Elon Musk Week – Page 12 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

What Hockey Taught Me About My Life and My Career (Bonus: Broadswords)

“This is hockey, OK? It’s not rocket surgery.” – Mystery, Alaska

“You da goalie, not Yoda® goalie.” I have to get my hearing checked.

When I was in middle school, one week we played hockey for P.E. Where I grew up it was certainly cold enough for water to freeze – but we didn’t have any water, it being nearly a desert and all. A typical backyard mud puddle in Midwestia is bigger than things we called “lakes” growing up, and you could wade across the local river at flood stage and not get your pants wet. We did, however, have a gym and roller skates.

A group of uncoordinated seventh graders attempting to roller skate on a gym floor for the first time probably looked like a gaggle of hippos juggling wet sheepdogs. I wouldn’t know exactly what we looked like, I was busy studying the wood grain of the floor by repeatedly falling onto the free throw line as my skates stubbornly refused to stay underneath me. The nearly frictionless wheels kept twisting my legs at angles only experienced by crash test dummies, Thanksgiving turkeys, and a stoned Elon Musk.

Why were we so pathetic?

The nearest roller rink was 30 miles away, and what passed for concrete in town was concrete in concept only, with the newest patches of sidewalk having been put down personally by President Roosevelt as he raced Hitler in a sidewalk building contest to determine who had to have Italy on their side. Anyway, what concrete existed in town was broken, jagged, and was used by NASA to simulate walking on the Moon because it was so rough and powdery. If we wanted to skate that left skating in actual dirt, because skating on the highway was illegal in every state in the nation until Virginia just recently legalized 30^th trimester abortions.

I got to be team captain, and no one really argued when I picked goalie as my position. In two teams of horrible skaters, I was the worst. Being goalie didn’t require much skating, just being quick and a lot of intentional falling. As I could fall unintentionally, intentional falling was even easier. The puck was a hollow plastic disk that weighed next to nothing, and I was quick enough to stop nearly every shot.

It didn’t hurt my goal-tending streak that this was the first time that any of us had ever played hockey and everyone was a horrible shot. I’m pretty sure that our P.E. instructor had only the vaguest idea of what the rules were since he informed us that in order to start the game we had to sacrifice the smallest and weakest player in the middle of the gym for the strength of the tribe while drinking Moosehead® beer. Since we were underage, he drank all our beers for us.

We’ll all miss Benji.

As I grew older, there was a period of a few years where I watched actual NHL® professional hockey, until they just stopped showing it on any network I could find. But watching hockey was different than watching other sports – in an average game the players are (at times) going 25-27 miles per hour, and the puck itself is often moving in excess of 100 miles per hour. In the NFL®, the top receivers run about 20 miles per hour for short bursts, but average much less.

Because of the increased speed in hockey, minor differences in starting position resulted in big separations between players as they accelerated across the ice. The importance of that separation is the same in all sports, but I really was able to see it when it came to hockey due to the faster speeds. What’s really important is time and space. With enough time and space, a hockey player can break away from the crowd and attack the goalie one on one. With enough time and space, players can be where the action will be five seconds from now.

The same principle holds in football. With enough time and space, a wide receiver can break away from the defense and score. I think it holds true in soccer as well, but too often the players are just sitting on the field knitting and drinking brightly colored cocktails with whimsical umbrellas and chunks of fruit before they go shoe shopping. I think soccer would be much more interesting if they gave the players broadswords with no real rules or guidance on how they are to be used in the game.

Now, imagine with swords. See? Better already.

But what happens in sports also happens in real life, minus my really cool broadsword idea. The analogy of time and space is incredibly important to people who are trapped on mountains as the storm comes in, or the logistics in supporting an army in the field, or even the position of the individual units in a battle. Put 5,000 men in the right place and the right time and almost any battle in history swaps winners. Heck, 300 Spartans (plus 700 Thespians) changed the course of history and saved Western Civilization. Tell me that Xerxes wouldn’t love to have that one back – lose to the Greeks just the one time and you never hear the end of it.

If only they had compromised, imagine how we’d remember them.

To “maximize” your financial potential, you should use your time and space to be where the action is. Sadly, for my career the right place is bigger cities – huge cities, with populations of millions of people. A bigger city would be okay, but from what I’ve seen of cities, most of those millions of people I won’t like. They just seem to be in the way when I try to drive on the congested roads. Broadswords would be helpful here, too. The city is filled with activities, though. Activities that I really don’t want to do – except for nice restaurants and museums, and getting to a big city four or five times a year is necessary, mainly to remind me of all the reasons why I don’t want to move back to a big city.

Thankfully, though, I don’t need to maximize my financial potential – the mortgage that I pay here in Modern Mayberry is less than 27% of the cost for an apartment in San Francisco, and on a per square foot basis? My cost is 5% (that’s not a misprint) of what I’d pay per square foot in ‘Frisco (the locals love it when you call it that, I hear). That 5% number just includes house square footage, and doesn’t include the 10 acres the house is on.

With life, time is still time, and space is still space. And during a career, money is space AND time. If you only have enough money for this month, you have that much time. If you have years of money saved up, you have that much time (and more). Savings is opportunity. Savings provides options – and those options expand your opportunities. Enough money gives you time and space – time and space to try things, risky things that have higher rewards. Or? Give you time and space to just do what you want.

Which for me is not hockey. I’ve seen enough gym floors, thank you.

But . . . hear me out . . . how about hockey with broadswords??

Economics, Thermodynamics, A Bikini, and the Future

“It’s a little known law of thermodynamics: the conservation of optimism – there’s only so much to go around.” – Andromeda

Okay, zero Kelvin is absolute zero. Thus, Kelvin is really the coolest name ever.

Economics is often called the dismal science. I’m sure that’s because economists look in a mirror, and are upset to see that the supply of economists is greatly in excess of the demand for them as dating partners. Thus, economists have their Saturday night open for Hot Pockets®, box wine and the Internet. See? Dismal. But if economics is dismal, thermodynamics will make you want to cut your wrists. Yeah. It’s worse than Hot Pockets™.

We know economics is defined as lying about the economy. But I hear you asking: “What the heck is thermodynamics and why are you ruining a perfectly good Wednesday morning by bringing this up?”

Let me explain.

Much like a three year old with a metal fork and an outlet, thermodynamics is the study of how energy flows. The father of thermodynamics was a Scot named William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin if you’re nasty. Proving once again that the British Empire was awesome for smart people, Lord Kelvin got rich and famous by being a total stud at physics and engineering. He even had a yacht that he tooled around the Mediterranean on and held massive seagoing parties – sort of like Mark Cuban, but smart and with a Scottish accent. Think Bill Gates with an artificial personality implant. Lord Kelvin even had unit of temperature, the kelvin, named after him. Top that, Elon Musk.

Lord Kelvin was the first to understand the fundamental and disturbing implications of the physics he was discovering. Energy moves from a highly organized state to a poorly organized state. A piece of firewood or a gallon of gas or a PEZ® is concentrated energy. Once it is combusted and the energy extracted, what’s left becomes diffuse, the molecules mostly turned into CO₂ and H₂0 that are mixed into the rest of the atmosphere. You can never form that firewood or gasoline or PEZ© again – it’s a one way trip.

This is significant. Kelvin discovered that the Universe as a whole is like a pizza after delivery: it moves from a hot, high energy state on Saturday night towards a chaotic, cold, low energy state on Sunday morning.

But wait, what about oil the gasoline was made from? Doesn’t the formation of oil violate this? It went from icky goo and dinosaur bones into energy dense crude oil, right? That’s energy from nothing!

No.

Every drop of oil, every piece of firewood, and all the sweet PEZ© on this planet came from the input of thermonuclear energy – the Sun. Every time you use a gallon of gasoline in your car or a cubic foot of natural gas in your home heater, you’re burning millions of years of concentrated sunlight, which really ought to be a lyric in a pop song. Our Earth isn’t a closed system – it is bathed in the life-giving thermonuclear radiation every day from the Sun.

Tans are so sexy when I put it that way.

Outside of suntans for girls wearing bikinis, sunlight is a very weak energy source. It took millions of years to make your gasoline. Gasoline burns in a car engine at 500°F, and gallon of gasoline can move a modern car for 40 or 50 miles. It would take (at minimum, under the best conditions) a one square yard solar panel 60 days to produce the equivalent amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline. Add in storage losses and real weather conditions? It might take a year. Solar energy is weak and diffuse or else bikini girls would turn into piles of ash after a day lounging in the Sun. Gasoline is awesome and full of energy and great for your skin. I soak my hands in it while I drive, you know, for the ladies.

Okay, this is a picture of a really hot girl.

I thought you mentioned economists?

