Category: Energy

Energy in 2022? I Hope So . . .

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy – sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body – anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

I went into a room with a negative person in it, and then there were no people in it.

Energy is freedom.

Energy allows one person to do the work of hundreds or thousands.  I sit here typing this in Stately Wilder Mansion, it’s near freezing outside, yet a nice and toasty 61°F (43 and 2/3°kiloPEZ®) inside due to natural gas piped directly to my heater.  I like it cold in the house, just like my heart.

My computer is running, the television is running, and because I am apparently the only person in the house who knows how to use a light switch, at least 32 lights are on in the house are on.  It’s winter, so a light left on is (at worst) a little inefficient heater, so all is not lost.  I will tell you that when I die, though, I will walk to the light.  And turn it off.

Our energy costs aren’t all that high in winter, especially since I can keep warm by rubbing my thighs together like a cricket.  I go and fill my gas tank about every two months, so gasoline isn’t even that much of an issue.  When your commute is four miles a day (two miles each way) and takes four minutes (if I get caught at the one traffic light), well, it’s hard to use a lot of gas unless I pour it all over the truck and ignite it to look like a cool meteor while I’m driving.  Again.

But energy is freedom.

I started bench pressing again.  That’s a huge weight off my chest.

When energy prices are low around the globe, freedom increases.  As I’ve discussed in previous posts, high energy costs act like a tax on nearly all physical goods.  Sure, it won’t make the cost of a Kindle® e-book go up much, but it will increase the cost of a physical book – that has to be manufactured using energy, moved using energy, and delivered using energy.

So, what’s up?  Why are prices where they are?  Where are prices going?

I’ll start with “what’s up?”

We can’t create additional energy just by turning a knob:  the process is a bit more complicated than one of Joe Biden’s coloring books.

Let’s take oil.  In the 1930s, oil in Texas was so plentiful that it crashed the price.  Pools of the stuff would show up if you stuck a McDonalds straw too deep into the ground in East Texas.  Oil was so plentiful that people could barely tell the difference between water and gasoline.  Of course, in Flint, Michigan, you can get the gasoline unleaded.

I hear their swimmers are always in the lead.

What happened then is the Texas Railroad Commission decided it was in charge, and it limited the amount of oil that could be produced.  It was OPEC® before OPEC™ was even thought of – their idea was to stabilize the price of a seemingly limitless resource.

It worked.

But the era of oil abundance in the United States ended in 1973, and the Texas Railroad Commission (which still exists but no longer regulates railroads, seriously) ended allocations.  Texas could no longer control the price of oil in the United States by restricting sales.  The hunt for the next big oilfield was on.

We had then to hunt for oil in more and more distant places.

  • Alaska.
  • The Middle East.
  • Deepwater offshore.
  • Johnny Depp’s hair.

Also?  When exposed to pollen, bees develop hives.

Then we hit the jackpot – fracking.  Fracked oil is different than conventional crude.  It’s hidden in tight rocks that aren’t as porous.  That’s where the fracking comes in – the rock has to be fractured to let the oil out.  To keep the cracks open, high-pressure water and sand (and chemicals) are forced into the cracks.  The grains of sand remain and keep the cracks open.  There are so many jokes I’m not going to do here.

When this process started, it was inefficient.  But smart people spending billions of dollars will tend to make progress over time.  Dumb people with billions of dollars?  We call that the opposite of progress:  Congress.

There are three problems with fracking:

One – fracked wells are most productive in their first year of production.  Oil companies often run a rejuvenation process that increases flow after a few years, but mostly the later years are just a trickle in comparison to the initial years of production.  So, to have a continuous supply, you have to keep drilling, which is not boring.

Two – you have to keep drilling.  If the price drops and drilling stops, then the quantity of oil available drops quickly.  Then the price goes up.  Then everyone drills.  Because everyone is drilling, then the prices drops again.  And everyone stops drilling.  This acts like a “crack the whip” on the economy, since, as mentioned above, high oil prices act as a tax.

Why fracking?  Because I hear drilling is rigged.

Three – there’s more than profitability at stake.  Let me give an example:  if I have to walk to the grocery store to get food, and then I walk back home, that sounds healthy, right?  Sure.  I’m burning energy to go to the store.

But what happens if I burn more energy to go to the store than is contained in the food that I buy at the store?

