of us are trying to swim against the tide of a disposable society and it sucks. We want your mechanic’s number.
23. You may find yourself daydreaming of backhoes and fences when you used to dream about yachts and Lamborghinis.
24. It is said that the average person can go only three days without outside resources like grocery stores. You’ll soon realize that the average person can’t read this sentence without a support team.
25. If your doctor says that homesteading is not exercise, punch him with the flabby unused muscles you developed lifting 100 pound bags of feed.
26. Flannel sheets are worth it. Lumberjack plaid goes with everything. Denim jeans aren’t officially worn out until the third round of patches.
27. Keep a jackknife in your pocket.

My tractor has me depressed.  Not because it’s broke.  (It’s an antique and I work it like a mule.  It has every right to expect maintenance and repair.)  It’s because every time I try to fix it I get interrupted.  Countless duties, all of which take precedence, suddenly crop up.

It’s uncanny.  If I pick up a wrench and walk toward my long suffering machine something will happen.  Asteroid strike, Viking invasion, an unavoidable business trip to Guam.  Always something always urgent.

The tractor is hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles and I can’t keep the lid on other stuff long enough to do anything about it.  It’s as if God himself hates my little Ford.

So I pulled my original blog header:And replaced it with one that didn’t remind me of failure:Doubletrouble noticed.  Nobody else did.

Which brings me to a story:

…………………………………………..

Many moons ago I was a radio DJ. You might picture an exciting hip mixmaster doing blow off a supermodel’s ass in a limo on the way to a gleaming recording studio.  It was nothing like that.

The pay sucked, the hours sucked, and the music was so brain numbingly repetitive that it should be banned by the Geneva convention.  As much as I might have wished for it, there were no supermodel asses in the dim stuffy 10’x10′ soundproof box where I languished.  Just a lot of coffee and some stone age equipment.  (This was not a college radio station…it was a job.  Curmudgeons get paid or they go home.)

The marketing pressure on top 40 songs was relentless and there were other drawbacks.  Some examples:

• There was a period of weeks when some nameless corporate flak decided to elevate Debbie Gibson from talentless jailbait to talentless hyper-promoted mercilessly overplayed jailbait.  I was forced to play her crap endlessly.  (I submit the Nuremberg Defense.)
  

  What the hell happened in the 1980's?

• The Michael Bolton era (or as I like to call it; “the dying of the light”) was even worse.  Once, in a fit of despair I played Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay but used the Otis Redding track (as God intended).  Immediately some squeaky teenage airhead called to demand who “this new guy Otis was” and “why he was copying Michael Bolton”.  Folks, nobody can prepare themselves for this level of spiritual oblivion.  Since the caller probably didn’t choke to death on her own stupid (which is a shame) I assume she still walks among us.  Statistically it is likely that she procreated.  Therefore I conclude that another generation of very very stupid people is alive and somewhere right now fucking up life for the the rest of us.
• Did I mention 36 consecutive hours of Christmas Carols?  I needed the money and nobody else would take the shifts.
  

  I should have made money doing something more honorable, like stealing organs from hobos.

• And of course there were sports.  Roughly 1,450,987 baseball games per week. Nine synapse meltingly boring innings each. I used to set timers to keep myself awake.
  

  A game that quotes statistics to add excitement?

• The ultimate boredom was running the board for high school sports on radio.

One evening I was running the board while a remote announcer was calling a girl’s JV basketball game.  I don’t want to sound dismissive but girls junior varsity basketball on the radio was worse than static.  Sports should involve hulking steroidal monsters in gladiatorial combat.  Ideally the participants should bludgeon each other while wearing enough armor to absorb the kind of impacts that would normally kill a Yak.  Non-team sports should involve very fast vehicles with a tendency to explode. (N0te to NASCAR: vehicles should steer both left and right.) I also totally dig watching bullfights and rodeos…men in large hats getting stomped in the groin by unhinged livestock. Excellent!

A fourteen year old girl dribbling a basketball is just not up to snuff.  Hearing someone describe a fourteen year old girl dribbling a basketball had almost stopped my pulse  In fact I’d rather watch lizards fuck on a pancake.  (Note: My editorial staff has pointed out that “lizards fuck on a pancake” is a metaphor which makes no sense and furthermore that I’ve never actually seen lizards on a pancake doing anything.  I respond that it makes perfect sense to me and the threat of lizards and pancakes is precisely why I don’t have cable TV.)

It had been an unusually close game.  The score was tied.  Shelbyville was playing Springfield and it was some sort of playoff game. The crowd (there’s a crowd at a high school girls basketball game?) was screaming like rabid squirrels in heat.  (The editors would like to point out…  THIS IS AN UNEDITED BLOG!)  The clock only had a few seconds left when someone unexpectedly snatched the ball and flat out hammered for the basket.  (Based on the rest of the game I assume all the opposite team members got confused and fell into the bleachers.)  She was all alone and took the shot at the three point line. The buzzer rang while the ball was in the air…

Then.  Nothing.