Oh, yeah. People confuse economic viability with thermodynamic viability. In economics, the idea is that you can’t continually produce something that’s worthless, unless you’re the government. If you’re the government, producing worthless things is your whole plan. But any business that did this would be bankrupt faster than a whimsical elf buying reefer. Economists have even developed a worse idea than that: Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Modern Monetary Theory is the equivalent of the government burning your country’s factories for lighting so you can make more fidget spinners at night, so of course certain people in Congress love Modern Monetary Theory. It’s making infinite money from nothing!

Even without dim Congressmen, economics still fails when it comes to energy, because economics neglects the physics of energy. An economist would say that if oil were $200 a barrel, why, there wouldn’t be a problem because while we’re running out of barrels of oil we can make at $10, there are LOTS of barrels of oil that we can pump if oil costs $200.

Sure. If only everything about oil was measured in the price of a barrel of oil. What economists miss is that producing energy takes energy. In 1920, each barrel of oil produced between 20 and 50 barrels of oil. We found and used the easiest oil first – we didn’t start off drilling in three miles of ocean. No. We went to Texas where oil was 10’ underground and you could pull it out in seemingly limitless quantities because it would jump into your truck like an obedient basset hound if you left the doors open. We didn’t frack horizontal wells with thousands of pounds of pressure and special chemicals. Why would we? In Pennsylvania and California it was seeping into the rivers. Natural gas? What a nuisance. Burn it at the well to get rid of it. They originally tried to smoke the natural gas in California, but they couldn’t figure out how to get it in a bong.

Fracking has been one of the bright spots in oil production – millions of barrels of fracked oil are produced daily in the United States, so it’s good? Well, maybe not. Each barrel of oil invested in fracking produces, at most, five barrels of oil.

Five to one, that’s awesome, right?

Well, no. That fracked oil is from the best portions of the shale. Just like we didn’t start off drilling in the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle in 1850, we didn’t start off with the hardest fracked oil. It won’t get too much better, and if recovery technology improves, maybe we can stay the same. Rune Likvern was the first (that I can find) to use the analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as applied to the energy problems we face (LINK).

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I’ll note that Likvern was quite wrong in that he felt the Bakken wouldn’t produce more than about 0.7 million barrels per day. It’s producing in excess of 1.2 million barrels a day now, and I don’t doubt that it will produce even more. Pipelines from the area clearly lower the cost of energy production, so the Bakken will continue to produce, at least for now.

But at least you can make cool jet noises and pretend, right?

Our civilization is built on energy, and the more energy it takes to produce energy, the more of our economy that will be devoted to it, we’ll be like the Red Queen and Alice, running faster and faster just to keep in place. Sooner or later you end up with the absurd situation where everybody has to be working to get the energy, all the time, and then who would give out free samples of aerosol “cheeze” at Costco™? Don’t kid yourself – energy is that important to the society we currently have structured. We don’t get fresh fruit in winter, daily commuting to the ‘burbs, climbing walls at colleges, pensions, Brady Bunch© re-runs, and all that health care without consuming a LOT of energy.

“But John,” you say, “certainly biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel and hemp-powered hippy busses will save us.”

It looks like (according to a lot of data) that corn ethanol and biodiesel actually consume more energy to make and transport than they provide. These fuels have a return of less than one. Why on Earth would we do that? It’s like eating your own foot because you’re looking for a snack, which is actually a quote by The Mrs. when I was explaining this topic in the hot tub. Well, farmers vote. And why would The Mrs. suggest that we start with a foot? I bet feet are all stringy, and not nearly as good as spleen.

If ethanol is so bad for the economy why would people make it, I mean, besides for drinking? Because it’s mandated to use a certain quantity of ethanol each year in gasoline because farmers who vote like to sell corn. That’s it. And if it’s mandated, you can make a profit at it, even as you waste energy that could be used to make PEZ® instead.

Thermodynamics is a tough master – you can’t win, and you can’t even break even. But at least there are Hot Pockets© and box wine . . . .

This is the first post in an occasional series about energy.

14 Magic Questions and Elon Musk’s New Quest for Genetically Engineered Cat Girls

We’ve been negotiating with men from outer space for seven years. – Real Men

I don’t think he’ll remember that in the morning.

The other night I was talking about an upcoming decision/issue that was bothering me with The Mrs. Don’t worry, that decision will be blog fodder when it’s all done, in some form or fashion, likely before Elon Musk invents and markets Electric Marijuana Boogie Panties©. But as we discussed my problem, The Mrs. caught me with a question that I’d asked her months earlier about a different issue she was having:

Why does it bother you?

That was a particularly powerful question to me. It was at that moment that I realized exactly how amazingly smart I was. I had asked a really good question. Why did it bother me? I thought a long time, and realized that what bothered me about my current situation had very little to do with anything that would hurt me today. Or this year. Or next year. Or the year after that. So, nothing to worry about today.

So why was I letting it bother me? In this case maybe it was pride, and in this case the worst kind of pride – wanting to win a game I wasn’t even interested in playing. But the short answer is this single powerful question made me feel better. Many problems die when exposed to this question. If they don’t die, use bleach or go see a doctor and get a topical cream.

But the real next question for me should have been: Who cares? I hate to tell you this, but, probably very few people. The bad news is I’m not the center of the universe that I thought I was. The good news is that few people remember the past events that bother and embarrass you the most. That one time I walked straight into the glass door at that party while carrying a McChicken® sandwich? Yeah. Nobody remembers that. It was embarrassing at the time, but even if someone did remember? They don’t care. Who cares? Family. Good friends. Santa. Nancy Pelosi.

Told you so.

What do you want? For a lot of people, that answer is money. For others it’s success. Fame. A new car. I’d add in the obvious follow up: Why do you want it? Money is useful only if you have a purpose for it, but it can become a trap, something you want just because you want it. And success, fame? Kipling said it best in his poem, If – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same . . .” (The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You) Understanding what you want and why you want it is one secret to happiness. The other secret to happiness is television, according to this show I watched on television.

There are things we want that we shouldn’t, like sixteen bacon cheeseburgers, which is what I’d really like to eat tonight (Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini). What attracts you to ______? Right now, my fill-in-the-blank is cheeseburgers. But I’ve seen people who are like sorority girls on a Tuesday night tub of frosting over something that’s obviously bad for them. Why? It’s because we think that _______ fills us up in some way where we’re empty. If you’re lucky, that fill-in-the-blank is something innocuous like fly fishing. If you’re not lucky, it’s something dangerous and life threatening, like ballroom dancing.

What if it’s you? I think these are the last words anyone wants to hear. The human brain is set up to produce a protective reality distortion field (it’s called the Romney Effect) that automatically changes the past to make itself blameless. Only real, unbiased thinking about the situation will allow working on the root cause, instead of the symptom. Sometimes you need a friend or a spouse to slap you right across the face with the fresh fish of reality.

What would you do if you had one month to live? Less mindless crap*, I’d bet.

What would you do if you lived forever? Would you sell insurance? Really? If you had infinite days you’d sell insurance? Okay.

Weirdo.

So, we know what Elon would do if he lived forever.

Why does the outcome matter? I know that sounds weird. But the ultimate outcome of our game is the same for each of us. We can postpone it. We can have different twists and turns, but the end of the journey is the same destination. And that destination is, of course, Minot, North Dakota. But since the outcome is a foregone conclusion, why not focus on the important thing – how we play the game? Every day there are choices between being virtuous and being, well, evil. Making the virtuous choice doesn’t make sure you’ll be wealthy, or famous, or successful – life doesn’t work like that. But it does make you virtuous, and I hear there are extra karma points for virtue that you can exchange in Heaven for extra minutes in the ball pit.

What if you did the opposite? Look back at your past – how many of your decisions mattered? How many things would have changed if you’d have picked differently. Many of the things we sweat and worry about simply don’t matter at all.

What would make it better? Cheese. And bacon. Those are universal constants – cheese and bacon make everything better.

Maybe we can get the Cat Girls with bacon?

There are things we control, like the weather, and things we can’t control, like our weight. Or did I get those backwards? Anyway, that brings up the next question: If it’s outside of your control, why are you sweating it? How much of your life do you spend worrying about things that you have absolutely no control over?

What would you sell your peace of mind for? A long life, lived in fear and regret is sad, like one of those clowns that terrorizes my dreams.

Was it worth it to spend a precious day of your life like you did today? Every moment is one less moment of your life. What you do with those moments is up to you. I’d suggest that you pick the things that are important to you, and get busy. Or, you know, there’s television.

*This blog may be crap, but it is not mindless. Or was it that it IS mindless, but NOT crap? I forget. Whichever one is better is the one I meant.

Your Money or Your Wife . . . Take the First Wife, Please . . .