I lose weight.  I’m actually spending more energy to get food than the energy in the food I’m consuming.  Plus, I’m rubbing my thighs together so I can stay warm.

What might be good for me is devastating as an economy.  At some point, it will be so difficult to get energy from oil, that, just like my trip to the store, we’ll be spending more energy to get the oil than the oil will provide us.  The energy return on energy invested will actually deplete the amount of energy available for us to use.

The more energy we use?  The faster we run out of energy.

I spent an hour on the treadmill yesterday.  Tomorrow?  I might turn it on.

Our primary energy source is that thermonuclear reactor that shows up every morning.  Our secondary source is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from that same reactor, which just happens to show up in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal.  But the sunlight striking us every day has a problem:  it’s so diffuse that it’s difficult to make profitable use of it.  Sure, it warms us, it tans us, it makes the wind for our turbines, the photosynthesis for our corn, and the rain for our hydroelectric.  Energy is only useful when it becomes concentrated in some way.

You can’t generate energy with a tan.  Unless it’s a really, really good tan.

Are we at the point where it takes more energy than it’s worth to get energy?  A wind turbine in a good location will return 10 to 20 times the energy it took to make it, though that’s over the course of 20 years.  In a bad location?  A wind turbine will never return that energy, though I hear they love music:  they’re huge metal fans.

So, are we there yet, where the production of energy costs more than the energy we get?

I don’t think so.  Not quite yet.  When we do get there, it will become a cascading failure – every bit of energy we produce will actually dig us deeper into a hole.  Just like the Red Queen I mentioned last week:

“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!”

Never take a racing snail’s shell.  That makes it sluggish.

To keep a world of 8 billion people alive and with enough energy to consume Doritos® and Disney™ and Facebook© takes an ever increasing amount of energy.  2020 was an aberration – people stopped driving and energy prices (temporarily) went down faster than Kamala Harris’ . . . approval rating.

The last question was “what happens next?”

Currently (today) oil is about $70 per barrel.  The analysts that JPMorgan® have chained up in the basement of their skyscraper say that oil will jump to an average price of $125 per barrel in 2022, and then pop up further to $150 per barrel in 2023.

Double today’s prices.  Yikes!

What about the Energy Information Agency (EIA, a .gov that seems to be actually interested in energy)?  They say that in 2022, oil will average about . . . $72 per barrel – nearly the same as today.

It’s funny, because to know the price of oil, you have to know what is happening with economic growth, oil demand, and inflation.  If any of us know any of those things with certainty, we could make bets and double our money or better in six months.

Why did Biden win the golf tournament?  Because he finished it with one big stroke.

If JPMorgan™ has that genie in a bottle, they certainly wouldn’t be sharing it with mere mortals like you and I on the Internet – they’d make private trades and be zillionaires.  The fine folks at the EIA probably don’t make nearly as much as the analysts at JPMorgan©, but they do have the abject despair of working at a government job every single day.

My prediction?

  • If the economy crashes and the stock market implodes, oil will follow. People who aren’t working don’t need to go to jobs.  Will oil hit $40?    Depends on how low the stock market goes.
  • But! If inflation spikes and the government keeps shoveling cash like coal into a train firebox, well, $150 per barrel oil might seem like a bargain that would be cheap enough to take a shower in.

Crappy prediction, right?

It is.  Because with all of the difficult issues we simply don’t know.  The easiest bet is that oil will be more expensive because once inflation is unleashed, it’s hard to put back into the bottle.  The 1970s looked like this, so that would be my best bet.

Regardless, expensive energy has almost always been the enemy of freedom.

Prepare accordingly.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.

Masque Of The Red Death, 2021 Version

“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers

I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.

Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner.  It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner.  Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth.  The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.

It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.

Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago.  Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it.  Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs.  (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people.  It just takes timing.  You should try it.)

But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?

When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .

The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference.  There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever.  How to make that better?  Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.

As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today:  The Masque of the Red Death.  Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:

Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside.  Spoiler alert:  it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party?  Death.

The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.

Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.

What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?

Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up.  Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it.  Nurses and doctors?  Not taking it.

The result?  Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities.  Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.

Oops.

I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview.  “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.

In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates.  If you need an ambulance ride, you get one.  It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.

  • Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands.  Why?  Pilots don’t want “the jab” either.   Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.

  • Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.

  • The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
  • Inflation?   Happening everywhere, and with everything.
  • Political collapse?   FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.

Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.

As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic.  This isn’t the script for a happy ending.  This is the script for a collapse.

I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades.   Those ripples are here and now.  Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.

Energy?  More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity.  But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.

He must be fun at parties.

I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding.  While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward.  This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story.  That’s where Death joined the party.  To me?  That sounds creepy.

I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death.  I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner.  At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note:  Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017.  It’s nice to be back.  Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road.  It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago.  There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road.  I was going to see my parents.  The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour.  There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles.  Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt.  One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape.  Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe?  I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box.  It slowed my car.  On one side.  Just a little.

The result wasn’t little.  A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth. 

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum.  I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator.  But you can think about it this way:  how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational.  As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything.  Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road.  Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal.  It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on.  The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do.  I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on.  It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear.  Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning?  Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch.  I was now pointing due south.  The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road.  I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette.  I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear.  The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous.  It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one.  When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something.  Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit.  It was (sort of) a prepping situation.  We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up.  And up.  Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill.  Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit?  Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean.  And we didn’t buy a single sheet.  We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t.  Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified.  It echoed down the system.  What kinds of shocks?

  • Initial runs on supplies.
  • Federal stimulus.
  • Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Lower demand for office space.
  • More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
  • Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.  It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal.  If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst.  But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years.  The debt is right now at $29 trillion.  That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year.  That’s a lot of money.  Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House.  The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential.  The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

  • Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
  • Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
  • Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at.  Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons?  We need to have a great documentary about oil.  We can save it under non-friction.
  • Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint:  all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed.  I’m sure this time will be different.
  • The man is a potato.
  • Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day.  They were shocking!
  • China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
  • Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required.  Oh, wait, have a job?  Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy.  It is certain that they won’t.  The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways.  When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail.  No chips for new cars.  No drivers for trucks.  Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops.  The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse.  How can I tell that?  It already has.  The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard.  Really hard.  The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see:  The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time.  It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago.  It was moving down the road at full speed.  One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring.  Prepare.  Stay away from crowds.  And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Recharge Yourself.

“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.

It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.

Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.

Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.

Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.

Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.

But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.

I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”

It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).

Teaching someone something new to them.

When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?

That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.

I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.

Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.

There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.

A crisp autumn day.

Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.

Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.

One out of our four cats.

We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.

But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.

The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.

That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?

My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.

As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.

What charges you up?

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic?  Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929.  According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends.  I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose:  it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too.  When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin.  The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well.  Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up:  whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization.  Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife?  Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape.  A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them.  If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke.  If you want to destroy a civilization?  Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said:  “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”  Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011.  That initial post I read back then is here (LINK).  Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement.  Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse.  Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh.  People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change.  During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light.  My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system.  People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have.  This rarely makes things better.  Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

  • They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
  • They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems.  And so on.  It’s a chain reaction.  To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
  • The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock?  Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

  • The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
  • The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
  • The First World War. The Russian Revolution.  The Second World War.
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France. 

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant.  The French Revolution started in 1789.  If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end.  That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then.  She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then.  When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen.  True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry?  Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short.  Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy.  What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.

When It Comes To Economics, Karl Missed The Marx

“It was a Russian ship. They taught me all about you imperialist swine. I was exposed to the works of great thinkers - Karl Marx, Lenin, L. Ron Hubbard, Freddie Laker.” – Top Secret

Pa Wilder wouldn’t let me date girls who ran in track.  He didn’t want me hanging around with fast women.

One of the advantages of writing these posts are the times when my family will ask me what I’m writing about.  They’re not reading it, of course, but it’s always a good conversation starter and it gets me off of the topics of “Why isn’t the trash out?” and “Who is going clean the lint from between Dad’s toes?”  Tonight Pugsley was the one who took one for the team was interested.

“What are you typing about tonight, Dad?”  He knows that as a writer I’m a fair typist.

“Well, it’s about economics and bad ideas.  Probably one of the worst ideas ever.”

“What was it, Cheetos-flavored Chapstick®?  Crystal Pepsi™?”

I gave The Mrs. Gorilla Glue® Lip Balm.  That left her speechless.