The line had gone dead.  (The remote was transmitting to me via normal telephone connection…it was the stone age remember.)

I quickly made an announcement: “We’re experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by” and flipped on some music.  …And began to weep as steaming heaps of Michael Bolton oozed out of the speakers.

Meanwhile I tried to reconnect the patch.  No doing.  Apparently the long expected Soviet ICBM attack had hit a girl’s JV basketball game first.  Hmmm…

I settled in to the usual routine of top 40 shit and commercials and waited.

Twenty minutes later I got one call.  ONE.  CALL.  A geriatric voice quavered on the other end of the line.  “Excuse me fella’, what happened at the game.”

I had no idea.  “The line went dead.  I think wolves attacked.”

He took it in stride.  “Well I was just wondering.  I an interested listener you know…”

I thanked him and went back to playing shit and commercials.  I was starting to prefer the commercials.  Then it hit me.  I was running a 50,000 watt station with a viewing area of about 200,000 people.  The system conked at the most exciting possible moment.  And I had only one “interested listener”.  That is when I realized that life is futile and has no meaning.

I never did find out who won the game.  A few weeks later I quit that job and moved to a swamp to take a different job that was demeaning in wholly new and interesting ways.

It is also why I gave Doubluetrouble a 1,000 word explanation as to why my blog header looks different.

It’s fun to bitch but our modern world is awesome! Poverty in America in 2011 is the life of a king in 1650.

Take any one of our many conveniences out of the usual context and they rock!  You need special experience to see their true value.  When you’ve gone without it, built it, or both… you know what I’m talking about.  The Ultimate Answer To Kings knows the score:

“What seemed a convenience so normal as to be virtually invisible becomes something miraculous.”

His accomplishment?  Plumbing!  (Note: I was a total chump and paid for most of my installation…he did it the hard way; shovel and all.)  Well done!

NASA pisses me off!  America was once awash in excitement about space exploration.  We were the balls out badass studs that put a man on the moon!  We did something that no human since the beginning of time had accomplished.  (And no other nation has managed to follow us yet!)  NASA was the heroic group that did it.

Humanity was on the cusp of another era of exploration not seen since The Age of Discovery.  What a glorious time to be alive!

And then…  we lost it.  Lost something.  Lost the spine.  Lost the class.  Lost the audacity.

Nobody has gone to the moon since December 7th 1972.  And I don’t want any bitching about the difficulty of the challenge.  We’ve got huge advantages over the 1970’s.  How primitive things were back then!  It was the Nixon administration.  A time before color TV, microwaves, and rap music.

A 1972 AMC Gremlin. The stone aged humans that rode in this shitbox went to the moon! (Possibly to escape their shitty cars.) (Photo is linked.)

Just look at the shitty 1972 era car!  If you were lucky it would have FM stereo and electric windows.  Whoopty fucking do.  If people driving the Gremlin could go to the moon, people with bluetooth enabled SUVs should be flying to the stars in luxury cruisers staffed by sexbots.

But no.  We’re sitting around watching Detroit crumble and retiring the Space shuttle.

NASA is the gutless bureaucracy that has resided over four decades of decay.

In 1972 it looked likely that space flight would become common (or at least as common as visiting Antarctica or Mt. Everest).  But no!  Thirty nine years after Americans were sipping Tang on the lunar terrain we’ve more or less given up on manned travel.  We’re paleolithic yahoos standing at the seashore remembering the amazing visit of Captain Cook a human lifetime ago.

NASA did that.  Fuck them!

For once, other people agree with me.  NASA dropped the ball and it’s bumming us out!  Check out these links:

• Thirty Years Of Innovation at Transterrestrial Musings.
• Dream at North.
• Or Abstruse Goose which posted the comic below.

You’ll find this chart replicated all over the net.  I sourced it from calculated risk but it’s referenced in countless other locations as well.  I have no indication that it is incorrect.

Those of you who are bad at math or Obama fans can take a powder for the rest of this post.  For everyone else I have a question.  (You didn’t all bail did you?)

Don't blame me. I voted for Kang.

Let’s get the initial (and obvious) reactions out of the way:

1. This is bad.
2. This is not good.
3. No matter how much the press tries to shove unicorns up your ass about how the recovery started an hour after Obama won the election, this is still weak economic performance augmented with turbo jets of suck.
4. Printing a metric shitload of non-existent money didn’t help.  See #3.  (I am not surprised.  There isn’t enough Kool Aid to convince me that amassing debt to destroy old Volvos magically creates prosperity.)
5. This is the worst unemployment “shift” (flush?) since 1948.  Seventy two years is a long time bubba!
6. Grrrr.