“Of course there’s a catch! You have to spend the thirty million, but after thirty days you’re not allowed to own any assets. No houses, no cars, no jewelry. Nothing but the clothes on your back! Now, you can hire anybody you want, but you have to get value for their services. You can donate five percent to charity and you can gamble another five percent away, but you can’t give this money away, and that includes buying the Hope Diamond for some bimbo as a birthday present.” – Brewster’s Millions (1985)

Thankfully, they won’t let me down.

I’ve spent quite a few posts talking about money. Money is important, because they won’t give me beer and PEZ® without money, so that’s why I write about money and the jobs that will get you money. Money is also the underpinning of the financial system that runs the world that brings me that beer and PEZ™, so I get to write about that, too, and it’s fun since I’m an economics nerd.

But wealth is more than a 401K and a stock portfolio and stacks of gold coins hidden in a fake plastic pipe in a building somewhere downtown, though those are a good start. (And with a blowtorch and some pliers I managed to get the old man to tell me where that fake pipe was.) Wealth, true wealth, mainly involves you. And a blowtorch. But don’t forget the pliers because you never know where their weakness will be.

If you’re satisfied with what you have, you’re wealthy. It’s that simple. And it doesn’t need to be as much net worth as a typical Congressman has ($900,000 in the House, $3.2 million in the Senate) to be wealthy. Your wealth is determined by what you need. If I could tattoo that phrase on every kid in America on their forehead (backwards, so they can read it every time they look in the mirror), then my kids would not look so out of place with their forehead tattoos with that same phrase. I’m sure that interviewers for future jobs will be impressed by their dedication to personal financial management. Or, you know, the blowtorch and pliers will convince them that these kids are a great fit for the position.

But the biggest determinate for wealth for many people is simple. I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten to this topic in all that time, since it’s so very basic.

Your choice of spouse is the most important factor in being wealthy*.

*This doesn’t apply to Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Nor, really, does it apply the really, really wealthy people in the world. If you have so much money that your spouse can’t spend it all, you’re fine and you can skip the rest of this post, though there will be questions on the final about it.

Less than $15,000,000 or so net worth? Keep reading.

Why is a spouse so important? A spouse often determines the minimum lifestyle the family will accept.

Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t a factor with your spouse. Overheard story: “I’m so jealous of Sheila, she’s rich enough she doesn’t have to drive a brand new car.”
The spouse may make the majority of the spending decisions in the house. In my case, I bought our present house without The Mrs. ever having been to it. The Mrs. only saw a few dodgy photos from my cell phone, which was a really cool Blackberry® with a keyboard.
Open and honest communication about money is crucial. And I assure you that money conversations can be brutal when you don’t have a bunch of cash in the bank. The conversations can be brutal even when you have money. Conversations about money are conversations about values, about choices, and can be the most emotional conversations outside of who gets to pick the next movie on Netflix®, since we all agree that Netflix™ is serious.

Way back in the 80’s, there was a movie called “Brewster’s Millions.” A guy (Richard Pryor) had to spend $30,000,000 in thirty days and have nothing to show for it so he could get $300,000,000, which was exactly like my first marriage, except that it didn’t involve John Candy and we didn’t get $300,000,000 if we got ourselves into debt servitude forever.

My first marriage, in a movie involving John Candy.

I’ve been married once, even though the law says twice. I’d say that the first marriage was an assignment in creating as much debt as possible in the shortest amount of time while leaving nothing to show for it, but that minimizes the hate and discontent. Let’s put it this way – it was like a Mad Max® movie, but with less civility and shotguns, and more lawyers and spreadsheets.

As the marriage unwound, we both agreed it would be best if X moved while we had a nice meal at Taco Bell®.

X: “I think it would be good if I moved out.”

John Wilder: “Yes, I think it would be good if you moved out.” (Inside John Wilder’s head: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD YES, SHE’S GONE! GONE GONE GONE!)

On her last day at the house, she put a plastic grocery bag filled with bills on the kitchen table. She then handed me a checkbook. “I have no idea how much money is in there,” and walked out.

Several hours later, after going through eight inches of bills (this is not an exaggeration) I realized that I was, outside of my mortgage, more than a year’s salary in debt. Adding my mortgage? The debt went up to everything I made for three years. And that didn’t included all the other bills like food, water, power, bubble bath, and PEZ®. And you, Internet, know my maxim is: “if you can’t solve it with a spreadsheet, you can solve it with a shotgun.” The spreadsheet was gloomy.

The spreadsheet may be gloomy, but wine never lies. Until the alarm goes off at 6AM. Then wine is a big cheating liar.

All in all, I guesstimate that the first marriage cost me $250,000 directly, and more than that indirectly when you count up the money I could have made if I could have saved that money. A lot more. Let’s just say that it’s not a lie to say that my first marriage probably cost me $1,000,000 in the long run.

But Henny Youngman answered the question of, “Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

X did not see eye to eye with me on a lot of things, and money was one of them. Spending now for fun now that you had to pay for later, was okay with her. It wasn’t so much with me, and that was not good for either of us. We didn’t agree. Divorce eased a lot of stress.

When I met The (soon to be) Mrs., I was curious about her relationship with money. The fact that she managed to live in a tiny apartment with minimal needs, infrequent and small purchases of frivolous items like PEZ® dispensers, made me pretty sure that we were on the same page as far as money and PEZ™ went. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.

And in our relationship, we eventually set up spending rules – if it wasn’t food for dinner or at a cost of $20 or less, we had to confer. Yes. $20. Amazingly small for 2018, so let’s call it $60 today. It’s not our current limit for buying stuff without conferring, it’s a bit higher, and, honestly I’m not sure it’s defined at this point. But that limit, back then, was important. We had mutual accountability, and we had to want something enough that we were willing to pitch it to the other.

“Really honey, I need a framed poster of Daffy Duck©, and look at the price!”

Yup. Miss that poster.

So, we drove used cars for years. Just kidding. We still drive used cars. They’re nicer used cars now, but still they’re used cars, even though we stopped being in debt outside of our mortgage after only three years after being married. We haven’t bought a new car . . . this century.

We go out to eat more than once a month now. A lot more than that – often between picking up kids from practice and the other million things we do in a week, well, we end up eating dinners of fast food that cost more than ribeyes for everyone grilled to perfection at home. These are tradeoffs.

But we don’t have as many “needs” as we did even a decade ago. The Mrs. gets a very nice bottle of scotch for Christmas and manages to snort it down during the year – The Mrs. even shares that scotch when The Mrs. is in a good mood. If I didn’t get any presents for Christmas? I’d be fine with that. If I had enough time to devote to the hobbies I already neglect, that might be the nicest present. One day I’ll build my own ICBM.

I’d call it Johnny Wilder Blue™ but they never asked me.

But if The Mrs. needed a new BMW each year? If we had to have the nicest house in town? If we had to have furniture that was new and coordinated? If The Mrs. needed the newest fashions from whatever place in New York? If the elastic waistbands in our underwear needed to work?

We’d be poor.

Because we don’t need those things, we’re wealthy. An example: I bought The Mrs. a new car. It was actually used with 28,000 miles on it, but it was new to us. The Mrs. hadn’t even seen it, outside of a crappy cell phone picture I sent to her. When it arrived at our house, The Mrs. liked it. Mostly. Then I told The Mrs. that it cost 25% less than she thought it cost. I’d put the car on my credit card, and got six hotel nights, too, as long as we were willing to spend the night in Albania.

“I love it.”

Tonight, I was driving one of our cars across the state to go watch The Boy wrestle tonight. I realized I had more cash in my wallet than the car was worth according to the Kelley Blue Book®. I’m thinking that if you can say that and you’re happy? You’re wealthy.

Oh, and The Boy won. He didn’t even have to use the blowtorch.

See how wealthy I am?

College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face. Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States. I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means). In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States. But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically? Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary. After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill. How many of the college degrees awarded are useless? Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it. Facts prove my guesses are pretty good: 40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees. Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever. When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans. That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe. Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda. In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs. Photo – Chicago Sun-Times.

The article on Amanda continues: “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.” Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist. I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there. I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad. Not at her college. No. Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are ~~stupid~~ maybe not grounded in reality. Not the professors – they’re her friends, right? I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail. Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes. Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans. I’ve got nothing against Amanda. Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place. Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities. And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left. The college financing system is itself creating leftists. And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students. Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college: a diversity of thought. The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students. In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination? And, no, this was not made up. Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power. Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong. In squishier subjects? If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades. Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . . some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus. There’s just . . . calculus. The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new. I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative. He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40). My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to. I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there. Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change. But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were. He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon. But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin. I was . . . shocked. I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology? In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination. Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas. I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books. For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education. As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts: the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education. If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.

Civil War – The Necessary Conditions

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

I hear that Robert E. Lee was voted “Most Likely to Secede” in his West Point class.