“Well, one economist in particular had some pretty bad ideas.  He had the idea that the things we made were only worth the labor that went into making them – nothing more, and nothing less.”

“So what about the $200 sneakers that toddlers make in Pakistan and only cost $2 to produce?”

“Well, that’s another idea that we’ll get to, but we can use that example.  In this economist’s mind, the toddlers who made the sneaker should have made most of that $200.  He would have argued that the $198 profit in the sneakers was exploiting the worker.”

Of course we were talking about Karl Marx.  Although he wasn’t the first one to embrace the “Labor Theory of Value”, this horrible idea was used to make more people miserable than the Kardashians ever have.

The biggest flaw inherent in the Labor Theory of Value in Marxism was the destruction of the price system.  In this case, if we had the same labor component in our sneakers and in, say, a polished piece of poo (don’t laugh, they did it on Mythbusters®) then they should cost the same.

Whoever stole my furniture polish, I will find you.  That’s my Pledge®.

Yes, shiny polished poo and fashion sneakers should cost the same to a Marxist – heck, if it took more time to make it really shiny, that would be worth more than the sneakers.  This sounds like nonsense, but the commies sold it to the revolting masses in Russia.  Why should other people make money?  The idea that they’re making a profit means you’re being cheated!

While this might have been a good strategy for children playing “store” in kindergarten or Hollywood™ stars protesting for (insert weekly cause here) it didn’t work out so well in practice.  The Labor Theory of Value caused all sorts of problems in the Soviet Union.  One of the first stories I ever heard about this is one I’ve related before – the Great Soviet Nail Failure.

The story goes like this:

A Soviet factory is told by Moscow to increase nail tonnage.  The solution?  Very large nails – one pound railroad spikes.

Obviously, the commissar in Moscow got in trouble.  The next commissar (after the first one got, umm, fired) gave a new order to the factory:  “Make lots of nails.”  So, they made thousands of tiny finish nails.  They were sad that the whole “invading Finland thing didn’t work out, or else they could have made Finnish nails.

Looks like they’re gonna need a new commissar.

I got a job at the chess factory.  I took a knight off.

While the nail story can’t be corroborated, what can be proven is that one Soviet factory produced exclusively shoes for young children with the leather they were sent.  Why?  They got a production bonus for making more pairs of shoes, regardless of if there was a need for them.

What they were missing, of course, was price.  No one sent a signal back that they made too many tiny shoes.

The entire reason for this nonsense is that profit simply didn’t exist.  You can’t have fully automated luxury communism if there aren’t prices for the things we use based on supply and demand.  Price tells factories what to make without requiring armies of bureaucrats to decide.  Failure means you lose your factory and someone smarter (or, luckier) gets it.

This is, of course, the reason that 21 year old girls are getting college degrees in Medieval Rap Lyrics.  Their labor is as good as anyone else, right?  So why don’t they get a job paying $235,000 a year with a company car and an apartment in New York and a clutch of sassy rich trampy friends?

Economics.  The highest value of labor of a 21 year old girl getting a college degree in Medieval Rap Lyrics is worth exactly as much as she can get in tips at Hooters®.  But they honestly believe that they deserve that cool job because . . . they work as hard as anyone else.

Marx would be proud.

I tried to pay for my dinner at Hooters® with an energy drink.  I guess Red Bull™ doesn’t always give you wings.

While we were talking about economics, Pugsley started getting the idea.

It turns out that Pugsley loves computers, and is really irritated.  The nice graphics cards he likes are in short supply.  First, the ‘Rona ruined the supply chain, so there are shortages up and down the line in the computer manufacturing world.

Second, high-end graphics processing cards (so they can watch the Pac-Man® in High Definition™) for computers are in really short supply.  It turns those graphics cards are they’re great for mining for cryptocurrency.  One video card with a manufacturer’s list price of $700 was going for $1,500.  The high-end graphics card is going for $3,000.  Pugsley figured that the higher-end card could pay for itself in crypto (at current prices and mining rates) in about nine months to a year.

So, yeah, it makes sense that these things cost $3,000.  Heck, at $3,000 they’re still a bargain, assuming crypto doesn’t disappear down a black hole to zero.  Which it could, because crypto is the ultimate expression of the opposite of Labor Value – every bit of crypto value is based on subjective value – it only has value because we agree it does.