Ok.  Have we gotten all that out of our system?  Good.

Because here’s my Curmudgeonly question.  Why?  Why should 2011 have so much  unemployment for so much longer?

The previous seven decades had plenty of mismanagement.  There have been wars, pestilence, drought, and disco.  Why the long period of suck this time?  How did did we eclipse everything since President Truman?

Never fear, I have a theory!  Either I’m seeing an underlying reality or I’m way off.  (Please comment.  If I’m wrong I’d like to know so provide your interpretations!  Hint: calling me an asshole is not a well reasoned argument.)

I believe that unemployment is higher now and is staying high longer because virtually everything we’ve done for decades has made unemployment a more tenable situation.  Regardless of intention, most Federal fiscal policy can be viewed as if the goal was to keep people out of the workforce as long as possible…possibly most of their life.   Perhaps the chart shows the demonstrable “success” of such policies?

Think about what differs between now and the past.  You know what we didn’t have in 1948?  Extended unemployment benefits.  Surely cash payments make being unemployed a lot easier than otherwise.  Nor did we have an unofficial immigration policy that counts on millions of illegals to be a shadow workforce. (Semantic note: they are not “undocumented”…they are illegal…as in breaking the law.)  Reasonable people can disagree about immigration but surely illegals picking cabbages in a shadow economy distorts the documented worker’s economy.  Regulatory hassles?  In 1948 you told an employee to show up and paid them cash.  If they sucked, you fired them.  In 2011 you need an HR department to avoid lawsuits, an accounting department to generate 1099 forms, and firing anyone becomes an issue.  Certainly that’ll discourage hiring.

And of course the biggest change of all is the rise of two wage earner households.  When you lose one of two paychecks it’s dire.  It’s also a common situation in 2011.  Losing the single and only household support is 1948 style bad news and it’s catastrophic and total!

In 1948 you’d work, get paid, or starve.  In 2011 there is a vast network of complexity that eases the transition from wage earner to welfare consumer.  Presumably the better the welfare state and the more programs that smooth the transition…the longer a person is likely to stay unemployed.  Why not?

BTW I’m not trying to disparage the unemployed.  Getting laid off sucks…and it hurts.  I’ve been there too.  I’m just saying that welfare and it’s associated programs, regardless of intention, provide an incentive and opportunity to stay unemployed longer.  Which is precisely what the chart is showing…more people are staying unemployed longer than we’ve seen since WWII.

So is the chart showing the “success” of policies that subsidize unemployment and penalize wage-earners?  Of is it just the worst bad news  in 70 years and me overthinking things?

Now, because I’m such an optimist, I’m going to add a ray of hope.  It’s bad but it’s not 1939 bad.  We’re not fighting on the streets for turnips.  Kansas hasn’t gone Mad Max because rains screwed up the corn crop.  Aside from Detroit (which is always screwed) and a few deeper blue states like New York, Illinois, California, and Minnesota (which all made decisions that are coming home to roost right now) the nation hasn’t totally shit the bed.  The lights are on.  The streets are filled with cars.  Wal-mart still stocks food.  People are still buying food.  (Possibly more with welfare money and fewer with wage money?)  Canada hasn’t attacked.  The Russians haven’t launched ICBMs.  The numbers suck but you can walk down a lot of streets in America and things superficially look ok.

This too would match my unusual interpretation of the chart.  Policy has encouraged a situation where gainful employment in 2011 is a “lifestyle choice” as opposed to 1948 where gainful employment was the alternative to being a hobo and eating roadkill.  (For the record, I once hit a deer with my car and after morning the car butchered the deer and stuck it in the freezer  So I’m not making fun of hobos either.)

In the long term the numbers are bad.  Making gainful employment an option is not a good thing for society.  It’s not good here and it’s not good anywhere.  (I can’t believe I’ve got to say that after we all watched mighty Russia collapse!)  The EU’s problem children of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Greece are not a good portent.  America’s problem children of over extended States is the same thing.  So yeah, long term we’re all gonna’ die but does the dissonance between numbers that say “we’re going off a cliff” and a society that still has gas at the pumps and Nintendos in Wal-mart say that the welfare state is doing precisely what it was designed to do?

I just stumbled upon some fresh snark from The Gormogons:

“Democrats are the drunks of the debt ceiling debate. Republicans are the friends trying to take away the keys to their car.”

It gets better:

D: “If you’re too bogus to lend me a couple trillion, China will. I’m totally driving over there to get my money, so I can get me some more PBR, dude! Anyway, no worries. China will never make me pay that money back.”

R: “Gimme those keys, there’s no way you’re in any condition to borrow more money from that loan shark China, much less drive there.”

Good stuff; you should read it in it’s entirety!