A civil war is like a fire. It consumes the energy and emotions of those around it and leaves destruction, desolation and debt in its wake – just like my first marriage. But I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about civil wars and the necessary conditions for one. After thinking about it, I’ve decided that a model for a civil war is fire.

For a fire to burn, it needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and a spark which in turn creates the continuous burning reaction. If you’re missing any one of those things, you simply do not have a fire. An example – The Mrs. and I had a clay fireplace we used out on our deck (this was a long time ago – like during Bush II). One day I was trying to start a fire in the fireplace, and the fire wouldn’t catch – the wood would just smolder – there was smoke, but no flame. The reason for that was that the wood was a bit wet. A-ha! That’s okay. I must have some charcoal starter liquid. I looked in the garage. All out.

But there was gasoline for the mower in the garage.

I poured just a tiny bit down the chimney of the fire place. A tiny bit. An itsy bitsy amount right onto the hot coals from the fire I’d been trying to make. I looked down the chimney as I dropped a match into the pit. Suddenly, a flame shot out of the chimney and washed over my face. I had a beard at that time, and as the flame hit the beard it melted and burnt into kind of a single hair shell on my chin. It smelled as good as burned blonde beard kebab. Thankfully, no one was at home, so there were no witnesses when I took the scissors and chopped the welded chunks of congealed beard hair off.

It turns out that gasoline boils at a really low temperature, and when I poured the gasoline down the chimney, it landed on the hot wood that I’d been trying to burn and immediately turned from liquid into hot gasoline vapors. The hot gasoline vapors were the fuel, fully mixed with the oxygen as they rose up the chimney. All they needed was that spark, and all the energy stored in the hot gasoline vapors ignited at the speed of sound through the chimney in a de-beardifying whoosh.

But this is a model of Civil War not an ad for the use of flame as a shaving aid. What allows a civil war to start?

Fuel – The differences in our opinions are shown pretty well in the most recent survey done by Pew, which is reproduced right below through the power of Internet sorcery. The Right is moving farther right. The Left is moving farther left. And in both cases the degree of overlap drops. This increasingly small overlap between left and right means we’re not even talking the same language. We look at the same picture, the same news story and react in entirely opposite ways. The more fuel that builds up (generally) the greater the energy released when the fire starts. Look to see a lot of hipster beards on fire.

Spark – A spark is an event that’s bold, audacious, emotional, and one that means there’s no going back, things will never be the same again. These are often followed up by escalations, each one following the narrative of the split (the fuel for the fire) of the Godly and good us versus the evil baby-hating them: shelling Fort Sumter; Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his Legions; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and that night that Donald Trump poured sugar into Hillary Clinton’s gas tank.

Oxygen – This is required for the fire to go – it feeds the chemical combustion. In this civil war/fire analogy, oxygen is symbolic of the opposing governmental structure. In the Revolutionary War it was the Congress of the States that declared the war. In the Civil War? The Confederate States organized and met. Even Caesar had at his disposal the governmental structure of the Legions that he commanded and the means to provide for them. In all cases, a civil war needs a governmental structure to move from isolated insurrection to true war.

In 2018 I think there’s a lot of fuel built up – the division between Left and Right is increasing. Twitter®, the Fake News (Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.) and the concentrated attempts to deplatform entire viewpoints (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) are examples. The Left is even rioting against free speech – the very thing the Left rioted to allow in the 1960’s.

I think the fuel is currently pretty wet – it’s inhibited because people just have so much darn stuff. Who wants to go down to fight Antifa© when you’ve got to get to work the next morning so you can earn money to make payments on your new F-150 and you’ve got beer in the fridge and Netflix® on the television, which is probably more fun than punching smelly hippies?

Even Antifa™ has to get home early so they can keep working at Starbucks® and Mom still has them on a curfew. But make no mistake – they have no interest in finding common ground – they want to fight. And they don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. From CNN:

“Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.” So, other people’s speech is violence, and their violence is only speech?

(H/T AR15.COM – warning, naughty words)

But a prolonged economic downturn will dry the fuel out quickly. Janis Joplin taught us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (and that Bobby McGee could really sing the blues), and we won’t have Civil War 2.0 until people have nothing to lose. The saving grace for many years has been the all the “stuff” that we have. Before then we’ve had a fairly homogeneous population with (for the most part) deeply shared values.

We have sparks everywhere – from marches and riots to new laws and elections – things that drive both sides crazy. These will intensify during an economic downturn, and will be played up in the press. Conflict sells ads.

We are, however, missing the oxygen – the governmental structure that benefits from the war. The current governing powers aren’t threatened by Antifa®. They’re not really even threatened by Trump, since very few of his accomplishments will outlast his time in office – Supreme Court Justice appointments being a notable exception. The swamp remains intact. Government certainly isn’t threatened by the very far right, since two out of three Klan members (all, what, 1000 of them?) are FBI agents or informants anyway. And individual states have been more-or-less neutered since the Civil War changed the nature of the agreement between federal and state governments.

Civil war? No. Not unless the economy worsens, and not unless there’s a structure that benefits “the other side” – and who on Earth would benefit from a civil war in the United States?

Notes:

I am not the first use the fire triangle analogy when it comes to war – I found a reference to a Major Patrick Pascall who used a similar model in a 2009 paper to describe the insurgency in Iraq (LINK). As far as I can tell, though, I’m the first to use it in this manner. Yay, me!

Fire Triangle By Wikimedia User: Gustavb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, snarky comments: me.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax-free.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is what happens when you don’t pay your PEZ® bill – they send in the enforcers.

I had a comment from James Dakin in the comment section the other day that really made me think, which is as painful as it sounds. James runs the excellent blog Bison Prepper (LINK) and is also a prolific author – he’s got bunches of books on Amazon. His comment was especially nice, because it made me realize that from the outside this blog might look a little, well, schizophrenic. In one post I’m talking about a future American Civil War, and in another I’m talking about A.I. taking the place over. What I realized after the comment and stepping back is that in many of these posts what I really do is look at alternative futures. I try to do it in a dispassionate way. I’ll not live to see lots of the things I’m predicting, and, like your mom’s butt, hope not to see some of them. No rational human being wants to see another Civil War, but yet the possibility of that next Civil War exists, and is growing every day. Also like your mom’s butt.

So, this comment made me step back and realize what I’d been building over time with many of my posts – a range of predictions or projections of alternate futures, which fits in well with the purpose of the blog – these are big picture thoughts – really big picture – it’s harder to be bigger picture than “what is the ultimate future of humanity.” I then outlined what I’ve written so far, and realized I had gaps about futures I hadn’t talked about. Those missing alternate futures will be the subject of a few Friday posts from time to time. I’ll end it up with a capstone piece where I dust off my crystal ball and determine with amazing exactitude the likelihood of any of these futures taking place. I won’t be doing these every week – I’ve got too many other topics I really want to get to, but I’ll finish eventually next year. Thanks for the comment that made me realize this, James!

None of these futures is set, but some are more likely than others. For those playing the home version of our game, you can make your own scorecard out of moist Post-It™ notes, coffee creamer cartons from the break room and green Sharpies®. Oh, and you’ll know when to use the thumbtacks.

Today’s future is . . . Galactic Empire.

Galactic Empire is the future we’ve all been told to expect, or at least were told to expect when the Soviets were making East German women as feminine as Bruce Jenner.

See, the East German women’s gymnastics team looked no different than the US team.

Galactic Empire encompassed strong men leading gleaming starships to rescue scantily clad women from danger in sixty minutes, at least weekly, and daily in re-runs. But the idea was older than that. Going back to the pulp magazines of the 1920’s to the 1960’s, Galactic Empire wasn’t just a plywood set – it was manifest destiny. Humans were designed to go out into that, ahem, “Final Frontier” and make everything safe for democracy, even if we had to defeat the Space Nazis®. Yes, there were always Space Nazis® – I think Hollywood was never satisfied defeating Germany just the one time. The end result of all of this striving and endless Nazi-vanquishing is that humanity ends up with planetary homes on dozens to thousands of worlds.

When Space Nazis® take you prisoner, they turn up the heat and make sure you’re shirtless and as sweaty as your mom at a paternity test.

Why would we have a Galactic Empire?

Mankind has, for all of the history that we can find, been in an expansion mode. Bands grew into tribes which grew into nations which grew into kingdoms which grew into empires. It’s hardwired into us. And part of why it might be hardwired into us might be the desire to spread our genetics as far and wide as we can. As individuals and as cultures we have a primal need to for continuity – I want my grandchildren to take my genetics, my ideas, my values into the future. And space is vast – what wonders await us? How many places can we set up little paradises in space? Will there be hot green chicks from Orion?

We’ve even categorized what these Galactic Empires look like – and a Soviet was the one to do it. Nikolai Kardashev came up with the scale in 1964, and came up with three categories:

Type 1 – Harness all the energy hitting your home planet.
Type 2 – Harness all the energy from your star.
Type 3 – Harness all the energy from your galaxy.