So why doesn’t the manufacturer raise the price so that they can keep more of the value of their video cards?

I went to a topless Amish bar the other night.  No bonnets.

Well, in this case, their core audience is gamers, who can be very, very loyal.  Crypto mining might go away in a year or two.  But if the video card users/fans feel they’ve been robbed?  Gamers will go to the number two manufacturer.  But they still won’t have girlfriends.

The manufacturer is playing the long game.

The high prices irritate Pugsley.  Pugsley would dearly love to have a nicer graphics card, but can’t afford them at these inflated prices.  His (minor) revenge is that his graphics card is whirring away right now mining itsy-bitsy amounts of crypto.  In a small way, he’s benefiting from the whole process.

In a free market you get people who take advantage of price-mismatches like that.  Scalpers fill this role, too.  As long as they don’t cheat the system (which they often do) it’s an honest living.  Me?  I had season tickets to an NFL© team for a time.  They were doing well, and I generally doubled my money (on the games I didn’t go to) every year.  Heck, I even reported the income to the IRS.

The beauty of a transaction in a free economy is that both people win.  If I want a burger and it costs $2, well, it’s because Dairy Queen® wants the $2 more than it wants the burger.  Me?  I want the burger more than I want the $2.

Which is also what they pay for their corn.

In a free exchange, both parties win.  And if I think $2 is too much for the chewy hockey-puck burgers our Dairy Queen™ makes in Modern Mayberry?  Well, they get a signal that people aren’t buying their burgers.

Or Cheetos®-flavored Chapstick™.

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

Texas Power Outages, Global Warming, And At Least One Bikini

“You want a prediction about the weather?  You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

Pugsley said it was so cold in the house that it was at absolute zero.  I said, “That’s 0K.”

It has been cold.  Really cold.  The good thing about that is that I like the cold.  It’s rarely cold enough for me – even now my fingers are nearly numb blocks of flesh mashing the keyboard and only occasionally hitting the right key.

Almost cold enough, but as I reach up I find that I still have feeling in my jaw and cheeks, so I’m not quite there.

But Texas is.  Today at lunch The Mrs. and I were discussing that it was colder in Anchorage, Alaska than in Houston, Texas.  That made me think.  And then I ended up wondering if it was too cold for Jeff Bezos to sleep in his undies, or if he needed his pajamazon?

Okay, back to Texas.

When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house.  The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.

If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.

And that’s just one problem.

The bigger problem is that Texas is supposed to be an energy source.  Oil gets pumped there, sure.  But the pipelines for all of that natural gas that is produced in Texas?  All of those pipelines head out of state.  Texas is silly with natural gas, and produces far more than it uses.

Natural gas has historically been used to heat houses.  It’s relatively abundant, quick and simple to ignite, and generally relatively cheap*.  It’s great for hot water heaters.  It’s wonderful for forced air heaters, like we have here at Casa Wilder.  Heck, in the 1970’s (I read once) they passed a law that restricted the use of natural gas so that its convenient, safe heat could be used by homeowners voters to heat their houses.

And one oil company was going to make renewable crude from insect urine.  It think it was BP.

But somewhere that philosophy changed – mainly when natural gas became abundant with fracking, and when Global Warming® activists became obsessed with coal.  Natural gas puts a lot less carbon into the air than coal per Btu (kiloparsec).  So, it became common to build industrial plants that used natural gas for heat, as well as power plants that used natural gas instead of coal.

Natural gas is pretty nifty when you use it for a power plant.  That same property of nearly instant heat is there, so if you use natural gas to drive an engine, for example, you can pretty efficiently use that fuel to generate electricity quickly.  To start up a coal electrical generating plant takes a long time.  To start up a natural gas electrical generating plant?

Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.

When The Mrs. and I met, I felt quite a spark.  Who knew she had a Taser®?

But what happens when all of those Texas houses, not built for cold, crank up the natural gas heater?  What happens when the people who use electricity to heat their house crank that up at the same time?  And, what happens when all of those wind turbines that are supposed to be generating electricity become electricity sinks, since many of them have electric heaters to prevent the gears and bits from freezing up and breaking?  And the wind isn’t blowing?

The system fails.

An aside:

As I wrote this, I realized that my heater hadn’t gone on for, oh, seven degrees.  The internal temperature in the house had dropped to 57°F (2°C).  Not good.  As I went to my trusty heater, I found it flashing a series of codes over and over again like an autistic R2-D2™.