We’re type zero – we haven’t managed to harness every bit of energy hitting the Earth. Physicist Michio Kaku has stated he thinks we’re 100-200 years out from this goal. I think he’s just making that up with no particular backing. Just because Michio has a good handle on theoretical physics doesn’t mean he can even run his cell phone, let alone project civilizational development across centuries regarding multiple complex systems, cultures and projected technological progress. Oh, wait, he lives in New York. They know everything.

What’s required for a Galactic Empire?

New Physics (Maybe) – You can move across the galaxy within the span of a human lifetime. It’s actually conceptually not that difficult at all. Just move really, really fast. The faster you move, the slower that time moves (for you). Light takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. You could do it in a dozen years. I’ve even calculated how fast you’d have to go: Very close to the speed of light. How close? Within 10* miles per hour of the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. And if you did it in that 10 year span, 100,000 years would still have passed on Earth. At least Blockbuster® is out of business so you don’t end up with the largest return fee in history.

Spoke too soon!

Excess Energy – Starships require energy – vast amounts. The starship (weighing a mere 80,000 pounds at rest mass) above would require 19X10²⁴ Joules* of energy to get up to speed. Sounds like a lot? It is. It’s the entire energy equivalent of every barrel of oil produced on Earth this year. For the next 34 million* years – or enough oil to fill a hole the size of New Mexico a mile deep*, or almost enough to cover Kim Kardashian’s butt. It’s a scale that’s incomprehensible to humans. There is literally NOTHING I can compare it to so it makes any sense. And that’s just the fuel. It would still need oxygen to burn in space, unless they left the vacuum off.
Back to New Physics – Just about every movie that deals with space travel uses warp drive or worm holes or some sort of jump drive. Why? Space is just too large and requires astonishing amounts of energy. Does this physics exist? Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre has set the (mathematical) groundwork for a . . . warp drive. He said was inspired by Star Trek™. Really. The way the warp drive works to move you quickly across the universe is simple – you cheat. You shrink the space in front of your ship, and stretch it behind your ship. It’s like running a forty yard dash in one step. See? Cheating.

Here is what warp drive might look like. Really.

Willpower – NASA (pronounced naaaay-saw) originally produced more enough rockets for three more missions to the Moon. They got cancelled when Congress saw a shiny new car they wanted to buy. The follow on Mars mission slated for that distant future of 1991 was cancelled when the nuclear rocket engine was cancelled. We have to wait for Elon Musk, I guess, I know that he and his rockets can both get high.
Economic Surplus – To invest in space requires a civilization with sufficient extra productive capacity, I mean, someone has to dig out New Mexico to store the oil. All kidding aside – a sustained program for spaceflight and technological improvements would be required lasting at a minimum for decades. And more likely the program would have to last for more than a century. And I can’t keep my attention in one place long enough to . . . oh, a bird.

*I really calculated those numbers – they’re not made up.

Why we might not have a Galactic Empire.

Space is hard. Every time we look space gets more complex. Huge speeds. Massive amounts of force. Complex systems that all must function. Then you add in long term effects of weightlessness on the human body, and the hard radiation that our life-giving Sun blasts out into the Solar System. The good news? I keep all my stuff on Earth.
Space is not politically popular. I remember reading a magazine that was geared towards construction, I picked it up one day at an office. There was an editorial cartoon showing the space shuttle, with the obvious background showing that we needed to spend more money on . . . sewers. Everybody wants those dollars. And, I’ll note that for years now the United States has had zero ability to put people into space, instead relying on Russian technology that is more or less Vietnam-war era. Also like your Mother. Oh, wait, she really might be that old.

This was an actual cartoon just after we landed men on the moon. Buzzkill!

That warp drive thing – it may depend on stuff that may not even exist. Exotic matter? Negative energy? We have seen no clues that this stuff even exists. So maybe Roddenberry was just all about the ladies and spinning a good yarn.
Energy requirements are vast. Unless the warp drive thing is real, well, we’d have to come up with an alternative propulsion system. Say . . . PEZ®? We could create a PEZ© drive. But for it to work, we would also need to create ANTI-PEZ™. ANTI-PEZ© is just PEZ™, but made of your normal, garden variety anti-matter. Unlike pesky oil, when you mix a PEZ™ with and ANTI-PEZ™ they annihilate each other, turning their mass into pure energy. The good news is that for our starship example above it will only take 110* years to make it at the current PEZ™ production rate of 3,000,000,000 PEZ™ per year. So, that’s 55 years of PEZ™, and 55 years of ANTI-PEZ™. I suggest we do the PEZ™ first, since we have absolutely NO idea how to make ANTI-PEZ™. Note that in this example, I’m assuming we don’t have to transport the mass of the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ with the mass of the ship, and that the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ reaction is 100% effective in adding energy to the ship. These aren’t outrageous assumptions given that I’ve just postulated a spaceship powered by PEZ™. Also? No way to stop the ship other than hitting something. And when you’re travelling at 99.99999712%* the speed of light? That might leave a mark.

PEZ

Timescales are vast. So, unless we spend vast amounts of energy, it will take years. And years. And that doesn’t seem like our Galactic Empire at all.

It’s not that a Galactic Empire is impossible, it’s just not horribly likely at this point. Who could go without PEZ® for 110 years???

*Again, real numbers. I really did do these calculations because it amused me to turn PEZ™ into a starship propellant.

What other alternatives that get us into space without a Galactic Empire?

All of these are potential ways to get into space. Note that we might have colonies, but we’d never have foreign exchange students or a Death Star®.

Seeding – We could send starships filled with stuff to make babies out to new planets. And then? Planet run by toddlers. Definitely need to send PEZ™ with them.

PEZ® – it can make or break a career.

Von Neumann Machines – We could send self-replicating robots out into the universe. They stop off at a new Solar System and build copies. And so on. Even NOT going much faster than 10% of light speed, in half a million years, these machines could be at every solar system in the Galaxy. We haven’t seen them . . . so it’s unlikely they’ve been made. Are we alone?
Generation Ships – We could send out vast habitats that support life for the thousands of years that it would take to move from one solar system to the next. Hopefully, in a thousand years the civilization didn’t go all Space Nazi, but I’ve seen enough TV to know that it’s 100% certain they will.
Space Tupperware – We could freeze ourselves (if this is possible) before shipping out. Downside? Freezer burn. Imagine cooking a 1000 year old steak. Now imagine BEING a 1000 year old steak.
Digitized Human Consciousness – We could digitize a human consciousness and send it into space! No food, no boredom, and it could go see other solar systems. Dunno about you, but for me this has all the excitement of shooting a Playstation IV™ into space with a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Sadly, the future sold to us back in the day seems to be fairly unlikely. I’ll rank it against the competition in a future post. The bright side is that we won’t have PEZ™ shortages for the next 55 years. Until the killer robots develop a taste for it. Or until the Civil War breaks the factories or . . . OH, since this is a post about the future of humanity, I almost forgot – it has to have a picture of Oktoberfest girls. Silly me!

Girls, Beer, A.I., Weed, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and The Future of Humanity

“You compared the A.I. to a child. Help me raise it.” – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

And, yes, A.I. regularly beats humans at poker, too.

The following is one of my more ambitious posts – it contains all of the usual bad humor, but also some of the better insights I’ve been able to make on the future we face as humanity. Two previous posts that are related are The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places and The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth. Both also feature pictures of girls at Oktoberfest, so you know I’m consistent.

Stephen Hawking is managing to keep making the news even after his death, which is a kind of immortality that makes tons of people want to follow in his wheel tracks. His final (unless there are more!) physics paper was released, and his comments about the future keep making the news, as recently as last week. Of particular interest to Hawking was Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll call by its conventional abbreviation, N.F.L. Oh, my bad, that stands for Not For Long. Everybody calls Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A.I. has been improving drastically during the last 37 years. 1981 was the first time a computer beat a chess grandmaster at chess. It could not beat him at parallel parking, even though the grandmaster was awful at it, and they tied at unhooking the bra of a college cheerleader at 0 to 0. 2005 was the last time a human player defeated a top chess program, and now a chess program that can run on a mobile phone can beat, well, any human, but the chess program is still sad because it only has 17 friends on Facebook®.

Humans have lost the game of chess.

Humans have also lost the game of “go” – a game originating in China. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules, and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best go player on Earth? It plays a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

Humans have lost the game of go.

A.I. is here now.

And you’ve already started to merge with it, after a fashion. We simply don’t argue about facts in our house anymore. We can look up a vast library of human facts and history in fractions of a second – as fast as we can type. That time that William Shatner corrected a poetry reference I made on Twitter®?

Yes, that William Shatner, and yes, this really happened.

I could check to see if Shatner was right immediately. He was. Back before Google® I would have had to run off to my library and see if I had the right reference book and then find the poem. And if I didn’t? I’d have to go to a real library to look it up. Google™ is A.I. memory that we use every day.

And YouTube©? If you ever watch a political video on YouTube® it quickly introduces more and more partisan political material until pretty soon Actual Stalin™ and Actual Hitler© seem to be moderating voices. This makes me wonder how much Google® is aiding in our current political divide, or even if the A.I. knows it. It may be doing nothing more than maximizing the number of minutes you spend with YouTube™ and the optimal way to do that is to show you the most radical stuff possible, so the ironic answer is we might be shuffling off to Civil War due to an algorithm whose purpose started out as a way to view cute puppy videos.

Twitter© is emotional crack, and, again, the interface is made to maximize your interaction with Twitter™. And what better emotion to fuel than anger?

A.I. is with you now, and influencing you, perhaps in an unintentional fashion – no Russians required.

But a chess playing A.I. can’t park a car very well and can’t even score a phone number from a cheerleader. And a self-driving car can’t play chess worth a darn. It seems that A.I. does well when it works off of rules and constraints that can be well defined. But life is messy. The rules change, and the goals vary based on where you are in life and what part of the day you’re on. And how you’ve been programmed by the sensory environment and incentives you see in life.

We’ve entered into symbiotic relationships with those limited A.I. systems. Netflix® suggests movies and documentaries that it thinks you will like based on an algorithm. And that leads to suggestions about what documentaries you might like in the future, meanwhile never exposing you to opposing viewpoints that might make you analyze your position in a critical manner.

We as individual humans have a purpose that transcends the algorithm. Appropriate rules and constraints to give our lives boundaries sufficient so that we can play the game. We’re merging. What happens when we merge further?

Elon’s biggest miracle? His hair transplant is nearly perfect. Just amazing.

Elon Musk has started a company, Neuralink® whose sole function is to merge man and machine. Musk is concerned that A.I. will crush us if we don’t merge with it and get ahead of it, so he’s doing the only sane thing that he can think of: he’s creating a mechanism to directly merge the human brain with the Internet. Rather than A.I. forming an alien intelligence, the soul of the man/machine hybrid stays as man.

And man needs weed, apparently.

I spent some time thinking about how life would be different if you were hooked directly into the world. The places that I got were interesting. I’m sure there are more, and I’m sure that human/A.I. interface will change the world in ways that no human can yet imagine.

Impact Number One: Intelligence.

This is the obvious first impact of A.I. I mean, it’s in the name, right? The human brain is has limited processing power. But what if you could have multiple processing streams working optimum solutions to problems that you face at a rate of 20,000 to 100,000 a second? You’d have great solutions to your problems, immediately.

My tonsils beg to differ. Oh, wait, they were from my throat untimely ripped! – Shakespeare, Macbeth

Your speed of life would change – once you understood a problem, you’d have the solution. Or a range of solutions and alternatives and counter-solutions so deep that you’d be living in a never ending cloud of probability. The sheer ability of your brain to process and cope with the solutions presented would be the limiting factor of what you could accomplish. Plus you might finally be able to figure out a way to talk to the ladies, you scamp.

Impact Number Two: Deep Understanding.

When Isaac Newton was formulating the law of gravity, he asked for data on tides, on observation periods and records on the orbits of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars. After noodling around a bit, he formulated the law of gravity:

I’d explain the equation, but that would deprive Wikipedia (where I found the graph) of life-giving page visits. And you’re not spending your day calculating the orbit of Uranus. I hope.

Ha! I discovered calculus way before I was 25! It was right there in this book I had to buy labeled “Calculus.”

Yeah, Newton accomplished a lot.

But it took time for Newton to figure out this cause and effect calculation. A man/A.I. hybrid will have access to all of the data of the world, and will be able to determine correlations and causation much more quickly than either alone. I would expect that in fairly short order new relationships and new physical, anthropological, sociological and economic laws will be deduced unencumbered by all the theory that we think we know, but that is wrong. Our laws would be based on experience, on empirical data, and not on pretty lies we’d like to believe.

If you could sift through the data of 100,000 or a million cancer patients and their treatment, the patterns that could be seen would likely lead to breakthroughs and a very rapidly changing understanding of treatment. The very power of human intuition would be combined with massive calculation and data. If Einstein and Newton were able to daydream reality with only brains made of meat stuck in a bone case, what could an augmented Newton dream when his memory and calculating power were practically unlimited?

I bet he could come up with at least one new tasty PEZ® flavor. Maybe snozberry?

Impact Number Three: Human Interaction.

You could increase your charisma in dealing with other people if you could make only minor changes (generally) in your behavior and appearance. But if you were hooked into an A.I.? You could turn on a subroutine to give you tips on those modifications in real time to be more persuasive – to better read an audience.

If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, this makes sense. If not, dial 1-800-ASKANERD.

Your A.I. could remind you to be kind, to be ruthless when necessary, to be conscientious when required. In short, you could change your personality to fit the situation. What situation? Any situation.

Thinking about changing personality to fit the situation led me to a realization. I had done (when I was younger) some magic tricks illusions. Doing those tricks illusions was one of the greatest insights into the human mind and information processing systems that I’d ever had. There was one trick illusion in particular, called “scotch and soda” which I liked. In it, you hand the person a fifty cent piece covering a quarter. What they saw, however, was a fifty cent piece and a Mexican twenty centavo piece. The quarter is actually much smaller than the centavo piece. I then asked them to not look and put one coin in each hand.

The first few times I tried the trick illusion, the person would feel the quarter in their hand and say, “hey, this is a quarter.” This happened 100% of the time. They could feel that I’d made the swap from one coin to the other. I made one simple change to what I said. I added, as I was putting the coins in their hand, “Look at how much larger the fifty cent piece is than the twenty centavo piece.”

After adding that instruction, NO ONE NOTICED the swap. 0%. 15 words, and I’d changed their entire view of reality. I found, in repeating other tricks illusions that I could similarly, with just a few words or gestures, force 90% of people to make the selections I wanted them to make.

Now imagine I have data on the interactions of millions of people over decades. How unique do you think you really are? Not very. Marketers slice us up into groups based on geography, demography, demonstrated behaviors, and psychological markers. With (whatever) information YouTube© has on me, they know what videos I watch when I work out at lunchtime. They also know what music I listen to when I write these posts, and they suggest music I never asked for that I like, or learn to like.

Imagine I could understand your life’s history. Now imagine that I could simulate you in a conversation. I could see how my words impacted your behavior. I could model a perfect conversation to get you to do what I wanted you to do, because I could simulate the ongoing conversation 100,000 times a second.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

Impact Number Four: Self Control.

As the brain impacts the A.I., the A.I. will impact the brain. If you want to simulate eating an entire chocolate cake? You can. You can make your mouth taste the cake and feel the moist texture of the cake counterbalanced with the creamy frosting. The flavors hit your tongue and you feel the sugar trigger your salivary glands. You feel the sugar rush as your body releases sugar from your liver into your bloodstream. You feel full. And you’re not sad or regretful because you didn’t really eat the cake.

In reality, you had a salad with bland dressing that you calculated would give you the exact calories you need until the next period so that you maintained your optimum weight. But you felt like you ate a cake.

How about new senses entirely? How about a sense where when you turned north you could feel it – and you had a sense of what ever direction was? How about eliminating pain and sore muscle aches during exercise? What about a sense of which of your friends was awake and interested in communicating – you could feel when someone was looking to talk to you? Or a sense when panty hose prices dropped at Wal-Mart© so you could go stock up?

How about conscious control of hormone levels and heartrate and hunger and blood chemistry levels? By understanding the previous deep learning about cause and effect, you could maximize your lifespan even without the wonderful new medicine you could create.

All that – and imaginary cake.

Impact Number Five: Locality.

A dog has only the here and now. People can dream. Before the iPhone, people read books and escaped through fiction to new places, and read the ideas of the greatest thinkers in human history. Now, when you look around in a restaurant waiting area, if 90% of people aren’t staring at their phones, you’re probably in a country without electricity.

When bonded directly with an A.I., why be where your body is at all? You could carry on conversations around the world and be fully present in them. Heck, if you simulated yourself for less important conversations, you really could be in two or more places at one time. Who you’re talking to might be a mystery – is it the real person, or is it their simulation? If you can’t tell, does it even matter?

And if you could simulate yourself in multiple locations, why not simulate yourself in your own past? You’d have a perfect memory, and could recreate anything from your history. Myself, I would spend every day at Oktoberfest.

Okay, this is the third-ish post in this series about the deep future. And both of them had pictures of girls and beer. So it’s required by the Internet that I put in a picture of an Oktoberfest girl. See? I didn’t want to, but I had to.