In the past, this was a failed part called a “flame roll out sensor” which appears to fail much more often than the penny I replace it with.  Just kidding!  I use stripped wire.  Also kidding.  I really don’t mess with the heater more than changing the filter every decade or so (Pugsley changes it twice yearly) and flipping the breaker on and off and then poking about the insides like an Albanian strip-mall lawyer trying to fix a copier. 

Which, oddly enough, works.  I know that there is some sort of computer logic that was finally satisfied – such as, “the gas is no longer explosive enough to launch Wilder into space in the most pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk since Wilder founded a company named Space Y.”

I make jokes about air conditioners, but not heaters.  That’s not cool.

My guess?  The gas pressure dropped a bit.  Which never happens, except in February, 2021.  I’ve never seen this particular error code, except the one time that I missed the exhaust portal near Yavin 4.

So, we have Texas, proud producer of natural gas, and now, neurotic consumer of natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas generating stations that need . . . natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas homes that need electricity to run the electric heaters (our house in Texas was one of those).

The system fails.  Power goes out.

But the Germans are going to build a car in Texas.  It will be called the Audi Neighbor™.

Thankfully the cold won’t last forever.  And this is a cold that, in some places, has broken records that were 122 years old, so it’s not the usual sort of winter storm in any respect.

But it does show us the limit of our systems.

Dang.  The heater is working again.  I can feel my fingers now.

*One source I saw showed spot prices up 24,000% (LINK), from $4.00 per million Btu last week to $999 yesterday.

America: Walking The Razor’s Edge

“The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge.” – The Razor’s Edge (1984)

What did the hobbits say as they rode the Ents into battle?  “Run, forest, run!”

It was on July 4.  I had convinced two of my friends to follow me on a bizarre quest – we were going to climb one of the tallest mountains in North America.  By one of them, it’s in the top 50.  So, in my book that counts.

The trip started using gasoline – we had a borrowed Jeep® that we took as far up the hill as we could, since it was a borrowed Jeep™.  My friend who had borrowed the Jeep© didn’t want to wreck it, since it was before YouTube® and we wouldn’t even get likes from a cool video if we wrecked it on the amazingly rough road.

We decided to make this hike a three-day event.  On the first day, we’d do nearly a mile gain in elevation while we camped out 1000’ below the summit of the mountain.  Then, we’d summit the mountain and spend the next night at our basecamp.  Then we’d hike out the next morning.

Of course, it rained.

At the elevation of our basecamp, trees can’t grow, so we boiled filtered water in the rain.  It worked, sort of.  At that elevation, water boils at less than 190°F.  It was enough to reheat a fifteen-year-old dehydrated Mountain House® Chili Mac, even though the beans couldn’t get hot enough to not be crunchy.

After climbing up a mountain, crunchy beans and all, it was the best dinner I’d had in years.  I think I ate two.

The chili mac wasn’t red hot, but there was no way I was going to give it away, give it away, give it away now.

The next day morning we were sore – but we could leave our packs at the camp so we’d just be carrying ourselves and our water.  It was nearly half of a mile to get to the summit – a half of a mile straight up.

The trip up was a true scramble – a broken field of boulders that we sometimes had to ascend on all fours.  It was steep – very steep.  As we intersected the ridge that led to the summit of the mountain, I looked forward to seeing what was on the other side of the ridge.  I was certain that it must be flatter than the steep boulder field we’d just climbed – there was no way it could be as steep.

I got to the edge of the ridge, and looked down.

Until that moment in time, I had never been afraid of heights.  But I was not expecting to see what I saw.

It was a cliff.  A sheer drop off – I was looking at a certified Wile E. Coyote precipice.

When I was stuck on that cliff, they told me not to “look down.”  So, I smiled.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked straight down and seen a cliff that went nearly three-quarters of a mile straight down when you weren’t expecting it.  For the first time in my life I was experiencing vertigo – it felt like the mountain under me was going to slide off down that cliff.

I moved back down the ridge.  But I still had to climb a few hundred feet upward to reach the summit.  Up the side of the ridge I went.  I assure you, I stayed back from that knife-edge as we crawled up that hill.