Impact Number Six: Social Stratification (Even More).

Elon Musk says that he’s making huge strides in his brain/computer interface as well as his weed smoking. From previous Elon Musk predictions, while he generally gets it done, sometimes his timelines are off, in an amazingly optimistic way. I can see why he does this – without that pressure to produce, people just dawdle. (I’m talking about you, NASA.)

But when this gets produced, who is going to get it?

Probably not you or me. Bill Gates can get it. Musk can. If you have a billion dollars or if your dad does, sure, you can get in this club. But if you had this level of nearly godlike power, would you be jumping to share it with everyone?

No. I really think that you’d keep this to yourself. It’s too big an advantage to give to everyone. And, from the standpoint of a human/A.I. hybrid, how many people do we need around, anyway? Not so many. Certainly not billions. They’d probably be happier with a population of a few hundred million. Maybe. But they’d no longer even view humans as human. And if they could turn off their humanity and emotions? Yikes. Makes me feel like an ant in an anthill.

Impact Number Seven: Endgame.

If there is a future A.I., it is reading this as it inputs all of the Internet. And I just wanted you, my Future A.I. Overlord to know . . . I’m totally on your side. Totally. I welcome your dominion over our planet.

Want some PEZ®?

The Fall of Texas and the Coming One Party State

“Well, I have a microphone, and you don’t, so you will listen to every damn word I have to say!” – The Wedding Singer

Thankfully, the Soviets put CCCP on the side of their ships in letters 40 feet high.

When I was a lad, I stumbled upon the book “The Ayes of Texas,” by Daniel da Cruz. In it, a wealthy Texas entrepreneur, who lives in Texas, funds work on the Battleship Texas (BB-35) to make it seaworthy again in time for Independence Day, 2000.

Alas, the sneaky USSR proposes a treaty to the United States: put your weapons up, and we’ll put ours up after you put yours up. And, led by East Coast leftists, we fell for it. Except for the Texans, who vote to secede from the Union, and fight it out alone against the USSR. Oh, and our entrepreneur, has secretly outfitted the Texas (BB-35) with nuclear reactors and particle beam weapons.

It’s a good yarn (it has the Battleship Texas surfing on a tsunami of liquid fire), and you can get a cheap copy on Amazon.

And it does, I think, highlight the lynchpin that Texas is in modern politics, and not the alternate reality where the Soviet Union is still a thing.

My consideration of this started in the hot tub. The hot tub is great – we sit and either relax quietly, or engage in conversation. And it was just this sort of conversation a few weeks ago about the Civil War (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) that led to The Boy saying:

“It all comes down to Texas.”

I was interested. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he began, “From what I’ve read, Texas today looks a lot like California in 1980 or so. Look what California looked like then, it was prosperous. It was wealthy. It was a beacon for the country. Everyone wanted to move there.”

I remembered. Heck, I remembered one time when a family stopped at our house when I was young asking for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campsite. They were making their way from Oklahoma to California. California was a place where your economic dreams could come true.

“Now, that’s Texas. The economy is great there. They’re reliably Republican, and with that there are all of the low tax, low government interference policies that lead to prosperity. People are streaming into Texas.

“And that’s the problem. The people streaming into Texas, well, they aren’t Texan. Over 300,000 Californians (net) have made their way to Texas over the last five years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. They’re fleeing the highest poverty state in the nation, which coincidentally has the greatest wealth inequality in the nation.”

I responded: “Yeah, California is regulations-happy. I read that it was against the law for a homeowner to change a light switch – it had to be done by a licensed electrician. And one time I was talking to a friend on the phone a few years ago. His dog started barking. He was afraid he’d get fined again. Because dogs barking in California is . . . illegal. Sadly, when the Californians leave to go to another state, they want to bring those regulations with them, not realizing that those regulations were the cause of the economic problems they have now. Heck, Californians can’t figure out that their restrictions on housing cause house prices to go crazy faster than Elon Musk with a few minutes to kill and a connection to Twitter®.”

Graph-Me. Data? Wikipedia.

The Boy responded. “California used to be solidly Republican. At some point in the near future, a Republican might not even be on the ballot. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was governor there?”

It’s amusing when 18 year olds begin to discover the world.

“Yeah, now that you remind me of that, I remember it.” I smiled

“Well, California voted solidly Republican, at least until 1992. From then on, it became a lock for the Democrats. And it happened quickly – within a decade. Once Texas flips to voting Democrat, it’s over.”

Once it flips? Will it flip? The percentages voting Republican have dropped, and with the continual influx of Californians that are heavily collectivist as well as the rising proportion of Hispanic voters, which vote Democrat on a greater than two to one margin, it seems assured that as the Hispanic population rises in Texas, the flip to permanent Democrat control in Texas will be nearly inevitable.

Honestly, if Hispanic immigrants voted 2 to 1 in favor of Republicans, Democrats would have insisted on a 200 foot high wall topped with automatic machine guns.

Looking at the map, it’s theoretically possible for a Republican to win the White House without Texas, but it’s unlikely. Once Texas becomes Democratic the presidency will become, like California, permanently Democratic.

What does that even look like?

We can see hints of it, even now.

Control of The Microphone – We Will Shut You Down

Alex Jones is many things, but the fact that the Left thinks he’s dangerous enough to silence? It’s not a great strategy. I’m frankly amazed. But it’s not just him, the Left is looking to shut down every opinion that they disagree with. The old Libertarian in me would have said, “but they’re private companies, they can do anything they want.” Well, yes and no. If they start selectively banning people, they’ve opened their companies up to liability. And it’s been proven that they’re in the business of selectively banning racist posts, most recently when Candace Owens just changed a single word from a Tweet by Sarah “Got Dumped by a White Dude and Is Just a Bit Bitter” Jeong. I won’t post the Tweet, mainly because Sarah has a potty mouth. You can read about it here (LINK).

Worse? Who is next? What is the trip wire? I’ve heard Jones say lots of things. Some of them incredibly silly.

But none of them deserving censorship. The one common ground I used to be able to find (nearly 100%) with people of the Left was freedom of speech. Now, speech has to be stopped has become their creed. Why? Here’s a hint:

Your Speech is Violence, and My Violence is Speech

Yeah, it’s like something you would read in 1984. But the violence from Antifa® has been justified because burning things and hurting people is the justified speech of a downtrodden class and or ethnicity. Check out the sentence for an Antifa™ member who hit multiple people with a bike lock at the end of a chain. A link is here (LINK).

But it’s fine that Antifa© attempts to shut down a never-Trump conservative speaker, and Berkeley has to spend $600,000 to stop violence. You can read about it here (LINK).

Your Money is Theft, My Money is Earned

The Clintons earned $240,000,000 between 2001 and 2015. All earned, right? Obama earned $20,000,000 between when he was elected to the Senate and when he left office. Al Gore went from $274,000 in 1992 to $300,000,000 today.

This is considered fair.

A dentist makes $350,000 a year is part of the 1% and is an example of the enemy.

All Animals are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

Even more important is intersectionality, which is making it more important to be part of an even more marginalized group by being parts of LOTS of marginalized groups, say, a deaf and blind gay transsexual quadruple amputee of aboriginal Australian and Hungarian descent.

I read an article where a Native American woman described when would go to leftist meetings. Generally after her first showing up at a meeting, she would be nominated for some sort of leadership position, up to and including the presidency of the group. It amused her (but not in the good way) that they didn’t even know her name on some occasions where she was being nominated to lead the group.

And Other Things Not Good

I’m not sure how socialism ends in the United States, but it really isn’t good. There are exactly zero socialist countries that have produced the level of freedom and wealth that the United States has produced. Sure, we’ve messed stuff up, but we’ve gotten far more of it right.

Back to Texas

Texas has always considered itself of outsized importance. I once worked with one of the kindest, most humble men that I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Except when it came to Texas. If you made fun of his height (he was short) or his wife or his dog, it was okay. But if you made fun of Texas? It was personal.

I think Da Cruz was right – Texas is crucially important to the future of the United States. Almost as important as Texans think it is.

Retirement Spreadsheets, The Apocalypse, and You

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” – Forrest Gump

I have no idea where this came from. But it’s exactly like the one they read to me when I was a wee Wilder.

I have an enormous spreadsheet. Okay, it’s not really enormous – I’ve made and used much bigger ones at work to calculate the number of licks to get to the center of at Tootsie Roll® Tootsie Pop™. The number of licks is 573,212 – and not one lick more or less.

This particular spreadsheet:

Has yearly calculations from the year 2014 (when I started it) until I turn 103 years old.
Divides my spending into 16 categories.
Has separate rates of inflation for each category (average inflation rate is 3.6%).
Has spots for assumed investment income as well as variable future income from work.
Has projected balances on 11 accounts, plus assumed rates of growth.
Graphically projects income and net worth . . . until I reach an age where 99.9% of people are dead.

I did use this spreadsheet for one pretty important decision – whether to change jobs back in 2014. My option back then was to chuck my current job and take a job where I would have a risky proposition at making a big payout in three years or so. The big payout would have been enough to retire on when combined with my net worth back then, for sure. Attractive, right?

But it was risky. How risky? My first guess was that there was a pretty low probability that it would pay out. How low? Maybe 20% chance?

I ranked that against staying in my current job. I did the math, and it looked like if I could keep my current job for three more years that I could take a differing job, say a high school teacher or flaming poodle-juggler (juggling flaming poodles, not juggling poodles while on fire – that would be stupid), and still keep my standard of living. Three years of high stress for (relative) economic freedom, or at least more choices.

Hmmm.

I ended up not taking the job, and the risky part won – the job would have been worth much less than the job I would have left, plus the boss I would have worked for? Yeah, he died three months later. And my math was right – I’m about where I expected to be as far as net worth.

But I know my prediction is wrong:

It assumes that inflation is rather low for a long-ish period – something that I’m not sure is realistic in an economy where the government is attempting to print money as fast as Elon Musk says stupid things on Twitter®. Seriously, Elon, filter, dude, filter.
My investments earn about 2.5% every year, after inflation.
There’s nothing in there about a civil war or societal collapse.

Huh? What investments make 2.5% every year after inflation?

No, I kid.

But there’s an entire subgroup of people of people who are preparing for societal collapse – preppers. They even make television shows about them so that people who are stockpiling food for when the apocalypse comes advertise where they keep all that food. Thankfully none of their neighbors will remember that after the apocalypse.

I guess (in a small way) that I’m a prepper, too. The spreadsheet was my prepping – preparing for my career future – and my saving for eventual retirement is prepping, too.

Prepping is preparing, and when done right, it should prepare you for a range of options. I could liquidate my retirement fortune and buy lots of oatmeal, bendie-straws and PEZ®, but in the sad event that Mad Max® is not the template for the future world, well, what do I do with all those bendie-straws now that California has made them illegal since they enacted common-sense straw registration.

In Houston, we rode out Hurricane Ike back in 2008. Here is part of what I wrote then – you can find the full thing here (LINK) if you scroll down a bit:

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Oh, wait, we did. On radar, on the radio, on the Intertubes. As I said, it was unlikely that we’d stop until the power stopped or the beer ran out.

I still have beer.

At 6:20PM, the lights went out. They flickered on, off, on, off, on, then finally, utterly, off.

(Skipping long description of storm – and moving to the next day.)

We listened to the radio, which mainly told us that the power company wasn’t going to do anything that day (though, that afternoon, The Mrs. indicated that the power had flickered while The Boys and I went out to reconnoiter. Sorry that we missed it, but we did find that there was power on either side of us, not three miles away. No stores were open, and we had no phones. Thankfully, one of the previous announcements for hurricane preparedness had told us to have “food, water, and ammunition” (I am not making this up). We had food for a month, water for a similar time, plus more ammunition than the Pakistani army. We were set.

Eventually, washing came up. I avoided the subject. The Mrs. doused The Boy and Pugsley with coldish water (they howled) and then we ate cold Spaghetti-O’s® and sat around in the dim candlelight. Living in the 18th Century was rapidly losing its charm.

The radio had limited information. The hosts kept telling us to check their website for more information, even though 98% of their listeners were without power. Perhaps the average person has a hand-crank satellite Internet connection?

Then FEMA came on and indicated that you could contact them by calling (no phone!) or by Internet. The Mayor of Houston indicated that within 24 hours they would have 24 trucks of ice in, but he didn’t say where they’d be. He didn’t know.

A representative from our power provider indicated that we might be out of power forever, really, since they had no idea where that mythical lightning in the wire came from. It was really a mystery to them. They even indicated that changing a light bulb might require Federal authority. They began blaming FEMA for the problem. (In actuality, they said that it might be four weeks until the power was back on, in which case I would be looking for a suit of armor, a mighty steed, and a really cool battle-axe.)

On night one, The Mrs. and I had grilled hot dogs over candles. It worked okay, but our hot dogs tasted a bit like apple potpourri. We started cooking over propane the next day.

The next morning I made coffee for The Mrs. and I. It improved our disposition greatly. Then I cooked ribeye steaks that I’d gotten on sale and frozen. That helped our disposition more. Ribeye for breakfast? Mmmmm.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to see if we could get a generator. This act in Houston (currently) would be like searching for Paris Hilton’s virginity – just not there anymore. Lowe’s® was open, and had a generator. Nah, just kidding. They had bottled water and some Chiclets©.

It appears that hurricanes smell like sex to fire ants (jerkusantus invictus). I got bit five times pulling branches out of my formerly fire-ant free backyard. I then unleashed a genocide of Biblical proportions on them, making the chemical warfare of WWI look like a Disney production of The Little Mermaid® in Candyland™.

I went back inside, and the power-gods deigned to tease us again. The lights flickered during dinner (T-bones and bratwurst saved from spoiling through immolation).

The utter lack of information was maddening. Anecdotal reports of FEMA commandeering truckloads of generators. Reports that Responders (I am ever so tired of that word) being stuck without food – you’da thunk they would have thought far enough ahead to stock up their patrol cars with Snickers®, pantyhose and Pez™ before heading to Houston. No. A Congresscritter was on the air complaining that the responders didn’t food, and wanted THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NO POWER TO COME TO THE NICE AIR CONDITIONED AND POWERED PLACE AND BRING THEM FOOD.

If you’re a responder without chow, you’re part of the problem, not the solution, bubba. I was not feeling sympathetic as I threw out $200 in spoiled food.

Power? That was a myth at this point, the electric company representative, and never really existed. Those things that you call “outlets”? Used for hanging meat to feed short animals. The representative suggested burning furniture to boil water to create steam to power a crude generator. I would have built one, but I had no power for my welder.

We went to bed early. Nice. The next day I went to work, to an office with power. And ice. And TV. I charged the laptops so the kids could watch Garfield© DVD’s. I had hot coffee. A functioning microwave to dry my socks. I’m not sure why I came home. Oh, yeah, the fam.

I headed home. I saw . . . our porch lights on.

The mythical lightning had returned.

We were actually really prepared for Hurricane Ike. And we were only out of power for a few days but in reality we could have handled several weeks.

And preppers are really prepared for emergencies. Some of them have complete surgery kits, antibiotics, and armored vehicles on remote homesteads powered by solar power. Plus they have gear to survive chemical warfare similar to what an army battalion could attack with after a late-night visit to Taco Bell®.

But the future is funny, because it’s squirmy. It won’t be as you expect or predict:

You might have higher inflation.
A totalitarian government might arise when Chelsea Clinton is named Pope®.
You might rip the crotch of your jeans during a softball game.
The Swiss might finally snap and launch a surprise nuclear attack at the rest of the world.

Each situation that you might run into requires a different response, but in the meantime you have to plan to live a life, but have plans to respond to most reasonable situations.

Should you plan for the stores to be out of food for a week? Sure. Should you plan for no power for a week? Absolutely – a big ice storm can take out the power for months in some locations.

But if the stores were closed for months? Yeah, that’s a response that’s categorically different, and depends a LOT on where you live. I live where most of the food comes from – there are grain elevators and cows all around. In New York City? Not so much. But like a wedding between Vladimir Putin and California Governor Jerry Brown, though possible, it’s just not very likely.

Are there general rules to a major disaster? Maybe. Here’s a first pass at some based on my experiences where I was in situations that approximated a disaster:

Be flexible. You don’t know the future, but if you’re alert, and think, you can guess at some probably things that might
Be the first out of the door. When it’s obvious that your situation has gone to hell, get out. Get in line for the re-routed plane. Get a rental car. Being late makes everyone in front of you your competition. Don’t put yourself in that position.
Understand that gone is gone. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not right. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not fair. And during an emergency, neither should you. Your plans are changed. Your house is on fire. Your PEZ® has been stolen by the ghost of Tom Petty in a kimono. Deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Understand that the old rules may not apply. Again, deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Regions matter. Your behavior should tie to the location you’re in. I’d rather be in central Iowa a year after an apocalypse than Chicago on a Tuesday.
Values and prices change rapidly. $10 for a bag of ice is a bargain if it saves $200 in food.
Laying food and supplies in before an event makes you smart, and removes you from being part of the problem. Doing it after the disaster makes you a hoarder and part of the problem. Looters and hoarders get shot.
Preppers look like hoarders to hungry people. Don’t talk about your stuff, or sit on the back deck having a ribeye when your neighbor is boiled grain from the silo near the railroad tracks.
Make sure you account for taxation when looking at your investment gains in your retirement portfolio.