Then, finally, tantalizingly close, there was the summit.  I was nearly to the top of one of the highest mountains in North America.

There was one little problem.

Between the ridge I was on, and the top of the mountain there was a path.  It was about six or eight feet long, and probably a foot wide, and it was flat, like it had been machined.

What’s the difference between Humpty Dumpty and 2020?  One of them had a great fall.

On one side of it was, you guessed it, a sheer cliff that bottomed out 3,000 feet or so below me.  On the other side of the path it was a lot better.  There was only about a 1,000 foot drop.

Wait, was 1,000 feet better?  I’d get more time to live if I fell down the 3,000 foot side.

Choices.

But when facing that last few steps, shaky with the first vertigo in my life, I’ll admit those were some of the toughest steps of my life.  But, hey, what was I going to tell the folks back home?  That I climbed to a spot nearly three miles into the air to stop two feet before I reached the top?

Nope.

But that ridge (to me) was a razor’s edge.  On either side was disaster.  I took a deep breath.  I put one foot in front of the other.  And I walked – one step, two steps, three steps – to the top, where my friends were waiting.

What brought this to mind was an email forwarded by frequent commenter, 173dVietVet, where he said (in part) this on discussing where our country is:

“(I’ve) Done a bit of mountain climbing in my Ranger days and I know full well the meaning of knife’s edge, where any wrong step throws you headlong forever into the abyss of death that lies on BOTH sides . . . .”

We are in that zone.  In climbing mountains, the knife edge is more than a metaphor – it’s real.  On either side is death, and it’s not metaphorical death, it’s mangled into a wadded pile of Wilder by the combined forces of gravity and the sudden stop on the rocky outcropping at the bottom.  Sure, Wile E. Coyote could survive, but not me.

Everything went downhill after gravity was invented.

But in life, the knife-edge is a metaphor.  We’ve created a financial situation where the economy is horribly broken, and for the last year we’ve survived mainly by printing money and not allowing people to be evicted from houses, despite the questionable legality of that.

A bigger component to our knife edge is that the rule of law has been progressively ignored in the country.  Where is the right of the Federal Government to stop evictions of tenants?

Oh, there isn’t one.  They just made it up.

That would be (at best) an action by a State, though even then it’s of questionable legality.  But then the Patriot Act made spying on American citizens “legal” so who cares about legal, anyway?  Then every agency with three letters of an alphabet decided to swallow up all of that online data, and all of the phone calls, despite laws to the contrary.

Of course, Federal employees were put in prison.

Hahahaha!

No.

The NSA:  a government agency that actually listens to you!

Despite obviously illegal orders, no one was put in prison, and the only one likely to be put into prison is the whistleblower (Edward Snowden) if he ever shows back up in the United States.  It used to be the Constitution that was ignored, but that’s so 1940s.

Now, the government can ignore any inconvenient law it wants to ignore.  Of course, the people that can ignore the law are those that are either leaders, government employees, or those favored (think Antifa™) by the government.

Destroy evidence?  A felony for most.  But when the government does it?  It’s “a regrettable incident.”

What people misunderstand is that Trump isn’t at all the cause of our problems today.  Trump is a symptom.  Without Trump, the answer would have been (yet another) Bush, this time Jeb, versus (yet another) Clinton, this time Hillary.  Oh, the excitement for electing ¡Jeb!

The difference between another Clinton and another Bush?  Nothing, really.  And America didn’t want that – so America elected Trump.  If anything, Trump cleared the fog, and made the knife edge we were walking clearer.

Jeb has a perfect place in government, as the Secretary of Low Energy.

And now, we are walking, and the knife-edge is sharper and narrower than the one that I walked to get to the top of that mountain on July 4th a couple of decades ago.

We have left the bounds of Constitutional governance some time ago – people think it’s quaint when I bring the entire idea of the Constitution up.  Is there a path back to an actual Constitutional government?

Sure.  It’s narrow – a knife-edge.  But so was getting that Constitutional government in the first place.  But getting that original Constitution depended upon men climbing a mighty steep mountain several hundred years ago.  Were they afraid when they saw the cliff’s edge, the price of failure?

I’m sure they were.  But yet they continued.  And when it was time to thread that final few steps to the summit?

They did, and damn the dangers on either side.

We face the same knife-edge.  Where are we going?